Another great piece, Curtis, but please I have a few questions that you may wish to consider, perhaps even answer.
The USA, like all regimes, has no choice but to shape, direct and gratify the psycho-affective forces of those who rule and those who are ruled. These are essential for securing loyalty. A degree of charisma is required for anything as personal as a monarchy, even one that is modelled on the position of CEO.
Much of the unhappiness of the USA today derives from the rapidly diminishing ability of the masses to identify with those they serve, let alone bond with them.
This problem is going to be especially acute for a CEO-styled monarchs. The trouble with CEOs is that the culture of the depersonalised institutions from which they emerge chills and disgusts.
The artificial social psychologies of such institutions is revolting and distinctly uncharismatic.
With all this in mind, what would the psycho-affective landscape of an American monarchy look like?
How would any member of the current, or any viable real-world, elite bond with the US masses?
How could a CEO-style monarch (possibly recruited from a racially diverse Coastal elite) do to bond with the Future Alawites of America in their redoubts in Idaho or the yeomen and kulaks of the Rustbelt across the Midwest?
Conversely, could a Muad'dib style CEO that was minimally attractive to the Red State Fremen secure the personal respect/loyalty of Covid-compliant Blue State SJWs?
Dude awesome post. Answer Obama was that charismatic person but somehow or another it did not work. I think it didn’t work because Obama reviles us Kulacs, yes? If someone as pretanaturally talented, good looking, and eloquent as Obama couldn’t make it happen, well, we’re lost, yes? Please tell me the bloviating Trump monster is not that leader, is that all we are?
I have gone back and read Curtis’s earlier thinking on armigers, yeomen and lazzaroni and, having done that, conclude that the questions I raised earlier remain urgent.
Cosmopolitan armigers may be good people, but the lifestyle of the armigers is alien and remote to the yeomen. The lifestyle and values of the armigers have the potential to intensify, rather than resolve, problems. Obama once publicly referred to the price of arugula, thereby advertising his membership of a very specific class. Trump’s love of hamburgers, by contrast, added to his image as a populist.
As America becomes more, not less, differentiated in its constituent cultures, races and classes, it will all become more problematic. The challenge is to minimise accidental provocations to class and caste feelings, while maximising loyalty and enthusiasm. The viability and legitimacy of any regime rests upon such things.
A president recruited from the armiger class must find a way to remain credible with their peers while communicating or bonding with a mass constituency of yeomen and lazzaroni.
Obama’s background as a legal scholar impressed armigers, while his quip about bringing guns to a knife-fight was an attempt to appropriate the thuggish and macho posturing of the lazzaroni. Trump’s problem was that the very qualities that appealed to yeomen enraged practically all armigers.
A CEO president cannot escape from the burden of modelling a specific style. The aesthetic of Silicon Valley CEOs is worlds away from that of a CEO from an investment bank in Manhattan.
No serious political movement that aims to revolutionise an existing state can evade this challenge.
Obama, arugula, ok I can agree , he was too Olympian in his demeanour to connect with flyover country.
Trump is absurd both naturally and on purpose. The commentator George Will excoriated him for something stupid he said, Trump’s retort “ people only think he’s smart because he wears glasses”. I love Trump.
Trump’s success was due in large part to the fact that he was not faking his personality: he is naturally blunt.
Militant candour is called parrhesia (παρρησία) in classical rhetoric. Trump was a born parrhesiast operating in an environment fouled by taboos and a wider culture that confuses euphemism with civility.
An electorate of yeomen frustrated by regimes that exuded armiger culture responded with enthusiasm, forgiving Trump his wealth. Most armigers, heavily invested in taboo-management and unfamiliar with any kind of debating style that is not curated into stupor-inducing banality, found Trump demonic.
Trump is essentially the Ragnar Lothbrok of Long Island – combative, a natural leader who never apologises or backs down and understands the psychic needs of those he leads (needs for recognition and representation).
As an entrepreneur he embodies an individualistic and personalistic form of capitalism that is now of historic significance within the elite but is still relevant to medium and small business owners and their employees.
Entrepreneurial capitalism is utterly unlike the depersonalised corporate bureaucracies that form the social psychologies of the managerial class.
Add the alpha male touch (evident in his interaction with mama’s boy Jeb Bush during the debates) and the lifestyle (hamburgers over arugula) and we can see a good example of a CEO presidential type who appealed across class and ethnic lines.
Obama, by contrast, is the embodiment of the professional strata of the armiger grouping. His manners, rhetoric, ideas and lifestyle all advertise his enthusiasm for this class and their class-culture. The Olympian affectations were ridiculous: the hauteur was real, the intellectual capacity an act...cake-walk aesthetics that are only plausible for armigers who take credentials acquired via affirmative action at face value, grating for everyone else. Obama was never even a genuine legal scholar, at the University of Chicago he 'lectured' on CRT and never even sat for his bar exam.
Obama’s rare attempts at being folksy came across as forced. He was unable to connect with much of the yeomen class. Even those white yeomen who voted for him the first time around switched sides during his second election.
Yet Obama was perfect to lead the coalition that the Democrats have come to rely upon (armigers, unionised yeomen employed in the public sector and welfare-dependent lazzaroni). Such are the ligatures at work in mass politics.
To return to my enduring concern, the disaffected and dissident, the Dirtbag Left and the NRx are clearly alert to the power of the psycho-affective or libidinal drivers at play in politics. The content and style that BAP has tapped into and is channeling expresses an historic inflection point. The goblin-people within the armiger class are vulnerable to psychic disruption. They can be destabilised by the right provocation.
A Yarvinite CEO presidential candidate (nihilist prince) needs to connect at a psychic level with mass constituencies within the armiger and yeomen classes. A bland or standard CEO from central casting of either the Silicon Valley or investment bank type won’t do it.
Authenticity is Trump’s appeal, he is proudly ignorant of their ways: “ I could shoot someone on fifth Avenue and I still go up in the polls ”, he proclaimed with bemusement.
I like your formulation - euphemism as civility and the need for taboo management. Trump’s insouciant bloviating is like Kryptonite to the elite affectation; a desperately needed high colonic for the bunged up denizens of clown world. I am in near total agreement with you and you express it very well.
Curtis Yarvin is a treasure.
Check out the Upheaval substack by HSLyons it is enormous, like wow!
Thank you, I was curious and noticed it was deleted.
I agree with Matt insofar as I am new to Curtis and find myself occasionally out of my depth.
But, Curtis is calling Matt Y a narrow minded dick. I am not a wonk apologist for entrenched power. In Curtis, I believe we have found an amplifier of the signal that reality is trying to send us. Matt is, as he must be, a sycophant and co-conspirator with the oligarchy and naturally wants to know what relative change can be implemented based on the ideas of Curtis and this new right.
I think Curtis‘s main point is that the expression of power should work with human nature and not try to redefine human nature because that’s really fucking stupid.
Foxes are just foxes, I get your point and CY’s point to the Scott’s; it is unproductive to get emotional, in fact it feeds the machine and depletes the resistance. But, the power of the cathedral is still corrupt and loathsome so even if it’s denizens are unawares, I reserve the right to call them names at least amongst friends.
In "The American Occupation of Germany" by Edward N. Peterson, the American military government is shown as clueless, mainly because the US officers in charge of all the German governmental units didn't speak German. So the Germans set about building the new Germany on their own. And surprisingly enough, you may think if you listen to our liberal friends, the last thing the Germans wanted to create was another Nazi regime.
Secondly, your "human asset model" is a good idea. It tracks with the notion of "intangible capital" which is the capital that humans carry around between their ears. But isn't the closest thing to "human assets" that we could ever measure the capitalization of the various productive units in the land, i.e., businesses? For capital is not "accumulation," as twerps like Thomas Piketty think, but the present value of the total productive assets of a business, from physical assets to human skills to human knowledge.
Curtis has cited Hoppe's "Democracy: The God That Failed" as one of the catalysts for his conversion from straight libertarianism/minarchism/whatever to a monarchist and is probably a decent starting point. It's as close to a direct precursor for 'Yarvin thought' as you're going to find, and exposes the deep roots this worldview has in Austrian economics. There are also other posts on this blog that address economics (https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-inflation-economy?s=r), and his old blog Unqualified Reservations can be fruitfully searched -- I would say broadly he was more interested in the topic back then and wrote about it more vigorously but keep in mind his views have evolved. There's a clear, slow drift over time away from strict Austrian orthodoxy but I would say that it still forms the backbone of his economic thinking.
I've been thinking a lot about the problem of creating accountability for a monarch and think I've come up with a solution that feels novel to me, or at least I haven't personally seen it anywhere. In the past Yarvin's response has involved using the blockchain to control access to a country's weaponry.
This is a neat idea but it sounds like an absolute nightmare to implement and maybe even worse to have to try to use. There’s a reason you still see AK-47s in use all over the world; there are some tools that you really, really need to work in clutch moments with as little friction as possible, and weapons fall in that category. Software is going to be buggy and edge cases will arise that create unanticipated behaviors, especially in any situation involving firmware. That’s not even getting into the issues of intentional sabotage by rivals and the creation of innumerable single points of failure for attack.
But an answer is right in front of us: cryptocurrency. Monarchs throughout history have been managed through external control of the pursestrings. It even has an elegant conceptual logic to it; taxation income is provided to the monarch with the faith and trust of the population, why wouldn’t there be a veto on its use? Money is needed to exercise pretty much any power, even in a monarchy; soldiers must be paid, after all.
I envision a cryptocurrency designed with provisions for a special kind of wallet that recognizes two owners, one which has permission to spend from the wallet and one which has permission to turn the wallet on and off. This is consistent with the requirement that the body providing accountability be denied direct power over government while the monarch has the tools to govern at the pleasure of whoever is supposed to be holding him accountable.
This leads to the last structure that I think is necessary to carry this off. Although the goal of this whole exercise is to eliminate unaccountable bureaucracies, I think we permit the existence of one which exists solely to administer the treasury. Their most important role in this schema is ensuring that all the money ends up in the correct wallet and doesn’t get siphoned off into secret funds that the monarch controls directly, but they would also handle issues like transfer of control to a new monarch, minting access tokens, along with all the usual duties associated with managing a government’s finances.
Denying access to financial resources seems like about as good a way to cut the legs out from under a monarch as you’re going to find, and I don’t think it has to be particularly fiddly or inconvenient. It also conveniently depends on technology that exists right now and could be implemented without too much trouble. I’m certain there are angles I haven’t considered but the theory seems sound.
The problem here is that the sovereign has complete power, including the power to change currencies. The weapon thing (which I agree is completely impractical) does have the benefit of giving the vetoers a method to seize power from the former sovereign.
1. The US Framers said they were trying to create a mixed government, with democratic, oligarchic, and monarchical elements. Why not take them at their word? This structure allows some fluidity in form.
2. The democratic/monarchical combination (Caesarism) was perhaps best exemplified by Andrew Jackson’s administration, which you rarely mention, cuz it collides with your biorhythm theory of US regime change. I submit the less tidy version of sloshing fluidity is fine.
3. FDR, the latest regime-changer, had 60-70% support in Congress throughout his administration. Talk about The Mandate of Heaven.
4. Possibly related: US voters, prior to 1968, were much more likely to elect a “unified” government, and more inclined to “vote for gridlock” as it were since then. GWB was the only Prez since Carter with more than 2 years of unified government, which is a good argument for gridlock IMO. Anyway, it doesn’t seem like the decisive majority necessary for you vision of the next regime change to take hold is anywhere close.
“People can simply be worthless—not just the very young, the very old and the very sick, but great swathes of physically healthy society. The final implication of liberal economics is genocide, figurative or literal. If you look at the “Rust Belt,” you see it. Hiroshima is certainly looking a lot better than Detroit these days.”
I think (or hope) you mean “economically worthless”. And that is the challenge - how to enable the maximum number of people, however “worthless”, to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives. Which as you imply elsewhere has maybe a lot to do with ludditism and back-to-the-land subsistence and community. And not the “bread n circuses” of globalised consumerism, or welfare dependency.
So seagulls are becoming a serious public nuisance and menace in many communities (most stories out of UK) and the local governments and bureaucrats basically side with the birds every time (there’s a law from the 1980s that protects the birds, cause ofc there is). It’s as bad as pensioners effectively being trapped inside their houses because the gulls have made a nest over their front door and basically attack them when they try to step outside. Was telling a friend the other day that this problem has a weird potential of being a flashpoint for societal upheaval because at its core, it’s a government unable (and often seemingly unwilling) to protect its citizens.
Something I want to know is what was it like in the time before FDR came to power in 1932. How did the press cover FDR before he was elected. What was the spin on FDR before elected.
Also the press hid FDR's handicap, how did that work?
So, how is it that the examples of Putin and Xi have not changed your thinking on the monarchy question? I was highly sympathetic to your views---till I saw the behavior of these lunatics. China was clearly run better when it was under a very small, the PSC, than it is now under its monarch. Do you prefer China circa 2022 to China circa 2012?
And how would you feel about King Trump? The thing about alternative political visions is that the most idealistic version gets contrasted against the existing reality. Before communism was tried, idealistic communism always faced off against capitalist realities.
I know this is going to anger everyone, but current events have refuted monarchism. We may require Constitutional reform, perhaps requirements that you can only serve ten years in government for a total of 20 with at least a ten year break working in the private sector to break up the deep state, but monarchy is clearly a failure.
Cultural tribes can all have their own internal currencies, which will live or die based upon the heath of their own cultures. Most people don’t want to run their own bitcoin node or be a bank, nor do they want to fiddle with an ML model finding them stories, news, etc. We are all using these systems that have tremendous influence, and at present the globalist culture runs these systems. But they’ve money printed themselves into obsolescence.
I expect a rise of distributed techno-Brahmin caste powering many smaller-scale tribes. A thriving private security market coupled with the intractability of large scale theft means we get the world you want, more or less for free.
Our king remains, anonymous, having acted once via a lever of tremendous length. And then, patiently. Who could be more patient than a king who reigns forever and devolves all executive authority to the various tribes, in accordance to their capacity to earn favor from the others?
Curtis I just read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address to Harvard in 1978 - he would certainly agree with your Cathedral concept and your assertion that America is a Clerical Oligarchy.
Another great piece, Curtis, but please I have a few questions that you may wish to consider, perhaps even answer.
The USA, like all regimes, has no choice but to shape, direct and gratify the psycho-affective forces of those who rule and those who are ruled. These are essential for securing loyalty. A degree of charisma is required for anything as personal as a monarchy, even one that is modelled on the position of CEO.
Much of the unhappiness of the USA today derives from the rapidly diminishing ability of the masses to identify with those they serve, let alone bond with them.
This problem is going to be especially acute for a CEO-styled monarchs. The trouble with CEOs is that the culture of the depersonalised institutions from which they emerge chills and disgusts.
The artificial social psychologies of such institutions is revolting and distinctly uncharismatic.
With all this in mind, what would the psycho-affective landscape of an American monarchy look like?
How would any member of the current, or any viable real-world, elite bond with the US masses?
How could a CEO-style monarch (possibly recruited from a racially diverse Coastal elite) do to bond with the Future Alawites of America in their redoubts in Idaho or the yeomen and kulaks of the Rustbelt across the Midwest?
Conversely, could a Muad'dib style CEO that was minimally attractive to the Red State Fremen secure the personal respect/loyalty of Covid-compliant Blue State SJWs?
Dude awesome post. Answer Obama was that charismatic person but somehow or another it did not work. I think it didn’t work because Obama reviles us Kulacs, yes? If someone as pretanaturally talented, good looking, and eloquent as Obama couldn’t make it happen, well, we’re lost, yes? Please tell me the bloviating Trump monster is not that leader, is that all we are?
I have gone back and read Curtis’s earlier thinking on armigers, yeomen and lazzaroni and, having done that, conclude that the questions I raised earlier remain urgent.
Cosmopolitan armigers may be good people, but the lifestyle of the armigers is alien and remote to the yeomen. The lifestyle and values of the armigers have the potential to intensify, rather than resolve, problems. Obama once publicly referred to the price of arugula, thereby advertising his membership of a very specific class. Trump’s love of hamburgers, by contrast, added to his image as a populist.
As America becomes more, not less, differentiated in its constituent cultures, races and classes, it will all become more problematic. The challenge is to minimise accidental provocations to class and caste feelings, while maximising loyalty and enthusiasm. The viability and legitimacy of any regime rests upon such things.
A president recruited from the armiger class must find a way to remain credible with their peers while communicating or bonding with a mass constituency of yeomen and lazzaroni.
Obama’s background as a legal scholar impressed armigers, while his quip about bringing guns to a knife-fight was an attempt to appropriate the thuggish and macho posturing of the lazzaroni. Trump’s problem was that the very qualities that appealed to yeomen enraged practically all armigers.
A CEO president cannot escape from the burden of modelling a specific style. The aesthetic of Silicon Valley CEOs is worlds away from that of a CEO from an investment bank in Manhattan.
No serious political movement that aims to revolutionise an existing state can evade this challenge.
Obama, arugula, ok I can agree , he was too Olympian in his demeanour to connect with flyover country.
Trump is absurd both naturally and on purpose. The commentator George Will excoriated him for something stupid he said, Trump’s retort “ people only think he’s smart because he wears glasses”. I love Trump.
Trump’s success was due in large part to the fact that he was not faking his personality: he is naturally blunt.
Militant candour is called parrhesia (παρρησία) in classical rhetoric. Trump was a born parrhesiast operating in an environment fouled by taboos and a wider culture that confuses euphemism with civility.
An electorate of yeomen frustrated by regimes that exuded armiger culture responded with enthusiasm, forgiving Trump his wealth. Most armigers, heavily invested in taboo-management and unfamiliar with any kind of debating style that is not curated into stupor-inducing banality, found Trump demonic.
Trump is essentially the Ragnar Lothbrok of Long Island – combative, a natural leader who never apologises or backs down and understands the psychic needs of those he leads (needs for recognition and representation).
As an entrepreneur he embodies an individualistic and personalistic form of capitalism that is now of historic significance within the elite but is still relevant to medium and small business owners and their employees.
Entrepreneurial capitalism is utterly unlike the depersonalised corporate bureaucracies that form the social psychologies of the managerial class.
Add the alpha male touch (evident in his interaction with mama’s boy Jeb Bush during the debates) and the lifestyle (hamburgers over arugula) and we can see a good example of a CEO presidential type who appealed across class and ethnic lines.
Obama, by contrast, is the embodiment of the professional strata of the armiger grouping. His manners, rhetoric, ideas and lifestyle all advertise his enthusiasm for this class and their class-culture. The Olympian affectations were ridiculous: the hauteur was real, the intellectual capacity an act...cake-walk aesthetics that are only plausible for armigers who take credentials acquired via affirmative action at face value, grating for everyone else. Obama was never even a genuine legal scholar, at the University of Chicago he 'lectured' on CRT and never even sat for his bar exam.
Obama’s rare attempts at being folksy came across as forced. He was unable to connect with much of the yeomen class. Even those white yeomen who voted for him the first time around switched sides during his second election.
Yet Obama was perfect to lead the coalition that the Democrats have come to rely upon (armigers, unionised yeomen employed in the public sector and welfare-dependent lazzaroni). Such are the ligatures at work in mass politics.
To return to my enduring concern, the disaffected and dissident, the Dirtbag Left and the NRx are clearly alert to the power of the psycho-affective or libidinal drivers at play in politics. The content and style that BAP has tapped into and is channeling expresses an historic inflection point. The goblin-people within the armiger class are vulnerable to psychic disruption. They can be destabilised by the right provocation.
A Yarvinite CEO presidential candidate (nihilist prince) needs to connect at a psychic level with mass constituencies within the armiger and yeomen classes. A bland or standard CEO from central casting of either the Silicon Valley or investment bank type won’t do it.
Authenticity is Trump’s appeal, he is proudly ignorant of their ways: “ I could shoot someone on fifth Avenue and I still go up in the polls ”, he proclaimed with bemusement.
I like your formulation - euphemism as civility and the need for taboo management. Trump’s insouciant bloviating is like Kryptonite to the elite affectation; a desperately needed high colonic for the bunged up denizens of clown world. I am in near total agreement with you and you express it very well.
Curtis Yarvin is a treasure.
Check out the Upheaval substack by HSLyons it is enormous, like wow!
OK I’m an idiot I don’t know how to copy and paste. Check out “No the revolution is not over”, the best of the best.
Pardon me but their support comes from 1] the striving educated 2] the safely rich educated 3] people they buy...
I think you are referring to the first group the striving educated...
The Left or Woke or whatever ye call them are now the religion of politics and their god is power..
Short answer, he "CEO" doesnt have to, because long answer:
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/5-the-land-its-people-and-their-dogs?s=r
For anyone curious about the Matt Yglesias tweet that was deleted, here is the archive https://web.archive.org/web/20220429164022/https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1520080412801912832
Thank you, I was curious and noticed it was deleted.
I agree with Matt insofar as I am new to Curtis and find myself occasionally out of my depth.
But, Curtis is calling Matt Y a narrow minded dick. I am not a wonk apologist for entrenched power. In Curtis, I believe we have found an amplifier of the signal that reality is trying to send us. Matt is, as he must be, a sycophant and co-conspirator with the oligarchy and naturally wants to know what relative change can be implemented based on the ideas of Curtis and this new right.
I think Curtis‘s main point is that the expression of power should work with human nature and not try to redefine human nature because that’s really fucking stupid.
If you’re a new reader, I think it would be best to have a read through this tasteful poast as good context for Matt Yglesias interacting with CY
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-journalist-rationalist-showdown?s=r
"...It is especially important to note that foxes aren’t evil—they are just foxes"
I read it, thanks, absolutely fantastic stuff.
Foxes are just foxes, I get your point and CY’s point to the Scott’s; it is unproductive to get emotional, in fact it feeds the machine and depletes the resistance. But, the power of the cathedral is still corrupt and loathsome so even if it’s denizens are unawares, I reserve the right to call them names at least amongst friends.
I hope you keep writing
This is really good. But...
In "The American Occupation of Germany" by Edward N. Peterson, the American military government is shown as clueless, mainly because the US officers in charge of all the German governmental units didn't speak German. So the Germans set about building the new Germany on their own. And surprisingly enough, you may think if you listen to our liberal friends, the last thing the Germans wanted to create was another Nazi regime.
Secondly, your "human asset model" is a good idea. It tracks with the notion of "intangible capital" which is the capital that humans carry around between their ears. But isn't the closest thing to "human assets" that we could ever measure the capitalization of the various productive units in the land, i.e., businesses? For capital is not "accumulation," as twerps like Thomas Piketty think, but the present value of the total productive assets of a business, from physical assets to human skills to human knowledge.
Granted, I've only read this once -- but I'm curious to understand more about the economics behind this.
GDP-growth for the sake of growth is not great and supply and demand should be matched -- fine. But this feels like a generic overview to me.
What school(s) of thought does this draw from? Does it align with the 'anarcho-capitalist' thoughts expressed by Hoppe? Or is it something else?
Happy if some kind soul could point me to further reading.
Curtis has cited Hoppe's "Democracy: The God That Failed" as one of the catalysts for his conversion from straight libertarianism/minarchism/whatever to a monarchist and is probably a decent starting point. It's as close to a direct precursor for 'Yarvin thought' as you're going to find, and exposes the deep roots this worldview has in Austrian economics. There are also other posts on this blog that address economics (https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-inflation-economy?s=r), and his old blog Unqualified Reservations can be fruitfully searched -- I would say broadly he was more interested in the topic back then and wrote about it more vigorously but keep in mind his views have evolved. There's a clear, slow drift over time away from strict Austrian orthodoxy but I would say that it still forms the backbone of his economic thinking.
Here a couple URs to get you started: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/08/urs-crash-course-in-sound-economics/
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/12/why-i-am-not-libertarian/
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/01/on-sovereign-financial-reconciliation/
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2011/04/on-monetary-restandardization/
May your days be ever based, friend.
Fantastic, thanks a lot for pulling these resources together!
Mormons aren't into acid but they love the molly - https://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/72505-mormon-use-of-drug-ecstacy-studied-at-harvard/
I've been thinking a lot about the problem of creating accountability for a monarch and think I've come up with a solution that feels novel to me, or at least I haven't personally seen it anywhere. In the past Yarvin's response has involved using the blockchain to control access to a country's weaponry.
This is a neat idea but it sounds like an absolute nightmare to implement and maybe even worse to have to try to use. There’s a reason you still see AK-47s in use all over the world; there are some tools that you really, really need to work in clutch moments with as little friction as possible, and weapons fall in that category. Software is going to be buggy and edge cases will arise that create unanticipated behaviors, especially in any situation involving firmware. That’s not even getting into the issues of intentional sabotage by rivals and the creation of innumerable single points of failure for attack.
But an answer is right in front of us: cryptocurrency. Monarchs throughout history have been managed through external control of the pursestrings. It even has an elegant conceptual logic to it; taxation income is provided to the monarch with the faith and trust of the population, why wouldn’t there be a veto on its use? Money is needed to exercise pretty much any power, even in a monarchy; soldiers must be paid, after all.
I envision a cryptocurrency designed with provisions for a special kind of wallet that recognizes two owners, one which has permission to spend from the wallet and one which has permission to turn the wallet on and off. This is consistent with the requirement that the body providing accountability be denied direct power over government while the monarch has the tools to govern at the pleasure of whoever is supposed to be holding him accountable.
This leads to the last structure that I think is necessary to carry this off. Although the goal of this whole exercise is to eliminate unaccountable bureaucracies, I think we permit the existence of one which exists solely to administer the treasury. Their most important role in this schema is ensuring that all the money ends up in the correct wallet and doesn’t get siphoned off into secret funds that the monarch controls directly, but they would also handle issues like transfer of control to a new monarch, minting access tokens, along with all the usual duties associated with managing a government’s finances.
Denying access to financial resources seems like about as good a way to cut the legs out from under a monarch as you’re going to find, and I don’t think it has to be particularly fiddly or inconvenient. It also conveniently depends on technology that exists right now and could be implemented without too much trouble. I’m certain there are angles I haven’t considered but the theory seems sound.
The problem here is that the sovereign has complete power, including the power to change currencies. The weapon thing (which I agree is completely impractical) does have the benefit of giving the vetoers a method to seize power from the former sovereign.
Couple thoughts:
1. The US Framers said they were trying to create a mixed government, with democratic, oligarchic, and monarchical elements. Why not take them at their word? This structure allows some fluidity in form.
2. The democratic/monarchical combination (Caesarism) was perhaps best exemplified by Andrew Jackson’s administration, which you rarely mention, cuz it collides with your biorhythm theory of US regime change. I submit the less tidy version of sloshing fluidity is fine.
3. FDR, the latest regime-changer, had 60-70% support in Congress throughout his administration. Talk about The Mandate of Heaven.
4. Possibly related: US voters, prior to 1968, were much more likely to elect a “unified” government, and more inclined to “vote for gridlock” as it were since then. GWB was the only Prez since Carter with more than 2 years of unified government, which is a good argument for gridlock IMO. Anyway, it doesn’t seem like the decisive majority necessary for you vision of the next regime change to take hold is anywhere close.
“People can simply be worthless—not just the very young, the very old and the very sick, but great swathes of physically healthy society. The final implication of liberal economics is genocide, figurative or literal. If you look at the “Rust Belt,” you see it. Hiroshima is certainly looking a lot better than Detroit these days.”
I think (or hope) you mean “economically worthless”. And that is the challenge - how to enable the maximum number of people, however “worthless”, to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives. Which as you imply elsewhere has maybe a lot to do with ludditism and back-to-the-land subsistence and community. And not the “bread n circuses” of globalised consumerism, or welfare dependency.
Hey, does anybody know how to best reach Mr. Yarvin?
So seagulls are becoming a serious public nuisance and menace in many communities (most stories out of UK) and the local governments and bureaucrats basically side with the birds every time (there’s a law from the 1980s that protects the birds, cause ofc there is). It’s as bad as pensioners effectively being trapped inside their houses because the gulls have made a nest over their front door and basically attack them when they try to step outside. Was telling a friend the other day that this problem has a weird potential of being a flashpoint for societal upheaval because at its core, it’s a government unable (and often seemingly unwilling) to protect its citizens.
Something I want to know is what was it like in the time before FDR came to power in 1932. How did the press cover FDR before he was elected. What was the spin on FDR before elected.
Also the press hid FDR's handicap, how did that work?
So, how is it that the examples of Putin and Xi have not changed your thinking on the monarchy question? I was highly sympathetic to your views---till I saw the behavior of these lunatics. China was clearly run better when it was under a very small, the PSC, than it is now under its monarch. Do you prefer China circa 2022 to China circa 2012?
And how would you feel about King Trump? The thing about alternative political visions is that the most idealistic version gets contrasted against the existing reality. Before communism was tried, idealistic communism always faced off against capitalist realities.
I know this is going to anger everyone, but current events have refuted monarchism. We may require Constitutional reform, perhaps requirements that you can only serve ten years in government for a total of 20 with at least a ten year break working in the private sector to break up the deep state, but monarchy is clearly a failure.
North Korea---monarchy
Russia---monarchy with democratic facade
China---monarchy with oligarchic facade
All are FAILURES.
I vote satoshi for king.
Cultural tribes can all have their own internal currencies, which will live or die based upon the heath of their own cultures. Most people don’t want to run their own bitcoin node or be a bank, nor do they want to fiddle with an ML model finding them stories, news, etc. We are all using these systems that have tremendous influence, and at present the globalist culture runs these systems. But they’ve money printed themselves into obsolescence.
I expect a rise of distributed techno-Brahmin caste powering many smaller-scale tribes. A thriving private security market coupled with the intractability of large scale theft means we get the world you want, more or less for free.
Our king remains, anonymous, having acted once via a lever of tremendous length. And then, patiently. Who could be more patient than a king who reigns forever and devolves all executive authority to the various tribes, in accordance to their capacity to earn favor from the others?
Curtis I just read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address to Harvard in 1978 - he would certainly agree with your Cathedral concept and your assertion that America is a Clerical Oligarchy.
"But I also have my own design for building a technically accountable monarchy."
System design is critical. User adoption is the hardest part to solve.
How do you convince people to buy in?
You need a revolutionary product, a phenomenal salesman, and a memorable name. I can provide all 3.
Email me.
jwsubstack@proton.me