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?
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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