The problem with your article was not that we are not enlightened enough to understand it, it is that you said (among similar statements) the following:
"In the West, where power depends on either managing or following public opinion, the idea of actual governance is almost unfamiliar. The wise experts who manage the public mind have one school of governance theater; the cynical sycophants who milk the populist mob have another."
The choice for a lot us is: does your business go bankrupt or not, do you lose you job or not, can you leave the house or not, can you go to the pub or not, do you have a social life or not, is your child subjected to elaborate ritualised abuse at school or not, do you have to take some shitty vaccine that you don't need and doesn't really work or not, is your doctor legally prevented from prescribing you possibly effective palliative medicine or not. What bad thing have these 'cynical sycophants' done to us that justifies you both-sidings it, other than your refusal to admit that you let your hypochondria get the better of you?
So, yeah, actually a lot of the original article was completely correct, but you couldn't resist rubbing our noses in your disease paranoia and limitless faith in big pharma, and, apparently, most of us really aren't in the mood for it anymore.
Also, P.S., your war analogy is retarded. War's aren't fought to save lives. Almost invariably the easiest way to save lives is just to surrender. War is when you sacrifice people's lives to achieve some sort of desired national goal, often national independence or the maintenance of your way of life. The logic of the war analogy is that the old and ill people who are risk of dying of Covid-19 should willingly lay down their lives to maintain a standard of living that we think tolerable for ourselves and our children.
Why are you saying this to us, Curtis? Are we really the ones who are not "clearpilled"? It strikes me that insofar Covid-19 is concerned, you are the one whos is not sufficiently clearpilled. And in a deeper sense than you yourself use that word.
You were the one to advocate very concrete political measures in response to the virus from the start. You are the one who continues to advocate such measures despite your own mantra that "power does what power wills and our opinion is irrelevant, so we should stop trying to have one". Then you chastise us for having an opinion, just like you do.
Your opinion is not any less reactive than ours. It is just as reactive, only in the opposite direction - "actually they should have cracked down on us EVEN HARDER". Then you LARP about being "clearpilled", quote Bruce Lee how we should "be like water" and tell us that we are cringe. I am fine with being called cringe (if we are honest I think that is clearly part of the reason why we are all paying for your content), but please try to be consistent.
Speaking of being like water, that is what the reaction of all governments should have been from the start of the pandemic. Some forces of nature humans still cannot stop or even control (in fact as you yourself pointed out earlier this year, this whole debacle was started by humans trying to do exactly that). So just let it go and get to natural immunity. Isn't that the "clearpilled" solution? Or are we really going to have to indulge your laughable example of China, as if we have any reason to believe any piece of statistical data coming from that country? And your data on Singapore is the exact opposite of reality.
Look, it's fine to be wrong. I actually agreed with you in spring 2020. I thought lockdowns were the way to go. I thought they were even too relaxed at first. I thought going full prison-planet China-style lockdowns is the way to go. I used examples like Singapore and South Korea for how efficient tracking and targeted but very strict lockdowns can work. Well where are those countries now? You can google the data yourself. China's numbers are obviously cooked.
And don't get me started on the vaccines. There are so many red flags that the whole vaccination process from the earliest clinical trials to now looks like the red army marching through Eastern Europe in 1944. I am not even suggesting malicious intent as others do, only rampant incompetence and corruption among our public institutions. The signs of which I have learned to identify very quickly in big part thanks to reading your texts over the past 9 years.
So can you please drop this ridiculousness? The Covid-19 pandemic is a gigantic tragedy. A tragedy of our incredibly corrupt public science establishment, as correctly identified by you. But sometimes a tragedy is so immense that it is well outside the scope of human power to control. As others pointed out in the comments under your previous post - this should be a lesson for the "Nihilist prince" that sometimes when shit hits the fan there is actually nothing which can be done to improve the situation. But plenty can be done to make it worse and in more ways than you can imagine a priori.
Put simply, you are overrating the power of power. Your sci-fi fictions of a multipolar decentralized global order being maintained by a benevolent solar-system level dictatorship already suggested that sometimes you tend to overlook the limits and realities of human power. This here is another such example.
Most of us wish you would just drop it already and move on, instead of continuing to obstinately insist that your readers (many of whom are very thoughtful people, and frankly much better informed on COVID data than yourself) "just don't get it, man".
Curtis, I don’t think you are listening. You were correct in your early opinion on the lab leak from Wuhan, and that deserves credit. Other than that, you have been wrong on many (most?) of the fundamental facts about covid, the covid vaccines, and the appropriateness of resistance to Regime measures like mandating an endothelial toxin for healthy children who are at no real risk from covid, but at real risk from Pharma “vaccines.” As I linked before, healthy young boys were found to have had a 3-6 times greater chance of being hospitalized for myocarditis/pericarditis- think *cardiac damage*- than they ever do of being hospitalized for covid. And we aren’t even discussing *subclinical damage* of administering an endothelial toxin multiple times a year, potentially for years. Myocarditis is merely the loudest, the least ignorable, of the significant safety signals surrounding these “vaccines”.
And thats why we need to be focusing on *all cause mortality* data, because it is very likely the least manipulable statistic indicating vax safety/efficacy. If covid is as dangerous as claimed, and if the vaccines are as effective as claimed, we should be able to see a clear reduction in all cause mortality among the vaxxed relative to the non-vaxxed. And yet, ***the actual data shows the reverse.*** (Please see statistician Norman Fenton and Matthew Crawford’s analysis on this).
Even Pfizer’s own trial data, which includes god knows how much fraud and manipulation, that was presented to the FDA, found *higher all cause mortality in the vaccine group over placebo.*
I don’t know who your sources of information are on covid, but they are fucking terrible.
And these are only some of the reasons why your readers aren’t on board with your “act like water, do what power wants” messaging on covid.
It should be noted at this point, that Hitler was a hypochondriac. Hitler's fear of cancer is a mirror image of Moldbug's COVID fear, and the Fuhrer wrote verbose screeds about how to run society (Mein Kampf is quite long, as is UR). This latest post is definitive proof that Yarvin like Hitler is the real racist.
I strongly suggest that anyone who wants to write intelligently about the COVID Pandemic should first read Robert F. Kennedy Jr's book: "The Real Anthony Fauci. Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health."
Yes, THAT Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Democratic Party Kennedy/Camelot royalty. What ids the book about?
"This book will show you that Tony Fauci does not do public health; he is a businessman, who has used his office to enrich his pharmaceutical partners and expand the reach of influence that has made him the most powerful— despotic—doctor in human history."
The more you dig into his book, the more you'll see that Fauci belongs in the same category of "doctors" as Dr. Mengele. RFK Jr's book is not some intellectual thought piece about existentialism or governance theatre. It's 900 pages with 1,780 links to references. One of the finest pieces of investigative journalism you'll ever read. I suggest that you get the Kindle version so that, as you read, you can link out to the references to verify his statement and allegations. Why did he write it?
RFK Jr: "I wrote this book so that Americans—both Democrat and Republican—can understand Dr. Fauci’s pernicious role in allowing pharmaceutical companies to dominate our government and subvert our democracy, and to chronicle the key role Dr. Fauci has played in the current coup d’état against democracy."
I have no relationship with RFK Jr and no financial interest. I just need to know the facts. Caveat Lector
Yarvin’s right about pretty much everything in here. Fighting against COVID policies, in the long run, is really no different than expending energy battling the million other idiocies and abuses the regime commits.
Did we expect that the next one wouldn’t affect our daily lives? Most of the complaints I’m hearing here about strategy miss the point. It continues to be pointless to waste our energy fighting regime policies. Yes, they are coming for our jobs— and beating them back for the next year or so with some weak political victory confirms that we and our children will only suffer harder in the future.
Still, Curtis, you’re pulling a serious motte-and-bailey by making all these inflammatory and incorrect COVID takes and then hopping behind your grander (and correct) political philosophy when anyone calls you out on it. Just drop it already.
I don't think anyone here has got bluepilled on activism over the last two years, since the street protests have failed so miserably to slow down the madness. I suspect that many, like me, are unvaxxed and have caught the ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ variant – but I don't see how this goes against detachment unless we are personally trying to infiltrate the state. Flowing around power like water doesn't mean jumping into its arms; and if people drag their feet on voluntary measures till the gov has to openly force them, that would lead to an increase in "formalism" as you put it.
Let's be honest: these coofposts are activism, not passivism. For partly understandable reasons, you identify with the bureaucratic hubris that is trying to turn back the tide of an ever-mutating respiratory virus and you want to see more of it. It is we who are being detached, indifferent, etc.
Those turning a 180 on you are misguided, because all you have said on GM so far is consistent with what you said at UR, and dissidents who discard that body of work will only backslide into Alt-Right nonsense. At the same time, let's not pretend that this doesn't highlight some fundamental problems with that body of work.
In early posts on UR, you used to argue that the incentive structure of neocameralism would produce de facto libertarian behaviour in an absolutist state. But much of that seems to have fallen by the wayside, replaced with "salus populi suprema lex" etc., and with good reason. A corporation is a little state, so you can say a state is a big corporation, but the difference is that the corporation is artificially restricted to economic incentives because it stands under the power of the state. As Nick Szabo used to argue with you, quite successfully as I recall, pure governance for profit is an impossibility because a sovereign state has a much wider set of incentives. This is particularly true in the modern era, as the value of fiat money basically comes out of the barrel of a gun, and thus cannot be expected to dictate the actions of the people holding that gun.
So that leaves us with the Hoppean idea that a state with a single power centre, run by a monarch with personal responsibility, would have more reason to leave most people alone than the current chaotic mess in which everyone is fighting at the trough of power. Up to a point, this is true. What we have now, essentially a Polish-style "nobles' democracy" of the priestly class, is a system perversely incentivised to expand the power of the state into more and more lunatic moral crusades. Had Western governments remained absolutist, on the whole, they would be acting a lot more sensibly. But we should not extrapolate too widely from premodern history.
Consider the situation of an old-school despot, let's say a Chinese emperor. Information reaches him at the speed of a horse; then he formulates his orders at the speed of brush and ink; then they are sent out, again at the speed of a horse, to be read aloud to the people in the towns and villages. He can audit his officials, but he has to trust most people to do what he wants, because he can't keep his beady eye on everyone. His ability to do arbitrary things, like corralling all the maidens in a town into his harem, is restricted to his immediate personal vicinity (although at least one emperor in Chinese history stopped all marriages across the land so that he could take his pick of the ladies). The social miasma of the tyrant's court – in which eunuchs are favoured for their dependency, all the women are state concubines, foreign mamluks hold the whip hand over subjects, flatterers get ahead by showing loyalty and stoking paranoia, etc. – is naturally bounded and does not flow out into the rest of society in the form of "Bioleninism".
Obviously none of this holds true in the modern era, where hubris has been unbounded by technology, and all of society might conceivably be watched through a vast online panopticon and directed from a despot's Twitter account. Obviously, wei wu wei would still be the way of wisdom, and a single individual has more potential to act wisely than a vast, power-hungry, irresponsible crowd. But the thing about personal government is that it depends on personality, not abstract reasoning about incentives. And the fact that you, of all people, can fall prey to Cathedral hubris and hysteria when it is salted with hypochondria and spiced up with tech-bro wonkery, ought to remind us of the wisdom of Balthasar Gracian's saying that "every man has his thumbscrew".
Perhaps you can think about some of these issues when you get back on track with your book. Speaking for myself, I don't need any utopian hopes about the future to practice the ethos of Juenger, or reject the charlatanism of Con Party activists and Alt-Right propagandists. I don't really see the new absolutism as much more than a lesser evil, which we must suffer through if we are to restore a social order being devastated by democracy. A truly sane and just order would probably require a religious correction of the West, but that is a task best left to others.
Yeah, you should ignore your commenters on COVID. The blue tribe likes ineffective measures to combat a perceived threat, so the red tribe partisans (who appears to have colonized the comment section) must deny that there is even the appearance of a threat.
I do like "clear tribe" as an alternative to Slate Star Codex "grey tribe"-ism. Beyond that, Sun Tzu said it all thousands of years ago: "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win."
"But: is it prudent to resist? Is it necessary to resist?"
There are millions of Americans whose livelihoods and basic freedoms still exist only because of resistance to Covid-tyranny.
"Never apply power. Only build power."
Hard to build power when your supporters aren't allowed to have jobs or enter public buildings.
"Assuming there is actually a collective action against this abuse that would be effective, we still need to ask whether the abuse of power is making the regime more powerful."
Does the regime ever act in an ideologically coordinated way that doesn't increase its power?
"Moreover, these kinds of goals are terribly distracting when we are sitting back in our armchairs and solving problem (b)—what the ideal regime of the future should do about a problem like covid?"
Long ago, a wise man said the following while discussing how to replace a bad regime with a good one:
"Neither of these options involves any of the following acts: starting a new political party, recruiting a paramilitary fascist skinhead stormtroop brigade, or engaging in eternal debates about the policies and procedures of the restored polity.
All of these are crucial, but the third especially."
Perhaps for reasons mirroring Carlyle's on the importance of heroes, it is useful to work through what an ideal regime might do during an emergency. At some point, though, don't these scenarios become so contrived that we stray from trying to build "the ideal perpendicular wall" and instead start building "the ideal wall, if only we didn't need to worry about gravity?" In your hypothetical, the virus is strong enough to require some decisive actions by the regime, but not so strong that it doesn't yield to them. Aren't we just making things too easy here?
So ok, when faced with a genuine and bona fide emergency, an ideal future regime would be only as strict and invasive as is necessary, and absolutely no more than is necessary. Not too hot, not too cold, but somehow, it knows exactly where this happy medium lies. Somehow, our ideal regime lacks factions that would benefit from looser measures than are necessary, factions that would benefit from stricter measures than are necessary, and factions who would wish to make the existing measures the new normal. Somehow. The ideal future regime would also make excellent use of modern technology, ordering up software applications, aerial PCR machines, construction of BSL4 quarantine hotels... and absolutely none of these contractors will want to preserve their new livelihoods once the emergency is declared to be over. Again, somehow.
The problem is, *any* future regime will be bound by the laws of power as surely as any wall is bound by the laws of gravitation. One law of power is that power is *always* contested, *always* contingent, and *never* absolute, and even if all your living enemies are subjugated, Isaac Newton will always be willing to defy you from the grave. The corollary is that you can never stop building power, because you will always have competitors.
So the regime will be "as strict as is necessary," but necessary for what? In practice, as strict as is necessary for the *regime's* survival. And of course, if the emergency is dire enough, there would be certainly be levels of survival it would be prepared to accept. A civilizational collapse is never a pretty sight.
To anyone dismayed by graymirror aka "my struggle with the gospel" I'd recommend David gornoskis recent cast "letting go of our obsession with power" or the first couple pages of 1 Corinthians. "The foolishness of god is wiser than human wisdom, the weakness of god stronger than human strength...he came to shame "elites"'
Ppl are clearly yearning for the violent Christ to smite their enemies and for an internet grifter to give them the words to pwn their colleagues intelackshually when Brian Christ wants nothing to do with this but wants his followers to actually follow him by doing it themselves.
Many can understand that the enemy is a parasite that seems to gain power from it's resistance. The gospel message, like John galts, is to remove the enemies energy source and let it eat itself. Lies will die and the powerful truth speakers will surely gain a morally convicted following thankful for their bravery, inspiring the same. But then what about B?
Why shouldn't b look just like a?
This covid situation couldn't be clearer. Governing by doing nothing is the mandate of heaven. All power has done is cover up the actually safe and effective science and innovation that happens naturally.
The evil is complex but thankfully there is a tradition that cultivates holy, spirited individuals with moral conviction and passion as well as a wise blueprint of understanding the sheep and wolves to emerge as shepard's, to Steward the wolves dressed as grandma to Die nasty as they wakeup from their hunters hangover wrapped around a coyote ugly fauxi tyranny that no matter how many legs they bite off, they can't get rid of that virus except by embracing the ungraspable cross they rejected in favor of following the crowd to that stoning party to tri to escape the GOAT.
This post has me wondering whether this blog is now being written by a GPT-3-backed program trained on earlier UR and GM writings. Would we be able to tell?
No, no, no.
The problem with your article was not that we are not enlightened enough to understand it, it is that you said (among similar statements) the following:
"In the West, where power depends on either managing or following public opinion, the idea of actual governance is almost unfamiliar. The wise experts who manage the public mind have one school of governance theater; the cynical sycophants who milk the populist mob have another."
The choice for a lot us is: does your business go bankrupt or not, do you lose you job or not, can you leave the house or not, can you go to the pub or not, do you have a social life or not, is your child subjected to elaborate ritualised abuse at school or not, do you have to take some shitty vaccine that you don't need and doesn't really work or not, is your doctor legally prevented from prescribing you possibly effective palliative medicine or not. What bad thing have these 'cynical sycophants' done to us that justifies you both-sidings it, other than your refusal to admit that you let your hypochondria get the better of you?
So, yeah, actually a lot of the original article was completely correct, but you couldn't resist rubbing our noses in your disease paranoia and limitless faith in big pharma, and, apparently, most of us really aren't in the mood for it anymore.
Also, P.S., your war analogy is retarded. War's aren't fought to save lives. Almost invariably the easiest way to save lives is just to surrender. War is when you sacrifice people's lives to achieve some sort of desired national goal, often national independence or the maintenance of your way of life. The logic of the war analogy is that the old and ill people who are risk of dying of Covid-19 should willingly lay down their lives to maintain a standard of living that we think tolerable for ourselves and our children.
Why are you saying this to us, Curtis? Are we really the ones who are not "clearpilled"? It strikes me that insofar Covid-19 is concerned, you are the one whos is not sufficiently clearpilled. And in a deeper sense than you yourself use that word.
You were the one to advocate very concrete political measures in response to the virus from the start. You are the one who continues to advocate such measures despite your own mantra that "power does what power wills and our opinion is irrelevant, so we should stop trying to have one". Then you chastise us for having an opinion, just like you do.
Your opinion is not any less reactive than ours. It is just as reactive, only in the opposite direction - "actually they should have cracked down on us EVEN HARDER". Then you LARP about being "clearpilled", quote Bruce Lee how we should "be like water" and tell us that we are cringe. I am fine with being called cringe (if we are honest I think that is clearly part of the reason why we are all paying for your content), but please try to be consistent.
Speaking of being like water, that is what the reaction of all governments should have been from the start of the pandemic. Some forces of nature humans still cannot stop or even control (in fact as you yourself pointed out earlier this year, this whole debacle was started by humans trying to do exactly that). So just let it go and get to natural immunity. Isn't that the "clearpilled" solution? Or are we really going to have to indulge your laughable example of China, as if we have any reason to believe any piece of statistical data coming from that country? And your data on Singapore is the exact opposite of reality.
Look, it's fine to be wrong. I actually agreed with you in spring 2020. I thought lockdowns were the way to go. I thought they were even too relaxed at first. I thought going full prison-planet China-style lockdowns is the way to go. I used examples like Singapore and South Korea for how efficient tracking and targeted but very strict lockdowns can work. Well where are those countries now? You can google the data yourself. China's numbers are obviously cooked.
And don't get me started on the vaccines. There are so many red flags that the whole vaccination process from the earliest clinical trials to now looks like the red army marching through Eastern Europe in 1944. I am not even suggesting malicious intent as others do, only rampant incompetence and corruption among our public institutions. The signs of which I have learned to identify very quickly in big part thanks to reading your texts over the past 9 years.
So can you please drop this ridiculousness? The Covid-19 pandemic is a gigantic tragedy. A tragedy of our incredibly corrupt public science establishment, as correctly identified by you. But sometimes a tragedy is so immense that it is well outside the scope of human power to control. As others pointed out in the comments under your previous post - this should be a lesson for the "Nihilist prince" that sometimes when shit hits the fan there is actually nothing which can be done to improve the situation. But plenty can be done to make it worse and in more ways than you can imagine a priori.
Put simply, you are overrating the power of power. Your sci-fi fictions of a multipolar decentralized global order being maintained by a benevolent solar-system level dictatorship already suggested that sometimes you tend to overlook the limits and realities of human power. This here is another such example.
Dude. Just repent and be saved already.
Most of us wish you would just drop it already and move on, instead of continuing to obstinately insist that your readers (many of whom are very thoughtful people, and frankly much better informed on COVID data than yourself) "just don't get it, man".
Curtis, I don’t think you are listening. You were correct in your early opinion on the lab leak from Wuhan, and that deserves credit. Other than that, you have been wrong on many (most?) of the fundamental facts about covid, the covid vaccines, and the appropriateness of resistance to Regime measures like mandating an endothelial toxin for healthy children who are at no real risk from covid, but at real risk from Pharma “vaccines.” As I linked before, healthy young boys were found to have had a 3-6 times greater chance of being hospitalized for myocarditis/pericarditis- think *cardiac damage*- than they ever do of being hospitalized for covid. And we aren’t even discussing *subclinical damage* of administering an endothelial toxin multiple times a year, potentially for years. Myocarditis is merely the loudest, the least ignorable, of the significant safety signals surrounding these “vaccines”.
And thats why we need to be focusing on *all cause mortality* data, because it is very likely the least manipulable statistic indicating vax safety/efficacy. If covid is as dangerous as claimed, and if the vaccines are as effective as claimed, we should be able to see a clear reduction in all cause mortality among the vaxxed relative to the non-vaxxed. And yet, ***the actual data shows the reverse.*** (Please see statistician Norman Fenton and Matthew Crawford’s analysis on this).
Even Pfizer’s own trial data, which includes god knows how much fraud and manipulation, that was presented to the FDA, found *higher all cause mortality in the vaccine group over placebo.*
I don’t know who your sources of information are on covid, but they are fucking terrible.
And these are only some of the reasons why your readers aren’t on board with your “act like water, do what power wants” messaging on covid.
It should be noted at this point, that Hitler was a hypochondriac. Hitler's fear of cancer is a mirror image of Moldbug's COVID fear, and the Fuhrer wrote verbose screeds about how to run society (Mein Kampf is quite long, as is UR). This latest post is definitive proof that Yarvin like Hitler is the real racist.
I strongly suggest that anyone who wants to write intelligently about the COVID Pandemic should first read Robert F. Kennedy Jr's book: "The Real Anthony Fauci. Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health."
Yes, THAT Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Democratic Party Kennedy/Camelot royalty. What ids the book about?
"This book will show you that Tony Fauci does not do public health; he is a businessman, who has used his office to enrich his pharmaceutical partners and expand the reach of influence that has made him the most powerful— despotic—doctor in human history."
The more you dig into his book, the more you'll see that Fauci belongs in the same category of "doctors" as Dr. Mengele. RFK Jr's book is not some intellectual thought piece about existentialism or governance theatre. It's 900 pages with 1,780 links to references. One of the finest pieces of investigative journalism you'll ever read. I suggest that you get the Kindle version so that, as you read, you can link out to the references to verify his statement and allegations. Why did he write it?
RFK Jr: "I wrote this book so that Americans—both Democrat and Republican—can understand Dr. Fauci’s pernicious role in allowing pharmaceutical companies to dominate our government and subvert our democracy, and to chronicle the key role Dr. Fauci has played in the current coup d’état against democracy."
I have no relationship with RFK Jr and no financial interest. I just need to know the facts. Caveat Lector
Getting a clotshot to own the libs.
The goal of not getting your kids and yourself injected with poorly tested biological agent is not regime-complete.
It is defensive in nature.
And on the existential scale it is up there next to being physically eliminated for a lot of people.
Yarvin’s right about pretty much everything in here. Fighting against COVID policies, in the long run, is really no different than expending energy battling the million other idiocies and abuses the regime commits.
Did we expect that the next one wouldn’t affect our daily lives? Most of the complaints I’m hearing here about strategy miss the point. It continues to be pointless to waste our energy fighting regime policies. Yes, they are coming for our jobs— and beating them back for the next year or so with some weak political victory confirms that we and our children will only suffer harder in the future.
Still, Curtis, you’re pulling a serious motte-and-bailey by making all these inflammatory and incorrect COVID takes and then hopping behind your grander (and correct) political philosophy when anyone calls you out on it. Just drop it already.
The subscription cancelations will continue until the writing improves.
I don't think anyone here has got bluepilled on activism over the last two years, since the street protests have failed so miserably to slow down the madness. I suspect that many, like me, are unvaxxed and have caught the ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ variant – but I don't see how this goes against detachment unless we are personally trying to infiltrate the state. Flowing around power like water doesn't mean jumping into its arms; and if people drag their feet on voluntary measures till the gov has to openly force them, that would lead to an increase in "formalism" as you put it.
Let's be honest: these coofposts are activism, not passivism. For partly understandable reasons, you identify with the bureaucratic hubris that is trying to turn back the tide of an ever-mutating respiratory virus and you want to see more of it. It is we who are being detached, indifferent, etc.
Those turning a 180 on you are misguided, because all you have said on GM so far is consistent with what you said at UR, and dissidents who discard that body of work will only backslide into Alt-Right nonsense. At the same time, let's not pretend that this doesn't highlight some fundamental problems with that body of work.
In early posts on UR, you used to argue that the incentive structure of neocameralism would produce de facto libertarian behaviour in an absolutist state. But much of that seems to have fallen by the wayside, replaced with "salus populi suprema lex" etc., and with good reason. A corporation is a little state, so you can say a state is a big corporation, but the difference is that the corporation is artificially restricted to economic incentives because it stands under the power of the state. As Nick Szabo used to argue with you, quite successfully as I recall, pure governance for profit is an impossibility because a sovereign state has a much wider set of incentives. This is particularly true in the modern era, as the value of fiat money basically comes out of the barrel of a gun, and thus cannot be expected to dictate the actions of the people holding that gun.
So that leaves us with the Hoppean idea that a state with a single power centre, run by a monarch with personal responsibility, would have more reason to leave most people alone than the current chaotic mess in which everyone is fighting at the trough of power. Up to a point, this is true. What we have now, essentially a Polish-style "nobles' democracy" of the priestly class, is a system perversely incentivised to expand the power of the state into more and more lunatic moral crusades. Had Western governments remained absolutist, on the whole, they would be acting a lot more sensibly. But we should not extrapolate too widely from premodern history.
Consider the situation of an old-school despot, let's say a Chinese emperor. Information reaches him at the speed of a horse; then he formulates his orders at the speed of brush and ink; then they are sent out, again at the speed of a horse, to be read aloud to the people in the towns and villages. He can audit his officials, but he has to trust most people to do what he wants, because he can't keep his beady eye on everyone. His ability to do arbitrary things, like corralling all the maidens in a town into his harem, is restricted to his immediate personal vicinity (although at least one emperor in Chinese history stopped all marriages across the land so that he could take his pick of the ladies). The social miasma of the tyrant's court – in which eunuchs are favoured for their dependency, all the women are state concubines, foreign mamluks hold the whip hand over subjects, flatterers get ahead by showing loyalty and stoking paranoia, etc. – is naturally bounded and does not flow out into the rest of society in the form of "Bioleninism".
Obviously none of this holds true in the modern era, where hubris has been unbounded by technology, and all of society might conceivably be watched through a vast online panopticon and directed from a despot's Twitter account. Obviously, wei wu wei would still be the way of wisdom, and a single individual has more potential to act wisely than a vast, power-hungry, irresponsible crowd. But the thing about personal government is that it depends on personality, not abstract reasoning about incentives. And the fact that you, of all people, can fall prey to Cathedral hubris and hysteria when it is salted with hypochondria and spiced up with tech-bro wonkery, ought to remind us of the wisdom of Balthasar Gracian's saying that "every man has his thumbscrew".
Perhaps you can think about some of these issues when you get back on track with your book. Speaking for myself, I don't need any utopian hopes about the future to practice the ethos of Juenger, or reject the charlatanism of Con Party activists and Alt-Right propagandists. I don't really see the new absolutism as much more than a lesser evil, which we must suffer through if we are to restore a social order being devastated by democracy. A truly sane and just order would probably require a religious correction of the West, but that is a task best left to others.
Yeah, you should ignore your commenters on COVID. The blue tribe likes ineffective measures to combat a perceived threat, so the red tribe partisans (who appears to have colonized the comment section) must deny that there is even the appearance of a threat.
I do like "clear tribe" as an alternative to Slate Star Codex "grey tribe"-ism. Beyond that, Sun Tzu said it all thousands of years ago: "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win."
"But: is it prudent to resist? Is it necessary to resist?"
There are millions of Americans whose livelihoods and basic freedoms still exist only because of resistance to Covid-tyranny.
"Never apply power. Only build power."
Hard to build power when your supporters aren't allowed to have jobs or enter public buildings.
"Assuming there is actually a collective action against this abuse that would be effective, we still need to ask whether the abuse of power is making the regime more powerful."
Does the regime ever act in an ideologically coordinated way that doesn't increase its power?
"Moreover, these kinds of goals are terribly distracting when we are sitting back in our armchairs and solving problem (b)—what the ideal regime of the future should do about a problem like covid?"
Long ago, a wise man said the following while discussing how to replace a bad regime with a good one:
"Neither of these options involves any of the following acts: starting a new political party, recruiting a paramilitary fascist skinhead stormtroop brigade, or engaging in eternal debates about the policies and procedures of the restored polity.
All of these are crucial, but the third especially."
Perhaps for reasons mirroring Carlyle's on the importance of heroes, it is useful to work through what an ideal regime might do during an emergency. At some point, though, don't these scenarios become so contrived that we stray from trying to build "the ideal perpendicular wall" and instead start building "the ideal wall, if only we didn't need to worry about gravity?" In your hypothetical, the virus is strong enough to require some decisive actions by the regime, but not so strong that it doesn't yield to them. Aren't we just making things too easy here?
So ok, when faced with a genuine and bona fide emergency, an ideal future regime would be only as strict and invasive as is necessary, and absolutely no more than is necessary. Not too hot, not too cold, but somehow, it knows exactly where this happy medium lies. Somehow, our ideal regime lacks factions that would benefit from looser measures than are necessary, factions that would benefit from stricter measures than are necessary, and factions who would wish to make the existing measures the new normal. Somehow. The ideal future regime would also make excellent use of modern technology, ordering up software applications, aerial PCR machines, construction of BSL4 quarantine hotels... and absolutely none of these contractors will want to preserve their new livelihoods once the emergency is declared to be over. Again, somehow.
The problem is, *any* future regime will be bound by the laws of power as surely as any wall is bound by the laws of gravitation. One law of power is that power is *always* contested, *always* contingent, and *never* absolute, and even if all your living enemies are subjugated, Isaac Newton will always be willing to defy you from the grave. The corollary is that you can never stop building power, because you will always have competitors.
So the regime will be "as strict as is necessary," but necessary for what? In practice, as strict as is necessary for the *regime's* survival. And of course, if the emergency is dire enough, there would be certainly be levels of survival it would be prepared to accept. A civilizational collapse is never a pretty sight.
To anyone dismayed by graymirror aka "my struggle with the gospel" I'd recommend David gornoskis recent cast "letting go of our obsession with power" or the first couple pages of 1 Corinthians. "The foolishness of god is wiser than human wisdom, the weakness of god stronger than human strength...he came to shame "elites"'
Ppl are clearly yearning for the violent Christ to smite their enemies and for an internet grifter to give them the words to pwn their colleagues intelackshually when Brian Christ wants nothing to do with this but wants his followers to actually follow him by doing it themselves.
Many can understand that the enemy is a parasite that seems to gain power from it's resistance. The gospel message, like John galts, is to remove the enemies energy source and let it eat itself. Lies will die and the powerful truth speakers will surely gain a morally convicted following thankful for their bravery, inspiring the same. But then what about B?
Why shouldn't b look just like a?
This covid situation couldn't be clearer. Governing by doing nothing is the mandate of heaven. All power has done is cover up the actually safe and effective science and innovation that happens naturally.
The evil is complex but thankfully there is a tradition that cultivates holy, spirited individuals with moral conviction and passion as well as a wise blueprint of understanding the sheep and wolves to emerge as shepard's, to Steward the wolves dressed as grandma to Die nasty as they wakeup from their hunters hangover wrapped around a coyote ugly fauxi tyranny that no matter how many legs they bite off, they can't get rid of that virus except by embracing the ungraspable cross they rejected in favor of following the crowd to that stoning party to tri to escape the GOAT.
Don't follow, fellow leader.
This post has me wondering whether this blog is now being written by a GPT-3-backed program trained on earlier UR and GM writings. Would we be able to tell?