Against Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug

Since 2007, there has been a tiny, marginal movement on the internet, or several overlapping movements, started by a person named Curtis Yarvin, better known by his assumed name, "Mencius Moldbug."  (I'll use that name; it's less obscure.)  Spreading out from Silicon Valley, where it first became trendy, the movement(s) have been known by various names.  Moldbug originally called his political philosophy "formalism" - at that time, he was advocating for the government being run in the style of a corporation - especially a Silicon Valley startup - with a powerful CEO.  But that never caught on, and he abandoned it in favor of "neo-cameralism."  But this turned out not to capture anyone's imagination either, and so other names appeared: the Dark Enlightenment, neo-monarchism, and most famous of all, the "NeoReactionary movement" - NRx for short.  Are all these terms equivalent, or are there subtle distinctions between them?  And what exactly do neoreactionaries (I see no need to capitalize the term) want?  There are no clear answers to these questions, neither from the media - which tends to focus on the connections between the neoreactionaries and the "Alt Right" white supremacists, nor from the neoreactionaries themselves, among whom the aims and principles of analysis keep shifting and changing, leading one to strongly suspect that Moldbug and his cronies are just trolling everyone and don't really have any serious ideas at all.  But perhaps what he and they are most famous or notorious for is the habit of declaring their commitment to absolute monarchism and demanding that the United States of America should be a monarchy.

Many people see the neoreactionary movement as their generation's equivalent of the neonazi skinheads that appeared in the UK in the 60s and gradually grew around the world throughout the 80s and 90s.  But they couldn't be more wrong.  Real skinheads wouldn't be caught dead with people like the neoreactionaries, because skinheads were fundamentally motivated by trying to be, in some way, cool, whereas the neoreactionary movement consists 100% of total nerds.  (Don't get me wrong - the neonazi skins are not cool and were never cool - and whatever style they had, they ripped off from people who actually were cool.  The original skinheads were not racist, and in fact the style was mostly developed by Jamaicans.)

The reality of the neoreactionary movement is that it was an online offshoot of the "Rationalist" community, a subculture that grew up around the blog "Less Wrong," whose main contributor was Eliezer Yudkowsky - at that point a tireless promoter of Bayesian statistics (against frequentism), who is now more well-known as one of the more influential AI doomers.  What brought Yudkowsky to such prominence, that so many of the smartest people in Silicon Valley were reading his blog?  Was he the CEO of one of the fastest growing startups?  Had he developed any famous software?  Was he the best coder around?  Was he a math professor or a Defense Department guy or something?  No - he first rose to fame as the author of some especially well-regarded Harry Potter fanfiction.  Yep - we're talkin' NERRRRRRDS.  (Btw, I've read "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality," and I can confirm it's really good - much better than the original Harry Potter books, which I never got into.) 

I feel a little bad dragging Yudkowsky's name through the mud by associating him with people like Moldbug, and I want to make it clear that Yudkowsky is not a neoreactionary and never was one.  I like him and respect him a lot.  My point is simply that we are in the sticky realm of profound nerddom.  Never forget that the original big hub of bitcoin trading - before it crashed - was called "MTGOX," short for the "Magic the Gathering Online Exchange."  Of course these people are into monarchy - they're into Dungeons and Dragons and J.R.R. Tolkien and A Game of Thrones and the "Society for Creative Anachronism" and all that stuff.  They're children.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the big difference, by the way, between Mencius Moldbug and James Burnham, the Realist author of "The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom," whom Moldbug so reveres - Burnham was an adult.  Also, this cuts both ways: the fact that they are so politically naive means that we can cut them a little slack.  There's really no reason to hate or fear the neoreactionaries.  Presumably, they will grow out of their cartoonish edgy phase once they get a taste of what it's like to live in the real world.  In the meantime, we can all have a little fun laughing at them.

Enter Moldbug himself.  Moldbug appears to have - not a stutter, exactly, but something like palilalia, the tendency to repeat words over and over uncontrollably.  In interviews, in the midst of his enthusiasm for Elon Musk, he'll go into rapturous paroxysms of "Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!" or "Right! Right! Right! Right!" or "Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome!" or "Totally! Totally! Totally! Totally!" each word delivered in exactly the same tone of voice, like a record skipping, or perhaps a bit like Max Headroom.  God forbid that his interviewer ever point out an inconsistency in Moldbug's ideology, or we will subjected to an endless stream of "But but but but but but but" or "No! No! No! No! No! No! No!" or "Actually actually actually actually actually actually" like a robot breaking down in an old Star Trek episode.  Does anyone remember this character, "Grass Valley Greg," from Mr. Show, played by David Cross?  The Silicon Valley guy who forces everybody to go on tofutti breaks all the time?

 

Why would anyone support monarchy?  Remember, this is a Silicon Valley movement.  It became somewhat popular among executives of tech startups - and even more popular among people who are not executives of tech startups, but who dream of being one - the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" - or billionaires - who populate the internet, all over the world.  They see government as the same as any other business, and think businesses are best when they are run by a powerful CEO.  They think that the free market always produces the best form of organization, and that elections and altruistic intentions almost never do.  

But the arguments against monarchy are obvious.  Even if we accept the idea that the free market produces the best forms of social organization (an extremely dubious hypothesis), that would only be true because constant competition between businesses incentivizes them to efficiently produce that which will attract the most consumers.  But since the state is traditionally understood as holding a monopoly of legitimate violent coercion within a territory, there's extremely limited competition and thus little incentive to do that which is best for their "consumers".  Even if there were competition, it's not clear that consumers would be completely free to choose between them.

That having been said, there is some choice, some "market", so to speak, some competition, and the news is not good for the neoreactionaries.  Because, believe it or not, there are still some absolute monarchies left in the world.  For instance, there's Eswatini in Southern Africa.  And the "consumers" of these "businesses" are using what little choice they have to risk their lives to "vote with their feet" and try to get into democracies by any means necessary.  People are streaming into democracies from authoritarian countries by the millions.  And there's good reason for that: Eswatini has the 12th lowest life expectancy in the world.  The median age is 22 years old.  Poverty and disease are rampant.  Given the terrible economy of the absolute monarchy, schools, clinics, and even pharmacies are closing down, in the midst of an AIDS crisis.  There are only 12 ambulances in the entire country.  To say nothing of North Korea.

Although Moldbug's neoreactionaries split off from the Rationalist community, it really had its roots in the Austrian school of economics and the right-wing so-called "libertarian" (more accurately termed "propertarian") political and social movements that justified themselves in the terms of its economic theories.  As he put it, "My CPU has a permanent open socket to the Mises Institute."  The famed economist Ludwig von Mises himself had generally been at least broadly supportive of democracy in theory and tended to seem a bit dismissive of monarchy, but his followers were increasingly resentful toward democracy, especially when they and their libertarian ideas proved extremely unpopular in democratic countries.  They liked to say things like "Democracy means two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner" (a quote falsely attributed to Benjamin Franklin; I think it may have been someone named James Bovard, though I'm otherwise unfamiliar with his work).  Murray Rothbard declared himself an "anarchocapitalist," and then Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in his well-known book "Democracy: the God that Failed," declared that monarchy had generally been better for classical liberalism than democracy, which inevitably tended toward socialism and tyranny.  In his view, the "anarchocapitalism" of Rothbard was, theoretically, ideally, the best system, but if that was not plausibly feasible in the contemporary political environment - and increasingly it seemed that it was not - then monarchy would serve as the second-best.  It only remained for Moldbug to take the next logical (?) step and insist that monarchy is superior to both democracy and anarchocapitalism even in theory.  And then Moldbug's buddies, like Michael Anissimov, of the "More Right" blog, set about trying to prove that everything had been better in monarchical Europe, especially in the Holy Roman Empire - though they did so in an embarrassingly historically illiterate way.  (Also, perhaps it's worth pointing out that while Ludwig von Mises may have given democracy some half-hearted support in theory, in reality he was the chief economic advisor to Engelbert Dollfuss, the "Austrofascist" leader of the last little vestige of that Holy Roman Empire.  So there's that.)

Sometimes I think that the neoreactionary love of monarchy is really a response to the objection that normal people often have towards "anarchocapitalists" - namely, that their utopia sounds a lot like feudalism.  Anarchocapitalists like to advertise themselves as representatives of freedom and liberty.  Sometimes they call themselves "Voluntaryists," meaning that they believe that every interaction should be voluntary.  The initiation of violence is always wrong in their opinion, no matter who initiates it - and they consider taking any property to be violence, thus they consider taxes to be theft.  They consider government to be inherently coercive, and thus they are against the existence of all government.  Therefore, in their dreamworld, there would be no public property - all property would be privately owned.  In their utopia, everyone's property would inviolable (somehow).  But, as many people have pointed out, the idealistic hype about liberation doesn't stand up to scrutiny - their utopian vision sounds like paradise for the rich and ruthless oppression for the poor.  Think about it this way: imagine we live in an "anarchocapitalist" world, and you happen to have been born as a poor person living on an island that was privately owned by another person(1).  Your family rents an apartment that the island-owning billionaire owns as a landlord.  At any moment, this landlord may evict you, at his whim.  You can't call the police - instead, the island is regulated by a private security force hired by that same billionaire.  There's no constitution, and no bill of rights.  If you are dissatisfied, you will never be able to vote for any change of leadership, or any change of any kind.  What exactly distinguishes this situation from feudalism?  What distinguishes the rent you pay from the tribute you would pay to a feudal lord?  This argument has been very difficult for anarchocapitalists to dispute, and so at a certain point, instead of trying to argue against it, they leaned into it - they reappropriated the label of "feudalism" and wore it as a badge of honor.

But precisely for that very reason, the neoreactionary concept of a monarchical civilization began its life as an idealized hypothetical utopian abstraction and was only later projected backwards onto real history.  It demonstrates all the earmarks of a conclusion-shopping ideology desperately attempting to shoehorn evidence into its preconceived ideas.  In many ways, the neoreactionary historiography is less based on the accurate facts of the medieval era as historians understand it and more a product of the romanticism of the 19th century, with its rosy-tinted nostalgic "Medievalism" - sopranos wearing horned hats, King Arthur, the sword in the stone, dragons, etc., etc..  Moldbug even more or less admits this.  He has very little to say about actual medieval history, and attributes the source of his ideas to Thomas Carlyle, the late-Romantic Victorian Scottish essayist and poet, whose rabidly pro-monarchic (and also racist, sexist, etc.) conception of history was utter hero-worship and fantasy, entirely unfettered to the material world. 

So Curtis Yarvin assumed the literary persona of Moldbug - essentially, what he imagines an old aristocrat of the 19th century would have to say about various contemporary issues - from the quite serious to the most ridiculous.  He's skeptical of anthropogenic climate change, he doubts the generally-accepted scientific narrative about the spread of Covid-19, he's passionately convinced that a commoner like William Shakespeare could never have written the plays and poems ascribed to him, because their production required the breeding and education of an aristocrat.  And most of all, he's convinced that what society needs is a good strong authoritarian leader and that all of society's ills are in one way or another derivative of this fundamental lack.  He's convinced that modern society is crime-ridden and chaotic and that this is the result of democracy.  I'm surprised that he has nothing to say about the flat Earth.  He could at least throw flatearthers a bone!

Moldbug and the other neoreactionaries are dedicated to undermining our faith in democracy and our belief that the transition from monarchy to democracy was a history of progress.  On his blog, "Unqualified Reservations," Moldbug claimed to have taken the "red pill," thus no longer believing in the matrix of democracy and "Whig history".  (Moldbug may have been one of the first people to publicize the use of the word "redpilled" to mean something like "manly" or "right wing" or both, though the term may have been floating around on the "manosphere" misogynist parts of the internet before that.  Of course they all got this metaphor from the movie "The Matrix," which is ironic because that movie made direct references to the leftist philosopher Jean Baudrillard and was written and directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski as a metaphor for their transition as trans women.  The original red pill signified an escape from the prison of masculinity, not an abject acceptance of all of the gender roles that have been imposed upon you.)

One thing that Moldbug is especially fond of saying - he says this over and over and over again, on his blogs, in interviews, in speeches, and everywhere - is that when we use the word "democracy" this always has positive connotations, whereas when we use the word "politics" this always has negative connotations, but in reality the two words are synonyms and you can replace one with the other  For instance, he points out, it sounds bad when a politician is accused of "politicizing" the judiciary, but you can turn that into a positive-sounding term if you instead say that the politician is "democratizing" the judiciary.  He loves to say that he's leaving this for you to chew on.  You know: mull it over, contemplate it for a while, blah blah blah. 

No, no, and no.

Moldbug is as wrong as he could possibly be here.  He's wrong about every part of this assertion.  He's wrong about democracy, he's wrong about politics, and he's wrong about the relationship between them.  Let's go through this, one step at a time.

Are the connotations of "democracy" always good?  Not at all.  Sometimes the word "democratic" has positive connotations, but often it does not.  Many people - I would dare say most people - are fully aware that there are problems with democracy.  There's that famous quote attributed to Winston Churchill - I'm not sure if he said it, but he certainly expressed similar ideas - that "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others."  People have seen that there are flaws with democracy for about as long as democracy has existed - maybe even longer.  Plato of course famously  wrote many lengthy and profound criticisms of democracy.  Democracy does not necessarily cultivate the highest aspirations of humanity, but may instead bring out our inclinations toward conformity, eagerness to please others, self-promotion, deceitfulness, shallowness, trendiness, flattery, and the unwillingness to express anything uncomfortable, among other complaints.  What is true is not always popular, and what is popular is not always true.  These concerns have always been valid, and are even more so in the era of mass media.  When I was in high school Civics (my high school called the class "PIG,"(2) to my eternal amusement), the teacher hammered again and again on the central point of the class, which was that America's founders intended it not to be a democracy, but a republic - its function was not to go along with the majority in every case, but rather to always safeguard our individual rights - if needs be, against the "tyranny of the majority."  Of course, there have also been Marxist critiques of democracy, as well as anarchist ones (and here I refer to real anarchists, not "anarchocapitalists").  And then there are those who fight for minorities.  For almost everyone of every political persuasion, democracy is a middling thing - neither utopian perfection nor dystopian nightmare, but something that muddles on, despite its many inherent self-created challenges and obstacles.

What about the word "politics"?  Are its connotations always purely negative?  Again, like "democracy," "politics" is a word that is sometimes is positive, and sometimes negative.  Sure, we can think of negative uses, like when someone talks about "office politics," or when they complain that they were denied promotion because of politics, meaning that they did not kiss up to the right people in positions of authority.  But there are other uses of the word "politics."  For instance, whenever you tell someone that you're a vegetarian, it's customary for them to ask, "For health reasons, or for political reasons?"  Many people will answer that it is their politics that led them to vegetarianism or veganism, and similarly some people say they are straightedge (refusing to indulge in alcohol, drugs, and in some cases promiscuous sex) for political reasons.  "Politics" here refers to a deeply felt, personal, autonomous, self-contemplated and self-imposed, philosophical and ethical commitment.  I can't help again invoking Plato and company: for the ancient Greeks, "politics" was a part of "ethics," and the highest, most important part.  For these philosophers, unlike "democracy," politics can arouse humanity's highest, most noble aspirations.  (I once saw Ralph Nader speak, and he quoted Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."  Cicero may have been Roman, but that's very in line with Greek thought.)  Aristotle would certainly be surprised to hear that the word "politics" had only negative connotations, and he would think that any society in which "politics" had only negative connotations would be a society so decadent that it is beyond saving.  For Aristotle believed that humanity is "the political animal"  - i.e., that it is precisely politics, our capacity for the ethical comportment necessary for us to speak together, think together, reason together, and legislate together in the polis, the city-state, that separates us from the other animals.

So is Moldbug right that "politics" and "democracy" are synonyms?  Not at all.  Obviously not.  Sure, some politics is democratic.  But not all politics.  For instance, there's a guy who goes by the name of "Mencius Moldbug," who's a political writer - but his politics is definitely not democratic.  It's anti-democratic.  There is such a thing, after all, as authoritarian politics.  Come to think of it, when people use the word "politics" with a negative connotation, it's usually authoritarian politics that they're complaining about.  When a person says that they were passed over for promotion to a position for which they were qualified because of politics, because they weren't friends with the right people and didn't kowtow to the right bigwigs, they're complaining about authoritarianism and the "good old boys' club".  When people grumble about "office politics," they're usually annoyed with someone else's ambition, narcissism, and manipulative scheming for power.  When a politician is accused of politicizing the judiciary, it's not democratic politics that people are afraid of, but authoritarian politics, in which loyalty to party or loyalty to an individual trumps equality before the law.

Moldbug likes to point out that our baseline assumption that democracy is the norm is merely a result of recency bias - a kind of selection bias, in which we give excessive weight to events that have just happened, blurring events further in the past into a vague blob, or ignoring them altogether.  If we could overcome this bias, Moldbug thinks, we would take a step back, look at all of history, and immediately see that monarchy is actually the norm, and democracy is merely a brief aberration. 

But I think that Moldbug is the one who is actually suffering from recency bias.  Yes, if we take a step back from the 20th and 21st century, and look at the last several centuries, monarchy becomes the norm.  But if we take a further step back, monarchy is very much the exception.  Humanity has been on Earth for at least about 200,000 years, though this included Neanderthals, Denisovans, and perhaps others such as homo floresiensis; for that matter we could talk about other hominins from as much as 2 or 3 million years ago.  Fully anatomically modern humans emerged at least 60,000 years ago - probably longer.  For most of this time, all humans lived in small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers.  As far as we know, there were no governments of any kind.  It was anarchy.  Ordered, stable anarchy.  (Personally, I think it's likely that social structures were far more complex than most anthropologists give credence to - but that's a topic for another time.)  Agriculture began about 12,000 years ago, and led to humans forming permanent settlements.  Our earliest archaeological evidence of human buildings have been excavated at Göbekli Tepe, dated to be from around 9500 BCE.  What we call "civilization" is only a few thousand years old, and it has taken a variety of forms of government - mostly in the form of city-states, but occasionally empires.  Even in 1000 CE, most of the world was not organized into modern states.  Are we talking about 95% of human existence?  99%?  However you slice it, the vast majority of time humans have been on Earth, humanity has been organized into relatively egalitarian, nomadic tribes, rather than monarchical nations.

Looked at from this vantage, monarchy is a relatively recent phenomenon.  Eventually the concept of individual ownership of land developed, but when the lord of a property died, in many cases the land would be divided up amongst his children.  The concept of primogeniture, in which all the land is inherited by one child, was a major innovation, which made the feudal mode of production possible.  Once the Salic Law was adopted, probably first in France, the aristocratic families that used it did not have their property broken up into smaller pieces anymore, and this lead to larger and larger feudal estates, especially as powerful families merged through (often arranged) marriage.  And the Salic Law did not appear all at once - in the earliest versions, in the 5th century, noble titles were still divided among all male heirs, but this evolved through the Carolingian period into a process of agnatic succession.  This in turn put competitive pressure on other feudal polities either also to adopt primogeniture or to be absorbed, either through outright conquest or, more often, through marriage (quite often a combination of the two) and so the Salic Law spread throughout Europe and eventually some other parts of the world.  

But what kinds of governments did humans have before monarchy?  There were many, and they were extremely varied, through a huge swath of history and prehistory, all over the world.  But many of them were fairly democratic in important ways.  Ancient Phoenicia, for instance, was ruled by the mw-'dwt, or popular assembly.  In various parts of India, the Sanghas and Ganas were decision-making assemblies that were important in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, respectively (the elephant-headed God Ganesha's name literally means "protector of the Ganas").  In many tribal customary legal traditions throughout world, from Africa to Australia, decisions were made by councils of elders.  Among the Germanic people, the Thing or Ding or Moot was the traditional decision-making assembly.  Obviously there is the Greek tradition, particularly in Athens.  And of course there were many important Native American democratic institutions, for instance among the Haudenosaunee, which may have had a direct influence on both the American system of government as well as American feminism. 

The truth is that throughout human history, from hunter-gatherer groups to gigantic metropolises, most (though perhaps not all) human social organization has been a combination of - and continual back-and-forth political struggle between - both something like autocratic tendencies and something like democratic tendencies, or what I call the struggle between "executive authority" and "ecclesiastic authority" (from ἐκκλησία, ekklesia, the name for the assemblies of many ancient Greek city-states, including Athens).  One can especially see this in the history of ancient China, which is a perpetual power struggle between the emperors and the sages/bureaucrats.  We can trace this development from archaic societies, in which a warrior chieftain had wrestle politically with the elders of his tribe (often women), up through various forms of government in which a singular figure as head of state would be surrounded by advisors, bureaucrats, and nobles.  At times, one would be dominant - say, a particularly brutal and charismatic King; at other times, the other would come to power, during for instance certain periods of the Tang and Song dynasties, when bureaucrats effectively ruled, rendering the Emperor into little more than a figurehead.

What Moldbug fails to understand is that in nearly every civilization, democracy is the conservative force in politics.  Indeed, democratic forces can often be downright reactionary.  I believe that most people are naturally conservatives - especially cultural conservatives (economics is more complicated).  We all think that the music that came out during the time between when we were age 8 and age 25 was the best music ever, and everything since sucks.  We like the old movies, the tv shows, the old architecture, the old stores.  That is to say, most people want to preserve the status quo, whatever it may be.  Most people find change scary and threatening, and respond to it with anger.  Most humans exhibit, to one degree or another, the form of cognitive bias known as "loss aversion".  People fear losing what they have, even when it means gaining something better.  Thus the ecclesiastic authority, drawn from the most powerful families of each polity, will tend toward constancy, regularity, stability.  (It is precisely for this reason that the "administrative state" is unfireable.  People like the Social Security Administration.  They don't want it to change.  They see the Social Security fund as something that they have been paying into their whole lives, they want to get a return on that investment, and this expectation aligns the interests of the public with those of the elites.) 

Moldbug likes to present democracy as a recent degeneration from the glory of monarchical Europe.  But if we look, for instance, at the history of Rome, the opposite picture emerges.  In the early Roman Republic, dignitas was not inherited.  Rather, the Roman aristocracy was competitive and largely based on merit.  Gradually, nepotism crept into the system, and eventually of course the Roman Republic devolved into an Empire, in which the position of Emperor was often (though not always!) inherited.  But this nepotism was seen as a symptom of the Roman political system's weakness and decadence, not its strength.  The same, in some ways, may be true of China: at least according to legend, Yao and Shun were leaders chosen by merit, whose offices ended with voluntary abdication, and the office of Emperor did not become hereditary until the ascension of the Xia, established by Yu.  Trace almost any monarchy back far enough, and you will usually find monarchs who were chosen by "general acclamation."  Even the Holy Roman Empire, so beloved by the neoreactionaries, was not technically a monarchy - its emperor was elected.  Yes, especially in later years, the Electors always chose the next in line of the Hapsburg succession, but they maintained a certain non-negligible power and often were the real de facto rulers.  The creeping nepotism of declining empires is a result of entropy.  (Plato understood this: according to his scheme, the utopian polity of philosopher-kings, a kind of meritocracy, eventually gradually degenerates into timocracy, the honor-based rule of powerful families, often those who have accrued military valor.)

Which brings us to an even more important point: Moldbug and his friends claim to be "absolute monarchists."  Well, absolute monarchy is a very recent development in human history, one that only became possible after the development of a worldwide mercantile economic system.  It's very telling that Moldbug's historical examples are rarely older than the 16th century.  Absolute monarchy is modern movement, which emerged in tandem with liberalism and the Enlightenment, driven by idealistic political ideology, developed by philosophers like Jean Bodin.  And it must be acknowledged that this great experiment called absolute monarchy was largely a failure, and led inevitably either to the dissolution of the monarchy altogether or the reduction of the monarchy to the role of a mere powerless figurehead.  Genuinely traditional monarchy was always limited monarchy, limited by the complex trees of relationships of vassalage and suzerainty. 

The central principle of Moldbug's politics is "order," which he equates with peace.  His contention is that monarchies were more ordered, and thus safer, more peaceful, less crime-ridden, than modern democracy.  This is utter hogwash, and he offers absolutely no evidence for it.  He does mention old premodern British crime statistics, and points out how few crimes are recorded there - but seems blithely unaware that this is an argument against his thesis.  After all, those were the crimes that were recorded, because those are the people that got caught.  It is true that in the premodern era, the state lacked the modern police force and prison system, and had no way of enforcing laws on the general public.  Then again, before the development of industrial capitalism, there were fewer displaced urban proletarians and lumpenproletarians, and so the development of modern carceral disciplinary institutions may not have been necessary.  It was simply a less ordered society.

Anyone who actually studies the history of monarchy - and especially absolute monarchy - knows that this history was one of perpetual war.  Which makes sense, if you think about it.  How did monarchies form?  How did traditional political regimes degenerate into monarchies?  Usually through war - people were willing to give up their traditional powers and privileges and surrender them, through acclamation, to a monarch, for the purposes of protection from an external threat.  The initiators of inherited authority are usually military generals, like Julius Caesar.  And then each succeeding monarch has to keep war going in order to maintain his legitimacy.  The sovereign projects the internal conflicts outward, always scapegoating domestic contradictions onto foreign enemies.  A monarchy is essentially a perpetual war machine.

I don't agree with Stephen Pinker about a lot of things - his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature is misguided in several ways.  (Anthropologists have taken him to task in particular on his account of the first two hundred thousand years of human society.)  But I think his statistics are pretty solid about the last few hundred years, which he painstakingly demonstrates is a progression of more and more peace, less and less violence, less and less crime.  All over the world, even in the most war-torn areas, we are living in societies that are far more ordered than the lives of even the elites in, say, the Kingdom of Mercia.  By several orders of magnitude. 

There is an advantage to monarchy, actually, and it lies precisely in what Max Weber called "traditional authority".  This sense of tradition is deeply important to people in a way that is not entirely rational and difficult even to put into words.  If it can be described in language at all, it could only be the language of poetry.  It speaks to something that floats in the realm of essentialism; it speaks to our sense of authenticity.  Walter Benjamin might say that it has an "aura."  I would say it speaks to us at a sub-cortical level.  (Read neuroscientist Paul Bloom's How Pleasure Works to understand more about this.)  Monarchy is revered in a way that democratic authority never could be.  British people (and weirdly, even non-British people) still get weepy when they think of "our Queen".  They did so when she was alive and they do so even more now that she is dead.  They feel a duty to defend a tradition even if it has no rational basis.  By contrast, since the authority of a democratic leader is derived from the authority of the people themselves, the people can never feel that kind of profound deference for their politicians, and quite often they will feel a kind of contempt, or at best a grudging, resentful toleration.

But this would not apply if a monarchy were established in the U.S.A..  An American monarchy can only ever be an ersatz monarchy, an artificial monarchy, a contrived monarchy.  No one would feel any deep reverence for it, because there is no deep tradition in which it is rooted.  Least of all would Americans feel any deep emotional ties to a monarchy established by a bunch of tech bro nerds.  Part of the reason that real Americans hate nerds is precisely the sense that nerds operate purely on the level of logic, math, and science, which seems superficial to most Americans - as they see it, nerds precisely lack that pre-rational access to a deep, warm, loving, abiding, indescribable thing that most people can feel in their bones.  To use Weber's terminology, Moldbug gets "traditional authority" and "legal-rational authority" horribly confused.  Nerds are too legal/rationalistic to ever be accepted as traditional authority.  Maybe a monarchy established by a football player(2) might fly, but not one created by nerds. 

And of all nerds, the Silicon Valley nerd is the type least likely to be embraced by Americans, because Silicon Valley nerds have that obnoxious, "we can fix it" attitude, that bright, optimistic sense of high efficiency, cold calculation, and especially the willingness to "disrupt" systems to make them more rational and effective.  Moldbug's sense of "order" is the same fundamental psychological drive that makes nerds want us to switch to a calendar of 13 28-day months - or better yet, a system of 12 months, where one month has 5 weeks, each of which is 6 days long.  This ethos of disruption is utterly incompatible and anathema to the very essence of the legitimacy of traditional authority.  What Moldbug most admires - and, in some ways, embodies - about startup culture is exactly what makes it permanently foreign to heartland America.  Americans will never accept a Silicon Valley monarchy for the exact same reason that Americans will never adopt Urbit.  (It's also the same reason that Americans are reluctant to adopt Google Glass or the Metaverse.)  I mean, let's get real: Americans will never even accept the metric system, for God's sake.

This brings us to another point.  Even if - somehow, by magic - a monarchy were established in America - what then?  Moldbug assumes that this monarchy would necessarily be reactionary.  (To be a bit pedantic, an American monarchy would not be technically reactionary, because America was never a monarchy before, and you can't turn the clock back to a time that didn't happen.  Unless Moldbug is suggesting that America should become a colony of the UK...?)  But we all know what he means: an American monarchy would be right wing, sorta libertarianish - he means that the Murray-Rothbard-style "anarcho-capitalists," paradoxically enough, could only achieve the substance of their goals by promoting a powerful executive who would have the plenary power to dismantle the imperial apparatus and the welfare state - i.e., Ron Paul on steroids.  Moldbug doesn't really give us a rational argument why a monarchy would necessarily be right wing, except through gnomic analogy - his favorite is the stellar cycle: weak government is large, just as large stars are often (relatively) cool.  The opposite, therefore, is small, strong government.  But even in this analogy, although bigness and weakness are correlated, and smallness and strength are (debatably) correlated, correlation does not imply causation.  Making a star stronger would not make it smaller, and making a star smaller would not make it stronger.  Similarly, it's hard to see how giving an authority more power would compel him to agree with you.

So... what if he's wrong?  Sure, there could be a right wing, "reactionary" monarch, but what's to stop a monarch from being centrist, liberal, or even leftist?  Imagine there are a series of right wing kings, and then the current king dies, and his chosen heir dies young, and the next person in line to the throne happens to pick up a book by Karl Marx and feels some kind of deep connection to the work (whether he actually understands it or not is immaterial).  And what if this young man gradually cobbles together some kind of political position, possibly explicitly articulated but most likely not, in which economic goods and services are redistributed from each according to their ability to each according to their need, but he still gets to be king?  What if there were a feminist monarch?  Or a vegan monarch, who imposed an animal cruelty-free lifestyle on their citizenry?  Or what if there were a monarch that identified as trans, or nonbinary?  Are any of these impossible?  Not only do I think it's possible that there could be a monarch who was in some way a leftist, I think it's most likely.  Monarchy can absolutely be a force for a progressive agenda.  After all, the list of monarchs who were progressive, modernizing, or secularizing for their own time (or at least saw themselves as such) is quite long: Chulalongkorn of Siam, Catherine the Great of Russia, Charles the III of Spain, the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa, William and Mary of the Glorious Revolution in England, and so on.  We could perhaps mention people like Mustapha Kamal Ataturk, or Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon III).  Many of the people known as "the Great" fit into this category... lots of "Greats"... and they tend to mostly be centralizers of power.  Indeed, thumbing through history, "absolute" monarchy and progressive ideology seem to be somewhat correlated - thus "Enlightened Despotism".  Not to mention people like the famous anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin, who was a prince.... Tolstoy, too, was also born into Russian aristocracy... or August Willich, who was born into German aristocracy and later became a collaborator with Engels and Marx.  (Apparently, there's a Reddit page called "Monarchosocialism".  I haven't really checked it out yet.  I don't know if it's a joke - if there's anarchocapitalism, why not monarchosocialism? - but it needn't just be a joke.  Poe's Law, amirite?)

Even today, many monarchs seem to be pretty "woke".  Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden, is fairly progressive - a year after he became King, he officially supported the successful movement to give governing power to parliament.  Now he chats on trendy podcasts.  His children are even more so: the Crown Princess Victoria has received awards for her commitment to LGBTQ+ activism.  Then Prince Charles - now King Charles - received honors from Harvard for his commitment to environmental causes.  Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil, Prince of Rajpipla, has come out as gay; Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark has made trans rights her signature agenda; and so on.  And of course we would expect the monarchies to hold these opinions - after all, these people are all products of the most elite educational institutions.  Come to think of it, what with the pageantry, the spectacle, the clothes... monarchy is pretty gay.  And always has been.

So - should Rothbardian anarchocapitalists really welcome monarchy, as Moldbug says they should?  Well, it depends on the monarch, of course.  But that's the thing with monarchy - you don't get to pick who your monarch will be.  So, long term, the answer is no.  This monarch may support your cause, but the next monarch will likely not, just because there are way more ways to disagree with you than there are ways to agree with you.  For that matter, even this monarch may change his mind later, or may be lying to you to get your support now - and if he turns on you, there's nothing you'll be able to do about it, in reality.  Of course Moldbug's conception of monarchy is completely imaginary, and has nothing to do with how actual monarchs in the real world behave.  (When I think of Mencius Moldbug, he always reminds me of David Allan Bawden, that eccentric from Kansas, the "sedevacantist" ultra-conservative Catholic who considered the Vatican to be too liberal and modernizing and suddenly declared himself the Pope.  Actually, he held a conclave of 6 bishops - two of whom were his own parents, with whom he lived, and had them elect him Pope.  The United States is always producing these kinds of people.  It's part of our charm.)

None of this would matter for the history of philosophy - Moldbug would just be a bogstandard right wing crank on the internet, one among millions - except that in the course of Moldbug's ranting, he does make one fairly interesting theoretical innovation.  I refer here not to the aforementioned "red pill," nor to his idea of the "Cathedral" - which is just Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony, repackaged for a right-wing audience.  No, I'm talking about "The Parable of Fnargl," which is worth quoting in full, and considering in depth, because it is his best and most original argument.  (Actually, there are a couple versions of the Parable of Fnargl, but this, the first, is the only one worth reading - Moldbug's later revisions, to my mind, only dilute his argument.)

"One easy way to construct this thought-experiment is to imagine the dictator isn’t even human. He is an alien. His name is Fnargl. Fnargl came to Earth for one thing: gold. His goal is to dominate the planet for a thousand years, the so-called 'Thousand-Year Fnarg,' and then depart in his Fnargship with as much gold as possible. Other than this Fnargl has no other feelings. He’s concerned with humans about the way you and I are concerned with bacteria.

You might think we humans, a plucky bunch, would say 'screw you, Fnargl!' and not give him any gold at all. But there are two problems with this. One, Fnargl is invulnerable—he cannot be harmed by any human weapon. Two, he has the power to kill any human or humans, anywhere at any time, just by snapping his fingers.

Other than this he has no other powers. He can’t even walk—he needs to be carried, as if he was the Empress of India. (Fnargl actually has a striking physical resemblance to Jabba the Hutt.) But with invulnerability and the power of death, it’s a pretty simple matter for Fnargl to get himself set up as Secretary-General of the United Nations. And in the Thousand-Year Fnarg, the UN is no mere sinecure for alcoholic African kleptocrats. It is an absolute global superstate. Its only purpose is Fnargl’s goal—gold. And lots of it.

In other words, Fnargl is a revenue maximizer. The question is: what are his policies? What does he order us, his loyal subjects, to do?

The obvious option is to make us all slaves in the gold mines. Otherwise—blam. Instant death. Slacking off, I see? That’s a demerit. Another four and you know what happens. Now dig! Dig! (Perhaps some readers have seen Blazing Saddles.)

But wait: this can’t be right. Even mine slaves need to eat. Someone needs to make our porridge. And our shovels. And, actually, we’ll be a lot more productive if instead of shovels, we use backhoes. And who makes those? And…

We quickly realize that the best way for Fnargl to maximize gold production is simply to run a normal human economy, and tax it (in gold, natch). In other words, Fnargl has exactly the same goal as most human governments in history. His prosperity is the amount of gold he collects in tax, which has to be exacted in some way from the human economy. Taxation must depend in some way on the ability to pay, so the more prosperous we are, the more prosperous Fnargl is.

Fnargl’s interests, in fact, turn out to be oddly well-aligned with ours. Anything that makes Fnargl richer has to make us richer, and vice versa.

For example, it’s in Fnargl’s interest to run a fair and effective legal system, because humans are more productive when their energies aren’t going into squabbling with each other. It’s even in Fnargl’s interest to have a fair legal process that defines exactly when he will snap his fingers and stop your heart, because humans are more productive when they’re not worried about dropping dead.

And it is in his interest to run an orderly taxation system in which tax rates are known in advance, and Fnargl doesn’t just seize whatever, whenever, to feed his prodigious gold jones. Because humans are more productive when they can plan for the future, etc. Of course, toward the end of the Thousand-Year Fnarg, this incentive will begin to diminish—ha ha. But let’s assume Fnargl has only just arrived.

Other questions are easy to answer. For example, will Fnargl allow freedom of the press? But why wouldn’t he? What can the press do to Fnargl? As Bismarck put it: 'they say what they want, I do what I want.' But Bismarck didn’t really mean it. Fnargl does.

In general, Fnargl has no reason at all to impose any artificial restriction on his subjects. He will impose laws only in order to prevent violence, which reduces gold production. He has no interest at all in 'victimless crimes.' Since he can define failure to pay one’s tax as theft from him, Fnargl, the Vast And Pungent One, it turns out that he operates a very normal system of law.

It turns out that, except for the 30–40% of our economic output that disappears into his gold stash, Fnargl is actually an ideal ruler. Far from being 'totalitarian,' the Fnargocracy is if anything remarkably libertarian. Does Fnargl mind if you light up a jay?(4) Not in the slightest."[sic]

It must be understood that Moldbug makes this argument in the context of a larger argument in which he is arguing for his theory of "symmetric sovereignty."  This is the idea that "primary property," i.e. sovereignty, or "independently secured property" - property that is secured through force of arms - functions essentially the same way as "secondary property," that is, property that is derived from primary property.  In this example, Fnargl owns the whole world as his primary property, but has found it advantageous to use this sovereign right to establish derivative "secondary property" to the people of Earth, so that they will create a productive economy and give him all the gold he wants.  Moldbug goes on:

"Why is Fnargl’s behavior so different from that of “totalitarian” dictators? What is the difference between Fnargl and the most powerful men of the 20th century, nasty pieces of work like Hitler, Stalin and Mao?

The difference is that Fnargl’s primary property, Planet Three, as secured by his magic powers of Invulnerability and Finger-Snap Of Death, is secure.  

[...]The reason the Thousand-Year Fnarg is peaceful and free is that we’ve defined Fnargl’s primary right so that it works just like a secondary right. If one day, Fnargl tries to snap his fingers and it doesn’t work—'damn,' he says—problems will arise.

Hitler, Stalin and Mao, on the other hand, had enemies. Stalin and Mao, especially, basically operated under the assumption that everyone in the world wanted to kill them and take their jobs. After a while this was quite the self-fulfilling prophecy. Terrorist government—as in the Reign of Terror, a usage that’s unfortunately lapsed—is a consequence not of absolute primary title, but of insecure primary title. It is best understood as a form of civil war."[sic] 

It's a remarkable argument, worth thinking about.  But does it actually hold up?  No, not really.

First of all, the idea that Fnargl will not impose any odious and unnecessary rules on the populace he governs assumes that Fnargl is rational.  But what guarantee do we have that Fnargl will be rational?  None at all - no more than we have any guarantee that a monarch will be in any way conservative.  Or, for that matter, that any government will be rational.  (Would we humans even understand alien rationality, if we saw it?)  In this, Moldbug makes the same mistake that Austrian economists make - actually, the same mistake that almost all economists make (even Marxists!) - the assumption that people behave rationally.  We clearly don't.  Austrian economists are especially self-contradictory and downright silly in this regard: they start out by assuming that humans behave rationally (of course according to their definition of rationality), and wind up angry that humans don't behave rationally.

Next, pay attention to the paragraph where Moldbug says "Someone needs to make our porridge.  And our shovels.  And actually, we'll be a lot more productive if instead of shovels, we use backhoes. And who makes those?  And...."  That ellipsis after the final "And" is doing a lot of work.  Moldbug's entire argument is really in that ellipsis.  But how far does that ellipsis go?  You can see how Fnargl has an interest in setting up a support system for the mine workers: food, lodging, tools, medicine, maybe some other goods and services, and sure, maybe some kind of court system, etc..  But is it really the case that, as Moldbug says, "We quickly realize that the best way for Fnargl to maximize gold production is to run a normal human economy and tax it"?  You can see how it's in Fnargl's interest to allow humans to produce porridge.  But is it really in his interest that humans maintain the availability of hot fudge sundaes?  Or teddy bears?  Or Nintendo Switches?  How?  Why?  ...And just what is a "normal human economy," anyway?  There have been quite a few different economic systems over the time that humans have existed.  Is the economy of Predynastic Egypt the normal human economy?  It lasted pretty long.  More likely, the hunter-gatherer economies of the Pleistocene Era are the normal human economy.  It's certainly not the American economy, because that's only been around a couple hundred years, at most (and arguably, we have quite a different economy now than we did in the early 19th century).

Even if there's an argument that it's in Fnargl's interest for humans to have Nintendo Switches, there's a bigger problem for Moldbug's argument.  Yes, Fnargl might be convinced that it's best for him to maintain an economy to support his mine workers.  But what about the people who don't live near the mine?  What about the people who live in countries, or rather regions of the Earth, in which there are no gold deposits?  Fnargl won't give a fuck about them.  He certainly has no interest in maintaining an economy of porridge and backhoes for them - let alone Nintendo Switches.  So the idea that Fnargl's interests turn out to be "oddly well-aligned with ours" only applies to, at best, 1% of the population (the part of the Earth's population that lives in and around gold mines) - and that's being generous.  As for the other 99%, Fnargl won't care whether they live or die.  Now I suppose you might reply that that will make Fnargl even more "libertarian" towards them, which is true in a way, but the whole point of this intellectual exercise was supposed to be that Moldbug was trying to prove that monarchies are better at imposing law and order than democracies, that the societies they govern will be less crime-ridden and more peaceful.  If the rest of the Earth, outside of the heavily-guarded goldmine areas, devolves into a chaos of rape and murder, Fnargl has absolutely no reason to care.  Moldbug, through this example, has given us a good reason to think that monarchy will be less ordered, and more crime-ridden, than democracy - as indeed it was.  And is.

So we're looking at tiny islands of a somewhat well-ordered economy in the immediate viscinity of goldmines - call it the GoldZone: approximately Bristol Bay, Alaska, the area around the Olympic Dam in Australia, the northern border of South Africa and - oh hey! - Eswatini, as well as Lihir, Papua New Guinea, Grasberg, Indonesia and a few other places.  If you're lucky enough to live in one of these places, great.  The GoldZone is surrounded by heavily-guarded walls, outside of which is a vast, virtually unliveable hellscape.  Come to think of it, once we take that into consideration, even life inside the GoldZone might not be so great.  I've already pointed out that Fnargl has no reason to care whether our economy provides us with hot fudge sundaes.  But actually, does Fnargl have any reason to ensure the availability of insulin?  If diabetics die in his mines, he can easily replace these people with the surplus population from outside the walls.  In fact, the people within the GoldZone are so replaceable, there's really little reason for Fnargl to be concerned about their well-being at all.  Maybe a lot of those medical services, food preparation, etc., etc., are mostly an expense that Fnargl can do without.  So long as the standard of living inside the GoldZone is slightly higher than the Wastes, there will always be a steady stream of a hopeful wouldbe immigrant labor force, trying desperately to get In.  Which means the standard of living even inside the GoldZone can be pretty bad, and it's no skin off Fnargl's nose - or whatever he has instead of a nose.

But leave all of that aside.  There's an even bigger, more important hole in Moldbug's argument.  Let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that none of what I've pointed out so far is the case, and that the Fnargocracy really will pan out the way Moldbug says it will.  Let's imagine, for fun, that it's true that the best way to produce gold is to run a "normal human economy," whatever that is, and tax it in gold, and that Fnargl will rationally choose to do this, and that, as Moldbug says, Fnargl's kingdom will not only have a thriving economy, but also a functional court system, and freedom of the press, and that Fnargl will impose laws only to prevent violence.  It only takes one small step further to see where this argument inevitably leads.  What else, besides press freedom and an independent judiciary, will Fnargl's kingdom inevitably develop?  Why, nothing other than... drumroll please... democracy!  After all, why should Fnargl care how the humans govern themselves?  So long as they supply him with gold, he's happy.  So why not give them what they want?  And how do we find out what they want?  Why, we let them vote, of course!  Elections might be an imperfect tool for determining the interests of the human population, but... Fnargl doesn't care.  They'll be good enough for his purposes.  (Come to think of it, monarchs like the Windsors, with their fabulous wealth that they have milked from their stock of human cattle, don't seem to mind that the herd governs itself democratically....)

This brings us to a fundamental incoherence of Moldbug's ideas.  Remember, by his own account, Moldbug came to monarchism by way of Hans-Hermann Hoppe.  But why does Hoppe prefer monarchy to democracy?  It's important to understand that Hoppe's argument is a mathematical, economic argument - an argument about what economists - particularly in the Austrian tradition - call "time preference."  First of all, this argument assumes that everyone is motivated by purely selfish incentives - that altruism doesn't exist.  In a nutshell, the argument works like this: in a monarchy, monarchs will pass their kingdom on to their children, and their childrens' children.  They thus have an interest in maintaining the quality and value of said kingdom, making it a nice place for their kids.  But in a democracy, the leadership will not be able to pass their nation on to their heirs.  They won't even be able to keep it for the rest of their lives.  So they have every incentive to extract all the wealth from their job that they can in the few years they have in office.  In economic lingo, they have "higher time preference."  Everyone would rather receive money sooner than later, but under certain circumstances, people will prefer small short-term gains to large long-term gains by a huge factor.  (For instance, if you think the world is ending next Friday, you'll cash out all your bonds today, at a huge discount.)   Thus, according to Hoppe's argument, democratic leaders - regardless of their political affiliation or ideological worldview - will be, by sheer structural forces, motivated towards short-term planning that results in the long-term deterioration, bankruptcy, and eventual collapse of the societies they govern.  And they will pursue their parasitic extraction to the very end, because they literally have nothing to lose.  Whereas monarchies and aristocracies, while falling short of the explosive exponential growth of anarchocapitalism, will at least tend towards a kind of mediocre stability, in which the government is also engaged in parasitic rent-seeking, but not so much that it would endanger their own investments.  (I think there are enormous holes in this argument, but that's a topic for another essay.  Let's just go with it for now.)

But when Moldbug grabs ahold of the pro-monarchic ideology, all of the math and economics goes out the window.  In fact, the monarchy itself goes out the window.  A monarch is defined as a sovereign head of state whose position is inherited.  Heredity is the essential characteristic.  But Moldbug's mind seems to wander whenever the topic of inherited authority is broached.  Asked for an example of a modern monarch, his favorite example is FDR.  That's right - Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  But I don't think anyone has called him out on the obvious problem with this: the problem is not that FDR's position was not inherited (FDR and TR were fifth cousins once removed, which for all intents and purposes means that they were not related at all; ironically, Eleanor was more closely related to TR than FDR); rather, the problem is that FDR had no ability to pass on his position as head of state to any of his children.  FDR was not a monarch in the commonsense definition, and more importantly for Moldbug's argument, FDR was not a monarch according to Hoppe's economic definition.  This in turn implies that Hoppe's economic argument about "reduced time preference" does not apply to FDR at all.  In fact, the reverse is true.  From the perspective of Hoppe's time preference argument, FDR was precisely the apogee of a democratic leader - thus one who will spend his limited time as head of state maximizing his power, extracting as much wealth from the polity as possible, collecting maximal taxes, and ballooning the federal debt.

Starting from this fundamental incoherence at the core of Moldbug's theory, the entire enterprise falls apart like a house of cards.  What does Moldbug mean by "monarchy"?  The more you poke at this central concept, the more it shrivels like an old balloon, until what you are left with is a near-tautology: Moldbug seems to be saying, "I like it when a leader has leadership!"  At which point you just want to pat him on the head and say, "That's nice."  As it turns out, none of the virtues that Moldbug sees in monarchs are incompatible with democracy, and so Moldbug hasn't come up with an argument against democracy at all.  Moldbug just wants to be able to justify voting for Trump while jerking off to pictures of Tom Cruise in "Legend."

And once you spot this contradiction, or rather this idea so vague and muddleheaded that black is white and up is down, it's hard not to see the rest of the illogic of Moldbug's rants.  Just like the term "monarchy," which is wishy-washy to the point of meaninglessness, many of the other ideas he throws around are equally vacuous.  Take "democracy."  On the one hand, he's supposed to be this anti-democratic dark horse, right?  But if you actually read his blog, he spends most of his time complaining that usually what present themselves as democratic institutions, if you peek under the hood, actually turn out to be oligarchies.  If so, then what is he complaining about?  From his perspective, that should be a good thing, right?  This is one of the biggest ambiguities of his argument: what does he mean by "oligarchy," and is he in favor of it, or against it?  Remember, he initially wanted government to be run like Silicon Valley startup.  Sounds like an oligarchy - a rule of the elites - a meritocracy - to me.  But then he spends most of his time using vaguely populist-sounding rhetoric railing against institutions like Harvard and Yale and the New York Times - institutions he collectively calls "The Cathedral" - for producing ruling elites.  In other words, he hates them precisely because, and to the extent that, they are a meritocracy.  And then he turns around, when asked how he proposes to prevent monarchs from being tyrants, by replying that what we need is a "school for kings".  Well, according to you, we already have that!  It's called The Cathedral!  Piling contradiction on top of contradiction, he tops it all off by complaining that the New York Times effectively runs US foreign policy and thus the world order, and that the New York Times is a monarchy.  But that's what he wants, right?  He should be happy!

Perhaps Moldbug can be forgiven for exploring ideas in a stream-of-consciousness way, without coming to any particularly coherent conclusion - throwing bon mots at other writers and philosophers without presenting any meaningful theory of his own, only piles of ironies, and never what he thinks is true.  Fair enough.  But even if so, this only underlines the conclusion that one must come to when interpreting "Unqualified Reservations": that Moldbug is a postmodernist.

Compare Moldbug to Foucault.  Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, presents us first with the execution of Robert-François Damiens, who was tortured with molten lead and boiling oil, and then drawn and quartered, that is, his arms and legs were tied to different horses, who tore his body apart, by order of King Louis XV in 1757.  Then Foucault proceeds to describe the history of incarceration and punishment since then, bringing up what he would later call "biopower" - the techniques of subjectification which not only display the sovereign power of life and death but the capacity to transform and in some ways create the life of subjects, always toying with the question - never fully answered or even straightforwardly asked - which is better?  The modern carceral subjection, with its pretension toward humanistic goals like rehabilitation, or the good old fashioned drawing and quartering kinda stuff?  Of course, like all postmodernists, Foucault is too wimpy to take a real stand in any particular direction - he merely hints and suggests.  

Moldbug is, if anything, more postmodernist than Foucault.  That is, he flirts even harder with the idea that the King Louis XV method is better than modern punishment techniques.  He's even more contemptuous of the modern, even more suspicious of Enlightenment claims of universalism and universal rights, even more titillated by the frisson of absolute power, from a perspective that owes something to Nietzsche, to the Marquis de Sade, to Machiavelli, etc..  We can succinctly put it this way: postmodernism is an incredulity towards metanarratives; Moldbug, an especially thoroughgoing postmodernist, writes about politics from outside the narrative of liberation.

So what gives here?  If Moldbug's ideas, upon close examination, flatly contradict each other - if his blogs present nothing but an incoherent postmodern mess - then what are we to make of them?  What do they mean to us - or better yet, what do they mean to Moldbug himself?  It's not too hard to scratch beneath the surface and find out what they really mean: he's mad at his dad.  That's it!  That's what it's all about!  Or rather, Moldbug's ideas are all about his complex relationship with his dad - which likely includes some deep anger, but also many more complex emotions.  That's right, Moldbug is the blogging equivalent of Knausgaard.

Because, as it turns out, Moldbug, aka Curtis Yarvin's father is none other than Herbert Yarvin, the academic-philosopher-turned-State-Department-bureaucrat, who worked for the Clinton administration.  Once one understands this, everything about Moldbug clicks into place.  The elder Yarvin and his wife Susan were both employed by the US Embassy in Cyprus in the 80s, where young Curtis grew up, and then later at the US Embassy in Portugal.  In the early 90s, he was appointed by Clinton to the State 2000 Force, a Pentagon think tank project which published a fairly important and influential report on the future of US foreign relations.  Then he was appointed to work for the embassy in Lagos, Nigeria.  Moldbug writes, seething with ressentiment, about growing up listening to NPR.  (Moldbug has also stated that his grandparents, Herbert's mother and father, were in turn members of the Communist Party.)

Moldbug's ideas may not be totally opposed to his father.  I suspect that when Herbert Yarvin started his State Department career, he was a fairly idealistic, or at least broadly well-meaning, liberal.  But his career probably changed him.  Like many people, as he got older, he probably became more frustrated, more jaded, less idealistic, more conservative, and eventually more contemptuous of the people around him, for instance during his sojourn in Africa.  (Maybe Herbert Yarvin's U.S. State Department cronies had something to do with the devolution of Eswatini into an absolute monarchy?)

The confusing and self-negating character of Moldbug's ideas can be somewhat explained by his attitude towards his father's work at the State Department.  It's not that he thinks everything his father did was wrong, or even exactly that his father became part of an elite society whose authority Moldbug completely repudiates.  What Moldbug hates is their hypocrisy.  He doesn't hate what the State Department was doing throughout the 20th century around the world, especially during the Cold War, in the fight against global communism.  What he hates is that the people who were committing these acts of brazen imperialism - Pentagon spooks, etc. - felt compelled to mouth idealistic slogans about liberty and freedom and spreading democracy to the rest of the world, about the United States as a "shining city upon a hill" and so forth.  Like so many children of extreme privilege, Moldbug came to a sneering contempt towards the culture of his parents' generation and its obvious lack of authenticity.  Rather than rejecting their political project, he rejects their vacillation and circumspection, embracing their project even more fully than they did, as a philosophical engagée.  His embrace of the far-right is a form of rebellion, but not really a political stance - it's more of an aesthetic rebellious rôle like that of James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause."  Moldbug's attitude towards his dad is like that which has been ascribed to Salvador Dali (I don't know if this quote is accurate) when he was questioned as to why he was painting seemingly fawning portraits of Hitler: "He is a father figure.  I love him, I hate him, I want to kill him, I want to be him."  In his own way, Moldbug is struggling to achieve some kind of acceptance and resolution and closure to his father's memory.

This brings me to a broader suspicion I have regarding the neoreactionaries - that their seemingly bizarre embrace of "monarchism" or authoritarianism or whatever really isn't that new.  I suspect that the kind of vile crap that Moldbug spews on his blogs is actually probably the same kind of stuff that the elites of the world system were already saying, in private - in the Pentagon, in their various fraternal organizations, at home with their families, and so on.  They never actually believed the "libertarian" pablum that they broadcast for PR purposes.  The United States government may have made fine speeches about "democracy" and "liberty" and "small government" and "free enterprise," and even "the free market" and "capitalism" but the US was never particularly shy about supporting authoritarian and occasionally genocidal dictators around the world when it served their economic interests: Mubarak in Egypt, Suharto in Indonesia, Vargas and Branco in Brazil, Syngman Rhee in South Korea, Armas and his successors in Guatemala, Pinochet in Chile, and perhaps most pertinent to this story, the Shah of Iran.  More recently, Hilary Clinton, as Secretary of State under Barack Obama, supported the coup in Honduras, with the inevitable result of the huge wave of refugees streaming up through our southern border.  The list goes on and on and on.  Supported?  No - installed, propped up, operated as a puppet.  The CIA was founded with this purpose, taking its cues from the longer-running British Secret Service, which indeed has monarchical roots.  The only difference is that now, people like Moldbug are expressing their anti-democratic sentiments openly.  This fundamental hypocrisy of the older generations helps explain why so-called "libertarians" have, in the past few years, essentially disappeared: they never actually believed that crap anyway.  They were simply lying.

There used to be a saying among 60s radicals, referring to the Vietnam War, that they were "bringing the war back home".  I think Moldbug's ideology is an example of "bringing dictatorship back home."

Moldbug may spout slogans such as "RAGE: Retire All Government Employees" in order to try to ingratiate himself to cultural conservatives, but don't fall for it.  He doesn't really want to retire all government employees.  Government elites are his people, and he wants them to retain their elite status, while gaining legitimacy with the broader public.  Don't be fooled, cultural conservatives: he's not one of you.

Moldbug sometimes refers to himself as a "recovering libertarian".  Well, all I can say is: best wishes towards a full recovery.  Moldbug uses the vocabulary and rhetorical tools of the tradition of (right wing) libertarianism, but without the fundamental axioms and telos that give that vocabulary any meaning.  The result is a jumbled mess, in which nothing means anything - full of sententious-sounding phrases, but resulting in nothing but, at most, a political quietism - a kind of c'est la vie fatalism, a great saying whatever to politics.  In short, Moldbug is grillpilled.  You can see the struggle of a mind that has been deeply indoctrinated in Ludwig von Mises/Murray Rothbard-type nonsense, and which yearns to break from this utterly mythical ideology, yet which is unable or unwilling to make the final effort to throw off the shackles completely.

My prescription: take the red pill.  No, not that red pill, the other one, the real Red red pill.  Read Marx. And more importantly, read Hegel.  Moldbug has admitted to never having read Marx in depth, but having read enough to realize that he is a great writer.  As for Hegel, well, I'm sorry, but you cannot understand Carlyle without reading Hegel.  Everything in Carlyle is already there in Hegel, and more.  Even Carlyle's "great man" theory of history owes something to the part of the Introduction to The Phenomenology of Spirit in which Hegel attacks other interpretations of history as being so obviously filled with ressentiment that they read like they were written by a great man's valet - and "No man is a hero to his valet, not because the former is no hero, but because the latter is a valet."  Of course, Marx and Engels read Carlyle - that famous passage in the Manifesto about the cash "nexus" is a direct reference to Carlyle - but read on: towards the end, they criticize "Young England" of which Carlyle was the most well-known member.  Better yet, become a real libertarian, like Noam Chomsky.

You're already so close to being a leftist.  You're almost there.  You're already an anti-imperialist, of a sort.  Indeed, your foreign policy is already essentially the same as that of the tankie Maoist "Infrared" type.  You know, ready to come to the defense of every dictator around the world, or at the very least, extremely critical of the slimy hypocritical universalist liberal lip-service toward "human rights" that is used to justify every NATO strategy.  (Indeed, sometimes Moldbug's mask slips a little and he admits to his admiration for the Xi regime.)  Essentially, all that Moldbug accomplished is that he provided an intellectual permission structure for "libertarian" MAGA chuds to support the authoritarian left.  Moldbug has advocated for an American executive to make a constitutional case for the Federal Reserve to be under the control of the Executive Branch, thus avoiding congressional oversight over appropriations, justifying unilateral and unlimited federal spending.  Indeed, the main effect of the neoreactionary movement has been to make MMT (modern monetary theory) palatable to conservatives, and since "the function of a system is what it does," that's what the neoreactionary movement is. 

To all the milquetoast moldbugs that have been "clear pilled" and become apolitical, such abject, obsequious "might makes right" triumphalists that they'll accommodate themselves to any power, whoever it may be, and especially to Moldbug himself, I have this to say: what if you get your wish?  What if there were a real monarchy in America?  What do you think will happen to you?  Do you think the King will keep you, as a pet, a kind of court jester?

I'll give you a hint.  Remember the old G. I. Joe cartoon show?  Originally there was supposed to be an episode for the first season, written by Buzz Dixon, entitled "The Most Dangerous Man in the World," in which the backstory of COBRA is revealed.  It never aired, though it has been published in book form.  In it, we find out that COBRA was originally a political ideology, invented by great philosopher.  Cobra Commander declares his commitment to the principles of COBRA, and builds an army with totalitarian discipline, but gradually the high ideals are corrupted and fall by the wayside completely, and COBRA becomes little more than an international arms-dealing pyramid scheme for the enrichment of Cobra Commander.  Cobra Commander's first act once he comes to power is to imprison the philosopher who originally came up with the COBRA ideology, and who is eventually killed.

Gandhi was killed by an Indian Nationalist Hindu.  Malcolm X was killed by Black Nationalist members of the Nation of Islam.  The Marxist theoretician György Lukács was sentenced to house arrest, and later exiled to Tashkent by the Stalinist USSR.  Indeed, the most dangerous thing to be in the USSR was a Bolshevik: victims of the purge included major figures like Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, and of course eventually Trotsky himself was assassinated.  Think of all the celebrities that have been killed by deranged fans - Mark David Chapman was angry because he thought John Lennon was a "phony" who had "sold out".  According to folklore, just before he pulled the trigger, he said, "I'm your biggest fan."

Once a philosopher's ideology comes to power, or even gains a little popularity, what will the politicians attitude towards the philosopher be?  The philosopher can never increase the power of the prince, but can only be a threat to the prince's power, because the philosopher's only real power is the potential to diminish the prince's legitimacy.

There's no reason for anyone to be scared of Moldbug.  And, contrariwise, liberals pose no threat to someone like Moldbug - none at all.  He has even admitted that he doesn't get much hate mail.  Instead of being scared of Moldbug, I think we should feel concerned for Moldbug.  I think he's in danger.  Not from liberals, or still less from the real left - instead, I think his wellbeing is threatened by his fellow right-wingers.  Sure, there's widespread speculation that Moldbug is a racist, and I'll just say, I wouldn't be surprised if he were.  He often hints at racism.  But the evidence that is most often brought forward for his racism is a passing remark he made in Unqualified Reservations that he's "not exactly allergic" to white supremacy.  Well, let me tell you something, Moldbug: you may not be allergic to white supremacists, but white supremacists sure are allergic to you.  You're everything they hate: a nerd, a long-hair San Fransisco hippie poet, a creature of the "Deep State," with connections to the Communist Party, an atheist, and most of all, a Jew.  Like Otto Weininger, Paul Gottfried, and many others before you, the white supremacists will tolerate you for a while, so long as it serves their interests.  But they have no real loyalty to you, and they will turn against you so fast it will make your head spin.  Undoubtedly, they've already fedjacketed you.

So, to Moldbug, and to all the moldbugs out there - come back!  Come back to normalcy and reason.  Come back to the left.  We'll welcome you with open arms, and protect you. The only society that will allow entertainingly bizarre intellectual weirdos like you to flourish is a democracy with a strong commitment to freedom of expression.

(1): Let's imagine, just for extra spice, that that person is Jeffrey Epstein.

(2): "Participation in Government"

(3): I nominate Colin Kaepernick.

(4): Come to think of it, Fnargl probably would mind you lighting up a jay, for the same reason that your boss doesn't want you to light up a jay at work: because it's likely to make you less productive.  It's remarkable that even in this paltry imaginary example of completely rapacious monarchy supposedly being more libertarian, Moldbug's argument doesn't work.