fare, posts by tag: reactionary - LiveJournal

"In 1968 our parents' generation burned everything down. Because fire is cool. Kids these days are imitating their parents, as kids do. But they're flicking their lighters on a pile of ashes. Sometimes they will get a cinder or two to glow for a moment. Whatever pleasure this produces, it's now objectively less fun than actually constructing something new." — Mencius Moldbug

Voici la traduction de l'anglais par mes soins d'une lettre ouverte, anonyme, mais nettement dans la lignée réactionnaire de Mencius Moldbug. Cette lettre est complètement folle, mais sa folie a l'avantage d'être aux antipodes de la Folie Française ultra-socialiste, et je trouve cela fort raffraîchissant. Cette traduction ne signifie bien sûr pas approbation, loin de là; je ne vois dans ce manifeste aucun point sur lequel je n'aie rien à redire. J'ai dans le passé longuement expliqué mes différends intellectuels avec Moldbug, et ils restent les mêmes. Quant à une version libérale du changement de régime, pour comparer, il y en a une sur mon blog, signée Roman Perdeanu — vous pouvez-voir les différences entre ce que le liquidateur y fait ou n'y fait pas — et dans ce second cas laisse les citoyens autant libres de le faire que responsables civilement du résultat.

The White Man has sinned, greatly; Whitey will pay for it, dearly — has already started paying; the solution to his suffering can only come through a moral reformation. This almost everyone agrees upon — though many will explicitly deride such unholy words and instead use a completely different vocabulary to say the exact same thing. The more interesting disagreement though is not about what words to use to say it, but about what is the nature of this Sin, and what reformation will bring moral regeneration rather than further degeneration. Indeed, this disagreement is not innocent at all, but the crux of the issue: the White Man's Sin is the opposite of what the all-too-influential Evil Preachers say it is (the worst amongst them being White Men), and is actually exactly what they propose more of as a solution. Indeed, that's how this Sin works: having embraced an ideology of Evil, Whitey ever commits more sins as alleged solutions to his problems, only to accumulate more of this spiritual debt that is already crushing him, and will do far worse to his descendants. But how do you tell good from evil?

Socialists will typically claim that White Man's Great Sins were Imperialism, Colonization, Slavery, Racism and are still Individualism, Capitalism, Consumership. His Sins were only partly redeemed by granting Independence to his former colonies and welcoming in his midst large masses of their former inhabitants. He must atone by apologizing for his past criminal hubris, forever paying blutgeld to these people, by dissolving his race into theirs through miscegenation, but also embracing the world collective, abandoning the race for profits, and scaling down any consumption. Unhappily, will mourn socialists, "we" are domineered by a reigning ideology, the ideology of the free-market, whichever its current name; all social ailments can be traced to these economic freedoms that still exist, and the evil people who defend these freedoms. Deep down, socialists have a deep fear and hate of Man and his corruption, and somehow want to create a New Man, by hook or crook. They always call for "More Democracy", which is a code word for more power to them supermen who claim to embody "Democracy".

As a libertarian, I will praise Individualism, Capitalism and Consumership as virtues, not vices; I will denounce the mass-murder and ruin unleashed by Collectivism and Socialism; I will point out that Consumership is nothing but individuals empowered to choose how to spend their own money, and that the alternatives are the evil and stupidity of protectionism and central planning. But that's not what I will discuss today. I'll instead speak as a reactionary. And as a reactionary, I will not only make excuses for Imperialism, Colonization, Slavery and "Racism", but I will instead put the blame on Democracy, De-colonization, Socialism and "Anti-racism".

White Man may have been racist, and that's a vice indeed; but he has always been and still is much less of a racist than any other Man; meanwhile, under the name "Anti-racism" hides but the worst of all racisms, racism directed against the White Man precisely for his virtues. White Man may have practiced slavery, which is evil, but he never started it, and on the contrary he is the one who forcefully abolished it all around the world, when previously it was almost universally practiced. White Man's colonization may have been brutal, as is the nature of any government; yet it was much less tyrannical and less corrupt than both what preceded it and what followed it; it also introduced most of the world to modern medicine, industry, agriculture, not to speak of literacy, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of press, and an explosion of music, literature and others arts... a period of unprecedented material prosperity and intellectual blossoming and moral progress, with an according multiplication of the population. Certainly, the conquest itself was violent, and included many war crimes, and even a few genocides, but not more so than preceding or subsequent conquests by "colored" conquerors — these sins are in no way specific to Whitey. As for Imperialism, the problem was more a lack of it than too much of it: denying the conquered formal citizenship of the Empire albeit second-class, failing to coopt the local elites into first-class citizenship like Rome once did, and worst of all, maintaining and spreading the deadly disease of an ideology that is obviously antithetic to Empire: Democracy.

As an ideology, "Democracy" is the belief that the world should be divided in "nations" each to be ruled in an egalitarian way, while excluding non-nationals from power — in other words, National Socialism. "Democracy" is the belief in the all-importance that peoples of the world should rather be ruled by a mass-murderous corrupt tyrant born a few hundred miles away, than by an honest officer born a few thousand miles away — Nationalism. "Democracy" is the belief that Political Power, the power to unaccountably kill and destroy, should be granted based on a popularity contest — Demagoguery. "Democracy" is the belief that through the Mystery of Democratic Election, ballots are transubstantiated into the almighty Will Of The People — Political Mysticism. "Democracy" is the belief that as long as they do follow the democratic rites and act through "legislation", the State and its bureaucracy embody "us", and are therefore axiomatically good and entitled to arbitrary power on all and everything that concerns "us" — Totalitarianism. "Democracy" is the belief that sovereignty is collectively being able to sway power every so many years between two wings of a massive monopoly Establishment that will spend half of what they make, whereas being each able to individually choose how to spend all of what one makes at all times is dependency to "private" therefore "evil" interests — Collectivism. "Democracy" is the belief that merely being born grants you rights upon everyone else, so that the careless r-strategists who reproduce faster and create nothing shall feed upon the careful K-strategists who prefer to create everything and are careful not to over-reproduce — Ochlocracy. "Democracy" is the belief that a majority can impose its culture and rulers upon the minority, with the consequence that ethnic war and ethnic cleansing are the only way to avoid being imposed some other group's way of life and corrupt leaders — Ethnocracy. "Democracy" is the belief that private individuals may only do meaningless discriminations, and only government officials may make meaningful discriminations, and set an artificial standard and calling following it "no discrimination" — Bureaucracy. "Democracy" is all these beliefs and many more dysfunctional beliefs. But at heart, Democracy is not a rational idea or a clear theory that can be argued, though some have tried, and the result is the many variants of Socialism. At heart, Democracy is a visceral emotion: the identification of the slave to the master, provided that the master is mediocre enough not to appear better than the masses.

This ideology of Democracy inspired a World War to make the world "safe" for it, resulting in tens of millions of dead people. After it won this war, this ideology of "Democracy" justified democides by the national socialists of Russia and Germany, who precipitated another World War, as well as by those of China, Cambodia, etc. It has fueled and keeps fueling to this day many religious conflicts and ethnic cleansings. It has led Whitey to leave his former colonies in the hands of mass-murderers that he has then repeatedly funded and bailed out as their tyranny drove their countries back into poverty. It has justified a reverse colonization, that instead of bringing Civilization to formerly barbaric parts of the world, brings barbarianism to formerly civilized parts of the world. It is the foundation for massive plunder of producers by governments all around the world, which results in financing eternal wars, the systematic grooming of a large underclass of idle parasites and criminals, a huge brake to progress and unprecedented destruction of wealth. It is the system that forever ensures that power will be in the hands of sociopathic narcissists competitively selected for being the very best liars, and of a class of completely unmovable bureaucrats who worship arbitrary power with no risk for themselves and compete for the greatest impact while protecting each other in the context of utter unaccountability.

In summary, the White Man's Sin is having shrugged off the White Man's Burden, having dropped the torch of Civilization, having forsaken his wards into the claws of brutal monsters, while having greeted another kind of psychopaths as his own rulers. What more, the White Man's Great Sin is the root cause to all this evil: to have abandoned the very belief in Civilization, and embraced the belief in Democracy, this ideology of De-Civilization, often formalized into variants of Socialism. In other words, White Man's First Sin was to violate the First Commandment, without which all other commandments fall short: Thy Shall Not Worship a False God.

Unlike conservatives, who are but the mindless authoritarian defenders of socialists long past, reactionaries do not believe that there was any point in time at which White Man used to perfectly worship the One True God. They certainly do not defer to corrupt religious "authorities" to tell them what God Commanded and how to interpret it (and once again, they do not care for the words used to say that as much as for the quintessential concepts denoted). But reactionaries believe that together with the evils of the militaristic Ancien Régime, some essential wisdom about the nature of Society has been slowly but surely destroyed along Man's descent into Democracy. This descent led to a Great Fall, the most spectacular symptom of which was WWI and its orgy of mass-murder, that also lead to the Russian Revolution and paved the way to German National Socialism. But before that, Whitey had made pretty good attempts at championing Civilization, taking it so much further than it had ever been; he was never perfect, but at least he was trying, and kept improving. Not only that, he was proud of succeeding better than others, and of sharing his success (indeed sometimes using unjustified overeager force, though force was often justified, too). He was not ashamed to exist at all, as he is now. He recognized that not all religions, ideologies or economic systems are equal, and was proud to argue at length which is best and how to make it even better. He hadn't yet fallen into relativism and cowered to political correctness, and passively accepted an ideology that claims it isn't one yet is uniformly spread by a diffuse Establishment. He was mistakenly hoping to use Democracy as a means to ward off the evils of past Tyranny and achieve Liberty; but at least he hadn't yet raised it into an Idol at whose feet everyone on Earth must kowtow. His bureaucracies hadn't metastatized yet, and were still somewhat capable of defending a rule of law that wasn't all self-serving tribalism and corruption — though Protectionism and other forms of systemic graft were all too present.

Reactionaries understand that Civilization is not a point that you reach, but a process that you keep pushing forward as best you can — or fail to — starting from as advanced a point as you can find. Thus, if you're civilized, your predecessors will look barbaric in comparison; and those you consider your predecessors aren't necessarily your direct ancestors, but whoever was carrying the torch of Civilization, anywhere throughout the world. Now since by definition you started from where the most civilized people left off, these predecessors were themselves ahead of other people around them at their time. Conversely your own successors will look back at you with slight disgust, for you'll look barbaric in comparison to them. If all the above paragraph is not the case, you are not actually partaking in Civilization — you're a barbarian, or worse, an agent of De-Civilization. In particular, if you only consider as predecessors in Civilization your ancestors, or an arbitrary group of people that includes them, you're doing it wrong. (Similarly, if the only people susceptible to imitate your peculiarities are your descendants, you're definitely not civilized.) Conversely if you fail to include any of them, either you're doing it wrong, or they were all barbarians indeed. And there's no shame to be had in this latter alternative, any more than pride to be found in the luck of being born within a more advanced civilization — pride is to be found only in the stars to which we fly, not in the mud from which we take off, and we all take off from mud. What have you done to advance Civilization?

Civilization is thus relative in space and in time, and depends on what you know or can learn from other people around you. Of course, Civilization is not monodimensional; thus its progress is seldom uniform: industry, science, and literacy could bring about the end of the ancien regime, great material well-being, moral progress as man was elevated above crass survival, and ended many old superstitions and bigoted prejudices; yet in other ways, there has been ideological and political regress that inspired orgies of mega-murders, whereby nations formerly at the outposts of Civilization reverted to barbarianism. Mesopotamia conquered by the Arabs or the Mongols, the USA descending into "Civil War", Europe destroying itself during its Great War and its ripple conflicts, so many countries falling into communism, Yugoslavia exploding, Rhodesia becoming Zimbabwe, etc., are spectacular symptoms of De-Civilization. Civilization is often but a thin veneer, and though the average layer of it can be quite thick and getting thicker, that mightn't matter much if there's a weak spot where it's getting thinner, and that's where it cracks and all the rest shatters or peels off. The virtues of Civilization have to be cultivated in the proper priority order: Survival comes before Victory, that comes before Truth, that comes before Generosity; trying it in a different order just doesn't work. Reactionaries understand that Civilization is not a Golden Age in the past as fantasized by conservatives; it is not a cinematic of progress mystically brought about through forceful purposeful struggle as propagandized by progressives; it is a fragile dynamic process of social construction, of capital accumulation, of undesigned evolution, that requires conscious cultivation and protection from the hordes of barbarians, conservatives and progressives who bring about De-Civilization.

Certainly, the White Man at his apex was right to be suspicious of civilizations that had proven their moral weakness or their intellectual retardation, and to overall look down on his conquered. But he was wrong to wholly reject anything they could bring: he was wrong to fail to recognize as equals those of the conquered who had embraced civilization and could prove they were indeed capable of furthering it; he was wrong to fail to use their insight to criticize and improve his own ideologies; he was thus wrong to fail to embrace the elites of his colonies — to the point that these elites eventually preferred to band against him. This race protectionism was indeed an instrumental part of the downfall of his Empires; his eventual attempts at fixing it came too late, after he had succumbed to Democracy in two self-destructing World Wars and thus proven his own weakness. But this failure was nothing compared to what he did to his wards' minds: in a war between his own old religions, and a new, worse one, into which he was falling, he failed to propose any articulate ideal to the conquered, so they may dispel their wrong beliefs and embrace something positive. Instead he planted into their minds the seed of a Great Evil — the belief in Democracy, and its acute form, Socialism. The Bloody Order of Empire thus gave way to the Even Bloodier Chaos of Democracy.

Democracy will only get worse, until its evil is fully unraveled everywhere into Socialism, that after it has fully ravaged a country leaves place to barbarianism and religious superstition. If you want to see where Socialism is taking Europe, look at Venezuela, Cuba, Zimbabwe. Until they have completely ruined the respective countries they are farming, various Democratic Establishments will remain solidly in place, thanks to their propaganda machines, which these days are decentralized and efficient; they are not trying to sell anything, since people have already bought Democracy — an easy sell. The point of propaganda now is to prevent any change of mind, to make it impossible for the cattle to even think that there is any alternative, to make any opposition as unthinkable by casting dissidents as madmen, the proper political word for which currently is "extremists". Therefore, there is no ideology and it's not called "Democracy" and certainly not "Socialism"; all the beliefs formerly associated to a thus-named ideology are just being "normal"; they are acknowledging the "obvious". But perhaps worse than the material ruin and the intellectual oppression, is the effect that this Democratic Socialism has on the soul of its victims: it denies any individual accomplishment outside of the State, which only distinguishes but few politically-designated heroes; instead it maintains its victims in dependence, and deprives them from any meaning to their lives — ultimately, it only offers meaning to the tormentors who live as professional parasites and relish in they success at preying upon others; as to the masses of its victims, it offers but blind obedience, self-sacrifice, crass materialism, and petty insignificant selfish choices.

The escape will not happen through Politics. There is no way out but up. The race is on between Technological Progress and Political Power and its Democratic Juggernaut. Technology is the only hope for Humanity to escape the death trap of Democracy, whether by vastly lowering time-preference by greatly extending longevity, by creating a new Imperial race of AIs, by dramatically displacing military equilibrium to make for much smaller countries, by artificially raising the intelligence of humans so they can understand the Evil of Democracy, by enabling individuals to escape national surveillance, by somehow spreading a message of actual moral reformation, or by some other great change. Of course, the Democratic overlords are wary of this jeopardy to their Power, and do their darned best to stay on top of Technology and to control its uses.

This Grand Struggle is happening before your eyes. You get to pick what you think is Good and what you think is Evil, and to act accordingly. But be careful what you pick — depending on your choice, you may spend your life working toward redemption, or toward damnation. Ideas have consequences.

PS: Let it be clear that collective responsibility doesn't exist, and that Civilization consists precisely in better recognizing individual liberty and individual responsibility — which when properly matched together constitute private property. Talking about White Man the way I did way is an aggregate that has no moral value — but I do it precisely to show the racial collectivists that their anti-white racism, "anti-racism" as they may dub it, is unfounded on their own racial collectivist grounds. Racism, Slavery, Colonization, Imperialism are evil — but they are not the worst evil, and do not justify a double-standard; and they can still be better than the opposite stance; a yet better one requires to reject this dichotomy and look at the essence of what matters: individual actions. People are not to be blamed because the ancestors of some people with a similar color of skin did something wrong — a random black US slave descendant has infinitely more of the DNA of a slave-owner than any white descendant of a XXth european immigrants to the US. Miscegenation is neither good nor evil (hey, I'm a métis myself, as such rejected by racists on both sides) — most importantly, it's none of your damn business, only that of the individual parents who may decide to have or not have (and raise) such kids. Also importantly, State-supported "eugenics", whether towards alleged race purity, or desired race dilution, is actually dysgenic as well as criminal. Similarly, I'm a migrant and a proponent of freedom of movement for all honest people. But government-enforced migration policies, whether for or against migration (im- or e-), is also evil and counterproductive, and ultimately dysgenic. It's sad that the contents of this post-scriptum isn't obvious and that I have to write it at all — and one more symptom of De-Civilization. As for the name "reactionary"? Well, my mother often says that when she's confronted with imbecility, she can but react ("Quand je suis face à la bêtise, je ne peux que réagir"). But it took me a long time to see things with her eyes, and I have to thank Mencius Moldbug for a lot of it.

A blogger I love to read is Mencius Moldbug, of Unqualified Reservations. I find him always thought provoking, and a pleasure to disagree with as well as to agree with. Indeed, he more than once changed my mind on topics where I didn't imagine I could be swayed, by bringing about a point of view I had never been confronted to.

Mencius Moldbug is familiar with libertarian ideas, which he once embraced; he notably shares with Misesians their methodological individualism in analyzing human behavior, and their resolutely realistic approach of what political power is, as contrasted with what some people would like it to be, or would like others to believe it is. This is the proper approach to social science, it is fruitful, and Moldbug seems to have taken it where it hadn't been taken before. For Moldbug embraced — and indeed regenerated — reactionary thought. He dusted from it all attachment to forlorn beliefs and institutions, and resurrected its core narrative: political power is an irreducible reality; order matters; dilution of responsibility is chaos, "progressives" bring this chaos; the US is controled by a "cathedral", a decentralized Establishment of intellectuals, bureaucrats, politicians, who all agree on "progressive" ideas and have been spreading them throughout the world in the XXth century causing hundreds of millions of innocent victims; etc. Moldbug is the most articulate and compelling reactionary I've ever read, indeed the only one I know of who doesn't give me the creeps by ultimately founding his explanations on some kind of superstition — though sometimes he seems to long for a superior source of authority he could believe in. In addition to clarifying many reactionary ideas, he made important contributions to political economics, including his theory of sovereignty, his theory of liquidation of the State, and his theory of money. I thus find Moldbug's reactionary narrative generally compelling, and have thus been reconciled with my own mother's reactionary values.

However, on his quest to rediscover and restore the reactionary tradition, Moldbug explicitly rejects some crucial libertarian ideas and values; he notably embraces de jure territorial monopolies and mercantilism. And there I strongly disagree with him. Indeed, not only do I think his rejection of libertarian ideals is unjustified, I also think that even in his accurate condemnation of the festering evil that purportedly represent "progressive" or "conservative" ideas and values, he fails to salvage the essential truths that need be salvaged — those kernels of truth around which lies acrete, and by which victims are hooked into the lying ideologies. My reactionary side values order. My libertarian side values freedom. My conservative side values tradition. My progressive side values novelty. There is no contradiction. The contradiction would come from trying to establish a hierarchy between them, from trying to prop one of them up where it doesn't apply, or from denying it where it does. (And no, it's not a matter of "balance" — typical emotionalist nonsense — but of propriety — to each its own domain.) Moreover, I notice how whenever he rejects libertarian ideas, he does so by erroneously departing from the methodological individualism and realism that brought his reactionary successes.

Tellingly, in a 2013 post Sam Altman is not a blithering idiot, Moldbug derides as "Pig Philosophy" any kind of hedonism or utilitarianism that would seek to satisfy human desires, whether immediate and lowly or remote and lofty. But viewed in such a broad way, there's no escaping "Pig Philosophy". If implementing some philosophy isn't in anyone's at least perceived and far-fetched interest, then no one's going to make it happen. Anything that requires purposeful action is "Pig Philosophy" by the overly broad standard of Moldbug. The politically elitist view of Moldbug, in which the ruler issues arbitrary edicts to promote his arbitrary values, be it contra libertarian advice, is no less "Pig Philosophy": unless you claim that the ruler's edicts have no human-intelligible and human-sought purpose whatsoever, and are but chaos and fury, it's still Pig Philosophy, whether the ruler is a decidedly lonely hero facing God and Devil all by himself, or an elite caste of enlightened aristocrats; and if you claim there is indeed but chaos and fury, that would certainly be the very opposite to the reactionary value of Order indeed. Order is not arbitrary and subjective, arbitrarily definable by rulers; it's objective. And Mencius knows it, or he would just be reveling in the glory of his progressive masters' social constructs. And so, regarding all that mercantilism that Moldbug justifies: Cui Bono? If no one actually benefits from the actions of the sick and cruel rulers, what was that qualifier already that Moldbug was using to describe the dysfunctional behavior of the DCvers towards their wards? sadistic government. And an implicit assumption behind the very notion of sadistic government, or of the good government that Moldbug is aspiring to, is indeed some form of Pig Philosophy. To paraphrase Daniel Dennett, adding in pigs: There is no such thing as pig philosophy-free science; there is only science whose pig philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.

So yes, libertarians and "Austrian Economists" in the tradition of Mises are indeed promoting "Pig Philosophy" (or at least, Pig-hybrid philosophy): we proudly study "Human Action", which is verily characterized by being purposeful, as well as acted by individuals capable of learning (Eliezer would say "anti-inductive"). Our "Pig Philosophy", however, is more "democratic" than "aristocratic", in that every one's purpose is accounted in the market; yet it remains more "aristocratic" than "democratic", in that there is no ballot and majority rule, but the reward of those who best move the world toward the satisfaction of human needs; and still, it remains more "democratic" than "aristocratic" in that those seemingly random humans who constitute our "aristocracy" are post-selected according to their demonstrated ability rather than pre-selected according to birth or cooptation. A natural, peaceful, aristocracy, if you want, rather than the warrior aristocracies of antique "nobility" or the artificial "aristocracies" of modern Establishment pull.

In the end, it seems to me that Moldbug dropped the ball of rationality on this particular topic. As he has stated himself, he longs for the belief in a mystical, supernatural, source of authority; but since he isn't enthralled by any particular superstition yet, he is condemned to finding all candidates to the Embodiment of Authority ever lacking. Finding a good King? Good luck with that. In the words of Bastiat: They would be the shepherds over us, their sheep. Certainly such an arrangement presupposes that they are naturally superior to the rest of us. And certainly we are fully justified in demanding from the legislators and organizers proof of this natural superiority. There is no escaping the hard problem indeed of matching Order and Power — and the achieving of it by a providential man only gets less likely as the alleged reactionary virtues of the past get rooted away or at least irreparably corrupted from any place of influence in a systematic eradication by the progressives in power. Where demagoguery is the universal religion, not exclusive of other superstitions, and supported by world powers, your providential man will be a Hitler or an Allende, a Chavez or a Mugabe. The "progressives" have learned their lesson and won't let another Pinochet disrupt their plans, much less a Francia, that Moldbug seems to overly admire, after Carlyle.

Another problem with many of Moldbug's articles, especially latter ones, is that he sometimes falls in the same trap as many statists, especially those who like Moldbug have an engineering background, the social engineering way of thinking: looking at social issues as engineering problems for a superman above society. This superman stance is precisely the kind of unrealistic approach to political power that Mencius Moldbug had forgone when brilliantly analyzing the actual and historical structure of USG. Yet, when looking for a replacement for USG, there he falls into the same trap that he had avoided so far; he ponders choices to be made as if he were a superior being with direct access to all social knowledge, with total liberty to cheaply change social structures, as well as total responsibility for social outcomes. It is not surprising that like all would-be social engineers, he reaches conclusions as absurd as his premise, and quite similar to the conclusions of previous statists having adopted the same stance. But the superman stance is a lure: no one actually has these powers and responsibilities, no one makes such decisions; its role is thus not actually in making decisions at all; it does not make useful predictions either, because it assumes a supernatural force that isn't, and systematically neglects the real human forces that are assumed away. So what good is this stance for? Why do so many people use it and propagate its use? Actually, the stance is a way to sell people on the legitimacy of power; it doesn't matter which of the proposed options you pick, by picking an option, you have implicitly adopted the superman stance, assumed that those people in power act in the name of society, and legitimated the coercion by which they "engineer" society. By being something completely different from what it purports to be, this superman stance is therefore the ultimate corruption, to reuse the term with Moldbug's definition: any human action that is not what it appears to be. I believe Moldbug is in good faith being victim of this meme, yet in the end he too propagates it.

And this stance is how, in the above-mentioned article, Moldbug defends some protectionist agenda as a "solution" to the perceived problem of a growing underclass of people being less productive than machines (a fraction that, if we believe technophiles, is soon to be all-encompassing). Yet to an Austrian Economist, this is a non-problem based on a Self-defeating hypothesis: as long as machines are trade partners, by definition, trade only happens if everyone is better off. The notion of "not being able to compete with machines" is absurd: if machines are competitively more efficient, by definition they make things cheaper, not more expensive, which means less work to trade with the machines (or their owners) to achieve the same satisfaction, though the work may also change in nature. If the machine asks too much in return for its services, it is not being competitive, and you can return to the previous method of production. It can never ask "too little" and provide satisfactions at too low a cost. And the Law of comparative advantages ensures that even all-around superior machines will always be ready to trade what humans do relatively better for what machines do relatively more efficiently, so machines can focus on what they machines do even better. In the very worst case scenario that somehow sentient machines decide that humans have nothing valuable to offer and retract from trade, then humans will be exactly at the same point as the luddite protectionist want to place humans by force even when that is not the case; in other words, protectionism is once again but a futile attempt to escape the risk of some bad outcome by embracing the certainty of the worst possible outcome.

The real problem with sentient machines is not their becoming overly efficient trade partners: it's their becoming mortal enemies rivalizing with us on grabbing vital resources without regard for our wants, desires, needs, or claims of priority or property. In other words, the real problem is that sentient machines vastly superior to us may treat us as we treat animals. But once you put the problem that way, you find that protectionism, embargo and war are as absurd and counterproductive a "solution" to the problem as they were to american indians invaded by europeans: antagonizing your vastly superior will only lead to defeat and extermination. The solution to this problem, if it exists, is rather to cultivate a sense of shared existence with these superior beings. Appealing to the good feelings of our superiors is likely to have as much success as PETA has, and be taken just as unseriously, for good reason. Egalitarian claims that humans are the equals to AIs, when they obviously are not, are also likely to bring nothing but contempt. A claim of one sentient being, one vote in a totalitarian democracy of sentient beings where the winner party does whatever he wants is unlikely to bring much relief anyway, when one trillion AIs vote to park humans in Qualified Reservations (a.k.a. concentration camps), and declare oxygen a pollutant to be removed from the atmosphere. More generally, political "solutions" only result in the repression of the weaker party, which by assumption will include all (or a least most) humans. Happily, sentient AIs are as interested as we are in the peaceful resolution of resource conflicts, because they face the very same issue against the next generations of even more vastly intelligent, more vastly powerful sentient AIs. And the one and only solution to the problem of peaceful resolution of resource conflicts, that scales to arbitrarily advanced AIs, is Universal Law, also known as property rights. Our best bet to survive the impending rise of sentient AIs is thus to strengthen the institution of property rights against political dominion, to homestead the resources we want to preserve for ourselves, and to invest in such resources, that will raise in relative value as labor gets displaced; humans may end up getting all their needs satisfied by machines as a rent for some of these resources, except for these needs only humans can satisfy, that will be the object of all trade between humans.

I much prefer an earlier Mencius Moldbug, who could claim the Irreducibility of Political Power (where indeed "vulgar" libertarians would believe in its dissolution), yet without looking for salvation in otherworldly intervention. He instead understood that at heart this is a problem of military technology broadly speaking (where politics is but the continuation of war by other means); and he was looking for some actual technological solution, not just waiting for the Ring of Fnargl to fall from the sky. He was willing to analyze things for what they are, before to make any pronouncement on what they should be; he would criticize proposed solutions considering how the inherent forces of human action would inevitably transform and (ab)use the proposed structures. For, having understood the lessons of Mises, he knows that the forces of Human Action, apply mechanically — or rather, humanically: not because of explicit purposeful human action toward it, and sometimes even despite explicit purposeful human action against it, yet as inevitable consequences of how human action involves purpose and responds to incentives. Ultimately, the capture of Political Power by a sadistic bureaucracy is just as likely in a military monarchy (as illustrated by the history of the Ancien Regime) or in a neocameralist corporation as in a progressive democracy: the root cause is institutional irresponsibility, and in fine, only property rights can solve that, by matching liberty (the freedom to choose) with responsibility (the accountability for choices).

While commenting on my previous post, l33tminion makes himself the candid voice of the usual democratic propaganda. Always incredible how otherwise intelligent people can drink wholesale the kool-aid. Yet, I believe that he and other people like him may not only be intelligent enough, but also have enough intellectual integrity to eventually reject the premises that they were brainwashed into accepting uncritically.

Here I will not be arguing that Democracy as an institution doesn't work at achieving the official goal it purports to achieve, of bringing good government for the people. How Democracy fails has been well documented by better people than I: Buchanan and Tullock, Hoppe, Caplan, Kling. I will argue that Democracy as an ideology actually works towards its real goal, i.e. its natural consequence, which is the destruction of societies by an oppressive power.

Magical Assumptions

Though he defends himself from assuming anything magical in the democratic process, my democratic friend still repeats as a fact the oxymoronic democratic propaganda according to which Democratic governments are both controlled and funded by the people they govern. Really? The ruled who control the rulers? Democracy is so magical, even Grammar is turned upside down! Kto Kogo? Who (rules) Whom?

My interlocutor affirms with assurance that he think[s] constitutional democracy has worked pretty well for the US. Although he does not reveal the mysterious standard by which it is meant to have worked or not, nor the means by which he can trace the supposed workingness that his standard would measure to constitutional democracy rather than another phenomena that constitutional democracy would be preying upon.

I suppose, if we can neglect the destructive effects of decades of slavery beyond the time it was abolished in Britain, a civil war killing almost a million people at home, many foreign wars involving millions of victims abroad and plots installing foreign regimes making even more victims, if moreover we suppose that the resources expended by said Democratic regime would not have been used productively under a different regime but would have burned in self-combustion in protest to the absence of such regime, if we discount the crises generated by its financial system, the erosion of liberties in its laws, and the corruption of its power elite, then yes, the sum total of Democracy in America can't be too bad.

Problem is, when you take all these issues into account, the answer doesn't look quite as obvious. And then, you find a more fundamental problem is: what epistemic process are you using to compare what is to what isn't? My interlocutor as well as all who repeat that Democracy works lack any epistemic method to decide if Democracy works better than the alternative, because they don't even have an understanding of what it means to be an alternative. Instead, they fall victim to the accounting fallacy.

Retreat to Subjectivity

When faced with their own incapacity of forming logical arguments allowing to discuss alternate histories, dogmatic followers will resort to their personal preferences, which they argue shall be respected. I, personally, prefer to live under a democracy as opposed to a monarchy or dictatorship declares l33tminion. How does he know? And whatever his preference may be, why should it matter? The Law is not a matter of preferences. The Law doesn't care what you do with your own life and property. Go meet with friends and elect rulers amongst your gang, that's your right. But when you start supporting your elected rulers ruling over other people who don't agree to that power, moreover without any limiting principle but the "preferences" of the winning party, then you're imposing your preference for "democracy" upon others and you're making yourself an oppressor. Mob rule is the essence of democracy; whichever superior you can use to contain this mob rule can be better used without any mob rule at all.

Incidentally, the preference argument ultimately rests on a libertarian principle, though misusing it: indeed there is a domain where someone's preferences matter and should be inviolate: his self and his own — his life and property. However here the argument is used to defend a preference as applies to other people's life and property, i.e. about violating their own preferences by submitting them to political violence as per the democrat's preferred political regime. And of course, this is the rub. Democracy is about making people subject to each other's preference. Society is not to be ruled by an objective Law anymore; instead, anything goes that emanates from the almighty Will of The People, fickle construction of collective subjectivity.

Like most libertarians, I don't care whether the ruler is a president, a king, a guide, or Papa Smurf, chosen by a ballot, born into his job, asserted through force, or "just drawn that way". I just care that this ruler should have and exert as little arbitrary political power as possible (ideally none at all), and that instead the Law should rule as much as possible. Now, the democratic myth has introduced the totalitarian notion that Power is unlimited. What King Canute used to know, that his power is subject to the laws of nature, is unfathomable to the voting masses, incapable of coherent thought (for only individuals think), and unstopped by the economic laws of nature. Demagogues flatter the public into believing that anything can be demanded, that majority demands are ipso facto justified, that electoral "representation" is a limitless mandate, that there are no constant laws of economics to take into account when voting the laws of men. And then they use their power to rule each and every aspect of our lives to their profit and for our ruin.

With the Sovereignty of the Majority being placed as principle for political legitimacy, no life and no property are ever safe from the interference of political majorities: democracy is intrinsically totalitarian in its claim of sovereignty. Once objective Common Law has given way to some subjective "Will of the People", infinitely manipulable by the Establishment, that can emit arbitrary Statute on any domain without limit, Power becomes Total.

War of All against All

The totalitarian nature of democracy can be opposed by long and strong traditions of respect for individual rights, as in the western world, or confirmed by the reigning ideology, as in Soviet Russia. The contributing factor of democracy as such is always totalitarian. But the pretense of democracy is not only totalitarian in that it applies to all aspects of life and society total, it is also totalitarian in that it enrolls each and everyone in the power game.

Under the Ancien Régime, when several populations live under a same Empire, and differ in races, languages, customs, religions, etc., they can all leave peaceably together as subjects of the same ruler. They are not enemies to each other. They may have a common enemy at the head of the empire, if the ruler is unjust and cruel; but at least their political situation does not pit them against each other. The Colonial British Empire, the cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian Empire, the varied Russian Empire were as many examples of people living at peace with each other under a same ruler. What more, Ancien Régime rulers understand that inhabitants of disputed lands are assets to be preserved to maximize the spoils of war; inhabitants only care marginally which king rules them and prefer whichever king will be more just, which coincides with efficiency at using resources. Under the Ancien Régime, wars are limited in scope and in destruction, and not directed against populations as such, only at rival régimes.

Eventually, the foreign or domestic ruler crumbles, and lacking an ideology to resist it, there does Democracy rise to Power. With the democratic virus, under the principle of one man one vote principle, these populations can vote taxes and regulations on each other; the discrepancies between cultural values become clashes in legal norms and political power. All these different people are no more peaceful neighbours, but minority groups vying to grab power so as to control other groups rather than be controlled by them. The threat of one group overtaking the others is permanent. If one party is firmly in charge, or if the clash is not too hard, then one party or coalition may seize control and prevent further party strife, establishing itself as a corrupt unelected oligarcho-bureaucracy oppressing the country under the cover of democracy. The Communist Party may run China, Republicrats may run the USA, UMPS may run France, Jews may run Israël, the PRI may run México. But when power is less secure, then civil war ensues — a war of the kind where entire populations are targeted for massacre, because it is the votes, hence by the democratic principle the very life, of these people, that is threatening.

Genocides, "ethnic purification", mass deportations are the direct, necessary consequence of the democratic principle of "one man, one vote" applied to countries with culturally divided populations. Each man who can be categorized as resolutely "other" becomes either a prey or a predator, always an enemy. Democracy is the war of All against All. Populations against populations. All against individuals. And this war isn't just notional and symbolic. Palestine, British India, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Tchechnia, Sudan, Georgia, and many more countries have known it very concretely. Other countries may know such horrors as they descend into chaos. Not only has the democratic ideal failed to bring good government on earth, it has led to mass killing on an unprecedented scale, before it reverts to a corrupt state of rule by unelected Establishment. Even religious wars are more merciful, since they offer conversion as a way of pacification. Democratic wars and oppression persist until the victim population has wholly disappeared.

What more, when two "democratic" "nations" are at war, it is no more a limited war between two Ancien Régime gangs of rulers. Now the entire populations are involved in war. War becomes total war. All the inhabitants of the other nation are your enemies, and consider you as theirs. Civilians are targetted by organized famine through blockades, captured populations are subject to large scale oppression and massacres, large numbers of people are parked into concentration camps, cities are bombed. War becomes total. Millions die. Horray for the democratic "ideal".

The Fruits of "Democracy"

In the name of Democracy, we've had World War I, World War II, communist regimes, ethnic massacres all around the globe, etc. Dictators and dictatorial parties such as Robespierre, Napoleon III, Hitler, Allende, the FIS got elected. Based on "democratic" ideology, and with the support of "democrats" abroad, the bolcheviks, the national socialists, the maoists, the khmer rouge, have risen to power and killed hundreds of millions. It's easy to dismiss as "dictatorships" entities that have emerged in the name of "Democracy", based on democratic propaganda and democratic beliefs. But the "democratic" ideal underlies the very existence and mode of expression of those democracies, even though the results are opposite to the propaganda and the hopes of the utopian proponents of "democracy". One has to judge the tree by the fruit it bears, not by the rosy results that are always promised and never delivered. And though the "democratic" ideology promises paradise on earth, the fruits it bears are deadly.

Ancien Régime monarchies never did anything quite as bad. The worst was possibly Czarist Russia, which was admittedly a pretty bad authoritarian hell hole — and still vastly better than the "democratic" regimes that followed it. At the polar opposite, in colonial America, people revolted against taxes, oppressive laws and unnecessary wars, and a "massacre" counting five hooligans as victims; they have had but higher taxes, more oppressive laws, massacres with hundreds of victims, and unnecessary total wars since they installed a "democratic" regime. Europe abolished the Ancien Régime in bloody revolutions and wars the destructions of which offset any good that may have been gained in abolishing the old privileges, only to end up with Establishments as entrenched and more corrupt than the previous ones, and policies that sacrifice all long term considerations to short term elections, leading to financial bankruptcy, runaway immigration, cultural disintegration and out of control crime.

With the democratic principle being forced upon all by the Anglo-american supremacy, their French copycats and Russian caricatures, entire populations have become the permanent enemies of each other. Democracy has institutionalized permanent war and political violence of all against all, with no end in sight. Modern mass deception, nationwide brainwashing, deep systematic mind control, is also directly linked to the need rulers now have to generate not just military dominion, but constant support in popular opinion.

No Turning Back

I am a libertarian, not a conservative. Therefore, inasmuch as my opposition to "democracy", "progressivism", "socialism" and other such people's utopias make me a reactionary, I certainly am not calling for a return to Ancien Régime.

The Ancien Régime failed to Democracy because it was weak. Kingship was doomed by inbreeding. The Aristocracy was doomed by firearms. The Clergy was doomed by the printing press. There are good technological reasons why the political structures of the past were no more sustainable.

My point is not that the Ancien Régime was a lost paradise: it wasn't. My point is that Democracy was in many ways a vast political regression from this Ancien Régime. My point is that to regenerate the countries being destroyed by Democracy, it is necessary to understand what was lost, that it may be regained. It is also necessary to identify what has actually been gained, so that it shall not be lost again. And for that you need sound political theories that go beyond mere propaganda.

There remain few Ancien Régime monarchies today, and in almost all of them, princes have been surrendering slowly or quickly to the prevailing democratic ideology, though sometimes with a backlash (as in Thailand recently). A few countries have been bottomed as democratically inspired terror regimes, and are now following a reverse evolution, trying to recycle the former democratic terrorist power into a neo-Ancien Régime, but often failing for lack of a proper ideology to replace the cult of democracy. Hope in Russia, China, North Korea, Syria, Lybia or Vietnam will not come from a longer descent into democratic lies, but in the rulers re-learning the principles of Natural Law previously destroyed by those lies. As the pretense of democracy wanes away and the Establishment feels stronger in its political hold not depending on opinion, totalitarian control can be loosened. But only if a viable alternative is offered to either tyranny or democracy.

And this alternative is: Natural Law. An old technology to maintain peace and prosperity, that has been kept alive and refined by libertarian scholars, and that could profitably be used again.