Jun 23, 2022·edited Jun 23, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
Absolutely go buy your guns and your extra ammunition. I am a big 2nd amendment proponent. However, the moment anybody tries to rise up in a revolution to overthrow the government I will be right there with my guns fighting to stop them, and so will most everyone else.
Here is the flaw in your theory. You say that self government is a myth, except it is not, because the government we have is exactly the government the vast majority of people want. You and I may not want to take vaccines that don't work but over 80% of the public does, so they get what they want. We will never eat bugs because the vast majority of people are never going to give up their Big Macs and large fries.
If you go and look at the major cultural battles over the last 100 years you will see that they all trend toward more personal freedom, not less. Civil rights, abortion, gay marriage, transgender bathroom access, marijuana, and on and on. In all of these cases our government and our courts has given people an official stamp to do what they want with their lives. I may disagree with abortion and gay marriage, etc., and I may think that official government approval of more and more deviant behavior is the wrong way to go, but my position has been losing because the other side has done a much better job of marketing. Besides, it is far easier to tell everyone to let their freak flag fly than to convince someone they need to actually behave and be responsible adults.
The same can be said of gun ownership. Try as hard as they might, the liberal elite will never be able to outlaw private gun ownership because there are just too many people that own guns, and the people won't stand for it. The best they can do is nibble around the edges.
And that brings us to why we have a nation of self government that appears to be an oligarchy. Just as we have started offloading certain thought processes to our phones, the vast majority of people offloaded their civic thought processes to political parties and government experts a long time ago. Most people are more interested in watching sports, or seeing who wins American Idol than they are in who runs the country. Most people couldn't even pass a basic civics test on how our government works.
When it comes to local government they don't even have any idea what those positions are or what they do, much less have an inclination to go vote for them. But for a country and a government to function, someone has to actually do the work to make that happen which is where you get your "experts." The result is that people have come along and told the masses, "Don't worry. We've got this. You just relax and vote for the people we tell you to and we will keep things rolling. Do you want a refill on those fries?"
So everyone is happy. The people who want to run things are happy because they get up, work their a-- off and get into positions of power. The masses are happy because they live in a country where they get to do what they want, eat what they want, sleep with what they want, and enjoy all the entertainment the world has to offer without worrying about who's minding the store. As depressing as that sounds, the system has worked pretty good so far. We are the richest, most powerful country in the world with the strongest military ever created, and we don't even use it to create an American empire. Okay, we're not the smartest folks in the world anymore and our population may be headed towards Idiocracy, but life is pretty good.
The only ones that don't like it are the cranks. The ones on the far left and far right who don't like people that either don't look like them or do things they don't like. These are the ones that are the most likely to revolt, and I would fight either of them to the death, because that is where your fascist oligarchy comes from. The spectrum of political belief from left to right is not a straight line. It is an arc where the two extreme ends meet in support of dictatorship. Both extreme ends want to have total control of your life, they just want it for slightly different reasons.
If you want to change the course of America you have to persuade the masses to go along with you, but persuasion is hard and it takes a long time, and like I said before, if you are a conservative it is even harder to persuade people to be responsible. It is incredibly easy to persuade someone to be selfish and vote for their own personal interest, so liberals have been winning the persuasion game. Guys like Yarvin don't have either the inclination or patience to do it. That's why he wants to go the dictator route. Why do the long, hard, messy work of trying to convince someone to agree with you when you can hire a strong man to take over and force everyone to do what you want?
And that is why I would be fighting any revolt that comes up. I may not like the direction our culture is going, but at least the direction leads to more personal freedom, not less. It may be depressing to see so many people offload their civic responsibility to people who are mainly looking out for their own self interest, but quite frankly our system of government is better than any other country out there. If it ever bothers me enough I will start working with people who agree with me to try and persuade more people to my way of thinking and try to make a difference.
Until then I have work to do so I can feed my family.
My initial reaction is that you attribute way more agency to the 'oligarchy' than exists in real life, except I know that neither you nor Yarvin do so. The various branches of this 'oligarchy' are mostly traditions, vibes, and conformity instead of any kind of rational actor. They're a stupid machine that burns a lot of resources justifying their own delusions. Why I am reiterating this if I think you already agree with it? Well, I think the latter half of the article isn't consistent with this view.
> If the transhumanist faction of the protofascist oligarchy invents “immortality for the rich,” they may decide they don’t need the poor and start wasting them. If the protofascist oligarchy converts the Army entirely into flying death robots, it may make wasting the poor push-button easy. The protofascist oligarchy may get all sorts of awful ideas, like making us eat bugs, or take vaccines that don’t actually do anything, or mandatory organ donation. The more the job automation bar moves, the more people will become professionally disenfranchised until robots do all the work and nobody makes any money to buy the stuff the robots make. The protofascist oligarchy has many potential future failure modes.
The problem is that the utility of people actually isn't a very large factor in propaganda/bureaucracy circles. Otherwise blank-slatism would be eviscerated, the difference in talent selection gained would be enormous for any structure that cared about utility. Even post-immortality the neurotic status-quo bias of bureaucratic institutions will persist, since that's what they select for in the first place.
I think there's a leap of faith happening here where disenfranchisement inevitably equals dystopia, and I think that's been false for some (though not all) political systems. There's a very sad truth that is both white and black pilling, which is that actually institutions are very permeable and fragile, but also that they're entropic in a way. Neo-racism (wokeness) isn't winning because of a grand strategy, but because scapegoating the successful group has been a winning political strategy in every country. Safetyism and scapegoating the unvaxxed is deployed because its a tried and true justification for power. And those strategies work not because we live in a dystopia because most people fall for it, and that's just human nature.
This is obviously incomplete, I'll add it to my article queue, but hopefully that at least makes the main lines of my reaction clear.
"today, life really isn’t that bad for most people."
The (organisms) humans in your not-that-bad society are (very stressed) fat, sick, and not reproducing themselves. This disease is spreading across the entire globe.
This system only works because you have forgotten that you are a mammal and instead believe that you are an economic actor who thrives on the median US income. (Have you noticed anyone else becoming confused about biology lately)
"Nobody’s revolting because it’s way easier to get into bloodless Twitter fights and vote harder in four years, while we watch on-demand Netflix and eat pre-packaged meals because even the poorest of us are overfed global 10%ers."
Nobody's revolting because humanity is, by poison and idleness, turning itself into a lifeless husk of a species which is incapable of revolt. Or have testosterone levels in industrial society not been dropping like a rock? You're almost there. Unleash your Darwinist impulse on the biology of the modern homo sapien, and let us know what you come up with. What are we selecting towards?
"The actual check against oligarchical power is firearm proliferation."
This is not very imaginative. What about the Boston Dynamics robot stormtroopers, which we are probably going to see in under a decade?
The future is going to look either like the Matrix, or like Idiocracy. If the current system is able to sustain itself, it will look like the Matrix, and the guns will be taken away, possibly in your lifetime, almost certainly with the aid of technology against which the civilian gun owner will be defenseless.
so where do those of us that are neither antifa or alt-right, but do recognize this, and have for years, fit into the equation? those who have been disenfranchised and see politics for the sham it is, hoping beyond hope we don’t have to use our guns, while knowing the time has likely already come and gone while the masses are distracted.
with the next tiger king just around the corner, outrage over kink and drag shows for children keeping the proletariat engaged and focused not on the man behind the curtain, but the pomp and circumstance made to keep our attention, there isn’t much hope to fight back against what the protofacist oligarchy has in store, so we now look to escape society and weep for our children’s future.
we’ve already lost, unless we can convince the unwashed, wfh masses that hard times are what it’s going to take to fix it, if there even is a fix. as you’ve rightly pointed out, we’re just going to end up back in the same place eventually anyway. what is your proposition?
"And both groups fail at the finish line because they don’t take the time to consider that maybe self-governance is suboptimal, Darwinistically speaking."
Interestingly, Herman Wouk in _The Winds of War_ has one of his characters, the engineer Palmer Kirby, propose pretty much this very argument over drinks with the protagonist, Pug Henry. I think oligarchy/protofascism offers a simulacrum of success until it founders on the knowledge problem, but I guess we'll find out the hard way unless we have both arms and demonstrated will.
The major problem with our oligarchy is that we can’t walk the streets or have babies safely right now.
We can’t send our children to schools to only be indoctrinated in the false narrative of representative democracy. No, the indoctrination is with a perverse set of morals that are destructive to the family.
Our oligarchy is patently insane, full of malthusians and transhumanists or at least people who despise the values of the common man.
They know it’s insane for us to commit to violent revolution right now yet they are pushing as hard as possible to trigger it.
Their true control is in the constant onslaught of mind viruses they release into the population thru the cathedral.
We’re attacked on so many fronts it has us spinning in circles trying to make sense of it all. The Red/Blue tribal battle is an easier concept to grab hold of so we cling to it.
You are right about owning more guns. It certainly can’t hurt.
"Your votes don’t matter. You’re electing figureheads, who are purely actors and potential future scapegoats. Every element of modern “politics” is a distraction. It’s a reality TV show of no more importance than The Bachelor."
Thank you! If you want to have some fun, try telling this to people's faces—they usually scoff and get angry and defensive, before dismissing you as a bitter crank (not that im not a bitter crank).
If all of this is true (and you make a compelling case that it is, although I'm already familiar with Moldbug and the Cathedral concept so I'm probably easier to convince than the average American citizen), why hasn't the American oligarchy already gotten us to Australian levels of gun control yet? If the main threat/obstacle to them being able to assert total dominance over the rest of the population is private firearms ownership, why do we still have that right in the US? I'm reasonably confident that at least 90% of the people who make up The Cathedral would be perfectly okay with a total ban on private firearms ownership. So, if the will of the rest of the people is irrelevant, it doesn't make any sense that I can still go down to my FLGS and buy an AR-15.
I don't buy the argument that "they can't do that because we already own too many guns and there would be a violent revolution". Australia and New Zealand both rolled over without a fight. The recent pandemic shows just how compliant the US population is, in general. I own guns and if the 2nd Amendment was repealed tomorrow and the police came knocking on my door demanding at gunpoint that I turn them over, I would, because I'd rather live than die, and as you point out, a violent revolution in 2022 America would be a really stupid idea.
Where does the phenomenon that voters can be bought via largesse from the public treasury until the whole economy collapses as a result, fit into all of this?
So, SCOTUS (and lower court) picks is probably about the only thing a president can do that will have any significant lasting impact on the left side of the graphic, and as you mention, other than Trump, it's been three decades since there wasn't a Bush or Clinton in there somewhere.
So the chances of anyone who even *wants* to push some good stuff onto that side getting one are pretty low. Interesting to note that it can be done, though. And potentially even through voting.
I hate that I'm saying this. Maybe voting isn't actually completely pointless. I mean... it probably is. But I suppose it's still potentially at least mildly effective.
Absolutely go buy your guns and your extra ammunition. I am a big 2nd amendment proponent. However, the moment anybody tries to rise up in a revolution to overthrow the government I will be right there with my guns fighting to stop them, and so will most everyone else.
Here is the flaw in your theory. You say that self government is a myth, except it is not, because the government we have is exactly the government the vast majority of people want. You and I may not want to take vaccines that don't work but over 80% of the public does, so they get what they want. We will never eat bugs because the vast majority of people are never going to give up their Big Macs and large fries.
If you go and look at the major cultural battles over the last 100 years you will see that they all trend toward more personal freedom, not less. Civil rights, abortion, gay marriage, transgender bathroom access, marijuana, and on and on. In all of these cases our government and our courts has given people an official stamp to do what they want with their lives. I may disagree with abortion and gay marriage, etc., and I may think that official government approval of more and more deviant behavior is the wrong way to go, but my position has been losing because the other side has done a much better job of marketing. Besides, it is far easier to tell everyone to let their freak flag fly than to convince someone they need to actually behave and be responsible adults.
The same can be said of gun ownership. Try as hard as they might, the liberal elite will never be able to outlaw private gun ownership because there are just too many people that own guns, and the people won't stand for it. The best they can do is nibble around the edges.
And that brings us to why we have a nation of self government that appears to be an oligarchy. Just as we have started offloading certain thought processes to our phones, the vast majority of people offloaded their civic thought processes to political parties and government experts a long time ago. Most people are more interested in watching sports, or seeing who wins American Idol than they are in who runs the country. Most people couldn't even pass a basic civics test on how our government works.
When it comes to local government they don't even have any idea what those positions are or what they do, much less have an inclination to go vote for them. But for a country and a government to function, someone has to actually do the work to make that happen which is where you get your "experts." The result is that people have come along and told the masses, "Don't worry. We've got this. You just relax and vote for the people we tell you to and we will keep things rolling. Do you want a refill on those fries?"
So everyone is happy. The people who want to run things are happy because they get up, work their a-- off and get into positions of power. The masses are happy because they live in a country where they get to do what they want, eat what they want, sleep with what they want, and enjoy all the entertainment the world has to offer without worrying about who's minding the store. As depressing as that sounds, the system has worked pretty good so far. We are the richest, most powerful country in the world with the strongest military ever created, and we don't even use it to create an American empire. Okay, we're not the smartest folks in the world anymore and our population may be headed towards Idiocracy, but life is pretty good.
The only ones that don't like it are the cranks. The ones on the far left and far right who don't like people that either don't look like them or do things they don't like. These are the ones that are the most likely to revolt, and I would fight either of them to the death, because that is where your fascist oligarchy comes from. The spectrum of political belief from left to right is not a straight line. It is an arc where the two extreme ends meet in support of dictatorship. Both extreme ends want to have total control of your life, they just want it for slightly different reasons.
If you want to change the course of America you have to persuade the masses to go along with you, but persuasion is hard and it takes a long time, and like I said before, if you are a conservative it is even harder to persuade people to be responsible. It is incredibly easy to persuade someone to be selfish and vote for their own personal interest, so liberals have been winning the persuasion game. Guys like Yarvin don't have either the inclination or patience to do it. That's why he wants to go the dictator route. Why do the long, hard, messy work of trying to convince someone to agree with you when you can hire a strong man to take over and force everyone to do what you want?
And that is why I would be fighting any revolt that comes up. I may not like the direction our culture is going, but at least the direction leads to more personal freedom, not less. It may be depressing to see so many people offload their civic responsibility to people who are mainly looking out for their own self interest, but quite frankly our system of government is better than any other country out there. If it ever bothers me enough I will start working with people who agree with me to try and persuade more people to my way of thinking and try to make a difference.
Until then I have work to do so I can feed my family.
My initial reaction is that you attribute way more agency to the 'oligarchy' than exists in real life, except I know that neither you nor Yarvin do so. The various branches of this 'oligarchy' are mostly traditions, vibes, and conformity instead of any kind of rational actor. They're a stupid machine that burns a lot of resources justifying their own delusions. Why I am reiterating this if I think you already agree with it? Well, I think the latter half of the article isn't consistent with this view.
> If the transhumanist faction of the protofascist oligarchy invents “immortality for the rich,” they may decide they don’t need the poor and start wasting them. If the protofascist oligarchy converts the Army entirely into flying death robots, it may make wasting the poor push-button easy. The protofascist oligarchy may get all sorts of awful ideas, like making us eat bugs, or take vaccines that don’t actually do anything, or mandatory organ donation. The more the job automation bar moves, the more people will become professionally disenfranchised until robots do all the work and nobody makes any money to buy the stuff the robots make. The protofascist oligarchy has many potential future failure modes.
The problem is that the utility of people actually isn't a very large factor in propaganda/bureaucracy circles. Otherwise blank-slatism would be eviscerated, the difference in talent selection gained would be enormous for any structure that cared about utility. Even post-immortality the neurotic status-quo bias of bureaucratic institutions will persist, since that's what they select for in the first place.
I think there's a leap of faith happening here where disenfranchisement inevitably equals dystopia, and I think that's been false for some (though not all) political systems. There's a very sad truth that is both white and black pilling, which is that actually institutions are very permeable and fragile, but also that they're entropic in a way. Neo-racism (wokeness) isn't winning because of a grand strategy, but because scapegoating the successful group has been a winning political strategy in every country. Safetyism and scapegoating the unvaxxed is deployed because its a tried and true justification for power. And those strategies work not because we live in a dystopia because most people fall for it, and that's just human nature.
This is obviously incomplete, I'll add it to my article queue, but hopefully that at least makes the main lines of my reaction clear.
"today, life really isn’t that bad for most people."
The (organisms) humans in your not-that-bad society are (very stressed) fat, sick, and not reproducing themselves. This disease is spreading across the entire globe.
This system only works because you have forgotten that you are a mammal and instead believe that you are an economic actor who thrives on the median US income. (Have you noticed anyone else becoming confused about biology lately)
"Nobody’s revolting because it’s way easier to get into bloodless Twitter fights and vote harder in four years, while we watch on-demand Netflix and eat pre-packaged meals because even the poorest of us are overfed global 10%ers."
Nobody's revolting because humanity is, by poison and idleness, turning itself into a lifeless husk of a species which is incapable of revolt. Or have testosterone levels in industrial society not been dropping like a rock? You're almost there. Unleash your Darwinist impulse on the biology of the modern homo sapien, and let us know what you come up with. What are we selecting towards?
"The actual check against oligarchical power is firearm proliferation."
This is not very imaginative. What about the Boston Dynamics robot stormtroopers, which we are probably going to see in under a decade?
The future is going to look either like the Matrix, or like Idiocracy. If the current system is able to sustain itself, it will look like the Matrix, and the guns will be taken away, possibly in your lifetime, almost certainly with the aid of technology against which the civilian gun owner will be defenseless.
so where do those of us that are neither antifa or alt-right, but do recognize this, and have for years, fit into the equation? those who have been disenfranchised and see politics for the sham it is, hoping beyond hope we don’t have to use our guns, while knowing the time has likely already come and gone while the masses are distracted.
with the next tiger king just around the corner, outrage over kink and drag shows for children keeping the proletariat engaged and focused not on the man behind the curtain, but the pomp and circumstance made to keep our attention, there isn’t much hope to fight back against what the protofacist oligarchy has in store, so we now look to escape society and weep for our children’s future.
we’ve already lost, unless we can convince the unwashed, wfh masses that hard times are what it’s going to take to fix it, if there even is a fix. as you’ve rightly pointed out, we’re just going to end up back in the same place eventually anyway. what is your proposition?
"And both groups fail at the finish line because they don’t take the time to consider that maybe self-governance is suboptimal, Darwinistically speaking."
Interestingly, Herman Wouk in _The Winds of War_ has one of his characters, the engineer Palmer Kirby, propose pretty much this very argument over drinks with the protagonist, Pug Henry. I think oligarchy/protofascism offers a simulacrum of success until it founders on the knowledge problem, but I guess we'll find out the hard way unless we have both arms and demonstrated will.
Some of us have been calling that the Deep State for a generation. While a couple points I find miss the mark, most of this is on target.
The best skill a free man can have is the ability to hit what he's aiming at.
The major problem with our oligarchy is that we can’t walk the streets or have babies safely right now.
We can’t send our children to schools to only be indoctrinated in the false narrative of representative democracy. No, the indoctrination is with a perverse set of morals that are destructive to the family.
Our oligarchy is patently insane, full of malthusians and transhumanists or at least people who despise the values of the common man.
They know it’s insane for us to commit to violent revolution right now yet they are pushing as hard as possible to trigger it.
Their true control is in the constant onslaught of mind viruses they release into the population thru the cathedral.
We’re attacked on so many fronts it has us spinning in circles trying to make sense of it all. The Red/Blue tribal battle is an easier concept to grab hold of so we cling to it.
You are right about owning more guns. It certainly can’t hurt.
"Your votes don’t matter. You’re electing figureheads, who are purely actors and potential future scapegoats. Every element of modern “politics” is a distraction. It’s a reality TV show of no more importance than The Bachelor."
Thank you! If you want to have some fun, try telling this to people's faces—they usually scoff and get angry and defensive, before dismissing you as a bitter crank (not that im not a bitter crank).
It's just like telling a kid there's no Santa!
If all of this is true (and you make a compelling case that it is, although I'm already familiar with Moldbug and the Cathedral concept so I'm probably easier to convince than the average American citizen), why hasn't the American oligarchy already gotten us to Australian levels of gun control yet? If the main threat/obstacle to them being able to assert total dominance over the rest of the population is private firearms ownership, why do we still have that right in the US? I'm reasonably confident that at least 90% of the people who make up The Cathedral would be perfectly okay with a total ban on private firearms ownership. So, if the will of the rest of the people is irrelevant, it doesn't make any sense that I can still go down to my FLGS and buy an AR-15.
I don't buy the argument that "they can't do that because we already own too many guns and there would be a violent revolution". Australia and New Zealand both rolled over without a fight. The recent pandemic shows just how compliant the US population is, in general. I own guns and if the 2nd Amendment was repealed tomorrow and the police came knocking on my door demanding at gunpoint that I turn them over, I would, because I'd rather live than die, and as you point out, a violent revolution in 2022 America would be a really stupid idea.
Where does the phenomenon that voters can be bought via largesse from the public treasury until the whole economy collapses as a result, fit into all of this?
So, SCOTUS (and lower court) picks is probably about the only thing a president can do that will have any significant lasting impact on the left side of the graphic, and as you mention, other than Trump, it's been three decades since there wasn't a Bush or Clinton in there somewhere.
So the chances of anyone who even *wants* to push some good stuff onto that side getting one are pretty low. Interesting to note that it can be done, though. And potentially even through voting.
I hate that I'm saying this. Maybe voting isn't actually completely pointless. I mean... it probably is. But I suppose it's still potentially at least mildly effective.