NeoReactionaries Redux... oh my!

If what follows seems scary to you on Christmas Eve, well, down at-bottom I’ll reiterate one final Redemption Daydream. One thing that one good man might do, to help us all. 

Alas, he is surrounded by morons. So he won’t. But speaking of morons...

== Moldbug 2024: 

    What this Wormtongue tells us about our insipid New Lords ==

Well, well. Instead of Elon, is this the “guy I know in highest places”? Oy.

Truly among the most repulsive characters I ever met, this ‘Mencius Moldbug’ has been gaining godawful influence over some of the very-richest, brattiest and most dangerously powerful humans on the planet, preaching death to the very Enlightenment that gave him and his fellow ingrates everything they ever had. 

This headline from The Guardian: "He's anti-democracy and pro-Trump: the obscure 'dark enlightenment blogger influencing the next US administration."

Only now – via his acolytes Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance – this monster’ll be strolling the White House, crooning gleefully that “Decadent democracy is over! Onward to absolute monarchy and feudalism!”

Do I exaggerate? I’ve dissected this nasty, ingrate “endarkenment” fetish before. Its roots and branches and openly-touted plans for us. And I tell you that Elon Musk is saintly and harmless, by comparison to this horror. 

They know that the vast, educated middle class has access to powerful technologies that -- should we become enraged -- could make the guillotine seem like louffah. Hence, the very concepts of science and democracy and meritocracy as great equalizers must be undermined and then destroyed.

Lately, in his role as ‘Thiel-Whisperer‘ and ‘Speaker-to-Gullibles,’ this lobotomizer-to-oligarchs – Moldbug, also known as Curtis Yarvin -- prompted me to ponder an outrageously cartoony fantasy character --

-- the bewitcher-of-Thèoden, Tolkien’s Grima Wormtongue. 

And I made that connection long before I took a closer look. 

So, are we expected to come up with a Gandalf to break this spell?* 

How about we get the Saru-aliens to stop aiming their stoopid ray at our aristocrats?

== Supposed smart guys – clutching desperate chants ==

Once again, I challenge these incredible ingrates to a fact-off! 

I assert that I can easily disprove every aspect of your justification incantations! Even most of the baseline/underlying ‘facts’ that you deem foundational. 

Moreover – whether or not I am right about that – such a challenge, issued by a person of my stature, ought to elicit CURIOSITY, at least in minds that are as free and sagacious as you guys claim that yours are. 

Inability to utter the sacred catechism of science -- (“I might be wrong, so let’s find out!”) -- is prima facie evidence of a cult. And – given that Moldbug’s followers are either rich harem-seekers or else incel wannabes – it’s a highly masturbatory cult.

What I do know from past encounters is that Moldbug/Yarvin dreams of becoming Top Dog – or lackey-vizier to one – in the coming restored feudalism. (He never liked it when I predicted his future role to be ‘kibble.’)

== The gauntlet, the gage, the glove is thrown! Pick it up, feudalists? ==

But hey, Brin, aren’t you taking a big risk, insulting them, this way? 

Well, yes. But I have five capsule answers to that.

1. Delusionals, who surround themselves with flatterers, imagine that they can quell or repress the 100 million nerdy top fact-users on this planet, plus their half a billion co-workers. Folks who know cyber, chem, nuclear, nano, bio and so on. Plus medicine and the law. They think the boffins will settle down to their place, if smacked a little.

But, in the words of Bruce Banner, you won’t like us when we finally get mad.

2. I’m loyal to the first civilization that ever at least somewhat instituted fairplay. And hence the only one that produced not only justice, but also Adam Smith’s prescription of flat-fair-creative competition -- the c-word that no ‘conservative’ ever utters anymore...

… in their rush to ally with “ex” commie-kremlin-commissars, plus murder sheiks, hedge parasites, carbon lords, cable impresarios and inheritance brats, all in order to resume 6000 years of feudal darkness... 

… even though Adam Smith’s c-word (‘competition’) is what made this the most creative (another c-word) of all eras.

But you dopes would quash it, just like every insipidly stoopid king or lord of the last 6000 years. (Shall we tally the exceptions and wager over the few kings who were measurably wise? Were there even ten, across all continents and 60 centuries?)

3. Oh, then there are the prepper-bunkers that you guys keep building – fantasizing that you’ll emerge after the dust and poisons settle, to be worshipped as demigods by ragged survivors. Only, this aftermath won’t resemble either Mad Max or A Canticle For Liebowitz, pals.  The survivors won’t go burning books and lynching nerds… but they'll wait eagerly to greet you, when you emerge, blinking like cicadas in the sunlight. 

And yes, we nerds have the schematics and locales of every deep or mountaintop ‘prepper’ compound. (Want proof?) And those hidey-holes will not have the desired outcomes. Especially after you do what I’ve heard some of you (like J.D. Vance) openly say… that you expect to deliberately trigger “The Event.” 

Think I am exaggerating? Get Douglas Rushkoffs book (cited below) about this circle-jerk of sick jerks who chant semi-erotic fantasies to each other: justifications to accelerate a civilizational collapse that never had to happen. And here's a further article about the very real accelarationism cult.

Except we’ll know and remember whose doing it was. As in this song, the survivors will remember.

An aside: how do I know these guys? Criminy, Ted Kaczynski sent me his book The Anti-Tech Revolution from prison, hoping for a blurb! Yarvin would deny any overlap with TK, but their pretensions and incantations and psychologies have far more in common, than not! 

Moreover, both Doug Rushkoff and I have been asked – directly by lordly ‘preppers’ -- how to solve their biggest worries, like “How do I keep my security staff loyal, when money isn’t good anymore?”

Indeed, I know that Isaac Asimov felt daunted, that those who were inspired by his ‘psychohistory’ speculations included not just brilliant fellows like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman, but also Osama bin Laden and Shoko Asahara. So, sure. Sci-fi fertilizes a billion flowers. Some stink and others may save the future. Hey, don’t blame the bee.

Back to directly addressing the stinkiest flowers…

== Okay, guys, almost done with my howl of defiance =

4. Let’s suppose that – as now seems plausible – your revanchist oligarchy does succeed at crushing this latest Periclean renaissance and restoring default feudalism -- (#1 on my list of Fermi Paradox theories, BTW.) In that case, are you so sure that you will be the final beneficiaries? The final kings and lords?

As I show in Existence, it’d take a clade of trillionaires much smarter than you.

Key point. Many of you got rich by being predatory Second Adopters. Or third, plundering first innovators, as happened in every industry, from railroads to radio to the WWW to e-cars and palantirs. (Bezos/Amazon appear to be a very rare exception.)

And hence, will others (currently biding their time, less flamboyant and noisy and noisome than you) simply take from you the august thrones that you have painstakingly erected, through your betrayals?

For one thing, those second-wavers will have millions of vengefully angry nerd-allies on their side!   Will you?

And hence… will those second wavers even want to keep around yattering ‘advisors’ like rabid-frothing moldbugs? 

Not if they’re smart enough to take everything that the takers took.

Perhaps instead they’ll surround themselves with those who fought against the mess you dopes are making. Advisors who thereupon are capable of offering advice that’s not masturbatory-lame flattery? 

It’s what Machiavelli did – who fought like hell for the Florentine Republic – till he finally realized that dream had fallen into shadow. At which point Niccolò (I knew him well) switched with agility to advising the Dukes, so that their undemocratic rule would at least be laced with some actual sapience. As the central locus of Enlightenment migrated, along with nerdy refugees, north to Holland and England, and then onward...

And if you don’t instantly perceive where I went with that – if you are incapable of understanding it on a first read -- then maybe that’s meaningful. Might it testify that you would-be Medicis aren’t as synaptically well-endowed as your flatterers tell you that you are? 

Flattery that’s all part of their beneficial advantage – those simpering advisors – but not yours.

Indeed, in hilarious self-flattery, here’s Moldbug/Grima styling himself as you-know-who. 

Oh... my....

== What I’m leaving out ==

Oh, did I say there were five reasons? Actually, there are seven… and I’m not telling the rest of them! Not today. Because telling might help some of these ingrate traitors to succeed. And also because… well… like Niccolò, I’m not giving out free advice.

Not till I see you are definitely winning. But it’s still way too early to count out Adam Smith and Franklin and MLK and Marshall, et. al. All of whom were geniuses. Unlike you. 

Or to count out the members of every profession that studies and investigates facts.

Or women, who know what you harem-builder misogynists plan for them.

Or vast numbers of normal, keenly-aware human citizens, who know that an open-transparent and self-critical civilization remains a better bet for them than any or all kings ever were, for any or all of our ancestors.

But especially… I sure as heck won’t talk about #5 through #7 till I see your offer. What you’re willing to pay. Just out of curiosity, of course.

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If you'd like a more detailed and less-livid dissection of the goals and rationalizations of these 'neo-reactionaries'... here it is. With multiple predictive points, BTW.

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== And finally, as my last December Daydream, I'll reiterate a tactic for Old Joe – How he could torpedo the noxious pirate ship of traitors and fools ==

Speaking of powerful men who are surrounded by shortsighted fools...

Hey Joe Biden, there is one last, super bold thing you could do that might tip over the clown car that’s bearing down upon us all. 

It would defy Putin’s putsch of the USA...

... and defy the mafioso heading to sit in your chair… 

... and it’d defy the incompetents in your own party, who put us in this position. 

Do this and be remembered for it, forever.

=============================================

PS: um… regarding that parallel with Wormtongue… seriously? Use some of your conspiracy yarn to connect that thought with RFK Jr.  and it all gets kinda… well… weird. Who writes this stuf??

Those who would be kings - Part 1. 'Neo-Monarchists’ and others who demand we drop what works, in favor or what always failed

This is not a polite essay - a two-parter offering new (and some older) insights into a world oligarchic putsch that endangers us all... and no-less the self-deceiving oligarchs, themselves. But we'll start with some of the lunatic shills they have subsidized or hired to push obsolete, dangerous notions.

Wiser heads advise that I just ignore a particular cabal of erudite fools, spewing ingrate insanity like frothy scum across a polluted beach. Alas, the ‘neo-monarchists’ are back! Now attracting real support from would-be kings. And since few others appear to be confronting them head-on, it's up to me, alack.

 Most recently I raged at them back in November of 2013 and again in February of 2022. 

== Know-Nothings get away with spewing nonsense ==

It should surprise no one that modern conservatism has migrated away from the ‘c-word’ that used to be one of their icons… competition… giving lip service to Adam Smith... 

... resuming instead the movement's older fealty to inherited privilege – drifting from Smith back to Edmund Burke, extolling 6000 years of rule by kings. 

Even the name of Friedrich Hayek is seldom spoken aloud anymore, by today’s 'conservative’ writers and pundits, since Hayek called for competition that is flat, fair, open, transparent, creative and maximally inviting to the widest range of potential participants. And we can't have any of that now, can we? 

Alas, no liberal pundit or politician ever points out this hypocrisy, or that the U.S. Founders and the original Tea Party rebelled primarily against cheater oligarchy. Moreover, anyone who actually reads Adam Smith knows that - were he alive today – Smith would be a flaming Democrat.

That hypocrisy spans the entirety of today’s conservatism, with one exception, that I’m about to describe. Members of this extremum are no longer hypocrites! 

That's because neo-monarchists openly despise Adam Smith. They espouse completing the antipodal migration of conservatism, from once-upon-a-time extolling competition, all the way to openly justifying its utter suppression. 

From Smith, past Burke all the way to Louis XIV.

(Note that there are many (perhaps 1%) on the left who rage against 'The Enlightenment' and every concept that led to their own knowledge, comforts and freedoms. But I do not deem them anywhere near as smart or as dangerous as the traitors on the other side. And hence... another time.)

== It’s baaaack!   Sycophancy for feudalism ==

I recall when ‘neo-monarchist’ jibberers like “Mencius Moldbug” – the nom-de-spume of a Mr. Curtis Yarvin – only flitted along the extreme right ankle of science fiction fandom, as mutated Ayn-Randian nuisances, bugging me and other sci fi authors on Internet fora. 

Now, subsidized by the likes of Peter Thiel, they are subjects of big-time profiles, like this one on Tablet, that feigns faux ‘balance’ while implying that Moldbug offers some bona fide, red-pill style Truths. But don’t be fooled by any semblance of an evenhanded tone. This article, by Tablet essayist Jacob Siegel, pushes the incredible, oligarchy-subsidized notion of taking Moldbug and his ilk seriously. 

“Whether you like it or not, Yarvin is the philosopher of, at the very least, our near future.”

Oh, what malarkey! In their denunciations of democracy, Moldbug/Yarvin and ilk rave assertions about human nature and history that are blatantly and diametrically opposite to fact. For example that:

 “…all organizations, big or small, public or private, military or civilian, are managed best when managed by a single executive….” 

…a stunningly counterfactual claim over which I have long offered wager stakes. An assertion-incantation that only breathes air because so many of our contemporary fellow citizens (e.g. Mr. Siegel) know next-to nothing about human history. (Tell it to the single-executive idiots who trashed Sears, Xerox and Kodak by enforcing their whims.) 

Indeed, when confronted by how spectacularly more-successful America and the West have been, by any range of metrics, across the last 200 years - especially the last 80 - than all other human times and societies combined – success that transpired and accelerated in direct proportion to how much more democratic, inclusive and transparently accountable we became – Yarvin and cohorts are reduced to chanting: 

“Yeah? Well, it won’t last. It can’t!”

And it may not. I’ve always held that the rare enlightenment experiments – less than a dozen across all human annals – always had steep odds stacked against them. Vastly more common, spanning all continents and 6,000+ years, were societies that - soon after achieving agriculture - became narrow pyramids of inherited privilege and raw male power. 

(We’re all descended from the harems of such kings, lords and priests. Indeed, incel, harem-envy is revealed, the moment you scrape any of these neo-feudalists.) 

Still, despite those harsh odds, a few oases of light have glimmered across the darkness. Periclean Athens, for example, was so vastly more creative, resilient, dynamic and fun – even in its crude, brutish form – that it terrified all surrounding kingdoms and oligarchies - (especially crude/vile/overrated Sparta) - who dropped all their bickering to join forces against the First Democracy, pouncing finally upon mistakes that we now know to have been inevitable.  

Similar oligarch-swarms crushed da Vinci’s brilliant Florentine Republic and came within a hair’s breadth of doing so, again, to renaissance Amsterdam, the seed that survived, then blossomed into all we know. Still, plagues of harem-seeking parasites have tried to destabilize our 300 year experiment every generation, ever since.

As if conceding a valid point, Mr. Siegel slyly grants Yarvin/Moldbug credence he never earned: 

“Philosophers and politicians like Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, to name only three among countless figures, including many on the left, have been outspoken in their warnings about democracy’s perils.” 

Sure, a factually correct sentence. Except that Mr. Siegel portrays as a bug what’s actually a feature! All of those thinkers… plus Franklin and Thomas Paine and Lincoln and FDR and Marshall and many others, criticized democracy’s faults in order to keep doing it better! In the same fashion that, should the American Experiment survive today’s insane treason of Murdochian Trumpism, we may enact transparency reforms that stymie similar failure modes, in future. (Forcing reflexive oligarchy cabals to innovate new attacks, of course.)

Oh, this cult is predictable and has historical odds in its favor, as well as Darwinian drivers like male reproductive drives and fantasies. But if you truly want to wallow in justifications for betraying our renaissance and democracy, you can do much better than these fools. The case for rulership by inherently superior demigods is made far more entertainingly and unctuously in the sly, slow-poison dramas penned by a bona fide genius (and traitor to everything that was ever good to him) named Orson Scott Card. But Scott's treacherously brilliant, anti-democracy propaganda is not today’s topic. 

So yes, do give Mr. Siegel’s article a look, if only to see how far fellows like Peter Thiel are now willing to go, subsidizing this lunacy in order to sabotage the great Enlightenment Experiment that made them, and resume instead history’s dismally unsapient calamity called feudalism. 

While there, have a look at the art-illustration, portraying Yarvin/Moldbug as Machiavelli! Like depicting the denizen of a padded cell as actual Napoleon. Uh huh. You wish.

When you’re done, come back here for a very simple and devastating refutation. Go on. I’ll wait.

While you’re at it, see also a fawning profile of Thiel’s eagerly dyspeptic (and trivially refuted) incantations that ‘liberalism has failed,’ while wallowing in its protection and myriad benefits. I so hope the author of this piece misinterprets almost everything, in almost every paragraph because… wow, the mighty sure can fall a long way. There are meme-poisons that burn away IQ.

Oh, and here's a late note that I'll come back to, another time: see this actual Swiss company that exemplifies and self-satirizes the desperate denialism of human males with unaccountable power and way too much money -- offering palatially opulent underground bunker systems for the uber-oligarch sociopaths in the aristo-prepper movement! Would-be lords who - rather than help the civilization that was good to them - are flocking to masturbatory fantasies about world domination after everything crashes down in "The Event." 

(Never pondering that the 100 million nerds on this globe - against whom they wage open war - are the very folks who know cyber, bio, nano, nuclear stuff... and thousands know the exact location and schematics of every bunker.)

I've consulted - along with Douglas Rushkoff - with a few of these folks and oh! Their smug delusions aren't even bad sci fi. But more on that in Part 2.

== The core and absolutely devastating reason oligarchy sucks ==

Back already? Well, okay. Where were we? Oh yes. 

Normally, when refuting vile lies, you’d build a series of increasingly cogent points, arriving at the best and most decisive one last. In this case, I lack time or interest in spending more’n an hour on morons. Anyway, I’ve dissected neo-monarchism before, here… and here. 

Hence, I’ll both start and finish with just one most-devastating rebuttal, based on the core essential fact about human nature.

We are all inherently delusional.

The more intensely you believe something, the more willingly you should check it out, now and then. Hence we know the only truly effective antidote to delusion that has ever been discovered is... 

The criticism of others. 

Criticism even—especially— by your enemies.

Oh, that’s not to say you’re doomed always to be wrong! For one thing, science has provided many self-check tools that reduce rates and levels of delusion, applying experimental and experiential honesty to enhance the central catechism that made science so successful. A pair of simple sentences spoken not just by scientists, but by any person with an ounce of decency or maturity.

“I might be wrong. Let’s find out.”

That wisdom was excruciatingly hard to come by! Especially since human beings hate criticism. In fact, your reflex, when criticized, is likely the very same as your enemy’s. You’ll try to shut your critic down. Evasion, distraction, shouting, logical fallacies, backstabbing gossip… all the way to threats and lawsuits…. To varying degrees, we’ve all wriggled and squirmed to evade searing reproach of our illusions.

Only now imagine you are a king. One with the power to order death to critics, at a whim?

Look at what I just did. I explained nearly all of human history! That horrible, wretched litany of delusions and mistakes spanning nearly all continents and at least a sixty centuries, during which every king, autocrat, high priest, paramount chief, baron, or lord could declare his favorite delusions to be Truth. Law. Policy. Many of them insane notions, or dumb, or calamitous… 

…or even good ideas that might have been muchly improved, if poked-at by discomforting critical commentary.

The nearly universal result? Wretched generations of calamity-stricken human beings paid the price of kingly hallucination and critic-suppression. Until, at last, something better came along…

…the constitutional/democratic equivalent of “anybody might be wrong.” 

Freedom of speech. 

Freedom for the many – in autonomy and confidence – to criticize the mistakes of even the mighty… though at a price!

The price of being criticized, yourself.

And that’s it. That is the foremost answer (among many) to these jabbering neo-monarchists. Not only are the rare, underdog enlightenments vastly more successful by every metric of human accomplishment, compared to all other societies combined. 

They achieve all that by unleashing competitive reciprocal accountability, which is the very opposite of rule-by-single-executive.

Inarguably better results, achieved by an unassailably better (much less lobotomized) method. A method that only works under conditions of general transparency. When light flows, even upon those at the top.

 Especially upon them.

Alas, there is a price. Only, it is not the one they jabber about.

... and I'll get to it in Part 2.