Part 12: The Moldbugian Solution

In Moldbug’s estimation, the only solution was reset, a civilizational bankruptcy procedure where the old institutions could be cleared away. The old loyalties and reciprocal obligations could be upset, and replaced with new forms of administration that would be more closely allied to providing value to the country’s main stakeholders: the citizens and their posterity.

For Moldbug, this radical reorganization would allow the original interests to come to the forefront so that the institutions of the nation might be reimagined and something of the old vitality restored.

Now as far fetched and vague as Moldbug is about this, it has a certain precedence, at least in corporate administration. In the best case scenario, corporations that are no longer solvent are liquidated and reconfigured so that their operation does not further injure the wealth of their shareholders.

We also can imagine something somewhat similar happening on a civilization-wide scale. During the fall of the Roman Empire, as Rome declined, its interests in the West became subsumed into various barbarian kingdoms. Subsequently, by taking charge of the Empire in piecemeal and by employing a radically different organizational schemes better suited for the times, these inheritors were able to (with a very, very long lead time) restore many of the same civilizational objectives as the original Empire.

Mencius Moldbug talks briefly about the kind of solutions he’d like to implement to encourage such a restoration. And to take a cursory glance, Moldbug imagines the combination of two ideas “Neocameralism”, and “patchwork”. 

Neocameralism, based off the original German cameralism, is the idea that the state should be operated centrally, and for the express benefit of its shareholders. Patchwork, a somewhat new fangled concept, is the idea that human organization works best as a set of decentralized mini states each with enforced peace treaties and freedom of exit for all citizens. The functional government is a mixture of small corporate-governments from which anyone might emigrate. In short, Moldbug’s solution is a system that is one hundred percent choice and zero percent voice when it comes to choosing government.

Many people consider the proscriptive dimension of Moldbug’s work to be the weakest, and I am in agreement. But I will note here that most people who believe we are in the process of decline and radical reform is needed oftentimes vaguely allude radical reorganization (usually not nearly as many words is mentioned small bug himself). Moldbug, here at least provides some direction as to the kind of things people should be looking for in a government once that reorganization occurs (skin in the game, mutual existence, formalism).

However, more important than the specific form of reorganization, Moldbug spends elaborates how a radical reorganization might be achieved in the present system, a system that believes itself to be “the end of history”.

If we do sense a decline is coming, if we know that a change is needed, and if we know that the sooner this change comes before the decline that reaches its zenith the better, then we are confronted with an essential question. How we achieve this objective?

And here once more, I think Mencius Moldbug’s ideas are quite useful. Let’s start first with what doesn’t work.

Perhaps what is most immediately obvious, what does not work is mainstream Republican politics.

“Conservatism” is futile and it’s futile by its very description. The point of mainstream conservative politics, the point of the Republican Party, is to operate as an acceptable opposition inside of the consensus (or the Cathedral). Conservatism cannot critique elements of the Cathedral that have gone wrong at a fundamental level. It’s not within its nature. And when one attempts to bring hard reactionary and anti establishment views into mainstream conservative circles, they may find that fellow “right wingers” fight them harder than the progressive opposition.

Of course, this failure is well-known to anyone on the contemporary dissident right.

But just to head-off another failed strategy, a strategy that is not commonly discussed in lieu of political failures, it is also entirely futile to try to organize a right wing militia movement, or to take actions in order to instigate a civil war, armed conflict against the societal consensus itself. Aside from being almost an impossible war logistically (fighting against the most powerful military force on the planet has ever known with will likely carry a popular mandate) the present day Cathedral has defined itself in opposition to right-wing and militarized movements.

What is the personification of evil in our age? Well obviously the Third Reich. What is the story about the salvation of America? Well, obviously the Civil War. In both cases, the villains are armed right-wingers. Any attempt to replicate this pattern will be put down easily by an establishment that will be perceived as entirely vindicated.

The path to victory in this way has been totally cut off, both culturally and institutionally. Those who pursue it are pursuing futility. The right-wing should not be looking in this direction for a solution, at least if they like winning.

Instead, what Moldbug imagined as a solution was passive-ism. No, not the refusal to engage in war, but rather the refusal to engage with political power structure as they exist, to essentially play a passive game against the Cathedral.

Elements of rebellion and revolution are not avenues that are open to people from the right. These activities are denied by the Cathedral and complaining that, “the left can get away with it!” isn’t going to help. Such a complaint would be like a pirate, once caught, complaining that state-sanctioned privateers were guilty of the same crimes he was. They were authorized.

And in our era, the left is authorized to perform protest and revolution, the right is not.

Activism, resistance, and revolution work for the left because they are operating within the Cathedral within the consensus that exists in our civilization as a whole. People like Gandhi and Martin Luther King were able to succeed in their efforts because they had sponsors and sympathizers inside the leadership of the West. And the same goes for Marxist, communist, and left-anarchists revolutions in the past. For evidence of this look no further than relative acceptability difference between the Communist Party and the modern formation of Nazi party’s in contemporary society, even though both have similar historic body counts.

If we’re interested in change from the right, change against the tendency of decline, we have to think differently about what can be accomplished. We have to play a passive game of building alternatives to the mainstream.

For Moldbug, this meant building an alternative to the Cathedral itself, starting with the most fundamental unit of consensus: the academy. Moldbug imagined an alternative to the university forming a type of “anti-versity”, an institution that operates under different principles but still pursues areas of academic exploration and education. Eventually this anti-versity might obtain an edge by exploring topics that are shunned by the ideologies that rain inside the Cathedral.

Through the process of forming communities of learning and knowledge that are respected, that are trusted, the right can create a beacon for people to rally around when our current cultural consensus goes horribly wrong and begins repeating lies.

It is important this process of opposition to the consensus occurs indirectly, never contesting directly for power against a much more powerful foe. However, from this activity, the seeds of a reactionary movement might be formed into something that can hold back a decline by providing an alternative that might provide salvation for civilization.

Indeed, when I think Moldbug speaks of an “anti -versity”, I immediately think back to the fall of the Roman Empire and the role played by the nascent Catholic Church by creating a counter-narrative to the Roman civic religion and planting new seeds of learning during the early medieval era. Now, it remains to be seen how much something like this is possible in the modern information era. But as authors like Rod Dreher have speculated, when talking about the “Benedict option”, something like this type of passive resistance is very obviously needed.

So after processing this final part of Moldbug’s ideas, where does this leave us? Well, I think with a new perspective on things, a foundation for ideas that most people and now call “Neoreactionary”.

While often neoreactionary, and others influenced by Moldbug as always expecting the worst and exhibiting a kind of paranoia, but in another distinct way reactionaries often we can tap into an inner-calm staring plainly at the bleakness of the possibilities that could lie ahead. Reactionaries understand the dangers that are in store, and as such they can dedicate energy to hedge against those dangers.

Like most right-wing labels, “reactionary” is a word that has been created by the enemies of the right. But when used in a modern sense, the word is to distinguish modern dissident perspectives from those of mainstream conservatives. Far from what the name implies, reactionaries do not want to slow things down, they do not want to stop history or go backwards to some previous golden age. They just believe that society needs, desperately, a different direction in which to go forward.

If, in any way, the reactionary might be considered to be responding to something, he is reacting to the manifest ruin that will result from the consensus view of progress and the direction of society.

But with all its associations, there’s one thing that a reactionary cannot be and that is simply reactive.

The point of neoreaction is to anticipate decline, to build and cultivate alternatives, to make oneself worthy of power and then, when necessary, take the appropriate actions to secure it

Here is where we are left by the work of Mencius Moldbug, agree or disagree. For those of us who are facing down decline in the West, we must be bold and take the next step. We must find what works and what doesn’t inside our communities and personal lives. We must understand what models can forge something better for ourselves and our posterity, regardless of what dreams or nightmares the future has in store once we have swallowed the red pill.

FIN

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Part 11: Conquest’s 3rd Law

Conquest’s 3rd law is the redheaded stepchild of the bunch, the one that nobody talks about.

The first and second law, look like commandments etched in stone, something that will be true now and forever. But the third law just looks like a complaint about bureaucrats, pretty pedestrian to be honest. And it’s not even clear how the Third Law is related to the other two.

Bureaucrats are inefficient? What a revelation! But when you stop to think about it, have we asked ourselves why government bureaucrats are inefficient?

Mainstream conservatives, like Ben Shapiro, have an answer for this question that is neat enough: incentives.

Bureaucrats are inefficient, they act like they’re in a conspiracy against the institution because they don’t have proper market incentives to act correctly. Corporationst, they say, do have proper market based monetary incentives and so their employees at least do not act like a conspiracy against the institution itself.

But is the explanation true?

Certainly no one ever accuses the military of behaving this way and the military doesn’t use market incentives. Furthermore, the mainstream conservatives assertion that employees of corporations do not act like a conspiracy against the shareholders is really only true when we look at healthy companies, companies that are solvent and in their period of growth. Unhealthy corporations, in impossible situations where their business model fundamentally fails, do start to act just like Conquest’s Third Law describes, the employees begin conspiring against the shareholders.

Corporations exist for one reason only, to pay off shareholders. They develop around some business model and expand based on its success. But along the way, as they grow, corporations change, the market shifts, the founding leadership leaves and is replaced by more mercenary management. And soon the organization has a new set of priorities that are not as focused on shareholder value. And so the corporation loses focus and eventually goes into decline.

And at some point in this decline, it becomes obvious to the management and other employees that the business model is insolvent. Then the incentives change, the priorities of the management stop being about to delivering value to shareholders in the long term, because the long term is futile. What matters is getting out with what you have, looking out for number one, and making sure that you’re not the one who’s holding the bag of shit when the music stops.

So once decline is reaches a certain point, management does become a conspiracy against the shareholders. And this pattern is present inside governments and inside civilizations.

In fact, it can be useful to model civilizations both as corporations. Both corporations and civilizations have shareholders, the shareholders in the case of a corporation, and the general posterity of the people in the case of a civilization. Each also has assets and liabilities that it manages and manipulates to further the objectives of those stakeholders.

Perhaps Robert Conquest’s Third Law is not as eternal as the first, but simply an observation about the current state of affairs. A description of our current age as transition of the leadership class in the west from a mode of delivering value to the people and their posterity, to just another bureaucratic organization trying to manage the decline of the body politic and get out of the door with their heads intact.

And if this is the case, do we have evidence that in fact we are in the middle of a decline, potentially a metastasizing decline that will end in total collapse? The music is slowing and it may yet stop.

But of course, again, this is somewhat subjective. We all have to decide how trustworthy our cultural, governmental, and educational leaders are. We all have to decide whether our leaders are no longer as interested in the people as in previous areas of the West and are just looking out for themselves. I get the sense that people generally feel like this is the case, but there could be some nostalgic misremembering going on. Maybe there’s nothing to worry about and we are on our way to utopia.

But what if the music is slowing down? And what if we get the sense that the load won’t bear, and that we might be looking down the barrel of collapse. This is the real red pill. And it comes along with a sinking feeling when you realize the nature of what we might be facing.

But then, at the same time, I think there is a relief that is also present when we face the worst and are able to prepare for it. So here we might segway to the very obvious next question.

What is to be done? How do we head off or lessen the impacts of this terminal decline?

(next, part 2: A Strange Tendency)

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Part 10: Our Choice

And so which of these two sides do we want to support?

Well, the left, obviously. At least if you like winning, and everyone likes winning.

After all, the left are on the right-side of history. They are going to be the ones who gets all the glory for the new social reforms when they finally, and inevitably, come to pass. They are the ones that are going to have the satisfaction of saying “I told you so” when they finally bring down the oppressive concept of monogamy, and the antiquated notions of nations having borders

And if you have no moral issues with what is described as “progress”, allying with the left is quite a good deal if you plan for a career in politics, And even if you aren’t, it will still have rewards, psychologically at least.  

But, dear reader, this is one small caveat, one small issue with going all in for the left.

And that problem can be felt if feel the suspicion that your society is not in ordinary operating conditions, but is, instead, approaching the beginning of an accelerating, metastasizing decline and collapse. We may be on the cusp of that final step step where the left devours the essential social bonds that form civilization and then finally destroys itself. In that case, assisting the left is only assisting in the acceleration of your own doom and destruction of yourself and your posterity.

It’s a possibility, but a remote one, right?

Our current cultural leaders, our current governmental leaders, have a handle on things. They certainly aren’t going to pursue projects that would drive civilization to the brink. They certainly wouldn’t allow any progressive cultural moves that don’t have ready technological solutions. They won’t create any issues that can’t be overcome by increasing wealth brought about by technology, right?

And sure enough, maybe everything will work out. Perhaps, universal basic income and growth fueled by Silicon Valley will solve the problem of third-world poverty and migration into the West. Perhaps robots and artificial intelligence will solve the problem of family decline and general loneliness of modern society. Perhaps cloning technology will solve the decline in birth rates and machine-guided surgeries will solve the problem of transgenderism to the point where no one can tell between the biological women and the elective ones.

We all have to decide whether this is going to happen or not. You either trust the technocrats who developed our cultural consensus of society or you don’t.

If you’re a right-winger like me, then for reasons either good or bad, you don’t trust our current crop of leaders.

But if you’re on the progressive side of things, then in one way or the other, you have placed your trust such men. We are headed for a techno-utopia, or perhaps even a singularity, and democratically elected technocrats are just the ticket to get us there.

Of course, the question has a certain amount of subjectivity to it. Everyone is going to decide for themselves who they’re going to trust. But before I move on to the last portion of this essay and leave the decision up to the reader, there is one issue I would like to examine before you cast your vote on whether our current societal trajectory is towards a utopia or towards collapse. And this examination begins with looking at Robert Conquest’s Third Law.

(next, part 11: Conquest’s Third Law)

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Part 9: The Return of History

Here we have discovered another correspondence between Mencius Moldbug’s theory of government and the very frequently revived idea of civilizational “cycles”, the growth, life and death of cultural groups.

Over the course of centuries, The Cathedral, or the cultural consensus of a civilization, has a tendency to move towards deconstruction, antinomianism, and the left. In our case, the Christian civilization, this process begins with the Reformation. Then slowly, the Cathedral sheds the external arrangements, promises, and customs that have given it life in the past. Until, at some point, it sheds necessary cultural apparatuses, and it begins its phase of decline.

Here Mencius Moldbug points to how this occurred in Christian civilization. The initial reformed Protestantism transformed first into a socially progressive minded Christian activism, then to a general liberal-progressive sentiment with no spiritual principles attached, and now finally to progressive consensus obsessed with deconstructing the very civilization that gave it birth. A brief review of the reigning consensus at Harvard and Yale will tell this story very clearly.

Our story is a tale as old as time. And it is very much the same cycle we hear talked about from Spengler and older thinkers.

Now since we are more or less done with explaining the theory, perhaps we can return to our own society and the contest between left and right. Can Moldbug’s theory help us answer our questions about this fundamental division?

What is the fundamental difference between the left and right as they exist in politics today? Who is correct? And who, if any, should we support?

What is the left and the Democratic Party? They are the representatives of the inner party of The Cathedral, the societal consensus, they are the force that drives progress, and our civilization as a whole.

What is the right and the Republican Party? They are the representatives of the outer party, the token resistance. They apply the brakes to the Cathedral’s progress that slows its course without stopping or changing it, they disagrees with the mainstream in a way that is acceptable to the Cathedral itself. They are the loyal opposition.

(next, part 10: Our Choice)

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Part 8: The Final Destination

In addition to progress versus degeneration, there’s another way to view the struggle between antinomian and pronomian forces, and that is as a transfer between two modes of survival.

Originally evolving and living in a harsh natural environment, human beings needed norms, disciplines, and structures to ensure that they would survive. And this need for norms persisted when the threats to human well-being shifted from the natural world to those posed by war and other human rivalries.

In this sense, technological development acts as an exchange, replacing internalized human discipline, rules, and organization with external physical technologies that can offload some of the work. When we invent the lever and the pulley, the discipline put on our muscles can be loosened.

As we invent inscription and writing on stone tablets, we lose the discipline needed to memorize and carry on long oral traditions.

Sometimes technology replaces one discipline with another (such as literacy and writing replacing memorization). Other times, as in the case of modern technological entertainment, a core human discipline is eroded entirely. As technology increases, modern man becomes increasingly atomized, sedentary and isolated, losing his contact with both the land and his fellow man. In this sense technology, and the subsequent increase of progressive influence on culture, is a double-edged sword, increasing our wealth but eroding our humanity through the destruction of norms. We rewrite the rules, orders, disciplines, and promises that would otherwise allow our society to survive under harsher conditions.

This is the fundamental decadence of progress. And in Moldbug’s conception, technological innovation covers up the degeneration and social disorder that would otherwise be obvious. More fundamentally, in the progress of technology and antinomianism, there is no guarantee that loosening of the rules and the destruction of promises is only going to remove superfluous social institutions, and norms that limit the emergence of technology.

As the victories of the antinomian left occur again and again, as it is further vindicated by technological progress, the demands of the left accelerate. The activists will begin to tear down more norms and rules until they begin to cut into living tissue, until they begin to destroy the organization that society needs to generate the very technological advance that progress needs to continue.

History has a leftward direction but there’s no guarantee that it is going to be intelligent about it. Like an auto-immune disorder, at some point the fixture of progressivism attacks healthy tissue. And even while being driven by the progress of technology, there is no guarantee that the antinomian forces inspires will be good for humanity in the long run. Of course, on the surface, both of these defects seem small. However, they can become bigger since there is no implicit mechanism in society to deal with these forces once they accelerate.

And so there is a bubble mechanism built into the pattern of history itself. The growth of wealth and technology enables the victories of the left enables the victories of antediluvian forces in society. But soon, the march of progress overtakes the benefits delivered by technology and begins to degenerate and disintegrate social bonds themselves. Just like a market bubble, the societal or civilizational bubble starts by pursuing a useful valued asset, creates hype and enthusiasm until everything is oversold, and then collapses, destroying the wealth of the people who were foolish enough to invest in it.

When a bubble is in its growth period, when the market is in an upswing, when technology and wealth are abundant, there are incentives to keep things going. If you buy into a bubble, there’s immediate benefit. And if you deconstruct social norms or remove rules that seem unnecessary in the short term then there is much to be gained in the short term. Therefore, an acceleration is experienced that is almost irresistible. Society will go ever further to the left, ever further into deconstruction until it begins to devour itself. And even within this process, will the leftward movement and acceleration of history always continue? Will we always proceed to further deconstruction?

Well as the economist Herbert Stein put it, if something cannot go on forever, it will inevitably at some point stop. And so for societies like ours, there are two possible endings.

In one very unlikely scenario, I hesitate to say optimistic scenario. The process of technological and wealth growth continues indefinitely, until science and technology have obliterated scarcity, and with it, any remnant of anything resembling humanity or the human condition.

In this scenario, nothing stops progress and so we will reach a type of techno-utopia, or go even further and attain what Ray Kurzweil would call the singularity, the point where technology devours humanity itself. In this scenario we will have reached some kind of culmination, some kind of perfect technology, an existence in a near godlike state. Although here, I hesitate to say “we” since whatever attains the dizzying height of existence is not going to resemble anything human.

However, in the other scenario, that is much, much, more likely, the constant progression of technology and progress will come up against some barrier that further technological development cannot solve. In this case, the progression of wealth growth will suddenly halt, the progressive bubble will burst, and civilization will take an enormous lurch backwards. And this time the sudden backwards thrust will occur in a truly catastrophic fashion.

After centuries of left wing victories there will be little remaining social organization that will be able to cushion society when it is no longer able to rely on technological growth. Like a car hitting a brick wall at very high speeds, the entire external apparatus of society will be disintegrated by the sudden stop and with it, will go the civilization and the people it deigns to protect.

And this disaster will be hard to hold back. Leading up to the catastrophe activists and administrators of the society and culture may see the disastrous fate ahead. However, these leaders may realize that they have become slaves of the process that moves society “forward” ever faster. Like a government that is experiencing hyperinflation, the short term interests of the party is to always continue, to print money to pay off short term debts regardless of the fact that the practice will lead to the death of the entire body-politic eventually.

(next, part 8: The Return of History)

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Part 7: The Hand of the Machine

So far in our examination of historical trends we have ignored the biggest, most obvious, trend in human history. Human beings do gain knowledge of the world over time. We pass it on, generation-to-generation. We do improve our understanding, increase our yields, improve our efficiencies, generate larger margins, and push the boundaries between ourselves and our families and the hardness of natural existence. And under these circumstances, the nature of the antinomian to loosen the rules and punishments, turn out, more often than not, to be vindicated. We must work to prepare for winter, but thanks to improved farming, winter seems farther and farther away.

One can imagine a hypothetical dialogue between our ant and grasshopper:

Ant: “The law says work of the Earth from sunup to sundown.”

Grasshopper: “with the newly invented plows and crop rotations we need less work.”

Ant: “Idle hands are the devil’s plaything!”

Grasshopper: “Come let us enjoy the fruits of our leisure time!”

I don’t think it’s hard to see what eventually wins.

Technology and wealth liberate us from the regulations and structures we once needed to maintain survival in a harsh world. And as this occurs, the antinomians triumph. The progressive is vindicated by technology, and history obtains it’s well known left-wing bias.Through technology and loosening of norms humanity is happier, or at least richer, and we return to the pursuit of our goals with more ease. And ss technology accelerates, so does the left increase its own ability to become obtain long-term political victory again and again.

And so we have finally come to accomplish our task, an explanation of the leftward force in history that explains both the simplicity of progressivism and the predictability of its victories. Moldbug’s model seems to explain the nature of the left and also a sort of Hegelian idea that history is moving towards some kind of conclusion or outcome. 

Returning to our timeline of conservatives through the ages, we can see at every interval that what separates each conservative from the last is their relationship to the disestablishment of institutional norms, the belief that certain rules should be done away with or relaxed and that the promises of the older society should be loosened.

So with some effort, we have successfully explained the first of Conquest’s Three Laws of politics.

We see that people are more conservative about the things that they love, because they’re looking to preserve them. And we see that institutions, by their nature, become more progressive over time, because they degenerate.

So now that we might recognize that the leftward force in history is driven by human technological progress, how do we feel about it? Is not this entire process a good thing? Should we not be grateful for it? Is this not a victory over nature, a victory for humanity, a vindication of the concept of human progress? Well, perhaps, and perhaps not.

This type of progress may be the ultimate salvation of humanity, but is there not a fly in the ointment?

(next, part 8: The Final Destimnation)

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Part 6: Ants and Grasshoppers

Still, the entropic explanation of the phenomenon is vague. It’s all well and good, as Moldbug does, to associate the left with degeneration. But what exactly is being degenerated? What is wasting away?

Dissolution and chaos, from analogy to religion and physics, tends to have a negative emotional connotation. If you were to ask me whether I want my society to be degenerated, I would probably say “no” simply out of emotional association. Still we haven’t specified what is being degenerated. What if it’s something bad? What if the object slowly melting away is oppression,

In that case, the entropic model of left would be correct, but the left would still be a good thing, at least under most people’s views.

So exactly what is degenerated over time?

It can’t be living standards. Ease of life has gotten better, for the most part. We might be more progressive than those old fogies in the early 18th century and perhaps this means we are more “chaotic” in the Jordan Peterson sense of the word. But in terms of wealth and technology we are by far their superiors. We may be in the process of degeneration, but if technology and wealth increases then we will be degenerating all the way to the bank.

So living standards aren’t degenerating, sp what is the subject of the left’s entropy?

Well, as Moldbug puts it in a word, or a Greek word, “nomos”: rules, laws, customs, and the promises and commitments that stem from those rules and customs.

Here we mean “rules and laws” in the most general sense. Saying “all men should take their head off before the king” is part of nomos but so is saying “little boys should wash their hands before supper”. Saying “all good churchmen should observe the Holy Days of obligation” is nomos, and so is the military draft

And here we have a simple explanation for what is left ,and what is right. The left is antinomian, and the right is pronomian.

If we look at human organization through history and human organizations generally, we see that each in turn are made up of promises and rules. One person, usually an authority, promises something to those who are lower and in exchange he is raised up in the hierarchy and is able to make the rules for the rest of the community.

This is a very basic model, but you will see it again and again in everything from the establishment of ancient civilizations and kings to corporate boardrooms. You even see it in the case of religions and gods. It is no accident that the first religious testament we have in the Bible concerns the development of a covenant, a promise made by God, and subsequently the rules set out to govern his people in order that God can fulfill that promise. This is the core cultural feature that binds a society together on a political and pre-political level.

Alright, so this might be an observation concerning how society is formed. But how does this play into our of institutional reformation and possibly the deformation? Well, as we might expect with promises and rules, the order of a society can’t remain static. Norms need to be modified to accommodate change, there needs to be some flexibility and modification. Some rules need to be renegotiated or possibly even reneged on as circumstances change. But here comes the problem.

When we make a rule or a promise, we limit possibilities, the potential of human action is constrained. By breaking a rule, we become liberated. We are free to make new commitments and to enjoy life and in unconstrained fashion. However, as we disregard promises and break faith with the rules, the authority loses credibility, the system is weakened, and potentially the entire justification for the system collapses. At some point, if we break too many rules, nothing works and there is a collapse.

For an immediate analogy in the modern world, we could look at the monetary systems and the printing of promissory notes on paper. Governments issue the initial currency as a fixed promise, just like an initial covenant between people and their rulers. Subsequently, the government prints bills and people borrow those bills to buy what they need and what they think they can pay back in the future. However, as the people and the government go into debt, it becomes necessary to break or bend promises by printing more and more paper money, inflating the currency, and therefore making it easier to pay debts and to borrow and spend worry free. However, print too many promissory notes and people will lose faith with the currency, there will be hyper-inflation, an accelerating metastasizing collapse of the system and its capacity to use money to negotiate for things that people need.

For perhaps a simpler example, we might imagine the trade-off between pronomian and antinomian perspectives being like the ants and the grasshopper from the famous Aesop’s Fables. The rule says “work every day hard, to store for the winter”. Break the rule for a single day and you get a nice day-off, a break from the ordinary pattern of existence and a chance to enjoy life. But break the rules every day, as does the grasshopper in the title of the fable, and you will starve come winter.

And so it goes with societies. The rules can be bent, but if they’re broken, all hell breaks loose. Things Fall Apart, order breaks down, trust evaporates, and men cannot rely on their fellow men.

And there and we can imagine, again a balance, a pattern that takes place in most societies, the antinomian bleeding-heart grasshoppers telling society to make exceptions, to ease up, to let loose, to take a break from the promises and rules of society. The pronomian fuddy-duddy ants sticking to order and the old ways, cautioning society that if it does ease up, that if it does slack from its duties, that if it does show too much mercy, society will starve come winter and the barbarian hordes will be at the gates.

But, after everything, does this explain the progressive direction in history over the long term?

Well, not entirely. If there was a trade-off like this, we would expect that our world will be simpler the equilibrium would be reached and that history itself would involve small cycles between these forces rather than a single direction. And this type of cyclical equilibrium might be the case if nothing changed. But of course, things do change. In particular, technology changes.

(next, part 7: The Hand of the Machine)

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Part 5: The Devil and Samuel Johnson

But how does this notion of The Cathedral help us to understand the dynamics of history and the reason why societal consensus always shifts to the left? What creates the left wing tendency in history?

To answer this question by way of analogy, I digress to an almost forgotten English political party: the Whigs.

Now, while Whig party’s political objectives are now almost forgotten (and not relevant for this talk), they and 19th century sympathizers were famous for first pointing out the constant tendency in history towards of reform and “progress”; a tendency that only goes in one direction. Since the party’s demise this view has become known as the infamous “Whig view of history”.

A funny, anachronism that can provide insight to the leftward force in history can be accomplished by juxtaposing the “Whig view of history” with Samuel Johnson’s famous quote about the Whigs, namely that, Lucifer was the first Whig.

Now, while I think Samuel Johnson’s original point was that Lucifer was the first rebel against the Crown (the Crown here being associated with God), might not Dr. Johnson’s quote be better used to help us understand as of yet unexplained leftward direction in history?

Perhaps we might incorporate a Luciferian element into our analysis. Rather than assuming that history moves left because the left is always correct, might we assume that history moves left because the left is always evil?

At first it seems like we have replaced an explanation that is overly flattering to progressives (“the moral arc of history!”) with an explanation that is overly flattering to conservatives (“The left is demonic!”). Still, if we vary our analogy and move from theology to physics, we might inquire whether the fundamental time-dependent force in history is not analogous to the fundamental time-dependent phenomenon in physics. What physicists call entropy.

What if progress and the leftward motion in history is simply entropy, disillusion, degeneration. Just like a teacup, in nature, shatters once knocked down but does not, in nature, reassemble itself; perhaps the tendency of all things to become more left-wing is a type of shattering, a type of winding-down a phenomenon where social institutions slowly degrade as time progresses.

Under this explanation, the leftward bias in history (or “Whig view of history”) does have a certain Luciferian nature. On this view, progress is simply a move towards chaos as time inevitably goes forward. As society ages, institutions are not so much improved by progress as they are slowly torn down, stripped of their fundamentals and worn out.

As Moldbug put it, Cthulhu swims slowly, but he always swims left.

Certainly the entropic explanation has a certain parsimony to it. Things of their own accord tend to wind-down, tend to fall apart. Institutions decay over time, just like all things in the physical world. We don’t need a further explanation.

The association of the left with entropy and degeneration also goes a way explaining why the left tends to win over time, and also why we can identify what is left-wing and what isn’t before it actually does win. When we see the leftwing trend in history we are not clairvoyant. We are not seeing the future any more than we are seeing the future by noticing that a teacup, once smashed, is not going to reassemble itself.

(next, part 6: Ants and Grasshoppers)

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Part 4: Man and Cathedral

Although we have a two party system, the asymmetry in cultural influence between left and right indicated that the common perception of each as equal and opposite forces might be questionable at least. In Moldbug’s mind, the relationship between Democrats and Republicans might be thought of as less like the left and right wing of a political assembly, and more like the inner and outer parties have a single political fixture, like in the novel 1984. The inner party develops the real agenda and the outline of where society is going in the long term. The outer party exists as a peanut gallery, taking power temporarily and moving in the same direction as the inner party, but at a slower speed. The main utility of the outer party is not real opposition, but creating the perception of controversy and discourse for what really is a predetermined conclusion.

Now while Moldbug’s analogy is quite illustrative, it is important to point out that he is not proposing a conspiracy (as in Orwell’s 1984) but rather a consensus. Despite what Alex Jones thinks, the leaders of the Democratic Party, hollywood and corporate america aren’t gathering together in a smoke-filled room to determine what the consensus of norms are going to be in the West. Instead, there’s a general consensus, an agreement that emerges organically among elites and which people who enter the elite are encouraged to believe

But if we live in an open society, an open democratic project that priorities free speech and free expression, how can this consensus even emerge to begin with?

To address this question, Moldbug takes aim at the concept of an “open society” as described by people like Karl Popper. What if we were to conceptualize social control more broadly than simply an “open democratic” or “authoritarian”?

Say for instance, we modeled a completely open society as a “Type I” society, one that had almost no controls on the types of ideas that could be said or thought about in any way, shape, or form. To contrast this we could compare it to a totally closed society, a “Type III” society, like North Korea where every aspect of a person’s life is completely controlled by ideology, by ideas that have to be asserted enthusiastically inside every communal interaction. Now while these pure “Type III” societies are exceedingly rare in human history (very few governments want total control over people’s ideology), I think it is also fair to say that the pure Karl Popper “Type I” society has never really existed.

In fact as Moldbug points out, most societies do maintain ideological order through a loose societal consensus over what is an acceptable opinion and what is not (a “Type II society”). This consensus is usually not designed. and exists pre-politically, operating mainly through social pressure and typically originating in the academic and educational institutions. This consensus system is loose and fluid. It extends over governments and between them, creating a sort of “unofficial multinational rules” for determining what ideas are commendable and what ideas are unacceptable.

A classic example of this is medieval society in Europe between 1000 a.d. and 1500 a.d. when the Catholic Church and its strictures were the de facto societal consensus. At that time didn’t matter whether one’s loyalties were to the Holy Roman Empire, to France, to Britain, to Hungary or the Kingdom of Poland. At the end of the day a person had been educated under Catholic guidelines, they asserted Catholic religious beliefs, and they had a Christian and scholastic methodology about solving problems.

It is this meta-political consensus that Moldbug called “The Cathedral”.

This Cathedral, more than anything else. is what defines a civilization. It is an organized system of consensus and an ideal about how society should run and should be operated going into the future.

What is the advantage of the Democratic Party? Well, in short, the Democratic Party is aligned to the desires of our contemporary Cathedral, the general consensus of the academy and others who generate ideas about how society should move forward. Everyone else are heretics, acceptable heretics in most cases, but nevertheless out of sync with agreed upon correct opinion.

(next, part 5: The Devil and Samuel Johnson)

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Part 3: Moldbug’s Virus

For Mencius Moldbug, the phenomenon of history’s leftward direction was more than just a weird sociological occurrence. For Moldbug, it was an indication that we needed to re-conceptualize the nature of power, cultural consensus, and history itself. In science when large observable and repeatable phenomenon cannot be explained by existing theory, those theories have a problem. Our problem begins with mainstream understanding of power and political discourse.

Given that in the modern world our political conceptions are fundamentally post-enlightenment, we have come to believe certain myths about human nature; myths that, if you press people, they readily admit are false even as they assent to them publicly.

We live in a “Democratic Republic”, what we call euphemistically, a “Democracy”, a place where citizens are looked to as the final arbiter of the direction society should follow. As such, we are encouraged to believe that citizens are rational and consider the problems faced by their culture, society, and community when voting. We are encouraged to believe that people learn, educate themselves, and exchange information to improve their own understanding of the universe and political principles through public discourse. We are expected to believe, publically at least, that through this “open” public discourse and exchange of information, and the vetting of policy inside a Democratic political environment, a correct consensus will often be reached as the ruling a democratic majority.

However, most people who are reasonably aware of human nature, including the very founding fathers who originated this system, are (and were) perfectly aware that this model of human discourse is entirely fictitious.

People are influenced by any number of other factors, mob mentalities emerge, false but appealing ideas spread like wildfire, and quick swings within public opinion are readily observable. As Mark Twain so famously said, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on. And this is true. Bad ideas have a way of spreading even though they are wrong, almost like a disease or a virus spreads through a population even while damaging to a host.

In fact, this analogy of human ideas to viruses has become quite popular mode of conceptualizing knowledge post-2007, especially in the wake of thinkers like Daniel Dennett. “Religion is like a mind virus!”, “Radical Islam is like a mind virus!”, “Nazism, communism, socialism are like mind viruses!” These ideas spread from person to person, irrespective of their veracity. They spread like a virus.

Here, I think it comes as no surprise that very few people describe ideas that they hold as viruses.

But to take this model seriously, what would happen if we modeled all ideas as viruses? If this task is too daunting, perhaps we can restrict ourselves to a single context. Returning to our initial example, could we model the right versus left in the American as both being viruses? What if the red and blue on the election map was actually the spread of two mind viruses, each growing, not because they were true or false, but rather because they had infected the minds of their host.

In this scenario which virus would be the more powerful strain? The left wing blue virus? The right wing red virus? Which would be the strain that would most likely cause a pandemic that could take the world by storm? We can examine each closely and turn.

The red right wing virus transmits itself through institutions like churches, small communities, rural organizations, and families. It targets the populations of Middle America, the rural poor, the military, and far-flung conservative religious sects. Its transmission mechanisms are slower, intergenerational, and genetic. And, in our present age, it captures old power and those who remain in the center of things.

By contrast, the blue left wing virus likes working through mass-media, academic institutions, the government, and school systems. It likes targeting populations of urban professionals, celebrities, teachers, and academics. Its transmission mechanisms are fast, memetic, and media-oriented. The blue virus captures the poor and the ascendant, but also the richest and most powerful heights of our present society.

Now, given this perspective and brief rundown, we immediately can see that these two viruses are in no way equal.

Imagine, for instance, looking at this comparison if you were a betting man and were wagering on which virus would capture more power and influence in the long term if unleashed upon a population. Which would you choose red or blue?

Well, the blue virus, obviously. What is Middle America and a vast population of fuddy-duddies next to the commanding heights of media, education, and the coastal corporate elite?

Once more, the winner is the left with a bullet.

We often look upon the modern contest between left and right, as a contest between two equal and opposite forces. However, to Moldbug, this implicit symmetry was ridiculous. The left had more cultural power, and this cultural power would lead to political power, eventually.

I remember making similar observations about the left/right dichotomy during the Bush administration. At that time there was no end of progressive bellyaching about how marginalized the left was in the contemporary political environment. And even, before reading Moldbug, I remember thinking that this was bullshit.

Even during the Bush Administration, the majority of the governmental, educational, media, and research institutions that my peers interacted with in their daily lives (and that my peers would interact with in the future) were totally dominated by the left-wing. The only thing that was dominated by the right, the only thing that could be dominated by the right, was the upper level of the federal government, offices that shifted between the left-wing and the-right-wing of the political spectrum every four to eight years.

Would my progressive friends seriously trade their dominance in the academy, government and social services for another eight years of power in the presidency and the Congress? Would progressives feel more comfortable in an America where the school systems and universities were Republican, if only Al Gore had won the 2000 presidential election? Obviously not.

What became clear to myself, and coincidentally Mencius Moldbug, was that when it came to setting the cultural tone and narrative, the left was dominant. In fact, the left was not just dominant, it was unassailable when it came to forming society’s cultural consensus. And after everything was said, it was this cultural consensus that ultimately determined where the country would go in the long run.

(next, part 3: Moldbug’s Virus)

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