Perceptual vs. Concrete Freedom

Concrete freedom is statistical. If one were to add the likelihood of an (innocent) person being attacked by the police to the likelihood of an innocent person being attacked by criminals, the total likelihood of being a victim is a measure of ones lack of concrete freedom.

Of course, in any system, ones likelihood varies by whom one is, and what ones race, income, etc., is. Certainly an (innocent) person who is wealthy is more likely to be attacked by authorities than someone who is poor. An (innocent) person who is political is more likely to be attacked than one who is not. Especially today.

This is a measure of how free an innocent person is. Less attack = more freedom. For criminals, the reverse is true: the poorer and more criminal one is the more likely they are to be attacked by the police and by criminals. For criminals this is desirable. Criminals should be constantly afraid of attack. The merely poor should not.

With criminals, less attack = less freedom, since they cannot control themselves and their actions are tyrannical to everyone else. To create freedom one must constantly attack criminals.

When a state protects the white innocent and attacks the criminal it is doing what it is supposed to. That is creating law an order, and law and order are inseparable from hierarchy, and hierarchy is indistinguishable from inequality.

Civilization (or more properly order) is built on having someone always above and someone always below—someone always in and someone always out.

So it isn't a matter of equality. That is impossible and leads to societal decay. It is a matter of being a member of the in group. Also, because of the diversity of human populations, who is the criminal is not random, so equal outcome impossible, and therefore minorities equally voting for Republicans also impossible.

Now of course, if you are the one receiving end of the jackboot you do not perceive yourself to be free, even if you deserve the jackboot you are receiving. From your perspective the system is unjust. The fact that the systems preservation aligns against you does nothing to persuade you that there is something wrong with you—oh no, it persuades you that there is something wrong with it. Even if you are parasitical you will view the system, not yourself, as the problem, since parasites evolved for their own self-preservation, and you, being a parasite, what to preserve yourself.

So freedom is always the perception of being on the inside. This is perceptual freedom.

Conversely, anyone on the outside will perceive themselves to not be free. This means Jews, all intellectuals (since they are bullied), all criminals, all mentally ill people, all people who perceive themselves as victims, and all groups that can be emotionally propagandized into perceiving themselves as victims.

Democracy cultivates perceptual freedom through the cognitive trick of voting. You, having voted, feel responsible for your government. Since everyone else also voted you feel that they are oppressing you when they vote foolishly. This conceals the truth that democracy is always run for the benefit of elites. It directs your anger towards your neighbors and away from the people who are actually in charge. It allows them to conceal their influence. So perceptual freedom is also a democratic trick.

America has the worlds highest incarceration rate. This would indicate that America has the least concrete freedom, either through locking up people falsely, or having insane levels of crime, or both.

But notice that Americans seem to think they have the most freedom out of any society on Earth. Though cracks are appearing in the façade, they have perceptual freedom.

Intellectuals, being high IQ, can never really experience freedom, since they can see the arrangement of imperium in imperio as the façade that it really is. So they attack society as a kind of revenge for being the out-group. Most philosophy can be seen as an exercise in vengeance against playground bullies.

Thus intellectuals tend to be enemies of civilization, since they, being the out-group never experience freedom, and like a bullied child, if they cannot have it no one else can. The average person, being a cognitive miser, can have this, so he seeks ignorance and takes the blue pill.

So here is the perverse thought. What if the problem is that the Matrix is not convincing enough? Basically, what if the solution lies in creating a more convincing perceptual freedom? One that fools even intellectuals?

What if the problem is not the Cathedral, but the glitchy nature of its simulation?

In a patchwork people separate themselves by identity. The very existence of a political system that proclaimed itself "libertarian," "socialist" or whatever, draws like-minded people from all around and repels people who disagree. A sorting effect occurs. The patchwork becomes a series of in-groups.

So a patchwork, if every patch were democratic, would create the highest perceptual freedom. The great diversity of patches, combined with the voting mechanism, would exacerbate perceptual freedom to ultra-matrix style levels of supreme delusion!

Delusion in the sense of believing that one is free, believing that one is a participant in his government as a voter.

But this still requires a feedback mechanism. Glitchiness comes from the failure of the Cathedral to interact with the real world. How to overcome this? Well, the solution lies in the patch itself. Voting with your feet enforces a minimum amount of reality to effect the patch since local elites operating under the imperium in imperio nature of local patch democracy are still local. Their investment is tied up with a place, and that place, to give them power, must work.

So even patchwork democracy is better at delivering perceptual freedom, (and probably actual freedom) than the current system, since elites, being local, must care.

Now one may say, "but that's the way it is already." No. It is not. The trick would be to empower minorities, (in the sense of small groups), not majorities, and to put the small radical groups in charge of their patch. If this could be pulled off, it would serve as a transitional form of government going from democracy to monarchical/CEO patchwork.

Commenting on Dark Reformation

I posted this on Dark Reformations blog in part 6. I'm reposting it here.


I apologize in advance if anything I am about to say is offensive.

I hate to say anything critical to a writer who takes the time out of his day to learn the dark enlightenment and write such a long and detailed summary of Moldbugs ideas. You have correctly summarized his writings. But I feel that in the effort to condense so much detail into a short space it come across as crass, disjointed, and a little manic. You don't really smoothly transition between paragraphs at all. But it is a valiant effort.

Are you an INTJ? Your ability to synthesize vast quantities of information sounds like it.

Of course personal comments are irrelevant so here is my critique of your ideas.

You diagnose Progressivism as the root cause of all problems. Moldbug himself may have formulated (or implied) this himself and then contradicted himself by saying that culture is downstream from power. If culture is downstream from power then progressivism cannot be the cause of decay—it can only be a symptom or an outcome. The cause must be democracy.

Of course you know this.

It is a common mistake in NRx for newcomers to focus on refuting progressivism. This is because democracy has trained all of us to think our opinions matter because we are all potentially voters (and as you have said it is a mind control system). It is hard to break yourself of that habit.

The central realization is that ideology is the outcome of power, and not, as the left-wing worldview has it, power the outcome of ideology. I think you know this since you reference de Jouvenel.

Nonetheless you focus (in terms of sheer volumes of words) on ideology—the effect, rather than the cause.

Basically what I am saying is that although you know power produces ideology your focus on ideology gives the impression that you have not fully digested this fact and realized what is means. Moldbug was escaping progressivism and had to talk himself out of it. So he spends most of his time refuting the left and is then remarkably short on building his own ideas. You have replicated this mistake. You have focused on refuting the left and given only (from what I can tell) two cursory ideas for dealing with the problem; 'New Arabia' and 'Competent Secure authority.'

So basically it is this; what neoreaction needs is building new ideas and not criticizing left-wing ideas. We need to be on the offensive and not the defensive. We need to generate new thoughts and not just react against the left-wing thesis.

So many great right-wing thinkers (F.A Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Lew Rockwell, Murry Rothbard, etc.) are short on creation and long on criticism. I see you falling into this pattern. We value your input. But we value NEW stuff even more. We need original concepts and we welcome you to give us your thoughts in as detailed a manner as possible.

This is also what I am trying to do and I welcome you to join me and give me your feedback.

My website is here: