The object and the source: on the impossibility of objective abstract morals, and the hallucinations of philosophers of moral reason

Whenever I challenge any liberal or conservative about the notion of equality they pull a series of goal post movings. "Moving the goal post" is a logical fallacy where the individual simply adjusts their standard as more and more evidence is presented to refute their assertion. For example;

Me: "communism has killed 94 million people."

Commie: "that is not the true communism. Real communism has never been tried."

Me: "they just tried real communism in Venezuela and it failed."

Commie: "it failed so that was also not the true communism."

It goes on and on like this.

In an argument about whether equality is real, the person who asserts that equality is true will make a series of retreats. First I will point out that humans are not equal: that humans are not the same. Remarkably, they will argue that indeed they are the same. After this retarded argument is put down with logic and simple observation of reality, they will insist that humans have equal worth!

They will insist that the equal worth argument was the one they were making all along. They will then retroactively change their own memory of the conversation and conclude that they never believed in equality as sameness, oh no, clearly people are not the same, but they must have equal worth! Oh yes, "that was the argument I was making all along!", they say.

They will simply change the argument a dozen ways and then insist that you must present a counter argument to each and every version of their delusional belief in human equality: equality as sameness, equal opportunity, equal worth, equal justice, and equal rights. They make you argue against each and every one, as they lodge personal attacks against you, call you names, engage in logical fallacies, rewrite their own memories of the conversation, and engage in a level of total mendacity that crosses into schizophrenic delusion and self-deception. This is motivated cognition par excellence. I have had entire conversations with Progressives that they have then later "forgotten" ever occurred because the red pills they were exposed to would have lowered their social standing if they accepted them.

So I am just going to cut to the chase and go straight for the jugular. Rather than the tedious task of refuting all forms of equality, I will simply attack the most important one, the one that is the Bailey of the Motte and Bailey argument: equal worth. I am going to make a simple assertion;

"innocent children do not have equal worth."

Here is the proof. Let us say that you are standing on a beach. On your left is your child swimming in the water about 200 yards away. On the right is some strangers child of the same age also about 200 yards away. They are both drowning. Because of the laws of physics, you only have enough time to save one. There is no one else on the beach to help you, and no one nearby. What do you do?

(a) save your own child because you are racist.
(b) save the strangers child because you are a guilty self-hating White liberal.
(c) practice equality by flipping a coin to decide who to save, thus, potentially allowing your own child to drown. (the coin flip adds a negligible amount of time to the equation).

So who do you save, huh? You can only save one because of time constraints. By the time you get to the other it will be too late. Pick. Your own child or the strangers?

If you flip a coin then you are a monster. If you save the strangers child, instead of your own, you are also a monster. Saving your own child is the correct thing to do in this situation. You should be prejudiced. You should be nepotistic. You should protect your own. That is what morality is all about: inclusive fitness. Your genes are the start of moral reasoning. That which is closest to you is the most important. The closer someone is to you genetically the more value they should have. This is why, contra Peter Singer, if you are White you should NOT give money to starving African children, but should spend that additional money on your own. If you have extra money beyond that then you should spend it on your extended family. If you still have extra, you should spend it on your distant family. You should NOT give your money to strangers and you should NOT set up foundations to help people you don't know. Your extended family clan is more important. Even your race is more important.

Of course, you can save the strangers child if there is time to. But this is a no time scenario. In a scenario where you have time to save both you should save your child first and the strangers child second, because of the different probabilities of death involved as a result of time constraints. If saving the strangers child would harm your own family, or your extended family, or even your race or nation, let them drown.

There are three political orientations that correspond to these three attitudes.

(a) corresponds to racism/nationalism

(b) corresponds to progressivism and "Israel first" type conservatism.

(c) corresponds to libertarianism, communism, and anarcho capitalism.

That's right. Libertarianism is a "flip a coin over your own child". . . "morality." That's why it's soul is closer to communism. Equality is just a plea for coin flipping.

I fail to see why either coin flipping or cuckoldry are superior alternatives to racism. The soul of heartlessness lies in equality while the soul of cuckoldry lies in self-sacrifice for strangers. Deep down all morality is sexual because all morality has its origins in genetics. It is very real to equate sacrifice for strangers with cuckoldry because subconsciously it is. Equality is an inversion of genetic inclination, and western culture has a shame word for everything noble: nepotism, racism, national chauvinism. You should be discriminatory. You should protect your own. You should be nepotistic. That is just helping your kid get into Harvard. Morality is like a Russian nesting doll: it comes in layers of loyalty: family first, community and then race, biosphere last, and in that order. I don't see "capitalism," or "equality" on that genetic list of things to be loyal to.

The problem is people. There is always a person. These people want to reduce morality to an abstract formula like "the greatest good," or the "kingdom of ends," This is a corruption of natural morality — which can never be divorced from the subject. Morality is always moral obligation towards someone just like power is always power over someone. There is always a recipient, always a person it is "being done to." There can be no such thing as legitimate moral math formulas that fail to take into account who it is being done to.

Just like morality is always done to an object, and thus, relative to the object, it is always done by a source, and thus, relative to the source. This is why there can be no moral "objectivity."

Objectivity does not exist. To state it ironically, objectively there can be no objectivity, since there is no objective viewpoint: only a series of subjective viewpoints. There is no objective morality, just billions of subjective moralit(ies), (plural). And there are as many subjective moralities as there are sentient beings in the universe, and possibly more than that.

Every person has a subjective morality. The will to make subjective morality real is the root of mass murder. The desire to make the subjective objective has killed millions.

There can never be an objective morality because morality has a source: the person "doing" morality. Morality will thus be practiced according to that person's subjective viewpoint, and this is the only morality that ever actually exists. Thus, to Hitler, Hitler was a moral man. And to Mao Zedong, Mao was doing what was necessary. And to X, Y moral atrocity is justified. And this is the only way it can be. Since there is no truly "objective" standard in physical reality, and since the attempt to impose an objective standards on physical reality only results in more bloodshed, no objective morality can ever exist. So the problem then becomes one of conflict management. All attempts to define objective morality are evasions of the far more important work of designing systems of conflict reduction.

In a nutshell;

Worth is defined by the subjective viewpoint of a person. Worth is always worth to someone. People cannot have equal worth because of inclusive fitness, and because worth is relative to the values of the person who values them.

Morality is always defined in the mind of a person. It is relative to a subjective viewpoint. The attempt to make it solid always ends in disaster.

Children do not have equal worth. They only have worth relative to the people who care about them. If a parent abandons their child then the parent has committed a crime against the worth of that child. Same with all family members.

Since worth is established by others placing a value on people, worth is established by the action of care. To perform caring actions is to establish worth. To refuse to perform those actions is to degrade the worth of others and betray them. Since there is no objective worth, failure to perform actions that prove the worth of another is a betrayal and a refusal to establish their worth. To allow injustice is to establish the worthlessness of the victim. To perform justice is to establish their worth. Caring is taking responsibility.

Notions of moral objectivity invariably lead to moral betrayal and even mass killings.

Morality is an action, a verb, and not a noun. It is a thing done to or for someone, either as a moral judgement against them, to protect them, or as an act of care. It is an action.

Moral sentiments towards strangers are a lie, equality is a coin toss, and real moral obligation is nested in concentric circles.

Last but not least. Both deontology and utilitarianism are reifications. They are the undead ideas of zombie philosophy that just refuse to die. They aren't real. There can never be an objective morality nor moral formulae, and thus, there can be no deontological ethics or utilitarianism. Consider that when you judge one of these two artificial abominations of natural morality, you always get the sense that something is not quite right. You feel there is something queasy about utilitarianism, or posturing and fanatical about deontology. You know that natural sense that you use to judge these other moral codes? That natural sense is your natural morals. It is the subjective morals that we just described: the morals of inclusive fitness. Your natural morals tell you instinctively that these moral codes worked out by philosophers are all either abominations or incomplete. Listen to your instincts. They are right. Nothing that is judged can ever be superior to the thing that does the judging — not where morality is concerned. That your instinctive morals judge both deontology and utilitarianism prove that natural morality is superior to either. That these two moralities are simply poor attempts to approximate natural morality is proof of the legitimacy of inclusive fitness. Mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery, and both of these artificial systems are just grasping at the thing they cannot quite put their finger on: the morals of inclusive fitness, the morals of nested tribalism, subjective worth, and demonstrated value.

How genetic enhancement will go down

(1) Gene therapies will be developed that make children vastly smarter, better, more capable, etc.
(2) The democracies of the world will ban it because "muh equality."
(3) Rich people who want children will get on a plane and go to wherever there is enhancement (China, Singapore, etc.), because "fuck government."
(4) The rich will have genius children and will get vastly wealthier as a result.
(5) The middle class, not wanting to get left behind, will also get on planes.
(6) Inequality will get vastly worse. Thus, the pursuit of equality will lead to more inequality.
(7) The people most passionate about equality will become a permanent slave underclass to the enhanced. They will look up and scream, "save us!" The enhanced will look down and whisper, "no."

Deport them all to Africa

An African man in 1600 gets captured by a Black slave trader. The Black slave trader sells the man to a White slave trader. The White slave trader takes the Black man to America and sells him at auction. Slavers give campaign contributions to senators. As a result, senators are unwilling to repeal slavery, and in fact they expand it to more states as the United States conquers the Western Frontier. Since this brings more Africans into America we will call it a "vicious cycle."

It takes a civil war to get rid of it. That is how hard it is to abolish a feedback loop in democracy. It is so hard that you need a war that kills 30 % of Southern males ages 18 to 40.

A man gets arrested. The private prison that incarcerates him is paid for by the government. Using the money they make off his incarceration, they give politicians campaign contributions. Politicians respond to these contributions by writing harsher laws that incarcerate more people. It feeds on itself. Call it a "virtuous cycle," since it reduces anarcho-tyranny.

As a result, America has the worlds highest incarceration rate. That is obviously a bad thing, but it is a hell of a lot better than more anarcho-tyranny, and liberals are importing the crime problem by the millions.

President Shitlord makes everything the left does, and only the things leftists habitually do, illegal. The penalty for all of these offenses that only liberals tend to do is deportation to Africa. Private deportation armies perform the service and Uncle Sam pays for it. These armies give campaign contributions to senators. Because of campaign contributions, the senators change more and more laws so the penalty is deportation. More and more degenerates are deported to Africa. It just so happens that there are slavers waiting at the airport to take new arrivals into custody. So the deportation industry profits on the back end too. More and more degenerates are deported. Now America no longer has the worlds highest incarceration rate. The cycle feeds on itself. Call it a "more virtuous cycle."

This is what democracy does. Democracy has a habit of accumulating feedback loops: welfare states, slavery, identity politics, profits from immigration, frivolous law suits, military profits, profits from college subsidies, and social security voters. In all these cases there is a feedback loop. Someone is getting paid. That someone is turning around and either paying back the senators or voting for them. Feedback loops basically run democracies. Everything the left does is a series of feedback loops. Why do they import hostile immigrants? Votes and profits from globalization will pay them back. Why can't social security be reformed? The elderly will stop paying back senators by voting against them. Why are colleges subsidized? Teachers unions pay congress back with campaign contributions. Why does identity politics exist? Activists pay back senators by campaigning for them. Paybacks don't have to be monetary. Votes and activism will also work. It's all the same in democracy: feedback loops.

Let's invent a feedback loop of our own.

The way to smash a leftist feedback loop without a civil war is to invent another feedback loop that cannibalizes off the previous one by making the previous feedback loop unprofitable. In other words, deport their immigrant investment. And while you are at it, deport white liberals as well — to Africa. No one can ever accuse you of being unequal that way. And why bring the Third World to America when you can deport the spoiled brats of the First World to Africa? Also, make refusing to uphold your laws itself a crime. Then deport the leftist judge who refuses to uphold you laws — to Africa. In fact, just deport them all. Where? Say it with me now.

AFRICA

Make everything the left does a crime.
Make taking money for leftist causes a crime.
Make George Soros a crime.
Make propagating leftist ideology hate speech.
Make censorship and no platforming a crime.
Make receiving profits from harassment lawsuits a crime.
Make hiring illegals a crime.
Make renting to illegals a crime.
Make refusing to uphold your laws a crime.
Make uncooperative generals a crime.
Make all crimes punishable by deportation.

Tribal Property Systems

Just musing about alternative property systems here.

Paradoxically, British minarchistic feudalism granted more property rights to the man who could pay than capitalism now does. This is because of the triumph of democracy over monarchy. Democracy is a special kind of property right that gives every adult non-felon a theoretical equal ownership of their government. Unlike corporate stock, a vote is neither fungible nor cumulable, and does not pay a dividend. It is a property arrangement that was produced by the equal weapons of the revolutionary war, (equal weapons created equal societies both in ancient Greece and the Colonial period). Since the world no longer has equal weapons it is a property arrangement that could not reoccur, that is, democracies cannot be created in the modern era without outside sponsorship.

This property right in government — the vote, is a legacy of a past technological system and the material conditions that it produced. The vote is a property right. What is owned? The state.

When you look at a western democracy and see its dysfunction what you are seeing is the inevitable friction between the democratic property system which we call the right to vote, and the capitalist property system. Democracy is non-transferable, non-cumulable, and pays no dividend. Corporate capitalism is the opposite in every way. All capitalist forms of property are transferable, cumulable, heritable, and can pay either a dividend, profit, or rent.

So democracy is akin to a communist property system running a capitalist marketplace.

And yes, there are different types of property systems. Soviet communism failed for many reasons, (1. 2. 3.) but I think the chief one was the total failure of communists to develop a practical form of equalist property. Indeed, the communists considered property as fundamentally hostile to their goals — a stupid mistake.

Every political system that works well is defined by an accompanying property system that reinforces it. Consider the property system of feudalism. It can be described using a simple relationship: service in exchange for ownership of some portion of the natural world, typically land. The whole society is defined like this from top to bottom with all relationships terminating and concentrating at the top in the personage of the king. Here are some examples;

—Barony (possession of lands in exchange for military service of you and your tenants)
—Knight-service (possession of land in exchange for service to your lord)
—Scutage (payment by a knight to exempt himself from obligatory military service)
—Fee simple title (payment of a tax in exchange for property)

Fee simple title is all that remains of the feudal system. When you pay your property taxes you are paying the fee for your title. Previously, you might pay this fee through military service to your lord. All of that was abolished in favor of money. This is stupid because the ability to make money is not universal. But the ability to wage war appears to exist in all able bodied young men.

Why did capitalism triumph? We can speculate.

Society tends to favor those property systems that accommodate human desires. Technology erodes central power by bypassing it, creating peer-to-peer relationships. Typically, power is built on some monopoly, say "land for service." Someone comes along and invents a technology that allows a person to make a living without needing land. So technology has disrupted that monopoly, routing around it.

The property relationships that prevail are the ones that fulfill human desires. However, technology does not just fulfill desires. As I have talked about repeatedly with birth control and other technologies, technology can modify human desires, trapping people in low level equilibriums, suppressing some desires while accommodating others, and creating moral decay.

So technology does not just fulfill desires but it creates the conditions that produce a range of options to choose from, and it can shape human desires by limiting the range of options available.

The purpose of this article is to create new property systems for a new political system. Never mind that these systems aren't compatible with democracy. They are not designed for democracy but the system that comes after it. Also note that just as capitalism helped destroy feudalism and create democracy, any property system may impose itself on a regime type, and force that regime to change from outside, so long as it can get its property relationships enforced somehow with hard security functions. Beyond the need for hard security functions (police enforcement), what determines the success of a new property system is (a), do people desire it more, and (b), does it alter the conditions of its environment such as to make the environment more suited to itself? That is, does it economically terraform the space it inhabits? In the same way that termites alter their environment to make it more suited to themselves, a good property system alters its economic and political environment to make it more suited to its own expansion.

It should be noted that although capitalism destroyed feudalism and helped create democracy this does not mean that capitalism and democracy are not in conflict with each other. The neocameral state is more suited to pure capitalism. It is an historical accident of monarchy that the feudal system turned into this rather than a for-profit corporation. Capitalism and democracy are misaligned with each other due to their having opposite property systems of their respective forms of corporate stock (transferable shares vs. non-transferable votes). But they are both voting systems; both the voter and share holder vote, and so they are alike enough to have lasted this long together.

So in summary, the tension between capitalism and democracy is the result of the difference between capitalism and democracies property systems.

A vote is theoretical equal ownership of government. It is;
(a) non-transferable
(b) non-cumulable
(c) pays no dividend
(d) non-heritable

Where capitalist property systems are;
(a) transferable
(b) cumulable
(c) pays profit, rent, or dividend
(d) heritable

Both are property. Both are votes. Both are commodifications of relationships.

Feudalism was capitalism in government. You could by your job (say the job of tax collector). Hence, jobs were "titles" just like land titles. You could accumulate titles. Those titles payed rents and were heritable. You could pass of the job to your son.

One can solve this tension by making democracy more like capitalism, or by making capitalism more like democracy.

The communists did not make capitalism more like democracy. That is the mutualist route. Marxism-Leninism tried to abolish property altogether.

Moldbug sought to make democracy more like capitalism. Hence, neocameralism and patchwork. One may think of the Moldbugian position as the precise opposite of mutualism.

Property is ownership backed by violence. Ultimately what stops someone from taking your property is the police officer. Let us say that I come over to you property.  I decide to start building a tiny house on your front lawn. I get the lumber, the concrete, the wiring, and the roofing shingles. There I am with a hammer pounding away at nails building my tiny little house on your lawn. I've got concrete bolts and everything so I can connect the timbers to the foundation — which I have already laid last night while you were sleeping. I have like 5 guys with me. And we have been building so fast the house is almost complete. You wake up to find half a house already built on your front lawn.

You come out of your house in your bath robe and say; "what the fuck are you doing on my front lawn?"

To which I reply: "it's not your lawn. It's may lawn. And I'm building a nice tiny little house on it."

You look at me in dumbfounded amazement and say; "uh, uh, oh, well, I'm gonna call the police!"

So you call the cops.

Now chances are the cops are probably going to arrest me and charge me with trespassing. They will probably also charge me with vandalism since I dug up your lawn to lay the foundation of my tiny little house.

So what is the point of all this, and what is property? We need a specific definition.

Property is defined as ownership enforced by violence.

But what is ownership?

Ownership are conditions of use, where the first condition is that only a single designated person may use it. So a better definition is;

Property is a series of conditions of use where the list of conditions is enforced by the violence of the state.

What are those conditions? Well, let's list some of them.

With the exception of business charters, only a single person has designated ownership.
You may not move an object belonging to the person with designated ownership, (prohibition of theft)
You may not change the object of the person with designated ownership, (prohibition of vandalism)
You may not inhabit the land of the person with designated ownership, (prohibition of trespassing)

In the final analysis it boils down to a list of conditions of use backed by violence of the state. There may be other conditions of use not listed above.

A vote is a form of property (ownership of the state) with many conditions of use. You may not collect votes. You may not transfer votes. You may not pass votes on to your children. And a vote pays no dividend. (That last part is a mistake since a dividend would reward voters for fiscal discipline and balanced budgets).

As a side note, observe that more conditions of use actually protects the average poor person from the rapaciousness of people who are more powerful. If votes could be transferred you would get a steady accumulation of power and wealth in a few hands. Eventually you wind up back at feudalism. Capitalism may paradoxically depend on the very democracy that is hostile to it in order to prevent from turning back into feudalism. But I digress.

The point here is that property is a series of conditions for use enforced by state violence, and that this means that any new property type can be constructed by defining new conditions for use, not just the limited property types of capitalism as it currently exists. We can invent an instrument of property by inventing new conditions for use. As long as the state is willing to enforce with violence the list of conditions then we have ourselves a new form of property. The easiest way to do this is with the open-ended mechanism of the contract, which allows individuals to construct customized conditions for use, in contrast to the predetermined conditions of land, cars, estates, marriages, etc.

Tribal Conditions of Use

Property designated as tribal property may only be transferred to other members of the tribe.
Membership in the tribe may only be conferred on persons belonging to a particular race, and who agree with the values of the society.
Property is transferable, but only between men.
Property is heritable, but only be the male members.
Property may pay a dividend, rent, or profit.
Property is NOT cumulable. A lone person may not accumulate property.
Only families may accumulate property.
Family property can only be bought or sold with the permission of at least one other MALE member of the family related to the original patriarch by blood.

The result of these condition is a property institution that forces men related by blood to coordinate their economic activity with each other, withhold economic power from women, and invest in their families. It is a semi-feudal capitalist system with equalist features. Imagine a democracy where only men can vote, and where men of a family must decide how to vote collectively in order for their vote to count, (because the family votes and not the individuals within it). The men are charged with representing their family interests. They must all mark the ballot the same way for every issue/office voted upon for their vote to be counted at all. They vote collectively as a family. Now imagine that this political system is coupled with the economic system described above. It's just a thought.

Commenting on cyborg_nomade's 'naturalism, ethics and politics' post

Over at Antinomia Imediata, cyborg_nomade says;

" '1) the preemptive rejection of the strong naturalist intention (study ethics and politics solely in view of empirical evidence) does not offer any good reason why it should be so.'

'1.1) one good reason I would see is that, while we can understand evolutionary impacts of certain kinds of political and ethical arrangements (and under which conditions they come into being), effectively testing them would demand another framework – one such as federalism or the archipelago.'

'1.2) the reason “it assumes that empirical knowledge is superior to ethical and political knowledge” is weak. the naturalist method has produced demonstrable results for over 4 centuries now, incarnated in the technological world all around us. ethics and politics have produced nothing of the kind. if that’s not an evidence against the method used in ethics and politics so far (an introspective method, based at best on logic and at worst on suspicious “a priori” definitions).' 

'thus it’s not that empirical knowledge is superior to ethics and politics, but that the empirical method works better than the introspective method used in ethics and politics.'

'2) the attempt to evade the facts of empirical knowledge (for whatever reason) does not make certain political or ethical theories any better adapted to empirical reality. their flaws and their course when realistically applied can be empirically predicted. refusing to listen and pay careful attention to what naturalist empirical knowledge has to say is undertaken at the critic’s own risk. reality rules.'

'3) there’s an universal impartial judge, and it’s called reality. reality shows itself through survival. irrealism will lead to death, necessarily. those that survive the most, have the most truth in their beliefs and practices. those that die, don’t.'

'3.1) sure, the contest may last a long while. and to this extent, two different and even contradictory sets of beliefs may be held as truth, at the same time. in such a point in time, both must be held as truth indeed. when one dies, then the other must be recognized as the truth that prevailed.'

'3.2) once again, choose to ignore reality at your own peril.'

3.3) theories, of course, evolve. hopefully, learning from deaths around itself. if a theory that leads to longer survival is abandoned, for whatever reason, the whole of the institutions and societies that embed and accept them will eventually die, especially when in competition from societies that haven’t committed the same mistakes (and will themselves learn quite a bit about how not to run institutions and societies).'

'4) for normativity, see “The Blind Mechanic II”'

'5) Only naturalist methodology is “legitimate” because only it works as a good proxy for real consequences, and thus ensures realism. all other methods are greatly liable to delusion and willful blindness.'

Quoted here in full.

I am glad that someone else agrees with me. I have been saying for some time now, but usually only implied, that the only competent judge of man is Gnon.

Usually reaction implies that because nature and nature's god agree with tradition that tradition is the limit of human morality, and that there is nothing beyond that. For example: the fact that patriarchy always wins is taken as proof that it is correct, and not as an indication that the human race should use transhumanism to engineer a species that can survive and breed without it. Religious people and male dominated households have more children than secular/atheist/feminist ones. HRx and CRx types then feel justified in asserting that Gnon has spoken in favor of the traditional and religious framework of living. And it has — for now.

But all of Gnon's rules are just algorithms and math can be gamed.

One last note. I would add that reality is the beginning of morality: meaning; that which destroys itself is automatically evil but that which survives is not automatically virtuous. Survival is the beginning of morality, but not the end.

Eventually this leads to a recursive behavior. One species uses its conceptions of morality to design another, potential successor species. That species then uses its moral code to design the next, and so on, and so on. The moral codes of each arise out of their own genetics. The moral codes of each then design the genetics of the next. So in essence each genetic code is producing the next. The process occurs recursive until it reaches a dead end. However, there are multiple species that are engineered. So ALL species never reach dead ends. The result is a family tree of human species designing each next species. Most of these lines die off but the process itself is eternal and rapid evolution of intelligence occurs within the biological substrate. Future successful moralit(ies) bear only tangential resemblance to past traditions.

Nazi milk foot bath

Do not squander the precious milk.

Alternate caption "THE COLLECTOR"
"And all those Nazi boys thought she was swallowing"

EDIT:

Milk: our official drink.
Pepe and Moonman: our official mascots.
Bitcoin: official currency of the alt-right
New Balance, official shoe of the alt-right.
Dr. Marten's boots with red laces: our fashionable jackboots.
Wend'y, our official square burgers.

Second edit, March 18th 2017

-Basic art history style symbolic interpretation, for people who need explanation;

It's a joke.

The milk represents the purity of Aryan genes. The woman is holding a leather bound copy of Mein Kampf. Because it is leather bound it is made to resemble the Bible — her "Bible." She is bathing in milk — literally she is bathing in whiteness that she has collected in jars obsessively. The person who is pouring the milk in her tub is wearing a mask in an act of submission. There are lesbian overtones. The milk container is a cheep plastic container, which contradicts the preciousness of the fluid. There is a tangential reference here to precious bodily fluids, a la the movie Dr. Strangelove. See the attached video;

Only whites can digest milk since only White people have the gene for digesting milk. Hence White milk is a symbol of Whiteness. The clothing is 50's retro style. The woman has an old fashioned haircut. She is wearing an over-sized ring on her middle finger, probably in a symbolic "fuck you."

Alternately, the milk may be a reference to sperm, and the desire of a woman to bathe is sperm, maybe even bathe in the cum of der Führer. There are certainly sexual overtones.

It's an anti-Nazi joke in a long line of anti-Nazi jokes. Like all Brahmin jokes, it is a test to see how intelligent you are.

The thought of this website is closer to fascist thought than reactionary monarchism, on account of the fact that I do not reject the usefulness of either eugenics or elections. Nick B. Steves once called this site "republican reaction," aka, RRx instead of NRx (neoreaction). This is basically true. I am closer ideologically to the vaguely libertarian/fascism of Robert Heinlein or the anarcho capitalism of Murray Rothbard, than the monarchism of Julius Evola. I have a soft spot for fascism. Why make jokes at my own expense? Because that's what Brahmins do. I am descended from Quakers, socialists, and southern liberal Democrats. This whole post is me making a joke at my own expense.

The artist is Dany Peschl. He also photographed the image below. Can you find the symbology here?

Responding to Reactionary Future (finally)

Way back in October of 2016 Reactionary Future commented on one of my articles and wrote about me;

"It is surely safe to conclude that neoreaction has no consensus, and it was never going to obtain one. When two people approach a concept with radically differing priors which are not examined in any way, any point of agreement will be necessarily brief and superficial. To supply an example, we can use the neocameral model of Moldbug which was cited as a unifying principle. Now, each person’s understanding of this model is based on their own priors from their own tradition. So, whereas Moldbug approaches it from priors based on rejection of imperium in imperio as he repeatedly announces, others have taken this model and used vastly differing priors, so that what is understood by the neocameral model differ wildly, and any agreement on this point rapidly diverges after this agreement."

A superb example is provided by the anti-puritan blog, as it was previously by Land on Xenosystems, and there are probably others that don’t come to mind immediately. Now, this rejection of imperium in imperio is key to understanding further Moldbug directions, and it was key to understanding the sovcorp model. Moldbug had reached the correct conclusion that having competing centers of authority in a single polity results in them fighting it out surreptitiously until one is supreme, and one always does end up supreme (violence when used short of civil war is always done through a proxy.) The resulting chaos is disastrous. This is a point which is utterly key. Competing centers of authority engage in conflict, but this first principle has not been taken on by those such as Xenosytems and the anti-puritan blog. Why? The answer is simply that they are working on liberal and modern principles. The joke is that the entire political system is based on the same principles held by the likes of Land, Axel and all other neoreactionary thinkers that do not hold the first principle that competing power centers engage in centralising conflict. There is absolutely nothing new or innovative about them."

He links to my post about fixing democracy. To quote myself from Neocameral Future, Chapter 4a;

"This blog is probably the only neoreactionary blog that does not reject imperium in imperio, aka, republicanism, though I once heard Jim express some doubts on Moldbug too. Reactionary Futures entire site is dedicated to accusing people of being insufficiently absolutist. He thinks we are all republicans."

I should clarify things, after all, I do literally say that I don't reject imperium in imperio. This does not mean that I disagree with the notion that competing power centers engage in conflict. They obviously do. It means that I have rejected Moldbug's explanation for why imperium in imperio is a problem. Here I am later in Neocameral Future, Ch 4a on the issue;

The actual cause of the Cathedral is compromise in an unsecure power structure, not the nature of unsecure power itself. COMPROMISE, not imperium in imperio, is the actual cause of left-wing power. As Land would say;

"'The left thrives on dialectics, the right perishes through them.' — TDE4C"

"But this is too vague and general. Specificity matters. Why does the right lose through agreement with the left? Because the loser must live in the winners house under the winners rules. It is true that unsecure power tends to breed compromise as a result of a majoritarian system. Compromise is the first type of method (a) for dealing with an unsecure power system. But there are three other alternatives to compromise, those being (b) dictatorship, (c) separation in physical space, or (d), full consensus. All reactionary thought is dedicated to option (b), or a from of it, since option (c) has been prohibited since the Civil War, and since full consensus raises the cost of bargaining prohibitively high."

This blog, the Anti-Puritan, is dedicated to option (c), not (b). It is dedicated to separation and not what many call "secure power." Which I just call "the jackboot."

Essentially, what I believe is that this thing that the current unsecure power system is fighting over, this market for plunder, should be privatized into a patchwork. The method I give in Neocameral Future is a usufructuary market where a corporation called a system is given sovereignty for a period of five years. To gain this sovereignty they must first prove they meet the capital requirements and get licensed. After getting licensed they put themselves on the ballot. They have to get ratified by a multi-part election to gain power.

As for fixing democracy, (the article he linked to), the reasoning is simple. Monarchy is not likely to happen any time soon. Something needs to be done in the short-term to address democracy's pathological flaws. That is what that article is about, and the case is not so hopeless as it seems. Immigration is the only problem that reforming democracy cannot solve. Continuing he says;

"What we see with this whole mess then, is that neoreactionaries come along to the model, ignore the key first principle behind it, and literally assume it is based on liberal first principles."

 I didn't ignore the key first principle. I addressed it, found it lacking, and created my own modified version of it.

"These include conceptions of property conflated with mere possession, the individual being before society and the state,"

 I don't say that the individual in before society and the state. But I do say that human nature is prior to the state when I talk about the five-phase model in Chapter 1 of NF.

". . .and various other theoretical pieces of crap all modern thinkers have taken as a given. The property point is one I have been banging the drum on for a while now, and should be give away that not all is right with the liberal interpretation of sovcorp – it isn’t Hobbesian because Hobbes was justifying oligarchic property distributions. Moldbug instead makes it clear Sovcorp is in full possession and then grants property status. This is a major difference."

As for property rights being mere possession? I don't know where this accusation is coming from. Obviously property is secured by the violence of the state. I never said is wasn't. Going on he says;

"Instead of sovcorp being an intellectual tool to explore the possible formation of political structures that ensure organised and complementary flows of authority, it has been turned into a democratic system, or a republican system with various wish lists list to be enacted."

Yes. So what. The whole project of Neocameral Future is to design a system that decays into patchwork, not patchwork itself. It is supposed to serve as a bridge from here to there.

"The patchwork of differing political states (one communist, one white nationalist etc.) is an absurd concept which is an express rejection of the rejection of the imperium in imperio first principle."

Never rejected the principle that imperium in imperio causes conflict. I rejected COMPROMISE and stated that it was the cause of the left. Without the possibility of compromise the left cannot exist. Anything that ends majoritarian compromise, (separation, full consensus, secure power) will end left-wing power. Unsecure power may be the cause of conflict, but there are more resolutions available to the problem than mere secure power. Moldbug listed only one solution. There are four in total.

"Rather than being political theory based on historical observation, it reverts to being liberal absurdity with no consideration of the effects of the political system on the participants. . ."

Liberal absurdity? Are you serious? No consideration of the effects? I am well aware of the effects of exitocracy; the stupid will perish.

Or is he referring to the article Fixing Democracy? In that case the effects will be a temporary reprieve from democracies worst effects.

". . .within the system because this conflicts with the liberal first principles that were basically pulled out of Hobbes and Locke’s asses to justify the collapse of western monarchy into oligarchy."

Obviously the state of nature as described by Hobbes and Locke is nonsense. I don't recall ever saying it wasn't. Reactionary Future appears to think that because he spends endless amounts of time blathering about Hobbes that somehow I care about this or take it as my central concern. I do not.

Ending Mortgage Debt Slavery

Houses could be traded on a futures exchange. If this was combined with a 100% tax on the profits from the sale of a home, (whatever you make after paying the debt you own is confiscated), then a society could be created that was virtually mortgage free. Furthermore, because you make an exception for builders and architects, you can still have housing development. And because you have a house trading system in the form of a housing futures market, people can still move out of their homes or leave the equity to their children.

The reason housing and apartments are so expensive is because homeowners lobby local governments to restrict the supply in order to raise its price. All other things being equal, anything that restricts supply of a thing results in a price increase. They do this for racial and crime reasons. We will have to address that in a separate article. For now, our goal is to abolish the debt slavery to banks that everyone deals with if they want to buy or sell a home.

The mortgage stimulates Americans to go into debt. It incentivizes people to treat their homes as a bank account. It causes people to lobby governments to screw renters by restricting the supply of housing and accomplishing a de facto transfer of wealth from renters (mostly the poor children of the middle class) to home owners, (mostly their parents). The high cost of a mortgage is dysgenic, causing the best families to delay reproduction. The mortgage boom and bust cycle is corrupting to politics. The act of paying a mortgage makes you a wage cuck until the day you die. The very existence of the mortgage has caused the size and cost of homes to increase through induced demand, and therefore the length of debt service to increase. Originally, mortgages were for only 6 years and covered only half the cost of your home.

Every time you move you get trapped by a new mortgage. The fact that you can cash out the equity in the old mortgage encourages people to be financially undisciplined. Lastly, being tied to a location decreases ones job prospects. Employees who can move are more likely to have higher pay and lower unemployment levels. However, one should not move for money. One should live where family is, and a mortgage can prevent family regrouping.

The mortgage is the perfect obscenity for the democratic man and his throw-it-away/strip mall/planned-obsolesce-high time preference R selected shite culture. It is improper for any reactionary economic system that follows in the wake of democracy.

The housing futures market works as follows; when you want to move out of an old home and into a new one the value of your home is assessed. Then a banker broker for the market issues you a pile of call options equal to the value of your home. Let's say you home is worth $230 thousand dollars. He gives you 230 one thousand dollar call options. Additionally, he loans you an additional 50 call options so you have some wiggle room to buy a more expensive home, (230 + 50 = 280). So now you have $280,000 in equity to purchase your next home with. You locate a new house worth equal or less than that amount. You have up to 90 days to vacate. If you go over that time, daily penalties accrue.

So you find another home, say it is worth $270,000. 10K in call options is refunded to your broker. 270 in call options are used to pay the seller. The seller, in turn, receives 270 put options, which can be cashed out (upon vacancy of the property), applied to any mortgage debts remaining, (upon vacancy), or converted to call options, (to move into another house).

The whole market is structured this way. The less debt you have the easier it is to move because you aren't having to finance part of the transaction or apply a portion of your equity to the debt. Less debt simply gives you more room to do what you want. More equity gives you a bigger house.

And you can pass the equity onto your heirs by leaving them equity certificates. So there is no need to haggle over who gets the house. Upon your death the market will simply sell the house, (in accordance with your will), and hand equity certificates to your heirs. They have 90 days to pack your stuff, or a fee is charged against the equity, and a moving company does the packing for them, and places it in storage for a proscribed amount of time, say 6 months. The equity certificates are reduced according to the fee amount as proscribed by will.

There is also a tax on speculation.

So how is this different than right now? Well, for one, you only finance the difference between homes. So that saves you a lot of money if you own your home free and clear. Second, since no one can profit from the sale of equity there is a tremendous incentive to minimize debts and maximize equity. So everyone in the market is frugal. Third, since you cannot cash out your equity you have no real reason to have too much. You want enough equity to buy the house of the size that you like. Fourth, if the market goes "upside down" all that means is that you need to trade into a smaller home. If you still own money on a part of your home you might abolish that debt by trading into a smaller home of less value and applying the surplus equity to the debt. So when the market is "down" there is an increased demand for small homes and when the market is "up" for large homes. Fifth, you are not nearly as bound to a particular location. You are both more able to move away from family (bad) and more able to move towards family (good). So in a way this accelerates exit and makes attempts to bar exit meaningless. Lastly, without profits from the sale of equity every person simply leaves their equity to their children. This give capitalism a profoundly feudal component, and encourages massive hoardings of equity in trusts controlled by families. Unlike the property of the feudal past, these estates are mobile. A whole extended family with a trust might buy 20 homes in one area and relocate everyone there only to pack up and move the entire family someplace else a few years later. It enables families to practice a kind of band-level nomadic tribalism in a landscape of capitalism. It is an ultimate exit technology.

The Legacy Rift: Biology, Culture, and the Future of Order: Chapter 4c, Benefits of Exitocracy

Go back to Chapter 4b.
Go to the Contents.

Chapter 4c, 

Benefits of Exitocracy

For some stupid reason I thought that the case for exitocracy would make itself. Apparently I was wrong. It has to be enumerated with precision and clarity, and the causes of these benefits defined point by point.

There are many reasons for the social solutions that exitocracy brings, each will be listed below. But the main reason is simple: any time you create an outlet for the controlled expression of human nature you may then gain control over its expression. Obviously. Control by the power system brings order, and is best when done with the lightest touch possible. Any more control than necessary engenders resentment, and thus, causes resistance to feed on itself as the state exercises more oppression to compensate for pushback against its oppression. It is always best to leave people alone whenever you can afford to, and to solicit feedback when you cannot.

So let us jump right into describing these social benefits. Our System of Systems solves an amazing number of problems. Many of these solutions are also found in Patchwork — assuming patchwork could actually be made to work.

It Subjects Governments to Faster Natural Selection

And that is a good thing. Whatever government is to become it should become it faster. Since good forms of government can only ever be discovered, it is best if one allows for experimentation. Furthermore, by allowing expermentation to occur you are removing a substantial form of entryism in society. You are also allowing the left to test its ideas against reality, and to be humiliated all the faster.

It Breaks the Civilizational Cycle

There is a popular internet meme amoung the NRx community. You may have heard it. "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times." This is an accurate representation of reality. It is also discussed in the article, (one of my favorites), entitled Crunchiness, by Nico Colchester. It is wonderfully perspicuous. Give it a try. In Nico's words, 

"Crunchiness brings wealth. Wealth leads to sogginess. Sogginess brings poverty. Poverty creates crunchiness. From this immutable cycle we know that to hang on to wealth, you must keep things crunchy."

He is simply describing the inter-generational economic version of a principle that applies to all of civilization. But why is this? Why does wealth inevitably lead to failure? Why do men go soft?

The species simply is not designed to to maintain discipline in the the absence of Gnon. This is because the physical universe provides pain and suffering in abundance in the ancestral environment. After all, this was a world with large predators, simple diseases that could kill, and no modern medical technology. It had hostile barbarians and genocidal empires. It had slaves. For the first 2 million years homo sapiens needed never to worry about lack of suffering. The industrial revolution is a recent occurrence. Genetics could not have possibly caught up to it in this brief time period. Humans are a legacy code. They are designed to operate at a much higher level of stress. In the absence of that stress they become delusional. In the presence of that stress they remain optimistic and driven towards their goals. The modern world is so deficient in pain that barriers must actually be supplied for humans to remain in peak psychological, spiritual, and physical condition. A deluded, immoral, obese man-child occurs otherwise. And madness is to the blue states what obesity is to red states. It is their mental obesity.

So some humans become fat without stress while others become insane.

The greatest benefit of exitocracy is that some systems are always failing. This is a feature and not a bug. By allowing (some) systems to die, (some) humans are made to suffer. Even better is that they suffer as a consequence of their own idealistic foolishness. This gives their children a special contempt for grand ideas of perfection, and educates them with a steely realism, and that supplies each generation with competent politicians at other levels of government.

Oh sure, you could try something like instituting the draft and putting several million young people through boot camp. That would give you a solid generation of competent leaders, especially if the draftees were drawn from the upper middle class and wealthy, and especially if they were drawn from liberal areas of the country, but what about after? It only takes one generation of disciplinary relaxation to destroy a nation. Does anyone have any doubt that the current regime is too decadent to implement something like this? It already allowed ISIS to come to power by failing to secure the Iraqi population post invasion. The draft was too unpopular even then.

No, the boat to restore national self-discipline has already sailed. By the time a country realizes that it needs to fight the relaxation of realism it has already moved past the point of self-correction. Simply put, Americans are delusional. When the human animal is placed in luxury is loses its sense of what is real. It is used to having realism supplied externally by the brutality of the physical universe. Exitocracy solves that by providing a little brutality to every generation, and by providing more failure when the people become more detached. It balances itself automatically. Like all living things, it allows individual cells to perish so the body prevails.

It Accommodates all Political Viewpoints

If the distal cause of violence is uncertainty than the ultimate cause of tyranny in democracy is compromise. Compromise is really a soft imposition of the will against another. The ultimate human right is exit, and compromise denies that by forcing the loser in the fight to live under the winners rules.

It Gives People Tribes

Tribes stabilize a population by diverting the clan impetus away from factional politics and racial identity grievances. They meet a deep subconscious need within the human genetic legacy code that capitalism, in its present form, refuses to gratify. People are radically alienated from community, clan, and even family. Everything is disintegrating under capitalism. Most people are rootless cosmopolitans who live thousands of miles away from the nuclear families that raised them. Much digital ink has been spilled about the hajnal line and Eurpoean exogamy. The Catholic church broke up the European family clan hundreds of years ago. This system begins the process of rebuilding new clans to correct that injustice.

It Destroys the Desire for Communism (Mostly)

At its root the communist impulse is a thirst for the ancestral habitat of pure egalitarianism and brotherhood. But this is a craving for an idealized version of the clan. Real band level societies were never shockingly violent. Exitocracy begins the process of restoring a kind of tribe, and that, more than anything, neuters the urge to overthrow capitalism. Fulfillment of human desires in a proscribed manner gives the people wu wei in relation to their government. It produces harmony within them, to prevent disharmony with the state, since people project their own internal anguish on to the government, and demand answers from it that it cannot provide.

It also accommodates the desire for communism by creating a handful of actual communist states. This frees the whole nation from the manifestation of communism at the national level, as the population watches one communism after another fail at the local level.

It Ends Democracies Demographic War Against its Own Population

There is always an incentive to wage a battle against the existing voters by either bringing in new ones or extending the franchise. This is the ultimate cause of America's immigration tradition: not the lofty proposition of a nation of immigrants. Like all ideologies, "nation of immigrants" is an excuse created ex post facto to justify the quest for power. Exitocracy ends that by breaking up the nation into 3,100 parts with their own immigration controls.

It Separates Competing Ideologies in Space and Ends Compromise

Needless to say that no one is forced to live under an ideology that detests them. Exitocracy is the only system of government that gives both homosexuals and homophobes their own separate city states. Never be forced to bake a gay wedding cake again. Never put up with another derogatory remark about your sexuality. So many problems are resolved by merely separating people who hate each other.

There is a reason that some people resent this. There is will to power in the human spirit. Power is always power over someone or some animal. When people say they want equal power I say "NO" emphatically. Why would they want power over others? To abuse them of course. Humans are at their very cores primates who desire some dominance. In politics, all moral arguments are disguised arguments for violence. They say, "we must decide what to do." Why? Who is this so-called "WE?" There is no "WE." There is only me and you, and I am not you. "We" implies that I will at some point agree with your desire to impose your will on me. That is unrealistic. The heat death of the universe will occur first. Nearly all supposedly practical arguments against exitocracy are really surreptitiously motivated by a hatred of losing dominance. We see then that exitocracy is the most civilized of all systems of government. But do not be mistaken; the failure to cater to the urge to dominate in no way constitutes a failure to succeed as a political program. Remember those tribes we talked about? That is the outlet for that urge, and that is local. People can also join the military, take up martial arts, watch boxing and play football. There are other outlets for expressing dominance.

It relegates compromise to issues of national defense only.

It Enforces a Minimum Level of Freedom

This is the obvious one. Supreme Courts may trample your rights. They may rule against you. All it takes is one wrong Justice and the court could repeal abortion rights, gun rights, etc. Exitocracy enforces a minimum amount of freedom. So much so that there is a real danger of Supreme Court rulings being ignored. Historical precedent shows that it was the highest court in the land, and not local governments, that tended to impose values on unwilling groups the most. The competing systems are so much more likely to uphold your rights than the Court that one might consider abolishing it altogether and making Supreme Court precedent constitute whatever 85% of system courts agree on through a digital smart contracts system.

The English common law system, with all its guarantee of rights, is the product of law under a competitive minarchism. It was competing jurisdictions that produced democracy to begin with and established basic rights.

It Fractures Cathedral Power

This is simple enough but can be undervalued. Instead of one proposition nation you gain 3,100. The coordination costs of trying to control them all become insurmountable. This is a good thing since conflict is driven not be a diversity of opinion but by its sameness. Societies that are radically different from one another have nothing to struggle over. They recognize the impossibility of reconciliation. It is only where the enemy is sufficiently like oneself that they may be absorbed into your population and a desire for control and absorption can exist. America's cultural civil war is caused by the extreme similarity between the two parties, and not by their differences. Similarity breeds narrow mindedness. Radical difference on all fronts breeds tolerance by constantly exposing the individual to a strange difference with others outside ones own culture. Paradoxically, the desire to make the world a multi-cultural strip mall destroys its diversity.

Go back to Chapter 4b.
Go to the Contents.

"A formalist manifesto;" Highlighting Moldbug

Though I no longer subscribe to tech com NRx or anything like it I still believe that it is crucial for people to understand the works of Curtis Yarvin, aka, Mencius Moldbug. He will probably turn out to be the most influential thinker of our time. The study of Mencius Moldbug is crucial for understanding the American new right and the neoreactionary movement, including its HRx, CRx, and Republican reactionary variants. Even the alt-right has its sources in Moldbugian thought, as many of them were once reactionaries.

But Moldbug can be a difficult read. He can be long-winded and esoteric. So I will highlight his work for you. Maybe this will become a series. You can read only the highlighted parts and skip over everything else. If you need clarification you can read the surrounding text. This is a better method than interpretation or summary, and is less prone to misrepresentation. To highlight I will be using something like "royal purple." I may also insert notes in parentheses. Just read all the highlighted parts as one continuous statement, skipping over everything in between. Let's start with the very first.

A formalist manifesto

The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.
What? I mean, am I crazy or something? First of all, you can't just build an ideology. They're handed down across the centuries, like lasagna recipes. They need to age, like bourbon. You can't just drink it straight out of the radiator.

And look what happens if you try. What causes all the problems of the world? Ideology, that's what. What do Bush and Osama have in common? They're both ideological nutcases. We're supposed to need more of this?

Furthermore, it's simply not possible to build a new ideology. People have been talking about ideology since Jesus was a little boy. At least! And I'm supposedly going to improve on this? Some random person on the Internet, who flunked out of grad school, who doesn't know Greek or Latin? Who do I think I am, Wallace Shawn?

All excellent objections. Let's answer them and then we'll talk about formalism.
First, of course, there are a couple of beautifully aged traditional ideologies which the Internet now brings us in glorious detail. They go by lots of names, but let's call them progressivism and conservatism.

My beef with progressivism is that for at least the last 100 years, the vast majority of writers and thinkers and smart people in general have been progressives. Therefore, any intellectual in 2007, which unless there has been some kind of Internet space warp and my words are being carried live on Fox News, is anyone reading this, is basically marinated in progressive ideology.

Perhaps this might slightly impair one's ability to see any problems that may exist in the progressive worldview.

As for conservatism, not all Muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims. Similarly, not all conservatives are cretins, but most cretins are conservatives. The modern American conservative movement - which is paradoxically much younger than the progressive movement, if only because it had to be reinvented after the Roosevelt dictatorship - has been distinctly affected by this audience. It also suffers from the electoral coincidence that it has to despise everything that progressivism adores, a bizarre birth defect which does not appear to be treatable.

Most people who don't consider themselves "progressives" or "conservatives" are one of two things. Either they're "moderates," or they're "libertarians."

In my experience, most sensible people consider themselves "moderate," "centrist," "independent," "unideological," "pragmatic," "apolitical," etc. Considering the vast tragedies wrought by 20th-century politics, this attitude is quite understandable. It is also, in my opinion, responsible for most of the death and destruction in the world today.

Moderation is not an ideology. It is not an opinion. It is not a thought. It is an absence of thought. If you believe the status quo of 2007 is basically righteous, then you should believe the same thing if a time machine transported you to Vienna in 1907. But if you went around Vienna in 1907 saying that there should be a European Union, that Africans and Arabs should rule their own countries and even colonize Europe, that any form of government except parliamentary democracy is evil, that paper money is good for business, that all doctors should work for the State, etc, etc - well, you could probably find people who agreed with you. They wouldn't call themselves "moderates," and nor would anyone else.

No, if you were a moderate in Vienna in 1907, you thought Franz Josef I was the greatest thing since sliced bread. So which is it? Hapsburgs, or Eurocrats? Pretty hard to split the difference on that one.

In other words, the problem with moderation is that the "center" is not fixed. It moves. And since it moves, and people being people, people will try to move it. This creates an incentive for violence - something we formalists try to avoid. More on this in a bit.

That leaves libertarians. Now, I love libertarians to death. My CPU practically has a permanent open socket to the Mises Institute. In my opinion, anyone who has intentionally chosen to remain ignorant of libertarian (and, in particular, Misesian-Rothbardian) thought, in an era when a couple of mouse clicks will feed you enough high-test libertarianism to drown a moose, is not an intellectually serious person. Furthermore, I am a computer programmer who has read far too much science fiction - two major risk factors for libertarianism. So I could just say, "read Rothbard," and call it a day.

On the other hand, it is hard to avoid noticing two basic facts about the universe. One is that libertarianism is an extremely obvious idea. The other is that it has never been successfully implemented.

This does not prove anything. But what it suggests is that libertarianism is, as its detractors are always quick to claim, an essentially impractical ideology. I would love to live in a libertarian society. The question is: is there a path from here to there? And if we get there, will we stay there? If your answer to both questions is obviously "yes," perhaps your definition of "obvious" is not the same as mine.

So this is why I decided to build my own ideology - "formalism."

Of course, there is nothing new in formalism. Progressives, conservatives, moderates, and libertarians will all recognize large chunks of their own undigested realities. Even the word "formalism" is borrowed from legal formalism, which is basically the same idea in more modest attire.

I am not Vizzini. I am just some dude who buys a lot of obscure used books, and is not afraid to grind them down, add flavor, and rebrand the result as a kind of political surimi. Most everything I have to say is available, with better writing, more detail and much more erudition, in Jouvenel, Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leoni, Burnham, Nock, etc, etc.

If you've never heard of any of these people, neither had I until I started the procedure. If that scares you, it should. Replacing your own ideology is a lot like do-it-yourself brain surgery. It requires patience, tolerance, a high pain threshold, and very steady hands. Whoever you are, you already have an ideology in there, and if it wanted to come out it would have done so on its own.

There is no point in starting this messy experiment only to install some other ideology that's the way it is just because someone said so. Formalism, as we'll see, is an ideology designed by geeks for other geeks. It's not a kit. It doesn't come with batteries. You can't just pop it in. At best, it's a rough starting point to help you build your own DIY ideology. If you're not comfortable working with a table saw, an oscilloscope and an autoclave, formalism is not for you.

That said:

The basic idea of formalism is just that the main problem in human affairs is violence. The goal is to design a way for humans to interact, on a planet of remarkably limited size, without violence.

Especially organized violence. Next to organized human-on-human violence, a good formalist believes, all other problems - Poverty, Global Warming, Moral Decay, etc, etc, etc - are basically insignificant. Perhaps once we get rid of violence we can worry a little about Moral Decay, but given that organized violence killed a couple of hundred million people in the last century, whereas Moral Decay gave us "American Idol," I think the priorities are pretty clear.

The key is to look at this not as a moral problem, but as an engineering problem. Any solution that solves the problem is acceptable. Any solution that does not solve the problem is not acceptable.

For example, there is an existing idea called pacifism, part of the general progressive suite, which claims to be a solution for violence. As I understand it, the idea of pacifism is that if you and I can not be violent, everyone else will not be violent, too.

There's no doubt in my mind that pacifism is effective in some cases. In Northern Ireland, for example, it seems to be just the thing. But there is a kind of "hundredth-monkey" logic to it that consistently eludes my linear, Western mind. It strikes me that if everyone is a pacifist and then one person decides not to be a pacifist, he will wind up ruling the world. Hmm.

A further difficulty is that the definition of "violence" isn't so obvious. If I gently relieve you of your wallet, and you chase after me with your Glock and make me beg to be allowed to give it back, which of us is being violent? Suppose I say, well, it was your wallet - but it's my wallet now?

This suggests, at the very least, that we need a rule that tells us whose wallet is whose. Violence, then, is anything that breaks the rule, or replaces it with a different rule. If the rule is clear and everyone follows it, there is no violence.

In other words, violence equals conflict plus uncertainty. While there are wallets in the world, conflict will exist. But if we can eliminate uncertainty - if there is an unambiguous, unbreakable rule that tells us, in advance, who gets the wallet - I have no reason to sneak my hand into your pocket, and you have no reason to run after me shooting wildly into the air. Neither of our actions, by definition, can affect the outcome of the conflict.

Violence of any size makes no sense without uncertainty. Consider a war. If one army knows it will lose the war, perhaps on the advice of some infallible oracle, it has no reason to fight. Why not surrender and get it over with?

But this has only multiplied our difficulties. Where do all these rules come from? Who makes them unbreakable? Who gets to be the oracle? Why is the wallet "yours," rather than "mine"? What happens if we disagree on this? If there's one rule for every wallet, how can everyone remember them all? And suppose it's not you, but me, who's got the Glock?

Fortunately, great philosophers have spent many long hours pondering these details. The answers I give you are theirs, not mine.

First, one sensible way to make rules is that you're bound by a rule if, and only if, you agree to it. We don't have rules that are made by the gods somewhere. What we have is actually not rules at all, but agreements. Surely, agreeing to something and then, at your own convenience, un-agreeing to it, is the act of a cad. In fact, when you make an agreement, the agreement itself may well include the consequences of this kind of irresponsible behavior.

If you're a wild man and you agree to nothing - not even that you won't just kill people randomly on the street - this is fine. Go and live in the jungle, or something. Don't expect anyone to let you walk around on their street, any more than they would tolerate, say, a polar bear. There is no absolute moral principle that says that polar bears are evil, but their presence is just not compatible with modern urban living.

We are starting to see two kinds of agreements here. There are agreements made with other specific individuals - I agree to paint your house, you agree to pay me. And there are agreements like, "I won't kill anyone on the street." But are these agreements really different? I don't think so. I think the second kind of agreement is just your agreement with whoever owns the street.

If wallets have owners, why shouldn't streets have owners? Wallets have to have owners, obviously, because ultimately someone has to decide what happens with the wallet. Does it ride off in your pocket, or mine? Streets stay put, but there are still a lot of decisions that have to be taken - who paves the street? When and why? Are people allowed to kill people on the street, or is it one of those special no-killing streets? What about street vendors? And so on.

Obviously, if I own 44th Street and you own 45th and 43rd, the possibility of a complex relationship between us becomes nontrivial. And complexity is next to ambiguity, which is next to uncertainty, and the Glocks come out again. So, realistically, we are probably talking more about owning not streets, but larger, more clearly-defined units - blocks, maybe, or even cities.

Owning a city! Now that would be pretty cool. But it gets us back to an issue that we've completely skipped, which is who owns what. How do we decide? Do I deserve to own a city? Am I so meritorious? I think I am. Maybe you could keep your wallet, and I could get, say, Baltimore.

(He doesn't say just yet)

There is this idea called social justice that a lot of people believe in. The notion is, in fact, fairly universal as of this writing. What it tells us is that Earth is small and has a limited set of resources, such as cities, which we all want as much of as possible. But we can't all have a city, or even a street, so we should share equally. Because all of us people are equal and no one is more equal than anyone else.

Social justice sounds very nice. But there are three problems with it.

One is that many of these nice things are not directly comparable. If I get an apple and you get an orange, are we equal? One could debate the subject - with Glocks, perhaps.

Two is that even if everyone starts with equal everything, people being different, having different needs and skills and so on, and the concept of ownership implying that if you own something you can give it to someone else, all is not likely to stay equal. In fact, it's basically impossible to combine a system in which agreements stay agreed with one in which equality stays equal.

This tells us that if we try to enforce permanent equality, we can probably expect permanent violence. I am not a big fan of "empirical evidence," but I think this prediction corresponds pretty well to reality. (94 million dead from communism)

But three, which is the real killer - so to speak - is that we are not, in fact, designing an abstract utopia here. We are trying to fix the real world, which in case you hadn't noticed, is extremely screwed up. In many cases, there is no clear agreement on who owns what (Palestine, anyone?), but most of the good things in the world do seem to have a rather definite chain of control.

If we have to start by equalizing the distribution of goods, or in fact by changing this distribution at all, we are putting ourselves quite unnecessarily behind the 8-ball. We are saying, we come in peace, we believe all should be free and equal, let us embrace. Put your arms around me. Feel that lump in my back pocket? Yup, that's what you think it is. And it's loaded. Now hand over your city / wallet / apple / orange, because I know someone who needs it more than you.

The goal of formalism is to avoid this unpleasant little detour. Formalism says: let's figure out exactly who has what, now, and give them a little fancy certificate. Let's not get into who should have what. Because, like it or not, this is simply a recipe for more violence. It is very hard to come up with a rule that explains why the Palestinians should get Haifa back, and doesn't explain why the Welsh should get London back.

So far this probably sounds a lot like libertarianism. But there's a big difference.
Libertarians may think the Welsh should get London back. Or not. I am still not sure I can interpret Rothbard on this one - which is, as we've seen, in itself a problem.

But if there is one thing all libertarians do believe, it's that the Americans should get America back. In other words, libertarians (at least, real libertarians) believe the US is basically an illegitimate and usurping authority, that taxation is theft, that they are essentially being treated as fur-bearing animals by this weird, officious armed mafia, which has somehow convinced everyone else in the country to worship it like it was the Church of God or something, not just a bunch of guys with fancy badges and big guns.

A good formalist will have none of this.

Because to a formalist, the fact that the US can determine what happens on the North American continent between the 49th parallel and the Rio Grande, AK and HI, etc, means that it is the entity which owns that territory. And the fact that the US extracts regular payments from the aforementioned fur-bearing critters means no more than that it owns that right. The various maneuvers and pseudo-legalities by which it acquired these properties are all just history. What matters is that it has them now and it doesn't want to give them over, any more than you want to give me your wallet.

So if the responsibility to fork over some cut of your paycheck makes you a serf (a reasonable reuse of the word, surely, for our less agricultural age), that's what Americans are - serfs.
Corporate serfs, to be exact, because the US is nothing but a corporation. That is, it is a formal structure by which a group of individuals agree to act collectively to achieve some result.

So what? So I'm a corporate serf. Is this so horrible? I seem to be pretty used to it. Two days out of the week I work for Lord Snooty-Snoot. Or Faceless Global Products. Or whoever. Does it matter who the check is written to?
The modern distinction between "private" corporations and "governments" is actually a rather recent development. The US is certainly different from, say, Microsoft, in that the US handles its own security. On the other hand, just as Microsoft depends on the US for most of its security, the US depends on Microsoft for most of its software. It's not clear why this should make one of these corporations special, and the other not-special.

Of course, the purpose of Microsoft is not to write software, but to make money for its shareholders. The American Cancer Society is a corporation, too, and it has a purpose as well - to cure cancer. I have lost a lot of work on account of Microsoft's so-called "software," and its stock, frankly, is going nowhere. And cancer still seems to be around.

(But no one knows the purpose of the US government)

In case the CEO of either MSFT or the ACS is reading this, though, I don't really have a message for you guys. You know what you're trying to do and your people are probably doing as good a job of it as they can. And if not, fire the bastards.

But I have no idea what the purpose of the US is.
I have heard that there's someone who supposedly runs it. But he doesn't appear to even be able to fire his own employees, which is probably good, because I hear he's not exactly Jack Welch, if you know what I mean. In fact, if anyone can identify one significant event that has occurred in North America because Bush and not Kerry was elected in 2004, I'd be delighted to hear of it. Because my impression is that basically the President has about as much effect on the actions of the US as the Heavenly Sovereign Emperor, the Divine Mikado, has on the actions of Japan. Which is pretty much none.

Obviously, the US exists. Obviously, it does stuff. But the way in which it decides what stuff it's going to do is so opaque that, as far as anyone outside the Beltway is concerned, it might as well be consulting ox entrails.

So this is the formalist manifesto: that the US is just a corporation. It is not a mystic trust consigned to us by the generations. It is not the repository of our hopes and fears, the voice of conscience and the avenging sword of justice. It is just an big old company that holds a huge pile of assets, has no clear idea of what it's trying to do with them, and is thrashing around like a ten-gallon shark in a five-gallon bucket, red ink spouting from each of its bazillion gills.

To a formalist, the way to fix the US is to dispense with the ancient mystical horseradish, the corporate prayers and war chants, figure out who owns this monstrosity, and let them decide what in the heck they are going to do with it. I don't think it's too crazy to say that all options - including restructuring and liquidation - should be on the table.

Whether we're talking about the US, Baltimore, or your wallet, a formalist is only happy when ownership and control are one and the same. To reformalize, therefore, we need to figure out who has actual power in the US, and assign shares in such a way as to reproduce this distribution as closely as possible.

Of course, if you believe in the mystical horseradish, you'll probably say that every citizen should get one share. But this is a rather starry-eyed view of the US's actual power structure. Remember, our goal is not to figure out who should have what, but to figure out who does have what.

For example, if the New York Times was to endorse our reformalization plan, it would be much more likely to happen. This suggests that the New York Times has quite a bit of power, and therefore that it should get quite a few shares.

But wait. We haven't answered the question. What is the purpose of the US? Suppose, solely for illustration, we give all the shares to the New York Times. What will "Punch" Sulzberger do with his shiny new country?

(Who cares?)
Many people, probably including Mr. Sulzberger, seem to think of the US as a charitable venture. Like the American Cancer Society, just with a broader mission. Perhaps the purpose of the US is simply to do good in the world.

This is a very understandable perspective. Surely, if anything ungood remains in the world, it can be vanquished by a gigantic, heavily armed mega-charity, with H-bombs, a flag, and 250 million serfs. In fact, it's actually rather astounding that, considering the prodigious endowments of this great philanthropic institution, it seems to do so little good.

Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that it's run so efficiently that it hasn't balanced its budget since the 1830s. Perhaps, if you reformalized the US, ran it like an actual business, and distributed its shares among a large set of separate charities, each presumably with some specific charter for some actual specific purpose, more good might occur.

Of course, the US doesn't just have assets. Sadly, it also has debts. Some of these debts, such as T-bills, are already very well-formalized. Others, such as Social Security and Medicare, are informal and subject to political uncertainties. If these obligations were reformalized, their recipients could only benefit. Of course, they would thus become negotiable instruments and could be, for example, sold. Perhaps in exchange for crack. Reformalization thus requires us to distinguish between property and charity, a hard problem but an important one.

All this fails to answer the question: are nation-states, such as the US, even useful? If you reformalized the US, the question would be left to its shareholders. Perhaps cities work the best when they're independently owned and operated. If so, they should probably be spun off as separate corporations.

The existence of successful city-states such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai certainly suggests an answer to this question. Whatever we call them, these places are remarkable for their prosperity and their relative absence of politics. In fact, perhaps the only way to make them more stable and secure would be to transform them from effectively family-owned (Singapore and Dubai) or subsidiary (Hong Kong) corporations, to anonymous public ownership, thus eliminating the long-term risk that political violence might develop.

Certainly, the absence of democracy in these city-states has not made them comparable in any way to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Any restrictions on personal freedom that they do maintain seem primarily aimed at preventing the development of democracy - an understandable concern given the history of rule by the People. In fact, both the Third Reich and the Communist world often claimed to represent the true spirit of democracy.

As Dubai in particular shows, a government (like any corporation) can deliver excellent customer service without either owning or being owned by its customers. Most of Dubai's residents are not even citizens. If Sheik al-Maktoum has a cunning plan to seize them all, chain them and make them work in the salt mines, he's doing it in a very devious way.

Dubai, as a place, has almost nothing to recommend it. The weather is horrible, the sights are nonexistent, and the neighborhood is atrocious. It's tiny, in the the middle of nowhere, and surrounded by Allah-crazed maniacs with a suspicious affinity for high-speed centrifuges. Nonetheless it has a quarter of the world's cranes and is growing like a weed. If we let the Maktoums run, say, Baltimore, what would happen?

One conclusion of formalism is that democracy is - as most writers before the 19th century agreed - an ineffective and destructive system of government. The concept of democracy without politics makes no sense at all, and as we've seen, politics and war are a continuum. Democratic politics is best understood as a sort of symbolic violence, like deciding who wins the battle by how many troops they brought.

Formalists attribute the success of Europe, Japan and the US after World War II not to democracy, but its absence. While retaining the symbolic structures of democracy, much as the Roman Principate retained the Senate, the postwar Western system has assigned almost all actual decision-making power to its civil servants and judges, who are "apolitical" and "nonpartisan," ie, nondemocratic.

Because in the absence of effective external control, these civil services more or less manage themselves, like any unmanaged enterprise they often seem to exist and expand for the sake of existing and expanding. But they avoid the spoils system which invariably develops when the tribunes of the people have actual power. And they do a reasonable, if hardly stellar, job of maintaining some semblance of law.

In other words, "democracy" appears to work because it is not in fact democracy, but a mediocre implementation of formalism. This relationship between symbolism and reality has received an educational if depressing test in the form of Iraq, where there is no law at all, but which we have endowed with the purest and most elegant form of democracy (proportional representation), and ministers who actually seem to run their ministries. While history does no controlled experiments, surely the comparison of Iraq to Dubai makes a fine case for formalism over democracy.

(originally posted at over at 2Blowhards - thanks, Michael! If you have comments, there's already a thread there...)