perfidy

A couple years ago, I ran across - I can't remember how - a peculiar website. Unqualified Reservations is a reactionary anti-democracy advocacy site. It's pseudonymous (I hope, for it would require some truly cruel parents to be otherwise) author Mencius Moldbug argues at great length that our current system of government is irretrievably broken, and that our only hope is a complete do-over. And that when we start over, we should be leaving all the democracy business behind us.

Well, that sounds weird, doesn't it? One's natural instinct is to judge the author mad, and go about one's affairs. But if you dig in a bit, you see that there are two aspects to his voluminous writings. (Those who remember fondly the USS Clueless will not be staggered by their length. But everyone else will.) The first aspect is an incisive critique of what we have right now. The second is a prescription for what we should replace it with, and how. In the first, I find myself more or less completely convinced. The second - I have issues with.

In the time since I first happened upon UR and Moldbuggianism, I've read his entire archives. Which is a metric buttload of stuff, to be sure. Without a whole lot of exaggeration, I can say that it had a serious impact on how I view the world. This may sound cheap - but one of the reasons I've not posted much over the last couple years is that I can't comment on anything related to current affairs without thinking about Moldbug, and I wasn't quite ready to out myself as an anti-democracy reactionary. But I guess that time has come. And I find myself surprised at how much I've resisted actually admitting that, even on a little-read blog with a single digit audience.

In my discussions with intelligent and well-informed individuals over the last decade or so, I often found myself looking at problems, arguing about solutions with a distinct sense that something was missing. While I am temperamentally conservative, I guess, I as often found myself attacking conservatives as liberals. Some cases could be explained away as those politicians or pundits failing to live up to conservative ideals. Or they were idiots. Or they were just politicians of whom i shouldn't be expecting anything. Or in the case of George Bush, some would say all three. Railing against all sides of the political spectrum makes you either a libertarian, I conspiracy nut, or just bitter and confused. I was trending toward the latter, with dalliances in the other two.

I felt that there should be a unifying explanation for everything I hated. A grand unified theory of hate. The whole process was similar to what I went through with dark matter and cosmology, and like then, I found an answer.

Back a couple months ago, I went looking for people who were commenting on Moldbug in an intelligent way, and I do believe I hit the jackpot in finding Aretae, Isegoria and Foseti. (I've been reading them, and dropping a few comments here and there, for a couple weeks now, and I recommend them highly.)

To them, most of what I'm about to say is old hat. Perhaps they can add some thoughts. This is for my fellow Perfidians, and my reader. (Hi Bram!)

Okay, how to summarize Moldbug? The dude has written probably a million words in the last four years. But, thanks to the magic of the internets, we have this: Condensed Moldbuggery. And you can start where I started with "How I Stopped Believing in Democracy" or dive into the first part (of 12!) of "An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives" The basic idea though, is that progressivism is a cancer, descended from universalist protestantism and metastasized into a number of horrific tumors including Nazism, Communism and the US Government. Along the way, he demolishes modern conservatism, takes swipes at libertarianism, and sings the praises of people we've largely forgotten, like the nineteenth century historian Thomas Carlyle.

It's hard to digest in one lump. But his critique of what we have before us is, I think, spot on. It gives us reasons for why the left acts like a religion. Because it is. It gives us a hint as to why conservatism fails, utterly, at most things it tries to do. Because, for one, it is merely warmed over thirty year old progressivism fighting against current progressivism. And for another, it fails to understand what it is. It survives because the dominant religion needs heretics, and because it is a home for traditionalists who don't like change. It explains why the State Department behaves so oddly, why the military is not allowed to win, and any number of other things.

The short of it is that a reactionary believes that the real struggle is between order and chaos. Modern progressives are, at heart, anarchists and the enemy of civilization. True liberty can only occur after order has been secured - the emergent order of markets, networks and the like depend on an underlying real order. And the store of civilizational order that we had built up has been pissed away by ten generations of democracy, the result being the crap heap we see before us.

To take one hypothesis and use it to explain a wide array of phenomena is, to me, a good sign of a powerful theory. So I dig it. It resolved issues that I had long had with politics - and gave me a way of looking at things that was entirely outside the bipolar democratic/republican thinking that had long been unsatisfactory. Moldbug's analysis of the modern world now has a comfortable apartment in my brain.

I have more issues with what he proposes as solutions for these problems, but I'll save that for the future. In the meantime, I really suggest - despite its length - reading the open letter series. Even if you remain unconvinced, I think you'll at least be entertained.