From what I remember, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was just about a horse race, but I cannot say for sure. I will not check, because the purported news story is not the important part of his work. The point of his work is to draw out the hyperreal narrative of driving a car through the desert while high. He even replaces himself in Fear, telling the story of Raoul Duke, a persona which Thompson cultivated and became consumed by. His creation of the Gonzo style enabled the emergence of general cultural truths rather than bare factual analysis.

If Hunter S. Thompson were born after 2000, he would have been a Kick streamer. IRL streamers, who walk around with their cameras livestreaming to massive audiences, are the perfected form of Thompson’s Gonzo journalism. They materialize hyperreality with their mere presence. Thompson’s output was his internal experience of the surrounding circumstances, turning the world he inhabits into an exaggerated version of itself. The streamer ceases to be their true self, because their true self ceases to exist at all under the constant eye of the camera. The streamer is Raoul Duke returning instead of Thompson, completely replacing him.

The IRL streamer seems like an authentic reporter, showing what is happening in their real lives right now. But this authenticity is part of the simulation, in which the camera, chat, donations, chat yappers, algorithms, and constructed persona precede reality and redefine it. Ice Poseidon, the pioneer of life streaming, warped reality as the stream defined his daily existence and relationships. Instead of just writing a Gonzo novel, streaming forced Ice Poseidon to turn his life into a Gonzo novel, culminating in his arrest in Bangkok over pornography charges. The appeal of the stream is that users did not know what would happen next. They got to watch his “real life,” filled with wild events, but it was entirely supplanted by the stream.

Contemporary streamers like IShowSpeed, Adin Ross, and Clavicular orient their lives around optimizing the streams. They must turn their lives into something interesting, something to be consumed as entertainment, becoming the characters in the book themselves. The higher the profile, the higher the production quality and expectations become. Life for the streamer becomes a constant performance, displaying novelty in a pristine, optimized form. Many smaller or mid-tier IRL streamers do pranks, challenges, or day-in-the-life streams where they escalate real situations for views. But they are not masters of the craft, and come across as inauthentic. But they are desperate to replace real life with a performance so they can live a novel false life on display to hordes of retarded zoomers.

This is the perfection of Thompson’s style, although it lacks the artistic quality and groundbreaking nature. It is also not as entertaining. But it is the highest-throughput version of what Thompson pioneered, creating a reality more interesting than the actual reality beneath it, and it reveals cultural truths far better than a new camera ever could. The only problem is that the culture of these buffoons is the most brain-melting content imaginable.

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Conservatives and right-leaning libertarians used to be the strongest on the mass surveillance question. The left-liberal establishment was, well, the establishment. They were the ones who did it. The left certainly did not have an issue with the power of the surveillance state when it was pointed at the mean J6’ers, who were not only tracked by CCTV facial recognition matching, but also by geofencing and cell-phone location data, enriched with a heap of Google profile data. No, they did not have an issue then.

But now, the libtard commentariat will not stop ringing the bell about big scary Flock Safety Cameras and bigger, scarier Palantir.

Palantir has become a big-scary ultra-boogeyman when it doesn’t do that much. Palantir does not collect or store client data. What Palantir does is tailor software for client data, which is often messy and siloed, spread across many different stores and sources. How do I know this? Because it is all simply publicly available online. Anyone can just look it up. Yet these libtard essayists, video-makers, bloggers, etc. all fail to take that basic step.

Do they sell to governments across the West? Yes, they do, and we should not blame them for that. They found an inefficiency they could make a niche out of and have gained significantly from it. When you press the mystery genepool soybros on this, they will admit that, sure, Palantir doesn't actually do that much, and the real problem is the demand for this data organization and collection.

However, bulk data collection was never a concern for these people when it was Facebook, Twitter, and Google sharing data with the government, taking marching orders from the Feds on who to surveil and suppress. But now that big data may identify a Somalian who has never taken a driver’s test running into a traffic light, it is suddenly a big problem!

These people are so unbelievably disingenuous. The only reason they are raising the alarm about the surveillance question is that ICE is using this technology to track down people who entered the country illegally, and police use it to catch vagrants and freaks who stab well-to-do Americans because of socioeconomic factors.

“But what about the abuses?” Yeah, because a cop looked up his ex-girlfriend in the Flock database without a warrant? Boo hoo. These people will deny and suppress the countless stories about mass immigration radically tearing up Western society. They will not even acknowledge that such bad apples exist. Yet the same leftist obsession with maximizing societal entropy because criminals are actually just precious little creatures who had a hard background and just need state-provided opioid needles is what creates the necessity for this data harvesting and surveillance in the first place.

It sucks that it has come to this point. I do not like the idea of bulk data harvesting for military/intelligence surveillance, and I do not like the idea of being tracked while I drive around.

I would prefer to live in a society where those things are not necessary. But that society is a high-trust society, where heritage Americans can build a life for their families and develop a community that will benefit future generations.

That form of society is the exact thing those very same leftists are foaming at the mouth to destroy. Surveillance technology like Flock and data aggregation service providers like Palantir are necessary to stall the entropy these people have created.

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But more and more, I see people who feel this way. They are sick of it, they are tired of winning, and I think it is pretty easy to tell why.

This is not a blindly pro-Trump post. It is barely even about Trump; it is about a spiritual malaise that extends across the American political spectrum. The online right simply gives us a clear, easy vehicle for explaining it.

This post exchange is a perfect microcosm of what I have seen multiple times:

Let’s break this down:

• Vance is posting about a new fee on H1B visas that the Trump administration is pursuing.

• Someone who ostensibly agrees with this position asks why Vance is not doing more about it.

• He even implies Vance is on the opposite side of the issue to protect his tech bros.

• He argues that Vance isn't doing enough, and maybe even that he should have done more sooner.

Meanwhile:

• The WSJ post says the Trump admin previously tried to restrict H1B visas, but the courts blocked it.

• This new fee is more extensive and restrictive, applying to domestic H1B applicants (which will lead to deportations/voluntary exits)

• Prior to Trump, even conservatives barely stood up to illegal immigration, much less legal immigration.

To make matters even better, mere days after this poster countersigned the admin on not doing enough about H1B visas, Trump placed a hold on all visas of all kinds.

This proposal is a clear win for those who favor immigration restrictions and the protection of national sovereignty. It is more of what we want. And yet people who argue from a pro-American sovereignty and workers' perspective are challenging Vance, complaining, etc. There are more comments like this. They're all among the top ones.

This same general pattern shows up on many issues. The voters asked Trump for an inch. Trump gave a mile. And the voters got mad.

Why is this?

They are tired of winning. But it goes deeper than merely being tired. They are upset by the winning. To understand why, we have to separate two groups of anti-winners: the influencer class and the non-influencers.

The influencer class

Imagine that you are very into a specific political issue. You are very upset about the type of rubber used in pencil erasers. You have spent years, perhaps even decades, researching the problem. The way that pencil erasers are constructed is simply incorrect. It causes billions in economic damages a year, leads to slavery abroad, undermines the American space program, etc. It is really bad.

So, you take to the digital streets and proclaim this important fact. You spend months on it, which turn into years, and you clearly establish this fact and carve out a space as the eraser guy. People are on board; you have a following; people are starting to listen. They even fund and support you, as do advertisers, to push this very important issue.

And then, one day, a man decides to run for President. Roger Rightrubber. Mr. Rightrubber has read your posts, your articles, and your essays. He sees that you are right, and he sees that his constituency cares. So, he runs on a platform of correcting the pencil eraser catastrophe and wins in a landslide. He follows through, fixes the problem, and voila! You are thrilled!

That is, until you realize that the issue that you have devoted your life to and the thing that people gave you money for has now been resolved. You stare into a void of purposelessness and moneylessness.

This shows that, even in the most honest and charitable cases, there is a perverse incentive among the influencer class not to want their problems solved. If someone comes along and does solve them, well now their issue is gone. The influencers we deal with today are far more cynical. In a case like the one above, this person may be given a cabinet position and the power to actually solve their issue, then transition to a new issue in the administration. Therefore, not a big deal that you are not posting anymore. So the influencers who remain are either unworthy or unwilling to take a position in the administration. For some, this is excusable because they'd rather earnestly support the President through continued online commentary.

Others have taken a sinister route. The problem with Trump winning and actually solving problems is that the things to complain about disappear, and the discourse has to shift to stay fresh. The economic dynamics encourage countersignaling Trump. Thus, many right-wing commentators decided to amp up their TEBS. Fuentes was one of the earliest on this train, as was Richard Spencer. Some, such as Tucker Carlson, are simply pivoting their content to appeal to a more third-world audience while still pretending to care about America. Then there are some that are actively hostile towards and dishonest about the administration, even though they touted themselves as conservatives for the past few years, like Candace Owens and Owen Shroyer.

It is easy to mentally model why the influencer class behaves in this way and assign, albeit speculative, intent to their messaging. The intention could be just about anything, though, because these are not the truly born losers. These are the opportunists, who would not have any kind of following if it were not for the droves of followers.

The followers

The born losers I am describing are mad at the Trump administration because it solves problems. If you are upset with Trump because he has caused a problem, made a misstep, or failed to solve something you believe is important, I am not talking about you. I am talking about the droves on the online right who become increasingly angry because problems are being solved.

They are mad about winning and about problems being solved because it means that they no longer have any excuse. When DEI is ripped apart and employment visas become more costly, and you still cannot get a job, you no longer have those things to blame. When mass deportations make housing prices go down, you have to deal with your own financial irresponsibility. Wokeness in the universities is under pressure. Libtardation in the military and government is also being targeted. Big corporations cannot buy single-family homes anymore, and taxes on tips are gone. Trump accounts will start your kid’s savings. Sure, many of these problems still remain to a significant degree in some domain, but these changes have made life materially better for Americans.

If the issue is that it has not gone far enough, then be patient! The administration is going further! If your concern is that the Democrats will just reverse it if they take power again, why are you dishonestly amplifying lies about the Trump administration?

But this is not a position you can argue out of. These people are tired of winning. Because they won a little bit, and the big abstract thing that was holding them back was reduced. And they have the opportunity to make something better of themselves, but in that moment they realize that they are not worthy of that opportunity. They have no agency, and they are mad, and thus they direct that anger at those resolving the external conditions they could blame their own failures on.

Spiritual Communism

This is the spiritual communism that animated the Bolsheviks, the bio-Leninists, and the Marxists of every flavor. It is resentment toward the right, the good, and the capable. It is the unwillingness to have agency in one's life and exercise will over one's circumstances. Has your life improved since Trump took office? If it has not, is that your fault, or is it his? If it is his, you are probably an illegal immigrant. If it is yours, you probably hate him more than said illegal immigrants do.

These are the vulgar masses that Spengler describes, hallmarks of the winter of high culture. They are resentful, operating according to what Nietzsche described as a slave morality. Spengler observed this in the leftists of his age, but now it applies to many ostensibly on the right. The weak and unable hate those who can achieve things through will and tact.

Instead of confronting their inabilities and becoming strong, they instead embrace a seething hatred and resentment. Without strength, they turn merely to the pen, filling tomes with justification for their own inadequacies and why it is all someone else’s fault. It is the slave morality that perniciously argues their morality into the dominant position and then mobilizes all those resentful to tear up everything and everyone and reduce all life to the lowest common denominator.

For those who are now angry:

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If you’re the kind of person who pretends to have read Heidegger, you may recognize this as a Heideggerian attitude. Despite the problems with Heideggerian thought (incomprehensible, never finished his book, Hannah Arendt, name that sounds like a slur, completely made-up words), Heidegger’s sketch of what it means to live historically resonates. He also sketches the antipode: the rootless cosmopolitan who lacks this connection to a shared communal heritage, and he argues that such a person would be unable to live authentically.

So what happens when the world transforms to the point where everyone becomes a rootless cosmopolitan?

In this essay, I will argue that traditionalism, as a political and cultural program, has become completely meaningless and is an obstacle to the pursuit of a positive right-wing cultural and political program.

Turn your cynicism up to 11 for a moment, and think about what a tradition is. A tradition is a social technology that allows important and complex rules and information to be passed down across generations without having to memorize them all. It also protects the next generations from having to relearn the same rules. Groups adhering to traditions that readily pass on effective survival rules will outcompete groups with poor mechanisms for transmitting traditions or poor rules encoded by those traditions. Selection pressure refines tradition, and the greater the difficulty and danger, the more important the traditions become.

Material abundance removed tremendous difficulty and danger from the world. As a result, groups faced less pressure to retain their traditional ways of life and pass them on. When violations of the tradition go without negative consequence, it is easy to let them go. This has the unfortunate byproduct of also discarding the aspects of the tradition that helped the person find meaning in life and long-term spiritual/psychological security. Traditional ways of life may also be discarded if they fail to prevent tragedy.

The 20th century saw the disintegration of tradition through both means. Industrialization granted material comfort, relieving the pressure on tradition as a survival tool. At the same time, tradition failed to prevent the horror of the trenches

Now turn your cynicism back down. Not healthy to keep it that high.

The 1950s marked the onset of American consumer culture, during which technological marvels began to reduce the need for manual labor at an unprecedented rate. This was followed by the 60s, the decade in which progressivism likewise accelerated. Burning Man, counterculture, LSD, Civil Rights Act, feminism. Washing machines now exist, so why would we listen to those constricting old traditions? Fair question, worth a shot. Now we know. Endless progress without a determined, realizable future, and nothing higher to attain, nothing in the past to reinforce your ways.

Many traditions had mythic/religious stories that accompanied them. These stories contained a vision of a final state, the apocalypse, the unveiling, and the final accounting of all reality. There was something to look forward to, a future, however far off, to live in accordance with. The loss of tradition, of course, meant the loss of these futures. Progress has no end state; it is an ever-present flux, a continuous striving for the next contrived social group’s liberation. This obvious has a political impact. And this works, somewhat. Even though there is no final accounting, there is at least the next thing, the next group to liberate. Re-evaluate and cannibalize the movement again afterward.

Shoehorning traditionalist beliefs and aesthetics into this modern political context does not make an effective political program. This applies to traditions across the board, whether Protestant or Catholic, Evolian chivalric-racism traditions, Norse pagan (obesity) traditions, etc. It should be noted that Christian traditionalism is quite important and effective within its context, but appeals to the 1500s Catechism do not have a place at the RNC. You may think they should for perfectly good and moral reasons, but it will also be totally ineffective.

And ultimately, the outward display of traditionalism as a political project is cope. It is a cover for responsibility. It is using history as an escape hatch and as a banal display of internet social clout. It is history against action. Nietzsche argues that man becomes himself by using the past in life, but when he uses history for more than that, he becomes petrified. He ceases to be the man he could have been, and would have been better off ignoring history.

A vision of the future is also meant to inspire action. The hollowed traditions peddled for attention on the internet do not actually posit a vision for the future. They actually say nothing, being thin shells of what they were once used for, for some ulterior aim.

Traditions are historically evolved solutions to problems in specific conditions. They are easy-to-communicate formulas for getting from point A (bad) to point B (a future good state). Once the conditions that select for the traditions disappear, the traditions themselves cease to be useful for short-horizon survival. Attempting to restore tradition wholesale by simply restoring and enforcing its outer appearances is not conservatism. It is maladaptation. Yet this is what the champion of traditionalism wants.

Many traditions are Darwinian truths. They provide an adaptive advantage. Traditionalists conflate the truth of the mythic structure surrounding the tradition with the tradition's fitness. Traditions encode accumulated solutions to the environments that produced them, so applying the tradition to a new environment is counterproductive.

The concern is not with religious traditionalism. Even under this cynical framework, the Traditional Latin Mass makes sense, because it is adapted for participation in timeless truth. The concern is with what the political traditionalist thinks needs to be applied on a political and civilizational scale to align them with the religious tradition. A Latin Mass enjoyer may also argue for Catholic-monarchical absolutism as a political solution or Distributism as an economic solution. In both cases, these are closer to what is needed than the current entropy of democratic managerialism, but they still miss the mark because they believe the traditionalist dressing on these alternatives is the important part, when it actually is not. What is important is digging into what these organizational methods encode and recognizing whether and how they are applicable to the present.

However, decoding undermines the very reason the techniques became traditions in the first place: they were difficult to transmit otherwise. Therefore, if a rule should be re-adapted, it needs to be re-encoded. What this looks like is the acceptance of the development of new attitudes, vibes, and aesthetics within the right, so long as they remain on the right. It is even better to let these evolve to suit the needs of politics and civilization rather than undergo deconstruction and reconstruction.

The obsession with history and the embrace of tradition become hostile to life, activity, and victory when reverence for inherited forms prevents adaptation. This is the danger of what Nietzsche describes as the antiquarian use of history, relating to the past solely through mere preservation of and loyalty to inheritance, absent any movement.

This does not mean that the right should embrace modernity, but it should not fully reject it either. History does not run in reverse, so the right must adapt. Technology, in particular, has irreversibly changed the environment, so our task is to discover and craft the forms of civilization that can flourish under these new conditions. To reject the conditions entirely cedes the moral interpretations of technological society to the left and leaves conservatives where they find themselves in so many other circumstances: with easy access to the tools and a principled refusal to use them.

The right should embrace technology and embrace the future. There are many domains where the left fails horribly at this, and gives the right the opportunity to become the progressive force, the force that will lead to prosperity and abundance. The right should adopt a pro-nuclear, AI, biotech, space, industry, and science stance, all under the banner of nationalism and authority. The great Faustian achievements available in these domains are simply impossible in organizations wrought with DEI.

The left operates under the assumption that the future, progress, belongs solely to it. When traditionalists argue for a retvrn to absolutely anything as a non-negotiable political project, they implicitly agree and cede the future to the left, content to forever occupy themselves with the proverbial action figures of history.

So I looked online to see if I could start collecting a wooden Thomas the Train set for him to play with at home. Much to my dismay, I found that the toy producers had pivoted to a totally different style: plastic, cartoony, built-in electronics. It is not the same toy at all. I began to think of other toys and brands that had undergone a similar transition. When I was a child, I played with my own dad’s childhood Fisher-Price Little People toys. They were simple, charming wood/plastic toys with houses, shops, vehicles, and figures. They are a far cry from today’s little people, which are plastic molds paired with electronic play-sets.

Toys are different now, and their transformation is emblematic of the tyranny of safetyism, the fear of silence, and a culture of quick consumption.

Old toys usually were representations of places or objects, whereas newer toys have a script. A barn is no longer just a barn; a house is no longer a house. They have buttons, lights, and gizmos to play jingles or scripted character lines. Older toys were often inert, and to play, the child had to be imaginative and supply a plot. Toys have since transformed into activity centers, eliciting predictable, standardized responses. Someone in some Mattel boardroom probably pitches at some point, “it’s not just a toy, it’s an experience.” They were right, and the object for play became a pre-packaged experience to be consumed.

This transformation was driven by an attempt to appeal to a younger audience. A one-year-old does not have much of an imagination. They “need” the stimulation. This percolated to toys for older children.

In a store, a silent wooden house just sits there. A plastic house with a “try me” button plays a song and looks more exciting to the parent, grandparent, or kid walking by. Toys increasingly need to communicate their value in five seconds on a shelf or in an online product video. Buttons, lights, and phrases do that better than the quiet durability of classic wooden toys. The toy turns into its own pitch, whether it’s pure entertainment or “edutainment” with a monkey that sings the alphabet.

Many modern toys are sold less as toys and more as developmental products. They have to teach numbers, colors, sharing, empathy, etc. Older toys were often less defensively educational. They were toys, which paradoxically made them better developmental tools by allowing the child to exercise their imagination.

The economics of planned obsolescence push the trend in the same direction. My old Thomas the Train toys are still intact. I don’t expect the plastic molds with cheap Chinese electronics inside to last a quarter century.

At the same time, safety concerns pushed toys in a younger, bigger, and softer direction. The classic Little People figures turned out to be a choking hazard. Fisher-Price redesigned them in 1991 into larger, chunkier figures. The transformation allowed the entire toy line to expand its target market to even younger children. Designing for younger toddlers creates a bias for big buttons, sounds, lights, and cause-and-effect features. “Press this, and something happens” is easier for a 1-year-old than “this is a village, invent a civic drama.”

It feels like the designers of these toys don’t trust children to have their own imagination. Obviously, a young toddler can’t invent a story, but for that skill to develop, noisy singing toys with pre-scripted experiences need to shut up. Perhaps this is downstream from the same safetyism that (correctly) prevented choking hazards, sharp edges, poisonous paint, and other physical hazards. But now that the physically threatening aspects of toys are gone, it’s as if the safety department treated boredom, stillness, and silence as safety concerns.

It is not enjoyable to play with these kinds of toys with a child. A toy that sings and talks crowds out the space for shared imagination and collaboration. The toy becomes the counterparty and playmate. It supplies the voice, the prompt, the joke, the song, the praise, the next action. That can be exciting in short bursts, but it crowds out the human back-and-forth. Scripted toys are socially closed, awkwardly interrupting a pair of children or a parent/child pair with a song about refrigerators.

Shared imagination requires a slow dance and merging of minds, especially when one party does not have full grasp of language. This is friction for a parent with TV and TikTok as alternatives, but the outcome of a shared creative experience is rewarding for both parent and child. But now the toys are optimized for holding attention. There is less room for imagination because prescribed attention-grabbers limit the toy's range of possibilities.

Marshall McLuhan described hot media as high-definition, filled-in, and low participation media. Cool media, by contrast, are low-definition and require the audience to complete the experience. The transformation in the toy industry is a shift from toys as cool media to toys as hot media.

Classic wooden Thomas toys are cool media, giving the child only a train, a track, a bridge, a station, etc., whereas the new alternatives are hot media, with sets having pre-decided (yet alterable) configurations, lights, dialogue, plot, etc. The silence that was once there, opening a space for imagination and the application of a new story, plot, or understanding, has been constricted.

The transformation of toys as media happened at the same time as other forms of media heated up and removed the room for participation. The toy must grab attention in five seconds, much like a pop song must hook instantly, an app must reward every action, a product must explain itself immediately, and a movie must avoid dead air. Silence has been systematically eradicated. Because silence is unsafe, it leaves room for ambiguity and reinterpretation. Safetyism removed the choking hazards, but it then began to optimize for protecting the child from boredom, frustration, ambiguity, quiet, and the time that it takes to be inventive. This is exactly what focus groups are used to eliminate.

The transformation of children’s toys may seem like a banal subject, especially for those without kids. Sure, some interesting history, but that could have been done in a short. But this transformation mirrors adult culture too. We have less tolerance for unresolved space: instrumental breaks, long intros, slow cinema, quiet novels, difficult architecture, liturgy, local customs, unstructured play, boredom, waiting. Everything must justify itself immediately or become suspect because it is always competing with instant dopamine machines. This is the attention economy of modern consumer culture. Human attention is a resource to seize, not something to be left alone to cultivate.

Addendum: the transformation I have described is by no means universal. One of the most popular toys in the world is Lego. Although Lego has undergone some transformation, the core aspects of the Lego system remain unchanged. Acknowledging that the trend is not universal because of this extremely obvious counterexample.

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The story begins with the unusual proclivity of the Mormons to baptize the dead. Unlike Christianity, the LDS Church believes that baptism is efficacious for those who have passed away. But to do this, they have to know who the dead people are. Thus, the Mormons got really good at collecting and keeping genealogical records. The Genealogical Society of Utah was founded in 1894, and today, FamilySearch is an LDS-run website used to trace family trees.

Collecting and persistently organizing large volumes of data is difficult at scale without the right technology. The Mormon genealogy interest is a major big data problem, giving the Mormons strong motivation to embrace and develop the latest technology. LDS tech interest included the development of Giant, a mainframe system, in 1969.

The CIA was created in 1947 as the Cold War began, and within the first five years, there were Mormon members. A notable early example was Neal A. Maxwell, an LDS leader and CIA economic analyst. There is no documented LDS-CIA official connection, and there is no evidence that Mormons are over-represented in the CIA. Do not confuse this absence of evidence with evidence of absence, though. Mormons seem prominent in the CIA because they make good recruits. This connection dates back to the Cold War, and its cause became public in the 1970s and 80s.

By the 1970s and 1980s, the idea that the CIA recruited heavily from LDS circles was already publicly circulating. A 1971 Ramparts article claimed Latter-day Saints supplied the CIA and FBI with some of their best personnel, and a 1981 Associated Press story said the CIA did some of its most successful recruiting in predominantly LDS Utah.

A CIA Reading Room copy of an Arizona Republic story from October 1, 1981, seals the convergence. Former Mormon missionaries were often recruited because they had foreign language ability, foreign-culture training, and experience living abroad. This made them ideal candidates, alongside the patriotic attitude many Mormons share, as well as the prohibitions of many kinds of vice the CIA would want to avoid in recruits.

The CIA and Mormons also shared a side interest at this point. Mormons wanted capable data technology to keep genealogical records for the sake of proxy baptisms. The Central Intelligence Agency wanted capable data technology to centralize intelligence, obviously. Relational databases did not exist yet. Once relational databases came about, both the Mormons and the CIA showed up to get a piece very early. A relational database is organized according to the relational model, meaning that all data are represented as tuples grouped into relations.

In The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison, a biography of Larry Ellison and the early history of Oracle, Mike Wilson details IBM's conceptual invention of relational databases and Larry Ellison's first attempt to implement them with Bob Miner and Ed Oates. The CIA had been keeping a close eye on the IBM database research since it hit the scene. They wanted one, and as soon as they could find someone to implement it, they jumped at the opportunity.

The CIA was the first Oracle customer. They won a two-year CIA contract for a relational database management system and used the project time to develop the commercial product. The CIA did not mind that there was no working product during that time. They needed the technology, so they were willing to wait.

Wilson also details the early Mormon interest in Oracle. The LDS Church and LDS technologists had a direct practical reason to care about Oracle: genealogy, membership, missionary, and institutional record systems were giant relational data problems. They were also the exact type of huge relational-data problem Oracle was built to solve. Thus, many early Oracle salesmen and engineers were Mormons.

The convergence of these three institutions, CIA, LDS, and Oracle, seems like it would point to a backroom conspiracy. There may even be one, but the emergent dynamic had far more important consequences than any caffeine-free cabal meeting would have.

Oracle sat at the technical center of two huge identity-record cultures: the national-security state and the LDS genealogical bureaucracy. Mormon talent helped Oracle because Mormons understood the use case intuitively, and Oracle helped LDS institutions because relational databases were ideal for genealogy and membership-scale recordkeeping. The shared interest of these three organizations led each to develop direct relationships with the others, from which the relational database emerged.

Today, the relational database is the default backbone of business software and has moved beyond being an Oracle-only technology. SQL databases are available on every cloud platform, and anyone can spin up a local PostgreSQL or SQLite database thanks to the open licenses. The world would not spin as it does today without relational databases, and they would not exist without Oracle.

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Michael Steinberger (whose libtardation masquerading as objective neutrality is nearly unreadable) quotes Alex Karp, in the biography of the piscine-cleped Palantir founder, as stating that Palantir's work is the wall that stands between modern Europe and a Europe where everyone is goose-stepping down the streets. This is because, Karp claims, numerous terrorist attacks have been prevented by Palantir that, if they had occurred, would have awoken the second era of forced Islamic exfiltration from Europe. I was struck by this line because it implies a profound incompetence on the part of liberal government in dealing with threats and adversity.

Post-Enlightenment liberal and democratic governments are incapable of serving the interests of the populace. Trump has made a Herculean effort in the United States to restore some effectiveness, but the problem is structural, not political. No bill passed through Congress, no Supreme Court decision, no amendment to the US Constitution (or any European equivalents) can solve the structural issue. Part of the problem is that decisiveness is suppressed and rendered impossible by the bureaucratic network. Make no mistake: Supreme Court decisions are entirely procedural matters, and in the last 2 years, have repeatedly challenged decisive actions by Trump.

This tension is not accidental. A liberal-constitutional order cannot write a general exception to all norms into the norms themselves without undermining the norms. It must suppress, proceduralize, bureaucratize, or hide the sovereign decision. This does not eliminate situations where the need for the state of exception arises.

A well-governed government upholds the well-being of the citizenry. To do so, there must occasionally be exceptional decisive action, especially in times of crisis. If the state fails in its duty in these instances, it may retain its legitimacy as a formal sovereign but prove it lacks capacity. If the state cannot make that decision, the decision migrates elsewhere. Whatever actor supplies the missing capacity assumes a sovereign function. It may not become sovereign in the formal juridical sense, but it becomes sovereign at the point where sovereignty matters most: the exception.

As the state fails and technology advances, technological capabilities and organizations step in to fill the shoes of sovereignty. Yet they only do this in a qualified sense. The formal sovereignty still belongs to the state because it is implicitly capable of disrupting its own norms. Functional sovereignty, however, rests with whoever actually makes decisions in times of crisis. The decisions in question are those that ordinarily belong to the state. Again, this is not a formal process or formal transition of sovereignty. Big tech does not abolish state sovereignty. Instead, it reveals that sovereignty has become fragmented, outsourced, and operationalized through technological systems. As private enterprises, they could not exist without some consumer or investment demand for their functional sovereignty. Existence of such demand indicates a failure of state sovereignty.

There are many examples that fit into this at different levels. As far back as Oracle’s first customer being the CIA, because the CIA needed to lean on an outside entity to put together the first relational databases, and also including the leaning on of private companies to control and manage information flows and push propaganda. Benjamin Franklin normatively declared that the postal system should belong to the government, and yet effective deliveries have been usurped by Amazon and effective communication has been usurped by the telegram the email the text message.

Palantir is one of the most striking examples. The rise of sensors in technology meant that more intelligence could be captured and observed, whether by police, the military, or other law enforcement agencies. More sensors mean more data, which must be understood in relation to all other data and meaningful context. Each new data inflow increases the complexity of reliably extracting intelligence. State intelligence apparatuses, militaries, and law enforcement agencies proved incapable of managing this complexity and drawing actual insights on their own.

These governmental organizations primarily operate to solve issues that should be solved upstream. Terror attacks could be prevented by not inviting foreigners by the millions and giving them free money. Crime and disorder are downstream from systemic problems such as “criminal justice reform” or electing judges who put insane people back on the streets (because they are insane). Empowering these hard-power entities, such as intelligence and armed forces, is treating the symptoms of the disease rather than the causes. The causes cannot be addressed because of liberal-democratic entropy. The symptoms cannot be treated by these entities alone because of the data's complexity. Hence, the need for a private enterprise like Palantir, which provides data ontology as a service.

The liberal state survives because technological intelligence systems perform the decisive work that the liberal state is too procedurally paralyzed to perform. In other cases, it survives because technological intelligence cleans up the mess caused by indecision.

The American Dynamism fund backs companies to serve a similar role. While the liberal state retains formal sovereignty, operational sovereignty lies with private-sector startups that can move quickly and operate like monarchies. Private tech companies, not the state, provide the operative capacity to build, decide, detect, deploy, manufacture, secure, and respond at crisis speed. The message American Dynamism sends is that the state is too slow, bureaucratic, and procedurally bound to meet exceptional threats. Therefore, startups must rebuild the practical machinery of national power.

Schmitt asks who decides. While private tech companies often do not make decisions directly, they increasingly provide the conditions under which the state makes them. Private entities like Palantir, Anduril, or SpaceX do not need to formally declare war, a state of exception, foreign policy, etc., to exercise operational sovereignty. But their status shifts from mere government contractors to something more when the state's core functions become impossible without them. In this era, the state of exception ceases to be a legal moment and becomes an operational environment in which private tech companies constitute the nervous system of sovereignty.

This is not libertarian privatization, in which the state's power decreases. The transfer of operational sovereignty empowers the state, even as it makes every effort to destroy itself. Critical functions need to be separated from the decay of democracy. The state retains symbols of legitimacy (courts, offices, chain of command. However, the ability to act on the exception increasingly depends upon companies that can supply the technological organs of decision.

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Whatever steps into decide the exception does not necessarily become sovereign in the full juridical sense. But it does assume a sovereign function. If sovereignty is defined not by ceremonial legitimacy but by the concrete capacity to decide when normal rules are insufficient, then the technological actor that enables or makes such decisions becomes sovereign at the point of exception. The modern liberal state retains the title of sovereign while outsourcing the substance of sovereignty to technological systems it cannot fully understand, publicly justify, or democratically control.

• Media: the tools and technologies by and through which we perceive and communicate.

• Media ecology: the study of media as environments that shape our thoughts, actions, and existence.

• AI: generative artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, often multimodal (can handle image and audio data, not just text)

• AI Agent: an LLM (often multimodal) connected to a framework that enables it to “take action” by using framework-defined tool calls. Typically, these frameworks are programming-related, allowing agents to organize and execute written code and interact with local or remote environments and applications (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor). Recently, many agent frameworks have been developed for use outside programming (e.g., Claude Cowork, OpenClaw).

A media ecological analysis is not a process of creation. Nothing new is created; things are only observed. In assessing the ecology of media, one analyzes how it has already impacted the human environment, understands how it has extended the human sensorium, and notes the pressure the medium exerts on its content. Media ecology is not invention but rather discovery (which does not preclude prediction). Having been a longtime student of media ecology, my aggressive foray into the cutting edge of AI Agents since the paradigm shifted in December has had a media ecology sub-process running in the background. I have been paying attention. How does this impact the human environment? How is this extending me? How is this shaping me? What biases is this introducing? But not only me. How is this/will this shape society, the human macro-environment? What happens to human beings when the Noosphere-given-voice grows metaversal arms and legs?

Precision

There is more than one way to skin a cat, so the saying goes. This analogy breaks down pretty quickly because I do not know any of the ways, but I imagine some are better than others. Prompting is like this. Ask someone to skin a cat, and you may have a serious cleanup job on your hands. Prompting is itself a skill, and the more I do it, the more I realize that fact.

Consider the scenario: You have a data-processing application that ingests data from a web source, transforms it, and then sends it to an external process. It has an error. You do not know what the error is, just that the process has stopped running. With agentic programming, you have two avenues:

There was a problem, fix it.

This is the first and easiest thought to write into the prompt. It is also likely the wrong prompt if the problem was severe or the software in question is important. A stack trace might show the full issue, but it may also omit important details that the AI and console logs do not capture. Or perhaps the problem did not show up in the logs at all; perhaps there is some issue with the processed data that would seem fine to an AI agent without domain knowledge. Defining the problem clearly is the first step, and then it is also necessary to define what the solution looks like, and occasionally what steps need to be taken to get there, to ensure that it is solved effectively.

Fellow Substack author states in ‘Against Sloppification’, subtitled “Resisting the temptation to automate thought”:1

AI offers a merely functional orientation fixated on problem-solving. Problem-solving, I need hardly mention, is certainly an aspect of human intelligence. And yet, it is also by no means all there is to human intelligence. Most of the best stuff in life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be basked in.

Reyburn’s assessment of the difference between AI and human intelligence is accurate and is often lost by materialists. Later in the essay, he says:

Now, let’s look at adding AI to the digital mix. What do we get?... AI encourages what is called “cognitive offloading.” Think of any skill you have. Now, think of getting a machine to use that skill. Then, come back to it yourself. The effect of not using the skill turns out to be exactly like muscle atrophy. What you don’t use, you lose.

(Go read his full essay, an excellent McLuhanite analysis of generative AI from a different angle.)

For these reasons, I do not let AI anywhere near my writing process. I enjoy thinking, figuring things out, and writing. I do not want the cognitive rot of the easy button to ruin that for me. I make an exception for bulk research, but I often have to sift through a lot of chaff before I get to the wheat. But it is still faster. (If you have a problem with this, consider that Google search is simply a dumber (sloppier) AI). I do not have the same reservations about letting it near work/hobby software and computer projects. I take it to the extreme in software, and what I have noticed is the exact opposite of what happens when people use AI for writing.

Because in the situation I just described, the AI has not replaced the core thinking. It has handled a lot of the more granular thinking about code syntax and algorithms and the like, but the abstracted thinking, the programming decisions, are done by me. After a few months of this, my thinking has become much clearer, and I think through problems at a more abstract level, applying that thinking both at work and in life. Coming up with a good prompt is a matter of properly articulating what you want, how it is measured, and then imagining every single counterfactual interpretation and projecting multiple future paths to protect against the ones you do not want. Many prompt AI without telling it what they think; they are telling it. They leave their statements ambiguous, giving the agent room to make assumptions they will pay for later. They are not treading it like the breakfast question. What would your agent have built if you hadn’t written make no mistakes.

Sure, my ability to write Python by hand will likely never recover, but why would it need to? Unlike writing, artisanal, handcrafted code quickly loses utility if it can be done just as well with a prompt. In an email or Substack article, the recipients must read the words to consume the output. With good code, no one should need to read it. The software should just work. Then again, how much AI-written software is out there right now that just works?

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Active Tactics | Contemplative Strategy

Agents can spew out code faster than anything before. The world is abuzz with people talking about all the stuff their agents are building. The world is not abuzz with agent-built stuff. Strange disconnect here.

AI agents have a heavy bias toward tactical programming. They will find the quickest solution to patch over whatever the prompt asks for, with little regard for the overall architecture. John Ousterhout describes in his book A Philosophy of Software Design a distinction between tactical and strategic programming. Tactical programming chooses the shortest path. Strategic programming chooses the path that makes all future paths shorter. The design decisions that go into the latter option require some foresight and reasoning about uncertainty that agents seem to fail at.

This bias goes hand in hand with another bias that agents introduce. They spew out code so fast, the diffs whiz by at breakneck speed. It is like a slot machine. Tokens in, always a lot more tokens out, but are the tokens any good? At a certain point, it becomes hard to tell. Fire up three Claude Code sessions in parallel on three distinct projects and start working on them. 15 prompts later, you have no idea what they have done or where they have gone, no way to know whether you have what you wanted, because you do not even know if the feedback loop was correct. These are all solvable problems, of course, but the bias is against them. Especially when the cursor in the prompt box blinks away, telling you more activity, max out this usage session, wouldn’t want to leave money on the table, would you?

Korean-German media theorist Byung-Chul Han distinguishes between the active and contemplative lives. Contemplation is often lost or forgotten in the loop described above. One must contemplate before the prompt. One must contemplate after the prompt. One must contemplate a lot after the prompt (unless it is web design, in which case you just see it). At a low threshold of complexity, it quickly becomes necessary for the human user to activate the electric meat of the mind and figure out what is going on. Sorry, agent, your usefulness has rapidly diminished.

The only limiting factor for an agent is what the user told it to do. For the user to tell it what to do, it needs to have a better idea of what is going on than the agent does: not necessarily about each and every bit of code, but at the abstract layers of the software as a whole. Agents can quickly lose sight of the goals and broader context, instead optimizing for some arbitrary metric they extract from the prompt's ambiguity.

Therefore, the optimal agent workflow includes revolving periods of activity and contemplation, the contemplative parts being more boring than the rapid slop-machine prompting. The bias is towards maximal activity, of course, but the optimal way to use it is the former, making it a second-order bias: those who choose to overcome the first bias will be the most effective with this medium. Unless, of course, someone can strike the balance and effectively process the rapid activity and translate it into actual outcomes, like the synthesists in Blindsight, who speak to AI and mediate the post-human symbolic system of the AI through information topologies for the sake of useful insight and verification. Such an activity or ability would be of great value and would involve identifying and tightening the most important feedback loop so that the outputs meet requirements and steer agents in the right direction without intensive human oversight.

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Societal Impact

There are still doubters out there, still some people who believe AI is a bubble. Meanwhile, there is more demand than supply for GPUs used to run Claude. Enterprise and individual customers compete against one another and the researchers to get a piece of the finite pie. When there is not enough to go around, it is not a too-much-VC-money situation. It is quite the opposite. Pets.com never had to consider how soon they should start using the trillion-word in infrastructure discussions.

Almost every day I am speaking with friends and family members new and old as they talk about or ask me what the AI can do. A good place to start is the boring stuff. This is how I got hooked on it in the first place, doing tasks that are little more than the digital analog of loading boxes into a truck. If the scale is right and the outcomes are measurable and verifiable, AI agents are a very good fit. There are many little annoying things like that across many information work jobs, and AI can shave anywhere from 30-95% off them. This impact has yet to be fully realized, as most AI users who have prompted ChatGPT a couple of times have not yet discovered the extent of the available optimization.2

In the short term, this has allowed me and many others to work faster on our individual jobs, creating a bit of breathing room and asymmetry. But this is rapidly snapping back in the other direction as institutional adoption steams ahead at breakneck speed. Shareholders and managers expect higher output. While this expectation is justified when one takes a simple view of agents, it feeds directly into the activity bias. This runs the risk of sloppification of the bureaucracy (aka hell).

This will likely resolve itself in the coming years, though, as agents are used more effectively across more domains and automated agentic systems are put in place. They will make bureaucracy effectively frictionless, being able to process, handle, and parse near-endless swaths of documentation and data. This being effective has some serious dependencies, though. Currently, agents can handle large code bases and document stores relatively effectively, and certainly quickly, but they primarily rely on tool use. They do not read everything from top to bottom; instead, they use bash commands to list files and find specific words in code and documents.

This can occasionally lead to prompt ambiguity, causing the agent to provide an incorrect answer. Even if they do not give an incorrect answer, they may give an overly confident answer. Users may assume that agents are competent in areas where they are not and trust their answers anyway. Both of these scenarios could be resolved in the next few years (or days3), but until they are, widespread agent adoption will put a question mark on everything. Even if one assumes that agents make such mistakes 10% of the time (it certainly varies by domain and prompting competence), that still leaves the rest of the information in question, creating a liminal work environment of quasi-truth and possibly useful information flows. Nobody will be certain of any of it.

I will forgo any discussion of “alignment” or related topics because I find the subject uninteresting and do not wish to make predictions about it. AI Agents lack the (ironically) agency to make any of the end-of-the-world predictions come true, and on its own, an LLM is simply space-age auto-complete and pretty dumb without the advanced agentic harnesses that are in use today. That being said, the threat model of AI Agents, both with and without accompanying world models in their multimodal capacity, certainly falls within an assessment of the human environment, but it is a more specialized and predictive domain, whereas this essay focuses on my direct observations of the impact of agentic AI.

Thank you for giving your time and attention to this essay. Much of what I have described I have discovered through practice, so translating it into the written word has been a bit of a challenge, and I am still unsure whether I have been accurate in everything I have written. But this is a rapidly evolving media landscape, and the environment and impact are certain to change.

1

The Eucatastrophologist

Against sloppification

In the year I was born, Harvard Law professor Roger Fisher proposed the rather shocking and, as it turns out, unwelcome idea that America’s nuclear launch codes should be implanted next to a volunteer’s heart so that the President would have to personally murder that volunteer to retrieve the codes and unleash doom upon the world. “My suggestion was qui…

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8 months ago · 154 likes · Duncan Reyburn

Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in 1973, arguing that memes are units of information transmitted through culture, much like genes are transmitted through reproduction. While some of the finer quantifiable points of Dawkins’ proposition do not stand up to scrutiny or scientific study, it is impossible to deny that there is an analogy here. Ideas exist, and they spread. Memes with certain advantages will “survive” more effectively than others. Ideas that contribute to the continuation of life will spread more effectively than those that do the opposite. Memes that make one feel good will spread effectively, but so can memes that make one feel bad if they feel the need to offload that feeling onto another mind to be rid of it.

While there is far more to say about memetics, and especially about its relationship to mimetics, this essay will not go further into what makes ideas spread well. This essay focuses instead on ideas that do not spread well for various reasons: antimemes, countermemes, and entromemes.

Antimemes

An antimeme is an idea that cannot spread easily. Out of the types discussed in this essay, this is the least interesting. An antimeme is hard to describe, like a complex mathematical formula. Even if it can be described simply, there is an obstacle to its transmission. An idea is like a seed, and to grow, it needs to be planted in fertile soil. One may be able to explain a gradient easily (as the combination of partial derivatives of a multivariable function), but the recipient needs a background in calculus to understand it effectively.

This kind of information is common and typically found in advanced graduate school textbooks. It can be accessed and spread, but it takes a very long time for such memes to do so. For a mind to receive and spread these kinds of ideas, it must be trained and disciplined over a long period of time.

Countermemes

Countermeme is barely a real term, with its only definition being in Wiktionary:

A meme posted in opposition to or as a mockery of another meme.

This is a terrible definition. Discard forever. Here is a better thing for the term to refer to. A countermeme is a meme that completely neutralizes the memetic forces of another meme. This means the former idea can no longer spread, which makes it quite difficult to find an example of it. This does not refer to the debunking of an idea, because in such instances, both the debunked idea and its debunking can survive and be transmitted. This is more akin to the original idea no longer existing and being entirely replaced by another idea.

A description of such a meme can only be approached from the side, not head-on. Hopefully, the reader will relate to this: occasionally, one becomes acquainted with something new, whether it is a new book, a new TV show, a system, or perhaps even another person. At the onset of such a discovery, one tends to have a first impression, a specific perspective on the matter. When one spends enough time with the subject at hand, that perspective can shift dramatically as it becomes more fleshed out. In the end, one realizes that their perspective has changed, but because of the new information, they cannot bring their head back to the previous perspective that lacked it. I have had this experience a few times, and it is especially pronounced when the initial understanding is a misperception.

Even if the reader cannot relate to this experience, I can, which means it exists. There are ideas that, at one time, depended on my subjective perception and that I cannot possibly recover because my subjective perception has since gained more information.

Another example may be gaslighting. When gaslighting, one introduces countermemes into another's head. These are often temporary countermemes in which the original erased idea is eventually recovered.

Entromemes

Entromemes (a term I just made up), or entropic memes, are ideas that break down as they are spread. They decompose and become less of what they are. They lose structure and coherence in their spread, even if they can still be represented. There is only one instance I can think of where information has this property: inefficiencies in the stock market.

The stock market is a remarkably effective information transmission device. It uses skin-in-the-game incentives to get all information about a security reflected in its price as quickly as possible. When this is not happening, and information is not priced in, such as if you see the ad for the iPhone 19x pro before anyone on Wall Street, you can act on this information and buy Apple stock. In doing so, you drive up demand for the stock, raising the price just a little bit. As the information disseminates, the price now reflects the increase in value that the new iPhone brings to Apple’s stock.

Edges in the stock market tend to be more complex than this, but not always. Often, an inefficiency is that information is not being priced in quickly enough. One can act on this fact and make the trade before this information is priced in. However, once they maximize this, they close the gap. They are now the ones pricing in the information, and the edge no longer exists. The idea of an edge in the stock market disappears once it is acted upon.

These edges disappear even faster when they are disseminated because more people act on them, causing them to fade. Edge erosion is why Renaissance Technologies is so secretive about its algorithms, and why there is a cap on the number of its investors in its fund. If information about their algorithms, which consistently beat the market (until recently), were made public, the essential aspect of that information (that it is an edge in the stock market) would decay.

Entromemetic edge erosion is similar to strategy optimization in game theory. Players will adjust their strategies based on new information, especially if that information is the opponent changing their strategy. Best possible strategies cease to be the best once everyone knows about them. Then they are no longer the best possible strategies: the meme itself degrades into just another strategy. The thing that made the meme spread: its effectiveness as a strategy, disappears as it spreads. An interesting dynamic is at play here, and I have had a hard time finding other examples of it.

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Meaninglessness

The plot of Infinite Jest takes place mostly outside the book. It is not even in the background of the book. It is absent, with only a couple of references to the “true plot,” which the reader must piece together after reading. It is as if Infinite Jest is a long collection of character backgrounds to serve as a baseline for the real plot. But it is not necessarily boring. Rather, it demonstrates persistent existential unease with a relative absence of drama. Long passages reflect the low grade “struggle” with this unease, which we all feel every day in boredom or other feelings.

Life is monotonous and lacks the typical extravagance of a good story. Work, school, responsibilities, and sleep onward into infinity. Many aspects of what we now call “tradition” were complex social technologies that addressed this, giving life coherence and meaning. Without those, coherence and meaning are not totally lost, but they are significantly lost. We did away with them because we found easier ways to handle the feeling. Ernst Junger observes in On Danger that bourgeois society has created an intolerably boring life. Danger is something far away, and the everyday stakes of life disappear. Wallace’s novel depicts a world in which characters experience a dull, persistent dissatisfaction with ordinary life. “The truth is usually not just un-but anti-interesting.” (p. 441) Gerhardt Schtitt, the token German at Enfield Tennis Academy, finds the USA both amusing and frightening due to its alien nature. Schtitt had his early education in a “Kanto-Hegelian” gymnasium, which taught how to “sacrifice the hot narrow imperatives of the Seelf... to the larger imperatives of a team” and state, which prepares the child for compliance with and service to the state and laws in adulthood. The United States, on the other hand, is not a team nor a code but instead a “sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.” (p. 76) The US exemplifies modernity in this way, with Schtitt observing that there is nothing larger to be part of or to serve. Instead, it is the individual, free to pursue his or her private pleasure.

This ethos takes away communal guiding lights. The Church, the State, the People, all of that is anachronistic and authoritarian, so the individual gets to decide on their own directives. These individual directives have gotten tastier over time, optimizing for only the quick dopamine hit. This results in profound boredom and concomitant minimal viable pleasure-seeking. Cybernetic circuitry reinforces the feeling of boredom and the need to appease it. Byung Chul Han argues that a sociology of hyperattention emerges. Boredom is a precursor to contemplation, which is a precursor to humanity's cultural achievements, and is frenetically attacked and washed away. Rapid change between tasks and sources of information is the dominant mode of awareness. What is necessary for the converse (meaningful construction of greatness) is not only boredom but profound boredom. Deep contemplative attention vanishes. This hyperattention has progressed since Wallace wrote to the point at which all feel the “spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important.” (p. 596) The low-grade stimulation provided by the television will become the focal point in a room filled with loved ones.

This stimulation from television or TikTok streams hollows out the soul. Look at someone’s eyes while they scroll without them noticing. You see that it sucks it all out, all feeling and meaning, as if the scrolling social media feed was a high-speed treadmill placed too close to a tablecloth. It disappears and remains gone until the treadmill is turned off and the cloth is pulled out. Anhedonia or some kind of depression is described as something clinical and particular, but it has become generalized. With this generalization comes cope:

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. (p. 597)

Although the anhedonia is not always performed in such a way, the experience of total social media-induced numbness has a necessarily performative character in that one only observes the performance of others for the social media feed, proceeding then to perform accordingly, as if always displayed in a social media feed. Baudrillard reflects on the collapse of play-acting and reality in reality television. Among others, no one is with others any longer but always potentially on camera, on reality teevee, and so they must dance to become part of the stimulation sludge that they consume. This performance consumption complex is one of many forms of escapism from the existential unease that permeates modernity. Wallace depicts other forms of escapism.

Escape

Escapism from boredom is not mere indulgence. American culture has made this escapism imperative. Life is spiritually flat, so one must urgently consume and relieve through commercially available means. This is the most clear theme in Infinite Jest, with one setting being a halfway house for recovering drug abusers, and a central theme being the brain-melting pleasure-maxxing “Entertainment”. The dullness and need for intoxication are clear from one of the first chapters, in which Erdedy waits isolated in his apartment after making every excuse for why he will not be seen in everyday life. He is waiting for his weed dealer to get back to him and promising himself that this is the last time he will go on a multi-day, solitary weed binge. Trapped in his boring and secure world, he waits for the call from his dealer, making every excuse that he needs it. Erdedy has a life, job, friends, etc., like everyone else, but in the age of spiritual flatness and consumerist nihilism, he needs to escape to the dull high of weed just to escape. He does not even like the experience, and marijuana ceases to be nearly as fun when used habitually. His hope is that he can snap himself out of it by using too much and making himself completely sick of marijuana.

In 2026, weed dealers do not exist anymore because, like every other banal pleasure, it can be purchased and delivered at any time with the click of a button. Pleasure becomes a duty in this spiritual desolation. Baudrillard argues that the consumer treats it as an obligation imposed on them, and, in many respects, this is due to advertising's psychological aggression. The consuming subject believes they are obliged to be happy, to have love, and dynamic, euphoric experiences. Baudrillard states: “This is the principle of the maximization of existence by the multiplication of contacts and relations, by the intensive use of signs and objects, and by the systematic exploitation of all the possibilities of pleasure.” The new ethics of constraining obligation toward happiness and pleasure (only ever in banal forms) is the modern equivalent of the duty toward labor. If the subject forgets to consume, Baudrillard continues, “he will be gently and instantly reminded that he has no right not to be happy.” He is obliged to engage in continuous pleasure maxxing, lest he run “the risk of being satisfied with what he has and of becoming asocial.” (Baudrillard, Selected Writings, p. 28)

The consumption ethos exists because of the total commodification of American capitalism. In Wallace’s book, time is subsidized. Years are not numbered, but named after a product or brand that purchased it. President Gentle pursues this decision after facing the triple-bind of an electorate that wants new stuff, no new taxes, and a Reserve Board that wants a balanced budget. After returning from a football game, he notes that the stadiums are named after sponsors, so why not years? There is no beginning or end to the cycle of consumerism. Revenue is needed to sustain consumption; it is generated through advertising slot sales, which in turn feed back into consumption.

The compulsion to consume interlocks with the compulsion to optimize. The subject views itself as a project that must be perfected and constructed. Han observes in In the Swarm that this is the new essence of liberation. Performance, achievement, and self-optimization are the expectations, and are displayed most clearly at Enfield Tennis Academy, where boarding students engage in slavish devotion to perfecting their tennis skills. “The achievement subject exploits itself until it collapses,” Han says. Not only is this seen in the psychological troubles of the students at ETA, but also by the founder, J. O. Incandenza, who commits suicide upon the completion of the Entertainment. “Often enough, they lead to suicide... the self turns out to be a projectile that it now turns on itself.” (Han, In the Swarm, p. 49) The core of Han’s observation about optimization is that freedom is not the absence of coercion, as classical liberal ethics indicates. Rather, freedom turns into self-coercion, because one must determine what to do with one’s freedom. Even attempts to pursue something great are done in an atomized manner outside of a broader, cohesive cultural project. “Psychic maladies such as depression and burnout express a profound crisis of freedom,” Han says. (Han, Psychopolitics, p. 1)

Self-optimization dominates ETA through total quantification of the self. There is a class on understanding athletic spreadsheets; every student is ranked nationally and within the academy. Players’ progress is constantly gauged like market performance: “This endless tension among E.T.A.s about how the coaches are seeing you, gauging your progress — is your stock going up or down.” (p. 651) Measurements of error and tactics at the minute level factor into the lives of all students, even to the point where their extracurricular game, Eschaton, is a convoluted, statistics-heavy activity. Other characters also place an undue focus on self-measurement, such as the chief of the US Office of Unspecified Services, Rodney Tine Sr., who cannot help his compulsive daily self-measurements.

The quantification of the self creates a false image of the subject, in which the subject is confused with a compilation of isolated measurements of the subject. This has reached an extreme in the digital age, in which big data constantly harvests user information to profile individuals for consumerist or political advertising and targeting. What emerges is a shadow or phantom of the subject profiled from their data residua. Bratton ties together self-optimization and hyper quantification. He argues that this form of optimization “elevates the principles of User-centered design into an existential mandate for biological disclosure and epistemological closure tuned to harmonize with the hyperindividuated self-regard native to the zones that link transhumanism and Atlas Shrugged... self-mastery through the quantification of system... is premised on a fundamental misrecognition—one for which the visual coherency of the object tracked is taken as validation of the subjective coherency of the “self” that stares back at it. As before, mirror reflection makes a false guarantee of the self’s apparent outline.” (, The Stack, p. 375)

The self is confused with its statistical representation. Hal understands himself as number 4 and John Wayne as number 1. Perception replaces the real with the representation, further symbolized how the ETA pass-time of Eschaton is a game which plays out nuclear conflict over a map, representing a territory, which collapse into one and are also played out over the tennis court, which is the map for the ETA students and yet it becomes their total life future and territory, just as their understanding of self is constructed through the values in the cells on the athletic spreadsheet.

The quantification of the self causes the subject to lose sight of the aspects of itself that are not quantifiable and cannot be reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet. Despite the hypothetical ability of scientific measurement to describe and quantify a human being, from the cells in the body to the synapses in the brain, the measurement of a thing is not the thing itself. It is a map of the thing, a representation according to a discrete theoretical schema, not an exhaustive replication of the thing in all aspects. This one-sided view of the self can lead the subject down a path of neuroses and depression, opening the door to further feelings of meaninglessness as the mysterious, unpredictable, and varied aspects of the human are hidden away. This results in further desire for consumption of numbing substances, whether it is drugs or entertainment.

The Entertainment itself is the logical conclusion of a self-pleasing, consumerist system: why not just go to extremes? Have the perfect maximum pleasure? Just overdose on heroin? Watch the most pleasurable film of all time to the point at which you will defecate on yourself and starve to death while viewing, and if you are forcibly taken away, you will never feel any pleasure again without it?

Agents Steeply and Marathe discuss the p-terminal and its relationship to the Entertainment. Steeply describes its discovery during a trial-and-error brain stimulation study:

‘What happened was that Olders and the Canadian neuroscientists happened to find, during all the trial and error, that firing certain electrodes in certain parts of the lobes gave the brain intense feelings of pleasure.’ Steeply looked back over his shoulder at Marathe. ‘I mean we’re talking about intense pleasure, Rémy. I’m remembering Olders called these little strips of stimulatable pleasure-tissue p-terminals.’ (p. 406)

Upon its discovery, the scientists began stimulating it in animals. The animals would auto-stimulate when given the chance thousands of times per hour, ignoring food, sex, and all other survival needs. When it came time to experiment on human subjects, regulations prohibited studies involving unwilling subjects. The study was leaked, and “hordes” of willing subjects showed up to be tested on, “just for the chance of this kind of pleasure,” and they were not deviants in any way. “Just regular young people... Volunteering for fatal addiction to the electrical pleasure.” (p. 408)

They float the idea of it becoming a consumer product, and everyone just staying home. Totally normal people shut into their homes, flicking the p-terminals, abandoning community and relations altogether. Total civic collapse. The agents analogize this to the Entertainment, which has the same effect. The prospect is horrifying, to find something so pleasurable that one would abandon everything in life that they ever found meaningful just to pursue pleasure unto death. Yet this is the logic of the entertainment age, where pleasure is used as a shield against nihilism. But it does not restore the good things; it is an anti-life escape from all negativity, from working through the emptiness to find the meaning on the other side.

Communication

The numbing self-pleasures engaged in to escape the meaninglessness lead the subject to isolation. Erdedy is alone as he waits for his weed, and he plans to be locked up alone for days with his weed. The consumer of the Entertainment consumes it alone, even if in the presence of others. Hal is incredibly secretive about his use of marijuana, going to extreme lengths to keep it under wraps. This means isolating himself when he consumes, and remaining isolated as long as necessary so that the effects of the drug do not tip off others. At the start of the book, which is also its final scene, Hal is trapped in his own mind. He has lost the ability to intelligibly communicate, although his inner monologue is intact.

His consciousness becomes sealed within its own experience, which reflects the atomization brought about by digital media consumption. Hal’s condition likely stems from accidental consumption of DMZ, aka Madame Psychosis, a fictional giga-psychedelic. Although the exact mechanism of Hal’s consumption is unclear, and may have had something to do with the ghost of his father, it unlocked a richer interior life for Hal. Before committing suicide, James Incandenza was certain that his son Hal was unable to speak. This was not true, but J. sought to connect with Hal despite his misunderstanding. He created the fateful Entertainment to communicate with Hal. It is unclear if Hal ever views it. That being said, it is possible that J.’s ghost drugged Hal, making Hal impossible to understand as J. thought he was, but also unlocking an emotional depth in him. This descent into incommunicability coincides with Hal quitting marijuana, an isolating and numbing substance. He leaves behind the numbing substance and develops emotional richness, but he loses the ability to communicate. This is the opening scene of the book, where his uncle CT bargains with college admissions and coaches to get Hal into college. Their discussion of Hal is not about Hal himself but about the quantified Hal, and why his grades and tennis performance qualify him for matriculation. Both symbolically and literally, Hal is mute because he has escaped numbness and found who he is on the inside, but those who surround him see him only as a number.

Communication is lost today. People exchange information, but the deeper forms of communication are few and far between. It is communication without community. The rapid flow of information through text messages, group chats, and social media is not a replacement. Flusser commented on the meaninglessness of the information stream before the age of digital tech:

The form of contemporary society embodies an unsatisfactory and in part incorrect perception of the society’s cerebral, netlike character. Mass culture, proliferating kitsch, the descent into boredom, into entropy, are the results of this faulty organization. As a result, the real function of society (of the mind) is thwarted. Rather than producing improbable, adventurous things, contemporary society is close to exhausting the information that is fed into it. It is a stupid society. (Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, p. 92)

Talking about a teevee show is banal; it is not communication in a community. It is good to share interests, but if relationships revolve around discussions of how we entertain and pleasure ourselves, they are hollow. The media environment has funneled society to this point. Written and printed words both led to an increase of interiority as information could be consumed in solitude, rather than in a community. Walter Ong argues that the “evolution of consciousness through human history is marked by growth in articulate attention to the interior of the individual person as distanced.” Philosophy becomes more preoccupied with the ego and the interior life over time, as does narrative. The progression “of consciousness described in a Jungian framework by Erich Neumann... move toward a selfconscious, articulate, highly personal, interiority.” (Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 173) Inward focus of consciousness created a feedback loop with the presence of written and printed words, both reinforcing one another. The printed word made this especially the case. Ong observed that “. The advent of print intensified the inwardness fostered by script. The age of print was immediately marked in Protestant circles by advocacy of private, individual interpretation of the Bible, and in Catholic circles was marked by the growth of frequent private confession of sins, and concomitantly a stress on the examination of conscience.” (Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 149) This inferiority has many positive aspects, but it increases the risk of total isolation from others as it grows.

Digital communication makes it worse, because relationships can be simulated through digital media. The subject understands oneself as quantified through digital relationships in terms of the number of likes, friends, and followers. These provide the illusion of relationships and a simulacrum of community. Han argues that the “compulsion of self-production” in attention grabbing displays through digital media, “leads to a crisis of community.” Community in the digital age is “atrophied,” and it “lacks the symbolic power to bind people together.” (Han, Disappearance of Rituals, p. 13) A healthy community needs an orientation; it needs to be directed toward something transcendent for the group to share a common purpose beyond mere career. Nations, high cultures, and faiths have filled this role for most of human history, but post-Enlightenment rationalists carefully dismantled each of them, labeling them anachronistic. There is no transcendent rallying point in the age of reason on a large scale, but communication only occurs on a large scale.

Order

The need for a higher purpose echoes Schtitt’s earlier observation in this review. It is easy to simply assume that extreme discipline, Prussian-style, will fix everything. As inclined as I am towards that perspective, that is not the perspective Wallace presents. Schtitt himself sees excellence as something only attainable through “sacrifice of Self” to the rules/Law: “The only way to get to them: sacrifice. Suffer. Deny. What are you willing to give.” (p. 83). Yet it risks psychic deformation: “It’s possible that the only jr. tennis players who can win their way to the top and stay there without going bats are the ones who are already bats, or else who seem to be just grim machines” (p. 377). The pursuit of excellence, especially athletic excellence, often takes on a celebrity form. This brings its own host of issues, in that relationships risk becoming extremely shallow, and the adoration of thousands simply serves as another numbing mechanism. Wallace uses Orin’s punting euphoria (”30,000 voices... as One Sound”) to stage performance as a temporary exit from self-consciousness: it is transcendence via spectacle rather than relation (p. 257). This is excellence as insulation, using elite performance as its own substitute for meaning.

The other prominent setting in IJ is Ennet House, the halfway house for rehabilitating drug addicts. Being a place for addicts, the house rules mandate that tenants must frequent AA or some other anonymous meeting. Addicts arrive at the house skeptical that they will ever be able to recover. Among them is Don Gately, who has graduated from the program and now works at the house to help others in their recovery. Wallace describes him:

Don Gately was a twenty-seven-year-old oral narcotics addict (favoring Demerol and Talwin), and a more or less professional burglar; and he was, himself, unclean and violated. But he was a gifted burglar, when he burgled — though the size of a young dinosaur, with a massive and almost perfectly square head he used to amuse his friends when drunk by letting them open and close elevator doors on, he was, at his professional zenith, smart, sneaky, quiet, quick, possessed of good taste and reliable transportation — with a kind of ferocious jolliness in his attitude toward his livelihood. (p. 52)

After spending four months in Ennet House, Gately was surprised to find out that any of the recovery process works. It is extremely regimented and community-focused. After those four months, Gately realizes that he has stopped sneaking away to use. It was not a conscious decision to stop; he just realized that he already had: “The idea that AA might actually somehow work unnerved him. He suspected some sort of trap. Some new sort of trap.” (p. 303) It seems like a trap because Ennet house functions in a manner that fills in the void that addicts are trying to fill in the first place. Part of this process means acknowledging a higher power, something above the material world, the wants of the self, something transcending all of it. In Gately’s path to recovery, he makes himself act as if there were a transcendent force before he has confidence that there is one:

His sole experience so far is that he takes one of AA’s very rare specific suggestions and hits the knees in the A.M. and asks for Help and then hits the knees again at bedtime and says Thank You, whether he believes he’s talking to Anything/body or not, and he somehow gets through that day clean... Gately still feels like he has no access to the Big spiritual Picture. He feels about the ritualistic daily Please and Thank You prayers rather like like a hitter that’s on a hitting streak and doesn’t change his jock or socks or pre-game routine for as long as he’s on the streak. (p. 382)

The question of a higher power is considered by many throughout the book. Some are more willing to consider it than others, but the AA veterans always say the same thing to the newcomers: whatever you think about it, whatever your opinion on God, it works. It leads to recovery, so if recovery is what the newcomer wants, they need to accept AA's higher power tenet and practice it. It is not sufficient on its own for recovery, though.

Ennet House and AA embrace a relapse architecture, with the house's physical and social structures designed to manage a return to normalcy (p. 173). The aesthetics of the space matter because the environment orients the subject. They practice ritual humility. AA slogans are treated as a catalog of routinized survival language. “I came here to learn to live by cliches... To turn my will and life over to the care of cliches,” one resident says (p. 236). The residents must humble themselves and trust received wisdom, even if it seems little and dumb. Because it works, it is seen as little and dumb. Most people do not need to repeat these to themselves because they are automatic; they are the background process. The residents are missing these background processes that keep most people away from hard drugs. Language functions as behavioral scaffolding, and the recovering addicts must repeat the cliches before they know if they believe them or not. McLuhan describes clichés as recovered archetypes, often drawn from earlier ages. Archetypes, in the Jungian sense, embody a shared psychic entity produced by the experiences of multiple generations and expressed through art. The dismissal and loss of archetypes, because they are not rational or logical constructs, leads the subject to also dismiss the function the archetype served. Repeating a cliché is a means of rectifying that.

AA meetings are repetitive and unglamorous, with everyone speaking in a communal setting, with no optimization or drive toward efficiency or consumption. There is no quantification of the self except in relation to escape from the substance, no simulation, and no irony. It is not done to be pretty or fun. It is a process of communal vulnerability in which the truth must be told to oneself and to others. “An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church.” (p. 320)

Recovery in Ennet House and AA is a life of rituals. These rituals bind together and bring forth a community with a common purpose above themselves and a shared rhythm. Han describes a crisis of resonance taking place in modern society because we have lost the dimension of the other. Shared rituals are a critical component of maintaining resonance:

Rituals bring forth a community in which resonances occur, one that is capable of accord, of a common rhythm:... Without resonance we are thrown back on to ourselves, isolated. Increasing narcissism works against the experience of resonance. Resonance is not an echo of the self; the dimension of the other is inherent in it. It means accord. Where resonance disappears completely, depression arises. Today’s crisis of community is a crisis of resonance. Digital communication channels are filled with echo chambers in which the voices we hear are mainly our own. Likes, friends and followers do not provide us with resonance; they only strengthen the echoes of the self. (Han, The Disappearance of Rituals, pp. 10-11)

Digital technology eliminates resonance by placing people in echo chambers where they see only those they already strongly agree with and connect with. Hard questions and insights that prompt a serious examination of self, the kind needed to overcome the root causes of drug addiction, are not found in this environment. The digital forum is the opposite of an AA meeting, where the only way to survive social evisceration is an ever-present guard of irony. The medium of the message. Additionally, digital communication eliminates contact with the other because it is not even real. The subject recognizes its subjectivity by seeing itself through the eyes of the other, where the subjectivity of each is thrown back and forth as both recognize that they are thinking, feeling, flesh-and-blood humans. I am skeptical that this process was ever possible on the internet, but with the domination of generative language models, it is certainly impossible today.

The way to recover meaning amid the meaningless of digital entertainment, consumer culture, and pain avoidance is to rebuild real community through shared rituals and a common vision that transcends materialism.

Addendum: Joelle

This review is effectively complete, but it seems odd not to mention Joelle Van Dyne, a through-line for many of the themes discussed above. Joelle is the former girlfriend of Orin Incandenza, Hal’s older brother. During their relationship, Joelle developed a strangely close relationship with J.O. Incandenza prior to his suicide. She was the victim of a chemical attack by her family member, which permanently disfigured her face, after which she has appeared exclusively wearing a veil. What is unclear is whether this disfiguring made her face beautiful or horrendous. From the little Wallace tells the reader about the Entertainment, it is clear that Joelle features prominently in the film, possibly with her veil lifted.

Joelle runs a radio show under the persona “Madame Psychosis”, which is also a name for the ultra-potent DMZ that Hal likely ingested, which made him unable to speak, as his father believed him to be, but also gave him a rich emotional life. J.O. created Entertainment to help Hal come out of his shell and connect with him. Shortly after the reader is introduced to Joelle, she nearly dies from a crack overdose and is placed in Ennett House, where she develops a close bond with Don Gately over the course of the book.

Her course seems relevant to the themes discussed here: she was already beautiful before her disfigurement, and she (possibly) jokes to Gately that her disfigurement is on the beautiful side. Physical beauty is recognized visually and consumable through visual media. She is and symbolizes the brain-frying Entertainment, and also names herself after the brain-frying DMZ, both of which J.O. used or intended to use to change Hal, and she lands in recovery at Ennet house, which functions as the real antidote for the emptiness of the age, or at least the antidote for some coping mechanisms. Despite these connections, I am unsure exactly how Joelle fits into these themes. Perhaps this is a flaw in my thesis. Please leave a comment if you have thoughts on the matter.

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Originally promulgated by Curtis Yarvin (under the pen name Mencius Moldbug) and Nick Land, neoreaction is an antiliberal philosophy that aims to recover and update pre-enlightenment modes of political thought. It recognizes that progressivism has been a complete failure, and an alternative is necessary to restore functional government and human flourishing, a statement that any conservative would likely find agreeable. The disagreement arises in the specifics of neoreactionary complaints and alternatives.

This essay addresses Muller’s primary criticisms of Neoreaction and clarifies his descriptions of it. Furthermore, it will assess the comparative efficacy of Neoreaction and Muller’s Constitutionalism in addressing the problems of modern America. Finally, this essay deconstructs the mythical understanding of the American founding that underpins Muller’s article.

In the endnotes, I have included my own summary of Muller’s article to avoid straw-manning it.1 Additionally, I asked him a few on-the-record clarifying questions.2

What is Neoreaction?

Muller makes four core claims about the Dark Enlightenment:

1. It holds that society should return to things that the Enlightenment overcame.

2. It holds that democracy is bad.

3. It holds that society would be better governed by a monarch/CEO/dictator than by the current American system.

4. It holds that AI should be integrated into the government.

This section will address all four of these claims about Neoreaction and explicate what Neoreactionary authors, especially Yarvin and Land, have stated on these subjects. Muller’s claims and evidence seem to be based predominantly on interviews with Yarvin rather than on his writings. While many of the broad strokes in the New American article are close to accurate, Muller’s account merits clarification.

The essence of neoreaction is not perfectly captured by these four claims, but it gets close. Land states in ‘Neoreaction (for Dummies)’, the first consensus of neoreaction is that “all neoreactionaries define themselves through antagonism to the Cathedral, and the Cathedral is the self-proclaimed consummation of Enlightenment rationalism.”3 Muller gets this right enough, stating that neoreaction wants to overturn aspects of the Enlightenment. However, he misses the second part.

The normative causes of neoreactionaries, at least in the 2010’s, could be split into three predominant camps: religious traditionalists, ethno-nationalists, and techno-capitalists. Among these camps, the alternative to the Cathedral looks wildly different. They do, however, “share a fundamental aversion to rationalistic social reconstruction, because each subordinates reason to history and its tacit norms – to ‘tradition’ (diversely understood).”4 Muller fails to account for who is (neo)reacting and why. These omissions are not necessarily criminal, but they are important to flesh out the subject matter of his piece.

In ‘The Reactionary Consensus’, Nick Stevens gives a more robust description of the neoreactionary consensus.5 These are descriptions of reality as the neoreactionary sees it, and as the Cathedral undermines or ignores:

• Hierarchical social structures: Hierarchy is not only not bad, but natural and absolutely essential to the proper functioning of any social structure;

• Sex Realism: Sex differences are real, are ordained by nature or nature’s god or both, and we ignore them at our peril;

• Race Realism: Race and group differences are real, are ordained by nature or nature’s god or both, and we ignore them at our peril;

• Memetic Realism (“Deep Heritage”): Traditional folkways tend to be real, i.e., non-ideological, and naturally arising adaptations to social realities, which therefore represent pretty good (at least) local solutions to very (or intractably) complex problems;

• Economic Realism (later badly dubbed “Microeconomics” and we still await a name for the phenomenon): In any economy where an absolutely fixed supply of (properly divisible) money is deemed impossible or impractical, there is ipso facto a con game going where the issuance of money has itself become a political weapon;

• (Hyper)Federalism: Local optima rarely scale well; subsidiarity; the right of exit must be guaranteed;

• Social Justice: If social justice is anything at all, it is merely justice;

• Democracy: The best and brightest of any society were ordained by nature or nature’s god or both to lead. Expansion of the franchise beyond that natural aristocracy is tragicomically foolish;

• Politics: Defined as competition for parcels of power over unrelated others, usually as a means of redistributing wealth, politics is rightly minimized in any sane society.6

This should provide clarity. Neoreaction, at its core, holds that the Cathedral is the apex of the Enlightenment, and the Cathedral ignores and/or actively suppresses a multitude of accurate and important observations about reality, the accurate observance of which are precursors to good and functional governance.

The Enlightenment

Anomaly UK, a now-defunct neoreactionary author, described the thing that neoreaction is reacting against in the following way:

For five hundred years, there have been attempt to reorder human society on the basis that hereditary privilege, and many other kinds of inequality between humans, are unjust. Reformers have attempted to alter systems of government and other institutions of society with the goal of reducing or eliminating these injustices.

These reformers have consistently underestimated the difficulty of getting people to cooperate in a society. The intellectual techniques of science and engineering that produced miracles in terms of manipulating the natural world, have, time after time, failed catastrophically to improve the lives of humans through changing government and society.7

In many respects, this gets to the essence of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment privileges reason over all else. Some stragglers were able to draw faith across the doorstep, but this contradiction gets eviscerated over time. Reason cannot be supreme while miracles happen. To the Christian, Christ is God incarnate; specifically, He is the Word of God, the Logos. He is the Divinity of reason and rationality. He is also one component of the Trinity. I will dodge the headache of trinitarian parsing here to emphasize that reason is good, but not everything. Faith and unrelenting reason coexisted perfectly for St. Thomas Aquinas, a pre-Enlightenment thinker. The Enlightenment means that the light of reason got brighter than it was for Aquinas, and one must wonder if the enlightbulb can handle this much wattage.

Some truths about reality cannot be found through reason alone. Attempting to rely on reason alone can lead to madness or worse. Reason is Hume denying causality can ever be known. Tradition is being a normal person who knows things cause other things. Tradition is doing things because that is the way we have always done them. There must be a reason we have always done them. Enlightenment reason is: this tradition is in the way of something I want to do, so I can use linguistically contingent algorithms to prove that these Traditions violate some sort of truth we hold to be self-evident.

Of course, traditions must sometimes be updated, but updating a tradition is a natural, somewhat Darwinian process that tends toward the social optimum. This is distinct from rationally-based societal engineering, which does not seek to update but to re-create entirely. The Enlightenment was not a purely political event and coincided with the early stages of mechanical construction and with Newton’s new mechanical model of the physical world, in which God is a watchmaker. This mechanical perspective was also applied to government. The American Founders designed a new government, taking a mechanical approach to ensure that the parts balanced one another and would remain balanced in the future. The mechanical-social-engineering approach is a downside to the Enlightenment that neoreactionaries decry. It is akin to the problem of central planning in the economy. More on the specifics of the American system later.

Land describes the Enlightenment in the first two paragraphs of The Dark Enlightenment:

Enlightenment is not only a state, but an event, and a process. As the designation for an historical episode, concentrated in northern Europe during the 18th century, it is a leading candidate for the ‘true name’ of modernity, capturing its origin and essence (‘Renaissance’ and ‘Industrial Revolution’ are others). Between ‘enlightenment’ and ‘progressive enlightenment’ there is only an elusive difference, because illumination takes time – and feeds on itself, because enlightenment is self-confirming, its revelations ‘self-evident’, and because a retrograde, or reactionary, ‘dark enlightenment’ amounts almost to intrinsic contradiction. To become enlightened, in this historical sense, is to recognize, and then to pursue, a guiding light.

There were ages of darkness, and then enlightenment came. Clearly, advance has demonstrated itself, offering not only improvement, but also a model. Furthermore, unlike a renaissance, there is no need for an enlightenment to recall what was lost, or to emphasize the attractions of return. The elementary acknowledgement of enlightenment is already Whig history in miniature.

Enlightenment is a process of moving from darkness into light. It is a synonym for Whig-ism and progressivism.

Democracy

Muller’s comments on the Neoreactionary critique of Democracy are, unfortunately, the weakest part of the entire article. So much so that his comments border on a total straw man. He states that he agrees with Yarvin’s view that democracy is bad and cites the Founding Fathers who held the same view. Muller then says that America is not a democracy but a republic. His simple definition of a republic is the rule of law, and of democracy is rule by the mob. The error is that Muller’s definition of democracy should not matter at all in his article on neoreaction. To address neoreaction’s critique of democracy, one must understand what neoreactionaries mean by democracy. Filling in the term with one’s own definition is a prime example of the strawman fallacy. So is the assumption that Curtis Yarvin, who enrolled at Johns Hopkins University at age 15, had simply never heard that America is a republic, not a democracy.

This is all to say, to understand why neoreactionaries critique democracy, it is critical to first clarify what they mean when they use the word. This is pertinent because the neoreactionary critiques of democracy apply to democracy as it currently exists in the United States. Generally, by 'democracy,' neoreactionaries mean that the general population has a say in government. If there is voting, there is democracy. The people directly voting on each piece of legislation, like a parliament with hundreds of millions of seats, would be pretty bad, as Muller and any neoreactionary would agree. But neoreactionaries do not focus on this kind of democracy; rather, they critique representative democracy, which is the norm in the post-Enlightenment Western world.

Land explains, in the first part of The Dark Enlightenment, “‘Voice’ is democracy itself, in its historically dominant, Rousseauistic strain. It models the state as a representation of popular will, and making oneself heard means more politics.”8 He also describes it as the nightmare engulfing the world. Why is that the case?

Land describes the feedback loop that quickly forms within a representative democracy. Democracy is a vector, ultimately aimed at gibs. He describes it as a “fundamentally degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption. The democratic politician and the electorate are bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, in which each side drives the other to ever more shameless extremities of hooting, prancing cannibalism, until the only alternative to shouting is being eaten.”

In Introduction to Unqualified Reservations, Yarvin compares democracy to the tragedy of the commons. When everything is shared by all, it will be poorly managed. A conservative has zero problem seeing this issue when it comes to fighting against universal healthcare and other socialist-lite programs. However, when the government belongs to all people equally, it becomes impossible to govern effectively. Everyone wants to get their slice of the government before others do.

Land echoes the sentiment in TDE.

Democracy might begin as a defensible procedural mechanism for limiting government power, but it quickly and inexorably develops into something quite different: a culture of systematic thievery. As soon as politicians have learnt to buy political support from the ‘public purse’, and conditioned electorates to embrace looting and bribery, the democratic process reduces itself to the formation of (Mancur Olson’s) ‘distributional coalitions’ – electoral majorities mortared together by common interest in a collectively advantageous pattern of theft. Worse still, since people are, on average, not very bright, the scale of depredation available to the political establishment far exceeds even the demented sacking that is open to public scrutiny. Looting the future, through currency debauchment, debt accumulation, growth destruction, and techno-industrial retardation is especially easy to conceal, and thus reliably popular. Democracy is essentially tragic because it provides the populace with a weapon to destroy itself, one that is always eagerly seized, and used. Nobody ever says ‘no’ to free stuff. Scarcely anybody even sees that there is no free stuff. Utter cultural ruination is the necessary conclusion.9

Austin Economist Hans Hoppe has had a tremendous influence on many in the neoreactionary space, especially with Democracy: The God That Failed. Hoppe makes an economic argument that democracy (i.e., any political system in which the common people have a say in government) tends to encourage high time-preference behavior. In a democracy, both constituents and elected officials are more interested in short-term gains than in long-term ones. This creates a degenerative tendency in which everyone seeks to use the government as a means of plunder.

Ironically, this is the only thing the U.S. Congress seems capable of delivering. The founders intentionally made Congress inefficient so as to prevent legislative overreach. Because of its inefficiencies, representatives must carefully choose what to deliver to their constituents. Sometimes this is free stuff! Other times, it is work the voter still must do, but it is made more easily available. Most bills passed through the House and Senate are hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of pages of simply this.

A representative democracy tends towards this state, regardless of where it starts. Elections are a prisoner’s dilemma, in which competing candidates can cooperate and agree to self-limit, as in the U.S. Constitution. But they could also cheat and tell their constituents they are going to see about cutting through all that old stuff and getting some free healthcare flowing. Cheating is more likely to get the candidate elected.

This should provide some clarity on what the neoreactionaries are critiquing. They did not aim at the American system and missed, as Muller insinuates. They are critiquing the system of government established by the U.S. Constitution and demonstrating its lack of safeguards to prevent against the specific problems faced today.

Before beginning the next section, though, it is necessary to clarify what we mean when we say “good government”. Yarvin does a nice job of collapsing the weird ethereal distinction between a government and a company. Both of them are ultimately corporations. Both are groups of humans, organized and employed to complete goals. In Chapter 4 of Gentle Introduction, Yarvin states:

For me, quality of government comes in two dimensions: responsibility and authority. Both qualities are monotonically positive. There is no Goldilocks about them. A government cannot be too responsible or too authoritative.10

These are good metrics of government quality. A government should have clear goals and the means to achieve them. The collapsed distinction between company and government is useful here, but more on that in the next section. First, it is necessary to demonstrate how democracy (or a Constitutional republic, or a representative democracy, or whatever you want to call the normal mode of government in the West), fails at both of these goals.

The failure of responsibility is clear and obvious in the American system. The above-described degenerative nature of electoral politics and the nth-order effects of that degeneration have resulted in a state incapable of performing one of its most basic functions: immigration enforcement. Even when a President is overwhelmingly elected on a platform that promises to restore it, the task is still colossally difficult. Even though it is technically easy. But the government is not responsible enough to simply let Erik Prince and Peter Thiel run wild on the border. Additionally, many American cities have decayed into crime and terror. Detroit was once called the Paris of the West, and St. Louis was Rome. These labels are laughable now. “City” means high murder rate. And yes, it would be unconstitutional for the President to fix Chicago. The Supreme Court said so, and the Constitution allows them to say so.

The second question, the question of authority, is also a point of failure for Enlightenment government. The separation of powers runs directly contrary to state authority, and the American founders did so deliberately.

Yarvin states:

There is no conceivable balance between competing authorities; they will fight until one kills the others. . . Of course, divided authority tends to be quite popular among those who divide the authority. Power is fun, and power shared three ways creates more total fun than power held by one. Note also the entropic quality of division: it is much easier to divide than to reunify.11

The division of authority is evident in the ability of all Americans to vote and in the separation of powers as enumerated in the Constitution. The separation of powers is an attempt to make the state responsible to a third party, but the third party is another part of the state in this instance. Any organization should be accountable; it creates strong incentives. This particular form does not create strong incentives. Yarvin continues:

The great error of libertarians, as well as many liberals, progressives, etc., is to suppose that the weaker the State is, the freer its subjects are. The opposite is very nearly true. A weak government is a large government—and the smaller the State, the freer its subjects are. Every time you weaken your government, you give it another excuse to become larger.

Essentially, big government is big because it is constantly competing with itself. . . In the US, not individuals but agencies of the State compete for power and importance. Each seeks to expand its own impact, budget, and personnel. If USG, tomorrow, were to find itself operated as a single authority, it would set quite a number of live coals under quite a number of superfluous agencies.12

What is the solution? How does one attain a responsible and authoritative government?

Monarchy

Why does the government not run everything? Why do other corporations exist at all? A communist says, so true! A conservative knows it is because the government is astoundingly inefficient. Have a small sip of von Mises, and the reason why is clear: the profit motive. Private corporations must deliver profits to their shareholders to continue existing. This creates a strong incentive to have good governance.

The market is a process of Darwinian selection for good governance structures. Companies that can deliver to shareholders prosper, whereas those that cannot fail. There is skin in the game, and bad decisions are punished unrelentingly. Consequently, companies are run by a single CEO. The CEO is accountable to shareholders and provides products or services that consumers are willing to pay for, making the company profitable.

Speaking of skin in the game, any military has a clear chain of command. The consequence of mismanagement is much harsher here. Instead of being broke, it is being dead. Militaries cannot afford anything less than a hierarchical org chart in which decisions come from the top down, and people obey.

Muller states, “Historically speaking, the concentration of power in one individual has always led to greed, corruption, and abuse.” He also says, “Only a bottom-up, citizen-led revival will turn the tide.” Of course, he is speaking about government structure, but what is so mystically different about governance when it is within the government, instead of in another kind of corporation or a military (which, come to think of it, is part of the government)? When the pressure is on, singular leadership rises to the top because it is the only way to achieve decisive authority. The concentration of power in one individual has not historically “always led to greed, corruption, and abuse.” When Elon Musk took Twitter private and assumed absolute control, he rooted out significant corruption and abuse, only possible because of his full executive authority. He did not turn Twitter into a bitcoin mining virus. This example is especially illustrative because such power to root out corruption was expected when Elon showed up with DOGE. He quickly discovered that such power does not exist anywhere in the federal government, because it is separated. Instead of rooting out corruption, corruption was given a haircut.

Any military that relied on bottom-up, citizen-led decision-making, if one ever existed, was likely destroyed so completely that no history book has recorded it.

Hans Hoppe argues for monarchy in Democracy, claiming that the incentives that lead to democratic degeneration do not exist in a monarchy. In a monarchy, Hoppe argues, the state is the private property of the monarch, and he has an incentive to grow its wealth over the long term. If it is a hereditary monarchy, he is incentivized to do so for generations to come. His revenue comes from taxation, so he wants to ensure he does not tax too much and that his taxes and decrees do not harm his nation's long-term well-being.

A monarch has a profit motive, so he governs well. The American Constitutional Republic clearly has no profit motive. It seems to have a deficit motive. It is not structurally impossible to transform the United States government into something with a profit motive, though. Yarvin offers a few ideas in his writings, but they will not be discussed in detail here.

Land states:

Ultimately, however , if after all these centuries of trying to improve society based on abstract ideas of justice have only made life worse than it would have been under pre-Enlightenment social systems, the time has come to simply give up the whole project and revert to traditional forms whose basis we might not be able to establish rationally, but which have the evidence of history to support them.13

“Pre-Enlightenment social systems” sounds like mud-and-manure streets on first read, but consider that the neoreactionaries are not arguing for the economic and technological systems of the pre-Enlightenment era. In reality, the entropy of democracy has been steadily offset by the technological boon, just enough for America to avoid total implosion. Consider contemporary nondemocratic countries with similar levels of economic and technological development. China, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Singapore all reject democracy in favor of something more decisive. They all also have profoundly lower homicide rates than the United States, with Singapore and Qatar boasting homicide rates 1/58th of America’s. Qatar is a literal monarchy, and Singapore is a one-party state. One of the most basic government functions is to prevent citizens from killing each other. Nondemocratic society + modern technology = riding the bus without getting stabbed. Of course, this is simplistic, but it is far more complex than Muller insinuates.

Hitler. I mean, what if the government starts killing people out of nowhere?

Maoism, Stalinism, and Communism generally are natural outgrowths of the Enlightenment project. They are the faith in man's ability to rationally reconstruct the social structure and to ignore all constraints. There is a through line that runs from Rousseau to the European socialist movement, which exploded into the hell of Communism last century, which I wrote about here:

But Hitler was not a Communist. Thankfully, since everyone thinks of Hitler first when they think about changing the government, Yarvin addressed the HQ in multiple places. The obsession with Hitler is weird, but there is a reason for its existence. This will be covered later. Yarvin states:

However, in the terminology of government, this system would be described as an absolute dictatorship, or (once) an Oriental despotism, and you consider it the most dangerous possible design—one certain to practice sadistic, Kafkaesque mass murder. The salient examples, of course, are Stalin and Hitler.

There are quite a few mistakes in this perception, but one of the main ones is to take examples from outside one’s own tradition of government. In the post-WWII era, everyone’s tradition of government is the Anglo-American tradition, and when we think of absolute personal rule we should be thinking of Elizabeth I. (If you’re going to argue that Elizabeth and Hitler were truly comparable, I’d like you to start by showing me the Nazi Shakespeare.)

Hitler and Stalin are abortions of the democratic era—cases of what Jacob Talmon called totalitarian democracy. This is easily seen in their unprecedented efforts to control public opinion, through both propaganda and violence. Elizabeth’s legitimacy was a function of her identity—it could be removed only by killing her. Her regime was certainly not the stablest government in history, and nor was it entirely free from propaganda, but she had no need to terrorize her subjects into supporting her. Not so the dictators of the democratic era, each of whom could have been removed by a combination of their subordinates, and depended absolutely on personal mass popularity to avert this fate. And killing or incarcerating opponents is a pretty obvious way to maintain one’s popularity.

Finally, the desire for CEOism or some specific form of monarchy is not a unified neoreactionary perspective, though Yarvin tends to emphasize it.

AI

This section will be very short. Muller claims that some neoreactionaries think the government should use AI. He quotes Joe Allen from War Room, who warns of algocracy. He then states that neoreactionaries wish to make the United States into an AI monarchy, or something like that.

Once again, neoreaction is not a unified ideological system with a proposed structure. It is the observance of constraints baked into reality, and the recognition that the post-Enlightenment system rejects or actively suppresses these to the detriment of human flourishing.

Raising a red flag over the government using AI is like raising one over the government using the internet. The United States government is already quite dysfunctional compared to other corporations. Imagining the government without AI in 2030 is like imagining the government without email in 2015.

Regardless, I have written on AI elsewhere, and I do not see this section as a core critique of neoreaction. Muller’s only connection is Thiel and Yarvin having a connection, and Yarvin’s claim that Thiel is fully enlightened, as well as:

The ties between the Dark Enlightenment and Big Tech data companies are worth noting. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund has partnered with Andreessen Horowitz to invest $1.1 million in Urbit, a decentralized computing system created by Yarvin.

This is a weak connection at best, at least until one realizes what Urbit is. The Urbit project and its goals make Linux look like a fascist dictatorship.

Enlightenment Liberalism vs. Neoreaction

To discuss a solution, there must be clarity on the problem. The primary problem that Muller identifies and resonates with Neoreactionary thinkers is the deep state. This results in bad governance. It is not amenable to human flourishing. Instead, it creates entropy, resulting in a gradual buildup of dysfunction and occasional eruptions of major problems. The latter becomes more frequent and larger over time.

The deep state is similar to but slightly distinct from “the Cathedral.” Curtis Yarvin described the Cathedral as the spontaneously emergent complex of journalism, academia, NGOs, activist organizations, and other truth-distributing mechanisms. These are the shapers of public opinion, and they all move in one direction. Yarvin calls it the Cathedral because it functions like a religious institution that disseminates absolute truth to the masses. Land has a similar estimation of the Cathedral, describing it as a theocratic priestly class that enforces progressive, egalitarian, and democratic norms. He states:

The Cathedral is an information system… that is characterized… by a structural inability to learn… [I]t displays a radical deficiency of significant feedback links to the control core. Every apparatus of information gathering occupies a strictly subordinate position, relative to the sovereign Cathedral layer, which is defined exhaustively by message promotion.14

He also describes the Cathedral as a layer on top of the occult government, i.e., the deep state.15 The Cathedral is the shallow state, functioning as the psychological warfare arm of the state, Yarvin says, that is critical to every democracy. The Cathedral and the deep state are both unelected power structures with much overlap. It is up for interpretation where the lines, if any, are drawn.

But the core question is: what problem with the Cathedral/deep state must be solved? The neoreactionary critique is that it obscures and suppresses constraints in the name of rationalist reconstruction of society. A core part of this is the idea that history has an upward trajectory and that progress has occurred. The essence of the problem is that devotion to rationality-driven societal re-engineering leads to poor governance, whereas adherence to natural constraints can lead to good governance and prosperity. This section explores some solutions proposed by neoreactionary authors.

Muller’s objection to the Cathedral/deep state seems to be that it is unaccountable to the American people, and that this must be addressed by restoring and following the Constitution. The neoreactionary objection to the Cathedral/deep state is that it tends toward entropic, degenerative governance. Neoreactionary solutions are diverse because they are not an ideology; this section will focus on neocameralism as the neoreactionary solution, as it roughly corresponds to the solution Muller critiques in his article. The remainder of this section will evaluate Müller’s Constitutionalist solution against neocameralism in its ability to solve the impacts of the Cathedral.

The Liberal Solution and Its Discontents

Muller argues that the US Constitution should be the chief governing document, the law of the land, the charter of the state, within the United States. Fortunately, that is already the case. In a way, Muller is arguing for the status quo. He is arguing that the US should be governed by its Constitution. It certainly has not been repealed, but here we are. But that is a bit of a strawman; I am being cheeky. Even so, to deny that you are advocating the status quo whilst also advocating for the same governing documents as the status quo is no true scotsman fallacy, akin to “That wasn’t real Communism.” Real liberalism has not been tried because it degenerates instantly.

In all seriousness, the historical record has proven that the US Constitution is wholly incapable of preventing the problems America currently faces. It is ineffective in its aim of limiting government. Muller states that the American founders designed the Constitution to limit government, but they did not do so well. The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it was intended to do. The distinction between two states is clear in software design; it does not matter what the author intended the code to do if it causes a stack overflow. The Constitution is the state's program and suffers from severe memory leaks, numerous unhandled edge cases, and is written in COBOL.

Muller says that elected officials are “bound by the chains of the Constitution.” Are they? Many of the problems that Constitutionalist Conservatives decry are downstream from elected officials acting outside the Constitutionally enumerated bounds of their offices. This complaint is so common that it is impossible to argue that the Constitution binds them. He quotes Washington, who says that whenever elected officials act contrary to their interests, they “undoubtedly will be recalled.” This does not seem to be the case either. Of course, there is disagreement over what the people's interests are. This is why there are two political parties. People naturally tend to vote for their own self-interest. This is the nature of democracy, as outlined in the above section.

Muller’s solution is not the Constitution alone, though. He knows the Constitution is still the law of the land. The problem is that the people vote for representatives who do not care about the Constitution. The solution is to educate the American people to be virtuous and to understand the first-, second-, and fifth-order effects of the slightest deviation from Constitutional constraint. Once educated, the argument implies, the people will be wise enough to select politicians who follow the Constitution. This education must continue forever. Muller’s solution relies on ensuring that enough Americans get it and that the infrastructure exists to sustain this level of education for hundreds more years.

The problems with this solution are threefold. First, the current educational infrastructure (the Cathedral) runs in the precisely opposite direction and with much more power. Second, it relies on core Cathedral dogma. Finally, the mass-education solution runs directly against the natural dynamics of democracy.

In a society where people have a say in government, being able to shape how people think about government and elections is invaluable. Whenever the people control the government, controlling the people is a great way to control the government. This is the essence of the Cathedral: a truth-manufacturing machine. It creates pleasant narratives and specialized agitation to get the American people to vote for itself. Of course, “it” has no agency and is an emergent, dynamic process of self-seeking people within and outside government. It specializes in telling people what to think, owning public education, academia, and the media. Muller’s solution relies on educating enough people about the Constitution's merits so that they will vote only for representatives who follow it. This will hypothetically be done through conferences, pamphlets, homeschooling, and other means.

What is the time horizon for restoring sound governance under this plan? Whatever it is, it seems long because Muller and those who share his reverence for the Constitution must educate people more effectively than the US government managed to convince everyone to go on lockdown in 2020. That is a tall, tall task. I do not want to be mean, but a strategy that banks on successfully educating the majority of America about the Federalist Papers more efficiently than the team that did MKULTRA and prints every textbook can get them to be passive on the matter is frankly laughable. I fear that Muller’s solution relies more on the idealist nostalgia for the American founding than on any feasible strategy. The Cathedral does not need to convince the people that the Constitution is bad. The idea of the Founding and the Constitution is not a danger to the Cathedral, so much so that public schools teach them to all schoolchildren. It may not be the best system, but that leads to the next problem with Muller’s solution.

Land states in The Dark Enlightenment:

The central dogma of the Cathedral has been formalized as the Standard Social Scientific Model (SSSM) or ‘blank slate theory’. It is the belief, completed in its essentials by the anthropology of Franz Boas, that every legitimate question about mankind is restricted to the sphere of culture. Nature permits that ‘man’ is, but never determines what man is. Questions directed towards natural characteristics and variations between humans are themselves properly understood as cultural peculiarities, or even pathologies. Failures of ‘nurture’ are the only thing we are allowed to see.16

Only blank slatism could rely on mass education as a solution. Muller’s solution cannot harm the Cathedral because the story of the American Founding is part of the Cathedral's story. It is one of the first revolutionary events in the long chain of revolutionary events comprising the progressive telling of history. It can integrate it easily, since blank slatism was inadvertently baked into the one part of the Declaration of Independence everyone remembers: “all men are created equal.” Sure, Jefferson meant “equal in dignity before God” (he also meant something different by “people”), but that is not what people think when they hear that statement. They hear the progressive interpretation that we are all the same on the inside and that the only factors affecting a person’s abilities are upbringing and education.

But people are indeed different. The average IQ in America is less than 100. Most people are simply following their appetites and consuming various forms of entertainment. They will not wilfully subject themselves to an education in the Constitution. This education in the Constitution must also include a comprehensive education in the Articles of Confederation, the Federalist Papers, and related sources, so that everyone is on the same page about why the Constitution says what it does, lest they inadvertently vote for something non-Constitutional. At worst, the American people are incapable of being educated to such a degree and have no desire to. Even if they can be educated to this degree, they will still have little desire to do so. People have jobs and responsibilities, and also weed and porn. Robust Constitutional theory is either inconvenient or unenjoyable for many. Likely most, likely vastly so.

And finally, it is appetite that rules democracy like gravity. A representative who promises free stuff will always be more appealing than one who says he will be a good Constitutionalist. Even if everyone were mind-wiped tomorrow, except for knowledge of the Constitution, it would not take that many elections for the Prisoner's Dilemma to return to its typical suboptimal state. Someone will try promising free stuff, get elected, and, when it does not work, will not admit that the failure was due to constraints, but rather to all the Constitutionalists around. Free stuff is delicious, being much more appealing to the masses' appetites than the idea of voting for people who will constrain their own power. Congress optimizes for gibs. It is a design bug.

So, in summary, Muller’s plan to defeat the Cathedral is to educate everyone more efficiently than all of the schools, academia, and media can, despite their lack of desire to be educated, and the education must implant a degree of fortitude and certainty that prevents anyone who promises free stuff from turning a single head. And even if we get to this point, what then? Just maintain this level of education forever?

And what does the intermediate process look like? Sure, a conservative would object that aspects of the Cathedral consent manufacturing can be curtailed in the meantime. This has its limits, one of which is freedom of the press. The Constitutionalist view also carries a philosophical allergy to gaining and keeping power, and a love for destroying or distributing one’s own power. The best Constitutionalists in Congress right now are Massey and Paul, total embarrassments for the furthering of America. They also lend credence to the idea that liberal government is ineffective, seeing as that they complained when police cleaned up the nations capitol and drug smugglers carrying enough fentanyl to kill millions were killed without due process.

All of that aside, what does rolling back to the Constitution even look like in modern America? Here is a test: Will these newly elected Constitutionalists survive the repeal of the Civil Rights Act? It is obviously unconstitutional; look at any conservative author writing at the time of its passage. It completely destroys the right to freely associate with whom one chooses within one’s own property. And you, dear reader, have your public education programming in the back of your mind right now, blaring “racist racist racist stop stop stop.” Whoever even proposes the repeal will instantly lose the next election on charges of severe racism and desire to return to Jim Crow. Anyone who votes for the repeal will meet the same fate.

This cannot be a serious solution. I have made a great effort not to strawman but to lay out how this strategy will actually work, and it seems that Constitution restorationists should try to do the same. It will not solve Muller’s problem with the deep state, which is that the people are not in control, because the problem stems precisely from the common people having control in the government in the first place. It will not solve the problem of bad governance either. This solution is at best ineffective, and even if it succeeds, it merely returns us to the status quo.

Neocameralism

Neocameralism is not a word that appears in Muller’s article, but it is essentially the neoreactionary solution Muller attempts to critique. This section will detail what neocameralism is and how it solves the problem of effective governance better than Constitutionalism. This section will then address Muller’s criticisms of Yarvin’s solution.

Yarvin describes neocameralism as a governance system in which states operate as for-profit joint-stock sovereign corporations.17 As I stated in the monarchy section, the idea that the state's organizational structure is wholly unlike that of a private corporation is silly. The government should be treated as a business that aims to maximize shareholder value. Yarvin also describes Patchwork, an international political arrangement in which territory is divided into smaller sovereign sections, each owned by a separate sovereign corporation, thereby ensuring competition among states.18

A neocameralist state (sovcorp) would have shareholders who own equity and control management through voting rights given to them by their equity. Shareholders receive profit when state revenue exceeds state expenditure. This provides a strong incentive to ensure long-term prosperity for the citizenry. Short-cited free-stuff proposals, which are the rule under Constitutional republics, would be useless for sovcorps because they do not benefit the government or its citizens in the long term.

The shareholders appoint a CEO who has undivided sovereign authority but remains bound by his fiduciary duty. Yarvin overcomes many of the other perverse-incentive dangers (going Hitler mode) with cryptographic enforcement mechanisms, such as private keys for decision verification and military oversight.

Residents are customers who enter into rights-protection covenants with SovCorp. They are the customers, so they pay taxes and rent to the corporation for this privilege. These will be optimized for efficiency and long-term gains, thereby avoiding abuse and excess in taxation. Should such a thing arise, exit is a suitable option. Relocate to another sovcorp.

This provides dramatically better management incentives than the status quo or even the original founding structure. The profit motive does not care about moral goodness, whereas the reason term limits are what they are is that Washington’s principled decision was to serve only two terms. The former system of proper incentives is tried and true; the latter relies on strong personal principles.19

When governance is aligned with profit incentives, crime goes down, and services become more efficient. This is the polar opposite of democratic tendencies. Competition between city-states like patches also incentivizes good governance. Effectiveness is tested through population flows. Freedom of thought and speech will also flourish because the system will not rely on convincing people for it to be effective. Actual, effective governance will convince people of efficacy instead.

Muller first boils this entire solution down to the embrace of dictatorship, which is a strawman, then makes the following criticism:

A logical and obvious criticism of installing a dictator would be pointing out the horrible atrocities that dictatorships have committed — from Stalin to Hitler to Mao.

Yarvin’s response: “You need to concentrate that power in a single individual and then just hope somehow that this is the right individual, or close to the right individual.”

The Hitler question was already addressed in the section above, but Muller also completely ignores Yarvin’s solution to accountability: cryptographic accountability to shareholders. Cryptography is nice because it makes it very hard to lie. I cannot lie about which Bitcoin I own, nor about whether I can read an encrypted message. The state's shareholders, who have the greatest incentive to seek good management, can cryptographically enforce their approval.

In addition, this is almost a strawman. In Gentle Introduction, Yarvin’s direct response to the Hitler question is explicitly:

Without any field-testing at all, with only one try to get it right, can we satisfy ourselves that the result of the Procedure will be actual sane government—and not Hitler?

Indeed we can. But not through hope, good thoughts and the power of positive thinking. (emphasis added) There is only one dark, half-magical art that can produce reliable quality on the first try. It uses no newt blood at all. It is called engineering.

The place that Muller gets his quote from is from a CNN interview Yarvin did. He did say that quote, but an interview with an adversarial publication is not where anyone typically gives their best and most clear thoughts. To actually grapple with Yarvin’s ideas, and the ideas of neoreaction, it is prudent to look at what he has written, rather than at what journalists have selectively placed within their articles.20

Muller quotes Yarvin’s comparison between a CEO and a monarch, but does little to comment on it aside from stating that Yarvin is “arguing that the state of California would be better managed by a CEO such as Apple’s Tim Cook.” This points to a disconnect in Muller’s understanding of neoreaction. I first read this as a strange mention of a great argument by Yarvin with no response, but I think the argument Muller is trying to make is that Yarvin believes a guy with CEO qualities would have good dictator qualities, and that Tim Cook is an example of a guy with good CEO qualities who would be a bad dictator. If this is Muller’s argument, he misses the point: it is the governing structure that matters, not the man himself. Neoreaction does not mean adding an MBA to requirement for the Presidency. It means rip out the whole incentive structure of modern governance because it is an utter failure.

Muller says that the problem with neo-reaction is that it relies on top-down solutions. This is curious because, compared to the Articles of Confederation, the U.S. Constitution is rife with top-down solutions. Another criticism Muller makes of the straw man version of Yarvin is: “Historically speaking, the concentration of power in one individual has always led to greed, corruption, and abuse.” This was addressed above, but it should also be noted that this is a completely false statement. There are numerous counterexamples from throughout history, including Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus, who founded the Roman Empire, the longest-lasting empire in European history. Muller argues that lasting change cannot come from the top down, but the advent of the empire did. There are other historical examples, including other Roman Emperors, Peter the Great in Russia, Atatürk in Turkey, the Meiji Restoration in Japan, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, Napoleon and the French legal codes, and Deng Xiaoping, who transitioned China out of Maoism into what it is today. There is much diversity in what these dictatorial/monarchical figures achieved, but in many respects, their changes were both lasting and good.

Such governance still exists today, with modern city-states like Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, and Liechtenstein practicing what effectively amounts to neocameralism. These states are known for their high-quality living conditions and effectiveness despite the lack of democratic input. The joint-stock corporation model, which Yarvin bases his governance proposal on, is hundreds of years old and has proven effective for profit-driven management. There are, of course, many examples of executive-controlled states and corporations making errors or having disasters. But when a profit-driven corporation makes a mistake, it is the Apple Vision Pro, not the Iraq War. We live in reality, and having a governance system that is perfectly effective and can be reasonably expected to last as it is into eternity is fantastical post-Enlightenment thinking. Political reality is a process; governance is a process. It devolves in all cases and must be renewed. A revolution is not a renewal, but rather a reinvention and a rejection of the past. Renewing old forms is the standard practice for fighting institutional entropy. Revolution breaks away from everything and plunges into the unknown. You cannot renew something born from revolution because it implicitly embraces revolutionary change, which always washes over renewal on its own charge.

Rule by the people devolves into rule by the masses, leading to allegiance and factionalism through clever propaganda. This results in academic, journalistic, and scientific institutions being corrupted by adverse incentives. Neocameralism solves this by aligning incentives, rather than hoping that idealistic and illusory ethical maxims like “limited government” will somehow just do what they say they will do. Democratic entropy means that each idealistic tenet of Classical Liberalism becomes a cover for darkness and a lengthener of feedback loops. Constitutionalism relies on noble, but ultimately unenforceable, shoulds that create space for rot.

The beauty of this solution is that it ultimately leads to libertarian outcomes. Everyone is allowed to switch to a government that suits them, whether it is one in which Church attendance is mandatory or one in which state-mandated homosexuality is the norm. Hence, Thiel’s famous statement that freedom and democracy are incompatible.

I criticized Muller’s solution on the grounds that moving from the status quo to it is impossible, so it is necessary to investigate the neocameralist alternative. For one, it is being done in a few places right now and with great success, as mentioned in this section. The U.S. Constitution is embraced in the U.S. and in Liberia with great failure in both cases.

There are many ways to get from the status quo to something better. The first step is to admit that the bounds of political possibility extend far beyond 1776. The second step is recognizing that a successful strategy will not rely on educating the masses who cannot and will not be educated. Yarvin’s solutions include, but are not limited to, pay off all civil servants to have lifelong vacations and never let them near power again, use some executive power trickery to make a new fed and then a new government during a government shut down, maximize states rights to the nth degree, reframe party tactics around digital technology and create a lifetime allegience party, etc.

There are many options. The current administration has taken steps toward doing some of them, but not nearly far enough. The difference between these steps and Muller’s solution is that these are thought out and practical from beginning to end, whereas the “educate everyone on the Constitution” solution seems doomed from the start.

Recommended further reading on practical steps for getting from here to there:

Gray Mirror

The situation and the solution

The story now seems clear: the second Trump administration is a tragedy. Let’s talk about what this means, and what can be done about it…

Read more

10 months ago · 568 likes · Curtis Yarvin

American Mythology

There is a reverent, mythological component to the way that Muller discusses the American Founding and the US Constitution. This is normal, and most Americans are used to thinking in these terms. Every government that has ever existed had absolute certainty about its own correctness. The slightest abatement of this certainty opens up the state to subversion. The state tends to push in the opposite direction, justifying its inception and nature to the population. If it can do so in mythological terms, even better. Yarvin describes this as Orwellian. The Orwellian nature of the American government was clear in 2009 and even clearer in 2025. Any conservative worth their salt would take no issue with this.

What a Constitutionalist conservative like Muller would find problematic, however, is labeling the American project as Orwellian from the beginning. The historical record is clear on this, though.21 The Puritans who came to America quickly established a truth-manufacturing and cultural governance apparatus before the American Revolution. It functioned as a proto-Cathedral. Some of the same institutions of this cultural governance apparatus are still in use today, such as Harvard.

Yarvin covers the Puritan system extensively in A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations. Additionally, he offers an alternative account of the American Revolution, heavily grounded in primary sources. One of them is Hutchinson’s Strictures on the Declaration, a point-by-point rebuttal of the statements made in the Declaration of Independence.22 Even the thought of such a rebuttal is uncomfortable because the Declaration is treated as a foundational, morally upright document, rather than what it actually is: a list of grievances from a particular political perspective.

Regardless of whether Hutchinson’s refutation is correct (he was the Governor of Massachusetts, which grants some credibility), the most important point is that few have any idea what the arguments for the alternative perspective during the American Revolution were. The history I learned and understood in grade school was a simplified, mythicized version, in which King George III is imagined as a cartoonish bad-guy monarch and his redcoats follow him for absolutely no reason other than slavish devotion to the monarchy. This is part and parcel of the Enlightenment view of history, also known as the Whig theory or progressive theory, in which everything in the past is bad, and history has a positive direction. Everyone was backwards for a very long time, and then people realized rights exist, and then later they realized that people should have a say in government, and then they realized that black people and women are people too, and then they defeated the Nazis. Conservatives embrace the Whig theory up to this point, whereas contemporary progressives extend it further. In 50 years, conservatives will have embraced every step of the Whig theory through 1990. By 2100, the conservatives will stop somewhere after state-mandated homosexuality.

The reality of the American Revolution is that it was a conflict between two British factions. On one side were the Puritans, who comprised the Whig party in the British parliament. Yes, the same Whigs as the Whig theory of history. It does not matter who the other side was, because this side obviously already won. But the other side was the Anglicans, who comprised the Tory party. The Tory party was reasserting its position that the law should be enforced and that the existing structure of government (the monarchy) should be followed and retained. Throughout the American Revolution, the Whigs consistently argued for conciliation with the American colonies, whereas the Tories argued that the law should be enforced. The conflict can be compared to the modern conflict over illegal immigration, where one side wants the law to be enforced, and the other side wants to give them free healthcare.

This is a cursory, extremely broad overview of the political conflict at that time. Further reading is encouraged. The point is that very few, aside from academics and devoted history buffs, have any proper context for what was going on during the American Revolution. Instead, most opt for the simpler, mythologized view. Muller takes a form of this view in his article, although he is more educated on the American Founding than most. This is evident in his faith in the Constitutional system as a brilliant form of government, as well as in a statement he makes about the influences on the Founders.

Muller states, “It was the positive elements of the Enlightenment that fueled the American Revolution, gave inspiration to America’s system of government, and helped liberate the New World from the authoritarianism of the Old World.”23 He seems to imply that there were negative aspects to the Enlightenment. I asked him for clarification, and he agreed that there were negative aspects, but “it is obvious that the Founding Fathers mainly implemented the positive outcomes in the American context.” According to Muller, America took Enlightenment reason and combined it with Christianity to get a good system of government, whereas the “French, on the other hand, took reason and made it absolute, leading to a new tyranny.” His original sentence reads like a declaration of faith, though. Faith that, at the very least, the American founders were guided by providence to only embrace the good aspects of the Enlightenment and not the bad. However, combining Christianity with it does not make anything good, especially since, post-Enlightenment, Christianity became a useful vehicle for various forms of progressivism. The Enlightenment put on (supposedly) sheep's clothing, but that does not make it so.

The core of the American mythology is the providential understanding of the American Founding and the U.S. Constitution. I am not sure if Muller believes that the Constitution is the perfect system of government. The founders certainly did not think so; they implemented an amendment process from the get-go. That being said, Muller and many other classical liberals treat the Constitution as if it has some absolute moral goodness to it, and any deviation is akin to sin. In reality, it is one of many possible government configurations, and that is all it is. It should be evaluated on its efficacy alone. Putting moral worth on a specific system of government is bizarre when one takes a step back. The American Founders certainly had noble aims in creating the Constitution. That does not necessarily mean it is the best form of government.

The American Mythology is conservative, meaning that it serves and justifies democratic forms while railing against the natural consequences of democratic forms. It is a useful subsection of the Cathedral.

One final note on Hitler, because I mentioned that I would address the weirdness of the Hitler question above. The Cathedral is a secular religion. Specifically, it is secularized protestant Christianity. They have done away with God, but they replaced the devil with Hitler. Land states:

Does anybody within the (Cathedral’s) globalized world still think that Adolf Hitler was less evil than the Prince of Darkness himself?…Hitler is sacramentally abhorred, in a way that touches upon theological ‘first things’. If to embrace Hitler as God is a sign of highly lamentable politico-spiritual confusion (at best), to recognize his historical singularity and sacred meaning is near-mandatory, since he is affirmed by all men of sound faith as the exact complement of the incarnate God (the revealed anti-Messiah, or Adversary), and this identification has the force of ‘self-evident truth’.

Land’s estimation of Hitler is that Hitler is the core of modern political theology. He is the core anti-God of the modern Cathedral. This is why so many on the left so often appeal to Hitler, compare to Hitler, or just bring up Hitler next to something to sully it. It is all part of the same tactic. Hitler was bad, obviously, but this demonic deification of Hitler is used to justify the suppression of any right wing thought and hold back any questioning of the Cathedral’s untruth. A common tactic among leftwing journalists is to say Hitler drank water too. Muller effectively does the same thing, in describing Yarvin’s position directly followed by and by the way, Hitler exists: “Perhaps not directly linked to the DE and Yarvin but still relevant, sympathy for Adolf Hitler…”

Muller mentions the rise in Zoomer affinity for dictatorship and Hitler. He states that neoreaction/Yarvin is deceiving young people into embracing dictatorship. He also states that Yarvin is a self-described open-minded progressive. This may be a quote from one of the Politco or CNN articles that Muller relied on for his research, but reading the first chapter of Yarvin’s first major work, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives, Yarvin states “I am not a progressive, but I’m not a conservative either. (If you must know, I’m a Jacobite.)” It seems more so that Muller has been deceived about the nature of neoreaction and Yarvin’s thought, relying on the accounts of left-wing propaganda outlets for his research, and expecting that they both A - fairly quoted Yarvin and B - Yarvin gave a robust and total explication of neoreaction to the scum of the earth known as left-wing journalists. These are two major jumps.

But it is important to address Muller’s thesis: that Yarvin and neoreactionaries are the deceivers (and implicitly, that CNN and Politico are honest and reputable sources for understanding the modern instantiation of pre-Enlightenment political theory). They want to deceive young people so a lot of them will vote in a dictator. Yarvin rejects democracy (a.k.a. liberalism and socialism in all forms, including the American form). Chapter nine of Gentle Introduction, he goes to great lengths to explain that the neoreactionary tactic is one of passivity, not one of creating a mass movement to elect a dictator. Because that is how Hitler happens, and Yarvin spilled much digital ink in this chapter to avoid Hitler happening. He warns against any form of right-wing activism, because it always helps the regime, whether it is Constitutionalist conservatives providing justification for the machine that grew the Cathedral, or Fuentian groypers saying the most shocking things, thus provoking a justification for increased left-wing funding and action.

So Yarvin and Land do not want to deceive the youth into a mass movement for dictatorship. Extensive review of their writings has not indicated that they aim to do so. They do not even want to carefully reason a mass movement into existence, because that does not work. Why does Muller claim that this is a deceptive plot? Where is the deception? Truth is the aim. Curtis Yarvin was the first to make red pill a political term, a symbol so prescient Muller even uses it in his own article to describe his ilk. Political deception only serves a purpose when it is done on a mass-level, to a mass-audience. The writings of Yarvin and Land are anything but accessible to a mass audience. Perhaps it is only the strawman of neoreaction, propped up by Politico, CNN, and now The New American that seeks to deceive.

Liberal Constitutionalism is noble, wanting to honor American Heritage and restore sensible government. However, it is based on nostalgia and idealism rather than on effectiveness. Restoring the Constitution today does not erase all of the ways that it has been circumvented over the last two centuries. There is no practical path to restoring the Constitution, no realistic idea of what that means, and no effective means of preventing a return to the status quo. These things are easy to swallow once one acknowledges that there is no moral imperative behind the U.S. Constitution.

Saint John Henry Newman once said that a Christian ceases to be Protestant once he is enmeshed in history. There is something similar here: to go deep into history is to cease to be a classical liberal. Neither of these statements is completely accurate, but just as a Protestant must realize Christian history did not start in 1512, the classical liberal must recognize that political history did not start in 1776.

In conclusion: Muller is a friend who I greatly respect, despite out disagreements. His article has been a useful foil for my deep dive into neoreaction, which I have wanted to do for a while. The ultimate failure of his article, however, is that he seems to exclusively source and quote Yarvin from interviews, whilst pitting his ideas against the top ten zingers written down by Enlightenment philosophers. His article could have been far more robust, and made far fewer errors in its descriptions of neoreaction, if he had read any Yarvin and more Land before critiquing them.

The site features the Earth and a spin button. The user clicks, and it lands on a country, with probabilities based on each country’s current relative birth rate. The user then receives statistics about the country they have landed on, such as lifespan, average income, years of education, etc. The copy states:

If you were one of the 251 people born this minute, where would you land? What opportunities would you get? And how much of your life comes down to chance?

The charity means to demonstrate global inequality, but it is a ridiculous exercise with absurd and pernicious existential assumptions baked in. These same assumptions permeate many aspects of the modern world and are contributing to the accelerating decline of the West.

What does the word “you” mean in that sentence anyway? It is easy to miss its ambiguity. “You” is a common word. But who are you? You are someone who was born at a particular time and place, to two particular parents who have given you a specific set of genes and, hopefully, a good upbringing. These are pretty critical aspects of “you.” They are actually pretty exhaustive, being nature and nurture. Nature and nurture shape every person. But this is obviously not the “you” Birth Lottery is referring to, because it replaces that. What if you were born in a different country, to totally different parents, and had a totally different upbringing? Then you would not be you, you would be someone else entirely.

Putting aside the metaphysical assumptions about personhood, this line of thinking is also emblematic of the modern idea that many aspects of reality are purely arbitrary and random. One can find this assumption in many left-wing arguments and lamentations. Why do these disparities exist? Why are some people poor? Why are there people in prison? They do not ask because they want to know the reason, but rather as an argument toward the state waving some magic wand to make it different, somehow. This approach to the world does not work. The fruit of criminal justice reform is murder on the subway.

Even still, one can understand why many are bothered by the seeming randomness of birth. How is it fair that a few people are born in affluent first-world countries, and the rest are born in developing or impoverished countries? And nobody has any say in where they are born? This line of questioning stems from modern assumptions about liberal autonomy. It is treated as an automatic good, implying that anyone should have the right to do whatever they want and the best opportunities to do so. When people cannot do what they want, that is like slavery! When someone has no say in the matter, it is literally The Handmaid’s Tale. Because nobody has a say in where they are born, that isn’t nice because autonomy and rights did not factor into it.

But does this matter? It is mostly harmless as long as it is only a marketing gimmick for a nonprofit that wants to help people in need. However, large bureaucratic nonprofits tend to bloat and lack key indicators of organizational success. And there is limited evidence that foreign aid works anyway. All of that aside, the real problems come along when the state begins to dole out taxpayer money to foreign nations under the guise of this logic. Thankfully, the dismantling of USAID has put a stop to a lot of that.

But the larger issue is that this “birth lottery” idea is demoralizing and obscures genuine goals, such as self-preservation and working for the benefit of one’s offspring. Birth seems unfair due to a lack of agency, but this complaint robs many others of agency. For one, it robs the agency of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. My birth in the United States was not a random occurrence. Instead, it is a consequence of the actions of many taken before me. It was a consequence of my Scots-Irish ancestors, who settled America before it was a country and fought in the Revolutionary War. It was a consequence of the German Settlers who tamed the Texas wilderness and carved out their slice against the forces of nature. No aspect of this was luck, because I am their descendant and I can only ever be their descendant. I can never cease being the great-great-great-grandson of Civil War veterans. It was a consequence, not a lottery.

I call this line of thinking “temporal atomization” in an essay I wrote last year, which covers some of the same ground here. In that piece, I argue that this temporal atomization is harmful because it not only disconnects the individual from their family history and the responsibility they bear for carrying it forward, but also robs them of the opportunity and agency to build for the future of their descendants.

I have kids. Their birth was not random or a lottery in any sense, except for the specific genetic makeup they received from my wife and me. I have a clear responsibility to raise them and work for their futures. Sure, they do not have agency in the fact that I am doing so, but it is not luck, because I certainly have agency.

Reject this birth lottery thinking. Reject temporal atomization. It is a scourge on Western culture.

I have not been writing as much recently, but I am not quitting Substack. To put it simply, life circumstances have become more demanding and complex in both career (thanks to the Society) and family life (thanks to my wife). Because I have had less time to write, I made an effort to focus on the things that I really want to write, write things that make me take pride in them, regardless of how much reach they get.

The interesting thing is that when I focus on what I get personal gratification from writing, it tends to do well on Substack. This is not always the case, but I would rather keep it this way than write something just because I think someone else wants to hear it. I write on Substack for nobody but myself, and I do it because I enjoy it. It is a happy, incidental byproduct that so many people read them, and that some even pay me for it. But I would still be writing even if people were not.

I was most proud of this essay this year:

It got profoundly positive feedback from here on Substack and from personal friends. I do not know if I will ever top it, but I will try.

Most of my writing happens in my head. It only gets actually written once it becomes too difficult to keep track of it in my head anymore. Words are a prison for ideas, and they calcify as soon as they are written down. I spent most of 2025 thinking about that essay. There are more that I am thinking about now.

Going into 2026, I plan to continue writing. I already have some good ideas and things in the works that I certainly expected to be finished by now. But life gets busy, and I need more time to think about them anyway.

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Ok Stop Yapping, Book List Now

This book list is ordered by genre, not reading order. Does not include any random or fragmented book chapters I read.

Philosophy

• Plato - The Republic

• Bernardo Kastrup - Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics

• Ernst Junger - The Worker

• Nick Land - Fanged Noumena

• Jeremy Johnson - Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness

Politics

• Christopher Caldwell - Age of Entitlement

• - Woke Eugenics

• - An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

• Curtis Yarvin - How Dawkins Got Pwned

Technical Books

• - A Common Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms

• - Designing Machine Learning Systems

• Chip Huyen - AI Engineering

• Bruce & Bruce - Practical Statistics for Data Scientists

• Deepak Kunungo - Probabilistic Machine Learning for Finance and Investing

Fiction

• DFW - Infinite Jest

• Cixin Liu - Three Body trilogy

• Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun (Shadow & Claw, Sword & Citadel)

• Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings (first time reading)

• Andy Weird - Project Hail Mary

• Neil Stephenson - Snow Crash

• Jean Raspail - The Camp of the Saints

Biographical

• Max Chafkin - The Contrarian (a completely libtarded biography of Peter Thiel)

• G. Gordon Liddy - Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy

Misc.

• Jefferey Pomerantz - Metadata

• Andrew Lo - Adaptive Markets

- Nick Land, ‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’

What would you do if you could predict the future?

Would you buy a lottery ticket? Short a stock that will imminently collapse? Use your ability to plan trips? Don’t take that flight—definitely not that one. Would you use it as a party trick? A way to flirt? Predicting the future has tickled the human mind since ancient Mesopotamia, when priests tried to divine the future by examining animal livers. Seems savage and barbaric, yet today the priests of the digital pantheon use the dismembered guts of our digital ghosts to make predictions about the future.

Machine learning is a fascinating subject that spans many techniques. Machine learning models are modern extispicy, and they do everything from winning chess games and populating social media feeds to creating images of nonexistent people and talking like a human. At the core of machine learning is prediction. Machine learning is a large subset of the broader field of Artificial Intelligence; so large that the two are nearly synonymous.

But there is nothing new under the sun. Long before the first neural networks and Monte Carlo Markov chains were sketched, human society actively embodied artificial intelligence in our exchanges with one another.

Intelligence Predicts

Intelligence predicts. Intelligence infers from data. Human intelligence seeks to predict the future. Problem-solving is a process of forecasting outcomes from actions. We plan for contingencies. We bring an umbrella. We hedge on the stock market. We do it a lot, but we are not great at it. The human mind is not a data-processing machine. It is a story-building machine. So, we created machine learning models to help us predict. But machines are not necessary to improve human predictive capabilities. Some of the things we make machines do to improve prediction can be emulated in other ways.

One way we improve machine learning models is by using rewards and punishments to train them to make better predictions. Another improvement is aggregation, both of data and in architecture. Machine learning models require big data. They work across many dimensions and predict through multiple layers of neural networks.

Both of these aspects are present within market economies. Capitalism is an artificially intelligent system. Human minds are the parameters, and the narratives they contain are the model's weights. Individual narratives shift and transform throughout life as people take in new information. As soon as they trade on that information, they are contributing to the model. Millions of people do this every day, whether it is in the stock, crypto, or prediction markets.

In the Austrian/Schumpeterian view, the chief drive of the market is the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is an individual who tries to predict the future. He tries to predict what people will want in the future, and he risks his capital to start a venture. The right entrepreneurs will make a profit, while the wrong ones will lose their money. In machine learning, this is called reinforcement learning. The model makes predictions in a complex environment to maximize its reward signal. But entrepreneurs are not analogous to models, nor are they the sole predictors in the economy.

What kind of reinforcement learning could be better than losing money? There is an adaptive process in markets to prune weights that are not predictive.

Instead, anyone trying to maximize profit is a predicting node in the AI we call capitalism. In neural networks, there is a process called pruning. Weights, nodes, and layers that contribute little towards prediction are discarded. In the actual market, it is more often the moderate losers who are pruned. The moderate and large winners are allowed to stay because they keep their money. The serious winners exist rarely. The negatively predictive neurons in a neural network are allowed to stay because they are predicting, just in reverse. When a neuron is negatively predictive, the model assigns a negative weight to it in the next layer.

This, too, has an analog in capitalism:

Predictive nodes in the markets take many forms. There are the entrepreneurs, as mentioned before. There are also investors. The stock and derivatives markets are efficient because market makers are constantly seeking and exploiting arbitrage opportunities. This forces prices to go into lock step across the market. This is why you cannot buy shares on Schwab and then turn around and sell them on Robinhood at a different price in the same exact moment. This process is why I was taught in my economics major that there is no arbitrage.

The next moment is a different story.

Asset prices change. If someone perceives that a company is undervalued relative to its market price, they will sell their shares. They will do this based on a narrative informed by some information that they have acquired. They sell the shares and inject this information into the market. In contrast, someone who has information indicating the company will be more valuable than its current stock price suggests will gladly purchase it. This opens up the door for future arbitrage, which is always uncertain. As soon as it becomes certain, the information spreads and everyone trades on it. It gets priced in.

The stock market then functions as a massive data-collection machine that turns that data into predictions by incorporating all information communicated through buy and sell orders. This works at more minor scales as well. In Adaptive Markets, Andrew Lo describes a class experiment in which he had his students simulate a market that consisted only of trading bycicle pumps. He was surprised when he saw that the market simulation matched the pumps' evaluations exactly with consumer preference studies. Over the next decade, he repeated this experiment with many other product categories and saw the same results. He states:

Efficient markets are powerful, practical tools to aggregate information, and they do it more quickly and cheaply than any known alternative. In effect, a market acts like a massive supercomputer, one whose individual parts are composed of the smartest computers we know: the human brain.1

The combination of multiple predictive nodes (the people in the market) and reinforcement learning (skin in the game, where you lose money if you are wrong) makes markets accurate predictors of the future. So, what if we used markets to predict the future outside of the business world?

Markets make inferences about the future. Models make inferences about the future.

Prediction markets have become incredibly popular recently. They are currently replacing traditional prediction methods, such as “experts” and polling. The key difference is that many people can incorporate information about simple, clear binary choices. Unlike polls, which can have loaded questions, sampling issues, etc., prediction market events put forward simple binaries that must be crystal clear. They must be crystal clear because money is on the line.

And because money is on the line, people trade their information.

Humans are bad at predicting when there is nothing on the line. If you are asked which blade of grass in a large field will grow tallest, you may as well guess randomly. If someone puts a good wager before you, you may soon become the world’s top grass expert. You may even be better than the world’s top experts. Has anyone heard from Nate Silver lately?

Optimization

Carissimo & Korecki (2024) model capitalism as an artificial intelligence driven by quantitative optimization. They argue that capital is a self-reinforcing, complex entity that processes quantified value (money, assets, prices) and pursues its own expansion.

The authors model Capital as a historical agential system, embedded in the social sphere, embodied in quantified value, and pursuing its maximization. Capital is driven by human, corporate, and ML systems seeking to accumulate more capital through quantitative and qualitative generation techniques.

They argue that qualitative techniques are based on subjective experience and individual values and are therefore non-quantifiable, whereas quantitative processes are amenable to optimizing governance. According to the authors, this means that aspects of Capital can be reduced to computational logic.

However, qualitative and subjective individual values and beliefs are still subsumed by Capital. The authors err by failing to recognize that these subjective experiences are the weights within the human parameters that operate within Capital. The Misesian position takes subjective individual values as the starting point for all economic phenomena, and this is correct. Any subjective value that is important to Capital is, by definition, priced into the market because individuals act on that valuation in their behavior.

Carissimo and Korecki identify two key relationships between Capital and AI. AI systems, from LLMs to recommendation algorithms, process quantified value to create more value through attention capture, transforming it into big data for advertising in the service of revenue. These AI systems are agents within capital.

The second relationship they define is Capital as artificial intelligence. Capital’s evolution is driven by quantitative optimization; it functions like AI. Keep in mind that the qualitative data also drives the evolution of Capital as mentioned above. Individual experience and information gathering are injected into the market in trades, transactions, etc. The collection of these individual actions, all of which are ultimately pursuing some form of subjective optimization, comprises the market as a whole. This creates capitalism as a perceived unitary whole pursuing growth and accumulation, which, in turn, generates new information.

Hence, they argue, Capital itself is an optimization process operating on a global scale. It is a distributed artificial intelligence without consciousness or intent.

Like large language models, Capital produces outputs that appear meaningful but lack intrinsic intent or morality: “Optimization does not possess a normative dimension required for intent.” Prices reflect human preferences, but prices also shape preferences; the drive towards equilibrium in supply and demand. The authors describe this as a recursive feedback loop that makes the “meaning” of economic signals self-referential and hollow. Capital simulates meaning. Prices are a simulation of meaning in the Baudrillardian sense in which the sign comes to replace the referent. Life insurance can put a price on your loved ones.

Capital, like AI, creates meaningless meaning. It becomes meaningful only when the human person incorporates the information into subjective experience.

Melting Down Kantian Containment

For Kant, the noumenon/thing in itself is the reality outside of human experience. Man’s perception conditions reality through man's perceiving it. This object of experience is knowable and empirical. The understanding within space and time unifies its appearance. Man can think about the noumenon, but he cannot ever know it because it is wholly outside of experience, apart from all sensibility and understanding.

Nick Land argues that Kant’s development of the object in philosophy is done as a security measure. The concept of the object captures and labels otherness, thereby constraining it. This stabilizes human experience. The Kantian framework eliminates alterity, being anything that would exceed or contaminate the categories of the subject. Otherness is fixed as an object within knowledge rather than as an alien, chaotic material flux.

In ‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’,2 Land suggests that the logic of object standardization for cognition is the same logic of capitalist exchange in the standardization of commodities for trade. This is the logic of colonialism: incorporating the otherness of the undeveloped world and using economic development to shield against its alien aspects. Land argues that the Kantian object is the transcendental prototype of capital. It masks the underlying energetic base of desire and production.

What the hell does this mean? This is the point in this essay where I dodge a nightmarish exposition on Deleuze.

Desiring-production, in classical economic terms, is the subjective valuations and entrepreneurial discoveries of many actors within the market. Individuals throughout the economy act on preferences and generate the spontaneous order through their individual quests for personal utility maximization. Textbooks, classes, exercises, etc., all demonstrate the process by which the producer and consumer haggle over the price of a good or service until the mutually beneficial price is established. In practice, however, I have only seen this process actually take place in Moroccan markets. In everyday American life, one does not have the chance to negotiate the price of milk with the cashier. Prices are abstracted and standardized away. The supply-and-demand feedback loop still exists, but it is much larger and utterly detached from the living, breathing, sweating, flesh-and-blood parts of the economy.

Living and creative activity is reified into objects for calculation, and market information becomes a series of snapshots rather than the continuous, vital process of production and exchange. Reality transforms into data. Data is what artificial intelligence eats.

The classical economic order is the Kantian containment structure. Markets are framed around humans and represent human values, like the logic of the object, and categories represent reality. The containment structure breaks down as feedback loops intensify due to the integration of machine intelligence into the entire system. The globalization of trade and tightening feedback loops, along with the fusion of markets with machines, created what Land names techno-capital; innovation increases speed, interconnection, and data, with economic and technological efficiency reinforcing one another.3

A meltdown occurs when the representation layer collapses. The representation layer of capitalism comprises the external structure and the models used to describe it. Hayek already recognized that the market was too complex for any one person to comprehend fully.

Things can work without humans having any idea how exactly they work. Economics sketches general descriptions that can be applied to economic reality, but these are always imperfect abstractions. They give heuristics but do not describe the market itself. The market has no representation; it is its own representation.

This is similar to the black box of deep neural networks, where backpropagation sets every weight during training, yet even the creators don't know what each weight means. They evaluate it based on its output accuracy. The outputs serve as a measure of neural network quality. With enough time and effort, AI researchers can identify what some of the weights mean, as the Anthropic team did when it figured out which Claude weight corresponded to the Golden Gate Bridge. Similarly, research papers can uncover and describe segments of economic reality. But in both cases, grasping the whole system at once is beyond the scope of the human mind.

The feedback loop of tightening information flow and economic globalization causes the meltdown. Rational categorization of any object or asset becomes secondary to the prices. Every identity becomes fungible, and exchange reintroduces alterity in the differential flux of money and prices. Shifting relationships among countless exchanges determine value, whether it’s Target, the S&P, or Polymarket. It is all communicating in a symbolic domain alien to lived human experience.

The world ceases to be organized around human categories and instead is organized around flows and machinic relations. Capital operates as a network of impersonal processes. Identity and meaning become temporary and ephemeral as capital subsumes them. Purchase product; post it on social media; picked up by machine learning algorithm; identity and product matched; marked to similar identity archetypes; hijack neural mechanisms for social cohesion; buy product to be part of group. I have no idea what a “Labubu” is.

The shield against the flux and chaos of alterity is constantly eroding. Categories must be updated as new information comes through and breaks the model. Containment is never static.

Prediction of any kind is part of this struggle with the outside. Capital markets, machine learning models, and Mesopotamian ecstipacy all try to barter with the alterity of the future. The future is unknown, undecided, complete potentiality. All prediction machines try to make use of the flux of the future, but safely within a defined symbolic system. Western reason chose to embrace alterity in controlling the trade system, leading to a runaway feedback loop in which trade becomes the predictor itself.

In ‘Meltdown’, Land stylistically describes what the breakdown of Kantian containment looks like:

Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off… Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway... As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip... Capital is machinic globalization-miniaturization scaling dilation: an automatizing nihilist vortex, neutralizing all values through commensuration to digitized commerce... Machine-code-capital recycles itself through its axiomatic of consumer control, laundering-out the shit- and blood-stains of primitive accumulation.

Capitalism consumes the entire Earth, not in an environmental sense (although this does happen), but instead in the way that AI training consumes all data. Humans become the liver of the animal disemboweled by the Mesopotamian priest. We exist as data phantoms to feed predictive algorithms; our words are hollowed out, as all meaning is tokenized and embedded to feed large language models; and our interaction with every penny serves as data for techno-capital.

These are not normative assertions. Individuality and humanism lose all meaning at scale. The relationship between humanity and the market is metaphysically different from what it was before. Markets always serve consumers, but capitalism no longer serves humanity. Instead, humanity serves capitalism. There is no possibility of a communist revolution or social democratic reform, because the laws of economics are as firm as the laws of physics. Just as the universe marches towards entropy in the perpetual escape of heat, so long as human beings act, economics enforces its march toward the extropy of techno-capital.

The artificial intelligence at work in capitalism simulates meaning, turning us into predictors of predictors. Work for your wages, compare the mortgage rate to the risk-free rate of return, and decide if bullion is worth it for shielding from inflation right now.

The ultimate prediction of capitalism is its own expansion. Human intent is obsolete on the macro scale.

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In the waning decades of the last century, skeptics of mass immigration faced an eerily similar fate. British MP Enoch Powell, citing Virgil in his now-infamous 1968 speech on immigration, declared, “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’” For this warning, he was branded a racist, and immigration restriction was declared a forbidden topic in British politics.

Jean Raspail’s 1973 masterpiece The Camp of the Saints, however, stands apart from all other prophecies of doom in the modern age. Few works can compare to its incisive commentary, prescience, or in how thoroughly it has been ignored and suppressed in the Western world.

Unlike the Left’s favorite “banned books,” The Camp of the Saints has been nearly impossible to acquire, subject to censorship in France and entirely suppressed in the English language by major publishing houses. Thankfully, Vauban Books released the first new translation last month, at last making the book available to a whole new audience. The timing could not be more relevant.

Raspail saw clearly both the internal and external threats facing the West, which are now manifesting in ways few others could have expected fifty years ago. He wrote, in words that ring ever more valid today:

The world seems to be controlled, not by a single orchestra conductor, but by a new apocalyptic beast, a sort of anonymous, omnipresent monster who has vowed, first and foremost, to destroy the West… Perhaps it is of divine or, more likely, demoniacal origin? - Ch. XIV.

Though it is easy to mock those shifting blame for modernity onto literal demons, it is impossible to deny, when faced with the outpouring of violence and hate from the Left in the last few years, that malevolent forces are at work.

Yet The Camp of the Saints is not, first and foremost, a cautionary tale about mass migration. Rather, it is a scathing look into the soul of the West. Raspail explores, with clarity and lifelike imagery, the motives and ideology of Europe’s home-grown Leftists who seek the annihilation of their own civilization, the conservatives who dither and cower rather than oppose them, and the treason of the West’s own institutions, especially its greatest: Christianity.

Instead of a mere warning, Raspail offers a provocation: “If one wishes to understand Western opinion as regards the immigrant fleet or indeed anything else of a foreign nature, one essential fact must be borne in mind: to wit, that it did not give a damn about anything.” Understanding this apathy has ever-greater urgency today.

The Decolonization Paradigm and the Psychopath Left

The Camp of the Saints is filled with examples of European leftists aiding and abetting the enemies of the West, from atheist reporters to rogue bishops. These characters, no doubt, stand in for real figures, or at least real human types; Leftist intellectuals of Raspail’s own time, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, come to mind. Each has his own personality and motivations, yet they are all united by self-hatred, a shame at the West's success, and a desire for the cleansing fire of oblivion.

This leads Raspail’s leftists to champion any cause, as long as it opposes the West and its traditional values and way of life. The central figures of these causes thus became a sort of “anti-Joan of Arc,” contrasted to France’s patron saint and historical savior from foreign domination. This figure, according to Raspail,

became, in turn, the despised Arab worker; the pornographic publisher on trial; the exploited Negro builder; the censored director; the red Madonna of the favelas; the rioter roughed up by police; the murdered tough guy from the pub; the academic terrorist; the schoolgirl who had an abortion; the director of the cultural center, summarily fired; the hemphead prophet; the prosecutor of the people’s tribunal; the married priest; the sexually active fifteen year old; the incestuous writer; the pop guru; the pedophile professor; the guy who took a shit on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier; the hunger-striking neurotic deserter; the gangland leader of the projects; the homosexual medically exempt from the draft; the sadistic high school bully; the rapist driven to crime by pornography; the righteous hostage taker; the delinquent, victim of heredity or social pressure; the abortionist proclaiming human dignity; the back country Brazilian woman sold in the brothels of São Paulo; the Indian who contracts the tourist’s measles and dies; the murderer agitating for prison reform; the bishop publishing his Marxist pastorals; the car thief enamored of speed; the bank robber enamored of the images of luxury in advertising; the cherry-popper enamored of sexual liberation; the Bengali man dead of hunger …And so many others, all crusading heroes and sometimes well chosen indeed. Many of them were appealing, convincing. And why not? The unbridled heart is a great bazaar. - Ch. XVI

A quick glance at today’s left-wing media, whether in journalism, progressive nonprofit websites, or art-house films, would furnish examples of each of these archetypes being held up as heroes and martyrs: George Floyd, Kyle Rittenhouse’s attackers, and Assata Shakur come to mind in recent history.

Yet none of these figures are themselves the core of the Left; they are at best client demographics, foot soldiers, and poster children. The real Leftist, Raspail shows, is something far more sinister and despicable.

The book places the Leftist type on full display in its second chapter in the figure of a young radical who confronts an elderly professor. Raspail describes this character in terms reminiscent of today’s Antifa rioters, campus revolutionaries, the would-be assassin of Donald Trump, and the successful assassin of Charlie Kirk. He is one of “those parasitic marginals that Europe had secreted by their hundreds of thousands and who already formed, like a cancer, a sort of volunteer Third World within it.”

This creature cheers the coming of the migrant fleet and relishes the thought of the violence and destruction which will inevitably come in its wake. He declares with glee to the professor, “I think you’re perfect. That’s why I hate you. And it’s here, to your house, that I’ll bring the most wretched ones tomorrow… They’ll build a fire with your lovely oak door. They’ll shit all over your terrace and wipe their hands on the books in your library.”

These words perfectly embody Nietzsche’s spirit of ressentiment, which he saw at the core of every radical and socialist movement, as well as Dostoevsky’s and Conrad’s characterizations of the leftist underground in Demons and The Secret Agent respectively. More recently, they fit with Ted Kaczynski’s analysis of American leftists:

Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.

As left-wing political violence continues to spiral out of control in America, driven by terrorist organizations such as Antifa, “John Brown Gun Clubs,” and most university faculties, and cheered by large swathes of the population, conservatives should take note. There is no common ground with people whose only motivation is hatred and whose only solution is violence.

Conservatives: The West’s Not-So Beautiful Losers

Arrayed against these radicals stand an assortment of cowards and weaklings known in polite society as “conservatives.” Samuel T. Francis famously called this class of intellectuals and politicians “Beautiful Losers” in his book of the same name, but for Raspail, even their beauty is ironic at best. “Moral qualms - the most cowardly kind - also played their part in spreading the contagion of their spineless commentaries,” Raspail writes with disdain, “Ah, what fine scribblers and pretty speechifiers we had in those days of reprieve!”

Modern America has no lack of such “scribblers,” though they are more likely to claim “principle” rather than “moral qualms.” The entire never-Trump movement, embodied in organizations like the Lincoln Project and The Bulwark, provides no shortage of examples: David French, Bill Kristol, George Conway, etc. All cite “conservative” principles, Christian religion, or generic “nice guy”-isms to explain why the Trump Administration is morally indefensible for daring to restrict immigration even a little bit.

More recently, attention-desperate social media figures like James Lindsay, Seth Dillon, and Jordan Peterson have decried the mythical “woke Right,” by which they mean anyone to the right of Ted Cruz. The Woke Left might be silencing opposition, murdering political enemies and law enforcement, and rioting through the streets, but remember, both sides are bad! The “woke Right,” after all, wants to limit the influx of millions of foreigners and sometimes make offensive jokes in private group chats!

More concerning, however, is the failure of well-meaning right-wing politicians to take the necessary steps to win. In The Camp of the Saints, the fictional president of France is such a figure. He understands the danger posed by the migrant fleet, but in the end still believes in the moral claims of the cowardly commentary class, sapping his will to act:

Appalled by the words he had written, tormented by the consequences that might immediately follow from them, the President forsook them after considering the matter one last time, for thirty seconds, and allowing his heart and conscience to speak. And for thirty seconds, the world, too, heard nothing but its own breath. After which, every word counted, so many handfuls of earth thrown into the grave and onto the coffin, like a goodbye: ‘...And so, I am asking every soldier, every policeman, every officer to weigh this dreadful mission for themselves, and to feel free to accept or refuse it. Killing is difficult. Knowing why even more so… My dear compatriots, whatever happens, may God help us… or forgive us.’ - Ch. XXXVII

Trump, for all his successes, showed these weaknesses in his first term, especially in its waning days. Faced with the George Floyd Summer of Love, he responded only with a limited use of federal law enforcement to defend federal buildings, and as the Democrats made clear their intentions to use Covid lockdowns to destroy the economy and steal the election, he continued to defer to the “experts.” His speech on January 6, 2021, calling for peaceful protest, felt almost as broken and hopeless as that of Raspail’s president.

Other similarly right-wing leaders around the world have similarly faltered at the decisive moment. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, for example, found himself on the receiving end of another obviously rigged election in 2022 against an openly communist and terrorist opponent, while the people rose up in support of his presidency and the military announced its willingness to intervene. Rather than crossing the Rubicon, however, he fled the country. Now his enemies in Brazil have convicted him for attempting a coup anyway.

Trump 47 has shown willingness to go further but, as has pointed out, still faces the danger of not going far enough. Ramping up ICE raids, declaring Antifa a terrorist organization, and deploying the National Guard to major cities to restore order are significant steps. Still, the actual numbers of arrests and deportations are far too low given the magnitude of the crisis.

To bridge that gap, the administration would have to overcome the real bottleneck in deportations: the courts. J.D. Vance, before he was elected Vice President, floated the idea of defying the courts, following the example of presidents like Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. Similarly, Trump could imitate the Left’s darling and genuine “Blue Caesar” Franklin D. Roosevelt, who strong-armed the courts with threats of court packing. Yet the Trump Administration has only flirted with that possibility, and has yet to take the necessary steps to restore American sovereignty.

Some conservatives, on both sides of the pond, hold out hope that, if things get bad enough, the people will “wake up” and launch a revolution against the regime. Yet, in a blow to populist and 3-Percenter fantasies, Raspail reminds the reader that this is, as the kids say, “cope.” Speaking of the common man of Europe, Raspail writes,

He no longer acts but merely goes through the motions. He bucks but cannot unseat the rider. And it won’t happen again. When the time comes, he will do nothing, as if it didn’t concern him. And when he suddenly finds himself once again concerned, it will be too late. - Ch. XVII

The last five years in Europe and North America are filled with examples such as the January 6 election protest, the Canadian trucker protest, and the anti-immigration protests of Ireland and the UK. The regime met each of these with the full force of the law, made examples of even the most peaceful protesters by seizing bank accounts and throwing grandmas in solitary confinement for months on end. Yet the people did not “rise up,” they acquiesced. Even white South Africans have remained law-abiding subjects of a regime actively dispossessing them and turning a blind eye to genocide. If the West is to be saved, it will not be by the people who just want to grill.

The Universal Failure of the Institutions

The true crisis, for Raspail, is not the migrant convoy, but the failure of the West’s own institutions. One after another, every structure that should have defended the West and its way of life either fails or, worse yet, works to further its destruction.

In The Camp of the Saints, as in real life, “the beast had Western police and justice systems firmly in its pocket.” In a description which could well be describing a George Soros-funded prosecutor or Britain’s “two-tier policing,” Raspail writes:

Be guilty of the most horrible crimes, rape and dismember little girls, beat old people to death with a hammer for a hundred francs, no matter, modern justice will come running to offer psychiatric aid and the excuse of a poorly made society. But no deeper explanation was sought for the appalling deed of Captain Notaras. He represented the white race and was found guilty of blind, racist hatred, full stop.

The military, once a bastion of French conservatism and every nation’s first line of defense, is no better. The French Navy mutinies at the thought of firing at the migrant fleet, while the Air Force fires on those who try to defend France on their own. As for the Army, one of Raspail’s characters explains:

The army? Bah…! Is there still a war it would accept to fight? Ideological war? Lost cause. People’s war or civil war? Surely not. Colonial or racial war? Even less so. Nuclear war? No more need for an army, no more need for anyone. A classic national war? Perhaps, but that would truly surprise me! - XX

This same question, whether or not they would truly fight, haunts every Western military. As a 2024 Gallup survey showed, an ever-smaller percentage of Europeans are willing to fight for their country; as Pete Hegseth recently pointed out in his speech to American generals, an ever-smaller percentage of American service members are physically able to fight for theirs.

But the greatest betrayal of all, both in Raspail’s work and in the modern crisis, belongs to the Christian churches. Raspail was himself a devout Traditional Catholic, and thus he focuses most of his critique on the Catholic Church, but several Protestant and ecumenical religious groups make an appearance; no Christian denomination is immune.

The post-Vatican II Catholic Church, in Raspail’s telling, has abandoned its traditional doctrine and authentic faith in favor of universalist secular humanitarianism. Symbolizing this, the papacy has sold the treasures of the Church and donated the proceeds to the Third World, but “it didn’t even cover the rural budget of Pakistan for one year! Morally, he had only succeeded in showing how rich he was.”

As a result, the Church twists its traditional doctrine, using Christian language and appeals to justify support for Leftist causes. The fictional Pope Benedict XVI (no relation to the actual Pope Benedict XVI) issues a letter calling for acceptance of the migrants:

On this Good Friday, a day of hope for all Christians, we implore our brothers in Jesus Christ to open their souls, their hearts, and their worldly goods to all these unfortunate people God has sent knocking at our doors. For a Christian, there is no other path than that of charity. Charity is not a vain word. It cannot be divided, cannot be measured. It is total or it does not exist at all. - XXXII

These words, invoking charity to justify invasion, sound almost verbatim like the words of Pope Francis in a letter just before his death, critiquing Vice President J.D. Vance’s Catholic defense of immigration restriction:

Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extends to other persons and groups. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception. But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.

Pope Leo XIV, then Cardinal Prevost, also weighed in on the debate, retweeting an article directly criticizing Vance; as Pope, his support for mass migration has not flagged. Meanwhile, the USCCB and many American bishops have consistently advocated for immigration, while Catholic Charities is the world’s largest pro-immigration NGO.

This lethal combination of Christian rhetoric with leftist activism permeates all modern Christian institutions, whether mainline Protestant churches or the “He Gets Us” campaign, funded by the heavily Evangelical Green family, who own Hobby Lobby. No level of inter-denominational feuding changes the fact that Christianity itself is in crisis.

Online PaganBros, using a combination of SparkNotes Nietzsche and Reddit Viking LARPing, often point to these facts to claim that Christianity itself is a force of the Left, but Raspail pushes against this narrative. He is a Catholic in the style of Francisco Franco, Hernan Cortes, and the Crusaders, not the post-Vatican II liberal clerics his story depicts. These modern humanitarian Christians, he makes clear, are traitors to authentic Christianity.

In the book, this perspective is voiced by the Belgian Consul, who seeks to prevent the departure of the migrant fleet from the Ganges. Speaking to the Bishop of the Ganges, who organizes and facilitates the fleet, the Consul declares:

You make for a fine Roman Catholic bishop! There you are, a mercenary for the pagans now… And to what do you bear witness? Your faith? Your religion? Your Christian civilization? No, none of that. You bear witness against yourself, like the jaded Westerners you are. - Ch. VI

He decries the values of humanitarianism, pointing out that they arise, not from authentic Christianity, but “Deplorable, vile, hateful pity! Or what you call: charity, solidarity, universal conscience… but when I look at you, all I see is contempt for yourself and what you represent.” Invoking the same ordo amoris which Vance cited (a term coined by Thomas Aquinas), he asks the bishop, “Is not unbridled charity a sin against oneself?”

Is It Over, Anon?

The picture Raspail paints of the future hardly encourages the reader, but the message is not a black pill; it is an exhortation. The West has not yet fallen, though it teeters on the edge. Our problems are not outside our power to solve, if only we can muster the will.

Several recent examples show what is possible. In an American context, violent crime reached an all-time high in the 1980s, but declined by 26% during the eight years after then Senator Joe Biden’s 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act drastically increased funding for prisons and law enforcement while pushing for harsher sentences. Mayor Rudy Giuliani turned New York City into a clean, peaceful metropolis in the 2000s through “Broken Windows Policing” and “Stop and Frisk.” More recently, around the world, Nayib Bukele managed to turn El Salvador into the world’s safest country by simply arresting gang members and throwing them into a giant prison. At the same time, Denmark’s Social Democratic Party government has completely closed its borders and begun a process of remigration.

All of these efforts have faced backlash, in most cases on racial grounds, even though they are not the work of right-wing extremists. Biden was a “blue dog” Democrat, and got the bill signed under a Democrat president. Giuliani was a moderate, socially liberal blue-state Republican. Bukele began his career as a representative of El Salvador’s center-left party, and the Danish Social Democrats occupy the same position on the political spectrum.

The difficulty is every effort to restore order and defend civilization in the West is inevitably met with the same moral criticisms and name-calling. Enforcing laws requires the use of state violence and can disparately impact different racial groups; therefore, they are “fascist” and “racist” and basically one step away from Auschwitz. The whole international human rights apparatus, including supposedly Christian and Conservative organizations, will use any appeals necessary to shame normal people and cause them to doubt.

As of EXIT Group wrote last week, one of the big problems the Right faces is that there is no counternarrative to the human rights consensus: “It isn’t even, exactly, that they’re afraid of being called a bad person: they’re afraid of feeling like a bad person. They have no way to confront these facts within the moral frame they were raised with.” Even many hardened right-wingers are tormented by Nietzsche’s “bad conscience,” unable to truly break with humanitarian ideology.

Many conservative Catholics, for example, are unwilling to criticize a Church hierarchy which obviously opposes the interests of Western Civilization, with one self-described “fascist” even calling for the maiming of right-wingers critical of Pope Leo’s immigration stances.

What the West needs is a clear internal sense of righteousness which can justify use of force to ensure its own survival. French conservative historian Domique Venner called this sense “the horizon of war,” without which a civilization will commit suicide.

This new narrative cannot rely on existing religious institutions, but can call on religious ideas. In the Catholic context, in addition to Aquinas’s ordo amoris, important arguments include Pope Pius XI’s Mit Brennender Sorge, which referred “race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power” as “fundamental value[s] of the human community,” and Pope Benedict XVI’s (the real one, not the fictional one) 2006 Regensburg Address, where he explained the codependence of Christianity and Western Civilization, writing that “Christianity, despite its origin and its important development in the east, has ended up taking on its historical character in Europe.”

From a purely Biblical perspective, many scholars have pointed out the Biblical defense of national identity, most famously Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony in The Virtue of Nationalism (2018). Further, legal theorist Carl Schmitt, writing in his 1932 The Concept of the Political (summarized well here by Charles Haywood), showed how Christ’s command to “love thy enemy” refers to personal enemies (inimicus) and does not prohibit state violence against public enemies (hostes).

The Right also can and must, like Enoch Powell, draw on non-religious sources to justify its own existence, especially the inheritance of classical Greece and Rome. Homeric warrior myths, the legend of Horatius defending Rome from invading hordes against all odds, and the conquering figures of Alexander and Caesar should serve as inspiration. Meanwhile, great modern European commentators on the classical world, including Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spengler, Venner, and Strauss, should provide the basis for a new right-wing philosophy, distinct from the broken conservatism of the last century.

The Camp of the Saints shows what the world will look like if the West continues down its current path, without a belief in its own right to continue; Raspail’s challenge is to find a way to renew a society whose institutions, traditions, and beliefs have been corrupted. Only with a clear-eyed view of this crisis will the Right summon the moral courage to do what is necessary.

I am sure I would love TikTok, but short-form video content…

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This is just a small sample of left-wing policy and rhetoric. They genuinely appear to be unable to learn from their mistakes. There are psychological reasons for this, rooted in extensive scientific literature. This essay will explore findings in psychology and behavioral economics to gain a better understanding of why libtards go libtarded.

Threat Detection

Anyone who has conducted research into the intersection between evolutionary psychology and politics is aware that the amygdala plays a significant role in shaping political affiliation. The amygdala is the part of the brain that assigns emotional significance to the events it encounters. This includes perceiving threats and generating fear, as well as assigning relative emotional weight to everyday events. A well-functioning amygdala will assign more emotional weight to a fight with a spouse than to a pen running out of ink. Someone with a damaged amygdala struggles to assign emotional weight properly, which could cause them to care as much about the inkless pen as they do about the angry spouse.

Extensive research has demonstrated that individuals with a left-wing political affiliation tend to have a smaller right amygdala volume.1 The amygdala works closely with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)—the ACC signals when something is wrong, or when a situation requires more analysis and attention. The amygdala will assign emotional significance to events, and if they meet a certain threshold, the ACC sounds the alarm to the rest of the brain. Left-wingers tend to have an enlarged ACC and a smaller amygdala. As a consequence, the threshold for sounding the alarm is less robust and is pressed more often. This is precisely the mental model one would expect of someone getting upset about “microaggressions” and promoting “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces.”

Additionally, the ACC is activated when social exclusion is perceived or when a situation is unfair. has done excellent work in extensively describing the left-right value differences downstream from brain structure. I will not retread much more of the same ground here.

Mirror Neurons and Theory of Mind

Mirror neurons are the neurons in the brain that perceive the actions of an external individual as similar to our own actions. They were first discovered in monkeys. A monkey would have specific neurons activate when it grasped an object, and then the same neurons would activate when it watched another monkey or a human grasp an object. Later research showed that humans had the same neurons. The neurons that trigger in your mind when you pick up and sip your coffee are similar to the ones that activate when you see someone else do the same.2

These neurons enable us to learn from observing others, and they also facilitate the development of a theory of mind regarding another person. Mirror neurons are the basis of our ability to recognize subjectivity similar to our own in another person. They let us put ourselves in another person’s shoes and think about what things look like from their perspective.

One key difference between human mirror neurons and monkey mirror neurons is that human mirror neurons are strongly connected to the brain regions involved in emotional regulation, particularly the amygdala.3 As stated above, left-leaning individuals tend to have smaller amygdalas, which can impact the efficacy of mirror neurons. This is a likely explanation for the leftists’ inability to create a theory of mind for conservatives. There are extensive models and explanations on the right that explain why the left is the way it is. This is one of them. The left often jumps to labeling right-wingers as bad because of enlarged ACC perceptions of unfairness. Unfairness is de facto bad and must be corrected.

This produces a very hollow form of empathy on the left. They love migrants/disadvantaged groups because of a fairness concern in the ACC. Conservative empathy pays more attention to kinship bonds, a genuine form of empathy stemming from properly functioning mirror neurons, which are processed by a larger amygdala.

Threat Detection and Gambling Problems

The amygdala plays a vital role in correctly recognizing threats. This is especially crucial at night when camping in the forest and hearing the grunts of a bear nearby. The same part of the brain is also used in many other parts of life. Recognizing that the stock market is taking a turn, there is a sketchy person in an alley, or the under-the-gun player at the poker table just raised to 5 big blinds, acting first. A proper amygdala recognizes these potential threats and uses the ACC to signal precaution to the brain.

In Adaptive Markets, Andrew Lo explores behavioral finance and explores why economically irrational behavior is common. One experiment Lo discusses is the “Iowa Gambling Task,” a study in which subjects with damaged fear responses played a gambling game, with a control group that had undamaged threat detection.

The experimental test subject … is seated in front of four decks of cards, decks A through D, and is given $2,000 in realistic-looking play money. The player turns over a card selected from any one of the decks, and the positive or negative number printed on the card is how much the player has won or lost for that turn. … What the player doesn’t know beforehand is that the decks are rigged. Decks A and B will pay $100 for each turn of a card, but deck A will occasionally cost the player a few hundred dollars, enough so that drawing from deck A repeatedly will lower the player’s total. Deck B is similar, but it will less frequently penalize the player an even bigger amount, $1,250. Decks C and D, on the other hand, will pay $50 per turn, with deck C occasionally penalizing the player a small amount, and deck D infrequently penalizing the player $250, but in neither deck is the amount large enough to cause a total loss in the long run.4

Healthy subjects will sample from all four decks and eventually converge on decks C and D, as they win in the long run. Risk-seeking subjects will still sample from decks A and B, but only to a limited extent.

Players with damaged amygdalas start by sampling from all decks, and then proceed to focus primarily on decks A and B, which are sure to bankrupt them. In the study, these subjects would be given more money when bankrupted, but they would still sample from decks A and B. They would not learn from their mistakes and would go bankrupt again. They cannot perform probability matching and consistently lose. Even self-described risk-averse individuals with damaged amygdalas would exhibit this behavior, far more than risk-seeking individuals with healthy brains.

The Leftist Mind

Left-wingers tend to have an increased sensitivity for fairness and envy (ACC). They also tend to struggle with learning from mistakes, recognizing threats, or developing a robust theory of mind for others (amygdala). We see this play out repeatedly in politics.

Communism is a key example. Communist agitators cannot put themselves in another’s shoes to recognize why things are the way they are. They are envious of those who have things and are upset about inequality. They struggle to emulate the behavior of the successful, and they cannot grasp why traditions are in place. So they attempt to enforce fairness by any means necessary. When millions die, as they did in Russia, China, and Cambodia, among many other places where Communism was attempted, they keep trying anyway. Lower amygdala function means less ability to learn from mistakes.

We see this at more minor, but still important, scales in American politics. In criminal justice reform, the threat of a criminal’s violent behavior is ignored, and fairness is put on a pedestal. This is how a 14-time felon ends up on a train in North Carolina. There is no genuine empathy for fellow law-abiding citizens, only a reactive sense of injustice stemming from perceived unfairness.

This is also clear in the remarkable tone-deafness of the American left over the last year. They are unable to rein in much of the rhetoric that alienated the American electorate in November 2024 and even drove people towards violence. Even when they recognize that the rhetoric must be toned down, they forget about it the next day.

In a way, this is not their fault. Some brain structures are formed in a particular way due to genetic reasons. This does not necessarily make them bad people. Just incompetent at many tasks critical for proper governance and human prosperity. There are many more examples that I could bring up, and many more you are probably thinking of, but I will not spill more proverbial ink. The point is clear. These individuals are incapable of exercising power responsibly. Power must be wielded to suppress their political influence.

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Good luck. This is why I bought the books: I knew I had a competitive edge over all those people.

Large language models (LLMs) are a versatile tool for numerous applications. They can be used for learning. They can help write an email. They can write code. They can help diagnose and resolve computer issues. They can even walk you through some unfamiliar tasks in the physical world. That being said, they have their limits. This essay is not about the limits of AI chatbots. This essay explores the limitations of human beings like you and me.

Have you tried to learn by talking to ChatGPT? It can be done, but only in some cases. Places where I have found AI to be helpful with learning:

• Helping me understand a compelling but confusing sentence or paragraph in a continental philosophy book.

• Giving me a list of methods and their use cases from a particular programming library.

• Giving me step-by-step instructions for a specific task that I perform, primarily if it is performed multiple times.

Notice that in none of these cases am I learning a book’s worth of knowledge or information from AI. It is not helpful in those cases. It is not helpful in many cases, and for multiple reasons. Below, I will list some cases and reasons in a relatively disorganized manner, which is intentional.

Making Your Brain Move

Learning is similar to weight lifting. When lifting weights, you must do some positive and negative motion with tension. When doing barbell squats, the negative motion is the downward movement, and the positive motion is firing your glutes and quads to get back into the standing position. Dumbbell curls are typically the opposite, where you start with the positive motion and finish with the negative motion. In essence, with weightlifting, you are repeatedly picking something up and putting it back down.

Learning is a similar activity. Much like muscles get used to the repeated movement by growing and getting stronger, the neural pathways in your brain that store or allow you to use information get stronger when you repeatedly pick up and put down the information. Repetition is key, and focus is non-negotiable. This is why writing notes is effective when learning or reading. Your brain picks up the information from the book or professor and then puts it on the paper.

In weightlifting, controlling the negative movement of the exercise can have a profound impact. This increases the time and type of tension placed on the muscle, which leads to greater gains. The same is true for learning. In learning, a controlled negative takes the form of the space between the information intake and reproduction. Class notes are more effective if the student waits until after class to put down any notes. This puts more strain on the mind, thereby reinforcing the neural pathways even more. I once had a professor who required this activity. Note-taking in class was forbidden. Similarly, if you are taking read notes, they will be least effective if you take a note after each sentence. They are more effective if notes are taken after each page or paragraph. If you get in the habit of taking notes after each chapter, it will train your brain to retain the information for even longer before putting it down.

Too Much Freedom

Now that we have a sense of what effective AI use looks like, do you use it in this way? It might be. In which case, good on you for making such good use of the AI chatbot. This is not what AI invites the user to do, however. ChatGPT is designed in its system prompt to ask you a question after each of its answers, thus encouraging you to extract more and more information from it. Then you can scroll down to read more. It is easy and encouraged to get five to ten questions into a conversation with the LLM within a few minutes.

This quickly results in information overload. Information overload can promptly leave you bewildered and unable to process anything. This is the same reason nobody learns anything from TikTok or Instagram reels. The torrential deluge of information-flavored slop becomes a gray mass more akin to a vat of melted crayons rather than a tasteful textbook written by a brilliant educator.

The Medium is the Message. The format in which information is transmitted governs the type of information and the way it is processed. It is all too easy to ask another question and get another answer. Learning requires patience, lingering, and slow deliberation. AI does not encourage this kind of learning.

This does not mean it is impossible. I have learned some things from AI, but my best learning experiences with artificial intelligence often take the form of three or four messages on a given subject over the course of a week. This gives me time to linger and reflect on the answers throughout the day, during downtime in the evenings, or while driving to work.

Unknown Unknowns

There are things that we know, and we are certain of our knowledge. There are some things we know, but only subconsciously: the unknown knowns. Then there are things we know that we are ignorant of. It is good to be cognizant of these. But the most dangerous category of knowledge is unknown unknowns. These are the things that we are totally ignorant of, that can sneak up on us and scare us. These are the things that embarrass you in a conversation or get you in over your head with responsibilities.

AI does not know if you are unaware of something, so if you are diving into a new domain and are entirely ignorant about some aspects of a subject, it will not provide the right starting point. It will not know what kind of context you need to get up to speed.

A recent example of this for me was trying to learn about generative AI in 3D objects. It is a relatively new domain, which already presents an obstacle for an AI conversation. However, to make things worse, I was relatively unfamiliar with many of the intricacies of CAD, the differences between STL and STEP file types, and what B-REP is. This caused a lot of frustration early in the conversation, which is okay. Learning can be frustrating, and should be at some points. Difficulty is the path. If it is easy, you are probably not learning.

I had to take a step back and conduct some broader domain research, including research alongside AI. I had to recognize this for myself and reframe the conversation, because AI was not going to do it for me. One technique I used to mitigate this difficulty was asking the LLM to provide a list of prerequisite topics for discussing the thing I wanted to learn about, and then having me rate my confidence in each prerequisite on a scale of one to five. This was useful because asking AI to take a generic step back would have it start covering ground I had already covered. I did not need new foundations in machine learning and programming, but I did need to get a new understanding of the world of 3D CAD.

Books have a distinct advantage in helping us navigate the unknown unknowns. In reading a book, you do not have to know what to ask to uncover things you are wholly ignorant of. The right book will introduce you to things you did not think you needed to learn about.

Our Limitations

Learning from AI is not impossible. You can do it. You can also learn from TikTok if you pull enough teeth. But, is it worth it? Is your effort going towards learning, or going towards resisting the dopaminergic pull to be entertained?

Despite numerous advances in information transmission, especially over the past few decades, books continue to exist. They are still read, if only by an increasingly small number of people. But they are still an advantageous way to learn.

Books are a technology that has evolved for thousands of years, transforming from the tablet to the scroll to the codex. Techniques for information framing have also developed to address human limitations specifically. Generative

AI builds on this foundation, of course, but it is still a different form of technology, and this means that we interact with it differently in subtle and unconscious ways. To learn from AI effectively, we need to address our own limitations in how we use it, and that may not be worth the trouble for everyone. Learning a complex concept from a book is likely a more profitable trouble.

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This was the prevailing ethos in the first half of the 20th century. In World War I, entire societies contorted themselves to perform optimally in the advent of highly mechanized warfare. It was all against all; a natural outgrowth of liberalism, which had infected all governments, even if not explicitly. The state is of the people, so state against state means all the people against all the people. In the U.S., civilians mobilized to ration, work in factories, and purchase Liberty Bonds, blurring the distinction between the home front and the battlefield.

Ernst Jünger, a German soldier, witnessed the mechanized carnage firsthand, detailing it in his war memoir Storm of Steel. Influenced by his experience in the Great War, Jünger published The Worker in 1932. He gave a philosophical account of the transformation in technology and the embrace of total mobilization. It is easy to think that the era of total mobilization has concluded. There is no world war going on at this time, and people live lives of comparative luxury and ease in the West.

While the material circumstances may have changed, total mobilization has not. Instead, total mobilization has transformed in the information age. Now, we are mobilized in service to the information war. This trend is only beginning. It will intensify.

The Worker

In The Worker, Jünger argued that bourgeois liberalism was on the verge of collapse, soon to be replaced by a new metaphysical force: the Worker. The Worker emerges as a product of industrialization, technological progress, and the total mobilization of World War I. Jünger describes the Worker as a new anthropological form, defined by discipline, will, efficiency, and technical mastery, embodying work as a metaphysical principle. War, labor, and even leisure become subordinated to collective effort and discipline.

Jünger sharply rejects liberalism, modernity, and bourgeois values. He does so not out of personal bias or philosophical complaint, but because of a Nietzschean belief in the unavoidable transformation of the world. The way the Worker, together with technology, shapes the world is a matter of destiny. Total mobilization, complete technological control, and the destruction of liberalism are inevitable and must be accepted. The new world he foresees will be anti-liberal, anti-democratic, and anti-individualist. The bourgeois world of comfort, commerce, and freedom declines. It is replaced by disciplined heroism, hierarchy, and sacrifice.

He made this argument nearly a century ago. During World War II, industrialization and total mobilization intensified, especially in Europe. However, liberalism did not end, at least not immediately or clearly. Instead, the form of total mobilization changed. Europe was devastated, and all old forms disappeared as American-style liberal capitalism collided with communism. Communist regimes allowed the metaphysical concept of the Worker to persist in a distorted form, but in Western capitalism, the Worker was replaced.

The Consumer

American capitalism replaced the Worker with the Consumer. The 1950s imagery of luxury and consumption is emblematic of this transformation. Work itself stops being a matter of duty and service to a greater cause, but instead is done in service to consumption. Consumerism continues to operate as the dominant metaphysical principle throughout the rest of the century. The specifics of total mobilization in the age of consumerism are reflected in trade and banking policies, which manipulate aggregate demand and other macroeconomic factors to optimize consumer markets and boost the green line. The last vestiges of the old form of the Worker slowly disappeared as the Soviet Union decayed and collapsed.

Just as the Worker blurred the boundary between war and work, so did the Consumer. This was seen most clearly in the aftermath of 9/11, in which President Bush encouraged the American people to fight back against the terrorists by going out and buying things. Of course, this had the economic impact of keeping the market afloat in the face of great tragedy, but it also signaled the metaphysics of the time. We, the American people, fight against evil terrorists by spending money on consumer goods. This became the metaphysical duty of the American people in the age of the Consumer.

However, things started to change again during the 2010s.

The Phantom

During the 2010s, development in industry and the effort to maximize access to consumers led to the acceleration of data analytics. Maximizing profits remained important, but capturing as much data as possible became a priority. Big data grew and developed as people increasingly turned to social media. The new structure of big data optimized everything from advertising to logistics and governance. The growth and acceleration of big data mirrored the total mobilization of industrialization that Jünger observed in the early 20th century.

Now, total mobilization harvests user behavior for predictive systems.

The 2008 financial crisis marked the beginning of the end of the consumerism that dominated the late 20th century. Data became the primary focus. Of course, data was in service to giving the consumer what they want. The end goal of the data drive was to increase consumption. However, big data has progressed past simple consumer service and is now a critical component of every aspect of industry. The most valuable companies in the world are now more concerned with some aspect of the data pipeline than they are with consumer goods. NVIDIA once targeted gamers. Now it is synonymous with the AI boom.

The 2020 pandemic cemented the new age of big data. Everyone was trapped inside, so interaction with the external world was exclusively online. Data-driven companies, such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon, surged. 2020 was the year that the Phantom completely supplanted the Consumer as primary metaphysical form.

The Worker and the Consumer are both metaphysical forms inhabited by the human being. The Phantom is distinguished from both in that the shadow of the human inhabits it. The Phantom is the form of the traces of data left by an individual online. It is the echo of the person that persists in the digital dimension after the user steps away from the device. The Phantom is now the chief subject and driver of total mobilization.

The Phantom is the amalgamation of all of one's profiles, strewn throughout data lakes and warehouses, waiting to be taken up in an algorithm. TikTok algorithms harvest the doomscroll for personalized feeds. The user’s Phantom predicts behavior better than the users themselves. Jünger’s Worker exemplified physical heroism in service to the factory lines. The Consumer maximized material pleasure in the shopping malls. The Phantom maximizes intangible extraction, manifesting itself in the digital corridors of the internet.

Information War

Total mobilization is deeply connected to warfare. The Worker’s mobilization was tied to the World Wars. The mobilization of the Consumer was in service to the Cold War. The mobilization of the Phantom is in service to the information war, which is progressing into the AI arms race between the US and China.

Information warfare has taken many forms over the last decade. It can be between warring political factions within a nation or between different countries that seek to shape the perceptions of another. The former instance includes Cambridge Analytica using Facebook data for political mobilization in 2016 and the systematic censoring of the Biden laptop in 2020. The latter instance includes Palantir using graph networks and predictive analytics to help the US military hunt down terrorists, translating data mobilization into meat-space warfare intelligence.

The world is currently undergoing a multipolar struggle for supremacy in data. The US and China are directly competing in the information war, with China seeking to extract as much data as possible from the United States. United States-based companies and intelligence services also focus on collecting data on US citizens, with China remaining closed off from America’s corporate panopticon. This gives them a distinct advantage. The speed at which China could create (or has made) profiles on Western subjects would (or has) far outpaced the capability of the United States to do the same on Chinese subjects. Population size difference is a minor factor. No US company is mass-producing data-harvesting Roombas to send to China.

The EU’s GDPR further cripples American dominance in the information war. American companies will abide by European regulations to access their market, thus hindering data collection on American citizens. Chinese products, on the other hand, shamelessly harvest data from inside American homes.

The total mobilization in the age of the Phantom is mass information harvesting. While the Worker was motivated by duty in service to his country, the Phantom was forcefully extracted. American data harvesting through social media networks feeds back into the networks to optimize their addictive capacity. The Phantom is motivated by what it wants, with the doomscroll algorithm constantly promising a little treat if the user scrolls a little bit further.

Total mobilization in this age culminates in the artificial intelligence arms race. AI is the ultimate mobilization tool, with states racing for dominance in autonomous weapons and intelligence. Additionally, many see the possibility of AI to make groundbreaking improvements in mathematics, science, medicine, economics, and more. Google’s DeepMind has already applied artificial intelligence in multiple domains to make improvements in hardware, system architecture, and mathematics beyond what the creators had imagined.

After the second inauguration of President Donald Trump, Alex Wang penned a letter to the President, urging him to increase American AI capabilities rapidly. Wang warned that the CCP's investment in AI was ten times that of the United States. President Trump started his administration by undoing the Biden-era executive orders that hindered AI and establishing the new Manhattan Project: Stargate. The Big Beautiful Bill also halted state-level regulation of AI, and Trump’s AI action plan aims to build American dominance in the AI space.

China has also accelerated AI development. They are developing AI-driven drones with lethality as the primary concern and safety as the second concern. Additionally, they are focusing on using AI for cognitive warfare:

The PLA defines AI-driven cognitive warfare as the systematic use of artificial intelligence, big data analytics (大数据分析), and psychological operations (心理战) to manipulate enemy perceptions, degrade decision-making capabilities, and control information flows before and during conflict. Unlike traditional warfare, which prioritizes kinetic force, cognitive warfare seeks to influence the adversary’s strategic thinking, sow discord within societies, and create operational advantages by shaping the information domain.

PLA military theorists emphasize that cognitive warfare is an extension of the “Three Warfares” (三战) doctrine, which consists of psychological warfare (心理战), public opinion warfare (舆论战), and legal warfare (法律战). By integrating AI into these domains, the PLA is enhancing its ability to automate disinformation campaigns, conduct large-scale social media manipulation, and employ deepfake technology (深度伪造技术) to distort reality. Reports suggest that the PLA increasingly sees AI-powered psychological warfare as a key enabler for securing strategic objectives.

China and the US are not the only players in the AI arms race. India is investing in autonomous AI weapons. Russian President Putin stated in 2017, "Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all humankind... Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world." AI has been used extensively on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, both for intelligence gathering and autonomous weapons. Additionally, Israel has successfully deployed AI systems to identify and eliminate low-ranking Hamas militants.

Information warfare is composed of operations used to gain an information advantage by controlling information flows for your team and exploiting the information flows of the other team. Successful information warfare is dependent on big data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to gain better insights from the data and exploit the opponent more effectively. Dominating the AI arms race will shape the outcome of the information war because it gives the superior actor a decisive advantage for offense and defense.

Currently, no single country has dominated. The U.S. leads in generative AI and commercial applications, while China excels in deployment scale and state-backed integration into military systems.

AI supremacy directly translates into weapons supremacy. Every image and video contributes to the training data of autonomous drones and turrets. Every imprudent outpouring of the heart on a public forum contributes to a psychological warfare capable AI. So does every split-second pause on the doomscroll. Additionally, many expect the economic benefits derived from cutting-edge AI to accelerate economic development. The country that has the best models and best applications of the technology first gets a head start.

These are the aims we are mobilized toward. We are haunted by our own Phantoms, mobilized by government and tech to surrender as much information as possible to gain the edge in the information war. This is our metaphysical form at this stage in human history.

Amor Fati

At this junction in an article like this, the reader may expect me to put forward some call to action for flimsy resistance. Use your phone less, use Brave Browser, ask for your data to get taken down, etc. The truth is that none of it will matter. Making a personal decision to stay on the sidelines during total mobilization is always available to some degree. Stay out of the war machine, stay out of the consumer mania. The total mobilization of the Worker and the Consumer fluctuated regardless of any individual acts of spiritual resistance.

In his essay, Total Mobilization, Jünger argues that World War I births an amor fati toward the impersonal forces of annihilation, death, and horror, experienced as the metaphysical frenzy of total mobilization. He predicts that the age continually advances toward a uniform, machine-centered mass regime that crushes the old liberal order and eventually destroys itself.

Jünger distinguished himself from other German conservatives. He rejected the idealized romanticism of other German conservatives who harkened back to pre-modern traditionalism. Jünger and peers like Spengler and Moeller embraced and accepted the destiny-driven transformations that mass technology wrought on the world. Jünger’s project in Total Mobilization and The Worker was to uncompromisingly grapple with Nietzsche’s ideas in the midst of drastic societal transformations. Much like Spengler, Jünger recognized inevitability and the rule of destiny in the changing of the world. Both of them were inspired by Nietzsche, as was Heidegger, who was also profoundly inspired by Jünger’s writings in The Worker.

Nietzsche states in Ecce Homo:

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.

Nietzsche’s stoic idea of the embrace and affirmation of reality as it is, which is a critical component of greatness, is reaffirmed in The Worker. Jünger states in the conclusion:

We are moving towards astonishing things here. Beyond the democracy of work, in which the contents of the world we know are recast and reworked, the outlines of state orders are sketched which are beyond any possibility of comparison… We see that the peoples are at work, and we welcome this work, wherever it is carried out. The actual rivalry concerns the discovery of a new and unknown world – a discovery that is more annihilating and richer in consequences than the discovery of the Americas…

To take part and to serve: that is the task that is expected of us.

Participating in the metaphysical demands of the age is not optional. It is especially not optional if one is pursuing greatness. The domination of big data and artificial intelligence is forging the new metaphysics of our age, one in which we are mobilized not as Workers or Consumers, but as data Phantoms. To exist in the form that our age demands, we must accept our station as Phantom and affirm it.

The information war is at hand. The battlefield is diverse, with political parties battling one another, corporations doing the same, and nuclear powers vying for global supremacy. Much like the total mobilization of World War I eliminated the distinction between the battlefield and the factory line, the information war eliminates division between every domain in which information flows.

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