Class Project(ion) and the Epistemic Solipsism of Identity, or What the Fuck is Tampico Anyways?

Dearest Fiends,

Happy Halloween and merry Election Day! It’s hard to say which is scarier some years, eh? While I’m sure many of you came for treats, as the kids say, I’ve only got tricks. Then again, so does Joe Brandon. You’re fat and spoiled anyways, you don’t need any more treats!

Remember the leftist creed: “The strong will eat, the weak are meat.”

So this is a post I promised to make in my latest thread in the Class Megathread, attached below for your convenience. It will also be included in Twitter Volume IV.

What is the principle of similarity? It is simple: Every class imagines that every other class resembles itself, psychologically, by default. The main differences are supposed to be the quantity of money, and to the extent they can imagine difference, it is because they see that quantity has a quality all of its own. So it is easy to imagine things like Vimes’ Boots Theory, because it is about everyone being essentially rational actors with the same motivations but different economic constraints leading to different results, qualitatively.

It’s a neat just-so story, but it’s also untrue. Allow me to present Monsieur’s Boots Theory.

Proles buy expensive shoes – sometimes. Proles are often buying expensive things, because they like them. Jordans are cool and it’s fun to look cool in front of your friends. For very small children, there are designer shoes that will invariably be grown out of in a few months, but people still buy them, because they are cool and you look cool to your peers (other low class moms). The middle class just buys regular shoes for a regular price, generally. Men buy men’s shoes cheaply, and women buy women’s shoes for a staggering price. I’d say that a woman’s shoe is 3x as expensive as a similar man’s shoe. For the upper middle class, I’ll share some stories. All my life until college, I went shoe shopping at Payless and bought sneakers that wore out in six months. Then one of my friends, of my class but who went to boarding school and thus had different tastes than me, said we should go buy some high quality shoes. We went to the mall and he saw a Foot Locker, which he said looked like an interesting store. That day, I spent over $100 on shoes.

They wore out in six months. I told my friend this is why I shop at Payless.

But later, he took me to a store he learned about from his boarding school friends, Nordstrom Rack, and there, the quality was exactly as advertised. Sometimes.

One last story. I was with an upper class friend whose shoes were wearing out after several years of service. He wanted them to get resoled, but being rubber cup soles, this would be prohibitively expensive. And yet, the desire remained there, strongly, despite the inability to reasonably fulfill it, and he lamented the decline of the age of cobblers. You see, it’s not primarily about cost and utility, as in Vimes’ Boot Theory. Fundamentally, clothing is a statement of identity through which we try to express our belonging in our sociocultural tribe and our values – his values here being longevity and legacy.

If Vimes’ Boot Theory were true, we would expect to see either a straight line or log-line relationship between clothing price, market segment targeted, and clothing quality, such that the rich pay the most and get the highest quality clothing while the poor pay the least and get the lowest quality clothing. I’d like to start with market segment and price and show why that isn’t true to begin with. Here we have shirts – and as best I can, I am going to use the same kind of clothing across all demos.

Click to expand gallery:

The Paul Stuart item is upper class, the Brooks Brothers item is upper middle class, Vineyard Vines is middle class, and the loudly branded Gucci is prole. You may notice that the prole item is consistently the most expensive by far (you can tell it’s prole because of the very large and obvious brand logo), the middle class item is somewhat more expensive than the upper middle class item, and the upper class item is several times the price of the upper middle class item. This is not consistent with Vimes’ Boot Theory in the slightest – there is actually a inverse relationship with customer income and price except with the upper class, an extremely small and almost insignificant cohort that shops at basically small boutique stores/brands.

But what about quality?

Have you ever heard of a “market for lemons”? The idea is that products are heterogenous, information is limited, and the cost of information is high, resulting in every used car being priced as lemon-like except for things like CPO cars. Well, imagine all those things are true, but your purchases are now high pressure and necessary. This is what I call the “market for quacks” – the archetypal example being healthcare. Because products are heterogenous and information is limited, you can’t effectively shop around. But unlike lemon cars, you must have your product, and therefore, rather than the limited information forcing all offers to be lowballs, it causes all offers to be highballs. Fashion is a market for quacks. I have gone into Nordstrom Rack and bought the highest quality item on the rack for $200 when all the other items are $2000. But at the same time, the $2000 item may be the best thing on offer and the $200 blazer might melt in the rain. There is not a consistent relationship between price and quality. All you know, vaguely, is whether a given clothing item is for your tribe, and you *must* always signal tribal allegiance or be ostracized. As such, we develop a market for quacks. If the prices are allowed to find a rational relationship between price and quality, then it ceases to be a market for quacks. That sounds good, right?

After all, not all luxury goods are markets for quacks. In steaks, wagyu A5 is better than prime (A3 equivalent) is better than choice, and the prices reflect that. In alcohol, ultrapremium liquors ($1000+) taste better than premium and superpremium liquors ($100-$300/bottle) taste better than a nice liquor at your local store ($50/bottle) taste better than some trash booze. So why is fashion a market for quacks? Why does it not follow the price of commodity textiles?

Well, commodity T-shirts are… a buck a shirt. If fashion simply reflected the cost of the textiles used to make it, every fashion brand would go out of business, and that includes the fucking Walmart store brand. Necessarily, we must have a market for quacks, because only massive pricing uncertainty allows for such outrageous price multiples over commodity textiles to survive.

Now, you may protest that fashion is a special case and thus a bad example for class markers and pricing. But what other categories of goods are used for class signaling?

Restaurants? Books and cultural products (the price here is time, not dollars)? Home decoration?

These are also markets for quacks.

You can see that the quality widely varies, the price widely varies, and the market can only be navigated with tribal knowledge corresponding to one’s class (or other identity) positions. For the most part, what you know is what others like you consume, and so your choices do not reflect rational shopping to maximize quality for price (impossible in markets for quacks), but a desire to signal belonging, causing wildly variable prices.

With me so far?

Oh, but you may protest – this is just basic class dynamics in the Fussellian manner.

Certainly, but I am merely refuting the money-as-quality-of-quantity thesis. The price points of various class categories in markets for quacks reflect not price-for-quality, as with normal goods, but the values of particular classes. What does that mean? Proles love to be flashy and splash their wealth around, when they have it. When they are saving, they buy bizarre, chthonic products like Tampico and Flavor Aid, but when they splurge, they splurge. As a rule, they are imitating the most showy, brash luxury they can find – proles like to go to restaurants like Red Lobster as a special treat, because this is the meal most like 1950s-esque high luxury still around. The middles are trying to keep up with the Joneses, so they can be milked pretty hard as well. Their products are often quite expensive (in the case of restaurants, places like Saltbae et al are far, far more expensive than anything else out there), and the goal is to project an image of sophistication and wealth that you don’t have. The upper middle class, loving a deal, is attracted to miserliness, or at least the appearance of miserliness. Though they won’t always have the absolute cheapest prices, they will almost always be paying less than the middle class.

The upper class has a personal relationship with its products. For instance, much of what is made for Nordstrom Rack was manufactured for the outlet as an outlet product. But haute couture? The total market of haute couture customers is a few thousand people on the whole planet Earth. These are the tastemakers, and fashion is their world. We just live in it.

So what governs the markets is not price-for-quality, but a reflection of values. What are those values? For a more detailed examination of class values and characters, please consult the Class Dynamics category. To finally, finally get to the point: Each class projects its own values onto every other class.

The long digression about fashion was to establish that the idea of price-for-quality and money having a quality of its own merely from quantity does not apply in markets for quacks, which happen to be the markets most used to signal class. But nevertheless, people believe that differences in class are merely differences in the quantity of money. Therefore, their idea of what people at different classes do is merely a reflection of what they would be doing – or what they imagine they would be doing – with different levels of money.

When classes above prole propose solutions to prole problems, what they are proposing is usually imagined solutions to the imagined problems they’d have at that strata – and that’s when they’re being sincerely benevolent. What proles generally want, more or less, is to secure their precarious existence, and then to live “good”, to have nice things that they enjoy and leisure time, and to be left the fuck alone from meddling interventions.

So that is the idea of the Principle of Projection. But why does this projection come about? Well, first of all, America systematically denies the idea of class. Ask any Briton whether class exists and the answer will be obvious and immediate. Britons understand class as a sociocultural tribe of birth that grants certain, largely immutable, characteristics which shape one’s experiences of the world. It is totally natural for them to believe that. But both America and Britain are class societies. In fact, every complex settled civilization on Earth is a class society! And yet, this understanding must still be taught. The only way most people learn things is through drilling, and culture is a way to drill complex understanding in an intuitive way.

Absent this, what we have is epistemic solipsism. That is, absent being taught that people are different in certain ways, the default is to assume they are the same, even when this doesn’t make sense. I’m sure everyone can relate to being asked if they were cold when someone else is cold, followed by a baffled insistence that you must be cold. No, I’m not cold. If I was cold, I would have put on more clothing, like you want to. Or, encountering fresh Midwestern Protestants, the bizarre insistence that Buddhism is another form of Protestant Christianity, only with Buddha instead of Jesus. It’s not, but they have this mental category of real religion, and Buddhism, being a real religion, is therefore like Protestantism but recolored. The news constantly writes articles about how millennials can’t afford houses. Well, I bought a house and my first paycheck was enough for the down payment. I am a millennial. And some millennials come from strata that can never buy houses and their parents and grandparents are also permanent renters. This housing narrative is only true for a given slice of the population, largely urban, coastal, and middle class, but it is projected onto the whole.

The world of acknowledged differences and possibilities we might call a universe of possibilities, and whenever a person encounters something outside their universe of the possible, they will often have an emotional reaction of some kind, followed by a small loss of sanity. Only one’s own existence is real, anything else presented is probably some kind of LARP. Something too far outside the universe of the possible will be rejected entirely – written out of one’s mental map of reality, forcibly blanked out. The Babylonian Hebrew has had this experience many times trying to explain the upper class to his middle class peers – it will not sink in at all. The height of epistemic solipsism is “theater kid”-ism, in which all differences are merely LARPs, and therefore anything can be put on by putting on the right costume. I am not sure why people go on Reddit so often and tell fake stories from an obviously fictional viewpoint (I AM BAD MAN. I AM VERY BAD. YOU NEED TO COME INTO WORK EVEN THOUGH NINJAS KILLED YOUR PREGNANT GIRLFRIEND’S SISTER-WIFE-FATHER. AND NO OVERTIME PAY.), but I suspect it’s an outgrowth of this theater kid mentality. Anything can be true if you believe it is and put on the costume.

The final rejection of epistemic solipsism, which results in a “redpilling” and a permanent shift to the “right” is the understanding that different things are different. This is only an abstract, theoretical statement, but it lays the mental groundwork to conceptualize new kinds of groups as being merely different things in a highly varied and complex world. I would describe this as the foundational concept of anti-liberalism: anti-universalism. Things are particulars, and particulars are different. Different things are different.

I will tell you that as a child, I was a “high-functioning autistic” and also scored high on those internet autism diagnosis tests. Well, once I understood that different things are different, and that people are a matter of pushing the right buttons, which vary by person, my autism score declined from autistic to neurotypical, and my Hare checklist rose to clinical sociopathy, which proved to be inconvenient during certain employment screenings. Ah well. Such is life. Full anti-liberal understanding, of course, only came later. Why is this relevant?

Epistemic solipsism is not actually a problem in a socially homogenous environment. The main differences one encounters in such an environment is mostly the personality difference, the gender difference, and the age difference – and one notes how often the class war is instinctively framed as the generation war (boomers fighting millennials over housing) – because age is one of those easily grasped natural categories. But cultural differences are very different to grasp. It often takes a lifetime, or at least a good few decades, to write a proper ethnography of a strange culture. Even to grasp class differences *within* a culture often takes several years to articulate. Diversity, therefore, is inherently costly because it raises the cost of social transactions by doing away with informal shared understandings born out of a common cultural environment. When social environments are heterogenous – diverse – the normal person becomes, effectively, autistic, requiring all social norms and rules to be formally verbalized. Which is not something that most people can do, absent exposure to the different. A fish does not know what water is. Only the contrasting of water and air can teach that.

What does it matter if our Midwestern Protestant biddy doesn’t understand Buddhism if she never meets a Buddhist? But drop Buddhists into her world, and now you have a problem. Of course, with enough decades, the two communities can come to understand each other, and Creolization will occur (hybrid cultures are cheaper than maintaining two cultures apart like a salad bowl). But in a world of infinite diversity, this can never properly occur. The result is perpetual social autism. Nobody can understand each other.

This is probably one of my least well-written articles, but I hope you won’t mind. I find the topic of talking about minds is almost inherently awkward because you have to formally articulate everything – which obviously does have some artistic merit in mimicking the experience of being socially atomized by diversity.

Well… what the fuck is Tampico anyways?

Lost in a sea of unknown water,
Monsieur le Baron


APPENDIX: The Imagined Other

So our last class thread was about material relations and how they relate to radical political tendencies. But I’d like to go back to class as a sociocultural formation for this thread. Today, we’re going to be talking about identity as it relates to the imagined class Other. It may surprise you, but the judgement of one towards the Others can itself be a class marker, and an even more reliable one than consumption markers or belief systems. Why? Because the judgement of the Other tells us where someone situates themselves in the universe. Tell me what you hate, and I will tell you are what you are. The Other is always a mirror of the anxieties, hopes, and prides of the Self.

For America, there is no China and never was. China does not exist.

There is only a projection of our own fears and hopes. On this website, you’ll often see people talking about the opulence or lack thereof of the rich. This says more about them than the rich. There are a number of assumptions that need to be unpacked. First, that the minimalist aesthetic of the rich is not conspicuous consumption. It is. But it is conspicuous consumption with a particular culture in which it is valued. Making this mistake immediately gives away the game and reveals the speaker as middle class or lower. But what they propose as a motivation is indicative of the speaker’s class. For the proles, they have an Imagined Rich. Their idea of the Imagined Rich is much like a prole, but much richer. Their reaction to minimalism is confused. They often believe that the rich want ugly and stupid things (not untrue) or that they are hiding (very untrue). If the UMC+ wanted to hide, they wouldn’t buy minimalist things because nobody else likes that crap, so it sticks out like a sore thumb – as it is meant to! It is conspicuous consumption, just with a terrible aesthetic.

But the Prole Imagined Rich is a Trumpian figure. I will explain the concepts further in a full blog post, but this is an extension of the Principle of Similarity, or Class Solipsism. Everyone assumes their class experience is the default and normal.

It isn’t.

Therefore, deviation from sameness requires some sinister motive. The Prole also has an Imagined Middle, but this Imagined Middle is mostly the product of the Middle’s own interaction with the Prole. Which brings me to the MC. Being in the middle, they have a lot of perceptions. And being in an insecure spot, they have a lot of Imagined Others. The interactions of the Middle with the Prole are dominated by the fear of falling. What the Middle has is a “comfortable” lifestyle (comfortable is the watchword of the middle for their wealth/status), and what they fear most is losing this position. Therefore, the MC, to salve their own fears and ego insecurities, tries to create as much distance between themselves and the deplorable CHUDs as possible, to minimize the possibility of falling and becoming them, as they then build themselves up to be so much better than them. This can express itself in a benevolent and malicious way. The benevolent manifestation is to try and baby the proles, to be their valiant “protector” because they are too weak to protect themselves. This is the impulse behind defending petty ghetto criminals. The malicious way is to mock and demean the proles as all stupid, evil, ignorant, and all manner of bad things. They’re simultaneously spoiled and hungry. They’re jet ski dealers but illiterate. They’re everything bad at once at the same time, somehow. Fuck them. The unifying theme, either way, is to condescend and create distance to assure the insecure Middle that they are, by character and nature, superior to these proles, and thus not at any risk of falling.

The Prole response to the Middle is to deride this unearned condescension. You think you’re so much better than me, college boy? Just because you have that stupid degree?

I’m gonna kick your ass, you weedy twig.

The Prole restores their own ego by creating an inverse of the Other’s Other. This allows the Prole to dismiss the attempts to condescend.Education becomes overeducation. The lack of practical skills of the middle class white collar worker becomes uselessness and also a lack of commitment to “real” skills and hard work. In a Marxian sense, the Prole takes pride in being a producer of surplus value. But the Middle is also in a dual role of looking upwards. They are always reassuring themselves of their own classiness, because if they lose their class status, then they fall back to hated Proledom. This fear is projected others.

The Middles also have an imagined Rich. The Middles want to go to classy expensive places because their Imagined Rich do. The Imagined Rich are always consuming the most sophisticated things, because they are so sophisticated. The Imagined Rich are always perfectly composed and mannered because they are so classy. Swearing becomes a kind of “socialist” transgression against the Imagined Rich, which is defined by “classiness” as a kind of purity totem, but so too does being a gigantic slob and pooping on the street. The content Middle emulates the Imagined Rich while the malcontent rages. The Imagined Rich must be obsessed with being classy and obviously classy and rich because the Middle imagines they, too, fear falling. Therefore, the Imagined Rich must spend their time showing how classy they are. Then the Middle tries to keep up with these imagined Joneses. This is the market for things like Salt Bae and fake private jets. The Middle imagines the Imagined Rich eating at Salt Bae and showing off as they fly private. But these pictures on RKOI and other places come from other Middloids as they show off (and torment) each other. Well, I happen to know a real story of a private jet (there are very few of these in the world). The wife is autism golem, like many noble women, so they need a private jet because otherwise she has sensory overload and starts autism screeching at everyone. To finish out this line, I was visiting a city and a person once, and she, of the middle, wanted to impress me by reserving a table at a fancy restaurant. I don’t reserve tables. I walk into Michelin restaurants and demand to be served. The food was pricy and “cosmopolitan”. Contrast this with a recent lunch where a young UMC person petitioned me for assistance, looking to raise a million or so for their startup. They proposed a “hole in the wall” tucked away, with “authentic” cuisine, then showed off by thanking the waiter in a foreign language. He did not walk away disappointed. 

This fear of falling narrative also, I believe, drives how the Middle sees the Imagined Rich, politically. This is partly speculation, so I may be as off about my Imagined Middle as the Middle is about their Imagined Rich. So appropriate caution is needed here. But I believe the Middle frames history as a series of struggles by Middles to attack and replace Elites. History is thus a series of events in which intellectual Middles rally the Proles and overthrow the Elite, becoming the Elite. The only problem is that this isn’t true. History is filled with countless peasant revolts, though few peasant emperors – peasants are disorganized. And history has many, many noble revolts. But middle revolts? The most common example given is the French Revolution. Well, at best, that’s one. And while Robespierre may be of the middle, the Society of Thirty had a very high number of noblesse d’epee. Other instances of rising middles are not “Middle” in the way we understand it, but lower elites who are denied status for one reason or another. Like factory owners. Because history becomes framed as Middle leading Bottom vs Top, the strength of the Elite is imagined to be the strength of their Middle opposition. If the Middle is weakening, the Elite must be strengthening. Therefore, society worsening is evidence of a strengthening Elite. To crush the Middle becomes the main task of this Imagined Rich, because that is the main threat in this framing. The more the Middle suffers, the stronger the Elite. Arbitrary, random suffering becomes a flex, a show of strength. Humiliation compels obedience rather than hate. Well, let me tell you this: the noble families, as a class, have ruled for thousands of years because that’s just how humans work, just like how ants have queens. It’s not evidence of supernatural competence, it’s more of a fact like the sky being blue. It doesn’t mean anything. 

But this obnoxious striving by the Middle does create a reaction coming from the real UMC (and not the Imagined Rich). And this is epater la bourgeoisie. The obsequious brand worship and conformist worship of fanciness is amplified into an Imagined Middle which is mindless NPCs. To spite the Imagined Middle and their trend loving and swallowing of propaganda, the real UMC tries to create as many destructive, transgressive ideas as possible, so that the Imagined Middle copies them and ruins their own lives, resulting in the UMC laughing disdainfully. The UMC lives by an ethos of “Go Fuck Yourself” and “Fuck You Money” because this is a way to show you’re not like those NPC Middles, you are a real man. And a real man is a Free Man. Metternich, consummate baron in material terms, said “Humanity begins at the rank of Baron.” Wear gray T-shirts because you can. Board planes bare-chested. Buy an anime car. Be eccentric, but obnoxiously and obviously so. Above all, fuck everyone else. Fuck them, fuck them, fuck them. Fussell advises driving slowly on highways to make everyone who needs to work angry. This is not the same as “Can I speak to the Manager?” because the point is not get better service. It’s to ruin someone else’s day and then laugh about it, getting the delicious pleasure of causing a little more pain in the world. Haha. 

The Imagined Middle, which is a perfect NPC, exists downstream of the UMC’s own self-perception, which is the perfectly competent and universally skilled gentleman. They are the doers. They build things and get shit done. They move fast and break things. They are Hank Rearden. The UMC is a man of wealth who chooses to work regardless because they see themselves as so competent and capable. Metternich is a perfect diplomat but also the sinister Grand Inquisitor. A scholar and a gentleman. An officer and a learned man. Well-rounded. The cream of Eton. Gore Vidal’s own description is telling – at boarding school, there are the rich kids and the smart kids, himself being one of the latter. The UMC carries on a self-perception deriving from the traditions of being the strong sword arm of feudalism and of the Ancien Regime. While the modern managerial state runs more on middle class minor supervisory employees and bureaucrats rather than eccentric gentlemen managing estates, doing gentleman science, and personal industrialization (owning your own factory), the memory remains strong. The UMC is born with agency, if not hyperagency, and this can never be stripped away. If the MC tends to blackpill irrationally and give up in despair at the first obstacle, the UMC, as a stereotype, are often irrationally whitepilled. Elizabeth Holmes still thinks she’ll win. 

This agency also leads to a tremendous mental burden. I say to myself frequently that there is no cavalry coming. I am the cavalry. I am always the force of last relief, the Triarii at the back of the line. Is this true? Nevertheless, it creates a mental burden. “What if I’m not good enough?” Imposter syndrome. “What if I can’t hold the line?” Burnout. A desire forms to have a simpler life. This creates its own imagined Other, the Imagined Prole. The Imagined Prole lives a carefree life because they are not responsible for others. Obviously this is not true, but this becomes an idealized lifestyle to emulate. This is the practice, still around, of gentleman farming. Of giving up the UMC life to live the simple life of a prole. One of the WASPs in WASPS: Splendor gave up his wealth to become a mechanic. Successful UMCs, ones that have made it, will spend tens or even hundreds of thousands on a chicken coop so they can pretend to farm chickens and be a redneck. Some of them even succeed at making eggs! But they will never know the essential fear of being at the whim of crisis. When these UMCs slumming it impact Proles, they invariably leave a curious impression. Damn, what a rich idiot playing games. Of course, these encounters are rare enough that no lasting and durable Other is formed, but it would probably be something like the “Butter Bars” Lt. 

If the UMC imagines themselves as the hypercompetent hyperagent, then the Imagined Upper is the mirror of that. Other classes are far enough from the top that they lump everything together into a generalized Imagined Rich, which they often call “upper class” or just “rich”. But the UMC is personally acquainted with the UC. If Gore Vidal is the “smart kid”, then the UC is the “rich kid”. Rich, not smart. Or, as Fussell would snark, the UC are a class without ideas.

This is highly uncharitable to the upper class. The Imagined Upper is a complete dolt. They are the thoughtless people Woody Allen implicitly parodies. They are the people without ideas. Actually, most real UC people have plenty of ideas because they need them to be charming (dinner conversation always revolves around ideas). But as with many interactions, there is a seed of truth. In feudalism, you had kings summon their lords to provide a levy. The Italian word for knight, capo di lance, is the origin for our own term, Lance Corporal – an E4 marine. From “miles”, Latin for knight, we get militia. The lord was expected to bring his knights to fight in war. In peace, the knights protected the land. They were the baddest dudes around. They were given land so they could gear q***r to their heart’s content. But the baron was their field grade officer. So they are also *there*. This persists into the Industrial Age. The noblesse de robe, the professionals, your doctors, lawyers, engineers – they are not workers. But they are still *there*. As such, they can only be so disconnected from reality and the understanding of labor and production. The real upper class may not be as big of twits as the Imagined Upper, but like the Middle they still live in @GmorkOfNothing‘s Richard Scarry’s kids book world because all they do is party and socialize all day. Their view of the world is the world seen through cocktail parties. And the upper class? Well, they live in the Richard Scarry world.

I don’t think I can generalize their Imagined Others, but they are interesting. 

The Concept of the Metapolitical, or Biostalinism Pt. IV

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https://inelegantviceroy.stechlinsee.ch/2020/11/25/translatio-imperii-or-the-conservation-of-a-ruling-class-biostalinism-pt-ii/
https://inelegantviceroy.stechlinsee.ch/2020/12/20/the-shape-of-the-sandwich-or-political-forms-and-their-functions-biostalinism-pt-iii/

Dearest Friends,

In the maddened fits of my dreaming, I see, rising in fits and lurches, a dread city, a monolith from the sea, a tyrant fish, a city of mirrors and rust, and the cog and nut cladding of a thousand eyed minarets. Above it all, the Black Sun rises.

The whispering voices, they tell me to write, and so I take up my pen…

If you don’t understand my theorizing, worry not. Sometimes, neither do I.

What is the concept of the political? Politics is about power and the power competition between interests and factions. Politics therefore is the battle which goes on in every society over who gets to be in charge and the distribution of its scarce resources. The concept of the political boils the political down to the core distinction, which is that politics is the friend/enemy distinction. But this itself is not a political statement or act of politics. Rather, it is metapolitical, describing the nature of the political system.

Metapolitics is a description of the systems and mechanisms of politics. Instead of describing any particular faction or interest or issue, it describes how factions and interests and issues come to form. The core concept of the political is the friend/enemy distinction, but this is not the core of metapolitics. Metapolitics considers itself with how the friend/enemy distinctions are formed and what distinguishes the sides. The friend/enemy distinction is the distilling of politics, but it is only the beginning of metapolitics. It is the first brick in our next layer of abstraction. Neoreactionary thought typically focuses on metapolitics and the study of systems rather than the study of liberal rhetoric and the owning of libs (oh, you believe so much in property rights? then why don’t you own more libs???).

What is the concept of the metapolitical?

It is status points.

Loyalty is the glue that holds political systems together. Loyalty is generated by the gain or promised gain of status or the threatened loss of status. All political mechanisms flow downwards from that fact. Fundamentally, all ways to build coalitions are ways to somehow increase or threaten the status of persons or groups.

Neoreaction spends a lot of time discussing Leftism and trying to define what Leftism is. My definition of Leftism is as follows: Leftism is the extension of a civilization’s foundational principles towards themselves. A liberal society becomes more liberal. A militarist society becomes more militarist. And leftism itself is the power process, because leftism enables to you build loyalty and outflank your rivals. Power exists on the left.

But what is reaction? This is a question, I think, rarely properly considered.

Let’s start by talking about status. Status is definitionally zero sum because it only makes sense as a relative measure. One is high because others are low. Equality in high status does not exist because there is no one to “lord it over”. Status being zero sum, all gains in status must come from another’s loss. All status adjustments are redistributions. Feminism necessarily is anti-male because it raises the status of women, thus lowering the status of the counterparty (because the counterparty, men, exists as a status group relative to women). The status hierarchies of a society are defined by what it values as good, its values. Being in accord with those values raises one’s status, making you a bigger chimp among chimps.

A social constructivist supposes all these values are socially constructed. But we are not social constructivists. There are things which are, by nature, good. These natural goods and their natural value constitute the basis of what I’ll call “innate social status”, or innate status. Natural goods are things like being more beautiful, more intelligent, stronger, more charming, talented at a skill, or possessing more resources (natural wealth). One does not need to be told such things are good to come to believe it (though one can be educated to the contrary). All things being equal, having any of these things is just plain better. The typical cope is to say pretty people are wicked (often true) or intelligent people are pathetic nerds (also often true). But we all know wicked ugly people and pathetic idiots. Again, all things being equal, to have something good is better.

So therefore, all status adjustments occur relative to the baseline of innate status. Political coalitions are built by adjusting status. By conducting politics, we are robbing the winners of nature, the natural aristoi, in order to elevate our own favored group, the created aristocracy. We are also often robbing many others. But the initial act of rule demands a robbery, and the easiest first exclusion to *only reward those who are talented AND loyal to you because they helped you take power*. The first division is to separate the natural aristoi into those in power and those excluded. But every further act of politics, to generate loyalty, must make further adjustments. And to redistribute status *back* to the natural aristoi does not generate particular loyalty, because it’s not a redistribution but a mere relaxing of one’s hold. So politics drives a status hierarchy, which, over time, must become more and more deviated from the innate status hierarchy. After all, the House of Welles was loyal to your father – ah, but you are not your father, are you?

When progressives speak about the continual progress of mankind and reactionaries talk about cyclical history, they are talking past each other. Progressives are talking about the steady improvement of quality of life, and this is true. For all of recorded history, we have seen a more or less steady march of technology, with only a few (but dramatic!) regressions. But reactionaries are talking about social orders. And in social orders, cycles prevail. After all, man is more or less what he was ten thousand years ago, even at the fastest rates of evolution. He may be somewhat smarter or somewhat more altruistic or somewhat less clannish, but the status drive is a far more primal thing than all of that – and we remain chimps. That is why we can read old books and relate to the characters, because human nature remains the same. When the queer historians look back at history to queer it, they are able to find plenty of material. And it is true that some is fabricated. But I have found examples even before the Great Awokening. The problem with the queer historian is that you cannot be too smart and engage in the field, because it is a bit like discovering hyper-advanced ruins or the remnants of a forgotten and regressed alien race. If we had gay rights in late Classical Persia and Imperial Germany and all the rest, what happened? What eldritch monstrosity must have come to devour these enlightened ones? It is a question that must crack the sanity of a true believer in progressive social history, so the best defense is to be too stupid to ask it.

But the monster is real.

And its dread name is Reaction.

Heretofore, we have only known it by the passing glimpses we have made of its qualities. While Leftism advances by inches and creeps, Reaction comes in a flash, suddenly and totally. And it is related to nature or reality, it is somehow the reckoning of reality, ala Gnon or the Gods of the Copybook Headings. We have whispered its maddened whispers, which come in the form of “Might makes right” or “The strong shall eat, the weak are meat”. We have seen cults of it rise, the Social Darwinists and others, who sought to praise a cruel, indifferent God that would just as quickly devour them.

Reaction is the mirror image of the social adjustments made to a civilization’s values through its long process of political maneuvering. If Leftism takes a civilization’s values farther and farther towards madness, it is because all civilizational values are a little mad to begin with, because the only values which can generate political capital are those that stand in the way of raw innate status. Not even those who praise the Master Race as cover actually want to be ruled by a Master Race, they want to be the Master Race. To submit to a caste of innate superiors who are not in any way beholden to you is totally monstrous. The order of Gnon is merciless and without compassionate. Nevertheless, the mirror image of our social adjustments necessarily grows stronger and stronger over time *because* innate status is not constructed. You cannot make an idiot into an expert: hence why our experts are so consistently wrong. Only one quick and clear of mind can *truly* be in an expert, because expert is not an arbitrary label but a recognition of a real capability. Reaction is like a pulled spring, merely the stored up energy of a war against reality reasserting itself. Revolutionaries or barbarians are merely pushing over a rotten house, a regime that has already destroyed itself. Total Reaction is the total reassertion of the innate status order and partial Reactions can be defined as a partial restoration of that innate status order. A civilization is therefore always waging a war on reality, an inherently romantic gesture, and eventually, it MUST lose. It is Civilization, not Reaction, which is the romantic act.

The day we stole the apple, we resigned ourselves to an eternity of tragic fate, redeemed only after death.

And thus, we have arrived at the definition of conservative. American conservatives are conservative liberals, just as conservatives of any stripe are always those who genuinely believe in the values of their civilization. Because the conservative is one that sees the course of history… leads off a cliff. He stands athwart History, yelling Stop, because he knows where it ends, and where it ends is the destruction of everything he holds dear. Whether it be liberalism or a thousand other dead creeds.

If the West dies, liberalism dies with it. After all, who still keeps the Arian faith?

If we might define the Neoreactionary intellectual, it is making tractable and reasonable the force of Reaction, which in prior ages was derided as irrational, sentimental, spiritual, and emotional. It is not that there can *be* no reason for the Right. It is that its secrets and mysteries do not yield to casual investigation, and therefore it was present as a political force long before it could be understood. There is a lesson there, more generally.

Ia! Ia!
Monsieur le Baron

EDIT:
I was shown this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180202060308/http://www.xenosystems.net/hell-baked/
Ah, and just when I thought I was being original. Yes, everything nice comes from Hell. Reaction brings us back to Hell, where virtues are forged, but, man, Hell sucks ass. So we build a nice little myth that says things should be better, and the Golden Age exists where people have the virtues of Hell but the myths we have, our ideologies, are not yet very insane. Or, in short, GOOD TIMES MEN HARD HARD MEN MEN TIMES BAD.

Glossies for the Bossies, or a Glossary of Terms for a New World Order™

Dearest Frondiers,

I have an admitted distaste for the prescriptive – it is so hard to do in a way that doesn’t cause you to lose 20 or 30 effective IQ points. Plus, plotting a New World Order™ is impossible to do without seeming both sinister and megalomaniacal, probably because that’s exactly what it is. Nevertheless, the Great Moldbug has pointed out that a losing regime must surrender to something (though it certainly isn’t going down peacefully!), and this something must present a superior positive vision.

So… allow me to define the terms of Marxism-Leninism 3.0, Monarcho-Communism.

Micro-ethnostates:
This one comes directly out of Lenin, but the idea is simple. Imagine any sort of community. Like a Historically Black Neighborhood, or a Levittown suburb. Or imagine moving to a neighborhood for the Good Schools. You may not directly like all of these, but I’m sure you can imagine one of them. But there are cases where a Levittown gets block busted, a Historically Black Neighborhood is gentrified, or your local good school is turned into a flaming crater, that something has been lost, and some implicit agreement has been violated, even though it breaks no laws relating to our individual property rights. That’s because what is at stake is not individual property, but communal. People have legitimate communal interests, but no defined communal rights. A corollary of Coase’s theory of property rights is that when the legitimate interests of parties are not codified into some form of property rights, negotiation is damn difficult. Even without legal action, covenants, like cartels, usually break down. But that doesn’t make them harmful. The costs of losing a neighborhood’s character are distributed and small for every individual transaction, while selling out is individually beneficial. But overall, you experience… some loss.

So what do we do? We codify. Communities have communal rights. We define the community as the micro-ethnostate, which only requires two formal rights to function: the right to secede and the right to associate. The first right, the right to secede, means that a subunit of the original community can divorce itself from the shared laws, covenants, and codes of the whole and form its own new community with its own new laws, covenants, and codes while remaining within the larger polity. The second right is the right to associate. This means that a community is allowed to police its own boundaries. In order to be admitted to a new community, one must have the permission, however granted, of the community itself. No forcible block busting here. Covenants are genuinely binding. This implies one more individual right, the right of exit, allowing persons to exit, as individuals, communities they dislike to seek greener pastures, if they can find them.

Within this framework of micro-ethnostates, one might even conceptualize people who wish to go on living in the old liberal way, the Last Libertarians. I wish them no will, and it is their right.

Conflicts between communities are mediated by the Sovereign and his national law, but most life occurs *within* the community by nature.

With the contiguous bourgeois ethnostate, there are no options but relocation and genocide. Abolish the ethnostate, community, and greater belonging, and you have only alienation instead. Lenin saw this way back in the 1910s. He was right then, and he’s right now. It’s time to listen.

Industrial Judges:
Another Lenin idea that sadly never found flesh. Just as communities have legitimate collective interests, so too do sectors. The current regulatory environment is governed by the rules and whims of bureaucrats who basically know nothing about what they govern. This is because of the stupid bourgeois idea of impartiality, which really means that those who know something and must care are automatically exempted. We systematically create experts with no skin in the game and are astonished by their spectacular stupidity.

This is mediated by a layer of skin. But only mediated. The owners, through lobbying, can exert their will over the law. But this only reflects the interests of the owners, which is not always concordant with sectoral health, but only the profit-maximizing (in the short term). Furthermore, owners, through lobbying, can engage in informal lawfare with each other, destroying rivals with onerous regulation. This damages the long-term viability of a sector by creating ridiculous, damaging regulations that only exist to take out enemies.

Instead of having bureaucrats write the regulations, the sectors themselves will write the regulations. And these regulations will not just be written by owners, but will be decided by workers. Workers have skin in the game to keep their workplace pleasant, while they have an incentive to not regulate it into oblivion. A combined sectoral union will, through its decision making process, create the regulations of a sector. When there are intra-industrial conflicts, chosen men, the Industrial Judges, will mediate these conflicts fairly. At the same time, a sector can attempt conditions unduly favorable to itself. To prevent this, the Industrial Judges of all sectors, collectively, can strike down individual sectoral agreements for the good of the whole, with the assent of the legislature.

What I am proposing, simply, is the idea of privileges. This was a concept abolished by bourgeois universalist law – we all became equals, with no special privileges. But the idea is that collective, corporate bodies can have special exemptions made for them by themselves, with the assent of the Sovereign, in order to fulfill their duties. The most notable is the job security granted to the guilds. Guildsmen had job security for life, essentially, which seems like an impediment to economic “efficiency”. But today, workers often withhold knowledge to protect their own jobs, not training a (cheaper) replacement until they’re ready to retire. The granting of the job security privilege facilitated knowledge transfer and the maintenance of techne. The inability to teach techne is one of the main causes of Admech America, or the decay of the American technological base. The Industrial Judges, the representatives of a sectoral interest, will attempt to pass the privileges necessary for a sector to carry out its duties.

Feudal Socialism/Industrial Democracy:
Here I break with Lenin.

Property is hereby abolished.

What are the usual arguments for property? That an owner has better incentive alignment, right? When the monarch is the owner of society, he has an incentive to keep it in good order, unlike someone who only enjoys usufruct rights, who wishes to loot it for permanent gains for his backers. This is a fine story.

The problem is that those “property rights” are not what we understand as property. What we have now is bourgeois property, not what they had. What they had was not property, but usufruct – but a particular kind of usufruct. The lord was a mere steward, but he was a steward not for “the people”, but for posterity. The claims here are the claims of all our dead ancestors and all the cries of the unborn upon the present. Are you sensing a theme here? The story of communism is collectivism, and the story of collectivism is the recognition of legitimate collective rights and interests *in exchange* for duties fulfilled. We are a sum of our identities, which constitutes the privileges we have and the duties we must carry out. No man is an island and no man can be.

Faith. Family. Fatherland.

An individual may possess no property. Instead, for their labor, they are compensated with labor vouchers, a particular narrowing of currency that retains its exchange value for goods, but not for ownership and the power that implies (See: Basic Marxism, Contra Luka – if you don’t read Luka, you must. This charming young lad is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on Rosa Luxemburg). That is, when you are paid your socialist wages for socialist commodity production in our Socialism in One Country under our great Red Tsar, Mecha-Stalin, you can only exchange them for short-term use of property (rental) or long-term (life-lease) use of said property, a state which does not outlast your death. Some would call this “personal property” rather than general property. That’s right. You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.

But property, by reality, exists. I mean, there is property, and it will always be owned. If not by us, the individuals, then someone. An abdication of ownership only defaults ownership to either strongmen or the state (the largest of strongmen). So who can be owners?

It’s simple. All property is hereby owned by Noble Houses. A Noble House is a durable corporate entity which exists over time. Individual income taxes are hereby abolished. Instead, only corporate taxes remain. To remain in existence, a Noble House must pay a base tax (~$10,000/year) and a progressive share of its income. By nature, (non-sole proprietorship) businesses being corporations, all (non-sole proprietorship) businesses are now Noble Houses. Sole proprietors are better understood as craftsmen belonging to a particular sector. In addition, a Noble House must have a clear designated line of succession, or it is abolished. For most, this will be the family relation, though others can legitimate stake on posterity, like a childless person adopting or taking godchildren, or a famed professor establishing a school of thought. But those with no stake in the future cannot be allowed to govern it. Until you’re a married adult with children or some other stake, you’re not a political adult – sorry! No cat ladies allowed. Only the heads of Noble Houses can participate in non-industry sectoral politics. A community’s covenants are set by the perpetual owners that reside within it. As it was before the rigidization and formalization of the font of honor, anyone who can meet the burdens can self-declare into the nobility. The only caveat is that their voting power begins at 50% and increases by 1% per year, as they acculturate upwards.

The employee relation is hereby abolished. The adult members of a Noble House are hereby co-owners. All Noble Houses are socialist cooperatives which engage in profit sharing. The profit sharing will be set internally, but must at least be proportional to wage-labor contribution, with deviations towards more equitable sharing being permissible, but not more inequal distributions. So long as someone is engaged with a Noble House, they hold their share of the Noble House enfeoffed from their Lord, so as to share skin in the game. In practice, employees of small businesses already share the negative skin in the game, as anyone who has been paid late during crisis can attest to.

The potential votes of a Noble House are its profits divided by the average per capita GDP or some other metric of national citizen income. Like Lenin, we recognizance the equivalence of economic and political power as power. (See my various writings on monopoly and cronyism). As a bonus, this gives Noble Houses an incentive to report high profits rather than squirreling everything through holes – if you don’t, you can be buttfucked politically. But the actual votes which it can cast are the number of people who swear fealty to the Noble House to represent its interests. This is a yes/no operation and fractal. Persons can swear fealty to a Noble House and agree to be governed by its laws, which does not give them a voice in picking those policies, or they can choose not to do so. Noble Houses can, in turn, swear fealty to larger Noble Houses. Very powerful members of a large Noble House, like engineers and lawyers, can be heads of Noble Houses in their own right, giving up some of their consumption-income in the standard way. Only those with a perpetual stake in society have a say, but the popular sovereignty mandate is maintained. This creates, again, a hierarchy.

Why do I break from Lenin here? Because I must.

When mystifiers talk about index fund socialism, they are defending the system which already exists. Lenin may have been a centralizer and a plannerist, but he always was adamant that the particular politics of a place exist rooted in its particular material conditions. The material conditions of yesterday, with industrial combinations and irreducibly complex products, necessitated the development of monopolies, which necessitated the securing of state power and the expansion of finance capitalism. When a modern mystifier talks about monopolies, securing finance capitalism, or central planning, they are defending the system of managerial capitalism which came into being in the 20th century in all major industrial powers. We already have the FED! We already have monopolies everywhere! To advocate for that is not progressive (again, meaning only the consequent flow of history), but conservative, conserving an order which has become stagnant and repulsive, and which knows only further planning, further monopoly, and further impoverishment of the common man. The Green New Deal and the Great Reset are the culmination of the contradictions of a decadent system.

The Emperor
Comrade-Kings of Regions and Religious Heads
Comrade-Dukes of States, Industrial Judgeships, and Megacorporations
Comrade-Counts of Counties and Big Businesses
Comrade-Barons of Families, Small Businesses, and Neighborhood Blocks
Free Tradesmen with Sectoral-Union Votes -> Sovereignty collectivized and delegated to Industrial Judges
Co-owning Members of a Noble House who lack individual sovereignty
Free Men living off in the woods

Collectively, all the heads of Noble Houses are the nobility, or, in Marxist-Leninist fashion, the Party. The Second Estate.

The Great Chain of Being is restored. If this is all sounding very politically Catholic, well…

The Cult of Personality/Divine Right:
Because it is. Who else but Stalin, educated a Jesuit priest, could have invented the Cult of Personality? The people are right to venerate him. A Cult of Personality is only just and proper. The Emperor is the Sovereign. The Sovereign, like many a monarch before him, is the vessel of the People and their Popular Sovereignty. He is the General Will made manifest, through the Divine Grace of God. You can tell this is so because he remains on the throne. His powers are the ability to determine the state of exception (effectively, unlimited power when desired, but destabilizing to do too often), to veto any legislation on behalf of the People, to propose a problem that must be legislated on behalf of the People, and the powers of Purge and Terror.

That’s right. Purge and Terror.

The Sovereign has a limitless and legitimate right to erase any Noble House it so chooses, and to levy any punishment upon its members. The chief oppressors of the people are the nobility: the thieving landlords, the crony capitalists, the labcoat tyrants, the crooked judges. They cannot be abolished – many a revolutionary has tried and failed to war against reality. We must have hierarchy, because hierarchy is human nature. But the people, being individually quite weak, cannot hope to stand against their oppressors. Only the Sovereign, invested with their popular sovereignty, can strike a blow against them. Hence, Purge, unlimited Purge, so that all corrupt elements may be swept away.

But this runs up against the classic problem where the Sovereign may be mad. And here, I will shamelessly borrow from Moldbug – the Sovereign can be removed by his board. But what board is worthy enough to judge the Sovereign, the People’s Representative and God’s Chosen? Only those who are his peers.

Within the nobility are those who are so grand, they are like little Sovereigns in their own right, so many have sworn to their banner. These greater Counts, Dukes, and Kings of the realm constitute the Emperor’s peers, and are thus the realm’s peerage – the Central Committee. There is one check and one check only on the Sovereign’s absolute power, which is a large supermajority of the Central Committee voting to depose him. At this point, a replacement is found, and all members of the Central Committee abdicate to their heirs.

With credit to Comrade Stump

There is no way forward but back, and no way back but forward. History proceeds not in a straight line, but in a spiral.

Warm regards,
Monsieur le Baron

Appendix: Updates and Suggestions
1. To remove the Sovereign, the Central Committee must also attain popular assent. An obvious hole to patch that I missed. Obviously, a Sovereign protecting the people against the peers is doing their job right.

2. This post covers the Second and Third Estates, but not the First Estate. Matters of culture and custom belong to the church, and the church can patch what law cannot. By custom, most punishments meted out should be public apologies/cancellations/due penance. This will protect against a mediocre and zealous monarch – most purged will just be cancelled.

3. Also, by custom (anything relating to the Sovereign can only be by custom, for law cannot restrict a Sovereign), the Sovereign ought to periodically tour the country. Hope lord leaves, hope lord returns. And the peasants should be able to visit the court and see the Central Committee dicking around.

4. Most “middle-class” families would be minor nobles here. It’s hard to draw a line between baron and truly free man, because many of the original words for baron, and the concept, mean “Free Man” or “Significant Man”. America really is a widely franchised society even if you restrict it to only married, staked, property holders. Perhaps a first tier of significant men, middle class citizens, who are locally franchised, and only true barons can vote on national events. Or maybe it doesn’t matter – your average middle class person only has a fraction of a single vote, which will only matter in local microelections.

5. Tax vote can be hacked by paying a lot of tax one year to push some nefarious scheme through. Let’s say the average of the last five or ten years.

6. Industrial court should be hard to legislate in, to ensure we only have the most essential and agreed-on rules. Fines are treated as a slap on the wrist, but accounting fraud, which punishes officers, is relatively rare. So violations of industrial court rulings should result in punishing the heads of the Noble Houses directly.

Aesthetica McNuggetica, Or Idealism Real Word Count by the Baron

Dearest Friends,

I’ve talked a lot about pragmatic action, Realpolitik as it were, but there is a time for lighter things: Idealpolitik. The time is McDonald’s, the place is McDonald’s, the why is McDonald’s. Mcdolans. What could be more ideal than a crispy, juicy Chicken McNugget dipped in Cajun Sauce, available for a limited time only as part of the BTS meal! Two great tastes that go great together! I’m Lovin’ It!

Or maybe you’d like something more refined? A steak, maybe. As we all know, the medium is the message. Medium is the message. For some people, it’s a job well done that’s the message, or perhaps a rare well done steak well done – with ketchup? Some people would call that a missed steak, but the thing about taste is that it’s subjective, right? That Trump trumps trump is well done well done, that cats up catsup is the postmodern condition, and the postmodern condition is to post modern conditions, not realizing the pointlessness of less points. All is subjective, and this is derivative, a meat slurry of discourse formed neatly, neatly, gently, creeping, into a boot shoop, sloop mast down into the Cajun sea, a imitation of spiciness, the appearance but not the reality of controversy!

Is there anything more passe, more banal, than lamenting postmodernity in the postmodern age? So I will eat the McNugget, for the McNugget is the sacred mystery of meaning without meaning and meaning for meaning, and I tell the whispering demon – yes, yes, a thousand times yes, let me face it again and again for eternity.

To make a long story short, if you eat a thousand McNuggets, you will go to the hospital.

Radiance.

So what am I talking about?

Meaning my meaning, of course. What does it mean for medium to be the message? The nature of a medium is by nature constraining, and this imposes a certain necessary shape to the art itself, which affects the kind of art which it can produce. Shot length is both a limitation on film and something to play with, something to explore, which affects the art. But it’s more than just physical limitations, but also the elements of style present, and the tropes. Every genre of art has its own expectations. Strunk’s Elements of Style has many counterparts. In either hewing to or subverting these structures, we come to recognize a piece as of a genre through the patterns present in it – it matches its peers in some way. And the definition it hews to – or subverts – comes to define it in some way. What is constrained, what is restricted, forms the negative of what we think ought to be present, but which we often overlook, assuming it without thought. The structure of our art is a negative of our values, just as an interior is defined by its borders. This creates a point. The values create and present themes, and themes are recapitulated throughout the life of a civilization. Art is not pointless and authors are not dead. All art has a nature which itself encodes the point – the medium is the message, no matter how much one might deny the *intent* of art, to deny that it has a *point*. When a postmodern gazes upon the Baroque, even an atheist, they cannot help be filled with an immensity, because within the *nature* of the Baroque, points are made about the divine and a Catholic, Christian civilization which expressed itself not only in the content of this kind of art, but in its form itself, in what makes Baroque Baroque, for the immensity is the immensity of God, for the starkness of the chiaroscuro must clearly separate dark from light and good from evil. These elements of a kind of art are its thematics, the messages which can be played, straight or inverted, with the medium at hand, and which in turn combine into an aesthetic. All the elements of Baroque together are Baroque, and all the elements each have a message within which together form the aesthetics of Baroque, which is a way of communicating the ethos of Catholic, Christian Europe not through mere words, but through emotion to the soul. The Renaissance art thus patronized was not ruined by these structures, but defined by it.

I know, I know. Dull, derivative, boring midwittery. Heard it a thousand times. But let’s stack one derivative layer upon another and see if we can’t make a flavorful lasagna.

What is pop art? Simply, pop art is art with a use. It’s created to do something. Whereas high art exists for itself, it is art for art’s sake, pop art has a use. When people make pop art, it can be a creative endeavor, it is often an artistic endeavor, but fundamentally, it has to accomplish what it is here to do. An ad that does not sell product is not a good ad. Whatever you may think of Marvel movies, they exist to sell tickets, and they do sell tickets. Even if they are schlock. This imposes restraints on what can be done, which the common artist takes as an insult to their creativity. But a negative, a medium and its constraints, exists for all forms of art. Art exists in the managing of constraints. Like eros, or a really clever engineering problem, it is the act of the hidden, the unshown, not the shown, which generates excitement. The act of artistry is to create the good within the bounds of these restraints. The commercial object at its highest is art, and high art indeed. Warhol. That’s the message of the soup cans – one need add nothing to these objects of beauty, so often overlooked.

And more than that, scorned.

To return to the McNugget, what we have these days is a kind of vulgar contrarianism which is mistaken for sophistication. The barbarian artist, seeking to make themselves a name, looks and disdains the beauty present in the popular pop art. What is a McNugget? The McNugget is the craft of a French chef who was the top of his class, a head chef that served kings and emperors of the world, working to design the perfect dippable chicken object which could be prepared by anyone for anyone. It is a reenactment of the sacred mysteries of Prometheus, a descent with the fires of Michelin to the masses below, a delivery of light to the darkness. In short, the McNugget is a masterpiece. And what is the negation of a masterpiece? Ugliness. Trash. The vulgar contrarian seeks to elevate by negating the popular object, not realizing that the pop object possess not only vulgarity, but beauty, and thus creates an object which negates the beauty of the common – an uncommon ugliness. An anti-masterpiece.

Le hecking subversion of Star Wars, with twists which made no sense, with points that go nowhere, with themes almost schizophrenic in their inconstancy, eaten up by fourth rate minds from third rate colleges.

The mark of a great artist is to create beauty out of the ugly. What we have now is the reverse.

So what is aesthetics? It is simple. Aesthetics is the pop art of hyperreality. We are drawn to believe in these larger than life things, these unreal specters. These visions of wealth beyond wealth, power beyond power, beauty beyond beauty, are the demons which drive postmodern man, and like Tantalus, they always recede beyond his reach. There never was such a man as Chad. Not even Gigachad is really Gigachad. In the beginning, we have the things which are real, the referants. To represent them, we create symbols, which exist as some insightful distillation of the real. But these symbols take on a life of their own. When the symbols begin to interact and recombine on their own, and reach frightful exaggerations or mutations, they cease to relate to reality, but become idols or objects of obsession and worship. These are the demons that haunt postmodern man indeed.

Or his gods.

Because, to return to the question, what is aesthetics? Aesthetics, like hyperreality, is unreal. Like the hyperreal symbols, the objects of an aesthetics never really exist and never really will. This is why small-souled bugmen accuse trads of falling in love with Coke commercials. Because this is essentially true. But while hyperreality, like high art, exists for its own sake, fighting as it will, aesthetics do not. Aesthetics embody the values which a civilization chooses to uphold. They are its objects of worship. An aesthetic is a picture of a societal ideal – of course it cannot be real, it is impossibly unreal – and yet, like beauty standards, it is something to strive for. A society’s aesthetic is its purpose, what it’s heading for. And so why do people thirst for better aesthetics and hate modern art? Because the ugliness reflects the meaningless – that there is no higher ideal being conveyed. The postmodern man, the Last Man, has no higher ideals because he believes in nothing. And when men lament art, they lament that we have no great vision of the good to move towards. Instead, we are drawn by our own inertia, we are a runaway train headed off a cliff. The crisis of art is the crisis of democracy. It is the crisis of a West which no longer believes in itself.

Why did the proles yearn for Trumpian magnificence? Why do they applaud the magnificent? Because they yearn for beauty. They want something greater than themselves. The showy rich, for all their many faults, are so full of themselves that they burst and overflow. So assured is Louis XIV that all wish to soak in his glow. And while they may not be able to create art, they know art when they see it. Trump was a well done well done steak, the slab of American red meat cooked almost to shoe leather, a reflection of Reagan’s reflection of Jackson – and yet something. Even the shadow of a message retains a voice, enough to still the deathly silence, if only for a stolen moment. Trump was a gasping of an ancient and powerful American dream, a man of proletarian culture done good, bedecked in all the golden splendor that entails. A Mr. Smith gone to Washington to drain the Swamp, to throw down the scoundrels from their high places, and restore power to the sovereign people. Trump himself, orange as a McNugget, was himself an art object. For a brief moment, there was an operation of the setting sun, and it blazed streaky scarlet into the sky before being snuffed out.

Radiant.

Here is where the rubes from Kansas sputter and point about Orange Man Bad, so fearful of tainting themselves by any association with low culture that they reveal their own lowness.

To channel an aesthetic is to channel the hyperreal impulse towards a higher end. From ugliness, beauty. To give that hunger something more, something that will fill it.

The disdain of the modern artist for the commercial is not a sign of their own good breeding, as they so suppose, but in fact evidence of the smallness of their souls, for they are unable to emerge from the smallness of their own souls and submerge themselves in anything greater than themselves. For the act of creating such is the act of channeling the essence of the greater thing, whereas they can only write of their own meager selves. Depression this, anxiety that, and a lot of Brooklyn status panic. That about covers the bulk of modern artistic production, doesn’t it? A self-absorption.

Now, go back and read it again.

Double dipping the Eternal Recurrence,
Monsieur le Baron

Twitter Volume 1 (Start – June 2021), Part II: Class and Culture

Exactly what it says on the tin, bruv.



Grendel was a good book. Grendel himself is a fantastic pointless man as crybully. But all of the mortals struggle. Grendel and other mortals are most like the Dragon and have the Dragon scent when they transcend their pathetic meat forms to grasp eternity. By inhabiting the story-forms, they become things beyond time and more than meaninglessness. What angers Grendel most is that someone might try to match his pitifulness. But at the same time, he drives them towards it. When he sees Unferth trying to live a story, he destroys him. Simultaneously, he wants to drag people to his level while also remaining the most pitiful. He’s the happiest when he can be the monster, and this is also when his dragon scent is strongest. But he loves to hear the stories too. We are so eager to defy structures because we see them as impositions on our absolute freedom. But we are defined by our relations to others and the world. If we never make a mark, what are we? By breaking free of these relations in their entirety, we abolish our own meaning. We become Grendels, pointless monsters, in love with our own pitifulness but afraid to admit it. Everyone is so wrapped up in ironic and gesture that nothing sincere or eternal remains. We cut off our families because we are afraid to love – and hate – them. We abandon friends. Where does that lead us? The Dragon. And the Dragon as timeless thing is no accident. The Dragon is Nietzsche’s timeless value creature, with an eternal and recurrent lifecycle. The Dragon is the Ubermensch completed, the Ubermensch the larval Dragon. Unferth is only a mortal man, and thus must steel himself with mere words of heroism. Beowulf *is* heroism. And thus Beowulf can restore meaning, as the Ubermensch, and banish the hideous nihilism.

Does Grendel sacrifice himself to religion, or does religion sacrifice Grendel? Does it matter?


There is a difference between sleaze and filth, and this is the difference between the crime wave coming now and the high crime times of the 1980s. Sleaze comes out of an unrestricted freedom, and this freedom begets psychological emancipation. An indifference to tired pieties. The crime of that day was *selfish*. The crimes of today are *selfless*. Crime then, and the accompanying filth, came from an abundance of ego which denied the rights or wellbeing of anyone around them, so eager was it to get some for itself. It is the behavior of the outlaw.

By contrast, the selfless criminal, the anarchist, behaves not to fulfill a hunger within them so strong it cannot be denied, but as a yearning for meaning, for something to coalesce self around. It is empty. It is narcissist in the Lasch sense. The anarchist struggle becomes an attempt to construct a cosmology, a narrative, some thing which will justify the person. The totally selfish person needs no justification. Their own hunger is the only meaning in the world. This is not to excuse it. But it is different. “Natural Born Killers”. That’s the crime of egoism. They have a message, as savage and brutal as it is. They have desires. They are full, so full, they impinge on others, and take from the weak to fill their own bellies.

And that is why the 60s, 70s, 80s, saw an outpouring of art. Art was the spontaneous expression of these selfish, cruel selves. But they were *selves*. Why is the modern Leftist censorious? Because they are a devourer of art, because their self must consume art, not create art, because there is a hole there. So it goes. Once as tragedy, again as farce. And that’s the difference between sleaze and filth. The filth is a product of sleaze, but it isn’t sleaze. Sleaze is the run-down nature of absolute egoist freedom. The filth cult of the modern left is just a cargo cult to sleaze, vainly hoping to be the same.


Let’s talk nobility!

Imagine! Grand palaces! Luxurious feasts! Dictating the course of world history with your whims! Conquering! Being a tiny king in your own right!

Yeah, I’m not talking about those guys. No counts or dukes or princes today.

I’m talking about the baron. How much does a modest manor produce? Between 20 and 30 pounds sterling in Britain. In France, just over 20 livre tournois. Today, this purchases about $20,000 in goods. But we don’t care about that. We care about relatives. I’ll explain later. This is about 2500 days wages. Converting back to modern money, 2500 days wages is about $200,000. So a manor produces about $200k/yr in income. How many manors does a baron own? Well, some own several. Some are even as mighty as a count or duke! But probably not. You see, the medievals did do censuses. In the County of Champagne in 1252, the count had 1182 fiefs under him. 42% were held by knights, 39% were held by bourgeois, 15% were held by barons, and 5% by clerics. The average amount of manors for a fiefholder was ONE, regardless of the official title. Single manor. But what about Britain? British barons are so important! Yeah, title deflation. Norman barons became major landholders in the new England. The English equivalent to the baron is the gentry. I will treat knights, barons, untitled lords, gentry and high bougies as interchangable.

So what did the barons do? So what are the barons? The barons are the people who rule your little shit village for the great lord, the Count, who can’t be arsed. He’s too important. And in times of trouble, they are marshalled for war. That was their original purpose. There are tons and tons and tons of these guys. Whenever you hear a historian quote a stat like “France had 1% nobility” or “Russia had 2% nobility”, by weight, that’s all fucking barons. They’re everywhere. The British peerage is a few hundred people. How many French? About 200 Frenchmen were ranked Count or above in medieval France. That’s not a lot of dudes. In fact, it basically rounds to zero. You may be noticing something similar in our lives. Millionaires and billionaires, perhaps? There are a few thousand billionaires ON EARTH. We’ll return to that and many other things later. The role of the barons was intricately tied to the feudal regime. They administered its lowest levels, managed its peasants, and fought its wars. So when early modern states formed with professional armies, they were gone.

Right? In evolution, Nature doesn’t come up with new organs willy-nilly. Limbs are adapted into other kinds of limbs. Systems are repurposed. So too with memetics.

The new system needed a labor pool to staff it. The baronage is dead. Long live the baronage. Why are college students upset when they have to be baristas? One could say it’s the income, which is terribly low. But they won’t be tradesmen or factory workers either, even when those can easily pay high 5 figure incomes. No, they want particular jobs. What jobs? Things like, I dunno. Doctor, Engineer, Lawyer, Banker, Bureaucrat, Professor.

What jobs did the baronage take up after the 16th century Crisis of the Nobility?

Doctor.

Engineer.

Lawyer.

Banker.

Bureaucrat.

Professor.

College degrees are minor titles. Always were. So, recall the average incomes of a barony? $200,000? Familiar, eh? What are the average incomes of a midcareer BigLawyer, Software Engineer, or Banker? About $200,000?

Applying Piketty’s 5% land value rule, we find a barony is worth $4mm. The average wealth of a US millionaire. Funny how that works. And what did they need the money for? Maintenance of honors. So dowries, housing, and… college tuition.

It all starts to click, doesn’t it?

All these figures are constant over time because the social-material relations have not changed in 1000 years. This is the dead hand of feudalism reaching into the present. Material conditions remain the same because social-material relations remain the same, regardless of whatever ideological garnish you put on. Call them professionals, managerials, nomenklatura…

The Eternal Baron. It is often said that the 19th century marked a new crisis of the nobility. And it did. But don’t we still have doctors, lawyers, etc? Of course. The decline of the traditional landowner was a minor crisis to be sure. But it merely finalized the shift to professionalization. But what was changing? And changing in a big way? Capitalism. The old world was being upended, and with it, the social order. Peasants became migrant farm labor or prole city workers. The communal village was destroyed. The *status* of the nobility was under attack. Remember our old friend, the haute bourgeois? In the middle ages, we see he earns about the same as the baron. They’re peers. The baron and the boat dealer are friends.

In the 19th century, the bourgeois stops being a boat dealer. And now he earns 100x what you do. Engels’s father is a factory owner, a typical New Man, a bourgeois. And he hates what Engels writes. So how can Engels always get a living? His mother. His mother adored him and gave him her moral code and values.

She was an aristocrat.

And Marx married Jenny von Westphalen.

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And why? Imagine those peasants, whom you have lived with, loved, cared for, and struggled with, for a thousand years, turned into grist for Satanic mills. Their children devoured by machines. Their lands despoiled by belching steel monsters run by migrants for a profit. Your communal village, destroyed. Overrun by foreigners. Your nursemaid’s family, gone. As Marx says, capitalism reduces the qualities of the proles to quantities.

Numbers. Data points in a spreadsheet. Dehumanization. Atomization.

All that is solid melts into air. Welcome to Hellworld.

There was only one thing to do. Make common cause with the peasants and proletarians being destroyed by this system and destroy Moloch.

Revolt against the Modern World.

Tragedy is the pain of facing irresistible fate. All politics is material interests, not ideology. Always remember that.

Blessed proletarians, will you join me again?

We will not eat the bugs.

And we will not go gently into that good night.

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In the year 1666, a strange thing happened. A rabbi from Turkey, Sabbatai Zevi, had declared himself the Messiah and was gathering up quite the following. He was marching to Constantinople (still of that name in that day) where he would confront the Sultan and depose him.

When he arrived, he did not depose the Sultan. On the contrary, he submitted – totally – not only surrendering his mob, but converting to Islam. The Sultan gave him a modest pension but later revoked it, because the man was troublesome. A few followers remained, but only a few. They disappeared back into Judaism or converted into Islam, like their leader. A few stubborn holdouts remained. About a century later, they rallied behind a leader, Jacob Frank, who claimed to be Zevi’s reincarnation. But Frank also converted, to Catholicism. Thus ended a curious footnote in history, as the Frankists followed their leader into Catholicism and Mother Church, assimilating into Christian Polish society. So it goes.

And this is where the textbooks end. So what did these curious people believe? Some of it may be familiar. They believed that the God that others believed in was a false God, a material God, a demiurge that created a world of wickedness, and that the true God had to be redeemed through special knowledge. And they were feminists! Yes, they believed in #girlbosses, slay. There could even be a female Messiah, and women had to be delivered from the bonds of marriage, a wicked, patriarchal concept. They were free, like us.

Is it any wonder that the like were drawn to the Enlightenment? They found themselves influencing movements as disparate as Enlightenment liberalism, Reform Judaism, and even @bog_beef‘s favorite, the Quakers.

So obviously they were hounded and hunted by the authorities. Such bigots never appreciated the Sabbateans in their own time. Orthodox Rabbis and Christian authorities attempted to root out this heresy, which was spreading both high and low.

Some, uneducated as they were, claimed the Sabbateans were engaged in magic, mysticism, strange rituals…

Sacrifices?

Ridiculous notions, all absurd.

After all, the Frankists had many friends, distinguished friends. They had protectors among powerful Christian magnates, such as the aforementioned Bishop Dembowsky, but also other wealthy Polish Christians had taken an interest in Sabbateanism, as well as wealthy Jews.

The influence of Sabbatai and Frank immediately calls to mind other charismatic religious figures. One obvious parallel is, of course, Rasputin. As we all know, this mad monk, unkempt and wild, quickly rose to prominence in the Russian court. Why? Well, the Tsar’s son had a terrible disease: hemophlia. But Rasputin could make his son well using his special technique of hypnosis. Of course, those outside the royal family didn’t know this. They were disgusted by this man and his disgusting and immoral behaviors. Rasputin slept around. Rasputin seduced noble ladies. And most of all, Rasputin had terrible hypnotic eyes that could draw anyone in. There is an essence in the eyes. A magic to them. In the eyes are marked terrible, horrible things. Princess Marat saw the power of his eyes.

What beliefs did Rasputin have? Although he was not a Whip himself, Rasputin was influenced by the Whips and their doctrines of holy sin and magical sex. The struggle of sin led to the heights of redemption. Holy sin.

His influence was vast. Trotsky himself remarked on this “leprous camarilla” ruling the state. They practiced magic. They had sex. They had sex… with children. Some as young as 7. “Widespread child seduction had become associated with the ‘best’ members of society.”

That is what held sway over the monarchy.

So let’s return to the Sabbateans. What did they believe in? You see, the conversion of Sabbatai Zevi was not an apostasy, but a sacrament. To save the world, Zevi had to pass into the world of gentiles, which meant converting. And so too did Frank. Zevi became a Muslim and Frank became a Catholic.

So what did these Sabbateans, these Frankists believe? They believed that they had to join their Messiah’s fight and do as he did.

Firstly, they too had to falsely convert, and enter the kelipot, the Kingdom of Evil. Their true faith would be that of the prophet of 1666.

But their false faith would embed them among Quakers, Reform Jews, heretical Orthodox and Reformed Christians, Enlightenment thinkers, Masons, and all manner of people. There they would spread their beliefs. And what were their beliefs? Why, the same as Rasputin, of one of these very heretical sects. Holy Sin. Sex Magic.

And… other things.

In the darkness, they helped each other prosper.

It may be instructive to inform you that Sabbatai’s name? It means Saturn.

The Sabbateans were the Saturn worshippers. They infiltrated sects and ideologies around the world. And their beliefs sound awfully familiar, now don’t they?

“I know the slander on the part of those who say that they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.”

Fin.



The mail order catalogue is dead, but shopping is not. Consoom is dead, long live consoom! Today, many people buy things at the Big Box stores or Amazon. And here, at the Big Box stores, you have class distinction. You see, there are many, fundamentally the same… But different. Big Box stores are all Big Box stores, but people will describe a vague distinction between them, not in the products, but in the atmosphere. That’s class culture at work. We respond to market segmentation by class.

So let’s start. Walmart is working class/lower middle. That one should be obvious, but I will still state it. The focus is on frugality and everyday low prices. The working class, by necessity, counts pennies. Walmart is bulk, but bulk of low grade/commodity grade items. The customers are usually dressed in a slovenly, prolish manner, and they act accordingly. I see a lot of arguments and messes at Walmart. I like it. It feels earthy, secure, down to earth, authentic. There’s not a lot of focus on projecting an image – people are here to shop.

Up a rung is Target. Target is middle class. You can tell by how it markets and positions itself. No longer are you here for [product], you’re here for the Target experience. You’re not a customer, you’re a ~guest~, like you’re at a hotel. And there is conspicuous wait staff. The middle class like the experience of being conspicuously waited on and treated as special, worthy of distinction. The analogue here is how the middle class in Fussell’s day loved “posh” French restaurants that focused on the continental atmosphere and wearing fancy clothes. They’re not just there for the food, they’re there for the atmosphere. Target shoppers aren’t just there to shop, they’re there to live – and Tar-jay will help. The price is a little higher, and this keeps penny-pinching proles away. It is subtle things that classgate.

Next in our list is Costco. Costco is upper middle class. Costco is very austere and minimalist. Customers are still waited on, but silently. At Walmart, you have to go flag someone down. At Target, the wait staff gets in your face. At Costco, everything runs smoothly, invisibly. The theme of frugality returns, but in a variant form. Things are cheap because they’re bought in bulk. But what’s being bought isn’t cheap. The Costco promise is the cheapest price *for the finest of goods*. Real extra virgin olive oil, imported wine, wagyu steak, Mexicoke, etc. The message is clear – Costco customers expect the finer things in life, and they treat it as the everyday, not as a conspicuous expenditure for which costlier is better. Steak is just the grocery bill, and you’ve got to keep it down. It is similar to another class marker. Costco is the dusty car of Big Box stores.

But there is also another side – the luxury car. And what’s the Luxury Car?

Well, you had to have guessed it. Whole Foods.

Whole Foods/Costco represent New Money/Old Money. Frankly, Whole Foods is a place that makes me incredulous. It’s flashy, it’s showy. Everything about a Whole Foods is meant to show off gaudy, conspicuous wealth. What they sell is often ridiculous and they sell it at ridiculous prices. At Whole Foods, you make a splash. So what above? Is there a Big Box store of the upper class? No, frankly. It would go out of business. There are simply not enough upper class people to sustain a Big Box store. But they do have their own stores. They’re smaller, more specialized stores. The upper class has small, boutique stores selling basically handcrafted or specialized versions of goods. These stores are expensive, and the products are almost indistinguishable from generic – but they are fine, very fine. You will find them in the back alleys of cosmopolises. Does the upper middle class have boutiques? Yes, but not for regular stuff.

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Basically, you spend lots of money on amusing white elephants. The upper middle class has plenty of money and likes to be amused. Being amused is an important class value.



The old Fussell wisdom still holds true, mostly. A general disdain for education is prolish. Proles (rightfully) mistrust the higher education system. The education system forms a key part of the American class system. I won’t belabor the old points, but I’ll quickly sum it up.

The middle class is very proud of having gone to college. If they are from a small town, they may be convinced this makes them much better than their origin. This is the transplant of CB’s “Midwestern Excellence joke”. It’s middle class to draw the line between college-educated and not.

The upper middle class assumes college is a given, since most of them have been getting an education since time immemorial. The thing that brings status here is going to a good, prestigious college. Don’t just go to Podunk Directional State U. You’ve got to be a Harvard man like your uncle and your father and your grandfather – carry on that legacy. The principle of legacy. This is what matters.

Uppers often go to silly little Lib Arts colleges that cost a king’s ransom.

Speaking of king’s ransom, let’s move on from Fussell and talk about what’s new. In his day, college was cheap. Now it isn’t. While the uppers can pay their way, lower classes must figure out how to pay for college. The proles, often first gen students, get need-based aid if they can wrangle the education bureaucracy/FAFSA. What they misunderstand is the generosity of need-aid at prestige schools. If they get loans, it is often because they go to for-profits or stingy low-grade schools. It is the middles that bear the brunt of student loans. Their parents are too well-off to fairly qualify for financial aid, and yet they are not well-off enough to pay their children through. So the middle class ends up saddled with student loans, made worse by high tuition. While uppers often go to these strange liberal arts colleges, they’re not an unpopular choice among the middles, since they’re not as competitive as fighting for one of the Harvard slots. But the price is steep, incredibly steep. So the upper middles. The more prestigious universities have incredibly generous aid packages and fat endowments to fund them. As such, many upper middles end up getting full ride need-based scholarships or sometimes full ride+ merit scholarships that actually make money. This is helped along by generous loopholes in the tax code that allow them to maximize the financial aid given to them by shielding lots of income and assets from FAFSA. Piketty has studied the US tax code, and the tax rate begins to decline at the UMC as SSI phases out. Tax and asset shelters allow the UMC to game the system and get “welfare”. The result is that I graduated to a higher income than most of you and without a penny of student debt.

Remember, privilege is what you get for free.

If you pay for it, they’re selling you something. The tax gap in action. Note the dip that starts at the top 10% and dives at the top 1%. That is the UMC hole. Red is with sales tax, blue without.

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So that’s paying for the party. What about getting there? Let’s talk about school. This is something else that has changed since Fussell’s day, and it deserves some looking at it. What does schooling look like for the classes? For the underclass, school is like an tiny prison. The purpose is discipline. Rarely can enough order be imposed to teach anything, and the students often aren’t terribly interested in learning anything anyways. These schools are usually failing. Teach For America kids go here. The working class will send their kids to whatever’s around. They don’t have the luxury of uprooting to chase a school. This can be good, this can be bad. For what it’s worth, I had a working class Latina classmate in Calc, and these people get sucked up into the UMC stream. The middle class is the beginning of school consciousness and the desire for a “good school”. Their main goal is to avoid the disorder of the underclass, so for them, “good school” is a euphemism for white school. You can admit that here. Ha! Any school is enough for “college”.

What is alien for Fussell’s generation and probably most of you is what I call “The Thunderdome”. It is a school system of intensive winnowing and it is the main pipeline from which our nation’s elites are produced. This is the form of intense American meritocracy. It begins when the aspirant elite is a toddler. They begin to take IQ tests to qualify for an elite preschool as well as personality screening. The cutoff for these tests is usually somewhere about 130. Some parents make their toddlers do test prep. The stakes are high. If accepted, the Thunderdome begins. The toddler, then child, then teenager, begins to compete with their rival-peers for resources and attention. The best survive, the rest are winnowed. Rank and yank. Ace the test or don’t come back. At every stage, advance. Never fail. A grade that isn’t an A is a permanent black mark on the transcript that will ruin your chances for Harvard. The child must have perfect grades, perfect grades, and perfect extracurriculars. The leadership requirement means they must outmaneuver their rival-peers to take a club. Many cannot handle the pressure. The suicide rate is not insubstantial. Coffee is common. A common coping mechanism beyond caffeine is performance-enhancing drugs. A swift trade in amphetamines has developed, as well as cocaine. Anything to get an edge in the academic race. The winners are the products of “meritocracy”, its blighted fruits. They are, as a rule, both brutal and conformist – conformity is a must to reach “perfection” as defined by a grading rubric. No principles but obedience. No desire but hunger. An Ivy league professor, himself an alumnus, compared the commencement speech he had received, one calling for noblesse oblige and reminding them of their responsibilities, to the one his young students were receiving.

They were told thus:
You are the fruits of meritocracy, and you deserve this and more. The world belongs to you by right. You must take of it. So eat, eat and never be full, and feast until the world’s ending – this is the truth of the world and what is right.

Anyways. On to the upper class. More cheerful! The upper class is schooled and socialized to be affable. Their schooling is not as intensive, generally, because the goal of their education is to make them good members of the upper class: socialites and networkers. For the upper class, the world can be treacherous, so school networks can be some of the most honest and true sources of friendship. In addition, a lot of their education doesn’t just come at school, but exists passively, in their upbringing. The upper middle class is cultured and sophisticated by education and training, the result of 10 hour school days. The upper class absorbs knowledge by osmosis. They end up with a passing knowledge of fine art because everyone knows it. They read books by whim. The goal is to create that charming affability and the perfect manners for which the upper class is famed. Imperturbably fine spirits, level moods, and a willingness to cover. Generosity befits an upper class person. This leads me to manners, but that’s a matter for another day.


A subject conspicuous in its absence from the Fussell book. Money and class are not the same thing, but, of course, they are related. Without money, one cannot maintain the expenditures needed to live above low proledom for long. So then money. For proles, money is a means for consumption. Proles convert money into goods or services and then consume them. For the lower sorts of proles, this consumption is primarily for survival, but the higher proles enjoy many (very expensive) luxury goods like jetskis and boats. Why is this so? Precarity. @acczibit has a concept “Hood Post-Scarcity”, where one can satisfy all one’s needs, but a single emergency would wipe out any savings. Luxury goods are expensive but “cheap” compared to wealth. Money is here today, gone tomorrow. Spend while you can.

As you move into the middle class, incomes are not necessarily higher, and often lower. But the tone is different. The watchword of the middle is “comfortable”. 90% of the time, when you meet someone who self-describes their upbringing as comfortable, that’s middle class. If they describe themselves as upper middle class but have low class consciousness, they’re also middle class. Twitter is a very middle class place – most of its users are middle class. The middle class no longer fears starvation – here is the source of its comfort. Instead, the middle class uses its spare cash for *status*. The middle class is always attempting to keep up with the Joneses, because its key value is respectability. So the middle class is in an arms race to maintain its status. It buys trends because it is forced to *conform*. And why must the middle class conform? Because little separates them from proledom. Certainly not their income. Respectability means keeping up the habits that keep you from becoming another “deplorable”, who often have lots of personal and life drama. Middles live by codes. Because of these material realities, the middle class plays the role of morality police. Their main asset is their home, and the patrolling of morality helps preserve the niceness of their neighborhood – and their net worth.

Remember: Class is downstream of material conditions. Above this, the upper middle. Here, many living expenses are permitted to fall, since the UMC does not have to follow (expensive) trends, while income drastically increases. This creates an inevitable and perpetual surplus. Within a year of graduation, I had >100k. Here begins the accumulation of capital. What is money here? Money is a tool. Money is power. Money is not hoarded, but deployed to useful ends. The UMC readily uses money to solve its problems. But it primarily is a means of accumulating more money and projecting power. Money can be donated to buy influence, and influence can be used to advance the self. Every investment begets further investment. The UMC is funding political movements, research, etc. Bill Gates was born UMC. As Burnham says, the UMC is the strongest part of the ruling class. Now, let us digress.

Imagine the classes as celestial spheres in the firmament. Hydrogen gas is capital.

The life of the underclass is fragmented, bizarre, full of misadventures, prison, and drama. They go from gig to gig, and sometimes prison to prison. They are space debris. If the space debris can cohere, if some semblance of order can be brought to life, then there appears a terrestial planet out of these space rocks. The proletarian has a functioning life now, a routine, and steady work. But no savings. No capital. That can change. When a proletarian internalizes the disciplined living of the middle class, the need to live respectably, it begins to save. It develops a small capital buffer, which is the “comfort” of the middle. The middles are gas giants. They have capital, but it is inert. However, the process of saving is long. Eventually, a successful middle accumulates enough gas that something changes. The capital begins to work upon itself. The gas ignites.

A star is born.

A Novus Homo takes their place among the Nobiles. Which, finally, leads me back on track. The upper class. While the process of entering the nobiles is slow, the ascent of a lesser noble to the greater is exceedingly fast. It happens in the “liquidity moment”. The UMC have, on average, a few million. They’re multimillionaires. In the liquidity moment, one very quickly experiences an increase in wealth in an order of magnitude or multiple orders of magnitude. A critical point is passed and explosive growth occurs.

A star becomes a giant. And what is money for these giants? Everything. Nothing. What is water to a fish?

Money is merely the reality they dwell in.

Fundamentally, the upper class does not understand money. In this, and many other ways, they are the most alien class of all. When I met @babs11111111, he asked me how much my Camry cost. His guess? $500,000.

But at the same time, the upper class can be quite frugal. I make money. For better or for worse, the upper class is beyond making money. That means no more is coming. The Banana Test. I do not know how much a banana costs ($10?) and don’t care to learn. By contrast, Babs knows how much a banana costs, down to the cent, because the principal must be preserved, but for big prices, he has no understanding, while I am shrewd and haggle. The upper class just has money. It’s always there. Like the tap, you turn it on and fill up a glass. But it has to be respected carefully, because one day it might go away forever and never return.

That’s the balancing act. The principal must be preserved, at all costs. From this, we see a material reason why the upper class is fundamentally anti-consumerist (whereas the upper middle is minimalist but can spend a lot). Consumerism would devour the fortune and return them to the lower nobility from whence they came.

Not that that happens often. In the act of rising, the upper middle class striver builds ideologies and movements, which become funded into small NGOs, which grow into large bureaucracies of power in triumph. But what happens after the rise?

The NGOs, finally, begin to do their ostensible goal. Where the UMC spends to create power, the UC is beyond striving. The NGOs stop being a front for a machine (or at least, not their machine), and become real charitable endeavors. The main living of the UC person is to be a socialite, and that means charity, charity, charity. For a long time, the upper class family exists in this kind of philanthropic stasis, throwing many fantastical and spectacular charity galas. But eventually, all things end. At long last, the star’s fuel burns out.

Things begin to change, once more. The final change. An upper class family, spending all its time socializing, builds up deep and wide connections across an entire civilization. Normally, it exists in torpor. When the money ends, it wakes. In its waking, it stirs, and it moves the world. Activity goes out across the connections. This causes the entire civilization to shake. When an UMC family ascends to the upper class, that makes the news.

But the decline and fall of an upper class family? That makes world history. The conditions which create and sustain an upper class family are fundamentally rooted in some reality about material conditions. When those are invalidated, the era is changing.

The liquidity moment is so explosive because its agent becomes an avatar of world historical trends. The ending and undoing of those world historical trends is not only as spectacular, it is more spectacular.

The giant goes supernova.

Elements are scattered to the far solar winds in vast, billowing clouds.

In some distant cloud, the fragments begin to cohere again…


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So why does Fussell not talk about money? Part of it is that money played a much less central role back then. And why is that?

Something has happened since the 80s.

Let’s talk about consumer debt.

Do the proles have debt? Yes and no. Many of you are familiar with payday lenders, which charge hundreds of % in interest a year. Now that people have cottoned, they are evolving into “social justice microlenders” that… charge hundreds of % in interest a year. But that’s not the only scheme. Witness CreditOne and other shady credit card companies which charge fees for carrying a balance, fees not carrying a balance, a fee when you pay, an annual fee, etc. Like the NASCAR card (NASCARD). Scams. Or rent-to-own, which started with furniture and appliances, but has actually expanded to housing, with the same exploitative terms. In this context, Walmart’s layaway program, with an APR of 7-20%, like the rest of Walmart, is exploitative but relatively benevolent. Subprime car scams involve setting exorbitant payments and luring customers in with promises of zero or almost zero down, then repossessing the car when they inevitably fail to make the payment. Or they might, like the others, charge really high interest. Which leads to the other side of prole debt. No debt. Proles come to distrust this usury, and for good reason. So the other side of proles is movements like Dave Ramsey and going totally debt-free. It makes sense. The kind of debt they run into is almost all totally predatory.

Leaving the proles behind, how does the middle class interact with debt? The middle class believes in having a sanitary credit score. Why? Because it wants debt. But only some debt. Instead of all-or-nothing, like the proles, the middle class separates out its debts. There is good debt and bad debt, and these differ primarily by category. Good debt includes house debt and at least used to include student debt. Car debt is also considered good debt. Bad debt is debt for frivolous purchases and other things. Credit card debt is bad debt.

This is a middle class credit card ad. Let’s analyze it, shall we? The card level is fairly basic, but it is treated as an aspirational goal (gotten after building credit with a pointless card). This is topped off with the symbolism of climbing a mountain. This act of climbing a mountain on vacation, a status expenditure, is treated as far more important than the boyfriend (not husband). Marriage still carries a lot of cultural cachet with the UMC while it is slowly dissolving in the middle. Class matters in how things are marketed.

So to transition to the UMC, let’s look at an ad for a similar product, but for a higher class. Same thing, different culture.

Like the previous ad, it has a travel motif. But the vibe is artsy. Furthermore, the card opens the beginning of a journey, not the end. While the Gold card is the result of building credit for middles, I got offered one (and similar cards) as a broke, 0 income college student.

In this ad and the next ad, we see the principles of amusement and countersignalling the high – shows you don’t hold it in awe. One of my friends, descended from a colonial governor, wears work boots and T-shirts smeared with truck grease to Whole Foods. The card the Vikings are pitching is one of CapitalOne’s top cards.

Here we have big deal Wes Anderson treated with humor and irreverence. Countersignal the high.

Before I forget – note the importance of family in the sincere commercial! What is the end of the journey she undertakes? A good marriage! Striver middles, take note.

So how does this tie into UMC relations with credit? First of all, everything is cheaper for the rich. As mentioned with Costco, the prices are lower. When I shop on Amazon, I get special Amazon Business Prime discounts not available to the hoi polloi. You apply corporate discounts, that’s another price cut. But the credit cards play into this. When you spend, you get money or points. These programs synergize. On UberEats, I pay with a Samsung wallet discount offer on UberCash, and those purchases earn Marriott points. So I get cashback on the underlying credit card in the wallet, points with Samsung, points with Uber, points with Marriott, and all of these get redeemed in my normal life – on top of cheaper sticker price to begin with. All in all, my prices are probably 20% less. The rich do not go into debt on the same terms as the poor. Like many things, it’s cheaper to be rich.

But the relationship with debt, like money, also differs. Money and debt are both part of one pool, liquidity. It’s all lumped together. What matters is the cost (opportunity cost + APR, cash has APR 0%), availability in crisis (cash is perfect), and liquidity needs. In that sense, debt is not necessarily a meaningful concept. Debt becomes part of a general pattern of money deployment to maximize asset efficiency. It’s not debt, but leverage, to be used wisely. It’s all of a kind.

Now, for the upper class, which has money for everything, why would they need debt? And generally, they don’t. But there are exceptions. When an upper class family begins to decline, they still need to maintain their social and philanthropic obligations. It’s all they know. In those times, you begin to see noble estates take on debt. And as these estates become increasingly indebted, they reach a crisis point. They have to act. Let’s take a look at an example. In the late 19th and early 20th century, a grain glut and economic shifts led to the collapse in value and income of vast landed estates, a ruinous event for great magnates and small alike. In Eastern Europe, the result was communism and collectives run by these very nobles. But in Britain? The great lords decided on marriage. They went across the pond and found wealthy heiresses.

The birth of an Anglo-American empire.

The birth of its champion.

Churchill was the fruit of such a union.

His old (American) home is down the road from my lake house. Like I said, the decline and fall of upper class families? That shapes world history.

That’s all for today.

Twitter Volume 1 (Start – June 2021), Part I: Basic Marxism

Many threads, together, a post!

This first section mostly deals with basic Marxist theory, but with fun analogies.



Trying to find the old Luke Ford show where I said the future was out-flanking from the Left so I can soak in my own status points. Occurs to me that Twitter/reddit politics/protesting is a form of parasocial relation where people can pretend to be friends with powerful Dems.

Blue check culture and its hangers-on is like celeb culture but for RBG and others. Incredibly cold takes here, for sure. But the social effect has an added effect – it adds psychological plausibility to the narrative talking heads propagate. Would my “friends” lie to me?

And this is made possible by the dissolution of traditional social bonds. Melt the family, replace it with commoditized Twitter bonds with your designated pal. Secondly, this is part of a greater “theme parking” of life, for lack of a better word. Everything becomes clean, fake.

Bugman technocracy is a natural outgrowth of this cleanness. Everything looks tractable and controllable, ready to be directed. Entertainment further encourages this outlook. In vidya, everything is easy and predictable. Use the Bird Mana to stoke your pops for war!

As if it was a matter of pulling the right levers and pushing the right buttons. People lose sight of the essentials. Politics is zero-sum. Politics is about power, not policy. The lives of the people are reduced to numbers to be regulated.

The people who fall for this feel like the rulers, when in fact, they are the ruled. The more reality separates from their own ego image, the more they have to lash out. Truth is, every society is ruled by a small clique of mostly hereditary elites.


palladiummag.com/2019/08/05/the-real-problem-at-yale-is-not-free-speech/ The reaction of liberal elites to Trump and the reaction of this author to Yalies shows status illegibility. Status competition through consoom only impresses those of limited means. They aren’t hiding from the plebs. They don’t even know what plebs are.

Without consumption signals, you end up like Twitter. Taste and idea signals dominate. Plebs think about what they’d buy with their money, so to show your class, don’t buy anything. The tension is greatest at the new money/minor nobility descendant barrier.

Showing off your new wealth is a signal that it’s new and therefore bad. 40% of Japanese salarymen at the zaibatsu are samurai descendants, and a sizable minority of the non-noble are going to have 3 generations of PMC pedigree or more. The pattern repeats everywhere.

The university is intricately tied with this status dance as the repository of Ancien Regime values. 80% of 16th century Provencal nobles had degrees. It’s symbiotic. Unis today basically have trained like fucking half of American young people to be Versailles-style leeches.


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The deep concern and involvement of increasingly vast swathes of the population with politics is bizarre. It’s bizarre because, well, Sticky Shoe is right. Politics, left or right, is the manipulation of ideological symbols to manufacture consent so some elites can topple others.

Hence Che Guevara (read: Che Guevara Lynch of the Lynch family, noble for nearly a millennium) topples other elites of another stripe. And Lenin topples the Romanovs and sets up his own shop. Rent still gets paid in the USSR, just to a State Owned Company.

Stalin restores order by purging a potentially hostile Party elite. Is he essentially reactionary? Yes. Why shouldn’t he be? Why shouldn’t any ML vanguard party be? Exit Jin Yuzhang, Manchu Prince, nephew of the Emperor. Enter Jin Yuzhang, vice director of Beijing.

Ideology is the belief that literally the same people (hereditary elites) with the same acculturation doing the same things will produce a different result. Hierarchy is conserved through many forms. One man saw through this: Mao.

Mao is able to see that the party structure itself constitutes an elite and will reproduce class privilege, ergo, a revolutionary state must undergo Permanent Revolution. Well, it turns out, that is a frightfully unpleasant and unpopular state of affairs. It’s rolled back.

When you see someone super excited over politics in that blue check way, what you see is either an elite scheming to get a bigger hat, or a striver who would put their own yoke on you instead. Why does the OWS founder flip as soon as he goes to Davos? Because that was the goal.

So what is the worker to do? First of all, vote for me goyim. I’m your pal. But secondly, recognize no elites are inherently their friend. Instead, the worker can strategically strike in favor of weaker elite factions opportunistically, extracting concessions from the new regime.

This means rejecting the left/right dichotomy as essentially a hobgoblin of capital. Instead, strike for those who you can exert leverage on, like in Yugoslavia, where young noble children allied with workers to overthrow their fathers. Then they rewarded the workers with coops.

But wait, Monsieur! Stalin was a working class man! How can he act according to aristocratic or bourgeois class interest? Because the nature of a vanguard is to be a ruling class, and all ruling classes trend towards aristocratic class consciousness. All nobles began as peasants.


I suppose I’ll expand on a comment I made on Spandrell’s blog. I am capital. Tucker Carlson represents a faction of capital. The Pentagon is capital. Why would Redgov, the military-industrial complex and its interests, red-bait? It’s simple – the tendency of profit to decline.

The long run interest rate and long run profit rate are intertwined. The developed world is facing widespread ZIRP, or worse, NIRP. Many investment classes have reached negative profit levels. That represents capital destruction. Productive capital is being destroyed.

While the billionaire class can flee this through imperialism and globalism, minor capital like myself cannot. Neither can the Pentagon, for obvious reasons, or domestic industry. Bezos is happy to take a larger share of a shrinking pie. I’m not.

What’s the answer? Worker coops have proved a durable method of raising profit rates, as seen in domestic coop industry and Austrian social housing. I won’t get into particulars. If you raise profits by 4%, and the long run interest decline is .02%/yr, you buy 200 years.

Thus, a reform towards socialism and worker-owned means of production extends the life of the ruling class. I’ll see you in 2220 for the next crisis of capital, the showdown between the Party-State vanguard and the new self-owned proletariat.

And yeah, the idea that Twitter anarchists seem to have where the Revolution swoops in tomorrow and they get to have FALGC is utopian fantasizing. Just remember, my class interests aren’t yours, even if they sometimes intersect.


Anyways. Speaking of this little gremlin, Matt, we have another solution to the 2020 crisis of capitalism. What if we just import, like, a billion people. Whoa. Naturally, the woke left defends the principle of limitless immigration as sacred. But what does it actually do?

Why don’t we “listen to Bernie?” To quote Mr. Sanders, “Open borders is a Koch Brothers proposal.” Not only do more workers drive down the cost of labor, more identities allow for capital to play a divide-and-conquer racial game. Diverse communities are less cohesive communities.

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So who gains? Well, the GDP goes up. But what does that even mean? The GDP per capita doesn’t go up. And the median income goes down as the population composition is shifted downwards to lower classes and the great mass of the proletariat loses bargaining power.

So why should it matter if GDP goes up? It’s simple. Just as socializing the means of production can raise profits and rescue the capitalist class, so too can generating more growth. While the people remain poor, the corporations are able to grow. The capitalists prosper.

Markets, ever more markets, seeking ever more growth. Not only does the domestic grow, so too does global consumption as a whole, since First Worlders consoom more goods than Third Worlders. And there you have a solution for capital’s woes.

One way or another, capital will find a solution. At the end of the day, the ruling class rules, and it will find a way to save itself, taking its materially governed course into the future. But you can move it towards a path that also benefits you. Seize the means of production.

Finally, as a followup to my last thread on this crisis of capital, in 2220, when the Stalinist state runs out of profit in turn, it will also try to save itself. What’s one way to open a new market? The market of space. And that’s how you get United Empire Space Stalinism.

Endless markets in Endless Space… 2.


Unironically love me a slimeburger with cheese as I guzzle liquefied corn in my pod while watching liquid modernity on my Armeniaphone.

I like to think a lot about ads and what they reveal about society. Its wants, its fears. The adworld is not the real world, but some sort of twisted reflection. We despise it, but clearly, we also want it. Adworld is the promised hedonist utopia.

No wonder the average DSA “socialist” thinks not about political economy, but consumption as the key marker of the socialist future. Working only 20 hours a week on hobby amusements. Living in free housing anywhere. It’s a reflection of a fixation on consumption.

All politics becomes, like a T-shirt, another product. And the politics, in turn, reflects the spirit of consumption. Where are the builders? All we have are the eaters. But you cannot have a world where everyone is a hobby farmer working 20 hours a week.

The bourgeois socialist dream implicitly rests on economic assumptions that must demand exploitation of *someone’s* labor, forcing *somebody* to do the unfun, unhobby work. Like the slimeburger itself, DSA socialism is “Impossible”.

The impossibility means it will never come, thus preserving the current class order. Thus, real class interests are reproduced using the fantasy. Price is only the flip side of cost. So long as products must be produced with depreciated capital and labor, there must be cost.


Claims we will use wealth taxation to *pay for* this or that program are in reality regressive claims because they feed a common myth. The falsehood is to conceive of wealth as a movable stash of consumer goods. Large fortunes are not dragon’s hoards of gold.

Even if they were, gold cannot conjure new hamburgers or horse buggies into being on its own. Rather, large fortunes consist of control of the means of production through debt or equity instruments. Amazon cannot be converted *into* universal healthcare.

This common misconception leads to one of the most common (and not misguided) criticisms from the average working Joe: “You just want free shit. You want gibs.” If wealth taxes were framed as means of redistributing the means of production, one sees what socialism is.

Socialism is the promise that the workers and their respected foremen can labor in peace without the depredations of coastal elites and meddling Washington bureaucrats. They themselves will control the means of production. Framed like that, the worker understands.


Chasing the bait, or failing to outwit a system. Let’s take the power instinct. In the primal environment, why chase power? Because power is status is women. As we are complex apes, not simple apes, this relation no longer holds as strongly. Power can often mean no women. Between the Silicon Valley nerd and some kind of rugged, muscular warehouse worker, who ges more sex? Or what about Cardinal Richelieu and other such powerful clergy? The stated purpose of the urge and the actual biological purpose of the urge divorce. Power becomes unfitness.

But a funny thing can happen. The TRP movement accrued a crust of rhetoric about building power. At the same time, it advised various alpha behaviors which often do not lead to power. And yet… what is the result? The result of adopting those alpha behaviors was not power. But it did result in sex! And sex was the biological purpose of the urge to begin with! We can see that the urge, ironically, did loop back around to fulfilling its purpose, through the failure of achieving the conscious purpose in favor of the subconscious.

We can think about many of these biological and social systems this way. Success at the conscious goal may cause failure at the hidden, true goals. The system may look totally broken, but in its brokenness, accomplish some other goal, Chesteron’s Fence style People can fail at their stated goals and still get what’s good for them. Getting back to the theme of this account: The DSA fails at its conscious goals of revolution and pushing the party left. But it succeeds at the real class goals of networking its middle class members.


Good for a person vs good for a class.

The median wealth of aristocrats went up after the French Revolution, but individually, it could be quite the tragedy.

The DSA machine chews up a lot of middle class kids, but as a class, it produces government/NGO sinecures for them. Bureaucratization is a political strategy which allows an executive to achieve absolutism. FDR, Stalin, Louis XIV – all these power struggles create a bureaucracy to cut down an aristocracy, leaving a very strong central figure but hollowing out the future.

Après moi, le déluge. A similar principle holds in corporate politics. Top employees and department-fief executives are powerful, powerful enough to oust the C-suite. A strong HR department allows you to collar these threats to your power. By running hiring/firing through them, you can purge. But like the bureaucracy in the state, HR is not a value center. By itself, it is not an independent power source, power is delegated through it. So you always have your C-suite control over it. The monarch plays the bureaucrat against the peerage to maintain control. “The natural border of the US is the Rhine.” – FDR

By subduing all power in your polity, you are able to wield an immense amount of force. You can build a world empire. You can sprawl everything. The loyalty problem is what governs parties. Bureaucrats have perfect loyalty. The problem? Once built, the bureaucracy never goes away. Gore Vidal called FDR our American Augustus, and he was. But the machine he made didn’t go away.

Without a master, it grows unceasingly, and its master becomes itself. The bureaucracy, the eunuchs of China, the apparatchiks – all these are the same thing. They are the machine gone rogue, existing to enlarge itself. This is true of both private and public bureaucracies. The Ford Foundation no longer serves the Fords, but is a thing for itself. The point of the DSA is itself.

Political ideologies, if they are to be stable, must reproduce the power of the class that enacts them.


Good for a person vs good for a class.

The median wealth of aristocrats went up after the French Revolution, but individually, it could be quite the tragedy.

The DSA machine chews up a lot of middle class kids, but as a class, it produces government/NGO sinecures for them. Bureaucratization is a political strategy which allows an executive to achieve absolutism. FDR, Stalin, Louis XIV – all these power struggles create a bureaucracy to cut down an aristocracy, leaving a very strong central figure but hollowing out the future.

Après moi, le déluge. A similar principle holds in corporate politics. Top employees and department-fief executives are powerful, powerful enough to oust the C-suite. A strong HR department allows you to collar these threats to your power. By running hiring/firing through them, you can purge. But like the bureaucracy in the state, HR is not a value center. By itself, it is not an independent power source, power is delegated through it. So you always have your C-suite control over it. The monarch plays the bureaucrat against the peerage to maintain control. “The natural border of the US is the Rhine.” – FDR

By subduing all power in your polity, you are able to wield an immense amount of force. You can build a world empire. You can sprawl everything. The loyalty problem is what governs parties. Bureaucrats have perfect loyalty. The problem? Once built, the bureaucracy never goes away. Gore Vidal called FDR our American Augustus, and he was. But the machine he made didn’t go away.

Without a master, it grows unceasingly, and its master becomes itself. The bureaucracy, the eunuchs of China, the apparatchiks – all these are the same thing. They are the machine gone rogue, existing to enlarge itself. This is true of both private and public bureaucracies. The Ford Foundation no longer serves the Fords, but is a thing for itself. The point of the DSA is itself.

Political ideologies, if they are to be stable, must reproduce the power of the class that enacts them.


So, monopoly production. I talk about how this leads to a certain political economy in my latest blog post. But it occurs to me that it might be helpful to explain the concept itself. A monopolist is someone that is the only major producer in a sector. Why does this matter? Well, a monopolist can extract rents by using market power. It can control the labor supply and dictate wages as a monopsonist – the only buyer of said labor skills. It can control prices on its products as the only game in town. By this, it can gain excess profits. The problem with this? The monopoly is fragile. It is a big creature, like an elephant, and must consume extra economic calories to survive. It is more exposed to the whims of fate. It can create variance to destroy its smaller rivals, but it is exposed to systemic shocks. So if a monopoly just sucks blood, why not trustbust them all? That’s the answer the early 20th century progressives came up with. You can break it up into oligopoly pseudo-competition.

It doesn’t work out. It worked then, doesn’t work now.

Why? Lenin said Monopoly is Good, Actually. Why is that? It seems strange to praise such things.

First of all, monopoly is the progressive (here, meaning merely consequent) direction of history. Monopoly is the production-relation of the Managerial Age. Monopoly is a planned economy. Monopoly needs big government and big government needs monopoly. But why do the *people* need monopoly? What does monopoly do that that makes it not an aberration on history? Two words: irreducible complexity. What does that mean? There are products that are made up of so many different pieces with so specialized a customer that the constituent components of a monopoly business *do not constitute viable independent businesses*. As such, a broken monopoly must still function as a de facto monopoly.

But we’ve got problems. The USSR collapsed. Planned monopoly production necessarily suffers from the information problem because the planners are not close to the business, but far. Adding more plans and regulations doesn’t fix it. 26%. 26%. Today, 18% of Americans work directly for government and 8% indirectly through NGOs. A full quarter of our workforce as apparatchiks, and a mismanaged economy. That’s trillions of dollars of value being tied. The Revolution will make the world’s first trillionaire. Just as the French Revolution resolved the contradictions of feudalism and birthed the bourgeois democratic system in Europe, *increasing* the median wealth of the nobility, so too does the problem of moving from planned to social production present tremendous latent power. The stage is set for a politics of the 21st century. The stakes are high. Who will complete the system of the NEP?


Plannerism is not sufficient to have Socialism. I think this is a really important point to stress because of modern capitalism. Modern capitalism is not the early, primitive capitalism in which a few owner-operator-shareholder bourgeois compete, but the finance capital system outlined by Lenin, in which the power of the bourgeois is diffused and specialized into various roles and production monopolies. Under such a regime, we already have a system of central planning – by the key bankers and apparatchiks.

By the plannerist definition, we already live under socialism – and God save us from it! 18% of the US works for the government directly, 8% for NGOs. Some few hundred financiers call the shots and by this, the bulk of this industrial colossus is directed. But this leads me into my point – you collapse the distinction between socialism and capitalism. However, there exist intermediary stages between communism and capitalism. Suppose all businesses are privatized into coops. We’ll call this semi-NEP, because there will still exist a directing class of Red Technicians which serves a dual role as a ruling class and Party Vanguard. This is obviously still capitalism. But over time, the roles of the Red Technicians could phase out (not that they will). Under this “full NEP”, the only coordinators would be foremen and craftsmen, who serve a dual role as technical experts AND workers, rather than engineers/doctors/other professionals. In this, the workers would wholly own production. So they would not be self-exploiting. Profit would not be abolished, but there would be no fraction given to bourgeois. This does seem like an intermediate state between communism and capitalism.

The value-form still exists because the different coops must trade because labor, capital, and resources remain scarce. From each according to their ability, to each according to their ability, and no coercive control or extraction. The second criticism relates to your critique of “socialist money”. It is true that socialist money necessarily preserves the value-form and commodity production. However, the idea of money as labor-scrip to purchase use-value is genuinely a deviation from capitalist money.

You overlooked the dual role of money under a capitalist system outlined in Capital I/II. Money is the means by which labor and bourgeois acquire products to consume. However, money also can acquire control-power, and capital *ownership* is essential to understanding power under capitalism. Anyone can accumulate value and then exchange it for control, allowing them to direct production and politics. Thus, money is not just consumption… It is crystallized power, which can be saved, and which renders all consumption opposed to the goal of power accumulation. By detaching money from control-power, you prevent people from accumulating control outside the Party-State mechanisms, forcing power formalism. i.e. power lies in office and formal control of means of production by appointment/election, and not through purchase or acquisition. The oligarch is formally part of the State and his position is revocable. This is an advantage the USSR and China enjoy over wild oligarchy.

And secondly, by detaching this, one also undermines the inheritance principle. Not just that property go to one’s heirs, but *control* does. Party offices cannot be inherited even if cars, dachas, and cigars can be. And this is essential when considering the historical context. Stalinism did not emerge from the void but in the context of a struggle with the Bolshevik Party, substantially composed of descendants of Tsarist aristocratic elites. As such, the inheritance principle and power-accumulation principles are core to that class consciousness.

The creation of Socialist Money is not just an arbitrary revision, but a reflection of the need of Stalin to struggle against and prevail over the feudal-aristocratic Party, replacing it with a loyal and centralized bureaucracy. Without that, he would not be able to win WWII. It is a repeat of Peter’s struggle against the boyars, and Stalin much admired Peter the Great for these very reasons. And as a practical man and from a practical viewpoint, we cannot discount power politics as a real material source of conflict and engine of history.


On material conditions and ideology – by analogy.

Do you recall the Bush and early Obama age of gaming? With brown and bloom everywhere? It was dark, it was grim, it was grimdark! Reviewers said it reflected the tastes of consumers, who wanted gritty realism, not kid heroes. Consumers were adults now! Dark, edgy adults! They wanted a dark, edgy product with a dark edgy aesthetic!

Yeah, that was bullshit. It turns out that that age of gaming was actually one about noble heroes and traditional, if paint-by-numbers, narratives. Big damn shoothero. So why the grimdark narrative? Why brown and bloomgloom? Some sort of artistic subversion where noble heroes looked like… dirt? No, nothing so high-minded. Graphics were improving. Games were moving past origami paper blob creatures. The new tech was bloom/brown. The material conditions – improved graphics cards – required the backfilling of some bullshit ideological reason for why everyone was brown now, and why you should care. But it was all bullshit! It turns out that games were going to get way, way darker in tone and story content. Spec Ops The Line pointed out real conflicts aren’t sunshine rainbows where big damn heroes kill bad guys in comic numbers to protect FreedomLiberty. You’re possibly a monster! The games industry answered that self-awareness with a Nordic Gamer Yes. But the brownbloom went away! Games became about evil people, very very evil people, who loved murder and pillaging innocents while snarkily quipping. In tone, very dark. But the graphics turned bright and cheery. Darker stories, but in Amazing Technicolor. Not ideology, but improving technology.

Now the current gen of graphics cards, first developed to mine bitcoin, can do realistic water and mirror lighting. So there are mirrors and water everywhere. They’re going to come up with some kind of narrative, a sell-story, to push these graphics cards. But it’s all bullshit! I actually like this aesthetic shift, but it’s technology-driven. Game developers put in the latest graphics tech to flex and sell graphics cards. That’s all. It’s not an artistic decision. Brown realism was just to sell graphics. It existed to *manufacture* hype.

And so what is ideology? Ideology is the manufacturing of consent for changed material changes. They craft narratives for the same sorts of purposes as the games companies want to sell graphics cards – to sell a regime more configured for the material conditions of the era. Do maggot sausages save the Earth? Short answer, no. Long answer, no. Why farm crickets when they have a feed conversion ratio as good as chickens, and a worse taste? For the narrative. For the humiliation. For the story. But just to sell some bullshit, mostly. NatSoc racial war, USSR communism and social justice, American freedom and justice – all of these were selling the same *material* changes by creating a packaging for managerial-monopoly capitalism. The US is the last one standing, but the cracks are showing in this model. Industry is too big and complex to efficiently centrally plan now. The regime has to collapse into, revolution, or reform into a regime more well-suited to time. They’ll have a story for that. I have a story for that – monarcho-communism. But it’s just a story! What you get? What you will get is a regime well-shaped and well-designed for the coming age of production, an age focused on high-tech manufacturing, automated industry, and the information economy. China’s already there, arguably. The question is if America survives the transition. And what this age of production will evolve into! Perhaps something liberating! Perhaps something horrifying. Perhaps a monster beyond even Zero HP Lovecraft’s imagination.

Stalin didn’t know he was building the bureaucratic Soviet economy. Great Men are still swept by history. In gaming, as in politics, I pray that the future will bring a renewed age of heroes. Sure, it’s corny. But corny doesn’t mean bad. Ironic evil, the watchword of the late Millennial era, is bad. It feels bad. It does bad.

Snark is the sadism of neoliberalism asserting itself.


Compare the behavior of the wretched “Left” to that of Lenin. In the Third Duma, the so-called Black Reactionary Duma, 34 peasants of 68 were right MPs, another 15 liberals. Did Lenin conclude the peasants were hopeless? Castigate them? No! He went to war against the mystifiers! He attacked the Mensheviks, the Liquidators, the compromisers, and all those who would blame the *peasant* as regressive. He knew that the peasant’s faith in the Tsar could only be dispelled by destroying the myths of liberalism, and this had to be done through the PARTY. He purged the Party of the weak and built the strong. He spread agitprop. And most of all, he set out to prove to the peasant, through experience, that the Tsar’s cronies were bloodsuckers, a cabal of Satanic pedophiles who mercilessly exploited the poor workers – body and soul!

Of course, Lenin was vindicated – in truth, despite Menshevik lies, the deplorable peasants were in fact the *closest* to Red radicalism, not the *farthest*, and certainly not the bulwark of reaction. They desired the leadership of a true Tsar – and Lenin brought it. The Mandate of Heaven has been lost. The American CHUD awaits the coming of a true Tsar and a true peerage. Who will take up this heavy burden? Any seizure of power by the proletariat is necessarily premature – power is what conditions its wielder to power. The socdem is one who says “Riper, riper” to the fruit on the vine until it rots off, then smugly says that this fleshy carcass proved the prudence of their caution. The proletariat will never live up to the ideological purity tests of so-called red intellectuals because the proletariat does not exist as the theorizing class. The proletariat works – and the essence of working without burden is to work without burden, not to talk about it.

Can the workers protest without “tangible results”, win victories they do not profit from? Yes. But they have action and spirit. Don’t blame the mass for not knowing theory. It is the job of the party to provide the theory and the plan. It’s easy to be a lecturing intellectual. In the aftermath of 1905, the peasants were majority “right-wing”. Lenin had to show them that there were Black Hundreds police infiltrators among them encouraging them to Fedpost and misstep. Because these right-wing peasants? They were – and had been – revolutionary material. In the meantime, what is the task of the class conscious advanced worker? To develop and expand the reach of the secret, illegal press. To ensure the second uprising succeeds where the first one failed (and the first is always doomed), there must be secret, secure comms. Don’t worry about numbers.

Be a lion, fight like a lion. The SocDems, the liberals, the police will have the numbers. And still, with only a handful, you can make them quake, if you have the strength of God and an iron will. 50 of you must become strong enough to be a contender against the whole machine!

Be the light in the darkness.

Do not ask for a savior. Be able to save others.


Picture, if you will, an awakened proletarian, full of fire and brimstone. His passions are inflamed against tyrants, his gut burns with righteous justice. With hammer and sickle in hand, he strikes out against against the regime and its machine. Miraculously, the regime falls. It is joy and light. Everything can change. Now, the peasants can be free. The lion can lie down with the lamb. At last, oppression is ended.

Our proletarian hero soon finds that a bigger barrier to the reading of theory was apathy, not force. He was always a bookish sort, and assumed others were the same, and only lack of opportunity stopped them. What a shock to find that they preferred their crude amusements.

Try as he might, he could not make them read. Or listen to opera. Or appreciate the fine arts. There are many fine places left abandoned, with much beauty. What is a palace, after all, but a house for government? And we, the Party, are now the government. Should it not be our house? Our House of Government? Our luscious spas and grand dachas? After all… why shouldn’t I? And he deserves it, after all. His duties are vast. His responsibilities lay heavy. It is the People’s Army, but he must lead it. It is his charge as a Party man, one of the shepherds of the proletarian mass (is he no longer a proletarian himself?) Rest befits a warrior. And one day, on leave, he meets a woman who is not of the rough hewn sort, whose eyes glimmer with intelligence, who speaks easily of art and music and the high sciences. He embraces her – but she pulls back: “I am a former person.”

He whispers to himself: “I will change that.”

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E02ibEZVIAY1-gW.png

The wars come to an end. He is old now. And when he washes his face and looks at himself in the mirror, he sees a familiar face, scarred by battle, eyes full of callous pride – the face of a Tsarist officer. For what have the years done? They have taken this callow youth and made him a champion of culture, a student of the most progressive sciences, a defender of the commoner, and a loyal servant of his lord.

The concept of aristocracy is anti-fragile because it arises organically. So long as elites conceive of themselves as elites, as a thing separate and above, and so long as they value certain virtues, then the creation of this class is natural, for that is what the class is, regardless of the words used to describe it. What does competition do? If competition arises along the traditional virtues, then it acts as a thresher, separating wheat from the chaff. The most brutal conditions harden and purge decadence. Anti-fragility benefits from conflict, it is not harmed. Hard times make strong men. After all…

Piast the King was Piast the Wheelwright.

So bring the storm and call the lightning. Let the forest burn out the deadwood. Our body politic is in need of some chemotherapy. The end is the beginning. The beginning is the end. History moves in cycles.

The Shape of the Sandwich, or Political Forms and their Functions, Biostalinism Pt. III

Dearest Friends,

Why is the sandwich the way it is? Why is the bread there? Certainly, to hold the ingredients. And while the bread takes different shapes, and is sometimes not bread at all, the idea of sandwich possesses the idea of bread for a reason, and is not arbitrary. What is this? This is materialism.

Let’s talk about the form of the next regime. I’ve held off on doing this for a long time. Part of this is because it is not a relevant question. As I’ve stated in the importance of ripping spines, the most crucial power is taking power, not drafting ideal policy, because policies are shaped by the power discourse and the reality of existing cultural and political traditions anyways. Part of it is because the descriptive is always more interesting and correct than the prescriptive. It is far easier to identify the problem than it is to solve the problem. It’s easy to see something is wrong, and even the simplest of citizens in our great empire now sees there is something rotten in this Denmark. But there are a variety of answers, and scratch long enough – all of them are stupid.

But part of it? Part of it is simply that this is a largely useless thing to do. I will explain.

First, without further ado, what is the shape of the regime I have envisioned? It is simple. I intend to complete the system of the NEP. What is the basic unit of society? It is clear that all communities must do two basic functions. First, to provide for their members. Secondly, to structure their lives and provide social bonds and continuity. Here we have the dual nature of production, and the social relations it engenders – around production, a community of producers is formed. And what we have, then, is a village. The factory is not merely a factory, but a township. The company town is not an aberration, but a reflection of that ancient truth that villages spring up and specialize in tasks. The company town was an echo of that, but itself was overcome by the steady expansion of production towards monopoly-social production. Where you have a factory owned by its workers, collectively, you have a village which is run by its members – and the Comrade-Director is merely a local noble lord – in truth, a Comrade-Baron. But when your lord is local, you can wring his neck. Strikes, protests, and general grumbling is always more effective when your master is next door and only has your local community as their power base. It is a return to the stationary bandit. The Soviet and its expert is merely the village and its lord.

Of course, many have noted that village life and laboring in a well-defined community is less alienating. The trick of it is that village life was *obsoleted* by the material conditions and the social relations of a new form of production. And that’s the snag which often catches budding reactionaries. The first layer of reaction is merely aesthetic – a desire to return to a prior time without grasping the real and material differences. The tradwife who is a whore for you and gives you anal and wears IG model makeup in the woods. RETVRN to TOGA without surrendering your iPhone. The second layer of reaction grasps the form had a function, and that the value of that Chesterton’s fence was lost, and having seen that, tries to put the fence back up. But the fence failed in the first place for a *reason*, a material cause, something which made its timber no longer so sturdy. To walk the left hand path of reaction is to recognize that the progress in history has made the old fence too weak to hold, but also to see the old function can be preserved by crafting a new form which will preserve the old idea. Old wine in new bottles.

The village is dead. Long live the village.

What has destroyed the village? Simply that the village is not compatible with monopoly-social production and the specialization of labor not only on the individual level, but on the industrial firm level. No longer the butcher, the baker, and the brickmaker, but MeatCo, Bakr, and Amazon Prime Presents: House. Why can’t we RETVRN? Because there was a reason why monopoly came about. Monopoly is not just a blight, a wart, on the face of history. Monopoly is necessary because of irreducible complexity, and thus represents a genuine advancement in the productive forces. What is irreducible complexity? It is when a product is so complex that any of the highly specialized constituent parts cannot form an independently viable product. The consumer is only one kind of consumer, the producer therefore faces a monopsony – even if one were to break up the monopoly, all the individual firms face monopsony conditions, thus operate as a de facto monopoly, guided by an invisible hand of market necessity. This is what Yang means when he says monopoly can’t be broken up – the Facebook website cannot be split into smaller Facebooks, even if you can spin out things like IG. It’s irreducibly complex. You *can* attack this by democratizing protocols, but it doesn’t solve the inherent problem of irreducible complexity where it remains – it is trying to kill the category by plugging a single hole. You need a general solution to the problem of monopoly.

Here we have the dialectic: the village production system against the result of capitalism advancing until it abolished itself into monopoly-social production (“late Capitalism”). The thesis, the antithesis. The synthesis! The de-alienation of labor and community while preserving the fruits of monopoly-social production and advanced planning of labor. What separates the Soviet from the Village? Both have a council, yes. The difference is that the Soviet, the council of workers, will be refounded around the productive element. By doing so, these productive units can voluntarily self-combine into larger productive combinations, while keeping the elements of worker control: corpo-duchies. What you get is not bourgeois democracy, but industrial democracy. Insofar as there are disputes to be mediated by different opt-in combinations or rules which must be maintained universally, those can be resolved by a central state which maintains, as Lenin wrote, a class of industrial judges, led by a powerful central committee – the monarchy, which protects the interests of the plebians against the powerful aristocratic heads of the various enterprises and even larger industrial combinations.

This may be sounding familiar – and you are right.

What is Gadaffi’s Arab Socialism and its partitioning of society into smaller, autonomous, self-governing units but this? They call it tribalism, but tribes reflect an ancient reality that can’t be ignored.

What is Curtis Yarvin’s latest foray of villages and foundations but this? The only difference is the governing entity he has is cultural, a foundation, while I propose an economic structuring of the villages. Perhaps a distinction without a difference! A good materialist believes culture is downstream of material conditions, and material conditions are downstream of culture.

What is Anarcho-Capitalism and its private security corporations but this? What difference exists between the Megacorp and the Corpo-Duchy? Merely ownership.

What is White Nationalism but this? The communities defined a different way, but fundamentally, the return to free association and the creation of local communities and collectives over the atomized individuals of modernity.

In short – White Nationalism IS Communism IS Anarcho-Capitalism IS Salus Populi IS TradCath Benedictism IS Reaction IS Revolution IS

A revolt against the modern world.

And why? What is the radical?

The radical is a person haunted by specters of futures past and futures present.

It’s merely convergent evolution. What you’re seeing is the common perception of a future present. If Woke Capital, the force of atomizing monopoly-social production, is the problem, then the solution necessarily must be AGAINST atomization, and a RETURN to Dunbar communities. The rest? Ideology, pure ideology. Imperial aesthetics! Ideology is an aesthetic, because the contents of ideology are governed by material conditions, by what the ideology is called into being to fight. All antitheses to a given thesis must have shared characteristics which relate to the negation and opposition of the original thesis.

So now, dear reader, you understand the meaningless of prescription. Because the way an ideology forms, is shaped, and runs downstream is governed by the material conditions of the age. This is a blessing. If I am wrong, then, so long as my successors do not impose my beliefs in a totalitarian manner, reality will correct them. The United States, Nazi Germany, and the USSR had very different ideologies. All thought they were building different futures. But the conditions of reality, the conditions of monopoly-social production, obliged them all to become managerial-planned economies. All these ideologies, these visions of the future, are shaped by a shared vision of what the future must be, but if the future is different? Then they will be different.

I am watching the night die. I am watching the day be born.

I am seeing the rot of ancient institutions. A place, of which I am legacy, but not alumnus – that itself, indicative of something – falling to ruins, shaking itself apart. And despite it all, I am saddened to see it passing. What am I, unworthy barbarian, to be the last to receive an education as old as this country, one that made, groomed, defined the American ruling class? It is one thing to wear a mask which a thousand generations before have worn. It is another to see the snapping of a chain forever. And though one might take a spark from a dying flame, the new flame which grows where it is planted will never be the same one. But I am no passivist. I was born and bred a prince, and this? This is duty. This is my birthright, which is really the same thing. If I fail here, then so what? History shall produce another. And another. And another. So long as the contradictions of the present hold, then their intensifications will result in more and more free energy for the taking, until even a mere child can knock down the whole rotten edifice. The Green New Deal and the Great Reset are not a change, but merely the maximum extent of the logic of managerial-planning, the whole world under the thumb of a handful of apparatchiks, which does not resolve the Information Problem, but only makes it more dire.

One way or another, history comes, not softly through a back door, but magnificently, astride a white charger, as a conquering general.

For better or for worse?

גַּם זֶה יַעֲבֹר.

Your humble scrivener,
Monsieur le Baron

Translatio Imperii, or the Conservation of a Ruling Class, Biostalinism Pt. II

Dearest Friends,

The statues weep salt as they topple. The barbarians are at the gates, but they’re inside the walls. The rivers run raw and jet black, the sky is burning bright and red, and the sparks dance minuet. Bombast and burst and crackle. The rockets stream white and black striped across the heavens. It is the end. It is the beginning. At the end of the game, the toys go back into the box. The pilgrims say a prayer for Absalom and prepare to depart. The beams shudder and crack under a weight they cannot bear. The stone is fracturing, dust spurts from open wounds. It is heaving, it is coughing bloody, faces are coated with limestone ash. A golden bull is melting.

Into the night goes a single spark, a torch passed to a distant and unknown future, given out of a single and solitary hope, the hope of man sitting alone in the wee hours of the night since time immemorial. The hope of not being forgotten. The hope of not being alone. The phoenix rising from a man who is sick but healthy.

The year is 1917. The year is 1956. Here is what the power elite did. The system of Capitalism 1.0, like all systems, had within itself the seeds of its own destruction, a set of internal contradictions that would destroy it and lead to the construction of a new system. The operation of unrestricted markets must produce a competitor which is more able than the others and which therefore comes to dominate the others, creating a monopoly. In this manner, competitive capitalism passes into monopoly capitalism. A monopoly no longer produces blindly for a market, but attempts to predict the entire social demand of a product. To this end, it must gather information and manage its response.

The ruling elite that was constructed as a response to this new form of capitalism was an amalgamation of different power bases. You had the powers of the military, the powers of corporations, and the powers of the old rich. These powers were bound, horizontally, through shared cultural connections and institutions, such as schools, universities, and social events. By this, they are bound into a single managerial elite for the whole empire with a shared class consciousness wrapped up in maintaining it. Above the managerial elite is an upper class of “rich kids” corresponding to these, the “smart kids”.

The “rich kid” strata, the upper class, is also a horizontal, bound by similar means. And they control their own operations of “smart kids”, which they move and deploy throughout the machine to contest various points of control and sources of power. The upper class strata is so small and concentrated that one node reaches to more or less every other node, allowing them to personally connect to all power within the empire. Each of these upper class families constitutes an organization similar in structure to a crime family. While younger families might be run by the house head, more commonly they are run by a chancellor serving the family’s interests. The organization is hub-and-spoke, with every upper class person as a hub connecting to the other hubs. Resources and capabilities flow up from their controlled verticals while protection and access flow downwards.

The endless subdivision of shares and ownership allows for increasingly small stakes to control corporations, because the wider pool of mass ownership is unable to meaningfully organize itself to contest anything, and the smaller the divisions, the more a single motivated stake can control a corporation’s formal sources of ownership authority.

This is one vertical. The other vertical is the NGO-political machine, discussed in Maw of the Machine. Upper middle class kids run each of these verticals for the benefit of their hub. In this manner, you have a variety of internal factions competing over hard power. Rather than weakening the system, this strengthens it, as iron sharpens iron, as power nodes become captured by the most ruthless operators. An operator can be deployed to capture a NGO through seizure of the board through large donations followed by a nomination of a director, or through lawfare. In the case of a corporation, loyal elements can be pushed upwards through the chain of command, or they can be installed by buying a directorship and then appointing a loyalist.

The largest of the hubs is itself an agglomeration of hubs as well as the decentralized consciousness of the government-mind. The larger the entity, the more fragile it is. Monopolies, being the largest possible sectoral entity, are extremely fragile. At the same time, the logic of competition means that monopoly sooner or later develops – if not everywhere, then at least in one sector. This is enough to bring about the next stage of capitalist development. The monopoly is powerful but fragile, and it wants to survive. And a monopoly is incentivized to form, sooner or later, because free competition is anathema to megafortunes, therefore a megafortune reward awaits the one who can first make and preserve a monopoly. The best way to survive is to transfer its exposures and its fragility to an outside entity – the state. In this manner, a monopoly comes to meld itself with the state apparatus in order to guarantee its own survival. The banks and fund-offices which control the monopolies through their ownership shares come to develop a close and tight relationship with the state’s central bank. The state, in order to safeguard the monopoly, must grow larger. Having grown larger, it becomes more profitable for each newly formed monopoly to exert its power to capture the powerful state and use that to make profits.

In this manner, the economy comes to be centrally planned by a managerial-bureaucrats running monopolies producing for all of social demand. This system is inefficient and is dissolving under the weight of its own failings. The US watched the USSR collapse and took it for a failing of Communism vs Capitalism, when it failed to realize its own economy was taking the same managerial-bureaucratic shape and is now facing the USSR’s same issues.

The keystone of the managerial-bureaucratic planned economy is information. This is why the masters are so-called technocrats and engineers have a special role in our current Second Technocracy. The more information, and the more this information can be parsed, the less wastefully the great planned machine can run. But the planners being distant from production, the knowledge problem must always rear its ugly head, and the information can only be a narrowing of the efficiency gap, not an abolition of it. The monopolies are inefficient but necessary because the long complex chains of late capitalist products cannot be reduced to smaller production combinations, so specialized is every node.

The finance capital-central bank machine has the mechanisms of direct control, through the aforementioned share pathway. But it also has an indirect means of discipline. The C-M-C cycle is dependent on the ability to convert capital back into money back into capital. In the modern economy, this is done by lending. Large corporate loans bear debt covenants which restrict and mandate a certain course of actions, set of behaviors, and key metrics. In this way, finance capital doesn’t even need to directly own a company to control it. The economy runs on debt to convert capital back into money, and debt is controlled by the banks, and the banks need the guarantee of the central bank as a backstop.

The Green New Deal and Great Reset are intensification of this trend, by further integrating the global economy into a more cohesive unit and by bringing production planning to an even more centralized cabal of bureaucrats, not realizing the inherent fragility of this system must only exponentially increase the more integrated and centralized – larger – it becomes. To cope with the even larger efficiency losses, labor must be stripped of even more amenities, reduced to pod-living, bug-eating inputs to the capital machine.

It is not a matter of decadent elites or wickedness. The material conditions of monopoly capitalism give rise to this power structure. Indeed, the material conditions of an era give rise to the power structures of that age. The Military Revolution creates absolutism by making it impossible for fortifications to withstand a strong central power, but also forcing that strong central power to be strong because a mass gunpowder army could not be deployed by a weak state. The castle-logic is undone by gun-conscript logic. The French Revolution was a fundamental incompatibility between the forms of the Ancien Regime and the material realities of the forming industrial-capital age. And when I say forms, I do mean forms. It is a classic middle class error to mistake the forms for the essence. That is why they believe the French Revolution was the overthrow of the aristocratic families rather their ultimate strengthening. The aristocratic families became richer after the Revolution – the Revolution brings about a new social order in which their power can be operated in a manner more aligned to the material realities of the day. The essence of the class is the continued rule of these families, not the aesthetics of the Ancien Regime, not its forms.

This is also why certain strains of NRx are fundamentally revolutionary, not reactionary. The Kshatriya, as a new self-appointed nobility, are really expropriating the descendants of the Ancien Regime, not restoring them. An analysis which focuses on the battles of forms in the superstructure misses the real families (which would like to go un-expropriated), the real bonds of loyalty and mutual affinity within these circles, and the material interests they pursue. It is fundamentally the same as the liberal notion of families of choice, people bonded by the same taste in Marveloid mass culture – aesthetic bonds are superficial, and wrapping one’s self up in the clothing of the Ancien Regime will only attract the wrath of its inheritors.

There is no going back to the old forms, and that is a place where classical reaction fails. The classic reactionary fetishizes the old forms, such as the ermine cloaks and court balls and swords belted to waists. But that order was born out of older material conditions, and any attempt to resurrect it will find it destroyed by the still extant modern material conditions. You can’t restore classical feudalism by just building new castles, because gunpowder will demolish them again. The free bourgeois has no answer to monopoly-capitalism and state capture by finance capital.

That is why Trotsky rightly said the Russian Revolution was betrayed. Because the essence of “Communist Revolution” was the abolishment of class society, but the USSR became a vehicle to adapt elite rule to the new material realities of monopoly capitalist production, which allows the old elite families to preserve their rule rather than abolishing it. Lenin was not a class traitor but ultimately his class’s greatest champion.

This is the secret of Burnham’s Machiavellians. This is the secret of Lenin in the dusty volumes of collected works. This is the realization of the Duke of Wellington in his old age. Translatio Imperii. It’s not just a dusty old phrase, nor is it merely a matter of piddling legitimacy. It is the means by which old wine can take new bottles. It is the process by which Cthulhu’s long swim can be yoked to the engine of power. It is the left-hand path of reaction.

Through leftism, ensure you and yours rule for ten thousand years. The House always wins.

Can there be anything more fundamentally *conservative* than that?

The pilgrims filed out of a forgotten and untended side gate, marching in a thin, narrow line, cloaks clenched tight to their bodies. And on their tongues and nestled behind their lips was the unspoken promise of Ethiopia distant. The hills were small, the city loomed large behind. Soon enough, the hills were large and the city was shrinking. First it was a bonfire, burning bright. Then merely a flame. Then only a spark, a single ember, reaching out to the spark fleeing it, one spark listlessly, longingly trying to recover a lost child, and then it was gone. Their number was 3 and 14, the flat circle, and to Jobela they gave gold and rubies and emeralds until he was laden thick, and he went back towards the city armed with a twenty-four inch gauge. Under the canopy of an acacia, they rested, and there they broke bread and salt. They slit the throat of a goat and let the blood bleed gently into the earth. Their names were Jobela and Jobelum and they set out on their bizarre adventure.

They went south, following the Wormwood Star.

Does the world revolve around the pendulum?

Running from the skifree yeti,
Monsieur le Baron