Statist Realism: an Anarchist Analysis of Neoreaction — Part Four
In Which Mencius Moldbug has a Tenuous Grasp of Medieval History
In part one, I mostly mocked Moldbug’s obvious biases and incredible narcissism:
In part two, I mocked his horrible research, as well as his internal contradictions:
In part three, I explained how he actually made some really incisive points in his criticisms of liberal democracy:
This is part four, though.
And Moldbug will not be making more good points this time around. Instead, I will be covering how little Moldbug actually understands of the world —he is a man of high theory, and he never seems to check reality to see if he has selected the right high theory to base his world-view upon.
Patchwork realms can be expected to enforce a fair and consistent code of laws not for moral or theological reasons, not because they are compelled to do so by a superior sovereign or some other force real or imaginary, but for the same economic reasons that compel them to provide excellent customer service in general. Real estate on which the rule of law prevails is much, much more valuable than real estate on which it doesn’t, and the value of a realm is the value of its real estate.
I cannot state this enough: moving is hard, moving is expensive, moving is annoying, and by moving you give up a bunch of in-person relationships that took you years or even decades to build. People do not generally move countries because they do not like the government that they are faced with, unless they are very rich, very weird, and/or very desperate.
There are enough costs associate with moving that they can easily outweigh whatever benefits that moving might provide — and, of course, keep in mind the risks associated with it. We should expect most customers of a given Realm to be more-or-less locked-in.
What is your experience of massive companies that are de facto monopolies? Is it “excellent customer service”? I don’t think so.
Moldbug accidentally makes a point about why liberal democracy even works in the first place:
Suppose a realm unilaterally abrogates this right of emigration? It has just converted its residents into what are, in a sense, slaves… If it’s any good with cinderblocks, barbed-wire and minefields, there is no escape…
This is terrible, of course. But again, the mechanism we rely on to prevent it is no implausible deus ex machina, no Indian rope-trick from the age of Voltaire, but the sound engineering principle of the profit motive. A realm that pulls this kind of crap cannot be trusted by anyone ever again. It is not even safe to visit. Tourism disappears. The potential real-estate bid from immigrants disappears. And, while your residents are indeed stuck, they are also remarkably sullen and display no great interest in slaving for you. Which is a more valuable patch of real estate, today: South Korea, or North Korea? Yet before the war, the North was more industrialized and the South was more rural. Such are the profits of converting an entire country into a giant Gulag.
To what degree is it really true that actually existing states, of any sort, don’t treat us as absolute slaves because of some sort of abstract set of principles? Is that really all that plausible? Or, is it simply the case that states are controlled by the same people who control businesses, and the people who control businesses would like their workers to be as productive as possible? This would explain why the ideology of bourgeoise dominance is also the ideology of human rights.
But, poor Moldbug, then this same motive would apply just as much to the world as it is as it would to the world as Moldbug is pitching in Patchwork: a Positive Vision.
Moldbug founds a lot of his political views on his ideas of what medieval history was like. The issue with this is that Moldbug does not actually understand what medieval history was like:
One of the most common errors in understanding the premodern era is the confusion of monarchy with tyranny. Nothing like Stalinism, for example, is recorded in the history of the European aristocratic era.
Stalin was, and I cannot emphasize this enough, intensely continuous with past Russian rulers. Most of his worst excesses — readdicting the Russian workers to state-controlled Vodka, massively expanding the surveillance and security state — were also things that every monarchical ruler of Russia had done.
Why? Because Stalin had to murder to stay in power.
Everyone has to murder to stay in power, dipshit. That’s what a state is — a centralized monopoly on legitimate violence within a geographic area.
Even to take his less literal meaning — something like ‘Stalin had no real legitimacy, he had only violence to keep him in power’ — you think that Stalin wasn’t genuinely beloved by many?
You think that the Soviet Union wasn’t filled with true believers? I assure you that it very much was — and to show you that I am unbiased in this, I will assure you that Nazi Germany was equally full of true believers.
Nearly every regime is. Need I remind you that even the Haitian Revolution began with a slave revolt demanding not freedom, but merely Sundays free of labor and an end to whippings? Even the most brutal of states have their own justifying ideologies, and the majority of their populations believe them, no matter how subjugated.
Anyone, certainly any of the Old Bolsheviks, could have taken his place. The killing machine took on a life of its own. The tyrant, the mafia boss, stands at the apex of a pyramid of power, each block in which is a person who hopes to someday kill the boss and take his job.
I dunno about “the tyrant”, but I can guarantee you that mafia members exhibited supreme loyalty to each other. It is what made them so effective.
In a tyranny, murder and madness become part of the fabric of the State.
Murder and madness are always the fabric of the state. Don’t be so fucking dramatic.
In a monarchy, however, the succession is clear, and if by some accident of law and fate there are multiple candidates, they are at least each others’ relatives. This rules out neither murder nor madness, but they are the exception and not the rule.
Do you know how often succession wars happened? Here, let me show you. I’m going to restrict the list to only Europe, because I think that it will have the biggest impact for my audience, but there is a whole lot more:
And finally:
Obviously, a monarchy is not a civil-war-proof form of legitimizing rule.
For all his criticisms of Stalinism, it is worth noting that a Marxist-Leninist state has never fallen to a succession war — the closest thing to that was the coup that ended the Soviet Union’s hopes of reforming itself. Even that, though, resulted in the so-called “Evil Empire” dissolving itself in an orderly fashion, without firing a single shot.
To push things even further, liberal democracy — so hated by both Moldbug and me — is much better at ensuring peaceful transfers of power than monarchy has ever been. Sure, it is not perfect at this — it tends to get couped by an overly-strong executive or a dissatisfied military — but as long as the ‘massive institutional network’ that I discussed in Part Three of this series is well-established (something that tends to happen automatically over time — old democracies do not tend to face civil wars, though young ones are much more prone to them) then the illusions of liberalism and democracy tend to continue chugging along with no more violence than any state requires to maintain its rule.
This is because democracy — whether Soviet or liberal — does a good job of showing approximately how much support a potential leader has, as well as giving the job to whoever has the most support, which both puts any potential challengers at a disadvantage and shows them how little support they have. Do note that I am in no way conflating “support” with some sort of vague democratic mandate — whoever stuffs the ballots or convinces people to vote a certain way, whoever’s endorsement ensures votes, the educational influence of the massive institutional network — these are sometimes (perhaps often) the supporters that actually matter; even if one does not believe this, and really believes that liberal democracy represents “the will of the people”, then the conclusion remains the same — though, of course, no such thing as “the will of the people” exists:
How this would all play into the politics of a joint-stock company is ultimately unclear — would customers really just leave if they didn’t like their “service”? Perhaps. As I suggested above, perhaps not. I certainly think that moving is easier than rising up in general revolt, though. Still, I would actually say that about our world as it currently is, and yet… there are revolutionaries.
We’re nearly at the end of chapter one (of four!) of this. I’ll be honest, it is becoming something of a slog — but people seem to be enjoying this (they are certainly reading it!) and so I feel somewhat obligated to finish it. Plus, it is fun to dunk on Moldbug, and I do feel that I am learning a certain amount simply from writing out in clear terms what my opposition to his ideas is.
Continued here:
