Berlin, 2017-05-15
With the Atlantic shedding a light on "alt-right" thinking influencing Bannon and Trump, I notice a parallel in the appeal of the Neoreactionaries and Karl Marx. Curtis Yarvin's website opens up with quite accurate analysis:
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Modern history is an epic tale of social decay under chronically bad government, masked by increasing technological wealth. The dominant liberal-progressive ideology is badly out of touch with reality, and actively destructive to civilization. Our society's elite factions are coordinated enough to distort public knowledge of society to neutralize threats to their power, but not enough to rule efficiently and responsibly. Traditional and organic modes of sociopolitical organization could remedy our problems, but we are held back by this weaponized self-conception and lack of competent authority. […] American globalist liberalism is an unsustainable mess. Everyone knows it, but no one will admit it until someone builds a concrete superior alternative. | ” |
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Karl Marx was just as razor sharp spot-on in the analysis of the problems of capitalism and bourgoise leadership. His ideas on how to organize a better world of Communism however were blatantly incompetent on the sociological side, leading to forms of regime that, after failing to realize the vision, ended up being a worse form of government than capitalist democracy.
Similarly do the following paragraphs from Curtis "Mencius Moldbug" Yarvin's draw shortsighted conclusions out of the situation:
| “ | The core of our problem is that there is no one with the secure authority to fix things. The core of our solution is to find a man, and put him in charge, with a real chain of command, and a clear ownership structure. | ” |
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In other words this person suggests we should go back to authoritarian rule because nothing else works. As if authoritarian rule actually works. Monarchies have seen their good moments, but none of the tyrannies ever did. The world under the rule of Ancient Rome wasn't a better place. Roman leaders just didn't have the technology to hurt humanity as hard as today's leaders can.
Napoleon, Alexander, Gengis Khan. Whichever great leader you may come up with — I am glad they didn't have today's weaponry or we wouldn't be as happily alive today as we are privileged to be. Humanity has been having the ability to blow up the planet for less than a century, and it is surprising it hasn't done so, yet. So far humanity has always done all the wrong it was enabled to. Not being at the mercy of some merciless autocrats may be a reason why nuclear apocalypse hasn't happened yet.
It is a typical expression that follows lack of vision — whenever you're not aware of better options, but you still have the urge to have an opinion, to go ahead and decide for an entire species and promote the half-baked first thing that came to your mind as something all of humanity should abide to.
Just like large portions of mankind made the mistake of trying to put Karl Marx' ideas into practice, just because his analysis had been so convincing, it is probably not a good plan to fall for neoreactionary logic, either. Same can actually be said about neo-liberalism or anarchism — all of these "isms" have the problem of having no reason-based foundation, and not taking sociology in consideration.
Corrupt governance is in the nature of mankind, authoritarian rule doesn't even solve that, as corruption thrives just fine — it merely becomes overt. We can transcend our limitations with better techniques of governance, just like the socio-philosophical practice of the Separation of Powers was able to implement the concept of Justice, by taking human behaviors fully into account — not idealizing some fictional best-intended populations that will magically behave purely in a common interest and cut out egocentricity. Egoism can neither be exterminated, nor can it be elevated to an ideology of wealth distribution. Social technologies need to be designed to deal with it.
There are indeed some serious challenges to take care of. If you're in need of some optimistic approaches on how to address these, what about:
Maybe a governance of collective reason taking human weaknesses into account can lead us out of the mess created since 1979 by the Trickle Down legitimization ideology of Egoism?
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