Mar 21, 2020, 11:34 AM
Curtis Yarvin Live at the Based Deleuze Release Party in LA (Mencius Moldbug)
youtube.com
youtube.com/watch?v=RRQO3VbJsMw&
SPECTRUM: I’m 60 (Curt Doolittle). Curtis is in his 40’s. Justin is in his 30’s. The audience might be in their 20’s-30s.
JUSTIN:
1 – There is an demand for intellectual life, intellectual discourse. You have to make it yourself. Put it on. If you build it they will come.
2 – Power Hungry Institutionalized
CURTIS:
1 – Loosen’s up and gets comfortable about 35 minutes in. Then we see the ‘him’. Good.
2 – Makes the point that the american lesson of democracy failed by wilson’s acknowledgement of it. (I use the economics of the american experiment in expansion permitting the luxury of our incompetence).
3 – American revolution is the vietnam war in the 18th c where england is america. A civil conflict between two factions (whig/puritan against anglican). Created conflict in two segments of english society, in a cold war, but it was a hot war in america. The americans win the war. But because britain loses the will to fight. “Jefferson is a cringe”. Articles of Confederation… John Hanson the president of congress. It was so disastrous because of democracy (by adams). “We have to establish responsible aristocratic government.” Very much an aristocratic republic.
4 – Fear of the Other. We are the enlightened few. Historically this is not a ridiculous fear. Deep bitter loathing between upper and middle class. (Disagree: Status conflict between capital owners and producers and capital renters.)
5 – “If anything is going to work it will require an alliance of the three classes.” , “are we in the late roman republic or the late roman empire”. “the history of the republic is conflict between the classes”, (He doesn’t believe civil war is possible.) “With augustus this whole conflict goes away. One side wins the civil war. The side that wins is the military. They were unifiers. They claimed to restore the republic. But they were authoritarians. we’ve in practice created a monarchy. So augustus is more like FDR. A startup nation. Under augustus restarted because of caesar.’s use of the people (working men)’s violence”. “caesar captures cato’s headquarters. And finds a chest of letters from cato’s supporters (the old guard’s wealthy supporters). We are going to kill them (soros et all) and give it our friends (magas). (We don’t need to find the chest. it’s public information.) …. (I think more in Mao’s terms but the problem is the same.) (the spartan way is to find some hostile and burn down his house).
6 – “I don’t have any ideas or any big ideas … I disagree … the important thing is all negative: the absence of belief.” (I agree. He’s a practitioner of Critique which is his cultural background. I do solutions. That’s mine. But criticism is more fun. you don’t have to bet anything on it – just feel good about yourself. You have to risk to take solutions. That doesn’t mean that criticism fails to help us understand the problem that we DO need to solve. )
7 – Agree on The Machiavellians as the most important book of politics in the 20th. (“The italian school of political science”, Mosca. Elements of political science / theory of the ruling class” Read Burnham instead. most political systems have divergence between formal power (supposed to work) vs objective power (who is really in charge). The reality of power and the formal legal reality of power diverge. (Hence my work on preventing that by providing a via-negativa market via the court). When appearance is powerless and symbolic, then the reality is unaccountable – especially when it’s distributed and bureaucratic. (Curtis isn’t mentioning the via negativa of monarchy, but that’s trivial.)
8 – The Times and the Post are part of the government. “The Department of Information” and it’s entirely unaccountable. The New York Times is an absolute hereditary monarchy.” (true).
9 – “Formalism and Sovcorps are old ideas that I emphasize differently.”
This is what Curtis does that others don’t equal. He criticizes and explains with historical literary depth and excels at thought experiments to assist the audience. This is the value of an analyst and teacher. The fact that he doesn’t have solutions is not a failing. We get intelligent conversation that isn’t dumbed down or sentimental.
The problem is the world wants solutions sold by someone who can explain them like curtis.
We don’t have that person.
QUESTIONS:
Large number of small governments. Patchworks. A governance structure. the government owns territory and runs t like a business. A government is a corporation that runs a country. Corporations are monarchies. “Imagine gordon ramsay going through the state department’s fridge”. The answer is as generally as possible, you want accountable monarchies. Augustus saved rome. That’s the unanimous sentiment. Tiberius. Caligula. Claudius. Nero. (Bad) Henry VI etc. Steve Jobs, Apple, most like monarchy. Puritans were very experienced at forming the republic. President was an accountable ruler to the shareholders. The President in the government was inherited from the puritan private corporation structure. The industrial revolution was the corporate revolution. (CD: he’s confirming hoppe on monarchy). (CD: no via-negativa.) reality… the ceo is a monarch, completely in charge but completely accountable to the board. but if the board gets involved then something is wrong. if the shareholders get involved its worse. The board isn’t corrupted by power because it doesn’t have power. It’s an exception handler. ( CD: Board as a form of via negativa judiciary – exception handler. I have to work on that idea. )
MY THOUGHTS
1 – I think Minsky’s observation that programming is as novel a way of thinking as were logic and mathematics. And that there is a very clear reason why programmers trend male, right, and libertarian, because we are always disambiguating categorizing, and testing empirically rather than intuitionistically.
2 – Curtis is a “pill dispenser” because he uses Critique rather than analysis. At least he uses it toward beneficial ends. 😉
3 – Curtis: academic institutions evolved as low influence. (He doesn’t touch the economics of it postwar and why that became a problem.) (He’s strangely interested in the marxist period .) They are power hungry and that’s the problem.
4 – Same attitude for blue state ruling class – these are my peeps – but are you taking care of the people or just power?
5 -Main difference between us is that I consider humans ‘bot’s that require an operating system that fails gracefully downward and increases in precision upward, and that we need both negativa legal and positiva reward (commercial) markets – and that all of this is noise on top of group strategies. Politics sits on Traditional Law and the Metaphysics therein.