Unqualified Reservations About the Dark Enligthenment

Discussion

Reviews two books critical of democracy:

Dan Becker:

"This essay “builds upon Unqualified Reservations (UR) by Curtis Yarvin and Dark Enlightenment (DE) by Nick Land. Both documents can only be described as an all out assault on democracy. Many of the ideas in this essay come directly from UR and DE.

When people desire to live in community, the need for governance is a fact. Effective community necessitates a decision making structure to enable collective action on shared interests including law, justice, infrastructure and defense. Creating a governance power monopoly, however, gives birth to a dangerous monster. Preventing the sovereign structure from devouring society becomes a primary concern. To date, no governance systems have successfully caged or controlled the sovereign power beast.

Reactionaries such as Yarvin and Land propose a hard political reset to replace western democracy. They argue that a new decision structure is required to produce stable, responsible and effective governance. I agree concerning their assessment but differ with C. Yarvin on the proposed solution.”

(https://x20s.com/finding-joshua/)

Six Criticisms of Democracy

Dan Becker:

“Many approaches to managing a sovereign decision making structure have been tried (tribalism, monarchy, fascism, socialism, republic etc.). Examples of systems that have produced stable and effective decision making structures are rare.

Unqualified Reservations assesses the current American situation as follows. “A century and a half of democracy has wreaked unbelievable devastation onto a place and people once considered to be by far the most promising on Earth. The USG has turned America into a shattered wreck. As evidence, consider the industrially gutted midwest, ruined finances along with dirty, dangerous and unlivable cities where millions of feral savages run wild.”

A harsh but accurate assessment. Still, to a person indoctrinated in the glories of democracy for their entire life, the above statement feels like a punch in the face. If you never encountered this line of thinking before, reading UR and DE might be too hot a pill to swallow. There is nothing “gentle” about “A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations.” The short list of democratic criticisms below may be a more fitting starting point for exploring democratic delusions.

Democracy Does Not Distribute Power

Democracy purports to be a system to divide authority among citizens. It claims to dole out microscopic portions of power to all of its’ subjects. In fact, power is simply transferred to those who form, instruct and organize large bodies of voters. “Wire Pullers” commonly include organizations such as political parties, unions, industry organizations, media, education and academia. In a system like this, wire pullers hold the power. Modern republics unbundled the centralized power of monarchs, and then re-bundled power into the hands of organizations that direct large voting blocks.

Empowering voters to shape and guide national systems acts as the key selling point for democratic systems. If in reality these systems fail to deliver effective control of government to citizens, are they not a complete failure at their principal goal? Do you believe that voters are powerful or in charge? If not, call the system what it is but don’t call it democracy.

The Cathedral’s Bishops’

In reality, democracy turned the government over to an unaccountable group of bishops’ (The Cathedral’s expert professors’ and scientists’). For instance, foreign policy gets outsourced to the Council on Foreign Relations. Similar bodies of experts largely dictate energy, health, economic and monetary policy. “In what way is this an improvement over monarchy or autocracy?” (UR)

To be perfectly clear, special interest groups hire The Cathedrals’ experts to write the policies that advance their interests. Covid provided a perfect example where an interest group, big pharma, used money to dictate the “science”, mandate their product, censor any criticism and made billions doing it. Similar examples are easy to find.

The decision structure outlined in the constitution, doesn’t match the process just described. Actual power structures operate unmapped and in the shadows. In a democracy, most governance occurs outside of the designed governance structure. Yarvin proposes to correct this by explicitly mapping all power relationships. Pulling them out of the shadows would allow power to be held accountable.

The Minimum Principle

Most people strive to balance two simple imperatives: 1) minimize effort 2) maximize gain. The average person intuitively understands that their path to even modestly above average economic results are extremely limited. As a result, most people seek to use their vote to live at the expense of others. Democracy provides a path to the radical expansion of positive rights and bailouts of all kinds. For the reason described above, handout programs are popular with the public as well as business interests. These programs are expensive and once established, nearly impossible to reform. The one way nature of these incentive structures creates a self-reinforcing doom loop consuming the cultural balance sheet. By incentivizing chronic government activism on behalf of the average voter, numerous programs have been created with pathological consequences. “Long ago these malignant programs replaced the problems they targeted as the source of social pain.” (N Land DE)

“The general will of the people and businesses is to legislatively abolish reality” (ie. abolish student debt). (N Land DE) Therefore, no system purporting to allow the average voter the option to enhance their effort/gain relationship at the expense of society can be considered even remotely stable. “Democracy is essentially tragic because it provides the populace with a weapon to destroy itself, one that is always eagerly seized and used.” (Nick Land DE)

The above argument does not imply that there should be less care and concern for the bottom 2/3rds of society. Rather, the minimum principal suggests that the average person has little interest in and nothing to add to discussions concerning governance design or policy. Almost everyone would be a lot better off with a stable, responsible and effective governance decision structure. Equally valuing all people’s votes epitomizes unstable and ineffective governance.

Extremes in Time Preferences

Building a civilization represents a massive and far sighted project. Members of a developing society work collectively to build social and economic capital. Builders look towards the horizon of possibility and beyond in an effort to leave more for the future than they found during their own time. Accomplishing that goal means putting more into the social and economic “capital bank” than gets taken out.

Democracy on the other hand, shifts political time preferences to the point of “creating a convulsive feeding frenzy that consumes progress.” Where a king literally owns the majority of a nations capital and has some incentive to protect and improve it, democratic politicians do not own the nations capital stock but do own the temporary use of the governance structure while in office. This lack of skin in the game from a long-term perspective introduces perverse political incentives. Politicians are incentivized to plunder the economic capital under their control while in office. “Anything not plundered might fall into the hands of their political enemies at the next election. Therefore, anything not plundered is potentially wasted.”

Elections

To believe in the veracity of modern elections requires a special kind of faith. If after considering the multiple layers of opportunity for election tampering below, you remain convinced that elections are fair and honest, you may be a true zealot in the democratic faith.

Running for office is purposefully expensive. Even very wealthy candidates would have great difficulty financing a campaign for state or national office. Of course this means that all candidates must obtain support in the form of campaign contributions from corporate and establishment donors. Radicals and independent thinkers need not apply.

In the event an “off-message” early candidate manages to secure funding to begin campaigning, the establishment media will commence with the personal attacks and generally biased treatment. Add electronic voting machines and mail-in ballots for another layer of potential skulduggery. On top of that, consider the impact of out and out vote buying by politicians to secure their position. Politicians regularly use their control over public funds to impact the outcome of elections (subsidizing gasoline, student loans, tax cuts etc.).

Outside of the U.S. (and increasingly inside of it) NGO’s and intelligence operations heavily influence elections via color revolutions, regime change operations and outright assassination of non-compliant leaders. When less drastic measures for controlling a political system are sought, an IMF loan may be enough to squash any budding grassroots movement. With twenty percent off the top to the president, the establishment can be next to certain that future events will go their way. If you remain unconvinced by the seven layers of opportunity to impact the outcome of elections please consider one more idea. At the end of the day, he who counts decides. Each time a US election has come down to closely looking at how votes get counted, it ends up being a disaster for the notion that elections do anything other than provide great theatre and make media corporations a ton of money. For those of voting age during the 2000 U.S. election, do you remember the fury around “hanging chads?” Any legitimate process for incorporating the input of citizens into the political process would have none of the above obvious corruption.

Note – Elections are not discussed in UR or DE

Democracy is not supposed to benefit people

Democracy gets pitched as a program to help, empower and free people. It’s none of those things and closer to the opposite. Democracy persists because it provides the most effective means known for centralizing as much wealth and power as possible. The Cold War demonstrates this point perfectly. There was a competition between two systems, one in which political elites owned everything (U.S.S.R.) and one in which political elites owned only the government and important institutions (U.S.). The U.S. system won because it turns out that having the government own less results in more resources being sent to the core. Democracy kind of works like a reverse centrifuge.

Note – This section is not discussed in UR or DE

If any of the above arguments pierced a portion of the propaganda hardened armor surrounding the idea of democracy in your head, perhaps you are open to considering future scenarios on the substantially less rosy side. Here is one possible scenario for the America of the not to distant future.

Emerging American Anarchy

At one point in “Unqualified Reservations,” Yarvin tells the following story. “The upas-tree, as is well known, kills all animals which approach it. What’s less well-known is that it kills all the trees around it, as well. (It needs a clear space in which to hunt.) This un-neighborly result is the effect of a toxin which the upas-tree’s roots secrete. But the upas-tree itself is not immune to its own toxin. It is just more resistant than its neighbors. When they are dead, it itself is merely dying. But it must succumb all the same. For it was not evolution, but grim destiny, that designed the upas-tree. In case it’s not obvious, in the reactionary version of the 20th century, the upas-tree is America and its toxin is democracy. Thus we see the same result: American democracy is the last philosophy standing. Not because it is sweet, but just because it is more lethal to its neighbors than itself.”

Democracy equals expansion of the state, and uncontrolled state expansion is inherently unstable. “Every threshold of socio-political progress has racheted western civilization towards comprehensive ruin.” (N Land DE) Stated plainly, democracy is a “degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption.” (N Land DE) A reversal of the devolutionary trend “lies beyond the bounds of democratic possibility. Since winning elections is overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society’s informational organs (education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than the electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician, and the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such misfits from the gene pool.” (Nick Land DE) Said otherwise, no course corrections are in the offing. The implications of all this are that anarchy is now rapidly sweeping across western nations. While all of this should be quite obvious to the mildly observant citizen, many people remain ensnared in The Cathedral’s propaganda web due to short-term money printing bliss. When the money printing stops, and it will, the anarchy will be laid bare for all to see.

Land sums up the situation succinctly when he says “Democracy isn’t doomed, it is doom. Fleeing democracy approaches the ultimate imperative.” (N Land, DE)

The Antiversity

Towards the end of Unqualified Reservations Yarvin highlights a plan to replace USG with a new USG (NUSG). The first step in the plan describes a replacement of The Cathedral with what he calls “The Antiversity” which acts as the brain for NUSG.

“The Antiversity is an independent producer of veracity—a truth service. It rests automatic confidence in no other institution. Its goal is to uncover any truth available to it: both matters of fact and perspective. It needs to always be right and can never be wrong. Where multiple coherent perspectives of an issue exist, the Antiversity must provide all—each composed with the highest quality available.” (C. Yarvin UR) The existence of an uncorrupted institution of truth must be a prerequisite for any measurable improvement to governance. Absent a firmer grasp on truth, people will act in a bewildered fashion, unsure of where they have been or are going.

Covid provided a perfect example of propaganda driven hysteria and group think. In the months prior to Covid, institutions got together to practice and train on exactly what to do and say in a future Covid pandemic. They gamed out ways to ramp up fear and take control of the narrative. When respected scientists disagreed, they were roundly criticized and harassed. Eventually, almost everything the media and experts said about Covid turned out to be wrong, People who provided accurate information were branded as dangerous purveyors of misinformation and censored.

Perhaps the central element in the degeneration of western nations has been the corruption of The Cathedral. That academia and the media can be described as having an orthodoxy pinpoints their failure. The Cathedral must be replaced before human progress can resume.

Wrap-Up

“At best, when democracy works, it appears to be a way to tether yourself to a community that can’t agree on anything.” Dan Becker

Citizens of western democracies grow up in a propagandistic system designed to indoctrinate them concerning the supposed virtues of democracy. In America, children learn civics in school, recite pledges, stand for the national anthem and gaze at 4th of July fireworks. These activities, and many others, wrap the idea of democracy in a candy coating making it purposely hard to evaluate unemotionally. Even if democracy worked perfectly as advertised, the idea that a series of popularity contests determines the decision makers must be a non-starter. On its’ face this is a terrible idea. However, democracy does not work as advertised and “does not provide a stable, responsible or effective decision structure.” All of the fog created by democratic sermonizing about freeing people appears only to serve as cover for the ongoing robbery of the western world.

Democratic systems suffer from a complexity problem.

No systems engineer would ever conceive of such a fragmented decision making process. Systems that work in the world are simple. If you want to pursue any kind of project like building a building, would you choose to do it in an organization that selected the executive team via a popularity contest and spread them across a bizarre organization chart?

When systems become complex, we must ask why? Who benefits? We enquire because complexity breeds corruption. These systems are purposely complex because operating in that way provides a perfectly opaque path to laundering trillions out of the hands of producers and into the hands of political parasites. The benefits to the political class are clear, more power and money. Democracy might be analogized to the bank robbers van. The van doesn’t commit the crime but it delivers the robbers and facilitates escape. From the perspective of the citizenry, what is the payoff for ingesting the poison of elections and politics into the social discussion? The apparent result is hate, division and fractured communities. The role of politics as a topic for social debate appears similar to the function of gladiators in the Roman Colosseum. Contestants enter the ring in pitched battle for the entertainment and distraction of the crowd. However, in spite of the very real costs to the gladiators, these battles have no impact on the relevant world. Important discussions like war, economics and monetary policy are largely outside of politics and firmly controlled by The Cathedral.

Objectively, democratic systems do not deliver on even their core promises. If they fail to manifest their central promises, are these systems not fatally flawed? these systems are complex, opaque and chuck full of perverse short term incentives. “They have never worked, are not working now, and will never work in the future.” Realizing that they don’t work liberates society builders to explore new paths. Democracy represents a significantly statist approach to managing society. What I mean by statist is the almost implicit assumption that if anything is to be done, it must and can only be done by the government (save the poor, health insurance etc.). Perhaps this ill-fated assumption will prove to be one of the most cataclysmic assumptions of the 20th century.”

(https://x20s.com/finding-joshua/)

More information

• Chapter 1 of Unqualified Reservations: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/