What looks thuggish from one perspective, feels inarticulately pissed off from another. Class lenses can be cognitively confining. Couldn’t it be that simple? (I realize that baroque conspiracy theory is more fun.)

– Nick Land

Is it as simple as that? Is the neoreactionary impulse nothing more than a new Baroque, inscribing the past within the cultural dynamics of our present slipstream, producing thought-worlds to confront the enigma of our future? Are these marginal renegades trying to achieve some form of aesthetic legibility so that their designs on the past can gain if not traction and historical legitimation then at least conspiratorial approval from the Right and silence from the Left? Is this new Baroque, with its historical and geographical, not to mention aesthetic eccentricity, challenging the past even as it implodes the future? Is it demarcating lines of flight within an arsenal of perspectives seeking nothing more than an opening, an ‘outside in’ that could infiltrate the hegemonic power centers of the Cathedral, thereby disinterring and unleashing the accelerating forces within late capitalism that would destroy it. At the crossroads of this renegade tribalism there are signs and wonders, an aesthetic logic no longer of mourning and melancholy, but of terror and hypermimetic luxuriousness, an erotic convulsion and counter-allegory built neither on pathos nor bathos, but bearing witness to the demise of postmodernity and to the very condition of a world that could not be assimilated by the project of the original Enlightenment. Instead the neoreactionaries offer a new Dark Enlightenment.

In many of the comments from a recent lampoon ‘You’ve got to be kidding? Neoreactionary Soup and The Fall of Man‘ a name kept cropping up in regards to this new dark enlightenment: Mencius Moldbug. Like many I wandered over to Wikipedia the supposed free encyclopedia of our cyberage and did a search. Nothing. Zit. Came up blank. Wondering why such an important personage within a marginal movement was left out of such a prestigious institution of technological empowerment (lol) I decided to look up the neologism ‘neoreactionary’. Of course, nothing. So I did a cursory search on reactionary, and low and behold we get the ideologically neutral entry here:

A reactionary is a person who holds political viewpoints that favor a return to a previous state (the status quo ante) in a society. The word can also be an adjective describing such viewpoints or policies. Reactionaries are considered to be one end of a political spectrum whose opposite pole is radicalism, though reactionary ideologies may be themselves radical.

So to be fair I took a peak at the ‘radicalism’ link to see how the opposite pole of reactionary politics was defined:

The term Radical (from the Latin radix meaning root) was used during the late 18th century for proponents of the Radical Movement. Historically, it began in the United Kingdom with political support for a “radical reform” of the electoral system to widen the franchise. Some radicals sought republicanism, abolition of titles, redistribution of property and freedom of the press. Initially identifying itself as a far left party opposed to the right-wing parties; the Orléanists, the Legitimists and the Bonapartists in France in the nineteenth century, the Republican, Radical and Radical‐Socialist Party progressively became the most important party of the Third Republic (1871–1940). As historical Radicalism became absorbed in the development of political liberalism, in the later 19th century in both the United Kingdom and continental Europe the term Radical came to denote a progressive liberal ideology.

So it seems we get this superficial sense of history of bitter rivals vying for the supremacy of their reactionary/radical ideologies as part of the Enlightenment project.

Now what does any of this have to do with Mencius Moldbug?

Slow down, I’m coming to that… after realizing I wasn’t getting more than the superficial crapology one typically gets from formal knowledge links of wikiworld I decided to move on over to Moldbug’s site, Unqualified Reservations. Now here is where it gets interesting. I decided to reach back to the beginning post and work my way forward. One revisits the early Spring of April, 2007, and his first post, a formalist manifesto, where he tells us he was “tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology”. The disarming style and humor are apparent from the beginning in his writing, as if through irony and an equitable distancing he might slowly peel back the layers of our ideological onion skin history through self-deprecatory humor rather than direct polemic.

What?  I mean, am I crazy or something?  First of all, you can’t just build an ideology.  They’re handed down across the centuries, like lasagna recipes.  They need to age, like bourbon.  You can’t just drink it straight out of the radiator.

And look what happens if you try.  What causes all the problems of the world?  Ideology, that’s what.  What do Bush and Osama have in common?  They’re both ideological nutcases.  We’re supposed to need more of this?

(more …)

I have to admit I laughed out loud at this. It did the trick, disarmed me in a way that allowed me to relax and then open myself up to what he really wanted to say. First up, is his beef with both progressive and conservative ideologies. With the progressives he remarks “My beef with progressivism is that for at least the last 100 years, the vast majority of writers and thinkers and smart people in general have been progressives.” Conservatives he tells us have been marked figuratively by Cain’s duplicitous heritage: “…not all Muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims.  Similarly, not all conservatives are cretins, but most cretins are conservatives.” The stigma attached to conservatives, whether fair or unfair, seems to cover them in an ideological pin cushion, and as he further states it:

 The modern American conservative movement – which is paradoxically much younger than the progressive movement, if only because it had to be reinvented after the Roosevelt dictatorship – has been distinctly affected by this audience.  It also suffers from the electoral coincidence that it has to despise everything that progressivism adores, a bizarre birth defect which does not appear to be treatable.

Next up on his short history of ideology is the only two choices remaining if one is neither progressive nor conservative, and that is the ‘moderate’ and ‘libertarian’ ideological fronts. Yet, to be honest, as he admits, the moderate or centrist is actually a non-ideological position, and anti-intellectual to boot so is both ineffectual and non-political, unworthy of consideration. Ultimately this moderate or centrist position leads him to say: “…the problem with moderation is that the “center” is not fixed.  It moves.  And since it moves, and people being people, people will try to move it.  This creates an incentive for violence – something we formalists try to avoid.”

Next up, and a favorite of his, is the Liberatarian worldview or ideology. Without even any reservations he offers up the Austrian School of Economics and the Mises Institute where one can study the Misesian–Rothbardian writings where you will be fed “enough high-test libertarianism to drown a moose”. Moldbug admits to being a “programmer who has read far too much science fiction” and was hooked on Murray Rothbard’s wit and intellectual acrobatics. ( I wonder myself why so many so to speak Leftists seem to disparage and malign Rothbard without even confronting his or Mises thought beyond cursory libels. I for one have always felt that we need to seek out both sides of the equation to come up with both problems and solutions that are never seen by those clouded within their robotic ideological cages. Maybe it was my early reading of William Blake, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Philip K. Dick and a host of other Left and Right sci-fi and drifters out of the non-mainstream that enforced my views. Either way I’ve always lampooned those in the cages. And, even now, as I look at this new neoreactionary movement I wonder if I have misplaced them in my overzealous treatment. Time will tell.)

Either way we find that Moldbug, as much as he is appreciative of the Libertarian worldview, also sees its limitations. As he states it: “On the other hand, it is hard to avoid noticing two basic facts about the universe.  One is that libertarianism is an extremely obvious idea.  The other is that it has never been successfully implemented.” He goes on to remark:

This does not prove anything. But what it suggests is that libertarianism is, as its detractors are always quick to claim, an essentially impractical ideology.  I would love to live in a libertarian society.  The question is: is there a path from here to there?  And if we get there, will we stay there?  If your answer to both questions is obviously “yes,” perhaps your definition of “obvious” is not the same as mine.

Finally we come to the heart of his post: “So this is why I decided to build my own ideology – “formalism.””

So what is ‘Formalist Ideology’? Remarkably there is nothing new in this ideology, he remarks; in fact, even the term itself is borrowed from “legal formalism” he admits to us. He even admits that all this is an eclectic mixture adduced from his exploration of a myriad of books, that he is “just some dude who buys a lot of obscure used books, and is not afraid to grind them down, add flavor, and rebrand the result as a kind of political surimi.” He also sees as precursors an affiliation with certain particular writers and political activist, etc. : “Most everything I have to say is available, with better writing, more detail and much more erudition, in Jouvenel, Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leoni, Burnham, Nock, etc, etc.”

A short interlude and background survey…

Bertrand de Jouvenal  whose books dealt with power, economics, etc. As a disgruntled youth he emerged from his leftist radical years as one of the foremost right-wing spokesmen and in his book The Ethics of Distribution, as William R. Luckey puts it:

Essentially, his approach consists in examining the actual activities involved in redistributionism and judging a) the motives behind them as to their link with reality, and b) whether or not redistributionist activities truly produce the effects they purport, or, perhaps, other side effects that were unintended or detrimental. If redistributionist activities have as their source an ideology (in the proper understanding of that term) removed from reality, and/or if the redistributionist activities do not produce the effects intended, whether there are other detrimental side effects or not, they are unethical. The existence of other undesirable side effects only increases the unethical nature of the redistributionist policies.1

Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn considered himself as an “extreme conservative arch-liberal” or “liberal of the extreme right”, Kuehnelt-Leddihn often argued that majority rule in democracies is a threat to individual liberties, and declared himself a monarchist and an enemy of all forms of totalitarianism. In his Credo of a Reactionary we get his most blatant views on just what was entailed in being a Reactionary:

As an honest reactionary I naturally reject Nazism, communism, fascism and all related ideologies which are, in sober fact, the reduction ad absurdum of so-called democracy and mob domination. I reject the absurd assumptions of majority rule, parliamentary hocus-pocus; the bogus materialistic liberalism of the Manchester School and the bogus conservatism of the big bankers and industrialists. I abhor the centralism and uniformity of the herd life, the stupid mob spirit of racialism, the private capitalism (socialism) which have contributed to the gradual ruin of our civilization in the last two centuries.

One could say that his motto is: “The real reactionary of this day is a rebel against the prevailing assumptions and a ‘radical’ in that he goes down to the root.” (p. 1)

Bruno Leoni was an Italian classical-liberal political philosopher and lawyer. His most important work was Freedom and Law in which (Wiki article) he contended that the greatest obstacle to the Rule of Law is the problem of overlegislation. Leoni also pointed to a parallelism between the market and common law on the one hand, and socialism and legislation on the other.

Albert J. Nock was another libertarian forerunner who considered “himself as a philosophical anarchist, and called for a radical vision of society free from the influence of the political state. He described the state as that which “claims and exercises the monopoly of crime”. He opposed centralization, regulation, the income tax, and mandatory education, along with what he saw as the degradation of society.” (Wiki entry)

Back to Moldbug…

Moldbug in reviewing all the above writers and activists said this:

If you’ve never heard of any of these people, neither had I until I started the procedure.  If that scares you, it should.  Replacing your own ideology is a lot like do-it-yourself brain surgery.  It requires patience, tolerance, a high pain threshold, and very steady hands.  Whoever you are, you already have an ideology in there, and if it wanted to come out it would have done so on its own.

As a programmer I understand where he is coming from when he says of formalism: “Formalism, as we’ll see, is an ideology designed by geeks for other geeks.  It’s not a kit.  It doesn’t come with batteries.  You can’t just pop it in.  At best, it’s a rough starting point to help you build your own DIY ideology.  If you’re not comfortable working with a table saw, an oscilloscope and an autoclave, formalism is not for you.” The point being that one will get one’s hands dirty, dive in, cut one’s samples from a thousand trees of culture, put them under the oscillating scrutiny of a steeled intelligence, then sterilize them in the high-pressure cooker of formalist practices thereby producing an amalgamated ideology of one’s own making. But when it’s all said and done we come to the simplicity and beauty of his formulation:

The basic idea of formalism is just that the main problem in human affairs is violence.  The goal is to design a way for humans to interact, on a planet of remarkably limited size, without violence.

Is that it one asks? Is that the simple truth of the matter, is it violence that has been the key to all those previous failure in ideological world building? And, now, the alternative: the pursuit of a world in which ‘violence’ is a thing of the past, a deadly guest we all bid adieu without even the fond memories of its terrible leave taking? I think all of us would agree to this proposition, to a world where humans could finally resolve their differences without resorting to violence, war, and death. But is it that easy? How can we accomplish such a task, that is the question and the problem to which the above is only a signpost pointing us in the right direction.

Even that quirky and formidable renegade of the left, William T. Vollman, in his seven volume encyclopedic work on violence, Rising Up and Rising Down could not have been more succinct and to the point. I mean Vollman spent 20 years attempting to establish a moral calculus in our consideration of the causes, effects, and ethics of violence. It seems that the two authors agree on violence as the bane of human civilization and culture and the driving force that underpins our dark enlightenment. Maybe it’s a tonal difference that makes the difference between the two approaches: first, with Vollman one gets a feeling that the sheer amount of information and its moral implications is there to beat the weary reader over the head, and through the sheer force of ethical persuasion to change us all; while, for Moldbug, secondly, it all comes down to ‘engineering': “The key is to look at this not as a moral problem, but as an engineering problem.  Any solution that solves the problem is acceptable.  Any solution that does not solve the problem is not acceptable.”

But if violence is the problem then what is the solution?

Well, he starts with an easy one: pacifism. Which as he defines it can be simplified to a game-theory pragmatics in which “the idea of pacifism is that if you and I can not be violent, everyone else will not be violent, too.” This game-theoretical mechanics comes down to a set of rules in which violence  is, as he states it, “anything that breaks the rule, or replaces it with a different rule.  If the rule is clear and everyone follows it, there is no violence”. He seems to be getting closer to Vollman’s sense of a ‘moral calculus’ of violence. As Vollman remarks: “The ultimate position of Rising Up and Rising Down is that moral values can be treated as absolutes in some respects, as relative quantities in others. I believe that every violent act refers itself back to some more or less rational explanation. To the extant that the explanations are irrational, they can be quickly disposed of. To the extent that they are rational, they enjoy the possibility of absolute status, provided the ends, means, and the intellectual-moral logic in between have all been correctly assembled (Preface to the Abridgement xi).” That emphasis on assembled aligns well with an engineering approach for a moral calculus.

In a sort of fantasy dialogue to such a moral calculus Moldbug in a different key asks:

Where do all these rules come from?  Who makes them unbreakable?   Who gets to be the oracle?  Why is the wallet “yours,” rather than “mine”?  What happens if we disagree on this?  If there’s one rule for every wallet, how can everyone remember them all?

Moldbug tells us simply that one need not look far, just open the pages of the great dead, those philosophical forbears who gave us volumes on such subjects. First, he tells us, rules are part of contractual relations:

First, one sensible way to make rules is that you’re bound by a rule if, and only if, you agree to it.  We don’t have rules that are made by the gods somewhere.  What we have is actually not rules at all, but agreements.  Surely, agreeing to something and then, at your own convenience, un-agreeing to it, is the act of a cad.  In fact, when you make an agreement, the agreement itself may well include the consequences of this kind of irresponsible behavior.

In game theory we come upon a concept, the Nash equilibrium, which is a solution concept of a non-cooperative game involving two or more players, in which each player is assumed to know the equilibrium strategies of the other players, and no player has anything to gain by changing only his own strategy unilaterally. If each player has chosen a strategy and no player can benefit by changing strategies while the other players keep theirs unchanged, then the current set of strategy choices and the corresponding payoffs constitute a Nash equilibrium. This would lead Nash later on to certain control theories of society in which Nash would develop work on the role of money in society. Within the framing theorem that people can be so controlled and motivated by money that they may not be able to reason rationally about it, he has criticized interest groups that promote quasi-doctrines based on Keynesian economics that permit manipulative short-term inflation and debt tactics that ultimately undermine currencies. He has suggested a global “industrial consumption price index” system that would support the development of more “ideal money” that people could trust rather than more unstable “bad money”. He notes that some of his thinking parallels economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek’s thinking regarding money and a nontypical viewpoint of the function of the authorities.

Of course John Forbes Nash a famous mathematician the creator of this theoretic was later diagnosed with schizophrenia, and would later renounce his early proclivities and theories, yet these very theories underpin much of the rational choice theoretic as outlined by S.M. Amadae in Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism and form the core of what many on the Left and Right might term the Cathedral (I’ll define this term in another post).

The next solution that Moldbug discovers is: social justice: “…idea called social justice  that a lot of people believe in.  The notion is, in fact, fairly universal as of this writing.  What it tells us is that Earth is small and has a limited set of resources, such as cities, which we all want as much of as possible.  But we can’t all have a city, or even a street, so we should share equally.  Because all of us people are equal and no one is more equal than anyone else.”

All in all Moldbug remarks that social justice is nice but there is a catch. There are three problems with this solutions: 1) equality is non-comparable (i.e., If I get an apple and you get an orange, are we equal?); 2) the bottom line is that if we wipe the slate clean, allow for full equality among individuals we will soon observe things become unequal very fast (i.e., it’s basically impossible to combine a system in which agreements stay agreed with one in which equality stays equal.), and if “if we try to enforce permanent equality, we can probably expect permanent violence”; and, finally, 3) is simply put: “…is that we are not, in fact, designing an abstract utopia here.  We are trying to fix the real world, which in case you hadn’t noticed, is extremely screwed up.”

So against these non-solutions of pacifism and social justice  Moldbug offers Formalism:

The goal of formalism is to avoid this unpleasant little detour.  Formalism says: let’s figure out exactly who has what, now, and give them a little fancy certificate.  Let’s not get into who should have what.  Because, like it or not, this is simply a recipe for more violence.

Reminding us that what he’s just said “sounds a lot like libertarianism” he forewarns the wary reader stating that there is a big difference. The libertarians see the State as the Enemy, and that it “is basically an illegitimate and usurping authority, that taxation is theft, that they are essentially being treated as fur-bearing animals by this weird, officious armed mafia, which has somehow convinced everyone else in the country to worship it like it was the Church of God or something, not just a bunch of guys with fancy badges and big guns”. As Moldbug emphasizes, “A good formalist will have none of this.”

Why? Well the good formalist will let the libertarian in on a secret: it’s way too late to take it back, The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek may have been a warning at one time, but now its become a fact of history, Moldbug tells us, we’ve all become serfs: “Corporate serfs, to be exact, because the US is nothing but a corporation.  That is, it is a formal structure by which a group of individuals agree to act collectively to achieve some result.” What Moldbug has discovered is that the United States of America is no longer a Government that it has become, simply put: “the US is just a corporation.” He continues:

 It is not a mystic trust consigned to us by the generations.  It is not the repository of our hopes and fears, the voice of conscience and the avenging sword of justice.  It is just an big old company that holds a huge pile of assets, has no clear idea of what it’s trying to do with them, and is thrashing around like a ten-gallon shark in a five-gallon bucket, red ink spouting from each of its bazillion gills.

But along with this one might ask “If the U.S.A. Inc. is a bonafide corporation then who are the trustees?” Well we have seen this secretive entity called the Federal Reserve System sitting there in plain sight since the turn of the last century whose so to speak agenda was to provide “maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates”. Wasn’t that a good thing? Of course many of its critics have leveled multiple criticisms of this entity – criticisms include the assertions that the Federal Reserve System violates the United States Constitution and that it impedes economic prosperity. Critic Miranda Fleschert contends that the twelve regional Federal Reserve banks (as opposed to the entire Federal Reserve System) consider themselves to be private corporations with private funding. The movement to audit the Federal Reserve System has gained national traction; a bill related to the movement was passed through the House of Representatives in 2012. Many critics see auditing the Federal Reserve System as a means of gaining insight into an institution they contend has historically had little to no transparency, that has acted without congressional approval or oversight, and that has the power to create and loan U.S. dollars based on a monetary policy determined by its own interests. (Wiki article)

So against the system or corporation that seems to be controlled by private corporations and private funding Moldbug tells us “we need to figure out who has actual power in the US, and assign shares in such a way as to reproduce this distribution as closely as possible.” Moldbug warns us not to get all starry-eyed and muddle-headed about it, either. This isn’t about redistribution of the shares to everyone and their brother,  “our goal is not to figure out who should have what, but to figure out who does have what”.  All this talk of power and shareholders ultimately leads Moldbug to ask “are nation-states, such as the US, even useful?” As he states the problem:  “If you reformalized the US, the question would be left to its shareholders.  Perhaps cities work the best when they’re independently owned and operated.  If so, they should probably be spun off as separate corporations.”

All this leads Moldbug to surmise a new world of utopic City-States:

The existence of successful city-states such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai certainly suggests an answer to this question.  Whatever we call them, these places are remarkable for their prosperity and their relative absence of politics.  In fact, perhaps the only way to make them more stable and secure would be to transform them from effectively family-owned (Singapore and Dubai) or subsidiary (Hong Kong) corporations, to anonymous public ownership, thus eliminating the long-term risk that political violence might develop.

Mike Davis and others in a dystopic leftwing version of this uptopic impulse tells us that these “bright archipelagos of utopian luxury and “supreme lifestyles” are mere parasites on a “planet of slums.”2 “On a planet where more than 2 billion people subsist on two dollars or less a day, these dreamworlds enflame desires—for infinite consumption, total social exclusion and physical security, and architectural monumentality—that are clearly incompatible with the ecological and moral survival of humanity.” (224-226 KL) In an extended foray he states:

Monstrous paradises, indeed, presume sulfurous antipodes. In his dense, almost brutal critique of the 1935 second draft of Benjamin’s Arcades Project (the exposé known as “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century”), Theodor Adorno chastised Benjamin for “discarding the category of hell found in the first sketch.” “Hell,” emphasized Adorno, was key both to the “luster” and “dialectical coherence” of Benjamin’s analysis. “To revert to the language of the splendid first sketch of the Arcades,” Adorno scolded, “if the dialectical image is nothing but the mode of apprehension of the fetish character in the collective consciousness, then the Saint-Simonian conception of the commodified world as utopia might well be disclosed, but not its obverse—the dialectical image of the nineteenth century as hell. But only the latter could put the image of the Golden Age in its proper place. . . .” (227-233 KL)

Yet, Moldbug, against such criticisms maintains:

Because in the absence of effective external control, these civil services more or less manage themselves, like any unmanaged enterprise they often seem to exist and expand for the sake of existing and expanding.  But they avoid the spoils system which invariably develops when the tribunes of the people have actual power.  And they do a reasonable, if hardly stellar, job of maintaining some semblance of law.

In other words, “democracy” appears to work because it is not in fact democracy, but a mediocre implementation of formalism.  This relationship between symbolism and reality has received an educational if depressing test in the form of Iraq, where there is no law at all, but which we have endowed with the purest and most elegant form of democracy (proportional representation), and ministers who actually seem to run their ministries.  While history does no controlled experiments, surely the comparison of Iraq to Dubai makes a fine case for formalism over democracy.

Of course from the left of Mike Davis’s socialist stance we get this rejoinder:

Let’s not kid ourselves: these studies map terminal, not anticipatory, stages in the history of late modernity. They expand our understanding of what Luxemburg and Trotsky had in mind when they warned of “Socialism or Barbarism.” Indeed, viewed as an ensemble, these idle redoubts stand as testaments to the resignation with which humanity squanders the borrowed time on which it now lives. If Benjamin evoked a society that “dreamed itself waking,” these gilded dreamworlds have no alarm clocks; they are willful, narcissistic withdrawals from the tragedies overtaking the planet. The rich will simply hide out in their castles and television sets, desperately trying to consume all the good things of the earth in their lifetimes. Indeed, by their very existence, the indoor ski slopes of Dubai and private bison herds of Ted Turner represent that ruse of reason by which the neoliberal order both acknowledges and dismisses the fact that the current trajectory of human existence is unsustainable.(244-250 KL)

Whose vision of the future will prevail? Which way forward: that, my friends, is up to each and every one of you… for me, at the moment, this is just an introductory visit into the Moldbugian Tetraverse of the Formalist vision. Where it will lead is anyone’s guess. I’ll leave my political shoes at the gate for the moment and just make a few tentative visits into this strange kingdom of engineers and shareholders. I’m sure others will have enough to say…

1. Journal of Markets & Morality 1, no. 2(October 1998), 169-191 Copyright © 1998 Center for Economic Personalism
2. Davis, Mike; Monk, Daniel Bertrand (2011-07-16). Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (Kindle Locations 241-243). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.