The Centre Cannot Hold [TE]

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes, 27 seconds. Contains 3093 words

Welcome back to Trenchant Edges a little, uh, sooner than I’d planned.

This is a newsletter about digging into weird people and ideas and I’m your host, Stephen.

This is something of a longform response to a comment I got on my last post about Curtis Yarvin’s Neoreactionary movement and their friends in the white house and Silicon Valley.

Right now we’re in the, “waiting to see if the courts can stop the president” phase of what many people are calling a coup. Things have polarized to the point where the right will cheer whatever Trump does just to spike anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan and the center right Democrats will complain but not do much about it.

So in terms of “What Is To Be Done?” we’re limited to a lot of what amount to survival, delaying tactics, direct action, and mutual aid.

The Democrats are the only alternative platform for national political action and I’m not exactly holding my breath for them. So a lot of this is trying to help enough people survive long enough to play the long game.

I’ve been saying for years that the people who get to decide how far this goes are the mass of conservatives who now have the choice between a democracy and a dictatorship and only seem to mind the latter when they’re among those being fucked over.

If congress, the courts, the people, and institutional bureaucrats don’t stop this I expect we’ll see them escalate as far as they can until other structural factors block expansion.

No clue what that might be. One possibility is that all the move fast and break things will eventually break too much and there will be some kind of crisis of dealing with it. H1N1/Bird flu seems a good candidate for that.

I suspect if we have as hot and dry summer this year as some predictions are making we might be looking at a situation where the billions of gallons of water Trump ordered released from reservoirs in California aren’t there to water crops in the hottest part of the year. The worst possibility there is mass crop failure which which could be wreck the country bad.

Trump seems to be collecting existential risks like he just discovered pokemon cards so sooner or later some of that will really blow back on him no matter how effective he is at taking or holding power.

What Is To be Done?

Looking at his ideas from orbit, Yarvin and his compatriots are simply capitalists who want to have the social status once afforded only to kings and aristocrats.

They don’t just want to be rich but *Important*.

One has to begrudge old money some wisdom here because they’ve largely decided to avoid being too obviously wealthy

One more bit of scene setting: William Butler Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I want to use this poem from 1919 as the axis of this post for a few reasons. First, it’s just a damn good poem and you should be reading and writing more poetry. Yes, you.

Second, being over a hundred years old it highlights the most uncomfortable fact of living in interesting times: Yes things can keep going even as many people die.

Sure, there will probably eventually be some kind of end. But, my friends, it isn’t hear and now. The wheel of fortune will turn.

What we’ve seen from the European enlightenment on down is the attempt to break away culture and politics from Christendom because the latter has been corrupt and useless. That enlightenment project itself is equally corrupt and useless as it kept most of the same problems Christianity had.

Why?

Because ideals matter to individuals, not the systems we’re embedded in.

The Holy Ghost, the power of God, has had two thousand years to produce a society not built on evil and exploitation.

Likewise, Euro-rationalism has had about 400 years to shoot for the same thing.

In both cases the inherited structure of European power has done far more to shape the mountains of human sacrifices either system needed to keep running.

The neoreactionary position is simply that we should stop trying to pretend this is a bad state of affairs if you’re one of the people doing the sacrificing rather than the victims.

And if you’re not? Who cares? You’ll be fed to the machine soon enough.

Setting aside the obvious moral problems with that, there’s another larger issue:

Industrial extraction is killing the biosphere.

Like, throw out climate change for a minute.

Let’s keep this as simple as possible.

Human beings need a lot of oxygen to survive. The oxygen in the modern earth is created by a complex interplay between continent and global scale ecologies.

• Phytoplankton make about 50% the world’s oxygen

• Trees make about 25%

• Algae make about another 20%

• Bacteria hand in about 5%

And we’re actively killing off those top 3.

Now, I’m no ecologist and these exact numbers are very much in dispute. I’m not going to even try and pin down the details because they don’t really matter. Unless they’re wrong by like, an order of magnitude each, it’s pretty easy to extrapolate a situation where industrial resource extraction kills off too many oxygen producers for us to survive.

Unironically, Spaceballs is the world capitalism is creating.

It’s easy to say at this point that, sure, but that’s so far away from happening we wouldn’t keep going that far, would we? That’s just fearmongering.

And it’s true to a point, sort of.

Like, it’s not going to be global carbon dioxide poisoning that gets us because we’re going to die of something else first.

Because there’s not like, one or two things like this that industrialization threatens. It’s everything in the biosphere. At least thousands of different axes that all interrelated and all feed into each other.

So, in absolutely real and tangible ways, we need to live differently.

Because living like this is going to kill, well, not quite everything. I’m pretty sure those bacteria living in sulfur vents at the bottom of the ocean are going to be fine literally no matter what we do.

But, like, if you think ahead a little bit on geological scales it’s hard to see a way that life survives this unless we choose differently at a planetary scale than we do now.

Now, it’s also true that maybe just about every natural scientist on the planet who isn’t currently working for the petroleum industry or a right wing think tank is simply wrong about this.

But how confident in that assumption can you be?

Like, if this was one field or one nation’s scientists I could see more skepticism. But I’ve spent a decent chunk of time looking for contrary evidence and I don’t see anything that just isn’t obviously propaganda.

These anti-climate change scientists aren’t slick. I’ve yet to see evidence that survives even my layman’s scrutiny about it.

So, unless an awful lot of this is wrong Neoreaction is a kind of suicide cult. Except it’s one insisting on taking all of us, human and not, with it.

The Only Constant Is Change

The magic trick Yarvin plays is turning the frustrating or annoying parts of liberalism into proof of a vast egalitarian conspiracy violating natural law that justifies any action to oppose it.

The advantage of this move is it’s very much self sustaining.

Unless you see the ways he distorts evidence and history, it’s easy to be persuaded into a state where you have to fully deprogram yourself to get out of his orbit.

And like any gravity well, it’s MUCH more energy intense to escape than to fall in.

But now let’s step back to our original question: What's your game play for alternative scripts to unfold?

If Yarvin’s work exists to launder frustration with democracy (an abundant and growing resource) into support for a tech elite aristocracy, how do you stop that?

Let’s start by ruling out the obvious way you don’t: Hiding behind institutions.

The Democrats were able to buy off one Trump administration, but the rot of the institutions under their care has continued. Not just the state institutions, but the private sector as well.

Like, Boeing becoming famous for crashing planes and killing whisteblowers is not a sign of a healthy market economy even under neoliberal terms. Our corporate overlords have turtled up into anti-competitive cartels in almost every industry and thus even their own logic of why capitalism is good doesn’t apply in any real way.

Blocked by anti-trust laws, the ruling class just took the next path of least resistance: owning all the big industry players with the same handful of financial organizations. Blackrock, Vanguard, etc.

And let’s take a look at the core of Yarvin’s beliefs:

• Rejection of Enlightenment Humanism

• Dictatorships are good.

• Wealth extraction and concentration is good

• Egalitarianism is bad.

Humanism is the ideology that says maybe you should give a shit about people outside your personal sphere because they’re as human as you are and as deserving of protection and well being as you are.

It was a tepid response to colonialism and practiced very imperfectly, but now it represents an extra burden many of our beloved elites see as a luxury.

Who are you to tell me I need to give a shit about anyone else?

Got mine and fuck you. What else can you call the American Dream?

An effective con game at least so far.

This is a hard problem, of course, because you can’t actually make anyone give a shit about other people and it would be, uh, probably bad if you could.

The squeeze within the imperial core’s ingroup is tight enough that giving a shit about anyone other than yourself and maybe your family feels like an impossible burden to people who didn’t want it in the first place.

They’re enraged that anyone does care and like to pretend that people don’t really. The final stage of what Marx called alienation.

So how do you counter that?

The feedback loop there is rage against disempowerment and the fear of being taken advantage of driving people into the team of demagogues who provide scapegoats to hate.

One school of thought on the subject.

They believe that embracing full dictatorship under capitalism will make them wealthier and safer than the alternatives.

Almost everyone who thinks this is wrong. But it’ll work out for some of them for a while. Maybe long enough.

Dictators can only rule with bribes and violence. Built in corruption. There’s no getting around it. It’s the kind of thing Yarvin’s analysis pretends isn’t real.

The monarchies of Europe didn’t fail because they accepted liberal institutions, they failed because people rejected their authority and liberalizing was the only way they could keep enough consent to stay alive and in power at all.

No crony left behind is a terrible way to run a government and history shows the weaknesses and failure modes of this way by the truckload on whatever continent you care to look for it.

Concentration of power means taking it from those who would otherwise wield it themselves, in great ways and in insignificant ones. Which means lots of people have to live like shit for one person to live well vs a situation of similar development structured differently.

Because, you know, power ultimately comes from things and their organization.

Which slowly brings us to the double-bind of wealth extraction and power concentration.

TLDR: We have to extract natural resources at scale to maintain our current population which requires at least industrial level organization.

In actual practice this is going to be very messy because all developed economies are having a really slow birthrate (often under the replacement rate) and this is a big driver of reactionary fearmongering because the neoliberal response has been supporting immigration.

Basically: Once people have secure access to food, shelter, education, and a viable career they tend to want fewer kids. This appears to be true cross culturally.

(If this is something people want me to write about I can)

And in our speed run of these issues, we’ve finally come to anti-egalitarianism. In a short generous reading: reactionaries believe that because people vary in qualities, egalitarianism is an impossible ideal and therefore should be discarded for an “honest” social darwinist view.

A more honest one would say they’re just doing scientific racism again.

It’s just another gloss on privilege.

Were their ideas about inborn superiority true, European royalty wouldn’t be collecting genetic disorders like they’re showdogs and the word failson would be impossible to consider instead of something almost everyone can instantly think of examples of.

Now, to be sure there’s some jank in exactly what people mean by egalitarian. But that’s a feature for Yarvin because any contradiction or confusion within a concept is grounds to reject it for a demonstrably untrue one.

So… this has gone on longer than I planned and hasn’t actually covered any of the things I wanted to.

But I think this is worth discussing. So let’s do a speedier run of my actual answer to the question and maybe revisit it in detail.

Counterblast

OK, so we’ve got the core pillars of Yarvin thought.

• Rejection of Enlightenment Humanism

• Dictatorships are good.

• Wealth extraction and concentration is good

• Egalitarianism is bad.

The tricky thing about responding to someone like this is their arguments are in bad enough faith that accepting their framing is itself likely to lead you to incorrect conclusions. But there’s also some seeds of things worth criticizing as well.

In fact, if not for Yarvin’s hatred for left wing politics he might find quite a lot to agree with in Karl Marx. Marx believed that common culture was tightly regimented by the ruling class to reflect their ideas, that the working class should break the dictatorship of capital and institute its own order in place, and that production itself should be developed until there’s enough to feed and clothe everyone easily.

Karl was calling the liberals of his age useless, disingenuous hypocrites in 1848 in The Neue Rheinische.

And he did that without the benefit of 150 years of them in power.

Now, no. We can’t just copy Karl’s notes. Though some of them are quite good.

We know a great deal he didn’t.

But as different as the world is there are some things that remain the same: Wealth remains concentrated in a small number of hands and they do so through ownership of production and distribution. Working people around the world are exploited for the gains of those owners.

Which brings us to:

#1 Class Solidarity

Broad, intergroup collaboration at scale. You you recognize the struggles you have in common even if you don’t agree on everything. Ultimately this is about collectively reframing our ingroup/outgroup wiring into something less destructive.

We can’t do any fucking thing about the larger threats to humanity and the rest of life on this planet while like 50 people own every fucking thing.

#2 Workplace-Ownership and Management

The economy can be run just as effectively through cooperatives and other forms of self-organization. What we have right now are functionally cartels designed to soak up as much marketshare as possible and offload risk, costs, and pain on to everyone they can get away with.

By breaking the chain of absentee owners who don’t feel the effects of a decision, firms would make considerably fewer decisions hostile to themselves (like dumping toxic waste in their own neighborhood) and there would be considerably smaller amounts of money at stake in each decision so making generational wealth would be much, much rarer.

Further, organizations would be able to spin off side projects if a group of employees wanted to leave or develop something new or the org decided they needed some business function elsewhere.

(yes, Marxists, we should also abolish the value form but like, one step at a time here)

#3. Personal and Communal Agency

As is, our society mainly rewards people who can coerce others into organizing into resource extraction schemes. Your preferences only matter if you have the money to enact them, the amount of which is wildly dependent on mostly closed markets where individual buyers have no leverage.

In short, unless you’re rich you can’t really make meaningful choices about most things.

By taking care of everyone’s basic needs, more people can make interesting choices without putting their family’s well being at stake. And by preventing the cartelization of industry, there’s a fairer field to play on.

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OK, so full disclosure, I was going to have a #4 and have rambled for about 1,000 words trying to build a tight, coherent idea that can address human needs without falling into various errors.

I… couldn’t do it. This would have been out yesterday if I could.

So rather than writing something I’m not sure of I’m just going to admit I couldn’t, lol, solve all problems arising from human differences in a section of a single post.

Which…. does sound like a crazy thing to try now that I’ve actually read it.

That’s going to have to be its own essay just to frame the problem I think.

Wrapping Up

Alright, that was pretty fun.

I’d like to put dealing with the Neoreactionary jagoffs on hold for a bit and get back into the high paranoia of UFOs as a nice break.

There’s some urgency in this because Behind the Bastards’ Robert Evans just did a two parter on my second most hated UFO guy, Richard Doty.

I haven’t listened to it yet but I suspect there is considerably more to explore.

It’s nuts when you’re going to UFO conspiracies for comfort but these days I’ll take what I can get.

Keep safe out there y’all.

I’m not entirely happy with my counter-ideals here tbh. What do y’all think would work better?