AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
No not really! Apologies for the clickbait title. Yarvin and his ideas remain terrible.
But I retain a sliver of admiration for his success as a writer. There are a lot of people who write at length about their worldviews on the internet. I'm one of them, albeit in a very minor league (don't even have my own substack). There are many who have made a name for themselves in this way. Some have established formidable bodies of work, and are known in the world at large, not just on the internet.
But Yarvin is in a league of his own. He has managed to get to a point where he is interviewed in the New York Times, featured in alarmed segments on MSNBC, on intimate terms with the rich and powerful, and seen as the guiding intellectual of a movement that is rapidly reshaping America into something new. Whatever you can say about him or his ideas, this is the big time.
He's spawned a whole industry of other writers commenting and warning about him. He is, literally, a world-historical figure. He defines the present moment. We live in his world. He is in tune with the zeitgeist. His rants adovacting the wholesale demolition of existing institutions are now being implemented. His vision of rule by radically authoritarian corporations may or may not come about, but it won't be from lack of trying, there are powerful forces using it as a blueprint.
This is especially notable if you consider that 15 years ago he was just another pretentious nerd with a blog. I "discovered" him back then, when I was on the prowl for interesting weirdos.
It was a whole hobby of mine, although I am hard-pressed to defend it.
All these posts seem exceedingly lame to me now, like I had discovered something but had no idea what it was, so clowning around with it. The current reality is my punishment for not taking it seriously.
(Sorry if that sounds demented, it's not like me taking Moldbug more seriously back in the day would have changed the course of history)
Of course coming up with an ideology that flatters the rich and powerful doesn't hurt.
This is all quite remarkable. It's as if we were actually living in an Ayn Rand novel. Except fiction is more subtle. Really, a novel in which the world's richest man is inexplicably given total control of the US government and struts around with a chainsaw as he fires everybody? That would be rejected as too cartoonish.
His basic idea: we take it as axiomatic that concentrations of power are bad, that authoritarian top-down hierarchies are bad. This is a basic tenet of Americanism and the kind of leftish-anatchistish thinking that I was raised in and took as axiomatic. Like the inventors of non-Euclidean geometery, he discarded (or inverted) this axiom and went on from there.
What if concentration of power was good, actually? It seems good for the one person in control, at least – no more tedious and failure-prone efforts to get others to go along with your schemes, you just command and It Is Done, a true executive/monarach.
The Cathedral
order ≡ good, disorder ≡ bad.
His appeal
Libertarianism taken to an extreme. Drained iof its liberalism.
Transvaluation of values – basically he's saying, what if we invert all the civic platitudes we learned at school? The kind about equality and freedom and such. Always been bullshit for the rubes, welcome to the real world boys. What if we take all the 18th century BS that America was founded on, and instead of trying to work towards those dreams of justice, freedom, equality, democracy, representation, human rights, self-determination, dignity – what if we treat those as the illusions they are, wipe them away, and build something better?
Exploiting a very real weakness in liberal ideology, although maybe that is a topic too far.
Antiamerican
Time to reread The Federalist Papers
The weakness of liberal statism.
Is this evil?
It sure seems so. Not just merely wrong in some intellectual sense. The Nazis were not merely mistaken. They had bad intentions – certainly towards their enemies, they were pretty open about that! I suppose a lot of clever people thought they could get on the right side of that malevolence.