Taking Authority

Remembering some forgotten ideas from Unqualified Reservations

If you moved in dissident circles at any time during the last decade, you must have heard of Curtis Yarvin’s old blog, Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug.¹ Even if you didn’t, and wouldn’t be caught dead in such circles – and have been warned by reliable sources all about the nazi russky incel trolls who lurk in them – you may remember the blog as a minor Threat to Democracy in which tech autists plotted to become absolute tyrants. UR was notoriously longwinded, at once realistic and fantastical, and may end up being remembered solely for a schoolyard idiot test in which you type “cathedral” and wait to see who comes back with “synagogue”.

Rest assured, nonetheless, that those of us who were cracked enough to read the whole blog have our reasons for rating it as one of the best things on the dissident internet. Yes, Moldbug did write a lot of questionable stuff about sovereign corporations and crypo-locked weapons², but there were better ideas at UR that are sadly less well-remembered. These have yet to be revisited at Yarvin’s new blog, Gray Mirror, but we can dust them off right here.

Let’s first put them in context by recapping the basics of Moldbuggery.³ Yarvin describes the American democratist regime as an ‘iron polygon’ or ‘clerical oligarchy’ – a concept that might be refracted through current-year dissident parlance as the Broad State. He emphasises above all the ability of the academy-media complex to direct this structure, this being the infamous ‘Cathedral’ (which is not in fact an anti-Christian slur, but perhaps ought to be rechristened the Anti-Church). It is staffed by the modern clerisy, or ‘Brahmin’ class – the credentialed and ideologically-pure, who gatekeep and inquisit most positions of power, and harass the subject people by various unlovely policies such as manufactured ethnic conflict. Yarvin warns dissidents that right-wing politics and activism (not to mention terrorism) are worthless as long as the clerisy stands strong in its usurped power, because it simply works with the activists, politicians and terrorists who tell it to do what it wants (i.e. regime leftists) while ignoring or suppressing those who oppose it.

None of this has aged badly in the wake of Do-Nothing Don and the Great Brexit Debacle, and Yarvin still writes incisive posts (like this one and this one) on the delusions of right-wing activism. Unfortunately, he spends far less time telling us what we ought to be doing instead (and no, waiting for absolute monarchy to appear on the ballot is not ‘doing something’), which naturally opens him to accusations of mope and indolence. The fact that this shit seems to have stuck to Yarvin makes it all the more odd that he has not revisited the ideas we are about to discuss.

The true message of UR, at least as I understood it, was not that everything is hopeless and we should all roll over and rot. It was that right-wing activists are performing, in cargo-cult fashion, democratist rituals like marches and elections that do not work without the top-down patronage of the Broad State. They are like benighted peasants – or, perhaps, the shifty handlers and brokers of those peasants – performing rituals of propitiation to an idol in a temple, while the priests on the other side of the wall pull the levers that control the answers of the god.

What should they (or rather we) be doing instead?

Yarvin did in fact lay out a detailed answer to this question at UR, although it is unfortunately less developed than his antipolitics and techno-monarchism. Let us begin at Part 9a of the Gentle Introduction, in which he finally announces his reactionary master plan for American regime change. Perhaps some of you still remember these words:

The Procedure comes in Three Steps:

1. Become worthy.
2. Accept power.
3. Rule!!1!

“Become worthy, accept power, rule.” Yes, this was Mencius Moldbug’s master plan – but it was neither well-understood by his minions, nor particularly well-communicated by the master. As we go on to examine what he meant by it, I shall take the liberty of critiquing the problems so as to clarify the underlying idea.

One particularly confusing element is the Prerequisite for this Procedure:

Before you begin any positive work on the First Step, you must master the daunting spiritual discipline of passivism...

The steel rule of passivism is absolute renunciation of official power. We note instantly that any form of resistance to sovereignty, so long as it succeeds, is a share in power itself. Thus, absolute renunciation of power over USG implies absolute submission to the Structure.

The logic of the steel rule is simple. As a reactionary, you don't believe that political power is a human right. You will never convince anyone to adopt the same attitude, without first adopting it yourself…

Here begin the problems. Not only is passivism (sounds like passivity, pacifism, pussifism) an unfortunate choice of word⁴, but we are now being told to renounce a share in power by someone who has just told us to “accept power and rule”. Moreover, he will soon go on to tell us that we are going to accept power in the second step of his plan, only to renounce it again in the third! Yarvin seems to have relished the Zen-like paradox, but we can guess that most of his readers did not.

As a matter of both principle and tactics, the passivist rejects any involvement with any activity whose goal is to influence, coerce, or resist the government, either directly or indirectly. He is revolted by the thought of setting public policy. He would rather drink his own piss, than shift public opinion. He finds elections - national, state or local - grimly hilarious…

The passivist has a term for democratic activism directed by the right against the left. That term is counter-activism. Passivism does not dispute the fact that counter-activism sometimes works. For instance, it worked for Hitler… However, it only works in very unusual circumstances (such as those of Hitler), and is extremely dangerous when it does work (eg, the result may be Hitler).

In case this isn't crystal-clear, the steel rule precludes, in no particular order: demonstrations, press releases, suicide bombs, lawsuits, dirty bombs, Facebook campaigns, clean bombs, mimeographed leaflets, robbing banks, interning at nonprofits, assassination, "tea parties," journalism, bribery, grantwriting, graffiti, crypto-anarchism, balaclavas, lynching, campaign contributions, revolutionary cells, new political parties, old political parties, flash mobs, botnets, sit-ins, direct mail, monkeywrenching, and any other activist technique, violent or harmless, legal or illegal, fashionable or despicable.

Of course there is an immediate rationale for this, i.e. the uselessness of right-wing politics and activism. But Yarvin wanted to present it as a principle, as opposed to a temporary condition, and it is not hard to see in hindsight why he failed to do so. Why, in principle, should anyone become worthy of power by ceasing to struggle for it? Why should power in a new regime accrue to those who renounced power in the old one? Such propositions seem completely divorced from reality.

This may explain why so many UR readers forgot all about the ‘steel rule’ as soon as the right wing upped the rhetorical stakes. And those who stuck to the plan did not always do so for the right reasons. When I first encountered Moldbuggers on the (now-defunct) Social Matter site, many of them had interpreted ‘become worthy’ as ‘lift weights, make money, have kids, avoid the lynch mob, and build parallel institutions at ground level’. All of that is a lot more worthy than being a politicoomer, but none of it will get you into power.

There is less excuse for confusion when we move on to Part 9b, although we do find the continuation of the Procedure buried under a Moldbuggian mountain of words. Yarvin is telling us what ‘become worthy’ means, and what it means is that we need to come up with a worthy alternative to the regime. And what that means is that we need to build just one (very special) parallel institution.

In the First Step, we do not replace all of USG. We just replace its brain—the University. With a new device we call the Antiversity, which is pretty much what it sounds like it is. Here is a summary:

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 never be wrong. Where multiple coherent perspectives of an issue exist, the Antiversity must provide all—each composed with the highest quality available…

The power of a truth service is its reliability. It may remain prudently silent on any point; it must err on none. The thesis of the Procedure is that if we can construct a truth service much more powerful than USG’s noble and revered ministry of information, we will be able to use it to safely and effectively defeat USG. Indeed, I can imagine no other way to solve the problem.

Given that we have identified the ruling class (and engine of revolutionary lunacy) as a clerical oligarchy, this at least should make intuitive sense. What Moldbug began at UR was the alternative to cargo-cult activism – the deconversion of society from the idolatry of democratism and its self-serving priesthood. Such a deconversion can only begin at an intellectual level – like the Reformation and Enlightenment that challenged medieval Catholicism, or the Christianity that converted the Roman Empire from paganism – and ideally it should end with a conversion to something more truthful than that which has been discredited. This latter, of course, is the more difficult part.

But let us bear in mind that not all of this was obvious at the time this essay was written. Moldbug was discussing regime change, a coup d’état, conceived as a backup plan to be invoked in the event that the current regime can no longer function. How is an alternative truth service directly relevant to this?

Here’s what he has to say:

Once this device of great veracity, the Antiversity—expressing not only razor-sharp analytical intelligence, not just exhaustive learning, but also great prudence and judgment—is fully armed and operational, it is straightforward to ask it the question: chto dyelat? What is to be done? What is the sequel to the coup d’état? What is Plan B?

The Antiversity will promptly deliberate, in its accustomed fashion, and churn out a hundred-page report... And this will be Plan B, which describes how the institutions of NUSG [New U.S. Government] are created outside power and installed in it. Plan B, in short, is the constitution of the Second Step.

Once this Plan B is complete, the Americans are finally ready to face the question. Are they happy with their present government? Or would they rather replace it? Once they decide that the answer is the latter and act collectively to make their will known, actual work can begin.

In the Third Step, the Antiversity continues to guide the New Structure toward stability—acting as the brain of NUSG, just as the University acted as the brain of OUSG. However, where the University pretends to advise the Modern Structure but in reality directs it, the Antiversity pretends to advise the New Structure and in reality advises it.

Sovereignty is irrevocable. Power is not being transferred to the Antiversity, but through the Antiversity. However, it must bear the Ring for a time, and even use it.

And here the problems and objections return in force. Why must regime change, especially in the case of current-regime failure, await the intellectual directives of a “device of great veracity”? Is it not enough to spread distrust of the regime and support whoever is willing and able to replace it? Could an Antiversity bear power, or even ‘sovereignty’, which has never been formally transferred to the academy-media?

And there’s more. The general tenor of the discussion leads one to think that Moldbug was expecting to swap out the corrupted ‘brain’ of the Broad State, and install a new one that would tell the bloated bureaucratic ‘body’ to off itself. That can only work if the ‘body’ obeys the ‘brain’ out of true belief; but if the actual role of this ‘brain’ is to come up with convenient justifications for the will-to-power of the ‘body’, then the transplant will be violently rejected. Indeed, if progressive democratism is a ‘mystery cult of power’ as Yarvin says, the sheer power of the Leviathan-state may be sufficient reason for most of the Brahmins to believe in it.⁵

The reader begins to wonder if this perceived need for the Antiversity is not a delusion, born of Yarvin’s habituation to the abstract systems-engineering of computer science. Or, perhaps, a case of Jewish-Brahmin squeamishness as to the possibility of ending up with the wrong sort of regime change – that is to say, Hitler, whom Yarvin calls “the poster child for what happens if you break the steel rule”. No-one in his right mind wants Hitler, but power is a dangerous thing, and you must be prepared either to use it or leave it be. Squeamishness is a hard sell to those of us who are neither Jews nor Brahmins, and are thoroughly fed up of hearing the clerisy cry Adolf whenever its own despotism is threatened.

All of this, I think, would have been in the minds of UR’s early readers. And matters were not helped by the fact that Moldbug then proceeded to skip over the post in which he would have laid out his detailed vision for the Antiversity:

Waiting on Part 9c for 15 years now

Finally, in Part 9d (which we’ll look at later) there are some more details on the Antiversity, but the majority of the post is devoted to precisely the sort of activism, mass propaganda and electioneering that Yarvin has by this point spent thousands of words warning us against. Of course, he says that the Antiversity must come before the Party, but it is none too clear why this must be so. He also says the Antiversity will take ten years to build, and fifteen years later it is as far out of reach as ever. In conclusion, it is easy to see why the majority of UR readers thought that they could safely do in practice what Yarvin had done in theory –that is to say, skip over the long high road to intellectual worthiness and get on with scheming for power.

So they thought, and so they did – but they were wrong.

I propose that the kernel of Moldbug’s plan is sound, and that the confusions and paradoxes surrounding it are instantly dispelled when we cease to use the word power and speak instead of authority. Although these are related concepts, and not always fully differentiated, they are not synonyms. Power is military and political, authority religious and intellectual; power is the preserve of the king, the hero, the warrior, and the bandit, authority that of the priest, the sage, the doctor, and the charlatan. And what strength is to power, truth is to authority (although, in both cases, it is possible to coast or bluff your way).

One concept that blurs the distinction between power and authority is sovereignty. This word is often used to refer to the supremacy of the absolutist-liberal state over all other entities in its territory (including the religious ones); but within this state, sovereignty denotes the ultimate decision-making element of power. As we learn from Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective (Bourke and Skinner ed.), in Western history this concept was first applied to kings and then to peoples, and in both cases soon lost to those directly operating the levers of government.

This, I think, suggests that sovereignty is a relative, modern idea, and also one of those ideas that works better in theory than in practice. Contrast this conceptual hothouse-flower with the natural distinction of power and authority, which has not only a modern application but also an ancient pedigree.

Without going too deeply into this, let me invite you to consider a Moldbuggian heresy. It is that almost all instances of questionable thinking in Moldbug can be traced to this concept of sovereignty – whether it be that Harvard lords it over USG, that the authority of the Brahmins can be checked by the sovereignty of an absolute monarch, that a state that had concentrated all physical power into its hands would grant its helpless subjects free rein to think and say what they want, or that an alternative truth service can and should orchestrate a coup d’état.⁶ But to say questionable is not always to say wrong, because the crystal-clear concept of authority still lurks beneath the muddy one of sovereignty. It is perfectly true to say that no clerical state can hope to function once its authority has been drawn away by an alternative lodestar; but this process can only be expected to work slowly, subtly, and indirectly, all of which is indeed to its advantage.

Let’s test this notion by recasting the reactionary master plan in terms of authority instead of power. Here are the Three Steps again:

1. Become more truthful, right and trustworthy than the regime priesthood.

2. Accept the authority that naturally accrues from this.

3. Guide and advise those power-wielders who wish to bring about a better order.

But let’s keep it short and sweet:

1. Become worthy,

2. Take authority,

3. Wield authority.

This, of course, is a monumental task. We may or may not need a centralized academic institution for it (we’ll get to that question in a bit). But we certainly need an alternative locus of authority that is not distracted from its task by fantasies of taking power.

It is not just that power and authority are naturally separate, and that the authority of the regime is open to dispute in a way that its power is not. More to the point, those who seek power through the official democratist channels must sell out their authority at the door, by compromising with the Big Lie and and collaborating with the stupid, fraudulent and incompetent conservative movement. And once we renounce the need to butter up the masses, seduce them to some dogmatic ideology, or build a coalition with the likes of nutsocks, terfs, and conspiraboomers, huge leg-traps and stumbling-blocks vanish from our path.⁷

This is why the Prerequisite must be retained, and indeed made even ‘steelier’ than Moldbug intended. We are not just pretending to renounce power, we are actually renouncing it, in favour of a quest for truth.⁸ The tasks that follow ought not to be taken up (at least not in a directive capacity) by those who engage in politics, activism or propaganda, and ideally those involved should not even voot.⁹ Those with the requisite skills to carry them out are of course free to ignore my suggestions; but I cannot see that any advantage of doing so could possibly be outweighed by the risk of everything going to shit.

Revipedia, the Dissident Wiki

Although it is a rare Moldbugger who still remembers the Antiversity, it is an even rarer one who remembers that it developed from four startup ideas that Yarvin pitched to the early readers of UR. These were named Uberfact, Duelnode, Revipedia and Resartus.

The best name of the bunch is Revipedia, because what we are talking about is an alternative verification service – more or less a Dissident Wikipedia. Obviously the devil is in the details of how we are to establish this verity, given that dissidents cannot resort to the Wikipedian method of repackaging regime propaganda in neutral language. Yarvin’s solution is not more pretended objectivity, but a model that works with the factionalism that already characterizes the internet:

Every contribution to Uberfact must be associated with a faction, and it is judged by that faction and that faction only. If the contribution is good, it improves your local reputation within that faction. ...

For example, early in Uberfact’s development, there would probably be a libertarian faction. This would then fragment into Rothbardian, Randian, and Kochian libertarians—at least. Various strongly-flavored personalities might spin off their own little factions, and so on…

For example, it’s easy to imagine upgrading Wikipedia to be uberfactious. Instead of one page for George W. Bush, you could read the story of George W. Bush according to libertarians, according to progressives, according to jihadis, racists, Ford lovers, emacs bigots, and so on—anyone who cares enough to have an opinion about George W. Bush.

One might quickly notice that these pages matched in certain details. For example, jihadis, racists, and progressives probably all agree that George W. Bush was born on July 6, 1946. So all of these groups might contribute to a consensus page, signed by a large number of factions, which might even be similar to today’s “objective” page. And since this would probably be the most commonly requested George W. Bush page, it would come up first. An uberfactious Wikipedia doesn’t need to be any harder to use than today’s neutralist Wikipedia.

However, it would be largely free from “edit wars,” because warring gangs would rapidly organize into factions and maintain their own forks of disputed pages.

Duelnode requires little comment, as it merely extends this model by laying out structures for different factions to argue with each other (which one imagines would have to be very strong to prevent the whole thing from devolving into chaos).

In the somewhat rambling Revipedia post, Yarvin introduces the idea of forking Wikipedia:

Given given the 98% of [Wikipedia] that is true, and the vast quantity of human labor that went into constructing that 98%, Revipedia needs to bootstrap as a Wikipedia mirror. When you use Revipedia, every page that has no Revipedia revision just redirects to La Wik. Of course it appears marked as such, to indicate its generally low trust level…

Obviously, Revipedia is no private club—anyone can read it. But can anyone write it?

Yes. But in Revipedia, the distinction between editorial staff and mere users is clear. Nothing that presents itself as a truth machine can possibly succeed without some sort of crowdsourcing. But inviting the masses is one thing. Surrendering to them is another…

And finally, as Revipedia becomes influential, it will develop enemies. This is good. Adversaries are both a sign of success and a necessity for eventual victory. Revipedia greets them with flowers, and invites them to contribute…

The presence of adversaries is essential to the production of truth. It demonstrates that all claims are tested. When you look at a Revipedia page, you can click a tab and see any or all hostile responses. Adversaries can and should develop editorial and administrative structure to make their responses as effective and convincing as possible… Ideally, in a healthy and successful ecology, the original Revipedia admins become just one faction among many.

As for the final form of the idea, Resartus, the best summary of it is found in this post (which is well worth reading in its entirety):

The idea of Resartus…is to build a general-purpose site for answering a variety of large, controversial questions. A smart person should be able to visit Resartus and decide, with a minimum of effort, who is right about AGW or human biodiversity or peak oil or the Kennedy assassination or evolution or string theory or 9/11 or the Civil War or…

To build a credible truth machine, it’s important to generate true negatives as well as true positives. For example, I favor the conventional wisdom on evolution and 9/11. On peak oil and the Kennedys, I simply don’t know enough to decide…

The easiest way to describe the problem of Resartus is to describe it as a crowdsourced trial. Indeed, any process that can determine the truth or falsity of AGW, etc., should be a process powerful enough to determine criminal guilt or innocence… A trial is not a blog, nor is it a discussion board. One of the main flaws of Climate Audit is that it does not provide a way for AGW skeptics and believers to place each others’ arguments and evidence side by side, making it as easy as possible for neutral third parties to evaluate who is right…

In the evolution world, the talk.origins index to creationist claims has probably come the closest to setting out a structured argument for evolution, in which every possible creationist argument is listed and refuted. However, a real trial is adversarial. The prosecutor does not get to make the defense lawyer’s arguments.

On Resartus, the way this would work is that the creationist community itself would be asked to list its claims, and edit them collectively, producing the best possible statement of the creationist case. Not showing up should not provide an advantage, so evolutionists should be able to add and refute their own creationist claims. Creationists should in turn be able to respond to their responses, and so ad infinitum, until both sides feel they have said their piece… As a matter of fact, as someone who’s served on a jury, I feel that such an argument tree would be far more useful than verbal lectures from the competing attorneys.

And if these structures were available on one site for a wide variety of controversial issues, it would be very, very easy for any smart young person with a few hours to spare to see what the pattern of truth and error, and its inevitable political associations, started to look like. It certainly will not be easy to construct a nexus of more reliable judgments than the university system itself, but at some point someone will do it. And I think the results will be devastating.

If these ideas intrigue you, you might want to seek out the original blogposts with comments when the Wayback Machine comes back online. One thing we learn from them is that some UR readers did try to put the ideas into practice, building two sites (Resartus and Thiblo) that are now dead and gone. Other alt-Wikipedias (such as Infogalactic) have been longer-lived, but are unlikely to ever dethrone La Wik even among dissidents. The basic idea has merit, but it befits us to ask ourselves why no-one has yet been able to make it work.

My suspicion is that it is just too ambitious – or more precisely, too impatient in its ambitions. Just as no woman can give birth to an adult, or even a toddler, no man or group of men can bring a brainchild into being in its final form.¹⁰ Before a revisionist wiki can hope to resolve major scientific and historical controversies, or cope with an influx of squabbling ideological hordes, it must survive a period of early organic growth after which intelligent contributors may be assured that they are not chucking their time and energy into a desert or sewer.

So let us imagine a more modest fifth incarnation of this idea, which we shall call Dissipedia.¹¹ Dissipedia would contain, as if in embryo, all the ultimate aspirations of Uberfact-Revipedia-Resartus. But its sole initial aim would be to survive infancy, by providing an immediately useful truth service to dissidents.

In the first stage of the project, it would merely aim to be a one-stop shop for all the information relevant to dissidents – the scientific hatefacts, the fake anti-white and anti-male statistics, the historical controversies, the travesties of justice and instances of academedia duplicity, all of which are ignored or played down in official sources and scattered across an underground archipelago of dissident blogs.¹² Once this information had been salvaged, it could be subjected to open disputation along the lines of the ‘Uberfact’ model, to purge it of accumulated errors and propaganda. Nazi russky incel trolls could use Dissipedia as a factual resource, and curious normies could be pointed toward it without much fear of their drilling down the rabbit-hole and falling off the flat earth.

In its early days, the site might include just two pages on any given subject: a bog-standard Wikipedia account representing the regime consensus, and an alternative one representing the ‘most reasonable’ dissident view. Factionalism would develop naturally from disputes over this alternative (for example, Moldbug names global warming theory as an example of Cathedral falsity, but I know one or two in the dissident camp who would be interested in defending it). Wider use of the site would eventually open it up to all factions and sundry – including its leftist critics, who would be split between engaging with its ideas and calling for its censorship.

Only at this point, with Dissipedia already a strong horse boasting plenty of engagement and authority, could the cart of Wikipedia be put behind it (as per the Revipedia-Resartus model). And only then could we think of pitching the site to the majority of internet users, as something that offers all the virtues of Wikipedia without the Pravdaisms on controversial issues. Try to do things the other way around, and we will risk choking on something too big for us to chew.

The Fall of the (Ivory) Tower

The Bazaar Model of the Antiversity

Now let us move onto the Antiversity itself – or at least whatever we can glean about it from the preliminary discussion in Part 9d of the Gentle Introduction. By this time Moldbug has already told us that it has to spread seditious truths, that it has to be “always right and never wrong”, and that it has to wrest the hearts and minds of good and smart people from the Cathedral.

Here he has some more intriguing things to say:

To begin the Second Step, the First Step must be complete. When the First Step is complete, the Antiversity exists, and it is not a baby, either. It has come together as a genuine institution. It is a substantial institution—perhaps not with as many contributors as Wikipedia has today, but in that ballpark…

But the Antiversity is not just limited to just existing. It can attack. It should attack. It will attack. How does it attack? The Antiversity attacks USG by studying it.

USG has never received anything like an independent historical audit, let alone the brutal proctoscopy to which the Antiversity will subject it. USG is, of course, part of history; the Antiversity cannot study history without it. So it will eventually be asking the questions: what the hell happened? And why? How, for instance, did Washington take over the world? And why?…

Washingtology is an applied discipline, like archaeology. Its mission is simply to study the real Washington. This mission requires no engagement with any of USG’s PR arms. Washingtology is not journalism. It is the study of what Washington is and does—never what it says. Unless that speech is in some sense an action…

What does the Antiversity do when it proctoscopes USG? For every agency, unit, or acronym within USG, it creates a knowledge base. It knows, more or less, what the acronym does, who works for it, what its budget is, etc. It understands the acronym’s bureaucratic purpose, decodes its public emissions, identifies its friends in Congress, etc., etc., etc….

Moreover, the Antiversity is not at all limited to the study of USG proper. It can study the entire Extended USG—University, Press, NGOs, contractors, and all others controlling or controlled by USG. This opens up a remarkable number of tempting targets. For instance, every working journalist and every working professor deserves his or her own dossier at the Antiversity. No, this is not even slightly creepy. When you accept the responsibility of informing the public, you accept the public’s right to study you and your work.

USG is a huge creature. Almost no one knows anything about it. Washingtology is a vast task of collecting, assimilating, and selecting information about this beast. As always in history, the end product is a story: what is it? What is it doing? What has it done in the past? What is it likely to do in the future?

This practical ‘statology’ (which, again, was being tried by others in the heyday of UR but seems to have largely fizzled out) would stand to conspiracy theorizing as scientific enquiry stands to peasant superstition. That is to say – instead of trying to reduce the Broad State to some cabal or conspiracy or supervillain that can be grokked and shouted about by a mob, it would resist all such ‘jumping to conclusions’ and aim to build up a full description of its complexity. The irony, of course, is that such honest description would be far more devastating than any amount of condemnation. Imagine being able to browse a sprawling online map of institutions and apparatchiks and lines of influence, each node lovingly annotated with the line of ‘work’ in which it is engaged and the approximate amount that it costs us.

Not all of this would require ‘insider knowledge’. The online dissident is constantly subjected to tides of ‘outrage porn’ – anti-white attacks, fape-accusations, speechcrimes and hategoatings and travesties of ‘social justice’, the overall effect of which is to maintain the state of impotent reactive anger that characterizes the politicoomer. But let us imagine an Antiversity site aimed at building a comprehensive account of the Law of Rules – the web of informal prohibition and selective enforcement by which the Broad State privileges its clients and punishes its scapegoats. All these cases would have to be fed into it, evaluated properly, and weighed against opposite instances – in short, they would be put to a constructive purpose.

Why not write a detailed descriptive constitution of the democratist total state, as Aristotle and his students did for ancient Greek city-states? Why not a descriptive political map of the world, distinguishing Western bloc satrapies from actual independent states, and delineating the intra-imperial fiefdoms of ‘Bluegov’ and ‘Redgov’ (a.k.a. the Anti-Church and World Unpire)? The watchword is ‘descriptive’: we should not be too enamoured of any theory, and it should go without saying that the Shit Midas of propaganda must be kept at bay. Ideally we want to get to a stage in which Antiversity material is used on the quiet by state-employed analysts, because it is simply more accurate (and if it gets used for malign purposes, then that too must be accepted, because any real truth shines on the just and unjust alike).¹³

However, once you have described the bloated machinery of the total state, it is only natural to wonder how human society ever functioned without it – and whether it might do so again, and how it might do so again (either here and now, after a regime change, or in a not-so-distant future in which humanity no longer has the resources to run a perpetual-production engine with a luxury ruling class). This question, too, the Antiversity must try to answer.

It is a sad fact that most dissident rightists, once you scratch the surface, turn out to believe in democratist mythology more deeply than regime leftists. Most of the time they are content to push ordinary people with ‘outrage porn’, and pull them with wish-list manifestos, in the hope that they will (any day now!) ‘wake up’ and somehow sort everything out for themselves. But if there is no plan for a new order in theory, then there is nothing for dissident power-holders to convert to and try to put into practice, and thus there is no point in pushing or pulling the rank-and-file one way or the other. No-one (even at UR) seemed enthused by Yarvin’s techno-absolutism other than Yarvin himself, but he is one of the few who seems to have grasped this point and made a start at laying out a theory.

But let us assume (if only for the sake of argument) that the formal sovereignty of a monarch would be no match for the authority of the clerisy. Let us assume that this would continue to work upon the corporate managers running the new state, until they had become the same old expansionist bureaucracy (assuming that they were ever anything other than this). Let us also assume that there would be no way to run a total state without some ideology of mass deception, because the subjects locked in the Machine would themselves demand the anaesthesia of a Matrix.

Let us assume, in short, that Moldbug’s proposals do not go far enough, and that the power of the clerisy cannot be broken except by devolving back to society some of the many powers usurped from it by the administrative state. The challenge for the Antiversity would be to figure out how this could be done under modern conditions. And even if society could be run with most of the bureaucracy abolished, there is the small matter that the shitizens of a total state are habituated to passive dependence, and would also have to ‘become worthy’ of autonomy. This would involve learning certain practical skills, which the Antiversity would have to teach them – becoming in the process anything but an intellectual ivory tower.

Admittedly, by this point I have stretched the definition of ‘Antiversity’ far beyond Yarvin’s original vision. And that brings me to another Moldbuggian heresy: that the ideal Antiversity should not be a single centralized institution, “always right and never wrong”. Centralization would render it much more vulnerable to lawfare, convergence, implosion, and almost other threats; and the pursuit of a perfect track record would tempt it to avoid learning from honestly admitted mistakes.

The reason why Yarvin insisted on centralization is that authority tends to concentrate within the walls of Cathedrals, while leaking through the sides of Bazaars. Yet this is not an insurmountable problem. The Protestants did not need a single institution, and nor did the humanists need to combine their learned societies, in order to take authority from the Catholic Church. Authority can accrue to an ideology or intellectual discipline (as with Marxism in its heyday), which in this case would be ‘statology’ and political honesty in general. It might even accrue to a Bazaar, as long as this is acknowledged to be a ‘black market’ where buyers must beware, and the vendors involved do not make the mistake of trying not to ‘countersignal’ each other.¹⁴

The Antiversity should aspire to more than this. But there is no reason why it should not work in much the same way as Revipedia, by replicating the Bazaar model at a higher level of quality control. One imagines that it would begin with a set of loosely affiliated sites, each working on a separate project, all held together by a common ethos of dissidence without politics. All information would be shared openly, so that in the event that one site gets compromised or shut down or derailed, others can carry on the project with which it was tasked. Of course the main threat in this decentralized scenario would come from the potential of bad actors (witting or otherwise) to poison the pipes with junk information – which is why the Prerequisite and Revipedia are so essential.

Conclusion: Against Soft Dissidence

In this post, I have tried to explain why the imperative to take authority was miscommunicated and misunderstood at UR, and thus largely forgotten thereafter. I have dusted off two of Yarvin’s original ideas, Revipedia and the Antiversity, and tried to reiterate them in forms that do not seem entirely beyond the capabilities of current-year dissidents. Yet there is a hole in my argument, because I have attempted no answer to the question of why Yarvin has not once revisited these ideas since returning to the dissident internet.

Ultimately, no-one can answer this question but Curtis Yarvin (and he’s welcome to come to my obscure poetry blog and do so, though I won’t keep the lanterns burning). I cannot read the man’s mind! But if I had to guess, I would say that he has not revisited the ideas because he senses that the dissident right is not capable of realizing them.

Perhaps Yarvin thought of his blog in much the same way as I like to think of this one¹⁵ – that is, as a rough and haphazard beginning to something that others would carry to greater heights of quality. But UR turned out to be the heights, if not the very peak. It was not all downhill from there, and some neoreactionary (NRx) bloggers would go on to write essays that equalled or surpassed Moldbug. But my impression of NRx as a whole after UR closed its doors is that it experienced a decline in quality – first degrading into sentimental Habsburg-jawing about tradcath monarchy, and finally being absorbed into the national-populist alt-right during the rise of Trump.

The first error of NRx was in failing to orient itself towards a project, such as those we have discussed here. This caused it to become directionless, which opened the way to the second and more fatal error, its dog-to-vomit return to right-wing politics. Since the Trump balloon popped, and the dissident right salvaged itself from the trainwreck of the alt-right, NRxish thinking has become mainstream within it – but in the process it has lost all coherency. No true Moldbuggers would behave as dissident rightists do today, beta-orbiting the con party and getting their hopes up whenever it makes some empty rhetorical concession. As Moldbug used to say, when you mix your wine with sewage, all you end up with is sewage.

But let us instead think of the dissident right as gold mixed with dross. It will not separate of its own accord, yet it must be separated, in order to be refined and concentrated. It was the groundbreaking impact of UR that separated neoreaction from radcon dead-ends like libertarianism and nationalism; but nothing that Yarvin or anyone else might write today could possibly equal that impact. Is there anything else that could do the trick?

Well, there is one thing looming on the horizon: the Trump balloon, reflated for the third and almost certainly the final time. One possibility is that it will be shot down (interpret as you will); but the optimal strategy for the Broad State would be to usher it into the office of ceremonial archon, in the knowledge that it poses no real threat. Although we should never assume those in charge to be immune to the propaganda with which they have poisoned the rest of society, one senses a quiet detachment on their part from the horde of leftoid nitwits still squawking about fascist dictatorship. They seem more or less ready to anoint Trump as Reagan II, and let him make amends for the upset he caused in 2016 by chasing the car and unexpectedly catching it.

What this means is that, one way or another, the hopes that have been invested in Trump ever since then seem destined at last to evaporate (unless, of course, he is hiding his own reactionary master plan up his sleeve). This of course will not prevent the majority of dissident rightists from moving on to the next cope. But those who remember UR – and Yarvin’s warnings against conservatism, and how rashly these warnings were disregarded in 2016 – may decide that they have had quite enough Shitdonnay, and are ready to split off from the wider movement and go their own way. These would not have a hope of entertaining political ambitions, but the alternative outlined at UR and here would be waiting for them.

They might abandon the ‘dissident’ label, or else qualify it by introducing a distinction between soft and hard dissidents: all those who compromise with conservatism, clerical democratism, and PAP (politics-activism-propaganda), versus all those who reject them on principle. Soft dissidence is the path of least resistance: the continuation of a failed strategy that has become morbidly habituated and guard-railed with terror of all else, like a ship of fools slowly sinking in an ocean of lies. But as long as a smaller boat could be detached (cordially or otherwise), it would become capable of renewed movement, and might hope again to find its way to land. That is to say, it might hope again to become worthy.

That is what I’ll be hoping for on 5th November, when all good dissidents in Airstrip One burn the current Parliament in effigy (do you celebrate holidays too, anon?); and if you’re an Amerikaner who would rather voot, just this once, don’t let me or Moldbug or Mean Old Mr. Reality put you off. Let’s smoke the whole pack of cigs down to the stubs, see this thing through to the end – and keep our fingers crossed.

1. This link is to the new version of UR, which is easier on the eyes than the original blog, but preserves none of the comments (which were often perceptive and thoughtful, and on some occasions superior to Yarvin’s posts). The posts with comments have been deleted from the original site, but you can still find them by copying the URLs into the Wayback Machine.

2. Although I do find these ideas questionable, they are a lot more debate-worthy than was insinuated by the rectum-breathing journalist who wrote that hit-piece on “mouth-breathing Machiavellis”. You can judge for yourself by browsing the relevant posts on UR – starting perhaps with this one, this one, and this one, the latter two serving to demonstrate that neither Yarvin nor his commenters were unaware of the problems. The gist of ‘neocameralism’ is that a government is just a corporation and ought to be run like one, and the main problem with it is that a corporation is artificially focused on economic efficiency in a way that a sovereign government cannot be.

3. Do please excuse the flurry of links to longwinded essays, but it’s hard to know where to start with UR and I may as well make it easier.

4. In Yarvin’s defence, passivism might be suitably humbling for the sort of dissident internet writer who thinks of himself as a temporarily-embarrassed warrior aristocrat. But it connotes a certain ‘playing possum’ in order to avoid danger, and Yarvin seems to have gone through a phase of thinking that purely intellectual critics of the regime can somehow escape the punishments meted out to activists. At the end of a classic essay posted late in the life of UR, he writes something that seems very naive in hindsight:

And if you can’t [avoid a fight with the lynch mob], don’t be defensive. Attack. If possible, attack in depth and preemptively. (What do you think I’m doing here?) One of the things that this evil machine is capable of, for example, is covering up hatefacts—realities that embarrass it or contradict its narrative. Your goal in attacking it is to embarrass and contradict it, creating a counter-narrative that it cannot incorporate into its own entertainment product. If you succeed, you will be covered up as well—which is exactly what you want. So the purpose of your attack is not to draw attention, but to avoid attention.

Of course, the mass media has no such need to cover up a blog like UR, because not one in a thousand of its slop-consumers would bother to read it before forming a negative opinion and not one in ten thousand would do so with diligence and charity. By the next essay, the last major post published at UR, Yarvin has been ‘called out’ by the media and a vile Blue Guard in his comments is threatening to physically disfigure him. I think we can do away with the notion that prudent dissent does not require the virtue of courage.

5. Yarvin proposes getting the Brahmins onside by paying them not to work, but this could be no less disastrous a compromise than the Samnite decision to walk the defeated Romans under the yoke. The subjects (who ought to be the natural allies of the new state) would be forced to support the old ruling class, who would have plenty of time and security to scheme and write and rebuild their authority, but would have been collectively humiliated by the admission that they are more use to society as parasites than as parasitoids. The idea could be made to work, I think, but only by buying off far fewer people with far more riches.

6. At this point we could mention also post-Moldbuggian ‘neoabsolutism’ (see e.g. Nemesis, C.A. Bond), in which religious and intellectual authority is straightforwardly reduced to power. This school of thought was by no means devoid of insight, but ultimately it degraded Moldbuggery by ironing out its contradictions and paradoxes, much as Nietzsche degraded Schopenhauer’s philosophy by ironing out the concept of denial of the will.

7. I am willing to concede that it sometimes works the other way: that the craziest redpill-overdosers in the dissident right are often restrained only by the fear of running too far afield of mass opinion. But this is a kind of artificial crutch on which we should be loath to lean too often, and in any case it is being swept out from under us by the normalization of conspiracy theories among boomers (up to and including literal flat-earthism).

8. Note that I say ‘truth’, not ‘authority’; it should never be forgotten that the one is the root of the other, at least for us dissidents, who cannot hope to bluff and coast our way.

9. Yarvin makes some ambiguous comments on voting in his essay on passivism, but he speaks against it elsewhere, and in any case the true dissident position is not in doubt. The ceremonialized election system, as the engine of a popular sovereignty that has been disconnected from power, remains an important locus of authority – in some ways, much like the ceremonialized emperor of Japan before the Meiji Restoration. As long as most people vote for the ‘lesser of two evils’, and the depredations of one Broad State faction create demand for the other, the system is set up to generate perpetual consent-of-the-governed. If you doubt the efficacy of this system, try giving three reasons for supporting conservatives that do not involve fear and hatred of progressives, or vice versa.

The optimal strategy for the dissident movement would be to repurpose the ritual of voting, so that anyone who votes is understood to be a supporter of the regime whereas anyone who dissents from it abstains on principle. This would leave the regime in power while eating away at its authority, and might later be developed into some sort of popular referendum on abolishing it altogether. In this, the much-bemoaned ‘popular apathy’ that so frustrates activists could be our greatest ally, but of course most dissidents would rather dream of caparisoned unicorns than ride the mules that are actually available to them.

10. Against this, however, we should note Yarvin’s warning that social networks tend to peak early and decline over time. He was of course thinking of the infamous Eternal September.

11. I choose the name solely for the purpose of distinguishing my take on the idea from Moldbug’s. My preference is for the name Revipedia (if only because God only knows what the word dissident will be associated with after the activists have had another larprising).

12. Due to increasing censorship and the legal troubles of the Internet Archive, much of this information is in danger of vanishing from the internet or at least becoming less accessible. Whatever you think of the quality-control issue, the dissident right must sooner or later salvage its sinking treasures, and we might as well build Revipedia while we are at it.

13. Given that the Broad State clerisy constitutes a ‘tribe’ in its own right (perhaps amounting to some 10% of the population of any society subject to a democratist regime), another area of study would be its culture, mythology and conceptual vocabulary. This deserves more serious attention than has hitherto been turned on it in satire and polemic.

14. There is a strong case to be made against ever trying to abolish the Bazaar model and the caveat emptor principle. This is that, even if a perfect truth machine could be created, it would only give rise to a new breed of smug midwits outsourcing all their opinions to it without ever exercising common sense. And were the truth machine to fall into their hands, it would simply degrade back into the modern mass media.

15. I refer, of course, to the main poetic project of this blog, not my occasional posts on the state of the dissident right.