I agree with the approach and think it is our best chance in the current regime. It just feels so beyond my ability. I am a working stiff ergo have not devoted deep study to academic topics. I have a solid broad knowledge but nothing deeply specific that I would feel confident putting in an encyclopedia. To be frank, I am an Indian with no Chief to direct my knowledge, as limited as it is.
It's beyond my ability as well, but many hands make light work. The individuals who got Wikipedia off the ground, like Larry Sanger (who hates what it turned into) could not have got together a fraction of its content between themselves.
All Revipedia would need are a few people who are trustworthy, tech-savvy, not excessively committed to some ideological hobbyhorse, possessed of a temporary abundance of free time, and living in non-repressive jurisdictions (the US is a good one right now, but won't necessarily always be). The weaponized autism of the dissident internet would do the rest. Tbh I have no idea why Curtis Yarvin isn't doing it, since he's the one who came up with it.
I remember reading about the antiversity and mostly resigining it to the moldbug good idea fairy box. I think this is because the difference between the "campaining, journalism, and propaganda" that is prohibited and the "speaking the truth" that is suggested wasnt really clear. (And this is still present to some extent with your explanation. The Antiversity you describe would for example still be "pushing outrage porn" - it just wouldnt be the only thing it does.)
Also, UR was in the beginning primarily for libertarians disappointed with failure. Of all the factions of the right, libertarianism was and is the closest to having an Antiversity. It has professors at conventional universities making its case, think tanks that do more than wordcelling, and a realtively coherent programm of what to replace the status quo with. Non of this helped them. Moldbug largely accepted the body of facts they produced, his more absolutists views are outgrowths of it, so noone thought "Well, itll work if we try it with the True Ideology", because it didnt seem like the old attempts were even mistaken.
Good points. Let me say first of all that I don't think the libertarians (broadly defined) were entirely on the wrong track. They produced or made available a lot of high-quality material, they landed some hits on the 'statist' hydra (from which it came back stronger) and they made the most inroads among the sort of people Yarvin wanted to convert. We could see much of UR as an attempt to correct that project.
One way in which it did so is by trying to lay out practically workable plans, instead of constructing highly idealistic arguments from chains of logical, legal or moral reasoning. An effective 'Antiversity' would have to do the same and better, and this is what I meant when I said (perhaps unclearly) that its theories should not be "larped or musterbated" but made fit and ready to put into practice. Then there is the Prerequisite and the need to detach from conservatism, which has long been able to steal the rhetoric of libertarianism while tarnishing it by association (thus helping to convince many young radical rightists that fascism was based and liberty was fake and ghey, until the Covidiocy put a stop to that). Without getting too arcane on the definition of truth, when you think you are embroiled in a partisan struggle within a regime or a popular uprising to take power, you become incapable of assessing the people and regime from a detached standpoint.
Another problem is that libertarianism became too narrowly fixated on economics and legal regulation, which Moldbug also tried to correct by adopting a wider reactionary worldview (which opens out a lot wider when you read that Carlsbad summary of Haller). You see the same tendency to fixation in other rightist ideologies, and it seems to be caused by adaptation to political compromise and sloganeering (e.g. many nationalists just want a state full of white people, trad moralists just want to ban porn or abortion or whatever without changing the wider society, and no doubt neo-monarchism could end up going the same way). Sean Gabb often used to deplore the libertarian obsession with economics, alienation from the rest of the right, and lack of interest in arts and culture. Although it didn't get mentioned here, the last of these ought to be addressed in the Antiversity-Bazaar as well.
>One way in which it did so is by trying to lay out practically workable plans, instead of constructing highly idealistic arguments from chains of logical, legal or moral reasoning.
What I mean is that versions of the for-profit state idea had definitely been around before, and the techno-absolutist version doesnt seem particularly more realistic then them - libertarians had good wonks already. What was new in Moldbug was that he explained media/academic bias in terms of entrenchement rather than human nature, without going full conspiracy nut. But it seems like youre saying the conclusion from that is just to go down the path the libertarians did already - only now with a theory of why. Basically, I havent understood what you are supposed to do differently, that will make you succeed where libertarianism failed.
The point about the wider worldview seems generally correct. There has been an earlier attempt at that too in paleolibertarianism, but that was largely separate from the antiversity and could propably be done better. Will read the Haller summaries. I found that blog before but apparently not the right entry point. (Interestingly enough, I did make a start reading Haller before that, but he is badly in need of summary.)
Failure is the story of the right, but I would say we are not going down the same path as the libertarians as long as we 1) refuse from the outset to be co-opted by conservatism and undersell authority for power, and 2) lay out a complete alternative, necessarily at first in theory, as did the liberals when they started redefining all states through the prism of Roman republicanism and social contract theory. Stuff like the techno-absolutism doesn't really enter into my thinking, save perhaps as a starting-point, because as you say that is where Moldbug most resembles libertarian wonkery.
I feel I am the only oldtime UR-reader that took the obvious step of moving to an absolute monarchy and working for its government. Teaches you quite a bit on how monarchical government actually works. I feel the greatest weakness of the UR-crowd is that they are satisfied which some cherry-picked anecdotes on absolutism in Europe, and 5-10 paragraphs on Singapore and Dubai to think they know and understand monarchism and spend most of their time thinking about abstract game theory, monetary systems, esotericism and aesthetics.
The greatest neo-reactionary moment of all time is currently happening at the moment, and it’s called Vision 2030. Hundreds of European architects, engineers, consultants, etc, are working on new cities, wonders of construction, industrial clusters and a modernist state rooted in tradition. The aesthetic is a conscious mix of the vernacular and the high-tech, millions get poured in a revival of carpentry, weaving, traditional music, etc.
If you want to contribute to reaction, get out of internet fantasyland and book a flight to Riyadh.
Good on you for upping sticks and learning from practical experience. Certainly the abstract system-engineering of NRx always made for a weird contrast with the advocacy of personal governance.
I did live in China for a while (which is not Moldbug's ideal, but has some similarities with it, such as the combination of personal freedom with suppression of politics and activism), and that helped dissolve some of my faith in democratism. And when that state ended up outdoing the Western bloc in bureaucratic lunacy and inertia over Covid, that helped me dissolve some faith in Moldbuggery as well.
It's funny that throughout UR he barely mentions China, and then decided to explicitly identify China as a beta version of his ideal government* precisely at the time it started engaging in public self-sabotage. Germaphobia is a terrible thing.
* Have you ever considered that if you own some consumer tat, it was most likely 'made by a monarchy *in* a monarchy' 🤯
Well, it has certainly moved closer to one-man leadership, as evidenced e.g. by Xi Jinping's being able to throw a former leader out of a public meeting like some drunken uncle. But that just meant Xi's prestige stuck to the stupid Zero Covid policy, and perhaps those around him were able to control his perceptions so that he actually thought it reflected well on China.
Doesn't bode too well for neo-monarchism, given that Yarvin has quietly dropped the sovereign profit-incentive stuff that was so criticized by Szabo etc. at UR, and seems to be relying mainly on the formal powers of the monarch to restrain administrative overreach. That's not gonna work if the bureaucracy (or 'management') is bloated and intrusive enough to police respiratory viruses.
Love the emphasis on the distinction between power and authority. But perhaps Truth is too broad of a concept. It seems we are particularly interested in a certain subset of ideas that grant authority.
What truth is this? What about non-truths?
It seems like we need a biological science of which ideas are relevant to authority, how they spread, what the population of them looks like (ie who believes them and how do they spread).
Although, I suppose a study of USG might be a study of power, not authority…
I know it's not quite what you're proposing, but Moldbug had some thoughts about the mutation and spread of ideas (based on Richard Dawkins' meme-gene analogy) from religious to political forms in the context of the modern state:
Arguably, the idea-genealogy is much less crucial than the modern (absolutist-liberal) state itself, which is the artificial god to which the ideas stand merely as so much 'theology'. It's K.L. von Haller (book linked in the footnotes) who pulls that apart, and he also has an account of the conversion of 18th-century Europe to revolutionary ideas in which the Christian admixture is totally absent. Once again, though, we see the revolutionaries first taking intellectual authority before transposing their theories onto political power, and once again we see barely any resistance to this on the part of power-holders until most of the damage is done.
Thank you, that is a very excellent and relevant post. But there are two things you said that really caused me to pause, and I was hoping I could get a bit of elaboration:
1. "the idea-genealogy is much less crucial than the modern (absolutist-liberal) state itself, which is the artificial god to which the ideas stand merely as so much 'theology'"
This is interesting to me because I am not sure how you can separate the theology and the state. the state itself is really nothing more than a meme. an interesting case is that of cryptocurrency. one of the great realizations of crypto was that money is just a meme. so a new meme emerged and viola! it becomes actual money -- backed by nothing!! the state itself is like this. like money it exists because many, many people believe it exists but if people stopped believing it would cease to exist because it is really a meme. However, I do believe that there are "theological" aspects that may be somewhat ancillary to belief in the state itself.
In any case, how do you distinguish between a meme-like god and a "theology"?
2. " he also has an account of the conversion of 18th-century Europe to revolutionary ideas in which the Christian admixture is totally absent."
M has describes the elements he things show an evolution from Christianity: "fair distribution of goods, the futility of violence, the universal brotherhood of man, and the reification of community. These might be labeled as the themes of Rawlsianism, pacifism, fraternism and communalism."
I personally don't think these are unique to Christianity, but let's run with it for a momeny. Were these ideas completely absent from KLVH's revolutionary ideology?
1) Well, if you like, the 'hard meme' of the modern state is responsible for the various 'soft memes' that infect it and spread through it – or to put it in Yarvin's terms, that it stands to them as the mosquito to malaria. Yet his own ideal model strongly resembles the early iteration of that state by Hobbes; and between UR and Gray Mirror he seems to have quietly abandoned most of the sovcorp-for-profit stuff that was supposed to keep it from becoming reinfected straight away. Yet he is obviously right about the 'red-giant' tendency, in which that state swells up to get around any blocks placed on it (e.g. by importing people to dominate the electoral system), so we are faced with the difficult task of rethinking it from the ground up.
(We could go further, and speculate that the whole memeplex results more or less inevitably from the collapse of the traditional spiritual function of the priesthood, which has pushed that class down into the power-holding position traditionally occupied by men of arms. This would make it dependent for survival upon the cult of power and the artificial god, and we would have real trouble converting most of that class to the authority of anything else.)
2) These are indeed broad themes, and I can't really defend "totally absent" for anything in European moral tradition, but there is a difference. In the Anglo world, these ideas are found under a Christian guise until quite recently in history (Moldbug had a eureka moment on this when he discovered that 1942 Time article calling for a "super-protestant" world order). Whereas in Haller's Continental account, they instead piggyback on humanism and the Enlightenment and take an anti-Christian form from the outset (although once again we see the same pattern in which they first knock out the authority of the Church and then develop political designs). I think Moldbug wrote something about the revolutionary tradition splitting into two strands (maybe in one of the Universalism posts before the Dawkins series), but didn't develop it much thereafter. It might've saved a lot of tiresome debates on whether he was trying to develop some sort of memetic group evolutionary strategy theory for Christians instead of Jews, though most of those those inclined to that sort of thing didn't bother to read UR in the first place.
I agree with the approach and think it is our best chance in the current regime. It just feels so beyond my ability. I am a working stiff ergo have not devoted deep study to academic topics. I have a solid broad knowledge but nothing deeply specific that I would feel confident putting in an encyclopedia. To be frank, I am an Indian with no Chief to direct my knowledge, as limited as it is.
It's beyond my ability as well, but many hands make light work. The individuals who got Wikipedia off the ground, like Larry Sanger (who hates what it turned into) could not have got together a fraction of its content between themselves.
All Revipedia would need are a few people who are trustworthy, tech-savvy, not excessively committed to some ideological hobbyhorse, possessed of a temporary abundance of free time, and living in non-repressive jurisdictions (the US is a good one right now, but won't necessarily always be). The weaponized autism of the dissident internet would do the rest. Tbh I have no idea why Curtis Yarvin isn't doing it, since he's the one who came up with it.
It is a real headscratcher
I remember reading about the antiversity and mostly resigining it to the moldbug good idea fairy box. I think this is because the difference between the "campaining, journalism, and propaganda" that is prohibited and the "speaking the truth" that is suggested wasnt really clear. (And this is still present to some extent with your explanation. The Antiversity you describe would for example still be "pushing outrage porn" - it just wouldnt be the only thing it does.)
Also, UR was in the beginning primarily for libertarians disappointed with failure. Of all the factions of the right, libertarianism was and is the closest to having an Antiversity. It has professors at conventional universities making its case, think tanks that do more than wordcelling, and a realtively coherent programm of what to replace the status quo with. Non of this helped them. Moldbug largely accepted the body of facts they produced, his more absolutists views are outgrowths of it, so noone thought "Well, itll work if we try it with the True Ideology", because it didnt seem like the old attempts were even mistaken.
Good points. Let me say first of all that I don't think the libertarians (broadly defined) were entirely on the wrong track. They produced or made available a lot of high-quality material, they landed some hits on the 'statist' hydra (from which it came back stronger) and they made the most inroads among the sort of people Yarvin wanted to convert. We could see much of UR as an attempt to correct that project.
One way in which it did so is by trying to lay out practically workable plans, instead of constructing highly idealistic arguments from chains of logical, legal or moral reasoning. An effective 'Antiversity' would have to do the same and better, and this is what I meant when I said (perhaps unclearly) that its theories should not be "larped or musterbated" but made fit and ready to put into practice. Then there is the Prerequisite and the need to detach from conservatism, which has long been able to steal the rhetoric of libertarianism while tarnishing it by association (thus helping to convince many young radical rightists that fascism was based and liberty was fake and ghey, until the Covidiocy put a stop to that). Without getting too arcane on the definition of truth, when you think you are embroiled in a partisan struggle within a regime or a popular uprising to take power, you become incapable of assessing the people and regime from a detached standpoint.
Another problem is that libertarianism became too narrowly fixated on economics and legal regulation, which Moldbug also tried to correct by adopting a wider reactionary worldview (which opens out a lot wider when you read that Carlsbad summary of Haller). You see the same tendency to fixation in other rightist ideologies, and it seems to be caused by adaptation to political compromise and sloganeering (e.g. many nationalists just want a state full of white people, trad moralists just want to ban porn or abortion or whatever without changing the wider society, and no doubt neo-monarchism could end up going the same way). Sean Gabb often used to deplore the libertarian obsession with economics, alienation from the rest of the right, and lack of interest in arts and culture. Although it didn't get mentioned here, the last of these ought to be addressed in the Antiversity-Bazaar as well.
Not sure Im following.
>One way in which it did so is by trying to lay out practically workable plans, instead of constructing highly idealistic arguments from chains of logical, legal or moral reasoning.
What I mean is that versions of the for-profit state idea had definitely been around before, and the techno-absolutist version doesnt seem particularly more realistic then them - libertarians had good wonks already. What was new in Moldbug was that he explained media/academic bias in terms of entrenchement rather than human nature, without going full conspiracy nut. But it seems like youre saying the conclusion from that is just to go down the path the libertarians did already - only now with a theory of why. Basically, I havent understood what you are supposed to do differently, that will make you succeed where libertarianism failed.
The point about the wider worldview seems generally correct. There has been an earlier attempt at that too in paleolibertarianism, but that was largely separate from the antiversity and could propably be done better. Will read the Haller summaries. I found that blog before but apparently not the right entry point. (Interestingly enough, I did make a start reading Haller before that, but he is badly in need of summary.)
Failure is the story of the right, but I would say we are not going down the same path as the libertarians as long as we 1) refuse from the outset to be co-opted by conservatism and undersell authority for power, and 2) lay out a complete alternative, necessarily at first in theory, as did the liberals when they started redefining all states through the prism of Roman republicanism and social contract theory. Stuff like the techno-absolutism doesn't really enter into my thinking, save perhaps as a starting-point, because as you say that is where Moldbug most resembles libertarian wonkery.
I feel I am the only oldtime UR-reader that took the obvious step of moving to an absolute monarchy and working for its government. Teaches you quite a bit on how monarchical government actually works. I feel the greatest weakness of the UR-crowd is that they are satisfied which some cherry-picked anecdotes on absolutism in Europe, and 5-10 paragraphs on Singapore and Dubai to think they know and understand monarchism and spend most of their time thinking about abstract game theory, monetary systems, esotericism and aesthetics.
The greatest neo-reactionary moment of all time is currently happening at the moment, and it’s called Vision 2030. Hundreds of European architects, engineers, consultants, etc, are working on new cities, wonders of construction, industrial clusters and a modernist state rooted in tradition. The aesthetic is a conscious mix of the vernacular and the high-tech, millions get poured in a revival of carpentry, weaving, traditional music, etc.
If you want to contribute to reaction, get out of internet fantasyland and book a flight to Riyadh.
Good on you for upping sticks and learning from practical experience. Certainly the abstract system-engineering of NRx always made for a weird contrast with the advocacy of personal governance.
I did live in China for a while (which is not Moldbug's ideal, but has some similarities with it, such as the combination of personal freedom with suppression of politics and activism), and that helped dissolve some of my faith in democratism. And when that state ended up outdoing the Western bloc in bureaucratic lunacy and inertia over Covid, that helped me dissolve some faith in Moldbuggery as well.
It's funny that throughout UR he barely mentions China, and then decided to explicitly identify China as a beta version of his ideal government* precisely at the time it started engaging in public self-sabotage. Germaphobia is a terrible thing.
* Have you ever considered that if you own some consumer tat, it was most likely 'made by a monarchy *in* a monarchy' 🤯
Well, it has certainly moved closer to one-man leadership, as evidenced e.g. by Xi Jinping's being able to throw a former leader out of a public meeting like some drunken uncle. But that just meant Xi's prestige stuck to the stupid Zero Covid policy, and perhaps those around him were able to control his perceptions so that he actually thought it reflected well on China.
Doesn't bode too well for neo-monarchism, given that Yarvin has quietly dropped the sovereign profit-incentive stuff that was so criticized by Szabo etc. at UR, and seems to be relying mainly on the formal powers of the monarch to restrain administrative overreach. That's not gonna work if the bureaucracy (or 'management') is bloated and intrusive enough to police respiratory viruses.
Love the emphasis on the distinction between power and authority. But perhaps Truth is too broad of a concept. It seems we are particularly interested in a certain subset of ideas that grant authority.
What truth is this? What about non-truths?
It seems like we need a biological science of which ideas are relevant to authority, how they spread, what the population of them looks like (ie who believes them and how do they spread).
Although, I suppose a study of USG might be a study of power, not authority…
I know it's not quite what you're proposing, but Moldbug had some thoughts about the mutation and spread of ideas (based on Richard Dawkins' meme-gene analogy) from religious to political forms in the context of the modern state:
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/
Arguably, the idea-genealogy is much less crucial than the modern (absolutist-liberal) state itself, which is the artificial god to which the ideas stand merely as so much 'theology'. It's K.L. von Haller (book linked in the footnotes) who pulls that apart, and he also has an account of the conversion of 18th-century Europe to revolutionary ideas in which the Christian admixture is totally absent. Once again, though, we see the revolutionaries first taking intellectual authority before transposing their theories onto political power, and once again we see barely any resistance to this on the part of power-holders until most of the damage is done.
Thank you, that is a very excellent and relevant post. But there are two things you said that really caused me to pause, and I was hoping I could get a bit of elaboration:
1. "the idea-genealogy is much less crucial than the modern (absolutist-liberal) state itself, which is the artificial god to which the ideas stand merely as so much 'theology'"
This is interesting to me because I am not sure how you can separate the theology and the state. the state itself is really nothing more than a meme. an interesting case is that of cryptocurrency. one of the great realizations of crypto was that money is just a meme. so a new meme emerged and viola! it becomes actual money -- backed by nothing!! the state itself is like this. like money it exists because many, many people believe it exists but if people stopped believing it would cease to exist because it is really a meme. However, I do believe that there are "theological" aspects that may be somewhat ancillary to belief in the state itself.
In any case, how do you distinguish between a meme-like god and a "theology"?
2. " he also has an account of the conversion of 18th-century Europe to revolutionary ideas in which the Christian admixture is totally absent."
M has describes the elements he things show an evolution from Christianity: "fair distribution of goods, the futility of violence, the universal brotherhood of man, and the reification of community. These might be labeled as the themes of Rawlsianism, pacifism, fraternism and communalism."
I personally don't think these are unique to Christianity, but let's run with it for a momeny. Were these ideas completely absent from KLVH's revolutionary ideology?
1) Well, if you like, the 'hard meme' of the modern state is responsible for the various 'soft memes' that infect it and spread through it – or to put it in Yarvin's terms, that it stands to them as the mosquito to malaria. Yet his own ideal model strongly resembles the early iteration of that state by Hobbes; and between UR and Gray Mirror he seems to have quietly abandoned most of the sovcorp-for-profit stuff that was supposed to keep it from becoming reinfected straight away. Yet he is obviously right about the 'red-giant' tendency, in which that state swells up to get around any blocks placed on it (e.g. by importing people to dominate the electoral system), so we are faced with the difficult task of rethinking it from the ground up.
(We could go further, and speculate that the whole memeplex results more or less inevitably from the collapse of the traditional spiritual function of the priesthood, which has pushed that class down into the power-holding position traditionally occupied by men of arms. This would make it dependent for survival upon the cult of power and the artificial god, and we would have real trouble converting most of that class to the authority of anything else.)
2) These are indeed broad themes, and I can't really defend "totally absent" for anything in European moral tradition, but there is a difference. In the Anglo world, these ideas are found under a Christian guise until quite recently in history (Moldbug had a eureka moment on this when he discovered that 1942 Time article calling for a "super-protestant" world order). Whereas in Haller's Continental account, they instead piggyback on humanism and the Enlightenment and take an anti-Christian form from the outset (although once again we see the same pattern in which they first knock out the authority of the Church and then develop political designs). I think Moldbug wrote something about the revolutionary tradition splitting into two strands (maybe in one of the Universalism posts before the Dawkins series), but didn't develop it much thereafter. It might've saved a lot of tiresome debates on whether he was trying to develop some sort of memetic group evolutionary strategy theory for Christians instead of Jews, though most of those those inclined to that sort of thing didn't bother to read UR in the first place.