Oligarchy is inherently leftist, just as monarchy is inherently rightist

Wednesday, April 5th, 2023

Our problem, Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) explains, is that the world is run by a regime with a long-run structurally leftist bias:

It evolves leftisms. On Mars, the same regime structure would evolve the same ideas. Oligarchy is inherently leftist, just as monarchy is inherently rightist.

[…]

The engineering problem is that when a marketplace of ideas makes final decisions, the marketplace is polluted with power. When the marketplace is polluted with power, its ideas compete not just on their wisdom, but on their ability to generate power—for example, their power to attract (or reject) funding.

This is why leftism always wins: leftism is what generates more power. Leftism always has more energy and more excitement. This is because its ideas generate power—leftist ideas always involve impact on the world. If science is put in charge of science, science will favor ideas which make science more powerful, which will be or become leftist ideas. Leftism at bottom is just the natural and inevitable human urge to matter.

Everything is science, or at least works like science. If diplomats and foreign-policy experts are put in charge of foreign policy, they will want to take over the world. If they can. If we can. Why wouldn’t they? How can isolationism compete in the market for foreign-policy ideas? Isolationism is to foreign-policy jobs as rat-poison is to rats.

Comments

  1. Bruce says:

    “Isolationism is to foreign-policy jobs as rat-poison is to rats.” First good line I’ve read from him. Can’t say I buy the previous paragraphs.

  2. Harry Jones says:

    If those who attained to power were worthy of power, none of this would be much of a problem.

    Power politics is the only kind of politics there ever has been or ever will be. Anything else is a sham.

  3. Dan Kurt says:

    Bruce: “…first good line I’ve read from [Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug)].”

    Yarvin has an IQ of 167. This probably explains his problem in communicating with you.

  4. Jim says:

    That’s pretty rich coming from literally the guy who invented the self-described Martian computer internet and made it structurally oligarchic by immutable design.

  5. Jim says:

    In reality none of this “leftism” theorycelism has any meaning—it’s post-hoc rationalization at best—and the world is run not from the bottom up but from the top down by highly compartmented intelligence agencies, de-jure and de-facto, sometimes conditionally cooperating, oftentimes ruthlessly competing, for primacy.

  6. Jim says:

    But I do like Yarvin and he is very smart, vax-happy nerdoid though he be.

  7. Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

    The idea that ‘only bad people aspire to power’ is, of course, a highly self-serving idea for bad people to spread in popular discourse.

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