A Better Future

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Posts in this series
The Anti-Democracy Project Of John Roberts
The Allies Of The Billionaires

In the first two posts in this series I described the constant onslaught led by the filthy rich against our democracy, and identified groups of people who supported those attacks. In this post, I offer two thoughts about going forward.

We cannot go back

The guidepost of the Biden Administration and the Congressional Democrats was a return to normalcy. They were convinced that Trump was a blemish on the brilliance of the US, a blemish that would come off with some scouring; that it was a nightmare from which voters had awakened. They believed that the US could resume its position as Leader of the Free World, the greatest economy ever, the center of innovation and progress and a beacon of freedom.

They restored an economy devastated by the Covid shutdown and the millions it killed and damaged. They were fairly successful in restoring the faith of our allies in our stability and worthiness to lead.

They were wiped out in the 2022 mid-terms. Harris promised to continue the restoration project. The voters rejected her. The Democratic Party dream of restoring normalcy is dead.

1. We cannot go back because that is not what the majority of us want. Whatever Trump voters want, it isn’t restoration. Non-voters wouldn’t go to the polls to vote for restoration or to vote against Trumpian chaos and destruction. Harris voters were willing to accept restoration, but even among them a large number, perhaps a majority, wanted much more.

2. We cannot go back because Trump has wrecked the institutions and norms we need for restoration. He has gutted agencies devoted to accumulation of soft power around the world, especially USAID. In the process he is potentially responsible for millions of premature deaths.  How do we recover from that?

He attacked our basic research institutions. He made it scary for foreign students to study and do research here. He handed our national health efforts to an ignorant buffoon. He turned the Department of Justice into a stable of third-rate lawyers loyal to himself. We aren’t going to recover from that for a long time.

3. We cannot go back because John Roberts and the Fasces won’t let us. They have wrecked the legal structure of the Administrative State, which sought to replace arbitrary decisions by the President with informed decision-making by independent boards for technical and scientific matters. They have blunted legislative power on purely political grounds. They have formed a protective barrier around the Presidency, so that Trump is effectively beyond the rule of law.

In the process, they have surrendered the the judicial power. Trump is free to do as he sees fit, throwing his tariff tantrums, his prosecutions, his lawsuits, his ICE thugs, and the US military around like a toddler angry at his toys. John Roberts and the Fash Five won’t let District Courts enforce the laws Trump is violating, meaning that the judicial branch is irrelevant.

When our young people think on this, why would they trust the government? How do we persuade them to follow the rules?

4. We cannot go back because no sane national leader would take us seriously. The period of US domination in world affairs is done. There is no going back.

5. We cannot go back because Trump has empowered the stinking worst of us to bully and torment us. They and their vile ideas sit like dead things in the dark poised to spread their deadly poisons.

6. We cannot go back because the filthy rich, the Theists, the Neoliberals, and the Grifters don’t like it and they will figure out how to hold on to as much of their power as they can. Too many weaklings sit in positions of authority, unwilling to protect the democracy that gave them their positions. They are easy prey for the anti-democracy ghouls.

But suppose a Democrat gets elected president, and Democrats take the House and Senate. It’s possible that she would try to rule like Trump, using the powers he asserts and those given him by John Roberts and the Reactionaries. That’s not far-fetched. See this at The Atlantic. Or maybe Roberts and the Revanchists will apply their double-standard to Democratic presidents, leaving the precedents for the next right-wing wannabe dictator.

Where should we go?

I don’t know.

But I do know we need to think about it starting immediately. The Democratic Party has run as the “We aren’t them” party for so long it’s in their DNA. Nothing changes unless we force change.

One possible starting place for a future is Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. They make a great program, and as the pic on the front page shows, they come with Norman Rockwell images. FDR articulated these ideas in his 1941 State of the Union Address, and expanded on them in his 1944 address:

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

These principles are the precise opposite of the program of Trump and the filthy rich.

Changing the future

If we don’t organize and act together, the forces that put us here will try to restore the social structures that benefit them and no one else.  And as Hannah Arendt tells us, participation in the political sphere is one part of what it means to be a full human being. Certainly she participated, as this PBS documentary shows.

There are plenty of people willing to organize against Trump. We also need people to help us see and organize for a better future.

 

 

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The Allies Of the Billionaires

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In this post I offered a brief history of the efforts by the filthy rich to destroy the New Deal. Under Trump those attacks are now aimed at democracy. This post lays out the field of conflict between the filthy rich and normal people. Who are the allies of the filthy rich, and what can we do with that information?

Andrew Mellon stated the program of the billionaires after the 1929 stock market crash:

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.

That’s Trump’s program. In the 1930s, when the attacks began, that program got no traction. The only way the filthy rich could succeed was to find allies who would effectively shield their goals from view. It took a few decades, but they found or created those allies.

It seems to me that there are three groups of collaborators, Theists, Neoliberals, and Grifters. Their motivations are different, and in some ways radically different from the filthy rich, but they all benefit by tagging along with the billionaires.

Theists

There are several groups who teach that the US is a “Christian Nation”, and that it should be a theocracy, or at least that the “laws” of the Bible should govern all Americans, religious or not. Among them are Christian Dominionists, Christian Nationalists, and specific sects. They are supported by groups engaged in lobbying, litigation, and proselytizing. They have their own education structures, including universities and their own media.

There are a number of Christian sects that share some or many of their beliefs. For example, the Catholic Church agrees that all Americans should be governed by their moral teachings about abortion, and that Catholics should be exempt from lnsurance laws that relate to birth control; but retains some sense of the teachings of Jesus on other issues. There are lots of people who agree on specific issues, like equal marriage, and act on them, perhaps by home-schooling, or by supporting theistic lobbying and litigation groups.

The common thread among these groups is the belief that they know the moral truths of the universe, and that the rest of us should/must accept their views. They don’t want anyone reading or thinking anything but what they allow.

Neoliberals

Neoliberas see human beings as homo economicus. They say that human beings have a single goal, maximizing their personal utility. They think that life is a competition for scarce resources, and that the strongest will survive and get the most, and that is just fine. For more, and for a sane alternative, see this post.

Neoliberals fall into two groups. On one side are sellers of goods and services, that is, people who own a business. This group includes investors, the rich who don’t have to work for a living, and the theorists and teachers of this doctrine. The rest of us, the masses, the employees, the consumers, the users, we make up the other side.

The first class has specific goals, mainly getting rid of regulations, and cutting taxes. In this, they agree with the filthy rich. For the rest of us, neoliberalism only offers an explanation of our condition: it’s our fault.

Owner neoliberals differ from theists in two fundamental respects. First, they don’t care what people think or study or theorize about, except for economics. There, they rigidly push their own version, which you studied in Econ 101. Or maybe you learned it in high school, taught from a syllabus prepared by a neoliberal think tank like the Heartland Foundation , which is funded by the Charles G. Koch Foundation and other right-wing operations.

They don’t want you to think clearly about economics, because you will see that they use it to preserve their power, and support the agenda of the filthy rich. They want you to ibelieve that their version of capitalism as foundational to democracy.

One of their tools is distraction. You do things you enjoy, whether it’s shopping, or going to the movies, or playing video games. These are fun and even necessary for a good life. But in excess they keep you from learning and thinking enough to participate in a democracy. You exist solely as a consumer. You work so you can buy entertainment and other stuff.

Expertise only comes with effort, even for the best of us. Here’s an example. At the top of this post is a painting by the American Thomas Kinkade. Take a quick look This painting is typical of the kind of art preferred by sellers of distraction. It doesn’t require anything of the viewer. It oozes with a brain-dead nostalgia, and hides every vestige of the reality of the era it depicts.

Now click through to this painting, Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi, painted in 1610. Look closely at what’s happening Even if you don’t know the story (it’s Daniel 13 in the Catholic Bible ), and even if you don’t know the life history of Artemisia, you can feel the pressing weight of sexual menace. This painting requires attention, and is made more potent with context both of its time, the artist’s experiences, and our me-too age. (Side note: I saw this painting in Paris in May in an exhibit at the Jaquemart André museum. There is also a fairly good copy of Judith Slaying Holofernes,  and the original of Joel and Sisera. And this is a reminder that Wikipedia is a terrific resource and worth a contribution.)

The point here is that owner neoliberals benefit if you limit your thinking to conventional stuff. It’s easier to make and sell profitably. Distraction pacifies you, makes you think you’re living a good life, but hides all other possible ways to live. Those other lives include participating in a functioning democracy.

Worker neoliberals? The billionaires just want you to vote for their candidate, work for them, and buy stuff. People who blame themselves for problems created by the elites don’t demand change. And they keep getting screwed.

Grifters

This is a group of second-rate people who cling to the illusion of competence. There are two main groups here: politicians and their strategists, consultants, and sycophants; and faux intellectuals who swarm in think tanks and even a few universities. Neither group wants you to think clearly about what they are doing.

The politicians want to serve a small club and you aren’t in it. They pretend to serve the median non-thinker in their party, weirdos for the Rs, and centrists for the Ds. Rs fight for the crazies. Ds punch left. Both parties serve their donors first.

The faux intellectuals have all sold out. They surrendered the essence of both the intellectual life and the democratic life, openness to the full implications of life in our society. In exchange, they get money and security. They pretend to provide a principled justification for the policies preferred by their donors, but only the ignorant are fooled.

So?

In any conflict, the first step is to identify the enemy, and to identify those on your side. Then you look for the weak points in the enemy lines. I think this description points to a couple of weaknesses in the alliance against democracy.

1. People who claim to be love liberty don’t want to be ruled by Theists. That includes a lot of neoliberals, both owners and workers. The Theist image of human nature is radically different from that of neoliberals.

2. The interests of owner and worker neoliberals are wildly different. The trick, I think, is to persuade workers that they are entitled to fair treatment as of right, not out of charity.

3. Republican politicians have been pushed so far into lunacy that they are vulnerable to attack from the left by almost any sane politician. Even if Alabama won’t elect a Dem, they should be willing to elect a Republican who won’t hurt them as much as the far-right loon Tommy Tuberville.

4. I don’t think there’s much hope for leaders of the Theists. The combination of self-righteousness and graft makes them impervious to criticism. But that isn’t true of regular people. I think many of them understand the actual teachings of Christianity, and can see where this administration betrays that teaching.

5. In general, I think most of the leaders of the allies are incorrigible. But I also think many followers are reachable, perhaps by shame. I’ll take that up in a later post.

6. What else?

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War And Peace And Trump

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While I was on the road, I read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It’s a novel about the wars between Russia and Napoleon between 1805 and 1812, told in part through the effect on several wealthy Russian families. Tolstoy himself was an aristocrat, and had served for several years in the Russian Army, as had other members of his family. There is also much discussion of his theories of what he calls the science of history.

War and Peace seems to be broadly accurate historically. However, there are a number of differences between Tolstoy’s accounts and the Wikipedia entry. For purposes of this post, accuracy isn’t the crucial point. Let’s look at two  questions Tolstoy raises.

How do people rise to power

It’s apparent from the first two thousand pages that Tolstoy thinks people and specifically historians place too much emphasis on the role of specific individuals in historic affairs. This is usually called the Great Man Theory. In the last chapter of the Second Epilogue he explains his theory of the science of history.

Tolstoy thinks there are deep forces in society that lead to great events. Let’s start with a simple example, a battle such as Austerlitz. The outnumbered French army defeated a larger Russian army. The battle takes place across a wide front.

Tolstoy says that in some places Russian soldiers march towards enemy lines under heavy fire, one turns and runs to safety, others see that and and also run, and that skirmish is lost. In other places a man shouts Huzzah and rushes on, others follow and the skirmish at that site is won. The battle is decided by the sum of such people, responding to the events in front of them and for their own reasons, not because of the Great Man, whether Napoleon or Tsar Alexander I. I think Tolstoy would say that the commands of the generals are a factor, but they’re just one among many, and are rarely decisive.

Tolstoy admires General Kutusov, the Russian, but not because of his brilliant tactics. Kutusov’s strength is his understanding of the spirit of his troops. He knows how his troops will respond to commands in battle. He knows in his heart that the loss at Austerlitz was due to the lack of spirit for the war, which was fought on foreign soil and only indirectly for the benefit of Russia. He knows that the same men will fight desperately to defend their beloved homeland. I’d guess Tolstoy thinks Kutusov himself is barely aware of this strength.

I think this is the way Tolstoy sees the forces moving in societies. For example, how did Napoleon rise from obscurity to leadership? I think Tolstoy would say that social forces arose in individual citizens of France based on their perception of events. As they interact with others, the perceptions of events harden, and the desires predicated on those perceptions become evident. People demand a leader who will answer to their desires. In the case of Napoleon, they got what they wanted.

These processes are unknowable. But historians always ignore the social forces that permit the rise of the Great Man and carry him forward, says Tolstoy. Instead, they attribute all the great results to to the Great Man and exculpate him from all errors and losses.

First lesson

Social forces arise today in the same way as in Tolstoy’s day. People perceive events, share their perceptions (which aren’t necessarily accurate pictures of reality) and the resultant perceptions harden in contact with their friends and their social circles. Almost everyone has to rely on the perceptions of others to understand much of what’s happening, and the selection of trusted people is the paramount determinant of people’s perceptions.

One difference, I think, is that in Tolstoy’s day, the biggest questions were about war. In a war the strength of one’s convictions is tested by willingness to fight and die. The soldier facing fire doesn’t go forward if there isn’t sufficient reason, and the command of the Emperor, or the preacher, or the internet influencer, is not enough.

It’s tough to whip up the same fervor about culture war issues. Take gender-neutral bathrooms. Who cares enough to die? Anyway, potty parity has been an issue for decades. I have receipts. Sooner or later, the actual problems will overwhelm these fake issues.

The Russian resistance

In Tolstoy’s telling, once the French crossed the border into Russia, the entire nation resisted at enormous personal cost. Kutusov was appointed supreme commander. The Russian forces were split. Kutusov took immediate command of one Army, but the other was distant. The French Forces were much larger than the two Russian armies combined.

He refused to give battle until the two Russian armies were joined. That meant falling back to Smolensk. The second army was delayed by a general who wanted to be the supreme leader, so Kutusov was unable to defend Smolensk, and fell back to Borodino where he tried to set up a defensive line. The second army arrived. The spirit of the Russian army was overwhelmingly in favor of killing the French, and Kutusov knew it.

As the French army advanced to the East from Vilnius, first to Smolensk (about 500 Km) and then to Borodino (about 400 Km), the Russian people left the towns and villages with their livestock and horses, burning everything that could be used by the enemy, homes, barns, silage, and storehouses There’s a scene from Smolensk where a fire is set to a huge barn, and a visitor objects. An onlooker tells him that’s the owner with the torch and laughing hysterically. They did this themselves, Tolstoy says. There was no central command, no order from the Tsar or a general or local leader.

This is repeated all the way to Borodino, about 130 Km from Moscow.

There the outnumbered Russian Army fought the French to a standstill, sustaining heavy losses. They did not have the strength to counter-attack. Kutusov moved his army to Moscow, but immediately realized he couldn’t defend the city with his weakened forces. He moved to  Tautino, in the rich provinces southeast of Moscow, where they recovered their strength and gained new troops, horses, and equipment over the next month.

Napoleon entered Moscow unopposed. The vast bulk of the citizens had left, leaving personal property but little food or forage and no horses or livestock for the French. The nearby peasants also left with their livestock, and burned their provender.

The French army, reduced by losses at Borodino, took to looting and drinking, losing their cohesion. Moscow consisted mostly of wood houses and buildings. It began burning almost immediately, either by arson or by accident, and was mostly rubble after four days.

By mid-October it was bitter cold and snowing. The French army left suddenly and in great haste, taking their heavy plunder and many prisoners. They moved back towards Smolensk to the West over the route where everything was burned and barren. They died in horrific numbers. The Russians gave small battles, but mostly just followed and picked off groups of soldiers using guerrilla tactics. Napoleon fled back to Paris, leaving his army to save itself. It didn’t.

Second lesson

Every Russian left ahead of the French, destroying almost all the food and forage. The peasants and serfs nearby did the same. This is how the Russians won. It was a victory by the entire nation. There weren’t any collaborators. No Quislings. No Vichy Government. No Vichy nobles. They all left, and they destroyed the French Army. The people did it on their own with no leader asking or demanding.

Trump is waging war against our democracy. He is aided by a group of anti-democracy self-proclaimed intellectuals, and a host of PR people, Republican Quislings, and the filthy rich with their pig corporations. They have a phalanx of reporters for major media cheering them on and covering up the reality of the assault.

There are ICE thugs in neck gaiters and balaclavas seizing our neighbors off the streets and assaulting protesters. There are other thugs in expensive clothes gutting our institutions. There are collaborators in huge law firms, universities, and other institutions. There are lawyers willing to sacrifice their self-respect and risk loss of their law licenses.

There are too many Vichy Democratic consultants and politicians ready to work with Trump and his voters. There are six anti-democracy members of the Supreme Court, and more in the lower courts.

But there are more of us who are ready to defend our democracy. I am inspired by Tolstoy’s tale of the heroic Russian people.

 

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Yarvin On Trump And His Henchmen

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The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

Yarvin has written several substack posts on Trump and his henchmen since the inauguration. In Barbarians and Mandarins (BM) he reacts to the first six weeks.  In Actually You Shouldn’t Van People (Van) he says it’s a mistake to pick up non-citizens on the street and throw them in vans. He criticizes Trump’s tariff/trade actions here (M1) and here (M2), calling these policies “mercantilism”. He just thinks they’re being done wrong,

There’s a sense of unease in all of them, a sense that things aren’t happening as he expected. That seems to be one aspect of this WaPo piece.

Grading Trump’s administration

BM is about 6K words. My first step was to chop out the repetition, the “jokes”, the snotty remarks about “libs”, and the other irrelevant material. That left me with about 2K words, and I was being generous. He starts by awarding Trump a C-. He says the new administration has two types of people: Barbarians, people who have no experience in DC, and Mandarins who do.

The Bs want to destroy, the Ms want to run things, but neither has the capacity to make the hard decisions about what should be done. Lacking a plan to guide them, they become grifters. Mandarins, he says

… have no strategy: no plan and no endgame. Since action without strategy is ineffective and ineffective action is a grift, the Mandarins are the most convincing grifters of all.

He explains why this is so, perhaps hoping to help them see the Yarvin way.

He approves of Trump’s use of laws and agencies in ways they were not intended

Second, existing infrastructure cannot be relied upon to work or even be controlled. Generally the right first assumption is that it needs to be hacked—made to operate in an unusual way that its designers, its previous operators, or both, did not expect. (The metamorphosis of USDS into DOGE will be the gold standard here for many years.)

I note that this is what Trump and his henchmen have been doing with the tariff law, the Alien Enemy Act, and other laws. Also, courts mostly hold that this is permitted by law and the Constitution.

He uses the assault on government support for science as an example. He says that scientists want power first, and that good science is their secondary goal. The new team, both the Bs and the Ms, are slashing around wildly with no regard to what the new ideology wants.

He says this violates his theory of how kings rule. Slashing funding for scientists makes them angry and makes them hate the new ideology he ascribes to the administration. He says scientists are not happy about the way science funding is managed. The goal should be to make them happy by restructuring that funding. Then they will see that the new king loves and protects them, and they will respond with love. He doesn’t explain how this overcomes their personal demand for power.

Van

In BM, written on March 7, there’s a passing mention of the great work the new administration is doing on the immigration front, but he says it’s not enough, and then inserts his concerns about having state governments, apparently because he doesn’t like federalism. In Van, written April 2, he addresses the reality of ICE tactics:

I refer to the recent news of surprise visa revocations, immigration detention, etc, for a few immigrant grad students, professors, etc, clearly low human capital individuals, who have committed various retarded, if hardly unusual, misdeeds—like writing a pro-Hamas column (probably plagiarized, certainly banal) in the lame student newspaper.

He thinks these tactics are bad. He has no moral or principled objection to any of ICE’s tactics. He just thinks they will backfire on the whole project, create enemies, and destroy support. I stopped reading Van at the point where he explains that Hitler had a theory behind the Holocaust, a theory that is utterly wrong and revolting.

Mercantilism

M1 and M2 are generally supportive of tariffs, but not the way they’re being used. He blames this on the Bs and the Ms. This is from M2:

Trump always has the right reflexes. But a reflex is not a plan. It is not his job, but the job of his administration, to translate reflexes into plans. While executing with great energy and enthusiasm, the administration has had a rocky start in this translation.

These two posts are absurdly long, so I didn’t read them to the end.

Discussion

1. What the hell did Yarvin think would happen when Trump took power? Was he not paying attention during the last Trump presidency? Did he not notice Trump’s insatiable greed, his indifference to policy, his willingness to walk along with anyone who flattered him adequately? Didn’t he notice that Trump doesn’t like competent people,  that he ignores them or fires them? Did he think Trump would suddenly take an interest in policy when every reporter and his own staffers said Trump wasn’t willing to read anything?

Is Yarvin that naive? That credulous? That desperate?

2. Yarvin is supposed to be some kind of computer genius. Has he never watched a large enterprise change its computer system? You don’t rip out the old system and then build a new one. You don’t tear out an old system and put in a new on overnight. You run them side by side long enough to be sure there aren’t any glitches that will poison your employees and customers. Or, you test and retest, and then replace little sections one or two at a time. There’s a plan, there’s testing, and there’s careful attention to outcomes.

Now he’s concerned that people who took his advice to burn everything to the ground are making big mistakes?

3. I think there are problems with our current structure. Yarvin writes about some of them, but never in any sensible context, or with an actual idea about an effective change. For a reasonably sensible discussion see this by Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. There’s a lot to think about in this article, even for lefties. Among other things, Chait complains about delays caused by citizen activists. He does not point out that the rich and their corporations use the same tactics to delay or overturn rules preventing toxic discharges and other horrors. These delay and destroy tactics have hamstrung government action on almost every front.

4. I’m done with Yarvin. Apparently he thought the Trump team had a plan for remaking the United States in ways that would be better as Yarvin understands better. His lack of contact with reality is unbearable.

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Yarvin Explains Why He’s Writing

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The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

Yarvin explains why he’s writing in this post. He opens with a poem by the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, Que Fecit — Il Gran Rifuto, which, roughly translated, is He Who Makes The Great Refusal. Here’s the text:

For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,

he goes forward in honor and self-assurance.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he would still say no. Yet that no—the right no—
undermines him all his life.

Translation by Keeley and Sherrard. Writing in 2007, Yarvin says:

Journalists and professors are all associated with what is essentially one large institution, the press and university system. There are few, if any, ideological quarrels between major universities, or between universities and mainstream journalists.

He says that they all agree on practically everything. The differences between universities are marginal, as are the differences between professors at these institutions, and the differences between journalists. He doesn’t agree with this consensus.

He notes the recent rise of right-wing think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation , the Cato Institute, and the Manhattan Institute, but these are weak, and in no way competitive intellectually with the universities and their acolytes.

He says he’s trying to create an entirely new perspective. He reads Cavafy’s poem first as a paean to the dominant system, and second to the value in dissent. The dominant system rewards joiners, and accomplishes many things. A world of refusers would be a horrible thing. But he wants to be the one who refuses to participate in the Great Consensus, he wants to create an entirely new perspective.

What I’m trying to assemble here at UR is a view of the world we live in that is genuinely alien—at least, as genuinely alien as I can make it. By “alien” I just mean strange, different, or unfamiliar. …

Snip

An alien perspective is useful because it is not, at least not obviously, influenced by the ideas that are loose in the world today.

He says that there are two ways to do this. One is to start from scratch. This approach opens the door to appalling mistakes. One alternative is paleoconservativism. This is perhaps the most alien perspective on our times that he can think of.

Paleoconservatives evaluate the present by the standards of the past. He claims that their views aren’t taught anywhere, there is no education grounded in paleoconservatism. He doesn’t like present-day paleoconservatives, though. He thinks they’re too clubby, too esoteric, and probably too much in love with past regimes. Yarvin isn’t interested in recreating the Holy Roman Empire, or the Byzantine Empire.

He wants to look at 2007 the way people in 2107 do. In the end, he writes because he enjoys doing it and a bunch of people talked him into writing.

Discussion

1. I’m not wiling to read any posts based on Dungeons and Dragons. Or religion. And no more The Matrix, either. Checking ahead, no comparisons between humans and computer hardware.

2. I am sympathetic to the urge to look for different perspectives. I imagine that’s something everyone does when they’re dissatisfied with the status quo; and that academics do it in search of advancement. I’m also sympathetic to the idea of reading older books. Wisdom isn’t the special province of the present.

3. I don’t think it’s possible to start from scratch, as Yarvin claims he wants to do. There is no such place.

I also don’t think that we benefit from considering the present through the lens of the past. The wisdom of the past was directed at the conditions that existed when it was generated, and much of it was dreamed up to support the then status quo. We have to examine each idea in light of our present situation before we try to use it.

That means we have to identify the problem we want to solve carefully. Yarvin hasn’t precisely stated the problem that drives him to consider paleoconservatism. Based on what I’ve covered so far, I’d suggest some possibilities:

a. The people with power are unable to exercise all their power.
b.. Governmental regulation and public opinion are too cumbersome, and should be removed.
c. Democracy can’t solve irreconcilable differences, so civil war is inevitable.
d. The only serious problem facing our society is violence against person and property. Democracy won’t solve that problem so we need another system.
e. There’s something, as yet undefined, wrong with the way the universities and reporters pursue truth.

As to e., there is a consensus at the root of our education system, one shared with all academics and more widely across society. It’s what Jonathan Rauch calls the epistemic regime, the system we use to construct knowledge. I discuss it here, and in the three posts in that series.

We also use that system to construct and evaluate solutions to problems. Yarvin’s Heritage Foundation and other think tanks aren’t trying to solve problems. They exist to create justifications for undoing solutions currently in place as demanded by their donors. They have no new solutions, and their use of the epistemic regime is intellectually suspect.

Yarvin is toying with the idea of rejecting the epistemic regime but has nothing to suggest as a replacement.

4. As I wrote in the introduction to this series, I’m trying to take this guy seriously. That’s not easy. I have trouble ignoring the possibility that Yarvin is just a contrarian, a jolly gadfly, skittering about puncturing platitudes with outrageous claims like this: “Safeway will sell you a whole, salted rhinoceros head before Harvard will teach you that Lincoln was a tyrant.”

5. Yarvin seems to think that scholars are all liberals. Whatever. I don’t suppose Yarvin has read Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. I wonder if he would say that Foucault was a liberal, or that he was part of the consensus he so dislikes?

6. Finally, a word about the Cavafy poem. Here’s the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on the title of the poem:

The great refusal (Italian: il gran rifiuto) is the error attributed in Dante’s Inferno to one of the souls found trapped aimlessly at the Vestibule of Hell, The phrase is usually believed to refer to Pope Celestine V and his laying down of the papacy on the grounds of age, though it is occasionally taken as referring to Esau, Diocletian, or Pontius Pilate, with some arguing that Dante would not have condemned a canonized saint. Dante may have deliberately conflated some or all of these figures in the unnamed shade.

The canonized saint in ths passage is Celestine V. Here’s the Dante line:

After I had identified a few,
I saw and recognized the shade of him
who made, through cowardice, the great refusal.

Dante says the speaker of the Great Refusal is a coward. Cavafy thinks that the great refusal is right for some people in some cases. The world needs people who refuse to accept the dominant social narative. Yarvin makes a point of saying that he’s made the right decision for himself.

 

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Yarvin on Democracy, Leftism, and Julius Evola

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The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

Blue Pill, Red Pill

In his second blog post, Curtis Yarvin makes what he calls a case against democracy. He begins by pointing out that we are all steeped in democracy and its values from birth, and it’s hard to change. To help see things differently (of course using The Matrix image of the red and blue pills) he offers ten statements about democracy and an alternative view. He doesn’t discuss any, so all discussion is mine. I’ll look at three, the first, and two chosen by the highly Enlightenment method: the 15th decimal digits of pi and e.

First PIll

blue pill:

Democracy is responsible for the present state of peace, prosperity, and freedom in the US, Europe and Japan.

red pill:

The rule of law is responsible for the present state of peace, prosperity and freedom in the US, Europe and Japan.

So close. Yarvin doesn’t ask himself where the rule of law comes from, nor why it’s working. I’d say that in a democratic polity  most people think they have a voice in deciding laws, so they are generally willing to obey the laws. That leads to the good stuff, which encourages further acceptance of laws. Of course, there are other reasons  depending on the nature of the individual and their sense of participation in humanity. Some people obey out of fear, or because that was engrained in them from birth. Others think about the alternatives, and agree to be bound. And there are many other possibilities.

Yarvin doesn’t ask himself who are the people who refuse to obey, like the current administration and its leaders. Are they acting like they live in a democracy? No. They act like they’re rulers. And it’s easy to see that a majority of people don’t like it. Of course the current administration goes much farther than others, but Yarvin might have noticed the abuses and corruption of the Bush administration, or that it pushed us into pointless wars and then failed at them. Maybe he suddenly has.

Third pill

blue pill:

The disasters of fascism and communism demonstrate the importance of representative democracy.

red pill:

Fascism and communism are best understood as forms of democracy. The difference between single-party and multiparty democracy is like the difference between a malignant tumor and a benign one.

Yarvin calls fascism and communism single-party democracies. But they were not democratic at all. They were all managed by a single person whose decisions were his own and were final. How exactly are they different from the monarchy he wants to install?

Fifth pill

blue pill:

Power in the West is held by the people, who have to guard it closely against corrupt politicians and corporations.

red pill:

Power in the West is held by the civil service, that is, the permanent employees of the state. In any struggle between the civil service and politicians or corporations, the civil service wins.

The premise here is that some person or group in each “Western” nation has ultimate power. It’s just as false that “the people” have ultimate power as it is that the civil service has ultimate power. Anyone who watched the Bush Administration run things would know this. The civil service is and always has been reasonably accountable to the political leadership, more in Republican administrations than in Democratic.

Yarvin doesn’t mention the role of the courts in all this. It’s a telling omission.

Leftism

In this post,  Yarvin tells us that the essential idea of leftism is that intellectuals (he prefers the term “scholars”) should run the world. Scholars are indistinguishable from priests.He asks:

Can anyone find an exception to this rule—i.e., a mass movement that is generally described as “leftist,” but which does not in practice imply the rule of scholars, or at least people who think of themselves as scholars?

I’d guess he means that the ideas that justify and organize a leftist mass movement come from intellectuals. For example, Karl Marx justified and motivated the leaders of the Russian Revolution. John Locke justified  the American Revolution and the form of its new government.

But that’s true of any revolution. There may be grievances, but grievances can be solved by negotiation or tweaks to the order of things. Regime change requires a replacement for the ideology that supports the existing regime. Does Yarvin understand that this applies to himself, to Ayn Rand, to all those right-wing jerks he cites?

1. In comments on my last post, people noted that Yarvin was going to debate Danielle Allen, a Harvard professor with a specialty in democracy. Afterwards, someone posted what looked like a transcript of the debate on Blue Sky. It was taken down and the account closed, but I read it before it disappeared. Yarvin’s arguments felt like a ball falling down a Pachinko board, bounding from pin to pin with no clear connection. Or, as the WaPo described his blog posts,  he was “wildly discursive”.

At one point he said that Harvard doesn’t teach conservative thought. For example, no one teaches the thought of Julius Evola. This is from the Wikipedia page on Evola:

He viewed himself as part of an aristocratic caste that had been dominant in an ancient Golden Age, as opposed to the contemporary Dark Age ,,,.. In his writing, Evola addressed others in that caste whom he called l’uomo differenziato—”the man who has become different”—who through heredity and initiation were able to transcend the ages. Evola considered human history to be, in general, decadent; he viewed modernity as the temporary success of the forces of disorder over tradition. Tradition, in Evola’s definition, was an eternal supernatural knowledge, with absolute values of authority, hierarchy, order, discipline and obedience. Links and fn. omitted.

Evola was a major factor in Italian fascism, with ties to German fascism. After WWII he was closely involved with far right-wing Italian politics. It gets worse: “Evola wrote prodigiously on mysticism, Tantra, Hermeticism, the myth of the Holy Grail and Western esotericism.”

So, Harvard doesn’t teach a marginal weirdo fascist. That’s what Yarvin thinks is a gotcha.

2. I’m on the road, and my main book for this trip is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It’s set in Russia between 1805 and 1812, and give a history of the Napoleonic Wars from the perspetive of Russia and five aristocratic families

Here’s how Tolstoy describes the attitude of one of his characters, Nicholas Rostov, towards Tsar Alexander I:

Rostov, standing in the front lines of Kutuzov’s army which the Tsar approached first, experienced the same feeling as every other man in that army: a feeling of self-forgetfulness, a proud consciousness of might, and a passionate attraction to him who was the cause of this triumph.

He felt that at a single word from that man all this vast mass (and he himself an insignificant atom in it) would go through fire and water, commit crime, die, or perform deeds of highest heroism, and so he could not but tremble and his heart stand still at the imminence of that word. P. 467, Kindle edition.

Does Yarvin feel that looking at Trump or Musk?

 

 

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Introduction To Yarvin’s Formalism

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The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

The previous post discussed two aspects of Yarvin’s first blog post, his rejection of current ideologies and his loathing of democracy. This post describes the ideology he created, formalism.

The goal of formalism

Yarvin starts with the proposition that the only truly significant problem facing humans is violence. The goal of formalism is to rid the planet of violence. Only then can we focus on other problems.

Next to organized human-on-human violence, a good formalist believes, all other problems—Poverty, Global Warming, Moral Decay, etc., etc., etc.—are basically insignificant. Perhaps once we get rid of violence we can worry a little about Moral Decay ….

He means exactly this: until violence is ended, we must focus on one thing, getting rid of it. It’s an engineering problem, not a moral problem. He sets up pacifism as an alternative, and of course pacifism doesn’t solve violence.

He also dismisses the idea of social justice as a solution. He describes social justice as the idea that we should all have an equal share of the limited resources available to us. He says we don’t know how to equalize things, it won’t last, and it isn’t practical. We’d have to start by setting up rules about equality in things, and then take from some to give to others.

Solving violence with rules

Violence is the result of conflict and uncertainty. People are in constant conflict about stuff, but if everyone knows the result of the conflict in advance, there’s no reason to engage in violence. He seems to think that’s true of state-level conflict too: if we knew how a war would turn out, why wouldn’t the losing side surrender, he says. So, the first step is creating rules of ownership.

Formalism says: let’s figure out exactly who has what, now, and give them a fancy little certificate. Let’s not get into who should have what.

The starting place is where we are now. We make a list of everything that can be owned, and whoever has it gets to keep it. Then we can define violence:

Violence, then, is anything that breaks the rule, or replaces it with a different rule. If the rule is clear and everyone follows it, there is no violence.

The United States is a corporation

Formalism says that the US government controls what happens inside the boundaries of the US. It has the power to collect taxes and make rules of behavior, and these powers are property, just like any other property right. The government isn’t going to voluntarily surrender them.

Yarvin tells us that the US government is a corporation, meaning “… it is a formal structure by which a group of individuals agree to act collectively to achieve some result.” In this setting citizens are serfs, actually corporate serfs. I think he sees private corporations as no different from the US government. He explains that the purpose of his exemplar, Microsoft, is to make money for shareholders by selling software.

But he doesn’t see the purpose of the US government. He thinks the government isn’t able to control much.

In fact, if anyone can identify one significant event that has occurred in North America because Bush and not Kerry was elected in 2004, I’d be delighted to hear of it. Because my impression is that basically the President has about as much effect on the actions of the US as the Heavenly Sovereign Emperor, the Divine Mikado, has on the actions of Japan. Which is pretty much none.

In his view, the US government is a poorly functioning corporation with no discernible control mechanism, loaded with assets and flailing around trying to do something for opaque reasons.

Yarvin’s solution

To a formalist, the way to fix the US is to dispense with the ancient mystical horseradish, the corporate prayers and war chants, figure out who owns this monstrosity, and let them decide what in the heck they are going to do with it. I don’t think it’s too crazy to say that all options—including restructuring and liquidation—should be on the table.

Snip

To reformalize, therefore, we need to figure out who has actual power in the US, and assign shares in such a way as to reproduce this distribution as closely as possible. Links omitted.

He suggests that the current power structures be evaluated and shares in the reformalized US be distributed on the basis of the power of each recipient. Corporations have power, and would be shareholders. He cites the New York Times as an example. Perhaps some citizens have power, and might get shares, but that’s not clear. In any event, having divided up the power, we let the people with power decide what to do with the assets they control. The rest of us just stay out of the way.

The new power structures may not see the use for nation-states. He suggests that cities, but not states, perhaps should be “spun off”; pointing to Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong as positive examples. He points out that there isn’t any political violence in those city-states because there isn’t any politics.

That seems to be Yarvin’s main point. He thinks politics always leads to violence of some kind, whether it’s the violence of taxation or of limits on personal freedom, or physical violence. Somehow that problem is solved by getting rid of politics and replacing it with system of control by those who hold power now.

Discussion

1. I rearranged the order of the arguments hoping to clarify.

2. One obvious thing about this is the reductionism. Violence is a problem, sure, but we can’t wait for that to be solved before dealing with other problems. Those lesser problems, poverty, climate breakdown, moral decay, are at the root of a lot of the violence.

Another is the casual acquaintance with reality. This post was written ten years after Hong Kong was returned to China, and the latter was encroaching on democracy there. Anyone who has seen Crazy Rich Asians will see the outcome of the structure Yarvin imagines: great for the rich sons and daughters of the rich in Singapor.

3. The purpose of the United States government is set out in the Preamble to the Constitution. Yarvin doesn’t address it.

4. Yarvin takes the side of Walter Lippman in his debate with John Dewey over democracy, and goes even farther. Here’s a short paper describing the debate. Very roughly, Lippman thinks that our civilization is too complex for the ordinary citizen, so we should select experts to handle the complexities and advise the government rather than depend on the wisdom of the masses.

Dewey thinks that citizens should be educated in critical thinking, so they could participate in the discussions on issues that affect them. The people most affected by an issue would constitute a “public” in his parlance. This post gives an introduction to his thinking.

But Dewey had a larger reason for supporting democracy. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Dewey views democracy as an ideal of associated life in the sense that as an ideal he thinks that it reconciles the full expression of individual potentialities and the common good. In this sense, democracy sits at the apex of his historicised naturalist account of individuality and community. “From the standpoint of the individual”, as he puts it, democracy “consists in having a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities of the groups in which one belongs and in participating according to need in the values which the groups sustain”, while “from the standpoint of the groups, it demands liberation of the potentialities of members of a group in harmony with the interests and goods which are common”…. Cites omitted.

Yarvin doesn’t address this debate.  He thinks the problems with democrcy, most of which were laid out by Lippman and Dewey, are so great that the solution is to burn it to the ground. So far he hasn’t identified a view of the individual that would enable him to address Dewey’s view of democracy. instead, he consistently ignores individual citiaens as if we were irrelevant to this discussion.

 

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Introduction To Series On Curtis Yarvin

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Posts in this series

The Beginnings Of Curtis Yarvin
Introduction To Yarvin’s Formalism
Yarvin On Democracy, Leftism, and Julius Evola
Yarvin Explains Why He’s Wrigint
Yarvin On Trump And His Henchmen

Trump acts on his stupid ideas, and on the foolish chatter of whatever loon has his ear. He and his courtiers and henchmen recite crackpot theories to justify working for their own ends, with no pretense of oversight by Trump or Republican legislators.

Some of these weirdo theories, like the tariff gibberish and Christian Nationalism, are well-known. They’ve been discussed in progressive circles for some time, and are occasionally acknowledged in the billionaire media. What I did not know, and what was rarely reported in the media I read, was the influence of a group of anti-democracy advocates.

Recently I began to read about Curtis Yarvin. Heather Cox Richardson mentioned him in one of her Letters To An American, and commenter TruthBtold linked to this substack reporting on Yarvin.  Here’s an article in Commonweal, Yarvin’s Case Against Democracy.

In 2012 Yarvin gave a speech titled How To Reboot The US Government. He gave more speeches and interviews on the subject and drew the attention of rich techbros and right-wing politicians like J.D. Vance. It looks like Elon Musk used Yarvin’s ideas first to remake Twitter as a hang-out for creeps, and then as a template for destroying our govenrment from the inside.

Yarvin claims that democracy has failed and that the only way forward is to get rid of it and replace it with a dictatorship, or a monarchy. It’s a view shared by a lot of people on the far right, and for different reasons by the same filthy rich thugs who’ve been wrecking our country out of hatred for the New Deal and all things that make life better for working people. I’ll be looking into Yarvin’s writings in my next series.

Background

This stuff is wild. To orient myself, I read a chapter written by Joshua Tait in a book, Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy. The book is supposedly available through your library. Tait focuses on a blog Yarvin wrote under the name Mencius Moldbug, Unqualified Reservations.  He gives an introduction to Yarvin’s theory of neoreaction, and his rejection of democracy.

Neoreaction’s basic assumption is that humans desire power. Interpreting democracy through this framework, Moldbug claims that democracy’s appeal is that it disperses power widely, indulging the mass desire for useless fragments of power. Since power-seeking is pervasive, society trends toward greater division of power and a concomitant erosion of order. Democracy is a “dangerous, malignant form of government which tends to degenerate, sometimes slowly and sometimes with shocking, gut-wrenching speed, into tyranny and chaos.”

Trump and his henchmen don’t acknowledge the anti-democratic aspect of Yarvin’s thought, at least not so far, unless you consider Trump’s third-term garbage. They just follow his plan for destroying the institutions that diffuse power; and work at concentrating power into the hands of Musk and Trump. Yarvin’s views  can be seen as justifying the unitary executive theory, and for presidential kingship, as contemplated by John Roberts and his anti-democratic colleagues in Trump v. US.

In his blog Yarvin traces out the development of his theories of history, economics and other matters. The blog ran from 2007 to 2014. He has a substack, Gray Mirror, which began in May 2020 (after Tait’s article) where he posted drafts of his book Gray Mirror: Fascicle I: Disturbance, published January 2025. The title is Yarvin trolling: fascicle is close to fascist, but means something else. I’m reluctant to buy the book so I plan to read from the two online sources first. He shows up on other social media sites, but I’m not going there.

I plan to focus on the anti-democracy material and his views of human nature. We’ll see how that holds up.

Defending Democracy

I won’t defend democracy here. I follow Americans like John Dewey and Richard Rorty. See, e.g. Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. My rationale for defending democracy is my understanding of human nature, which I discussed in my series on individuality.

But I also think that we as a nation have for a long time regarded democracy as background for our lives. We see it as a game we watch on TV. We yell at politicians as we would yell at referees. We don’t think of democracy as making any demands on us, much less as something that requires our constant maintenance and improvement.

Caveat

It’s very difficult to write about material with which you fundamentally disagree. There’s a strong tendency to minimize any good points, and to mock rather than try to understand.

I plan to be very careful about separating Yarvin’s words from my thoughts on how to understand what he’s saying, and to try to indicate where I’m having trouble following an argument, so that readers can check my thinking. That should help with the bias problem.

It’s important to note that Yarvin isn’t some Qanon weirdo cranking out conspiracies. I assume that he’s read the material he cites, and that he has tried to be intellectually honest. That distinguishes him from craven ideologues like the SCOTUS right-wingers and from lazy hacks like David Brooks.

Final thought

Yarvin and the filthy rich idiots he influences are dangerously wrong, wrong in a deeply fundamental way. They think they know what’s best. Not what’s best for you and your family and community. They think they know what’s best for the future of the human race.

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Techbro Theories Of Everything

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The Trump mob has a bunch of crackpot theories. One of these, beloved of techbros with Ketamine-plasticized brains, comes from Guillaume Verdon, a 32 year physicist. This Wired article is primarily about Verdon’s alternative to quantum computing, but it gives an introduction to Verdon’s big theory of “effective acceleration”, or e/acc.

Will Knight, the author of the Wired article, gives this bit of background:

By the 1990s, a British philosopher named Nick Land was advocating for a real accelerationist movement that would unshackle capitalism from the restraints imposed by politicians and welcome the technological and social destruction and renewal this would bring. Accelerationist ideas are echoed by other alt-right thinkers, including the influential blogger Curtis Yarvin, who argues that Western democracy is a bust and ought to be replaced.

Let’s take a look at Verdon’s manifesto.

The thermodynamics of the origin of life

Verdon starts by asserting that life emerges as “matter reconfigures itself such as to extract energy and utility from its environment such as to serve towards the preservation and replication of its unique phase of matter.” He links to this article by Katherine Taylor  about a theory created by John England.

Current views of the origins of life begin with a primordial soup of raw chemicals in bodies of water with external sources of energy like sunshine and lightening, and constant motion. England’s theory explains how that system can lead to early organized forms of matter. The article explains England’s theory, starting with the words “At the heart of England’s idea…..”

At the risk of oversimplification, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy increases over time. In certain systems, entropy can decrease in clumps of matter that absorb and use energy and emit energy in a less concentrated form, which is to say at higher levels of entropy. Entropy increases in the overall system, but decreases in a small part of the system.

A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

Taylor’s article suggests that this process, called dissipative-driven adaptation of matter, lies at the heart of all evolution, which may or may not be England’s view. Either way, the article acknowledges there are countless other factors that influence the outcomes.

Verdon calls this process dissipative adaptation. He says it “…tells us that the universe exponentially favors (in terms of probability of existence/occurrence) futures where matter has adapted itself to capture more free energy and convert it to more entropy.”

First Interlude

Notice that Verdon uses phrases like “matter reconfigures itself” and “the universe favors”. These phrases could be read to suggest that the universe and the matter it contains have some sort of drive or even a purpose. In this setting, words are used metaphorically, to describe England’s equations. We don’t use the words to reason about the implications of mathematical language, because you can’t safely reason from a metaphor.

Here’s an example. When I was a kid, we had an encyclopedia with a representation of the Bohr model of an atom. It was a map of the US, with a basketball in the center of the country and a couple of ping-pong balls on the coasts of California and Virginia. Someone asked why if there was so much space between the nucleus and the electrons you couldn’t squash the atom into a tighter space. That’s an example of reasoning with a metaphor. Don’t do that.

Also note that Verdon claims that this theory is about extracting “utility” as well as energy. No it isn’t.

Accelerating Evolution

So, the first part of Verdon’s manifesto is consistent with current evolutionary theory, apart from the utility thing. Then Verdon tells us:

Intelligence emerges as a smaller timescale specialization of this adaptation principle; it allows life to identify patterns in the environment which have utility towards acquiring more resources to procreate and/or maintain said intelligent life form.

We’ve gone from absorbing free energy to, I suppose, catching prey. But this view of intelligence isn’t consistent with Darwinian theory in its current form. The range of evolutionary pressures is much broader than simple identifying patterns that represent energy.

Verdon goes on to say that consciousness is the natural limit of intelligence in the individual. So much for people. Then there’s meta-consciousness in the form of organized groups of humans, like corporations and governments and states. In a capitalist system, these “compete for resources” with other meta-organizations.

Second Interlude

Well, that’s nonsense. Elon Musk isn’t competing for resources. He took control of the government and is using it to grab resources from all of us to use as he sees fit, without regard to the impact on other people. Other capitalist organizations do the same thing, though usually with less law-breaking.

As an example, consider renewable energy. In Verdon’s theory, everyone should be grabbing the free energy of renewable sources like the sun. It’s now mostly cheaper than fossil fuels, and is more sustainable. But the giant oil companies have fought it, lied about it, and pushed for more pollution, with the aid of complicit politicians. So if the universe favors free energy, why does this happen?

Or consider the LED bulb. These marvels use far less energy than incandescent bulbs. But the shriekers on the right wing erupted in an apoplectic fit  when the government began to insist on their use. Why? It has nothing to do with free energy and dissipative adaptation, that’s certain.

Capitalism is a form of intelligence

Verdon writes:

Hierarchies of information propagation and control are part of the civilizational intelligence; these should be dynamically adapting at all organisational scales and on various time scales, in order to be optimal at identifying and capturing civilizational utility.

Has this guy never heard of intellectual property? That’s part of the capitalist system, and it works against this bullet point, if the bullet point has any meaning outside Verdon’s head. And who gets to decide what “civilizational utility” is?

Verdon says that capitalism is a form of intelligence. The explanation is that it “dynamically morphs” civilization to grab all the utility/energy out there. In his telling making the world safe for profits is a marker for intelligence.

E/ACC has a goal

The goal of e/acc is to recognize this “multi-scale adaptive principle” and accelerate it. That is accomplished by “… letting the intelligent meta-organism system dynamically adapt by itself to new environmental variables whenever they present themselves.”Apparently the universe favors profits.

We already do that. We let corporations, those paragons of intelligent meta-organisms, dump tens of thousands of chemicals into our environment. Turns out a bunch of them are poisons that interfere with our endocrine systems, kill bees and pollute the Gulf of Mexico. That doesn’t seem at all intelligent.

He says that e/acc wants to follow the will of the universe, presumably referring to that free energy/utility/resource/(profit?) thing that keeps morphing in this screed. In other words, he wands to accelerate the transition from the current state of entropy to a higher state of entropy. But why? He doesn’t say.

How do we accelerate?

Deregulation. Low taxes. Freedom for the Techbros. There is no price too high to pay for these goals, including human lives.

Discussion

1. I rarely read the writings of the people Trumpians call intellectuals, mostly because it’s dumb and badly written. Sadly these yahoos have have power now, so it seems like someone should.

2. Verdon doesn’t explain how e/acc will help us be better humans, or live better lives. He’s not interested in this world or the lives of people who live in it. He only cares about the next world he’s trying to imagine.

3. Hannah Arendt says that the Nazis and the Communists claimed to be following and accelerating a scientific program. For the Nazis, it was the laws of nature, and for the Communists it was the laws of history as discovered by Marx. Both programs were said to lead inexorably to the perfection of human beings and human society.

Verdon wants to do the same thing with his very scientific program.

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Sell Your Tesla Dump Your Stock

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That was one of the chants at the #TeslaTakedown event I attended in Chicago last Saturday. But selling your Tesla car is not easy. There isn’t much of a market for used Teslas in this area. There’s a similar problem in Boston. And Seattle. It seems to be a world-wide problem. Perhaps Trump will single-handedly create a market for used Teslas among his cult. That would be great, since only a few years ago they were crazy angry about libtards driving electric vehicles.

If you want to sell your Tesla stock, that’s easy. There’s a robust market in the stock. Over 110 million shares traded on March 17. But there is the problem of figuring out how much $TSLA you own, According to the 2024 Tesla Proxy Statement, after Musk, the two largest holders are Vanguard and Black Rock, both huge in investment funds and pension management. If you have a 401k, an IRA, or a pension plan, you most likely own at least a little of the stock of Tesla. It has the 9th highest market capitalization of US stocks,

This site says there are 517 ETFs that hold stock in Tesla.  You probably wouldn’t expect Vanguard Consumer Discretionary ETF to hold Tesla stock. Its largest holding is Amazon at 23%, and it includes MacDonalds, Chipotle, Loews, Booking.com, and similar stocks. The second largest holding is Tesla, at 17%. I do not think of electric vehicles as a consumer discretionary expenditure.

I searched for ETFs with low Tesla holdings for the past year, and almost all of the results were funds with lots of Tesla. There are, of course, investment vehicles that don’t hold Tesla. You could look at industry specific funds like ETFs investing in Pharma or Health Care. But you’d be wise to check the actual holdings. I found some on this site where you can search for several sectors.

If you search for Tesla stock you’ll find plenty of people saying it’s fairly valued, or even undervalued. The Yahoo Finance site says the one year target price is $343. Here’s one that’s not so rosy. if you want to see for yourself, here’s a link to the 2024 10-K. .

Note that the people talking about dumping their Tesla cars don’t take about the car itself, in fact most of them like their Teslas. They’re selling, even at a loss, for other reasons. In the same way, the decision to sell Tesla stock doesn’t necessarily mean there aren’t good reasons to hold it. That decision may nave nothing to do with the fundamentals of Tesla, or its businesses.

The Proxy Statement says that Elon Musk has pledged about 1/3 of his holdings as collateral for loans, probably including loans for the purchase of Twitter.  It seems plausible that the lenders will demand additional collateral or even call the loans if the price sinks dramatically. For example, the current PE Ratio is about 116 at market close March 17. If it were selling at the same PE ratio as the information technology sector, approximately 35 at market close March 17, the price would drop from the current $240 to about $75.

Search for the term Tesla meme stock. It’s possible the chanters have a point.

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