Mencius Moldbug: The Second Coming

This article is named the Second Coming, as it is both a summary and an expansion of my recent article in which I gauged the rise of monarchical Caesarism of whom Curtis Yarvin – also known as Mencius Moldbug – is a leading advocate. The Second Coming refers to the ascendance of a Messianic figure: a leader who could pull Western civilization out of its ongoing collapse, the symptoms of which are laid down in the previous piece.

Given that the previous article outlined my take on this matter, it is time to write a bit more about my own position. The Dutch author and philosopher, Joris Bouwmeester, recently witnessed a debate between Robert Lemm and Victor Kal, organised by Forum for Democracy. Robert Lemm is a blackpilled reactionary Catholic and Victor Kal is a mainstream academic who took it upon himself to write about Aleksander Dugin in order to ‘warn’ young aspiring conservatives. After this debate, Bouwmeester concluded that I would sooner ally with secular humanist classical liberals than with theocratic traditional conservatives. This is an important piece of background information, as to engage with neo-reaction should never be a light-hearted endeavor. 

Bottom-up sovereignty versus top-down statecraft

Let us start out from contrasting two concepts of sovereignty. The first one is the Eastern, Oriental concept, that Michel Foucault described as “bio-power”. The idea is that masses of humans are kept together in metropolitan cities and ruled as a communal body under a collective command. This concept of sovereignty is also present in the Chinese concept of statecraft, where the emperor embodies the unity of the state, and where all power emanates from the centre, the imperial court.

Opposed to this concept of sovereignty is the Western interpretation, which has more space for rugged individualism. It started out with small bands of Vikings and other North-Germanics who lived together at the edges of rivulets and creeks. When they could no longer endure one another, they packed up their gear and sailed to a new destination, where they founded a new settlement. It was much the same for the colonists of Ancient Greece.[1] 

The concept of bottom-up sovereignty that emerged from this practice was epitomised by the treaty of Augsburg in 1555 which laid down that every region was to have its own religion in accordance with the preference of the local sovereign: cuius regio, eius religio. The treaty follows the analysis of the medieval philosopher Marsilius of Padua (1270-1342). In Defensor pacis (1324), Marsilius argued that all authority comes from the full body of believers. This means that clerics derive their authority from the congregation of the faithful. It contains a coherent outline of bottom-up sovereignty.

Bottom-up sovereignty is thus anchored in the local community, and it is easy to see how globalism and technocracy, erode this very fundament of Western political identity. The Ancient Polis and the city-states of the Renaissance epitomise this concept, which throughout the course of Western history was anchored by important founding documents such as the Plakkaat van Verlatinghe, the Bill of Rights, the Blijde Inkomste and the Magna Carta. It was later cemented by the Atlantic Charter and the Charter of the United Nations, which guarantee nations the right of self-determination.

Sadly, Western structures of bottom-up sovereignty are being eroded and replaced by top-down structures of autocratic government. Such as social credit systems, CO2-budgets, media censorship programs by the EU and central bank digital currencies. Just see the recent letter by EU-Commissioner Thierry Breton to Twitter/X-CEO Elon Musk as evidence. Through competition with other superpowers on a global digitalised world theater, the West copies more and more of the structures of the powers such as China — even though, on an identitarian level, the West claims to reject such practices. 

This similarity between power structures in East and West, means the end of the authentic cultural character of Western societies. It also has ramifications for whether individual citizens can thrive and attain excellence. Furthermore, it presents an abysmal setback to the diversification of the human species in terms of cultural development, the multiplication of ideas and the organization of socio-political power.

Barons

Bottom-up sovereignty is a key component that defines Western political identity. It is also important for neo-monarchical forms of governance. The current democratic model comes with countless boards that are tasked to solve problems, yet in practice have every interest to perpetuate the problem (the salary of the board members being just one incentive). The ‘participatory’ trajectories for citizens and stake holders often serve as smoke screens. This is done so that the public officials can pick and choose components of citizen input which legitimise those policies the officials had already decided upon before the participatory meetings were even held. The jargon of ‘citizen participation’ generally increases the bureaucratic pressure on those who are already struggling with making ends meet and taking care of their children, elders and other loved ones. 

In the neo-monarchical forms of governance of the neo-reaction, we work not with semi-democratic board structures, but with barons. The baron holds power over the local situation, but is also accountable for maintaining law, order and quality of life. This means that when citizens come knocking, the baron has every incentive to solve the problem. After all, the baron wants to spend his time hunting and to enjoy time with his mistress – he does not want to have to deal with the problem again. 

The baron also knows that if problems go unchecked and accumulate, citizens will eventually find themselves forced to take action and remove the baron from power. Although it could be fatal to the baron himself, it is in accordance with the natural way of things in a universe of bottom-up sovereignty. The neo-reaction owes much to the recent movies Dune and Dune II, because they give new shine to the concept of rule by barons.

Ortega y Gasset and the ‘trad boys’

The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) wrote about the future of Liberalism in the West. He characterised the Fascist and Communist movements as attempts to push the clock back to pre-modern society. He argued that Liberalism could not be ‘stopped’, but would have to find its full expression before it could be transcended. Attempts to push the clock back would only result in the clock starting to run again. In this analogy, the ‘Brussels sprout smell’ of the fifties, would again be subsumed in the marihuana smell of the sixties. Ortega y Gasset prophesied that the West would reach a post-liberal phase once the Islamic world and China had reawakened on the global stage.

In the same vein, I prefer the term ‘post-progressivism’ to ‘conservatism’ and ‘reaction’. Think of the feigned moral indignation regarding sexual topics in tight-knit religious communities, while we live in an age where every teen has seen at least a snippet of a porn movie. A post-progressive cherishes the norms and values of family life, but acknowledges that sex functions differently in this era of fleeting relationships.

What we thus seek to do is to reconcile modern advances in technology with more traditional ideas and find a good balance between ancient loyalties and modern liberties. Neo-reaction certainly acknowledges the potency of technology. Some ‘trad boys’ and religious believers adhere to the idea that we can somehow return to the sheltered clarity of pre-modern society. The end result of such a worldview is that we will live in a medieval box bed, while China buys up the whole world, dominating it through technology – we will still have to live like drones. Moreover we are already modern ourselves – our urge to transcend modernity is inspired by the experiences we have with it.

One ends up as the painter who wants to clear the canvas to start from a new zero point, but who can never do so because he would have to erase his own experiences, and everything that urges him to make the painting in the first place. It is exactly as Ortega y Gasset expounds in his work on the mass man. In the history of warfare, the cannon will inevitably triumph over the lance – it is the next step in the order of things. Those who interpret conservatism as ‘going backwards in history’ will repeat all the mistakes that followed. As I argue in ‘Be Abyssal’, the only way across modernity is the way through it! 

There is another good reason to replace conservatism with post-progressivism. As long as you want to conserve, you have to knock on the doors of the existing establishment institutions – you are thus stuck in situations with people who do not allow any space for realism: any compromise with them is a toxic compromise. One invests time and energy into a club that ultimately wants your downfall. We must therefore think not in terms of conservation, but in terms of sacrifice. If the stumps of my houseplants are yellow and shrivelled, I cut them off. A little later, deep green leaves have grown in their place. Don’t mourn the loss of the city but celebrate the man who razed it!

The threat of equality

Let us say we find ourselves in a group. Everyone senses that what some contribute to the group is different from what others contribute. The contribution of some members of the group is invaluable, whereas the contributions of some are more or less dispensable.

In the interest of the group, we deal with this situation diplomatically. We choose not to express it and to treat each other equally, as equals. This resembles what Hegel described: humans no longer need to rival one another in quarrels over status, honour and prestige, once we introduce a justice system that recognises everybody as equal before the court of law.

But now the great illness of modern society is that it does not stop there. Because the social justice warrior also wants to be experienced and seen as an equal. The desire to be treated as an equal fuels the desire to control the inner life of the other subject as well. The social justice warrior wants to enforce the experience of equality through legal means – this is where the LGBTQ-propaganda comes in and all the hackling surrounding enforced pronouns. What we call ‘woke’ is an expression of narcissism: the world must exist in a form in which one constantly recognises oneself – everything must be a reflection of you.

Under the guise of demanding equal opportunities, the left perpetually steers towards equal outcomes. This requires digging deeper and deeper into all personal and cultural spheres. When the left talks about equal opportunities, they also want to level culture because otherwise it would be ‘unfair’ for immigrants, LGBTQ, etc., who are not as familiar within the established mores. This approach echoes the ideas of the revolutionary communist Antonio Gramsci, who reinterpreted the Marxist doctrine of class warfare into a cultural discourse of ‘oppressor’ versus ‘oppressed’. 

Through an ongoing process of ‘emancipation’ and ‘deconstruction’, the nation disappears as the supporting sphere for the state. Only separate atoms remain that are nudged at an individual level by a deeply invasive government-commercial apparatus that tolerates no borders and no privacy. Authors such as Eric Voegelin have outlined how the ‘eschaton is made immanent’: exactly what is happening here. One example is the EU’s ‘farm to fork’ policy, where the EU wants to control how food is created, how it arrives at our doorstep and how much we eat of it.

Every buffer between the individual and the technocratic apparatus disappears – first the guild, then the church, now the family. In the end, one hive mind remains. Dave Eggers described this accurately in The Circle (2013) – the public mind falls together with the mind of God, and the mass media become the eyes of God. This is so because the mass media – and this includes the social media, which after Brexit and Trump’s election have undergone a Gleichschaltung with the established cabal – have completely merged with the data intake of the individual consumer. The collective media have merged with the internal processing and reflection of the individual via algorithms, microtargeting and nudging. Thus the ‘eschaton’ has become immanent.

How to counter the left

The left will then say that even if equality of outcomes and even true equality of opportunities can never be attained in practice, the common citizen still finds assurance in knowing that it is at least attempted and that in this process, the most gross exorbitances of inequality will be corrected. The left will add to this that the right must take the ideas of the left to extremes in order to legitimise itself. The ideas of the left are taken to extremes in order to scare people into supporting the right.

But these arguments, if perceived through the lens of clarity, immediately turn against the one who uses them. Exactly because true equality can never be arrived at, it becomes totalitarian in practice. When we are constantly told that we can and even should be equal, a minor difference can become a source of rancor, because equality is always close enough to be smelled, but never close enough to be tasted. After equalizing material wealth, immaterial attributes such as talent and beauty become causes of unrest. 

Secondly, if the right is guilty of making the left look like ‘extremists’ in order to legitimise itself, then why is the left always out to frame ordinary citizens with concerns about say, grooming gangs and mass-immigration, as fascists and neo-Nazi’s? The ongoing civil tension in Britain illustrates how protesting citizens are framed as “far right activists”. When the left claims that the right misrepresents them, they are following the Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky: accuse others of what you do. 

If one looks at the discourse of the left, it is no longer about, for instance, how cleaners and construction workers can enjoy better wages, more job security and safer work environments. Instead, left discourse is all about how we must feel and how we must express ourselves, about a plethora of ‘vulnerable’ groups – the left is all about controlling our ethical preferences and emotions. Under the guise of everyone being equal, the left establishes a hierarchy where they get to police our moral sentiments.

And even with geopolitical conflicts over which the ordinary citizen has no power– such as Russia versus Ukraine or Israel versus the Palestinians – there the left wants to control completely how we think and speak about it. The less actual influence we have on something, the more important it becomes for the left to control what goes on in our hearts and minds about it. The essence of the left is abolishing the distinction between the private and the public, between the individual and the collective. The essence of the left is totalitarianism. 

Sadly, society cannot wake up to this realisation because – at least in West-Europe – people are already in bed with the government in terms of money, status and social positioning, entwined with its Utopian narratives and subsidised projects. We arrive at what we previously established: the necessity of sacrifice.

One look at reality demonstrates immediately that the right does not need the left in order establish an identity. In a world without the sickening corruption of cancel culture, one would just be covering the writings of say, Aristotle, Plutarch, Cicero, Shakespeare and J.S. Mill at a college, high school or university. There would be so many beautiful things to do without the left, and we would actually get to do them. Given that the left maintains an extremely intolerant dominance over all the institutions in Western Europe, one is forced into a total struggle against them in order to arrive at the core practice that our souls long for. 

Final recommendations

While it becomes obvious that policies of recent decades have weakened us in important areas, media and even ‘alternative’ media still prefer to stay ‘within the system’ of established ideas. They thus guard the boundaries of permissible thought, being afraid to be accused of ‘racism’ and ‘conspiracy thinking’. The ‘intellectual dark web’ is highly fragmented, which is a missed opportunity to form a countervailing force together.

Even billionaires today, who have all the means to create new institutions, long for recognition and acceptance from established institutions such as Harvard. I urge everyone to use their means and abilities to build new initiatives rather than adapt to the rules of the system. Real change is only possible when people dare to deviate from the mainstream and no longer depend on them.

We must eviscerate from our souls the urge to ‘fit in’, as this is actually the fear that controls us. The only way to escape the current abyss, is by building new structures and projects outside the established order, without the need to be accepted by the system. Creating opportunities for people to connect and to employ their talents for something meaningful, is thus more important than merely commenting on the status quo.

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[1] For more information, see: Sid Lukkassen, ‘Review and discussion of Paul Cartledge, Democracy. A Life.’, pp 229-247 in: Oswald Spenglers Geschichtsmorphologie Heute (Lüdinghausen & Berlin, 2020).