On Mencius Moldbug and the social chaos leading to monarchial Caesarism

This article was originally published on Saul's Place HQ.

In this article on Quillette, Max Borders makes an analysis of Curtis Yarvin, also known as Mencius Moldbug. The article focuses on the “unworkable ideas” behind the neoreactionary movement. It is my intuition that Borders’ critiques of Yarvin as well as of the neoreaction, miss the point. Max Borders emphasizes the merits of decentralized organization. But what he seems not to weigh accurately in his analysis, is how that the digital revolution, multiculturalism and the disappearance of the middle class reshape Western societies, is so extreme in its consequences, that the emergence of ‘New Caesarism’ is probable.[1]

And this only highlights the internal volatility of the Western world – which currently has a steamy eruption in Britain, and previously in France, through the yellow jackets movement; we see an unprecedented political polarization in the US. We do not yet touch upon how, throughout the previous centuries, the European-American sphere lead the world in terms of technological, economical and social advances, and in doing so, more or less set the pace globally. It meant that our internal democratic machinations had time to play out. Today however, due to the technological interconnectedness of the globalized world and the rise of BRICS, the shifting geopolitical order puts additional pressure upon the internal democratic processes of the Western world. The emergence of Chinese police stations within the Netherlands is just one example.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Western world knew a limited social mobility, but enjoyed the benefits of a tight and sturdy social cohesion. In the second half of the twentieth century, social mobility became more loose but the possibilities for social climbing became meaningfully bigger. Today, we have less social mobility as well as less social cohesion. 

The tragic reality is that we have a generation trapped in small apartments, where they waste their twenties and thirties to alcohol and dating apps. They start to feel how hollow their autonomy is, which was initially the selling point of the ‘liberal dream’ that advocates moving to a big city in pursuit of opportunity. For those in this position, it becomes unclear what makes it beautiful to be human, and steadily, people transfer control over their lives to machines, which become smarter every day. Many descend into digital worlds where connections feel more true and authentic than the atomized encounters of urban daily life.

This critique is relevant because it elucidates the social chaos that prepares the ground for Ceasarism. Max Borders makes a concise point of how a CEO-Monarch would likely crash and burn once he would actually be put in charge of today’s system. Being the CEO of a startup and of a powerful multinational, requires different mind- and skillsets, and as liberal-conservative economists have understood, the complexity of globalized economies transcends the computing power of any individual mind. One gets back to the ‘invisible hand’, the ‘road to serfdom’, and so forth. 

Now think of the Wright brothers, who invented motorized airplanes and flew them across the US. Today, this would invariably meet resistance from regulations. Although we have Elon Musk testing rockets, these are giant companies that make their influence felt through lobbying. And they relate to these regulations in a very different way than the average freedom-loving citizen does, who is just as small and powerless in the face of those big corporations as he is in the shadow of governments. And in his powerlessness, he longs for a recognizable leader, who makes power personal again and whom he feels watches over him: something he no longer expects from the anonymous bureaucratic institutions. 

The ominous looming force of which we are trying to sketch the contours here, is not only in technology and economics, but is party theological in nature. Humans want to feel the sacred aura of their leader, especially in times of turmoil. Think of the Holy Roman Emperors, who wore cloaks embroiled with stars, that peasants wanted to touch as their monarch passed by, to be permeated by the energy of regal sanctity. 

One can argue the contemporary citizen has moved through the Enlightenment and absconded his soul from such sacred hankerings. But at the same time, the technologies which mediate contemporary life become so delicate and complex that for most, any understanding of their workings dissolves into evanescence. An early modern peasant could roughly grasp the workings of a steam engine – an android phone, by comparison, is an object of myth. Is the connection between contemporary man and his ‘technology priest’ who manages digital infrastructure, any less theological in nature than the understanding between the tribesman and his shaman? Is the rise of ‘cyber gods’ truly unimaginable, now that – as Hideo Kojima foresaw – the conditioning of human cultural context is increasingly delegated to AI? 

Ancient society was organized in the Polis: a city-state consisting of a few thousand people. In such a situation, one has a better understanding of those one deals with. A shared cultural sphere is a fruitful environment for social trust. The Polis provides a situation in which you experience your own interests and those of your neighbors and dear ones as integrated and overlapping. Whereas today, there is a pervasive uneasy sense of “for whom am I actually doing all this?” – one pays for the social check of an unemployed person who has smoked himself silly in a coffee shop in the big city. And if you don’t want to pay for that, people will call you “selfish”.

Those overlapping links, in which our interests coincide organically, of you as an individual and the community of which you are a part, have disappeared in modern mass society. Either you sit in your apartment as a separate atom, watching streaming services while consuming food from a home delivery service, or you are addressed and even morally blackmailed with the poverty of emaciated children in Africa and all the global threats to the environment and climate.

Ignored and disregarded are the links of ‘civil society’, the organic experience of a thriving neighborhood and local community. Links that mediate between individual selfishness and cosmopolitan world improvement narratives. It remains a cliché but is dreadfully true that when applying to the board of a multinational, fraternizing with street kids in Columbia looks better on your resume than playing checkers in your local elderly care home.

Modern humans are thus confined in a horizon of pure alienation. Namely, stuck between a very individualistic and even egoistic life practice, and altruistic ideals that are so all-encompassing that they can do little else than trap the individual in an ineradicable sense of guilt.

It is truly hard to picture a way forward from this bleak landscape – where is the brimming star on the horizon to beckon us with inspiring energy? The left has its great visions of carless societies, fifteen minute cities, renewable food and energy sources. But one can’t escape the impression that a lot of irreparable and even immobilizing damage will be done – to our privacy, our farmers, our freedom of movement, our economic productivity and energy security – before we ever get close to such a ‘green’ utopia. More likely, urban civilization will collapse under the weight of these over-ambitious projects so that the brutal hierarchy of the jungle will reign from the overgrown ruins.

Meanwhile the right dreams of mass-deportations. Yet I don’t see it happening that – even if the political establishment somehow finds courage to ship the most criminal elements and islamist trouble makers back to their countries of cultural background – Westerners would suddenly rediscover a socially welcoming middle class society with a supply of pleasantly marriageable partners, successful and fruitful relationships. 

The precariousness of primary relationships, the demise of basic immaterial certainties (as opposed to material certainties such as food and housing), is what funnels the ‘death of the West’ in earnest. The riots and instability caused by mass-immigration, however frustrating and demoralizing it may be, is not what makes it impossible for us contemporary Westerners to form nuclear family unit connections at a personal, existential and socio-economic level.

With all this, I wanted to make the point that the grueling powerlessness droned into our souls by today’s globalized system (it can hardly be called a ‘society’), while at the same time the liberal narratives tell us how ‘free’, and ‘liberated’ we are, must at some point find a way out – some sort of meltdown must occur. Institutionalized disillusionment, is perhaps a way to phrase this energy – it will indeed give credence to forms of monarchical Caesarism. 

–

[1] For an extensive exploration and definition of Caesarism, see: Sid Lukkassen, ‘Caesarism and the Aesthetical Turn of Politics’, pp. 55-87, in: From Herodotus to Spengler: Comparing Civilisations throughout Time and Space (Lüdinghausen, 2024).

> Follow Sid on Telegram
> Follow Sid on LinkedIn
> Follow Sid’s Newletter
> Support Sid through BackMe