In this episode, we discuss the concept of Neoreactionalism and how it relates to neo-conservative thinkers like Curtis Yarvin and Hans-Hans-Monschus Moldbug, the godfather of that type of political theory.
00:00:33.360I've got a great stream with a great guest that you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:38.280So, we talk a lot about a type of political theory on this channel called Neoreactionary Theory.
00:00:44.500And the godfather of that type of political theory is, of course, Curtis Yarvin.
00:00:49.060Originally writing under his name, Menchus Moldbug, his pen name there.
00:00:53.880And he's great at breaking down a lot of systems, but many people have noticed a problem.
00:00:57.720They said, does this guy have any solutions?
00:01:00.000Does he ever actually offer any way out?
00:01:02.280Is there any way forward with this stuff?
00:01:04.580Well, I want to go over a concept that I have hinted at many times, but I've never actually done a complete video or stream on, called neocameralism.
00:01:13.220This is the concept that Curtis Yarvin brought up as his solution to the problem of governance.
00:01:18.640So, joining me with me today to do that is The Prudentialist.
00:01:43.200But before we do, guys, let's hear from our sponsors today.
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00:03:42.080So the first thing I want to touch on is kind of the roots of neocameralism.
00:03:46.360A lot of people might be aware, but some people may not, that Curtis Yarvin and many other neo-reaction thinkers tend to come from the libertarian sphere.
00:03:55.260They were originally people who were libertarians.
00:03:57.860And when they approach things, they do kind of have that mindset.
00:04:02.540They still don't, you know, they don't really follow all of its tenets.
00:04:06.360But there's still that DNA inside of these ideas.
00:04:09.980Now, neocameralism is going to specifically come as a very libertarian-influenced idea because it's going to talk about, believe it or not, corporate ownership of countries, how countries can be run by corporations.
00:04:27.740And this ties Curtis Yarvin to many other libertarian-style thinkers, people like Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who kind of outlined the ways in which kind of these societies might run.
00:04:43.120Prudentialist, just kind of the outset, what do you think about the libertarian origins of this thought?
00:04:48.120Does it make sense, the transition between libertarianism and the kind of, I guess, futuristic neo-feudalism he's going to talk about here?
00:04:58.320Well, yeah, I think that you can definitely see the Hans-Hermann Hoppe influence on sort of this neocameralist idea that Yarvin puts out.
00:05:07.080You see it especially when you think of like Hans-Hermann Hoppe's works about, you know, from aristocracy to monarchy to democracy,
00:05:13.100that, you know, things were more productive in the sort of era of some sort of medieval feudalism where there was less likelihood to have more freedom,
00:05:20.700where people could be not under the control of some Leviathan state.
00:05:24.440You kind of see this being reinvented in a way or repackaged with sort of the Silicon Valley, you know, influence that Yarvin clearly has,
00:05:34.100both as a systems analyst, but also as someone who sort of looks at things like a startup state.
00:05:38.460And it shows where he starts talking about this sort of neo-feudal concept where we want to have a world where the sort of micro states can better organize themselves
00:05:48.480and are focused on profit motive rather than sort of the traditional idea of a state ruling overall and having this concept of a nation state.
00:11:19.060However, what you do have is the opportunity to exit at any time.
00:11:23.360No one is stopping you from leaving one patch and going to the other.
00:11:27.660And the hope is that because each patch is relatively small, it's not a large empire, you could easily, you know, move from one to another.
00:11:35.840And because they'll be in constant competition for each other, they'll want good human capital, right?
00:11:42.080You'll, as a CEO running a patch, you're going to want the best, the brightest, the most productive.
00:11:48.620And so you're going to want to create a society that caters to those people.
00:11:53.760And so if anyone can leave your patch and go to another patch at any time, then that means you have to create an environment that attracts people who are going to be, you know, helping with your patch.
00:12:06.600And so the idea is like this constant ability to exit and this constant option of competition creates almost the most free market possible for kind of how people would align themselves in any given nation state.
00:12:23.400And the concept, of course, is that this is sort of a global system.
00:12:28.040And because you have this strict market-oriented competition, you want to ensure that you're a profitable entity, that you can have people, you know, being the productive consumer base and patron base for your sort of startup business-esque society.
00:12:46.320And that that's one way to maintain sort of this mutual competition between states and that having some kind of cryptographic control.
00:12:57.180And he's talking about this in 2008, but, you know, ideas sort of evolved now with the blockchain and crypto that you could have the ability to control how government works in a way that not one person can just usurp it and take over.
00:13:10.640Outside of the power outside of the one that's deemed to be sovereign alongside the likelihood of decreasing war.
00:13:17.400And he goes throughout this, both is neocameralism as an escalator of masarchy.
00:13:23.340And then, of course, the four chapters on patchwork, his sort of idea for a world peace.
00:13:28.080But, you know, he doesn't tell you how we would transition towards this, but it is sort of this theorized proposal for an alternative to the sort of democratic bureaucracy that we live under now.
00:13:40.640Yeah, and I think a lot of people are going to look at this as very pie in the sky, and they're going to be right about that.
00:13:47.020I don't think that this is a realistic solution kind of to where we're at now.
00:13:52.880But I do think it's an interesting and important thought experiment because it lets us look at kind of the limits of some of this type of thinking, right?
00:14:02.240Like, he's going to take many of these libertarian solutions to their absolute maximum.
00:14:06.780And then we can kind of look at that and say, what parts of this work?
00:14:10.480What part of this parts are legitimate?
00:14:14.500And where can we find kind of different ways forward?
00:14:18.680So one thing that you talked about here was kind of the technological aspect of this solution, right?
00:14:24.820He talks about kind of this cryptographic government, and that's been updated with kind of how that he's because it's been decades basically since he wrote this.
00:14:35.740And now in gray mirror, he's kind of fleshed this out in a more serious or I shouldn't say more serious.
00:14:40.480It's still a little fantastical, but in a way that's more updated with our current technology, understanding that basically you could set up a scenario where kind of each one of these people is hidden but accountable.
00:14:57.280We'd have to like read a whole essay to really get into this.
00:14:59.460But basically the idea is like each of the shareholders could be anonymous but could be held accountable through the technology available, that they could be tied to things like weapons control, that these things could be turned over to the CEO or denied to the CEO, much in the way that a lot of people kind of want to use smart guns, right, where you have to use the fingerprint and you have to biometrically affirm that you're the one who's allowed to operate this thing.
00:15:25.520You would tie these same things to the monarch, the CEO, that kind of stuff, and so that you could kind of still create basically this kind of accountability through the corporate structure process and through the technological advancements that wouldn't be there than necessarily through just kind of the democratic process.
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00:16:19.820Yeah, and this is where he calls this crypto governance or something along those lines.
00:16:25.600You want things to be anonymized to ensure that, and he also talks about this in Gray Mirror as well, that at any point in time, you wouldn't know who the other key holders are as to ensure that you're not being influenced by other people in some form of conspiracy or in sort of an ideologically consistent way to govern,
00:16:45.660because you never know if they might vote against you or may vote you out based upon your own record.
00:16:50.860And he argues that this is a way to also link it to the military, to ensure that you need your patrons and subscribers to back this up in a way that if you wanted to declare war,
00:17:01.600it'd have to be seen as a viable way to do so, and so on and so forth, alongside other decisions that may be made to be more competitive against your other sort of sovereign corporative entities.
00:17:14.860Whether, you know, he prescribes the idea that, like, San Francisco at the time that had, like, 750,000 people living in it, right?
00:17:22.980Like, they would spend millions of dollars beautifying the place, making sure that, you know, it was a good place to have a business set up.
00:17:29.760That way you're making sure that they're not being taxed to death for maximum laugh or curve extraction and to be sort of the ideal world that you want to live in.
00:17:38.820Very sort of utopian minded, but in a way that seems, at least in his view, technologically feasible based upon the libertarian thinking that he had,
00:17:48.100ranging from Hans Herma Hoppe, mix it with a little bit of Sir Robert Filmer's divine right of kings.
00:17:54.260And this is where he sort of sees the conclusion.
00:17:57.600Yeah, you can definitely see Hoppe's influence here, you know, in Democracy, the God that Failed, Hoppe kind of lays out this idea of kind of these contractual communities.
00:18:07.620And a big part of this for Hoppe is, you know, a lot of people, when they think about libertarians, they think about just live and let live libertarians, right?
00:18:17.380Like, whatever you want to do is fine.
00:18:19.720The government doesn't get involved in those kind of things.
00:18:22.280That's not actually kind of how Hoppe sees his construction of this.
00:18:27.960You have to abide, you know, by very strict contracts moving into this.
00:18:33.960Hoppe is very supportive of kind of the right of association and the right to say no to certain people, to demand certain things of people.
00:18:43.580He's very big on kind of drawing those lines and allowing the community to kind of put those restrictions on itself.
00:18:50.720And really, Yarvin takes that a step further, right?
00:18:53.900He, instead of saying the community will bind all of this stuff into kind of a agreed upon social contract, he says, I'm going to go a step further.
00:19:02.360And I'm just going to kind of basically create a monarch who will have wide power, will have a large amount of power to, you know, he's not libertarian in this sense.
00:19:13.000The government will be able to take big moves, you know, have wide sweeping powers.
00:19:17.960However, it will still be bound through this kind of corporate structure of accountability backed up by that technological safeguard.
00:19:26.840And again, really essentially, there's this entrance and exit restriction.
00:19:31.620You know, there's a restriction on entrance, but there's no restriction on exit.
00:19:37.220So you might have to meet some very serious requirements.
00:19:40.720If you're running like the ideal patch, you don't just want anyone in there.
00:19:44.100Like free immigration into your patch is a problem because if you're constructing this really profitable patch and then a bunch of people are like, hey, that's a really nice place to live.
00:19:52.900I'm just going to move in there and not care about like what makes it profitable.
00:19:56.900Well, they're just going to destroy your patch.
00:19:58.680So you do have to have a lot of gatekeeping about who can move into your patch, but anyone can move out at any time to kind of move on to the next one where they think they'll do better.
00:20:08.460Yeah. And you mentioned we've been using the words exit and voice is alongside these entities.
00:20:14.240And I think it's important that we, you know, cite where he's getting this from.
00:20:18.000He's getting this from the German political economist and philosopher, Alberto Hirschman, who had wrote a book, I think, in the 1970s called Exit, Voice and Loyalty.
00:20:27.760And that exit and voice are ways to measure the decline of businesses and organizations.
00:20:33.980And that we see this particularly within democratic governments that, you know, the more vocal and the worse that things tend to get.
00:20:43.180Exit can also be seen as this of people who are leaving an organization, either as consumers or shareholders.
00:20:48.900It is a sign that things are not going particularly well for you.
00:20:53.040And in this instance, they want those things to happen.
00:20:55.400But if you want to have exit, you need to appreciate it and approve it in a way that they're not leaving because your company sucks.
00:21:02.200But that opportunity is available to them.
00:21:04.360You want low exit and low voice in respects to being an effective sort of business that people would want to invest in and live in and enjoy it.
00:21:14.140And to sort of date this, he compares it as to like how certain organizations have license agreements inside the video game Second Life.
00:21:23.060But this thought kind of just echoes that there is sort of this philosophical tradition that goes back through the centuries that he's pulling all these different threads from to illustrate that this would be his model for how things work.
00:21:35.300So would like Singapore be the closest thing we have to like a model for this kind of government that we see today?
00:21:44.660It would probably be the closest thing.
00:21:47.260And I mean, he references throughout his works, Singapore as an example, alongside its leadership.
00:21:54.120And to me, it seems like the closest thing that we might have.
00:21:59.180I mean, if if you could turn the confederated states of Micronesia into every little state being Singapore, every single little island, then maybe that'd be the closest thing that we have.
00:22:10.780But there is not a sort of in real world one to one example.
00:22:16.020But that is the closest thing to work off of.
00:22:18.680Yeah. So I guess we can kind of use that as as maybe a little jumping off point.
00:22:22.660So I think we're going to get to plenty of problems.
00:22:26.220But let's let's start with maybe some of the possible upsides.
00:22:29.240Right. Like what would be some of the advantages of this framework?
00:22:33.780So the first thing, obviously, the thing he's most focused on and some people might, you know, find this controversial depending on how they feel about it, but it eliminates democracy.
00:22:42.640Right. And by eliminating democracy, it eliminates a lot of the social incentives for division.
00:22:50.680Right. You remove a lot of the the because power is unified into one entity and the entity is without question because there is low voice.
00:23:01.660That means there is clear and decisive leadership.
00:23:04.220Whatever the vision is for the patch, you can reach it consistently.
00:23:10.740There's not a lot of need to divide the community to secure power for yourself because there is no opportunity to secure power for yourself.
00:23:17.740There is no free power like there is no power out there floating unattached to something.
00:23:23.040All of the power is very clearly and visibly kind of centered exactly where it's supposed to be.
00:23:29.500Also, there's a high degree of accountability.
00:23:36.820We know exactly who to blame if things go wrong or who to praise if things go right.
00:23:42.600And the corporate board can remove the CEO if mistakes are being made.
00:23:47.920People can exit if they don't like what's going on.
00:23:52.260And so there is a there's a high probability of kind of very clear and formal accountability being laid kind of at the feet of these people.
00:24:01.520And then obviously you also have what if you're going kind of along with Moldbug's thesis that this creates a high degree of competitive competitiveness.
00:24:10.900You have this situation where you're seeing a lot of motivation to create the best patch to to be the the best corporation nation state because the competition is so high, which increases the kind of quality of life of everyone, because there's there's no way to kind of escape the fact that if you run a bad patch, people are going to leave.
00:24:33.180If you're going to get replaced, you always have an incentive to kind of be on top of your game.
00:24:37.940Are there any kind of other obvious upsides that you might see that I didn't mention there to kind of the possible patchwork idea?
00:24:46.580Well, I think that alongside sort of bypassing democracy, Yarvin also makes it kind of clear when talking about neocameralism and patchwork that you sort of just bypass a lot of the structural problems that sort of have existed with separation of powers, because even inside our own government.
00:25:05.620Right. We have these three branches. Right. We have these three branches. But even then we can sell that the idea of them being sort of co-equal has not really played out in the way that we've talked about.
00:25:15.260He expresses this as well when he sort of lambasts James Madison and Federalist No. 10 about political factions, political parties and one portion of the government ruling over the other.
00:25:25.040You know, returning to the smaller and more confederated forms of these business sovereign entities would be a way to sort of bypass one totalizing confederating form of government that overrules the rest.
00:25:42.120You know, for him, it would be like if Otto von Bismarck had never unified all of the Germanic states and all the Germanic microstates existed as they were.
00:25:51.560You're not being under the rule of one sovereign authority. If you don't like the sovereign, say, outside of Hamburg, you know, you can go to Stuttgart or whatever and you'll be perfectly fine.
00:26:00.060And that's sort of an obvious way to bypass it. Right. Like we have federalism on paper in the United States.
00:26:06.660But, you know, when the Supreme Court and the executive branch can take away rights that are enumerated in the Constitution to the states, what's kind of the point?
00:26:14.420And so Yarvin is trying to see past some of the obvious faults in our government that may not have been seen by the original founders in the 1780s.
00:26:25.280Sure. And so I think those are kind of good first arguments.
00:26:30.440There are other advantages that could come, but some of them are kind of based on his assumptions, you know, that go forward.
00:26:37.640Does everything actually play out the way that he wants? I mean, does this could have the advantage of world peace? Right.
00:26:42.800Everybody just kind of, you know, falls into this a multipolar stasis where they're heavily disincentivized to really enter into any kind of military action.
00:26:52.700And that's a possibility. But I think I think that's that's assuming a lot.
00:26:56.600So I guess that said, we can dive into some of its weaknesses.
00:27:02.460So I think the first weakness that many people might kind of think about is, you know, how do we know that?
00:27:11.040And you kind of brought this up before we started streaming. How do we know that the corporation stays a corporation?
00:27:18.400What's the incentive for this government to continue to act in this way?
00:27:23.740If there's a better form, a better way to kind of secure its sovereignty or to expand its power or its gains, those kind of things, its territorial monopoly.
00:27:34.600Why would they continue to abide by this particular structure?
00:27:40.560Yeah, and this is sort of the big thing that I was when I looking back on sort of these you are posts and reading them before we went on the air and when we talked about doing the show.
00:27:49.820One of the things that sort of gets mentioned in chapter one, as well as in the neocameralist bit, is about how the subscriber or the person who engages in these sort of states with soft corpse directors,
00:28:07.580is that all these sort of cryptographic keys are meant to stop, you know, vertical integration or one state sort of buying out the other states because he doesn't like the idea of a permanent global gugocracy, right?
00:28:21.120Like, well, we just sell everything to like the Google state. We're good to go.
00:28:24.880Although I think BlackRock's doing a better job than Google is right now.
00:28:27.840But, you know, that sort of form of stability is the thing I was concerned about, because when you look at nation states as they exist today,
00:28:37.940you know, no nation state voluntarily gives up sovereignty in respects to its competitors unless it's by force or that he sees some sort of comparative advantage in reducing sovereignty for another benefit.
00:28:50.640I mean, you can see this with, on paper, at least, I don't think that the world's best examples, but like the European Union, sort of the Schengen agreement that, hey, there's going to be some rules made outside of Brussels.
00:29:00.400You're going to agree to this. We're going to play along with these benefits.
00:29:04.120Nations naturally tend to pursue empire.
00:29:07.020And that's something that I don't know would go away in this sort of neocameralist or patchwork state.
00:29:12.560If I have the means where my board or these anonymized figures recognize that our competition is killing us out there because they have access to a river or rare earth mineral resources on their territory, what's to stop them from going to war and seeking hegemony?
00:29:27.240So the idea of maintaining some kind of stable military peace, I don't see likely.
00:29:33.520And when he talks about sort of alongside cryptographic weapons, these other concepts of mutually assured instruction, you know, not every Singapore out there is going to have your, you know, mcnukes, right?
00:29:44.100If we're going to play off of Han Sermahop a bit here.
00:29:46.120So to me, it's more of a concern of, well, how do you transition to this?
00:29:49.640Or even if it were to exist, how is it that, say, you know, the state operated enterprise of the People's Republic of China, because everything inside China is a state owned enterprise, doesn't just wallop you with that respect.
00:30:03.400So the international relations school of realism comes to mind as a rather large concern.
00:30:09.980And then the second one, and I think this is the more important one for what we've seen is sort of hindsight, is that for Yarvin, this idea of neocameralism, these patchwork states, is that they're kept in competition by profit motive and sort of business competition between these sovereign corporation entities where everything's ran like a joint stock company.
00:30:31.140Well, I think what we've definitely been able to notice, especially since 2008, is that a lot of corporations are willing to burn an ungodly amount of money in order to achieve a message.
00:30:43.680I mean, Disney has burned millions of dollars in movies that are not particularly good.
00:30:51.000They don't, you know, give any respect to the source material.
00:30:54.280They are an insult to the cultures in which they came from.
00:30:57.000And consumers are obviously saying no to this.
00:30:59.820And that's a form of voice alongside exit.
00:31:03.080So even though those companies can survive, you know, people protesting or one, you know, guy going into a grocery store and dumping Anshower Bush beer into the middle of the aisle.
00:31:14.040So it raises the interesting question of, OK, well, you have exit and you have voice.
00:31:19.300But what is to stop a sovereign corporate entity from pursuing more totalitarian control through ideological means or administrative means like we've seen with our government or other, quote unquote, woke corporations from doing that instead of, you know, just relying on on business?
00:31:37.720Yeah, I think that is a little naive of him to assume that, like the soft power infiltration of this will kind of go away just because the democratic aspect is gone.
00:31:51.880I think that's kind of what he's banking on is that that that that that need to kind of expand in that way disappears simply because democracy goes away, which I don't I don't think tracks as well.
00:32:03.540He has in some ways addressed bits of this problem with kind of what essentially becomes an additional layer of sovereignty on top of this.
00:32:13.360So in gray mirror, he kind of made these really vague posts about kind of how you need to control the air and you need to control the sea and you need to control space.
00:32:22.380And so, you know, if there was basically like this gigantic, like, you know, laser network of satellites that was kind of locked in by this again, like the cryptographic government, then basically you could you could basically have like another layer of sovereignty, like a like a global sovereign that does nothing but say this is how everybody has to play by the rules.
00:32:48.100And if you don't apply by the rules, you're going to get hit by a space laser.
00:32:51.880And so like the idea is basically like you create this this network here and it feels like we're just, you know, it feels like we're creating God to another God to explain the existence of why God doesn't have to exist.
00:33:05.400You know what I mean? Like when atheists do this where they're like, OK, well, you know, this isn't real.
00:33:09.900We don't want to solve this problem. So there's another thing.
00:33:12.400You know, it's we're actually in a simulation. It's it's not God. It's a simulation.
00:33:16.520It feels like he's doing the same thing with government. It's it's not a real unified sovereign.
00:33:22.200It's you know, it's another layer above that makes everybody play by the rules, but isn't the actual thing.
00:33:27.660And it feels a lot like that where, OK, well, we're going to get our we're going to get our tiny little patch states.
00:33:33.480But the only way we can keep them all in line is by creating a one world government that exists above the patch states and like enforces the continued compliance with kind of the corporate structure and and everybody playing by those rules.
00:33:48.280And so I'm not sure where he's going to take that next.
00:33:51.680If he's I asked him when he was on the show before kind of what happened to patchwork, if we're going to see it again, because he's kind of walked away from this in a lot of ways, which we'll talk about in a second.
00:34:02.220But but he said it's going to come back. He said that it's still there.
00:34:06.560But I think there's there's one more feeling that I want to talk about before we talk about him walking away from it.
00:34:11.380And that is the exit focus, right? His focus here is exit.
00:34:16.640You know, no voice, all exit. You can't you can't demand things from the government, but you can leave.
00:34:23.500And I think that's a huge problem, because I think, like you said, what you want is loyalty, right?
00:34:28.660Like the third option here. And the problem is this is Yarvin is still stuck in this very modern idea of kind of completely deracinated cultures and peoples, right?
00:34:40.960Like the community isn't what matters. The culture isn't what matters.
00:34:45.880You know, the church isn't what matters. The only thing that matters is kind of the efficiency of the machine.
00:34:51.440And so he's still stuck in this kind of managerial solution.
00:34:54.960He's not looking at spiritual solutions. He's not looking at communal solutions.
00:34:59.300He's not looking at even Marshall solutions. The only solutions are merchant based.
00:35:03.720They're all technology efficiency, properly operating bureaucracies like this is this is what the solution is.
00:35:10.960And if you don't like it, we just move you to somewhere else where where it's going to be better.
00:35:15.100But like people staying in one place is what builds culture. It's what builds community.
00:35:20.180It's what builds a spirit of people being able to work together and improve things.
00:35:25.060And he's he's just treating everybody as kind of this individual deracinated mercenary instead of understanding that like there's a huge human cost to having this interchangeable style of kind of living, you know, like in America.
00:35:38.480It's always, hey, you got to go move across the country to like, you know, leave your family and never have connections to anything you love and your culture and everything in order to make an opportunity.
00:35:47.420And it's like, actually, you know, that that destroys communities that destroys organic organization that destroys all of this stuff.
00:35:54.340And so I think in in a kind of a weird way, he is ignoring the core of the problem to kind of continue down the more modernist understanding of like what a human being is and how to solve that issue.
00:36:07.880Yeah, the other thing, of course, resumes back the question over tyranny, like if we're going to have sort of a CEO, Leviathan, the question really doesn't then become so what do you do to remove him?
00:36:23.180He's talked about this before that there's a board of directors that keeps him holding accountable.
00:36:27.540But if they're all residents of this sort of sovereign corporation, its patchwork realm, I mean, in his own words, he says, residents of a patchwork realm have no security or privacy against the realm.
00:36:37.860There is no possible conflict in the matter, not being malignant.
00:36:40.320The government is not a threat to its residents.
00:36:42.260And since it is sovereign, they are not a threat to it, the absence of conflict.
00:36:45.380And then he says that they all are there are even temporary visitors to the realm carry an ID card with an RFID response.
00:36:51.600Everyone's genotyped, iris scan, public transportation.
00:36:55.120You know, we're going to turn everything into London with its CCTV and sort of NSA levels of being able to spy and or surveil everyone.
00:37:03.260So even if something were to go wrong, then there's still an opportunity for literal control and command to stay over in the state, which, again, if you don't want any voice, you don't want any participation, they can leave.
00:37:14.420Well, what's to stop you from bypassing, say, profit motive and say, you know, having these people enslaved?
00:37:20.740His answer, of course, is to say, well, that's not profitable and people would probably not want to be there anyways.
00:37:27.280But again, to me, if you have everything controlled, surveilled, people can just get up and leave.
00:37:34.520There's no culture that can be formulated.
00:37:40.340I don't have a loyalty to my president right now, that's for sure.
00:37:45.240But I don't have, like, loyalty, for instance, if Elon Musk were to start Patchwork X, you know, outside of, like, Austin, Texas.
00:37:52.840Like, and I, you know, I don't see myself being loyal to that, being like, yep, I'm willing to die for Elon Musk.
00:37:57.520I'm willing to die for random soft corp, you know, joint stock company CEO king.
00:38:03.100There isn't a, and it goes back to the sort of the issue about, like, faith or materialism and religion is that there isn't this sort of unifying aspect of what brings people together.
00:38:15.500People don't believe in anything, and they're sort of this deracinated, deculturated, de-territorialized people.
00:38:22.740Because, sure, you know, Yarvin can square the peg into the round hole when it comes to being an atheist that believes in the divine right of kings, but the average person that you're going to rule over needs something to believe in, or those that are your rivals who have a better political formula or better yet, a belief system, I see being more of a prominent threat here.
00:38:46.440And, I mean, even then, right, like, we can look at really poorly run places in the world like South Africa.
00:38:53.820South Africa since 1994 has slowly degraded into rolling blackouts and poor quality of life, lengthy times for government services, the roads are ran poorly, but the white South Africans that are in there who are targeted for racial crime, violence, murder, etc., they still stay there because that's where they exist.
00:39:13.860That is their homeland. That is their culture. And it's been that way longer, you know, with the Huguenots and the Explorers that have been there.
00:39:19.740That's the only place on Earth where Afrikaner has spoken. Why would they leave?
00:39:24.120And that becomes the same question about, you know, trying to set up these sort of federal or, you know, sovereign entities is, well, what would be the point in staying if I have no culture?
00:39:33.860We see this all the time in America where, you know, mom and dad live in the middle of nowhere, their kid goes off to California, and they no longer have any relationship because they've been totally changed by California culture, and then they have awkward fights over the dinner table at Christmas and Thanksgiving, and a family is broken.
00:39:50.820So it really does illustrate, I think, some of the cultural bonds and weaknesses of this project that I think comes with most, if not all, materialist lenses of looking at politics, because you do need something deeper to anchor you to it.
00:40:03.860Yeah, I always have been kind of caught by that Carl Schmitt passage about the monstrous nature of asking a man to die for an economic zone.
00:40:15.760That's kind of exactly what you'd be doing here, you know, and it is very difficult, you know, it's kind of assuming that, well, because of this competition, there will always be good times and, you know, everything will always kind of get solved through this.
00:40:30.740But that's just not how real life works.
00:40:34.060And in those moments of difficulty, what brings people together, what binds them together for the good, instead of just having them all immediately, you know, jump out the escape hatch, you know, all heroic moments are really, or I shouldn't say all heroic moments, but many heroic moments are those where people denied exit, you know, where they stood firm and the human spirit overcomes,
00:40:57.400or are often moments where people turn away from that option.
00:41:00.900And so I think there's a real bit of that missing there, like you said, because of kind of the materialist nature of this.
00:41:07.100All right. So as we've said, Yarvin doesn't talk a lot about this anymore, though.
00:41:11.840It sounds like he might still be, you know, turning it over in his mind.
00:41:15.980He might still be thinking about how to retool this.
00:41:18.700One person who's really sad about, you know, Yarvin not continuing to pursue this is Nick Land.
00:41:24.680Nick Land is obviously another near reactionary philosopher, somebody who's intimately tied to Yarvin's work, who's, you know, stuff you and I have done episodes on and I've done with other people kind of explaining much of his work.
00:41:37.600What's Nick Land's problem with Yarvin kind of abandoning this?
00:41:40.960If it's so obviously flawed, why does he see this as an issue?
00:41:44.500So Nick Land, of course, I know that Curtis doesn't read a lot of criticisms or responses to his work.
00:41:51.240I don't know if he's read anything of Nick Land since the last time he said he hasn't read anything of him.
00:41:55.780But in The Dark Enlightenment, Nick Land talks about exit sort of being this core fundamental trait of sort of the Anglo-American identity.
00:42:04.280I mean, you saw this when sort of these Puritans and Anabaptists and Quakers decided to leave and go, you know, across the sea and sort of for this desire of religious exit.
00:42:14.620They're not Anglicans. They're not Catholics. We might as well just go somewhere else.
00:42:17.560You saw this, of course, with the concept of the Hartford Convention in the 1800s or later yet when the South actually did secede from the Union.
00:42:26.720And we see this, of course, with things like white flight, right?
00:42:29.180People naturally want to avoid bad areas and want to start fresh elsewhere.
00:42:34.060We see this even to this day when blue state, you know, people leave for Texas or Florida.
00:42:39.220We saw this during COVID. We still see this today with progressive policy.
00:42:42.360And so he notices that exit is sort of this really key aspect of how Americans especially try to resolve their problems.
00:42:52.720And by sort of abandoning this concept or abandoning this project, you're sort of ignoring this key.
00:42:59.880I don't want to say it's a purely identitarian issue, but you're abandoning something that is an important variable to consider when looking at politics on the right today.
00:43:10.420And then the other reason why is because exit is a key form of accelerationism.
00:43:15.300If I can get up and leave en masse, I'm accelerating the collapse of a state per the Hirschhauer concept of exit and voice being these ways to gauge the decline and quality of a government or an organization.
00:43:28.080So clearly, as rich people fled during COVID out of New York or California, you know, those states had significant tax revenue problems to a point where, you know, governors in New Jersey and New York were like trying to find ways to incentivize the wealthy to come back to New York City because so much of their government budgets were ran off of these revenues and taxes off the wealthy.
00:43:51.680By so by trying to get not focus on this issue or not talk about it as much, you know, land kind of use this as a method where, well, these are important things to look at on how we can either accelerate and get to this sort of like we are techno capitalist utopia or, you know, sort of bring about the collapse of really crappy leftist governments.
00:44:12.120Right. Absolutely. Yeah. So he sees this and, you know, he talks about this a number of times in the Dark Enlightenment about kind of just the the the need to flee.
00:44:23.500Right. Like fleeing the zombie apocalypse is the only option. There's no negotiation with it.
00:44:28.200And so he's kind of sees this as kind of the last refuge of escaping the democratic virus of kind of escaping what is kind of consuming much of the Western world.
00:44:38.300And so, you know, stepping away from this project is a bit of a problem for him.
00:44:44.020But I do think there is just an acknowledgement, you know, that there is, I think, at the heart of this, the they want to avoid conflict.
00:44:55.420Right. The desire to create a situation in which no existential questions ever really have to be answered because there's always another way out.
00:45:05.860There's always another place to flee. There's always another place to go.
00:45:10.980You know, there's there's this never has to come to a head.
00:45:13.880And this, of course, again, puts me to the mind of Carl Schmitt and kind of the idea of liberalism being the escape from kind of the clash of existential questions and identities.
00:45:24.580Right. Like if we can just engineer the world correctly, if we can just engineer states correctly, then we never have to come to kind of those hard questions and the attempts to resolve them.
00:45:37.940We can always just find a new and different way to kind of bail ourselves out, find some kind of neutral management position, find some way to kind of to push that friend enemy distinction into the corner.
00:45:49.960But again, I think you eventually run into the same problem, which is these are eternal aspects of the human condition and they will reemerge.
00:45:58.520And perhaps in any more even more horrific ways if you deny their existence.
00:46:04.040Yeah, I mean, to me, it just feels like it is the Silicon Valley's attempt at some kind of secular millionism, right, that we can build some kind of way to bypass the issues of man.
00:46:16.660And what and of course, the bypass sort of the Christian ideas of like sin or that we are just naturally fallen beings and things like this.
00:46:25.000I mean, he mentions this with with Patriarcha, where it's just like Robert Filmer gives you a Calvinist answer for why crap just happens and you have to accept it.
00:46:33.460Whereas, you know, he's trying to build a way where, well, when crap happens, you can just get up and go.
00:46:37.980And I think it still runs into the hard economic concerns of both business entities that are purely focused on profit motive as a way to compete with others.
00:46:48.120Like, do would they have an answer on how to keep people from being there or from just getting up and leaving when a recession happens?
00:46:55.360You know, if we're still operating on this sort of boom and bust cycle of business, are we going to be able to maintain our sovereignty of a particular territory or corporate entity when the bad times happen or say there's a run on a bank or something like that?
00:47:10.620These things are not fleshed out fully.
00:47:13.160And I do hope that he returns back to the idea, maybe to perhaps answer some of these questions.
00:47:18.840But to me, it does seem like you've run into the limits that we fundamentally cannot have infinite growth from a finite number of resources.
00:47:28.720Are these going to be, you know, are these little micro states like, you know, Singapore, are we going to run into the problem of Spantle's the IQ shredder?
00:47:36.720Are we going to just have low birth rates everywhere that you go when eventually we're going to see a real demographic problem?
00:47:43.160And this compounds the problem of the competency crisis, as Palladium magazine was just writing about not too long ago that, you know, or is FedCorp going to have an HR resource department where, you know, we're going to ensure that there's diversity, equity and inclusion?
00:47:58.560And are we going to make sure that the trains run on time or the airplanes don't fly out of the sky?
00:48:03.100These are things that are sort of taken for granted.
00:48:06.180And again, while this is all theoretical, it's all very new.
00:48:09.140You know, this has never been tried before.
00:48:11.360These are real concerns for when you're trying to propose an alternative when you're talking about things like peaceful regime change or an alternative to the current mechanisms of government that we have, which are clearly not working.
00:48:24.880You would want to offer something that is better than, hey, imagine strip mall, but a country, you know, you want something that offers more incentive than that.
00:48:33.480Absolutely. All right. Well, I think we've covered this in pretty good detail, guys.
00:48:38.440Like I said, it's it's an idea that in many ways has kind of been passed by as people have kind of seen the numbers, number of problems with it.
00:48:46.000But it does, you know, for many people who have asked, is there any solution offered by these people?
00:48:50.860You know, this is one of them. And I think it does, if nothing else, create a really interesting thought experiment.
00:48:57.640One of the things I like about Yarvin is a thinker is even when he's wrong, he's wrong in interesting ways.
00:49:02.140And so by exploring things that even, you know, where we think, oh, that doesn't work or that's going to fall apart, those kind of things, we can still find important truths, important, you know, realizations, important things that we need to incorporate when we're thinking about this stuff.
00:49:17.580And I wanted to make sure that we cover this because this is a core idea of kind of part of neo reactionary philosophy.
00:49:24.800And I know many people have not read all this stuff. They're not familiar with all the stuff.
00:49:28.680They haven't gone back and kind of done all the legwork on this.
00:49:31.220So it's nice to have kind of some of these explainer videos in these streams that kind of pull these concepts together and allow you to explore them before maybe you go reading them on your own.
00:49:40.200And I know I did a lot of that. Guys like Charlemagne, guys like Clossington and Amnesis, they were creating, you know, videos that I watched before I read Moldbug.
00:49:51.140So when I did, I kind of understood better what I was reading.
00:49:54.580I find those very important and helpful. And I think that's one of the reasons I try to make them for people as well.
00:50:00.760All right, Prudentialists, we're going to swing over to the questions of the people.
00:50:03.780But before we do, where do people find your excellent work?
00:50:06.840Oh, sure. Well, once again, thank you for having me on, Oren.
00:50:08.900You can find me at findmyfriends.net slash Prudentialist.
00:50:11.980I mainly cover history, culture and international relations.
00:50:15.920And you can find me on YouTube, Twitter, Telegram and all of those wonderful links that you can find down below at the description.
00:50:22.320And that's what I am. And that's what I do.
00:50:25.160Excellent. All right, guys, let's go over here to our questions real quick.
00:50:28.360We only have a couple. JS here. Thank you very much, sir.
00:50:32.100Can Mecha Bentham be the monarch, please?
00:50:34.900If you manage to assemble Mecha Bentham, let me know.
00:51:41.260So, I am, I have what I'd call like a survey level knowledge of Kukagard.
00:51:46.480I read him in college and I have read him in bits and pieces throughout my life, but I have never really drilled down on Kukagard.
00:51:57.520And so, I would say at this point, while I do find his thought interesting, I am not well read.
00:52:04.140Some of the things you'll run into, guys, like one of the things you'll notice is like I keep being in this scenario where I need to read more, but every time I need to read more, I also realize that what I should really be doing is rereading everything I've already read.
00:52:17.140Because there's so much there, guys like Spangler, guys like Thomas Carlyle, like these are people, you know, whose books I need to read many, many times to get them.
00:52:28.600I don't just read complicated books once.
00:52:30.920And so, like, I know, for instance, like I need to read Heidegger, but Heidegger is such a commitment to grasp properly.
00:52:37.480I know I'm going to need to read it like three times and I still need to go back and read Oswald Spangler another time, you know, to like to bring all that stuff forward.
00:52:44.400And so, like, I want to understand more of Kierkegaard's thought, but I don't know.
00:52:49.420Pridigilis, since you just did a video, I don't know how deeply read you are, Kierkegaard, but where should people start?
00:52:55.440Well, I would recommend, of course, the Two Ages of Literary Review.
00:52:59.920That's the work that I was building off of to write that recent essay called Kierkegaard and the Gay Paperclip.
00:53:06.340Kind of takes a look at the concept of the leveling, which I recommend people look into.
00:53:10.060The attack upon Christendom is also a really good piece to consider.
00:53:16.920This is stuff to sort of look at when people are looking at the Reformation and Christianity falling now in the wake of this sort of enlightenment, pure reason skepticism.
00:53:27.940He's very critical of people like Edmund Burke or Alexis de Tocqueville in comparison.
00:53:32.360I think that if you want an interesting counterbalance to the existential crises of Europe in the 19th century, I think that you should read Nietzsche alongside Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky.
00:53:45.920But I would definitely say the Two Ages of Literary Review and Attack upon Christendom are great places to start if you want to get into Kierkegaard.
00:54:04.080Would y'all agree to a concept of exit that allowed extreme freedom of association and exit,
00:54:10.640along as every entity agreed on core principles such as Christ?
00:54:15.560So I'm not I guess I'll take that in pieces.
00:54:18.660So the the you know, both Hoppe and I believe Moldbug are obviously pretty, pretty strong on freedom of association.
00:54:26.540That's one of the more controversial parts about Hoppe, of course, especially in the libertarian community.
00:54:32.000But he's very clear that like that is a key part of this, that people can assemble the communities as they would like under these contracts.
00:54:40.400And that is including, you know, exclusionary, you know, devices of all kinds.
00:54:47.180And so I think that that's a pretty strong portion of kind of patchwork and both patchwork and kind of the contractual communities of Hoppe.
00:54:58.240Yeah. Oh, the kind of as long as everyone entity agreed on core principles such as Christ.
00:55:07.100So I think everybody should agree with those principles in general, but I'm not sure what that has to do with this in particular.
00:55:14.020I'm not sure how that that general unity.
00:55:17.680I mean, both of these people, I think, due to their kind of freedom of association would say if communities want to not agree to those principles, that would be part of their freedom of association.
00:55:27.620If you wanted to form an Islamic or an atheist or whatever community, you would kind of have that.
00:55:32.760But I don't know, Prudentialist, how do you see that question?
00:55:36.680I mean, I'm an incredibly big pro freedom of association guy.
00:55:40.160I wish it existed in my country, wish it was back in some form or context, you know, if everyone agreed to it, I mean, in some form of covenant, sort of like what Yarvin describes, where it's based upon, you know, total allegiance or total belief and faith in Christ.
00:55:55.480I mean, this would be, I guess, in a world where like, you know, there was sort of this patchwork world, but it was the various churches or denominations like, yeah, you'd find me over at the, the Orthodox sort of patchwork church state, wherever that might exist.
00:56:12.580But, uh, I mean, on, on paper, that sounds like a lovely idea, but I think that that also would be a fun thought experiment on how you, you mix that with, uh, the various Christian denominations and churches and their views on political theology and how they should govern in the world.
00:56:29.700But, uh, I mean, I would definitely be in support of something like that.
00:56:33.480I mean, I, all right, so I think I might've lost credentials there for a second.
00:56:53.100Well, actually, uh, that was the ultimate punishment in many, uh, ancient communities, not just native American communities.
00:56:59.440Of course, uh, banishment was a very serious penalty in places like, uh, you know, uh, the Italian city states or the, uh, the Greek city states.
00:57:09.940Uh, the big thing about this, of course, was that banishment, you know, um, the, the, the city state was kind of the natural, uh, size that most, uh, civilizations could kind of grow to at that point.
00:57:22.760And so banishment from your city state was very serious because, uh, people tended to take kind of their ethnos far more seriously.
00:57:30.660In many ways, they would often tie it kind of directly to their national identity that, that those were the same thing.
00:57:37.400And so, uh, being banished from those kind of completely cut you off from any possibility of political tie, any possibility of social tie.
00:57:46.380If you were banished, uh, you were banished from your hometown and you couldn't just easily immigrate into another city state because that city state defined kind of its existence by its ethnos.
00:57:58.700And because you were not part of that, you joining, maybe, maybe you might get the opportunity to live in that city, but you would never be a part of it in the way that like people are a part of say America.
00:58:09.480Now, in many ways, people think of that, where you just kind of get a piece of paper and you're a citizen.
00:58:13.720That was not a thing in most ancient communities.
00:58:16.460And so banishment was very serious because it wasn't just, Oh, you can't live here anymore.
00:58:20.880It's that you'll never be like a native part of any culture again, because that, that's not kind of, they didn't have this liberal idea of kind of just moving in between that kind of your, your national allegiance, your cultural allegiance would just be kind of mercenary and you can move between it.
00:58:36.900So in some ways, yeah, I mean, this does bring that back because if you are banished from your patch, it is, you know, then you are forced to move to a worse patch, right?
00:58:48.160So if you are not abiding by kind of that community, uh, then you would have to move to another community that is not as ideal.
00:59:04.740If your last patch threw you out, why should we let you in?
00:59:07.440However, it does lose some of that identity kind of, uh, kind of aspect of punishment, right?
00:59:15.140Of banishment because banishment was kind of primarily a, a, uh, a punishment because it was a loss of identity and community.
00:59:24.080And because these patches are entirely mercenary, they wouldn't have the same idea of identity and community.
00:59:30.840And so therefore, you know, you, you wouldn't quite have the same, it would be still be a punishment, but it would be a punishment that is of a slightly different kind.
00:59:38.380It would be more materialistic and less kind of spiritual and cultural, uh, which again, as we've noted is, is something that is a recurring theme throughout many of, uh, Yarvin's kind of, uh, assessments, assumptions, and solutions.
00:59:51.720All right, guys, well, I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up.
00:59:55.040It looks like we did lose the Prudentialist here, but of course, uh, he is great.
01:00:01.200Hopefully, you know, his internet will, will return to him soon.
01:00:04.160Uh, but I really appreciate him coming by.
01:00:06.560Make sure that you check out everything that he's doing.
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01:00:31.540All right, guys, thank you once again so much for coming by.
01:00:34.840And as always, I'll talk to you next time.