Mencius Moldbug: The Clear Pill (Part 1)

Mencius Moldbug is back with a thoughtful series of essays on how liberal democracy actually works. He calls it “the four stroke regime” with two stories and compares it to classic totalitarianism which is “the two stroke regime” where everyone believes one story. Both regimes rule the masses through Orwellian methods of thought control.

American Mind:

“The turn-of-the-century Italian School of political science—whose leading figures were Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, and which James Burnham summarized in his best book, The MachiavelliansDefenders of Freedom (1940)—taught that all states are ruled by elites who subdue their subjects with illusions.

Mosca called these illusions “political formulas.” A political formula is any narrative element which makes its host prefer actions that objectively stabilize the regime. The peasant in ancient Egypt might submit to his Pharaoh to avoid offending the latter’s father, the sun.

Political formulas are cousins of stage magic. Stage magic works by presenting true facts in a pattern that suggests a false story, and obscures a true story. To act politically is to act on a stage beyond our lives and senses. No one can perceive unmediated reality. We act within a story. We read that story as reality: present history. …

The staff does all the real work, but not even the staff writes actual bills. Congress has two sources of legislative input: activists and lobbyists. The activists come for power; the lobbyists, money.

Activists are Democrats; lobbyists are whores. Either is more than happy to write any “language” that any staffer needs.

Congress manages Washington by coordinating activist and corporate power with the agencies themselves, following the inspiration of the press, the judgment of the academy, and the generosity of philanthropy. This real constitution is written nowhere.

I largely agree with what Curtis is saying here even though he is describing the structure of how our system works rather than who is running the system.

Let’s just cite the most obvious recent example: we have all noticed how the ADL, the mainstream media, Congress and Big Tech are coordinating the narrative. The ADL is a Jewish NGO which isn’t part of the government, but obviously it is wielding power. It is deciding who can have a bank account and who can use social media. It is compiling lists of people to be blacklisted. I know it even sends dossiers on its political enemies to local police departments.

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3 Comments

  1. “The ADL is a Jewish NGO which isn’t part of the government, but obviously it is wielding power. It is deciding who can have a bank account and who can use social media. It is compiling lists of people to be blacklisted. I know it even sends dossiers on its political enemies to local police departments.”

    So the Anti-DEFAMATION League is actually DEFAMING those they consider their enemies and creating blacklists. Technically, the ADL should be named JDL — Jewish Defamation League — an organization of, by, for Jews to defame those they consider to be their enemies. (White people need a league like this but of course the MSM will name it the KKK.)

    Defamation, calumny, vilification, or traducement is the communication of a false statement that harms the reputation of, depending on the law of the country, an individual, business, product, group, government, religion, or nation.[1] In South Korea[2] and some other countries, communicating a true statement can also be considered defamation.

    Under common law, to constitute defamation, a claim must generally be false and must have been made to someone other than the person defamed.[3] Some common law jurisdictions also distinguish between spoken defamation, called slander, and defamation in other media such as printed words or images, called libel.[4]

    False light laws protect against statements which are not technically false, but which are misleading.[5]

    In some civil law jurisdictions, defamation is treated as a crime rather than a civil wrong.[6] The United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled in 2012 that the libel law of one country, the Philippines, was inconsistent with Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as urging that “State parties [to the Covenant] should consider the decriminalization of libel”.[7] In Saudi Arabia, defamation of the state, or a past or present ruler, is punishable under terrorism legislation.[8]

    A person who defames another may be called a “defamer”, “libeler”, “slanderer”, or rarely a “famacide”.

    The term libel is derived from the Latin libellus (literally “small book” or “booklet”).
    — Wikipedia: “Defamation”

  2. One of the reasons leftism gathers more control once in power is that it’s an authoritarian system. Power and control are its’ goals, through any means possible. Systems that aren’t there to gather power, such as the “minarchist” (minimal gov’t) state that was the early US republic, are susceptible to being supplanted by philosophies centered on gaining and holding political rule. That’s why, even though I admire the American individualist anarchists like Spooner and Tucker, the fact is the state of total freedom they advocate calls for a high degree of personal responsibility that most people can’t handle, or don’t want to handle.

    People generally want the freedom to succeed, along with safety and security. Those are contradictory desires, ones that can only be satisfied by an authoritarian power structure with limited freedoms. We keep moving towards such a system, but with an elite hostile towards lower-class aspirations. There have been only a few regimes in history that provided security and mobility without extreme inequality. One of them was run by Mean Mr. Mustache, thanks to his implementing Reinhardt’s economic programs.

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