Cloudwalking OwlWhat does it mean to be successful?
bsmall2> “But [in your kingdom], dogs and swine eat the people's food, and you don't control it. People are dying of starvation in the streets and it doesn't occur to you to distribute grain from the storehouses. People die, and you say: ‘It's not my fault; it was a bad harvest.’ How is this different from stabbing a man to death and saying, ‘It wasn't me, it was the knife.’ If you would stop placing the blame on bad harvests, all of the people in the country would come to you.”
> The King said: “Shall the Worthy also enjoy this kind of thing?” #Mencius replied: “”After one is truly worthy he can enjoy this kind of thing. The unworthy, even if they have it, will not really enjoy it.... The ancients were able to enjoy things together with their king. It was because of that that it was enjoyable. The #ReportOfTang says: “When will this Sun see its demise? I will die together with you.” The people wanted to die together with him. Even though you have a pavilion and lake with birds and animals, how can you enjoy these by yourself?
Christopher Stewart« The great man is he who does not lose his child’s heart. »
— Mencius
🔗 · https://poligraf.tumblr.com/post/746049277311254528/the-great-man-is-he-who-does-not-lose-his-childs
#quotes #Mencius #greatness #InnerChild #HumanNature #humanity
Chuck Darwin‘This is what we’re going to do’
Yarvin is the originator of the neoreactionary or
“dark enlightenment” movement,
whose early ideas he developed on a blog called
"Unqualified Reservations" in 2007 and 2008
under the pseudonym #Mencius #Moldbug.
He now writes a Substack newsletter under his own name
and the far-right imprint "Passage Publishing" recently published an anthology of his earlier writing.
The Guardian previously reported that Passage Publishing’s founder is #Jonathan #Keeperman,
a former UC Irvine lecturer who had previously operated under the pseudonym “#L0m3z”.
For years, Yarvin has consistently held to a number of explicitly anti-democratic beliefs:
🔸republican self-government has already ended;
🔸real power is exercised oligarchically in a small number of prestigious academic and media institutions he calls the #Cathedral;
🔸and a sclerotic democracy should be replaced by a strict hierarchy headed by a single person whose role is that of a monarch or CEO.
He also thinks that current liberal democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction.
As JD Vance put it in a 2021 podcast interview with far-right influencer #Jack #Murphy:
“There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin who’s written about some of these things.
One has to basically accept that the whole thing is going to fall in on itself.”
Vance added:
“The task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved
and then when the inevitable collapse comes you build back the country in a way that’s actually better.”
-- Jason Wilson
The next morning,
wrecked,
I put on sweatpants and a hoodie
and tried to smuggle myself out of the hotel without having to talk to anyone.
I gave my chit to the valet and looked around to find Vance and Yarvin standing there waiting for cars.
“How do you guys feel?” Yarvin asked.
Vance was wearing a hoodie too and looked like I felt.
“I feel horrible,” he said.
“Not good.”
Yarvin asked what I’d thought of everything.
I said it would take a long time for me to figure that out.
We all shook hands,
and they waved as I got into my car and we all resumed our usual battle stations in the American info-wars.
#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
“We are in a late republican period,”
Vance said later,
evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar.
“If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild,
and pretty far out there,
and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
“Indeed,” Murphy said. “Among some of my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’ has come up quite a bit.”
I’d asked Vance to tell me, on the record, what he’d like liberal Americans who thought that what he was proposing was a fascist takeover of America to understand.
He spoke earnestly. “I think the cultural world you operate in is incredibly biased,” he said
—against his movement and “the leaders of it,
like me in particular.”
He encouraged me to resist this tendency, which he thought was the product of a media machine leading us toward a soulless dystopia that none of us want to live in.
“That impulse,” he said,
“is fundamentally in service of something that is far worse than anything,
in your wildest nightmares,
than what you see here.”
He gave me an imploring look,
as though to suggest that he was more on the side of the kind of people who read Vanity Fair than most of you realize.
If what he was doing worked, he said,
“it will mean that my son grows up in a world where his masculinity
—his support of his family and his community,
his love of his community
—is more important than whether it works for fucking McKinsey.”
At that, we called it,
and the crowd of young men who wanted to talk to him immediately descended on the couches.
People kept bringing drinks, and there was a lot of shit talk, and it went on late.
I remember thinking at one point how strange it was that in our mid-30s
Vance and I were significantly older than almost everyone there,
all of whom thought they were organizing a struggle to change the course of human history,
and all of whom were now going to get sloppy drunk.
#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
Yarvin and Laurenson bounded out of the crowd as the cheers were still ringing.
They were giggling, seeming to have had some wine.
“Nixon—Nixon!”Laurenson said,
still laughing.
I couldn’t tell if she was delighted or horrified.
A couple of hours later I found Vance standing up by the bar,
surrounded by a circle of young and identical-looking fanboys.
I went over. He asked what I’d thought of the speech, and he suggested we find somewhere to talk.
He asked me to turn my recorder off so we could speak candidly.
I agreed, with regret, because the conversation revealed someone who I think will be hugely influential in our politics in the coming years,
even if he loses his Senate primary,
as both of us thought was possible.
It also revealed someone who is in a dark place,
with a view that we are at an ominous turning point in America’s history.
He didn’t want to describe this to me on the record.
But I can show it anyway, because he already says it publicly, and you can hear it too.
That night, I went up to my hotel room and listened to a podcast interview Vance had conducted with Jack Murphy,
the big, bearded head of the "Liminal Order" men’s group.
Murphy asked how it was that Vance proposed to rip out America’s leadership class.
Vance described two possibilities that many on the New Right imagine
—that our system will either fall apart naturally,
or that a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial powers.
“So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said.
Murphy chortled knowingly.
“So one [option] is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance went on.
“And so the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse” of the current order.
He said he thought this was pessimistic.
“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said.
“And turn them against the left.
We need like a
de-Baathification program,
a de-woke-ification program.”
I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said.
“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice:
Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,
replace them with our people.”
“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say
—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order
—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
This is a description, essentially, of a coup.
#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
On the last afternoon of NatCon,
a few hours before he was set to give the keynote address,
Vance showed up.
He spotted me drinking a beer at the bar and came over to say hello.
“I still have no idea what I’m going to say,” he said, though he didn’t seem worried.
I wandered down to the ballroom to wait and ended up sitting with the U.S. correspondent for the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.
I knew that some of the reporters there might have been under the impression that this was all mostly just tweedy MAGA pageantry.
He had a more complex view, having just spoken to Yarvin,
and asked me to explain his philosophy.
I found myself at a loss.
I said that there were these things called the regime and the Cathedral and that Yarvin was “sort of a monarchist.”
“A monarchist?”he asked.
He seemed taken aback to learn that what this hero figure of the New Right dreamed of was a king.
Vance showed up, wearing a suit and bright red tie,
looking relaxed for a person who was about to give a speech to hundreds of people who viewed him as possibly a last great hope in saving the American nation from global corporatist subjugation.
He’d shot up in the polls and at that moment was second in his primary, helped by regular invitations from Carlson.
I asked how he was feeling about the speech. He looked impish. “I think I’ve got a good topic,” he said. “I’m going to talk about college.”
What he meant was that he was about to give a genuinely thunderous speech, titled
“The Universities Are the Enemy.”
People immediately pointed out that it was a variation on something that Richard Nixon said to Henry Kissinger on White House tapes back in 1972.
Vance denounced elite colleges as enemies of the American people;
he has long proposed cutting off their federal funding and seizing their endowments.
The speech was later linked in alarmed
op-eds to “anti-intellectual” movements that had attacked institutions of learning.
But that doesn’t quite reckon with what an apocalyptic message he was offering.
Because Vance and this New Right cohort, who are mostly so, so highly educated and well-read that their big problem often seems to be that they’re just too nerdy to be an effective force in mass politics,
are not anti-intellectual.
Vance is an intellectual himself, even if he’s not currently playing one on TV.
But he thinks that our universities are full of people who have a structural,
self-serving, and
financial interest in coloring American culture as racist and evil.
And he is ready to go to extraordinary lengths to fight them.
#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
We drove a long way into the desert before we arrived at the campaign meet-and-greet,
which was being hosted by a former CIA official in a comfortable retirement community.
The crowd of a few dozen was mostly sweater-wearing retirees,
immersed in a media culture in which the people who repeated the most incendiary and Trumpist talking points tended to gain attention and political support.
This kind of groupthink was not just a phenomenon of the liberal media,
and this fact has hampered the campaigns of both Masters and Vance,
who are often seen as Trump-aligned culture warriors,
and who have had a lot of trouble working their more complicated policy ideas into our fervid political conversation.
He talked through his proposal to regulate tech companies as common carriers,
like America once regulated phone companies.
The crowd seemed interested but hardly electrified.
When he took questions at the end, they were mostly the usual ones about the supposedly stolen 2020 election
—a view that Masters did not push back on
—the border wall,
vaccine mandates.
One man raised his hand to ask how Masters planned to drain the swamp.
He gave me a sly look. “Well, one of my friends has this acronym he calls RAGE,” he said.
“Retire All Government Employees.”
The crowd liked the sound of this and erupted in a cheer.
#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook