The Darkish MAGA Gov-Corp Technate — Half 1

What did Elon Musk imply when he mentioned he was “darkish MAGA?” Exploring this query will definitely take us to a very darkish conclusion. But, sarcastically, it’s this very conclusion that, as soon as seen in the correct gentle, can liberate us.

This two-part collection examines the real however misplaced hopes of the tens of millions of US residents who elected Donald Trump to his second non-consecutive time period. Unbeknownst to them, they’ve voted to dwell in a Technate administered by what is named “gov-corp.” In so doing, they’ve taken one other step towards a multipolar world order, or “New World Order,” as some have lengthy referred to as it.

Shortly earlier than the November 2024 election, Elon Musk, talking at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, introduced, “I’m not simply MAGA, I’m darkish MAGA.” Solely a few months earlier Trump had survived an alleged assassination try on the similar Butler present grounds. Sharing the stage with “bullet-proof” populist hero Trump, an absolute shoe-in for the presidency, Musk seized his second.

The Make America Nice Once more (MAGA) acronym is broadly understood. However Musk’s added adjective “darkish” is little understood — and implies far more.

Explanations for his “darkish MAGA” declaration have ranged from Musk pushing the Darkish MAGA meme coin to Musk casting himself as a super-antihero and even an advocate of a violent fascist takeover of the US. None of those claims have addressed his extra apparent reference. Musk is one in every of a cadre of technocrats behind the Trump presidency who promote the concepts encapsulated by the Darkish Enlightenment.

Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal together with Musk, might be the best-known proponent of the Darkish Enlightenment whereas Musk is the best-known proponent of Technocracy. However, as we will see on this article, these sociopolitical theories have appreciable overlap and are mutually reinforcing.

Elon Musk’s Technocratic Heritage

In a 2021 SEC submitting, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Tesla’s then-Chief Monetary Officer Zach Kirkhorn formally modified their respective working titles to turn into the “TechnoKings” of Tesla. This may appear to be nothing however irreverent enjoyable—take into account that Kirkhorn was additionally recognized by the Sport of Thrones title of “Grasp of Coin”—however Musk actually understands the gravity of Technocracy and the related time period “technocrat.”

Their cautious alternative of phrases is a vital level emphasised all through this text. Whereas oligarchs like Musk and Thiel typically categorical concepts in a seemingly flippant method—or as if the concepts sprang from out of nowhere—these obvious offhand remarks should not meaningless. It’s Aesopian language indicative of the core beliefs held by folks like Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and different members of what Council on International Relations suppose tank member David Rothkopf generously characterizes, in his e-book on the topic, because the “Superclass“: individuals who can “affect the lives of tens of millions throughout borders regularly.”

The “joke” is on us. Or, fairly, on these of us who assume it’s all only a joke.

Each Musk and Thiel are members of the “superclass,” although “parasite class” may be a extra becoming description for the oligarchy Rothkopf describes. “Insider” Rothkopf’s estimate of round 6,000 particular person oligarchs, whose selections impression the lives of the remaining eight billion of us, appears possible.

Musk and Thiel are simply two among the many 6,000 by advantage of being welcomed into the “superclass” by behind-the-scenes oligarchs who do not characteristic on the revealed lists of the world’s wealthiest women and men. Musk and Thiel are made males. We’re specializing in them as a result of they’re outstanding accelerationist technocrat supporters of the Trump/Vance administration.

Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather was Joshua N. Haldeman (1902–1974), who hailed from Pequot, Minnesota. In 1906, when Joshua was 4, his mother and father took the household north and settled within the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. In 1936, after 34 years of life on the western plains of the US and Canada, Joshua Haldeman moved to Saskatchewan’s provincial capital, Regina, the place he established a profitable chiropractic enterprise.

Between 1936 and 1941, Haldeman did greater than realign spines. He was additionally the analysis director and chief of the Regina department of an up-and-coming entity often called Technocracy Integrated, shortened to Technocracy Inc. In 1940, whereas serving in that publish, he was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) for violating Defence of Canada laws, below which Technocracy Inc. was deemed an “unlawful organisation.” Consequently, Haldeman was denied entry into the US, the place he had supposed to ship a speech selling Technocracy. He was then fined and given a suspended sentence for heading up the controversial Technocracy Inc.

Following his 1941 conviction, Haldeman joined the Canadian Social Credit score Social gathering (Socred), which had been fashioned in 1932 by evangelist William Aberhart. Socred sought to implement the “social credit score” financial principle of British engineer and economist C. H. Douglas. Like Socred, Technocracy was based mostly upon the “industrial effectivity” concepts of engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (Taylorism). It additionally dovetailed with the “conspicuous consumption” financial theories of Thorstein Veblen.

C. H. Douglas introduced his principle of social credit score to deal with what he noticed because the inequality of alternative created by the centralised management and hoarding of assets and wealth. He recognized the “macro-economic hole” between retail value inflation and wage progress. He recommended filling that hole by creating the “Nationwide Credit score Workplace”—which might be impartial of state management—to concern “debt-free” credit score to customers. A part of this Nationwide Credit score can be used to decrease retail costs. The rest can be distributed to all residents, no matter their private monetary state of affairs, as a means of making client demand for items. Douglas’ suggestion was an early mannequin of Common Fundamental Revenue (UBI).

Joshua Haldeman’s household of seven, which included a daughter, Maye Haldeman, left Canada in 1950 to arrange base in Pretoria, South Africa. As entrepreneurs and adventurers, they travelled extensively. By her personal account, Maye Haldeman was near her mother and father and adopted their entrepreneurial spirit, sense of journey and work ethic. Unavoidably, she was additionally aware of her mother and father’ political concepts. Maye recalled that, as a toddler, she and her siblings would do their “month-to-month bulletins and photocopy newsletters, after which put the stamps on the envelopes.”

Maye Haldeman married Errol Musk in 1970. Their son, Elon, was born in Pretoria a 12 months later. He was an toddler when his grandfather died in a airplane crash. Nonetheless, as he was rising up, Elon realized about and have become intimately aware of his grandfather’s political philosophy.

Although Musk was evidently near his mom, he elected to stick with his father in Pretoria when his mother and father divorced in 1979. After Elon’s relationship along with his father soured, he inspired his mom to say her Canadian passport, in response to Maye. Her doing so enabled Elon to shortly safe his personal Canadian passport, to migrate from South Africa—which he did at age 17—and thereby keep away from obligatory army service in that nation.

Elon’s final aim was to dwell and work within the US. However earlier than that, he determined to go from Montreal to Waldeck, Saskatchewan, the place, upon returning to his roots, he labored as a farm hand on his second cousin’s farm. There, he awaited his mom Maye’s arrival from Pretoria. She was adopted by Elon’s two siblings, Kimbal and Tosca, who additionally wished to be nearer to the Haldeman aspect of the household in Canada.

Musk studied at Queen’s Faculty in Kingston, Ontario, for 2 years earlier than performing upon his intention of settling in America. He transferred to the College of Pennsylvania, the place he earned a bachelor’s diploma in physics and economics. Subsequently, he interned in Silicon Valley tech firms earlier than abandoning training to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions.

Quick Ahead to At the moment

In October 2024, a potential spoof account for Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos posted on Musk’s “X” platform an alluring assertion: “The Community State for Mars is being fashioned earlier than our eyes.” The actual Musk enthusiastically replied, “The Mars Technocracy.” To which the Bezos-like account responded, “Depend me in.”

As he continues to dream about colonising Mars, Musk has made it abundantly clear which political system he prefers. In 2019, he wrote: “Accelerating Starship improvement to construct the Martian Technocracy.” Notice his use of the phrase “accelerating.” For Musk “accelerating” doesn’t merely imply a rise in velocity.

Musk has lengthy advocated Common Fundamental Revenue. Right here’s one occasion of his embrace of UBI: On the World Authorities Summit in 2017, Musk mentioned, “We must have some type of common fundamental earnings.” One other instance: In June 2024, talking with then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on the UK-convened first world “AI Security Summit,” Musk painted a Utopian imaginative and prescient of a man-made intelligence-dominated society and “an age of abundance” earlier than including, “We received’t have common fundamental earnings, we’ll have common excessive earnings.” In different phrases, he was suggesting that the plenty would have good “lives of abundance” enabled by the last word AI-controlled distribution of UBI.

Musk needs Technocracy—and a social credit score system—simply as his grandfather Joshua Haldeman did. That is evident past his private historical past and his phrases. The whole lot Musk does is totally congruent with these twin pursuits. However after we are invited to debate Technocracy in reference to Mars, we’re after all requested to disregard all of the proof that exposes Musk’s and his fellow oligarchs’ makes an attempt to determine a “Technate”—a system of technocratic, totalitarian continental management—right here on Earth.

As is the case with a lot of his oligarch brethren, Musk’s enterprise acumen and his ethics are extremely questionable. It seems he has survived and thereafter thrived in enterprise solely due to his community connections, his appreciable state backing, and the largess of his traders. As George Carlin properly noticed, “It’s an enormous membership.”

Musk invested greater than a quarter-billion {dollars} to put in Trump within the Oval Workplace. Naturally, he anticipates a return on his funding. In actual fact, that ROI is a executed deal: Musk already makes billions from US taxpayers by way of an online of authorities contracts. For tycoons like Musk, cash is solely a method to an finish: acquiring energy. His wealth has positioned him to begin critically implementing his grand imaginative and prescient of Technocracy.

Musk’s dive into Technocracy is underway by way of the newly established short-term company in Washington, D.C., he now chairs. Introduced final November by Trump, created on his first day in workplace, and supposedly set to finish its mission by the summer season of 2026, the US Division of Authorities Effectivity, often called DOGE, seems to be a nascent Technocracy.

Enterprise capitalist Musk and biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy had been handpicked to run DOGE with the assistance of Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick. Vivik has since departed to run for Governor of Ohio. Lutnick was Trump’s option to turn into the US Secretary of Commerce and was lately confirmed. His appointment raises many considerations. Not least of them is his hyperlink to Satellogic, a strategic associate of Peter Thiel’s Palantir Applied sciences. This hyperlink reveals Lutnick’s private funding within the public-private surveillance state that’s ruled by US and Israeli intelligence businesses.

But Lutnick has an much more vital battle of curiosity. He’s steering Cantor Fitzgerald to again Tether (USDT), a stablecoin that’s more and more buying US Treasurys. As we transfer towards the period of digital currencies, the US authorities venture to avoid wasting its debt-laden greenback and its fragile financial system is carefully tied to stablecoins. Thus, as Secretary of Commerce, Lutnick shall be ready to information the event of markets towards the brand new US digital financial system. We’ll increase on this angle in Half 2.

Maybe it’s only a coincidence that “the Doge” was the formal title of the chief administrator (Justice of the Peace) of the mercantile Venetian Republic. As we will additionally focus on in Half 2, there are lots of causes to suspect that right now’s DOGE acronym is not a mere coincidence.

The departure of Ramaswamy and Lutnick from the DOGE venture seems to go away Musk as its sole “CEO.” A company monarchy, led by a CEO “king,” (TechnoKing) is in step with the theories underpinning the Darkish Enlightenment.

The acknowledged goal of the DOGE is to restructure the federal authorities to scale back expenditures and maximise effectivity. That aim is in step with Taylorism, a basis of Technocracy.

One of many main neoreactionaries (we’ll clarify this time period shortly), Curtis Yarvin, coined the catchy acronym RAGE. It stands for Retire All Authorities Workers. The parallels between the acknowledged ambitions of the DOGE and the intention of Yarvin’s RAGE are marked.

Apparently, the DOGE won’t be an official government division however will as an alternative function as a Federal Presidential Advisory Committee, supposedly exterior of presidency. However make no mistake: The DOGE shall be inextricably tied to the political course of. Its staff shall be housed within the former places of work of its predecessor, the US Digital Service. And its helmsman, Musk, will reportedly have a private workplace within the West Wing of the White Home.

The effectivity concepts of sure nominated consultants, beginning with Musk, shall be given political clout through a new “DOGE” subcommittee of the Home Committee on Oversight and Authorities Reform. This subpanel is chaired by controversial congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)—also known as MTG. On the floor, it could appear like an oversight subcommittee with authority over the science, engineering, and know-how “consultants,” however in follow the “consultants” shall be successfully controlling the associated political coverage selections. This idea of coverage designed by technical “consultants” is central to Technocracy.

J.P. Morgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon is amongst those that have welcomed the DOGE plan. Definitely, the proposal to radically cut back and even eradicate US authorities’s monetary regulators appeals to bankers like Dimon. The Trump administration is searching for to grab and centralise management of monetary regulators such because the Safety and Change Commssion (SEC) and the antitrust regulator the Federal Communications Fee (FCC). Consequently, the banks are anticipating a a lot lighter regulatory contact. Talking at Davos, J.P. Morgan asset wealth fund supervisor Mary Erdoes—tipped to succeed Dimon as CEO—mentioned the strikes had freed US bankers’ “animal spirits” and set funding banks in “go-mode.”

On condition that Elon Musk was neither elected by Individuals nor licensed by their representatives in Congress, the DOGE represents a proper shift in political energy from the general public to the personal sector. It’s essentially a personal sector-dominated suppose tank brazenly empowered to “restructure federal businesses.” If the DOGE proceeds as recommended, it’s clear that, as we identified above, elected US representatives—MTG amongst them—and US senators will not have the higher hand. Certainly, we’d query if they’re even able to greedy the ulterior motives of these driving the DOGE idea.

Additionally, on condition that Musk and different DOGE supporters—Bezos, for instance—have lengthy profited from big authorities contracts, and on condition that the likes of Dimon will doubtlessly be requested to “advise” the DOGE, we see a large battle of curiosity on the coronary heart of the DOGE venture. That battle, like every little thing else in regards to the DOGE, and its supporters like Bezos, are aligned with Technocracy, for it affords pecking-order privileges to the very technocrats who search to manage a Technate.

An In-Depth Take a look at Technocracy

To understand why folks like Musk and Bezos are so enthused by the prospect of Technocracy, we should perceive the complete extent of Technocracy. We should grasp not simply what it’s superficially portrayed to be, but in addition acknowledge its deep, darkish, humanity-mutating, society-altering intentions and goals.

Technocracy doesn’t merely name for technocratic governance—that’s, a sociopolitical system the place certified consultants, or “technocrats,” fairly than politicians, set coverage.

Technocratic governance got here to the fore through the 2020–2023 pseudopandemic. Medical “consultants,” notably Anthony Fauci and different members of the White Home Coronavirus Process Pressure, had been put in positions very seen to the general public. They had been broadly seen as main the coverage response—particularly, mass “vaccinations,” lockdowns, small enterprise shutdowns, and different imposed-from-on-high mandates designed to implement and measure worldwide compliance.

However the Technocracy that Musk, Bezos, and different tech “consultants” search to determine implies extra than an experiment within the results of mRNA injections, extra than a take a look at of controlling and mesmerizing the plenty.

Technocracy relies on the assumption that there are technological options to all social, financial, and political issues. The Elon Musks and Peter Thiels of the planet and plenty of extra of their ilk share this single-minded perception.

For instance, when, 20 years in the past, Thiel co-founded the impression funding platform referred to as the Founders Fund, its mission assertion famous that “know-how is the basic driver of progress within the industrialized world.” It additionally declared that the Founders Fund exists to unravel “tough scientific or engineering issues.” If the proper know-how succeeded, the Founders Fund rationalized it to be the “shortest path to social worth.”

Technocracy provides a type of coverage response—there isn’t any political “coverage” as we perceive the time period in a Technocracy—as technological options to social issues. However that is solely a restricted side of Technocracy. (Be mindful, religion in technological options just isn’t discovered solely in Technocracy.)

Technocracy is really distinctive, in contrast to any of the sociopolitical, philosophical or financial ideologies acquainted to most of us.

In 1937, Technocracy Inc.’s in-house journal, The Technocrat — Vol. 3 No. 4, described Technocracy as:

The science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the whole social mechanism to supply and distribute items and companies to the whole inhabitants.

To offer that definition context, we’ll return 20 years to 1911, when American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, arguably the world’s first administration guide, revealed The Ideas of Scientific Administration. His e-book got here out on the fruits of the Progressive Period in the US.

The Progressive Period was a historic interval marked by the political activism of the US center class, who sought to deal with the underlying social issues—as they noticed them—of extreme industrialisation, mass immigration, and political corruption. “Taylorism,” which was fixated on the approaching exhaustion of pure assets and the advocacy of environment friendly scientific administration methods, was a part of the spirit of the age.

In The Ideas of Scientific Administration, Taylor wrote:

Previously[,] the person has been first; sooner or later[,] the system have to be first[.] [. . .] The very best administration is a real science, resting upon clearly outlined legal guidelines, guidelines, and rules, as a basis[.] [. . .] [T]he basic rules of scientific administration are relevant to all types of human actions, from our easiest particular person acts to the work of our nice firms.

Taylor’s concepts jibed with the theories of economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen. Veblen proposed that financial exercise isn’t simply a operate of provide and demand, utility and worth, however that it evolves with society and is thus formed additionally by psychological, sociological and anthropological influences.

Veblen is probably greatest recognized for his principle of “conspicuous consumption.” He noticed that the rich signalled their social standing by way of ostentatious show of their buying energy: costly properties, automobiles, jewels, and so on. Inside the hierarchical class construction, aspiring lessons tried to emulate the conspicuous consumption of the category above them. Veblen contended that the cascade impact of this social climbing created demand for superfluous items and companies and that the online financial impression was subsequently hopeless inefficiency and wasted assets.

In The Engineers and the Value System, Veblen recommended that technocratic engineers ought to undertake an intensive evaluation of the establishments that maintained social stability. As soon as the establishments had been understood, these with technological experience ought to reform them, enhance effectivity, and thereby engineer society to be much less wasteful. Shortly, we’ll focus on how this concept was later tailored by the accelerationist neoreactionaries.

Each Taylor and Veblen had been centered upon maximising the effectivity of business and manufacturing processes. That mentioned, they each recognised that their theories could possibly be prolonged to a wider social context. It was the extra expansive utility of their proposals that beguiled the oligarchs of the day.

In 1919, Veblen was one of many founding members of a John D. Rockefeller-funded, New York Metropolis-based personal analysis college in New York referred to as The New College for Social Analysis (later renamed The New College). This progressive academic mannequin quickly led to the creation of the Technical Alliance, a small staff of scientists and engineers notably together with not solely Veblen but in addition Howard Scott, who would come to steer the group.

The Technical Alliance was reformulated in 1933 after an enforced hiatus was prompted by Scott’s publicity as a fraudster. He had falsified a few of his credentials—as, apparently, had C. H. Douglas. Put up-hiatus, Scott was joined by M. King Hubbert—who would later turn into globally famend for his imprecise and usually inaccurate “peak oil” principle—and others. The members of the Technical Alliance renamed themselves Technocracy Inc.

Technocracy was completely outlined in Technocracy Inc.’s 1933 publication of its Technocracy Examine Course. In accordance with the research course’s technical specs, society must be separated into what the advocates of Technocracy (any more known as “technocrats”) name a “sequence of features.” On this sequence, society as we all know it’s eliminated. As an alternative, centralised management of all human interactions and behavior is proposed as a part of the “social mechanism.”

A complete “social mechanism” subjected to technocrats is named a Technate. A Technate is designed to work “on a Continental scale”—that’s, on every continent, or Technate, whose boundaries are drawn on a map. The Technate of North America map consists of Greenland, Canada, the US, Mexico, components of Central America, northern South America, Caribbean islands, and the japanese Pacific Ocean.

There are not any nationwide governments in Technocracy. Nation-states are abolished in every continental Technate.

Pushed by the assumed precepts of effectivity, technocrats deem the centralised management of all assets important:

Technocracy finds that the manufacturing and distribution of an abundance of bodily wealth on a Continental scale for the usage of all Continental residents can solely be achieved by a Continental technological management, a governance of operate, a Technate.

Every operate, or “Useful Sequence,” is categorised as both an industrial sequence, a service sequence, or a particular sequence. For instance, the “Transportation Useful Sequence” and the “Area Tech Useful Sequence” are each industrial sequences. The “Public Well being” and “Schooling” useful sequences are among the many service sequences. The “Particular Sequences” are these associated to safety and defence (Armed Companies), scientific and technological improvement (Continental Analysis), governance of the inhabitants (Social Relations), and the Technate’s relationship with different Technates or nation-states (International Relations).

Administration of a whole Technate—every continent—is additional subdivided by “Regional Divisions,” every outlined in response to their longitude and latitude boundary markers and designated by a corresponding grid-reference quantity. “Space Management” is an administrative fairly than a useful sequence. The Technocracy Examine Course specifies what meaning:

[An Area Control] is the coordinating physique for the assorted Useful Sequences and social models working in anyone geographical space of a number of Regional Divisions. It operates instantly below the Continental Management.

The entire system is overseen by “Continental Management” (proven because the Continental Board above) and in the end by the “Continental Director”:

The Continental Director, because the title implies, is the chief government [CEO] of the whole social mechanism. On his rapid workers are the Administrators of the Armed Forces, the International Relations, the Continental Analysis, and the Social Relations and Space Management. [. . .] The Continental Director is chosen from among the many members of the Continental Management by the Continental Management. As a consequence of the truth that this Management consists of just some 100 or so members, all of whom know one another properly, there isn’t any one higher fitted to make this alternative than they.

To be clear: every total continent—a Technate—is managed by a self-appointed physique which selects its nice chief—the Continental Director—from inside its personal ranks. This self-appointed physique controls every little thing within the Technate.

These early technocrats had been supposedly making an attempt to plot a classless system that would supply “lives of abundance” for all. Musk’s phrases typically echo the particular meanings outlined by Technocracy Inc. When, as an illustration, Musk spoke of “an age of abundance,” he was referring to Technocracy. Sadly, the unique technocrats purported aspirations for a classless society seem to have been impressed both by unimaginable evil or hapless naïveté. Take your decide!

For instance, Nineteen Thirties technocrats seen all crime merely as a product of the inequality inherent within the capitalist Value System; we’ll cowl the “Value System” in a second. As a result of technocrats appeared upon the “human animal” as little greater than a behavioural automaton, they both selected to disregard or didn’t even recognise—not to mention account for—different potential motivations for crime moreover financial inequality, akin to megalomania. Consequently, power-hungry folks just like the Rockefellers, who recognised that there are different incentives for human behaviour moreover sensible necessity, seen Technocracy in phrases the technocrats might both barely comprehend or determined to disregard.

The technocrats’ seemingly woeful grasp of the human sciences led them to think about a Technate that might allow some type of spontaneous order to emerge—”spontaneous pure precedence,” they referred to as it. They rejected the precept that “all males are created equal”—largely, it appears, as a result of they didn’t perceive it. Of their minds, it had “no foundation in biologic truth.”

Upon analysing the behaviour of cow herds and hen flocks, the technocrats recognized a pecking order—from which they derived so-called “peck-rights”—as an evidence to justify the totalitarian, hierarchical social mechanism they had been advocating for people:

Sure people dominate, and the others take orders. These dominant ones needn’t be, and often should not, massive in stature [referring to cattle and domestic fowl], however they dominate simply as successfully as in the event that they had been. [. . .] The best stability in a social group can be obtained the place the people had been positioned as almost as potential with respect to different people in accordance with ‘peck-rights,’ or precedence relationship which they might assume naturally. [. . .] There have to be so far as potential no inversion of the pure ‘peck-rights’ among the many males.

Whatever the intentions of technocrats who first designed Technocracy, the attraction of this technique for oligarchs is apparent. Technocracy constructs a “social mechanism,” managed by those that declare “peck-rights,” particularly engineered to facilitate the final type of totalitarianism.

As talked about above, residents of the Technate are described as “human animals” and are seen as programmable machines. The scientific operation of the social mechanism—Technocracy—allows the “service” (labour) of the “human animal” to behave because the “human engine” for the environment friendly operation of the assorted Useful Sequences.

The technocrats flatly rejected ideas such because the human “thoughts” and “conscience” and “will.” These constructs, they mentioned, belonged to humanity’s “ignorant, barbarian previous.” To them, a human being was nothing greater than an “natural machine” that makes a sure number of “motions and noises,” comparable, in response to the technocrats, to a canine or a automobile.

As defined within the Technocracy Examine Course, the Technate would maximise the “effectivity” of the Technate by socially engineering—behaviourally controlling—the “human animal”:

Virtually all social management is effected by way of the mechanism of the conditioned reflex. The driving force of an vehicle, as an illustration, sees a pink gentle forward and instantly throws within the clutch and the brake, and stops. [. . .] If they’re taken younger sufficient, human beings will be conditioned to not do virtually something below the solar. They are often conditioned to not use sure language, to not eat sure meals on sure days, to not work on sure days, to not mate within the absence of sure ceremonial phrases spoken over them, to not break right into a grocery retailer for meals despite the fact that they could not have eaten for days.

Tying this terrifying oppression collectively was a brand new financial system designed to deal with the issues the technocrats noticed with the capitalist “Value System.” Very like the proponents of Socred, the technocrats seen the inequality of wealth and useful resource distribution as a significant downside.

The capitalist “Value System” was thought “wasteful” and subsequently unacceptably “inefficient,” largely as a result of the “cash” used to measure costs was generated by financial institution lending (debt). The technocrats referred to fiat foreign money as a “generalized debt certificates.”

The technocrats subsequently decided that the capitalist “Value System” inevitably led to each class inequality and conspicuous consumption because the holders of the debt accrued extra wealth than anybody else. Conspicuous consumption, in flip, led to the inefficient allocation of assets into pointless manufacturing, expenditure, and self-importance initiatives. So, they proposed a brand new financial system based mostly upon the power value of manufacturing.

Corresponding “Vitality Certificates” would higher mirror productive work executed, versus wasteful credit score (debt) consumed, as a result of “power is measurable in models of labor—ergs, joules, or foot-pounds.” Thus, Vitality Certificates could possibly be equitably distributed—by the Distribution Sequence—throughout the Technate, based mostly on the power required to carry out the operate.

The technocrats recognised that some features require extra power than others. The Transportation Sequence development of a brand new railroad would require extra power than a single “human animal” engaged on establishing that railroad. The Distribution Sequence would handle the resultant “truthful” allocation of Vitality Certificates:

[E]nergy will be allotted in response to the makes use of to which it’s to be put. The quantity required for brand spanking new plant, together with roads, homes, hospitals, colleges, and so on., and for native transportation and communication shall be deducted from the whole as a type of overhead, and never chargeable to people. In spite of everything of those deductions are made, [. . .] the rest shall be dedicated to the manufacturing of products and companies to be consumed by the grownup public-at-large. [. . .] Thus, if there be accessible the means of manufacturing items and companies [. . .] every particular person can be granted an earnings[.]

Put one other means (with quote marks round Technocracy’s phrases): “If” there are remaining means, after these with adequate “peck-rights” have taken the assets they want for his or her operate—”a type of overhead”—the “the rest” can be allotted “pretty” to the “human animals” and regarded adequate for them to carry out their operate.

Every issued Vitality Certificates can be non-tradable and could possibly be used just for the acquisition of assets, items, and companies supplied by Continental Management inside the Technate.

The Distribution Sequence would file the main points of each group or particular person to whom the Vitality Certificates had been allotted and would then monitor how that Vitality Certificates was used.

The diploma of centralised management inherent in Technocracy is nearly past creativeness:

[O]ne single group is manning and working the entire social mechanism. This similar group not solely produces however distributes all items and companies. Therefore a uniform system of record-keeping exists for the whole social operation, and all data of manufacturing and distribution clear to 1 central headquarters. Tabulation of the data [contained on the Energy Certificates] supplies an entire file of distribution, or of the general public price of consumption by commodity, by intercourse, by regional division, by occupation, and by age group.

With Vitality Certificates allotted to the person and recording all their private particulars, the surveillance state is full. Continental Management can have oversight over each citizen and can have the ability to monitor and management no matter they purchase and wherever they go. In different phrases, in a Technocracy, all human behaviour is watched and rationed.

Regardless of their expressed aversion to the capitalist Value System, the technocrats weren’t antagonistic to the buildup of wealth. They merely redefined wealth in their very own technocratic phrases.

In 1933, the authors of the Technocracy Examine Course additionally revealed their Introduction to Technocracy, by which they wrote:

Know-how has launched a brand new methodology within the creation of bodily wealth. [. . .] Bodily earnings inside a continental space below technological management can be the online accessible power in ergs, transformed into use-forms and companies over and above the operation and upkeep of the bodily gear and buildings of the realm. [. . .] This methodology of manufacturing bodily wealth and measuring its operation precludes the potential for creating any type of debt.

Usury—that’s, the issuance of almost all fiat foreign money as debt repayable with curiosity—is undoubtedly a key instrument with which right now’s oligarchs amass wealth, which they then convert into sociopolitical energy. It’s helpful to notice that the phrase “wealth” means “prosperity in abundance of possessions or riches.” “Riches” implies “an abundance of means.” The etymology of the phrase “means” defines it as “assets at one’s disposal for undertaking some object.”

Technocracy locations all assets below the command and management of a choose few, who’re then free to perform no matter goal they need—throughout a whole continent—by rationing all assets to whomever they select, every time they need, as they see match. In a Technocracy, the “choose few” who’ve “peck-rights” over and above everybody else don’t want financial wealth. Technocracy guarantees to ship the zenith of Aristotelian oligarchy.

To say Technocracy is radical can be a large understatement. We predict by way of political “isms,” however phrases like “communism,” “fascism “or “feudalism” don’t come near describing the extent of the novel tyranny intrinsic to Technocracy.

In 1965, Technocracy Inc. revealed a written trade between its founder, Howard Scott, and assistant professor of economics J. Kaye Faulkner. The dialog was later re-released below the title The Historical past and Objective of Technocracy.

Scott wrote to Faulkner:

Technocracy has at all times contended that Marxian political philosophy and Marxian economics had been by no means sufficiently radical or revolutionary to deal with the issues introduced on by the impression of know-how in a big measurement nationwide society of right now. [. ..] We’ve at all times contended that Marxian communism, as far as this Continent is worried, is to this point to the correct that it’s bourgeois. It’s properly right here to remember; the technological development of the following half-hour invalidates all of the social knowledge of earlier historical past. [. . .] Know-how has no ancestors within the social historical past of man. It creates its personal.

As Scott’s phrases point out, the technocrats foresaw that the speedy advance in know-how would inevitably current each immense alternatives and dangers. In an effort to mitigate the dangers, the technocrats’ proposed resolution was to embrace know-how and goal it to the service of extra “environment friendly” authorities—i.e., a Technate.

This notion of a technological “singularity” threatening to surpass humanity’s means to adapt would later encourage the maybe much more radical political philosophy of the accelerationist neoreactionaries. There are various commonalities between the 2 sociopolitical theories.

Technocracy, each then and now, is actually inhuman. It elevates technological improvement above morality. As Taylor made clear, “the system have to be first.”

Folks like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos wish to set up a Technocracy and dwell in it—or at the least make us dwell in it. Why? Do they hope we are going to all dwell “lives of abundance” below Technocracy? Or do they envisage themselves as elitist members of Continental Management, with a free hand to socially engineer the remainder of us, whom they view as a herd of “human animals”?

What do you suppose?

The Accelerationist Neoreactionaries

Simply as Technocracy relies upon the evaluation of the “social mechanism” and the following “environment friendly administration” of “Useful Sequences,” so the Darkish Enlightenment—often known as the neoreactionary motion (NRx)—relies upon the deconstruction and redistribution of energy held by the actual ruling entity. The neoreactionaries referred to as this entity “the Cathedral.”

As soon as the “administrative, legislative, judicial, media, and tutorial privileges” of “the Cathedral” are correctly understood and quantified, they are often “transformed into fungible shares” to be owned and traded by “sovereign firms”—sovcorps—that may kind a “patchwork” of “neostates”—neocameralist-states, to be actual—because of “neocameralism.”

Thus, the state will be separated from the “ruling entity”—the Cathedral—and will be run extra effectively as a company construction referred to as “gov-corp.” This construction is similar to the environment friendly administration of the “Useful Sequences” forming the “social mechanism” recommended by Technocracy.

Admittedly, there may be rather a lot to unpack right here.

Constructing on the work of Karl Marx, in 1942 the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter theorised that capitalist economies continually evolve as a result of cyclical disruption brought on by improvements that destroy previous markets and create new ones. He popularised the time period “artistic destruction” to explain this theoretical financial progress course of, which, he mentioned, was basic to capitalism. Schumpeter emphasised that emergent know-how had the potential to disrupt, overturn, and renew the related socioeconomic and sociopolitical energy loved by capitalist monopolies. Due to this fact, artistic destruction additionally implied a realignment of the social and political order.

Throughout the mid-Nineteen Nineties, a various group of iconoclast students understanding of the Cybernetic Tradition Analysis Unit (CCRU) of Warwick College within the UK and led by the philosophers and cultural theorists Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher, and Nick Land, mixed their ideas about Schumpeter’s artistic destruction with their exploration of “deterritorialization.” A product of the crucial principle of the Frankfurt College, “deterritorialization” recommended that any sociopolitical “territory”—no matter it could embody—would in the end be altered, mutated or destroyed, solely to reemerge as one thing else following the method of “reterritorialization.”

Contemplating deterritorialization an inevitability and viewing capitalist “artistic destruction” as an important sociopolitical and financial evolution, the CCRU cyberpunks (led by Fisher and Land) famous that the speedy enhancements in trendy computation—quantum computing, for instance—enabled successive ahead technological leaps at ever-shorter intervals.

A technological singularity—or just the singularity—by which technological progress turns into self-perpetuating, was seen as unavoidable. The technological suggestions loop meant deterritorialization can be automated. It will speed up sharply and outstrip humanity’s means to intervene or adapt to it, in response to the CCRU.

Due to this fact, the duty earlier than society is to both adapt or die. Adapting implies that artistic destruction of capitalism have to be embraced and intensified—not simply because it’s a socioeconomic phenomenon however as a result of it’s a fascinating “schema” to implement. The artistic destruction of social, financial and political methods is a proposed survival technique that itself must speed up to maintain tempo with the inevitable deterritorialization as we pace in direction of the singularity—or another apocalypse.

In his 1967 novel Lord of Mild, American science fiction author Roger Zelazny depicted revolutionaries who wished to quickly rework their society by enabling higher public entry to know-how. Zelazny referred to as his fictional revolutionaries “accelerationists.” The time period was subsequently popularised by professor of crucial principle Benjamin Noys. Notice: This was prior to Nick Land labelling his interpretation of Schumpeter’s artistic destruction “accelerationism.”

In 2016, Land defined:

Deterritorialization is the one factor accelerationism has ever actually talked about. [. . .] On this germinal accelerationist matrix, there isn’t any distinction to be made between the destruction of capitalism and its intensification. The auto-destruction of capitalism is what capitalism is. “Artistic destruction” is the entire of it [. . .]. Capital revolutionizes itself extra completely than any extrinsic ‘revolution’ presumably might.

Main CCRU figures Nick Land and Mark Fisher within the UK and, notably, Curtis Yarvin within the US had been a part of the rising neoreactionary motion (NRx). Neoreactionaries fall on each the left and the correct of the standard political divide, however all neoreactionaries are accelerationists.

The related time period “accelerator” has actually caught on. In 2011, researchers from the UK enterprise and innovation “charity” Nesta revealed a dialogue paper by which they famous the speedy rise of “accelerator” programmes, beginning within the US and subsequently spreading to Europe and past:

The variety of accelerator programmes has grown quickly within the US over the previous few years and there are indicators that extra lately, the pattern is being replicated in Europe. From one accelerator programme, Y Combinator in 2005, there are actually dozens within the US which are funding a whole lot of startups per 12 months. There have already been various high-profile startup successes from accelerator programmes.

Now 20 years previous, Y Combinator (YC) utilized the accelerationist method to enterprise capitalism. Notable profitable start-up ventures adopted. Stripe, Coinbase, and Dropbox had been amongst YC’s winners. In 2011, Peter Thiel protégé Sam Altman (who, alongside Thiel, Musk and others, co-founded OpenAI) joined YC and in 2014 grew to become its president.

Apart from the US authorities, the UK authorities and EU members states have totally embraced accelerationism. The UK authorities, for instance, runs quite a few accelerators.

Accelerationism has been conspicuously used to develop defence and surveillance know-how. Contemplate the D3 accelerator which is reportedly “solely centered on military-related startups.” Initially focusing in Ukraine, the “Dare to Defend Democracy” (D3) accelerator is a public-private partnership that adopts the accelerationist method to startups focusing completely on AI enabled intelligence, cybersecurity, and army know-how.

The D3 accelerator’s main traders embrace former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Along with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and different traders in AI options, they’ve mixed to make use of the Ukrainian battlefield as a take a look at mattress. As well as, Thiel’s Palantir and Musk’s Starlink experimentation collaborated with the Pentagon to develop Mission Maven. The venture deploys AI to quickly analyse huge quantities of knowledge to generate automated targetting. Accelerationism’s affect on public-private AI start-ups within the defence sectors on each side of the Atlantic is already vital. We’ll discover this additional in Half 2.

However, for all its winners, the accelerationist method additionally creates many losers we by no means hear about.

[A]ccelerators usually present companies by way of a extremely selective, cohort-based programme of restricted length (normally 3–12 months). Companies typically embrace help in growing the marketing strategy, investor pitch deck, prototypes, and preliminary market testing. [Accelerators] base their enterprise mannequin on fairness from the startups. Which means they’re extra progress pushed, usually aiming to supply firms that may scale quickly or fail quick, thus minimising wasted assets.

This selective, high-impact, artistic destruction-based mannequin of enterprise capitalism covers its potential losses by seizing fairness from the beginning. The beginning-ups that don’t make it are left with nothing. Their traders search to recoup what they will.

The Cathedral

Writing below the pen title Mencius Moldbug between 2007 and 2014, Curtis Yarvin revealed a collection of essays by which he laid out his numerous “UNQUALIFIED RESERVATIONS” (a title that runs throughout the underside of every essay).

In 2014, Yarvin took a break from writing as Moldbug to deal with his enterprise pursuits, with Thiel’s help. In 2013 he obtained start-up funding from Thiel for his firm Tlön and its Urbit platform, a decentralised peer-to-peer (P2P) community know-how firm. (Notice: Yarvin shifted his focus again to writing in Could 2020, issuing an announcement that he was partway by way of his e-book, Grey Mirror Of The Nihilist Prince.)

Yarvin (as Moldbug) recognized what he referred to as “the Cathedral” as the first goal for artistic destruction. Fellow neoreactionary Michael Anissimov described the Cathedral as “the self-organizing consensus of Progressives and Progressive ideology represented by the schools, the media, and the civil service. [. . .] The Cathedral has no central administrator, however represents a consensus performing as a coherent group that condemns different ideologies as evil.” In different phrases, the Cathedral just isn’t a proper construction of the state however fairly the dominant progressive ideology of these exercising a controlling affect over the state.

In essence, the neoreactionaries view “the Cathedral” because the governance impact of the assumption system maintained by the Institution—the ruling class. Yarvin noticed that the Cathedral prevails as an off-the-cuff “establishment fairly than an individual.” Thus, he argued, conventional approaches to political reform had been ineffective. The actual ruling entity, he reasoned, existed extra as a shared ideology and as a resultant set of agreed-upon aims held by a dominant class than as an identifiable political construction:

[T]he energy buildings that bind the Cathedral to the remainder of the Apparat [bureaucracy] should not formal. They’re mere social networks. [. . .] [T]right here is nothing you are able to do about this construction. You possibly can’t forestall folks from emailing one another.

The NRx claims that the Cathedral champions trendy, left-leaning progressivism. The truth that there may be little or no proof of any Institution dedication to egalitarian social reform is only one of many evident errors and woeful assumptions littered all through neoreactionary political philosophy and accelerationism extra broadly. We’ll cowl essentially the most egregious errors and assumptions shortly.

Whereas progressive mores are often touted by members of the Institution, that is evidently a notion administration tactic and a part of social engineering. The Institution likes to be seen as progressive and definitely prefers that we undertake progressive values, however there isn’t any proof that the Institution conducts itself in step with progressive ideology. Nonetheless, there may be fact to Curtis Yarvin’s commentary that the Cathedral, expressed in neoreactionary phrases, “doesn’t want to relinquish energy.”

The NRx makes use of the phrase “democracy” when referring to “consultant democracy.” But “democracy” and “consultant democracy” are two separate, distinct, and virtually diametrically opposed political methods. Consultant democracy relies on each sovereign particular person devolving all of their decision-making “authority” to a choose few elected politicians, whereas “democracy” sees each sovereign human being retaining and exercising their very own sovereign authority by way of the rule of regulation.

This confusion of definitions is a typical NRx error. So frequent, in truth, one has to surprise whether it is merely an “error” or a deliberate obfuscation. Regardless of the case, the NRx is true to focus on the near-religious zealotry with which mentioned Cathedral extols so-called “democracy.” By declaring consultant democracy righteous, the NRx contends that the Cathedral establishes what’s successfully an ethical dictatorship.

Yarvin wrote:

The actual downside is that, as a political kind, democracy is kind of a synonym for theocracy. (Or, on this case, atheocracy.) Underneath the speculation of in style sovereignty, those that management public opinion management the federal government.

As “democracy” hinders the mandatory artistic destruction and is propelling humanity like lemmings in direction of the cliff-edge of the singularity, axiomatically democracy have to be destroyed and a greater type of authorities—a type of company monarchy—put in, per Yarvin:

The one solution to escape the domination of canting, moralizing apparatchiks [the Cathedral and its acolytes] is to desert the precept of vox populi, vox dei, and return to a system by which authorities is resistant to the psychological fluctuations of the plenty.

Cameralism will be described because the science of public administration. It perceives the state as a enterprise that runs a rustic. Cameralism unfolded in Europe through the 18th and nineteenth centuries, as massive, centralised states emerged. The systematic gathering and evaluation of statistical information grew to become more and more essential for state directors and planners.

Cameralism breaks the operate of the state into three components: (1) public finance (cameral), (2) the administration of order, and (3) oeconomie. The latter determines the connection between state and society. It’s social engineering utilizing economics and different instruments. Cameralism, in all its features, serves the effectivity of the state.

The neocameralism of the NRx applies cameralism to the Cathedral. The envisaged post-neocameral state, by which the federal government is “resistant to the psychological fluctuations of the plenty,” can greatest be realised, or so say the neoreactionaries, by changing the state into a company construction.

Yarvin defined it this manner:

Let’s begin with my excellent world — the world of hundreds, ideally even tens of hundreds, of neocameralist city-states and ministates, or neostates. The organizations which personal and function these neostates are for-profit sovereign firms, or sovcorps.

The Darkish Enlightenment

French thinker Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and French psychoanalyst and political activist Félix Guattari (1930–1992), who wrote various works collectively, argued that whereas capitalism let out the acquisition and distribution of assets, its architects had been extremely territorial, tending towards monopoly, which in the end resulted in capitalism bringing “all its huge powers of repression to bear.” Due to this fact, they argued, “deterritorialization” was important. As capitalism was inherently self-destructive, the duty, they mentioned, was to “speed up the method.”

Echoing the “conspicuous consumption” theories of Veblen, French thinker and sociologist Jean-François Lyotard posited that consumerist staff in trendy capitalist societies didn’t need emancipation. Their materialistic needs meant they loved “swallowing the shit of capital,” Lyotard wrote.

Constructing on these theories and pushing the ideas introduced by Mencius Moldbug (Yarvin) to the utmost, former CCRU chief Nick Land revealed “The Darkish Enlightenment“ in 2012. If Technocracy is inhuman, Darkish Enlightenment borders on psychopathic.

Land contended that the postmodern tenets of liberal democracy—by which he meant liberal “consultant democracy”—created an inescapable sociopolitical “vector” that might inevitably result in a “new darkish age” as “Malthusian limits” would unavoidably “brutally re-impose themselves.” Solely an accelerationist neoreaction might avert the inevitable totalitarian disaster.

Land continued:

For the hardcore neoreactionaries, democracy just isn’t merely doomed, it’s doom itself. Fleeing its approaches is an final crucial. The subterranean present that propels such anti-politics is recognizably Hobbesian, a coherent darkish enlightenment, devoid from its starting of any Rousseauistic enthusiasm for in style expression.

By agreeing to Rousseau’s “social contract” delusion, propagated by the Cathedral, everybody condemned themselves to “democratic politics,” Land argued. The results of “democratization” is a capitalist “sovereign energy” that runs the state to everybody’s detriment and to seemingly inescapable corruption:

[T]he dynamics of democratization [are] essentially degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating personal vices, resentments, and deficiencies till they attain the extent of collective criminality and complete social corruption. The democratic politician and the citizens are certain collectively by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, by which both sides drives the opposite to ever extra shameless extremities of hooting, prancing cannibalism, till the one various to shouting is being eaten.

Land highlighted the accelerationist view that the Cathedral assumes a postmodern “central dogma” and, consequently, maintains a misplaced “absolute ethical confidence.” Unquestioningly accepted by the brainwashed public, the “secularised neo-puritanism of the Cathedral” deifies the “evangelical state.” Consequently, all opposition to it’s deemed heresy. Land argued that nothing could possibly be extra illiberal of dissenting views or much less inclusive.

The issue with the Cathedral, Land declared, was that whereas know-how was able to “accelerating improvement,” the “rent-seeking particular pursuits”—the ruling class—who maintained the Cathedral swallowed all the advantages. There have been no political options to this capitalist conundrum as a result of their neo-puritan religion in so-called liberal democracy rendered populations incapable even of understanding, not to mention tackling, the overwhelming energy of the Cathedral. Land considers this a societal psychological dysfunction that Yarvin referred to as “demosclerosis”—an intransigent, self-destructive religion within the Cathedral.

The Cathedral had integral morbidity, and post-WWII globalization had unfold the illness. To take care of demosclerosis, the Cathedral’s solely resolution was to eat ever extra to retain the neo-puritanical beliefs of the devoted. Land referred to as this situation “modernity 1.0.” It necessitated the fixed growth into new markets, to the purpose the place Land predicted that the “Eurocentric” mannequin can be deserted. Anglo-American energy would thus be subtle because the Cathedral sought to roll out “modernity 2.0.”

Writing in 2012, Land mentioned:

Modernity 2.0. International modernization is re-invigorated from a brand new ethno-geographical core [the East], liberated from the degenerate buildings of its Eurocentric predecessor, however little doubt confronting lengthy vary developments of an equally mortuary character. That is by far essentially the most encouraging and believable state of affairs (from a pro-modernist perspective), and if China stays even roughly on its present observe it will likely be assuredly realized.

The Darkish Enlightenment means that modernity 2.0 merely postpones the inevitable failure to adapt to the singularity. A real “Western Renaissance” might solely be realised with the demise of the extant world Cathedral. Due to this fact, each disaster must be accelerated and exacerbated in an try to interrupt the Cathedral’s maintain:

To be reborn it’s first essential to die, so the more durable the ‘onerous reboot’ the higher. Complete disaster and disintegration provides the very best odds. [. . .] As a result of competitors is nice, a pinch of Western Renaissance would spice issues up, even when — as is overwhelmingly possible — Modernity 2.0 is the world’s principal freeway to the longer term. That relies upon upon the West stopping and reversing just about every little thing it has been doing for over a century, excepting solely scientific, technological, and enterprise innovation. [Emphasis added.]

Observe that, from the neoreactionary perspective, “scientific, technological, and enterprise innovation” are the one beneficial Cathedral attributes. As neoreactionaries incorrectly suppose sovereignty implies nothing greater than the facility to exert authority over one other and because the Cathedral possesses the last word alleged “sovereignty,” neocameralism can be utilized to audit Cathedral sovereignty and thereby run the state extra successfully.

Whereas the phrase “sovereignty” actually implies “superiority,” the libertarian idea of self-ownership, or particular person sovereignty, is extra than simply ignored by the accelerationist NRx. It’s wholeheartedly rejected. The proponents of the Darkish Enlightenment describe themselves as libertarians, however are utilizing that time period in a weird sense.

Land at the least acknowledged the existence of a ruling class, however the Darkish Enlightenment relies on the misperception that oligarchs merely pay for political favours. As soon as the oligarchs’ path to financial bribery is eliminated, they will safely be ignored:

[T]he ruling class have to be plausibly recognized. [. . .] It’s [only] essential to ask [. . .] who do capitalists pay for political favors, how a lot these favors are doubtlessly value, and the way the authority to grant them is distributed. This requires, with a minimal of ethical irritation, that the whole social panorama of political bribery (‘lobbying’) is precisely mapped, and the executive, legislative, judicial, media, and tutorial privileges accessed by such bribes are transformed into fungible shares.

Thus, the helpful “features”—or “chambers,” in neocameralist phrases—of the Cathedral will be “mapped” and transformed into freely transferable shareholdings.

Yarvin recommended breaking nations into neostates run by the shareholders of sovereign firms—sovcorps. Land, maybe adopting a extra conventional cameralist place, envisaged changing the whole nation right into a enterprise enterprise run by gov-corp:

The formalization of political powers [. . .] permits for the potential for efficient authorities. As soon as the universe of democratic corruption is transformed right into a (freely transferable) shareholding in gov-corp, the house owners of the state can provoke rational company governance, starting with the appointment of a CEO. As with every enterprise, the pursuits of the state are actually exactly formalized because the maximization of long-term shareholder worth.

In a virtually similar trend to Technocracy, the Darkish Enlightenment proposes dictatorship. As an alternative of a Continental Director of Continental Management, it advocates for a CEO of gov-corp. It’s nonetheless a choose few who rule with absolute authority and impunity.

Clearly, there isn’t any democratic accountability of any form—not even consultant democratic accountability—below the totalitarian rule of gov-corp. Certainly, politicians and politics would turn into out of date. However, just like the technocrats, the accelerationist neoreactionaries had been, in their very own seemingly naïve means, making an attempt to deal with authorities corruption and its impacts.

Within the Darkish Enlightenment, gov-corp would act as a service supplier of efficient authorities. Residents would turn into its “clients.” They might subsequently count on worth for his or her cash, and so they might make a grievance in the event that they had been dissatisfied:

If gov-corp doesn’t ship acceptable worth for its taxes (sovereign lease), they will notify its customer support operate, and[,] if mandatory[,] take their customized elsewhere. Gov-corp would focus upon operating an environment friendly, engaging, very important, clear, and safe nation, of a sort that’s ready to attract clients.

It’s tough to know the place to begin criticising this absurd concept. Whether or not they’re referred to as “sovereign rents” or “taxes,” nobody chooses to pay them. The notion {that a} buyer “buys” a service implies that they’re equally free to decide on not to purchase it. But the one alternative supplied by the NRx’s gov-corp is to both pay up or get out. As Land places it, absent politics of any form, “no voice, free exit.” For billions of individuals this isn’t remotely potential.

The neoreactionaries’ appreciation of oligarchy is monumentally facile. Land brazenly acknowledges that the proposed “house owners of the state” are those that would have adequate means to “purchase out” the Cathedral’s present “stakeholders”—that’s, its “house owners.” So, who does he think about will run gov-corp however the oligarchs who already “personal” the state? Gov-corp does not problem the “ruling class.” As an alternative, it fingers complete management of society and state over to the “ruling class” on a gold platter.

Residents can already make a grievance to authorities by way of a wide range of mechanisms, together with lobbying, petitions, protest, and different types of activism. Elections make no distinction exactly as a result of authorities is at all times corrupted by oligarchs who, whereas they often squabble, basically agree on the course they need humanity to go. To be sincere, the opposite present routes of grievance don’t actually work both, for kind of the identical purpose.

The Darkish Enlightenment resolution to this precisely recognized downside is to “formalise” each avenue of dissent and promote it off to oligarchs, who’re trusted by the neoreactionaries to function a good and simply “customer support operate.” This isn’t a believable resolution of any form from humanity’s perspective.

There’s each purpose to suspect that this so-called resolution is an try to mollify fools and persuade them to purchase into the Darkish Enlightenment. Frankly, humanity is despised by the neoreactionaries, who want to see it solely dispossessed.

The Cathedral would maintain almost all “sovereignty,” however the share of “sovereignty” held by common people can be negligible. Relatively than tackle this logical conclusion, nevertheless, the Darkish Enlightenment treats human beings as virtually irrelevant. As Land sees it:

Insofar as voters are value bribing, there isn’t any want to completely exclude them from this calculation, though their portion of sovereignty shall be estimated with applicable derision.

Land’s eugenical tendency is apparent when he claims that “individuals are, on common, not very vibrant.” Since, in Land’s eyes, the citizenry is value so little and their share of sovereignty is virtually nil, it’s best to deal with them because the largely clueless clients of gov-corp. In gentle of looming singularity, the query, in response to Land, is the way to maximise the helpful operate of those clients so as extract the suitable “sovereign lease” from them.

His suggestion is that we must always all turn into “technoplastic beings.” This may make us “prone to specific, scientifically knowledgeable transformations.”

Land writes:

‘Humanity’ turns into intelligible as it’s subsumed into the technosphere, the place data processing of the genome — as an illustration — brings studying and enhancing into good coincidence. To explain this circuit, because it consumes the human species, is to outline our bionic horizon: the edge of conclusive nature-culture fusion at which a inhabitants turns into indistinguishable from its know-how.

Primarily then, in accordance with the Darkish Enlightenment, the accelerationist resolution to humanity’s ills is to finish humanity.

As soon as we’re “technoplastic beings”—transhuman cyborgs—in a world the place “biology and medication co-evolve,” we are going to cross the “bionic horizon,” as Land calls it. At that time, we are able to lastly kill God and abandon the “essence of man as a created being.” We shall be free to sacrifice our humanity and embark upon our “new evolutionary section.”

As valued clients who’re rendered intelligible solely by melding with know-how, we are able to all prostrate ourselves and our youngsters earlier than the sovereignty of gov-corp. Underneath the watchful eye of our illustrious CEO, we will be programmed as required. The outcome? Lastly, in the end, we can have an efficient authorities. In spite of everything, “the system have to be first.”

The Accelerationist Left

In 2008, two Canadian left-leaning neoreactionaries, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, revealed the #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics. On this treatise, the pair had been responding to Mark Fisher’s ideas on “capitalist realism.” (The next 12 months, Fisher turned these ideas right into a e-book referred to as Capitalist Realism: Is There No Various.) Fisher had noticed that, after the Soviet Union collapsed, no viable political-economic various to capitalism had been supplied. In all probability quoting Slavoj Žižek, Fisher had written, “[I]t is less complicated to think about an finish to the world than an finish to capitalism.”

Fisher argued that the left had did not problem neoliberalism, which he described as a separate however reinforcing element of contemporary capitalism. Contemplating the inequities wrought by neoliberalism, Fisher urged the left to embrace an accelerationist method to capitalism. He recognized neoliberalism, fairly than progressivism, because the founding religion binding what Land and Yarvin referred to as “the Cathedral.”

Like his counterparts on the correct, Fisher contended that technological progress was unstoppable. He argued that the standard left’s try to recreate a socialist society with out accounting for the homogenising impact of contemporary know-how was an act of futility. If the hope was to make significant use of progressive political principle, the left wanted to embrace capitalist realism and deploy accelerationism to creatively destroy and “deterritorialize” neoliberalism to make sure a progressive, post-capitalist reterritorialization.

Of their #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO, Williams and Srnicek accepted capitalist realism and mentioned:

On this venture, the fabric platform of neoliberalism doesn’t must be destroyed. It must be repurposed in direction of frequent ends. The prevailing infrastructure just isn’t a capitalist stage to be smashed, however a springboard to launch in direction of post-capitalism.

Making use of neocameralism to neoliberalism, they added:

[T]he left should benefit from each technological and scientific advance made potential by capitalist society. We declare that quantification just isn’t an evil to be eradicated, however a device for use in the simplest method potential. Financial modelling is — merely put — a necessity for making intelligible a fancy world. [. . .] The instruments to be present in social community evaluation, agent-based modelling, large information analytics, and non-equilibrium financial fashions, are mandatory cognitive mediators for understanding complicated methods like the trendy financial system. The accelerationist left should turn into literate in these technical fields.

As accelerationist leftists who’re pursuing a progressive future, the co-authors advocate a “sociotechnical hegemony” to make sure that “manufacturing, finance, logistics, and consumption” are “reformatted in direction of post-capitalist ends.” They promote public-private partnership—stakeholder capitalism. They usually imagine that “governments, establishments, suppose tanks, unions, or particular person benefactors” ought to work collectively to create “an ecology of organisations, a pluralism of forces.”

This “ecology” of private and non-private establishments might, Williams and Srnicek envisioned, create “a brand new ideology, financial and social fashions, and a imaginative and prescient of the nice” and design new “establishments and materials paths to inculcate, embody and unfold them.” Working collectively, this partnership of stakeholders would assemble “a optimistic suggestions loop of infrastructural, ideological, social and financial transformation, producing a brand new complicated hegemony, a brand new post-capitalist technosocial platform.”

It’s considerably humorous that, regardless of all their speak of a “sociotechnical hegemony,” the accelerationist left has been divided from the neoreactionary proper by the identical previous disagreements—to not point out some extent of animosity. Harshly crucial of Land particularly, Williams and Srnicek described Land’s inhuman mannequin of accelerationism as “a easy brain-dead onrush,” whereas their very own mannequin guarantees a extra human-centred “navigational” accelerationism.

Any human being who want to see future generations of humanity thrive can be hard-pressed to decide on both the #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO or the Darkish Enlightenment. Each are deeply rooted in transhumanism. As an alternative of being programmed to be good clients of gov-corp, we’d be programmed to be excellent progressives below sociotechnical hegemony. Of the latter, Williams and Srnicek write:

Any transformation of society should contain financial and social experimentation[,] [. . .] fusing superior cybernetic applied sciences [. . .] with subtle financial modelling [. . .] and a democratic platform instantiated within the technological infrastructure itself, [. . .] using cybernetics and linear programming in an try to beat the brand new issues. [. . .] The left should develop sociotechnical hegemony: each within the sphere of concepts, and within the sphere of fabric platforms. Platforms are the infrastructure of worldwide society. They set up the essential parameters of what’s potential, each behaviourally and ideologically.

In reality, accelerationist neoreaction, on each the left and the correct, outlines nothing aside from a future technological and sociopolitical dystopia. There’s completely no purpose to think about that hegemony of any form is able to delivering something however tyranny. Just like the technocrats, the accelerationist neoreactionaries appear equally unable to know that there’ll at all times be megalomaniac oligarchs set on “undertaking some object,” regardless of how deranged their goal could also be.

Disillusionment with consultant democracy isn’t any purpose at hand over totalitarian sociopolitical management methods to oligarchs. Accelerating in direction of hegemony just isn’t an answer. Except you might be an oligarch, it’s a silly and suicidal proposition.

Neither Technocracy, accelerationism nor the Darkish Enlightenment exist inside our acquainted political paradigms. They’re to this point exterior the Overton window that we are able to’t even focus on them with out both being embroiled in pointless and redundant debates about whether or not they’re communist or fascist or being subjected to eye-rolling scorn.

To be frank, it makes little distinction what we hoi polloi imagine. The oligarchs who’re conversant with these political philosophies are evidently making an attempt to deliver them to fruition in our lifetime. We ignore the ensuing cultural revolutions and social engineering initiatives at our peril. Make no mistake: They’re already underway.

Contemplate Land’s darkly enlightened willpower that we should reject “any Rousseauistic enthusiasm for in style expression”—the frequent notion of the “social contract.” We are actually seeing his goal transition into [public] coverage.

President Trump has come to energy backed by technocrats like Elon Musk and neoreactionaries like Peter Thiel. Considered one of Trump’s first acts as president was to announce a $500 billion public-private infrastructure funding venture referred to as “Stargate.” The intention is to assemble the info centre and energy era capability wanted for the event and rollout of synthetic intelligence (AI) methods.

The Stargate public-private consortium brings the US authorities right into a partnership with OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank. Thiel’s protégé, Sam Altman, is the CEO of OpenAI. Talking shortly after Trump’s announcement, Altman made a press release thick with Aesopian language. He informed reporters:

I feel know-how does an awesome deal to raise the world to extra abundance and to raised prosperity. [. . .] I nonetheless count on that there shall be some change required to the social contract. [. . .] [T]he entire construction of society itself shall be up for some extent of debate and reconfiguration.

Darkly Enlightened Christianity

No matter the assorted spiritual rites practiced by totally different Christian denominations or of the sectarian divisions to which they provide rise, the unifying values of all real Christians—love, compassion, humility, integrity, and justice—are simple to understand and respect.

However right-leaning members of the neoreactionary motion, together with Yarvin and Land, take exception to what they take into account a progressive translation of these Christian values. Consequently, self-proclaimed Christian neoreactionaries have adopted a warped reinterpretation of the standard Christian values most of us recognise.

“Universalism” is a Christian theology that preaches the doctrine of common reconciliation with God. Christian Universalism maintains that anybody—Christian or not, saint or sinner—can discover salvation by way of Jesus Christ. Universalism typically holds that there isn’t any everlasting damnation to Hell as a result of “the Lord won’t solid off perpetually.”

The theology of Universalism is aligned with Mainline Protestantism, which emphasises social justice and private salvation and provides extra liberal and progressive interpretations of scripture. Yarvin assaults Christian Universalism as an excessive type of Calvinism, which, he says, dictates that “all canines go to Heaven and there’s no Hell.” His objection is to the inference that “everyone seems to be a part of the elect.”

The assumption that we’re all equally deserving of grace is opposite to the dogma of the neoreactionary proper. Bear in mind, the NRx proclaims that humanity’s “portion of sovereignty” is worthy solely of “derision.”

Consequently, the NRx neologise “Universalism” to imply the synthesis between “the mainline Protestant and secular Nationalist actions.” Yarvin argues that US secular nationalism has turn into “internationalism”—globalism—and that “nationalism” has consequently turn into “an inappropriate time period.”

The neoreactionaries reference an article revealed in Time journal in 1942, titled “Faith: American Malvern” as alleged proof that progressive liberal theology has mutated and merged with progressive, political globalism. That is thought-about to be to the detriment of each Christian beliefs and nationalism. Although the article hyperlinks the political corruption of the church within the US with globalists like John Foster Dulles, it does not display that Christian theology and progressive political ideology are intertwined.

Nonetheless, because the Cathedral is outlined because the supposed dominant progressive ideology of the ruling class, Yarvin concludes that political progressivism is a “sect of Christianity”—and not a sect he embraces.

Frankly, this seems to be little greater than linguistic trickery. Apart from the truth that reform is frequent to each political progressivism and theological liberalism, the neoreactionaries’ recommended marriage of the 2 appears tenuous. It’s virtually unimaginable to observe Yarvin’s and Land’s reasoning, to the purpose the place many have questioned if there may be any.

Yarvin insists that trendy Christianity itself has turn into a core element of the “nontheistic sect” of NRx-defined Universalism—the neo-puritanical religion within the Cathedral. Consequently, in response to the NRx, the neoreactionaries who oppose Universalism are seen as literal heretics by the neo-puritan acolytes of the Cathedral—that’s, everybody who just isn’t a neoreactionary.

Yarvin rejects this notion and sees those that embrace liberal theology—progressivism—because the true heretics. It’s the NRx, he posits, that seeks to revive the true Christian religion:

If a Christian who believes his or her religion is justified by common purpose is a Universalist, a Christian who believes his or her religion is justified by divine revelation—in different phrases, a “Christian” because the phrase is usually used right now—may be referred to as a Revelationist.

For NRx Christians like Peter Thiel, imposing gov-corp and eradicating the stultifying affect of the progressive Universalism is the Christian factor to do. Of their view, the true revelation is that “actual” Christians reject liberal theology and maintain to a extra literal studying of scripture. Mixed along with his sociopolitical philosophy, this theology has evidently led Thiel, and presumably others who share his religion, to undertake supposed Christian values most of us would wrestle to recognise as Christian.

At the moment, the TechnoKings—akin to Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan—and lots of the main lights within the Mainstream Various Media (MAM)—are extra brazenly discussing and selling their Christian religion. Take Russell Model, for instance. Model’s proselytising is in style on the Thiel-backed Rumble video-sharing platform, the place many MAM heavyweights have prospered.

As famous by the UK’s Christian At the moment, Hulk Hogan, Shia LaBeouf, Rob Schneider, Kat Von D, Candace Owens, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are additionally among the many many celebrities and “speaking heads” to have very conspicuously transformed to Christianity (primarily Catholicism) in latest months. Earlier than we assume this means a resurgence in Christian values, maybe we must always first have a look at what these values may be.

It’s tempting to see the style for brazenly advocating your Christianity as a advertising technique, notably within the US. The “Bible Belt” represents a sizeable demographic and normally a Republican heartland. However there may be extra to it.

Peter Thiel has been one thing of a religion chief among the many TechnoKing class and has lengthy been open about his personal allegedly Christian beliefs. Thiel can be an fanatic and former pupil of the philosophy of René Girard (1923–2015). His private Christian values are evidently closely influenced by his sociopolitical and philosophical beliefs. They diverge significantly from the Christian values now we have mentioned up to now.

Girard argued that individuals’s need to mimic others—mimesis—led them to covet objects and companies, ascribing them corresponding and sometimes irrational worth. His mimetic principle is essentially in step with Veblen’s conspicuous consumption.

When people are pushed by mimetic need, social battle—and in the end violence—is inevitable as we compete for assets, Girard proffered. The battle escalates till it turns into all-consuming and threatens to destroy society. That’s when a scapegoat turns into mandatory, he argued.

By way of the scapegoat mechanism, a person or group is blamed, persecuted, and murdered. This “founding homicide” unites society and returns it to a extra secure situation. However the peace is precarious, for the underlying mimetic need stays. If we observe Girard’s reasoning and assume the founding homicide requires planning, we might describe the othering of the scapegoat as an archetypal psychological operation (psyop).

The founding homicide facilitates cultural renewal by way of the method of sacralization. An accompanying mythology imbues the murdered scapegoat with nice energy. The scapegoat’s guilt means they needed to die for society to be reborn, thereby rendering the homicide a sacred act. Subsequent symbolic sacrifices, in response to Girard, had been reaffirmations of the cultural significance of the founding homicide.

Girard transformed to Catholicism in 1959 based mostly on what he contended was an empirical philosophical method to scripture. He recognized the story of Christ Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection as an archetypal instance of a “founding homicide.” The Lamb of God was the scapegoated slain sufferer who turns into the miraculous basis of a brand new tradition.

Girard seen the resurrection of Jesus—theologically proving he was “not responsible”—as a cultural turning level in human historical past. It uncovered the lie underpinning the scapegoat mechanism. The founding homicide of Christ reveals the contradiction on the coronary heart of human society. Its treasured “peace” is barely—can solely—stem from its personal inherent and uncontrollable violence.

In 2003, Thiel wrote an essay titled “The Straussian Second.” In it, Thiel challenged each the rationality of the Enlightenment and prevailing Christian theology. He argued that the founding homicide “is the key origin of all spiritual and political establishments.” Due to this fact, to keep up its Enlightened delusions and its Christian pretensions—in Girardian phrases—trendy society’s solely possibility is to deceive itself by ignoring the “fact about human nature.”

Thiel criticized Enlightenment philosophers, akin to John Locke, for overlooking the mimetic needs of human beings. Figuring out this “need” to be a basic side of human nature, Thiel wrote: “Within the place of human nature, Locke leaves us with an unknowable X.”

Thiel argued that human nature—the unknowable X—could possibly be recognized and accounted for. Thus, like Yarvin, Land, and the broader NRx, Thiel rejected the alleged ambiguity of the Enlightenment:

[T]he Enlightenment undertook a significant strategic retreat. If the one solution to cease folks from killing each other [in the name of religion or conflicting beliefs] concerned a world the place no one thought of [human nature] an excessive amount of, then the mental value of ceasing such thought appeared a small value to pay. The query of human nature was deserted as a result of it’s too perilous a query to debate.

Thiel finds this “lack of information of this fact of human tradition” to be a deadly flaw. He agrees with Girard’s level that “the trendy world accommodates a powerfully apocalyptic dimension”—mimetic need. It’s essentially unstable, liable to revolution, corruption, and collapse and can’t be everlasting. Due to this fact, the Christian crucial is to acknowledge mimetic apocalypse and perceive that the reality delivered by the resurrection is the true revelation of the founding homicide: humanity is the issue.

In “The Straussian Second,” Thiel presents this world view by proposing a plan of action for Christian politicians who perceive the “fact” in regards to the founding homicide of Christ. As soon as understood, violent human nature and the cyclical inevitability of apocalypse will be included in a extra cohesive theology, he believes.

Christian politicians ought to proceed by “figuring out the right combination of violence and peace” they could have to utilise, relying on the circumstances. The duty is to handle the “limitless violence of runaway mimesis” with the target of delivering the “peace of the dominion of God.”

It’s ironic that Thiel criticises what he sees because the vagaries inside Enlightenment rationality. There seems to be various ethical ambiguity in Thiel’s Christian “values.”

Over the past 20 years, Thiel’s opinion has modified little. His Girardian view of mimetic apocalypse has presumably mixed along with his darkly enlightened conceptualisation of the singularity and formed his private theology. Talking to Peter Robinson from the Hoover Institute, Thiel laid out his ideas about the apocalypse.

Thiel mentioned that human nature has a “limitless violence to it.” Due to this fact, biblical prophecies of the apocalypse actually converse of what “humanity is prone to do in a world of ever extra highly effective know-how.” Thiel agrees with René Girard that violence just isn’t “one in every of God’s attributes.” Consequently, he rejects the extra humanist view of the Enlightenment philosophers that humanity “just isn’t that harmful.” Once more, humanity is the first danger in Thiel’s theology.

Thiel considers that the world is beset with existential crises. He lists local weather change, the specter of nuclear battle, the singularity, pandemics and different features of the so-called polycrisis. Humanity fears the “apocalyptic specter” however, he contends, it views the answer to be “a one world state that has actual enamel, actual energy. And the biblical time period for that’s the Antichrist.” Thiel deems centralised world authorities synonymously as “the Antichrist or Armageddon.” As salvation will solely be discovered when folks recognise the reality in regards to the founding homicide of Christ, society should confront and be life like about its personal mimetic violence. The issue is, Thiel argues, that humanity just isn’t “apocalyptic sufficient.”

Persevering with his dialog with Robinson, Thiel used the allegory of Odysseus‘ return voyage to Circe’s island, observing how Odysseus rigorously navigated the waters between the risks of the six-headed monster Scylla (the polycrisis – apocalypse) and the whirlpool Charybdis (a one world state – Armageddon or the Antichrist). Evaluating himself to Odysseus, Thiel says that he want to chart “some slim path between these two the place we are able to keep away from each.”

From Thiel’s theological perspective, the mimetic apocalypse is driving the polycrisis and humanity is reacting to it purchase embracing the Antichrist—one world authorities (Armageddon). He posited that humanity is “groomed to the Antichrist resolution.” Thiel mentioned he’s “not a Calvinist,” that these outcomes weren’t predetermined and he might envisage a “third means.”

Accepting mimetic apocalypse and the Antichrist Armageddon as the one “two choices” is the error of the “political atheist,” in response to Thiel. Apparently, the third means lies someplace between. When you take a extra Christian view, because the “US is floor zero of globalization” its can be “floor zero of the resistance to unhealthy globalization.” Globalization isn’t unchristian however the mistaken type of globalisation—unhealthy globalisation—is seemingly so.

Talking as a “Christian” at an occasion final 12 months organised by the ACTS 17 Collective—a backronym whose full title is Acknowledging Christ in Know-how and Society—and held on the dwelling of Garry Tan, Thiel claimed that humanity is “caught up in all these loopy dynamics” and that “[t]listed below are these unhealthy cycles of imitation, standing video games that you simply get wrapped up in.” When contemplating how his fellow Christians ought to reply to the inevitable mimetic disaster and future apocalypse, Thiel suggested:

[Of] the Ten Commandments, the 2 most essential are the primary and final on the record. The primary commandment is, you need to worship God. The tenth commandment is, you shouldn’t covet the issues that belong to your neighbor.

In accordance with Thiel, the Christian factor to do, in the beginning, is to keep away from mimetic failings and worship God. It appears the opposite eight Commandments—which extol conventional Christian values of not taking God’s title in useless, not killing, stealing, committing adultery, or bearing false witness, and so forth—are much less essential to him. One wonders what the purpose of worshipping God is that if God’s important message to humanity is of secondary significance to this self-proclaimed Christian.

That mentioned, ethical leeway actually accommodates “Christians” who wish to guarantee they keep the “appropriate combination of violence and peace.” As we will see in Half 2, this would appear notably essential for Thiel’s “Christianity,” given his intensive hyperlinks to the US military-intelligence-industrial complicated and his genocidal battle profiteering. (It isn’t fairly clear how these pursuits match with any recognisable Christian values.)

ACTS 17 payments itself as a Christian non-profit organisation that’s “redefining success for those who outline tradition.” Plainly “success” and the flexibility to “outline tradition” are actually Christian values.

This non-profit runs church seminars and workshops as an alternative of meals banks or neighborhood initiatives. It reaches out to America’s tech-savvy, TechnoKing wannabes fairly than embracing the disenfranchised poor. It was fashioned by three servants of God: Y Combinator’s Garry Tan, Founders Fund associate (and Anduril co-founder) Trae Stephens, and Trae’s spouse Michelle.

ACTS 17’s exploration of Christian values is uncommon. It seems to offer Christianity as an alternative choice to believing in “no matter.” Michelle Stephens, a PhD and RN who co-founded Oath Care and is its chief nursing officer, defined the philosophy this solution to San Francisco Normal reporters:

As people, we’re all made to worship and can worship one thing if we don’t worship God. [. . .] What are you placing your religion in? What are you worshipping?

Oh properly, why not give the Christian God a go then? It’s not as if you need to decide to anything, aside from avoiding mimesis, when you can.

For his half, protection contractor and enterprise capitalist Trae Stephens is relaxed with growing AI weaponry and concurrently being a “Christian.” In a September 2024 interview with the know-how journal Wired, Stephens declared his perception that “Jesus doesn’t care about lessons of individuals. He cares about folks.” He then added:

There’s quite a bit that enterprise capitalists do that’s instantly aligned with abundance—caring about bettering humanity. [. . .] [T]he essence of enterprise capital is creating wealth. It’s not extractive. It’s not zero-sum. It’s the thought which you could make one thing from nothing, and that’s, foundationally, a theological concept.[. . .] The decision that I’ve been making an attempt to make to the tech neighborhood is that now we have an ethical obligation to do issues to profit humanity, to attract us nearer to God’s plan for his folks.

Accelerationist enterprise capitalism is thus made a Christian act of mercy. The social penalties of 1’s funding technique are largely immaterial. Producing one thing—nice wealth and the facility to kill—from nothing is our ethical obligation and the essence of Christianity.

Trae is instrumental in shifting warfare into the personal sector. Underneath his steering—and Thiel’s affect—Anduril’s “Lattice for Mission Autonomy” system makes use of Anduril’s bespoke Lattice AI software program to allow a single human operator to supposedly management a whole lot of autonomous weapons methods. This consists of Anduril’s AI-run Barracuda cruise missiles.

I’m in no place to query anybody’s religion, and I’m not doing so right here. However it’s cheap for any of us to problem apparent hypocrisy. When used as an adjective, the phrase “Christian” means “good, form, useful” conduct. These qualities mirror actual Christian values and are the least we are able to count on from somebody who describes themselves as “a Christian.”

It’s indefensible to profess oneself a Christian whereas performing in a means that no rational particular person might ever understand as Christian. Calling oneself a follower of Christ whereas founding firms whose mission is generally perceived as unchristian—certainly, is antithetical to the frequent understanding of what it means to be Christian’. It feels like ethical grandstanding and it’s authentic, if not requisite, to query such duplicity.

This isn’t to recommend that every one the characters on this article don’t imagine in God or genuinely take into account themselves Christian. They properly might. But when Thiel and Stephens do, their idea of Christianity is one which the overwhelming majority of us can’t relate to.

Darkish Enlightenment Christianity, then, seems to be an mental reimagining that’s based mostly extra upon sociopolitical philosophy than on any cogent theology. Positive, when you declare that Christianity calls for a supposedly life like appraisal of the mimetic violence of human tradition; when you imagine a extra sensible method to battle is warranted; when you contend that your final goal is to mitigate the human value of the approaching apocalypse and keep away from the Armageddon of the Antichrist, then calling your organization’s targetted drone strikes “Christian” just isn’t off base. However to the remainder of us, such self-justifying speak sounds extra like self-deception than an unselfed Christian stroll.

As to what the opposite latest converts to the Thielverse actually imagine, who can say. However, whether it is something like Thiel’s model of Christianity, there isn’t any purpose to welcome it.

From Ideology to Coverage

Political ideology solely turns into influential as soon as it shapes authorities insurance policies and political agendas and, in flip, as soon as these insurance policies and agendas impression society. By means of instance, let’s take into account stakeholder capitalism.

The United Nations (UN) redefined the function of governments through the Nineteen Nineties. Its then-Secretary-Common Kofi Annan, addressing the World Financial Discussion board (WEF) in 1998, spoke of a “quiet revolution” on the intergovernmental stage:

The United Nations as soon as dealt solely with governments. By now we all know that peace and prosperity can’t be achieved with out partnerships involving governments, worldwide organizations, the enterprise neighborhood and civil society.

Annan described the shift to a world public-private partnership (G3P) mannequin of worldwide governance. This “multistakeholder governance” resets and diminishes the function of governments. As mere companions of the personal sector and of civil society organisations (CSOs), governments are tasked with creating what is named an “enabling setting“:

An financial system’s enabling setting encompasses each formal and casual establishments; utilities and infrastructure akin to transport, power, water and telecommunications; in addition to the framework situations set by financial and financial coverage, and extra broadly, public funds. [. . .] [T]he high quality of a rustic’s enabling setting won’t solely must be assessed on its means to assist progress and productiveness, but in addition on the flexibility to rework the financial system to attain environmental and shared prosperity targets.

A correctly designed and centrally deliberate enabling setting ensures that multistakeholder partnerships—of which governments are associate members—can set coverage and laws to attain their shared “targets,” no matter they could be. For instance, the UK authorities has created the mandatory enabling setting to ensure that public-private partnerships to attain Internet Zero prosperity targets. Its coverage and regulatory measures embrace:

• New enterprise fashions, requirements and market preparations to facilitate uptake of options, for instance power as a service and time-of-use tariffs.
• [F]inance choices to assist new services and products.
• Financial fashions for brand spanking new or considerably scaled-up commodities.

It’s a mistake to imagine enabling environments are parts of the type of centrally deliberate command financial system we’d usually affiliate with communism. Multistakeholder partnerships and enabling environments have emerged not from collectivism however from stakeholder capitalism. First outlined by the present chairman of the WEF’s Board of Trustees Klaus Schwab within the Seventies, stakeholder capitalism has progressed by exploiting the communitarianism proposed by Amitai Etzioni and others. Though the communitarian philosophy is an outgrowth of the concepts espoused by the Utopian socialists, there may be nothing socialist about stakeholder capitalism.

A full-blown stakeholder capitalist society would change consultant democracy with a community of so-called citizen assemblies. The propaganda pitch for these assemblies alleges they’re designed to enhance citizen engagement in coverage making. Consultant members of the general public, personal, and “civil society” sectors assemble to deliberate coverage with the purported intention of decentralising political energy.

But when we glance extra carefully on the stakeholder capitalist meeting mannequin, we see that the public-private partnership retains all of the authority and controls the distribution of all assets. What’s extra, the public-private partnership units the agenda for debate. The “civil society” element, largely represented by what investigative journalist Cory Morningstar calls the non-profit industrial complicated, is dominated by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), that are beholden to the “philanthropy” of oligarchs like Jeff Bezos.

We’ve already mentioned that stakeholder capitalism suggests a triumvirate power-sharing construction resulting in multistakeholder policy-setting. And we’ve mentioned that, in reality, the public-private partnership two-thirds of the triumvirate dominates the civil society one-third. “Citizen assemblies” are merely PR stunts meant to lend the public-private partnership fake democratic legitimacy.

Consultant democracy doesn’t afford the folks a lot democratic oversight. If stakeholder capitalism, together with its citizen assemblies, had been totally carried out, as Klaus Schwab proposes, democratic oversight can be eliminated fully. Stakeholder capitalism is designed to liberate public-private partnerships—not the folks.

Multistakeholder public-private partnerships are ubiquitous. China’s mannequin of stakeholder capitalism, as an illustration, has totally built-in public-private partnerships inside the mechanism of the state. Whereas massive, state-run coverage analysis models stay dominant in China, privately funded coverage suppose tanks, such because the Nationwide Technique Institute and the Chongyang Institute for Monetary Research, have been afforded rising affect.

Within the West, the historic relationship between personal capital and the state is totally different from that of, say, China. The US and UK governments, for instance, have lengthy favoured coverage improvement strategies from personal suppose tanks.

Nonetheless, wherever we glance, stakeholder capitalism has taken root. Gov-corp represents the whole privatization of the state, and Technocracy provides a blueprint for the way the totally privatised state can handle the general public “social mechanism.”

The notion of a totally privatised state, that’s, a “personal” but “public” state, is a considerably odd idea for most individuals to wrap their heads round. In all probability the closest instance of an identical governance construction can be Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy. Within the 1935 publication Fascism: Doctrine and Establishments, Mussolini wrote:

The company State considers that personal enterprise within the sphere of manufacturing is the simplest and helpful [sic] instrument within the curiosity of the nation. In view of the truth that personal organisation of manufacturing is a operate of nationwide concern, the organiser of the enterprise is accountable to the State for the course given to manufacturing. [. . .] State intervention in financial manufacturing arises solely when personal initiative is missing or inadequate, or when the political pursuits of the State are concerned.

That mentioned, stakeholder capitalism just isn’t fascism. It’s an inversion of the fascist relationship between the private and non-private sectors.

The fascist doctrine units the personal sector free to innovate however constrains its authority inside the orbit of the political state and its establishments. Stakeholder capitalism in the end allows personal firms to make use of the political authority of the state for their very own ends by way of partnership agreements. Stakeholder capitalist ideology has taken maintain of presidency coverage in every single place and is a logical step alongside the highway to a gov-corp Technocracy.

Oligarch Upheaval

Extremely believable hearsay has it that a number of Silicon Valley firms run by self-styled “TechnoKings”—amongst them Thiel at Palantir, the administrators of OpenAI, and SpaceX founder Musk (the unique “TechnoKing of Tesla”)—are forming a consortium and main the cost to grab management of the US military-industrial complicated. For his half, Musk’s defence and intelligence contracts are the centrepiece of his sprawling industrial empire. His provision of Starlink satellite tv for pc terminals to Ukraine through the battle with Russia is well-known.

Starlink, a SpaceX division, was utilized by the Ukrainian army for offensive functions. It will be ridiculous for Starlink representatives to faux they didn’t know their satellite tv for pc service can be used to launch assaults, and but deny it they did. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, as an illustration, mentioned Starlink was “by no means supposed for offensive functions.” Ukrainian officers mentioned they discovered Shotwell’s feedback “unusual,” since Starlink’s supposed army use was manifestly apparent.

It ought to come as little shock that virtually the primary “inefficiency” concern raised with the DOGE got here from a defence contractor. CEO Chris Kubasik of L3Harris Applied sciences, an organization that specialises in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) in addition to alerts intelligence methods, informed the DOGE that the US defence acquisition system—procurement course of—was too gradual and bureaucratic to maintain tempo with the threats posed by Iran and China.

It’s clear who would be the beneficiaries of the DOGE drive to make the US military-industrial complicated extra environment friendly. In an interview with CNBC, Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and a Thiel protégé who invests closely in Anduril, mentioned:

I’ve quite a lot of buddies concerned in DOGE. [. . .] In case you are pressured to make use of your cash extra effectively [. . .] that’s when Palantir and Anduril will win. [. . .] Pete Hegseth, our Secretary of Protection, was very clear that he desires to have competitors, he desires the very best concepts to win. [. . .] And meaning firms like Anduril and like Palantir are going to continue to grow actually quick.

Secretary of Protection Pete Hegseth’s public Venmo profile exposes his shut relationship with the Thiel/Musk-linked faction bidding to grab management of Division of Protection (DOD) procurement. It appears Lonsdale’s commentary that Hegseth is “our Secretary of Protection” is much extra particular than most American voters realise.

We’re evidently witnessing an influence shift inside the globalist oligarchy. The brand new breed of technocrat neoreactionaries are favoured within the US. Sadly, whereas American voters have been duped into considering this provides them an escape from what they perceived because the suffocating “woke” censorship regime of the Biden administration, they’re really being accelerated towards one thing worse.

Oligarch upheaval by no means improves our lives, it merely signifies which oligarch faction has primacy. The DOGE assault on USAID—which was extensively infiltrated by US intelligence businesses—is symbolic. Whereas Musk has castigated USAID’s waste and inefficiency, he has failed to say that USAID beforehand funnelled funds to finance Starlink’s ventures in Ukraine. Are we speculated to imagine Musk would destroy one in every of his personal earnings streams?

If and when the Thiel/Musk-fronted oligarch community seizes management of DOD budgets, they received’t want the USAID again door. As shall be evidenced in Half 2, the brand new public-private intelligence partnership fashioned by Palentir, Anduril, ClearviewAI, and others implies that the potential for US intelligence company initiatives to go even darker has elevated, not decreased, with the purported demise of USAID.

In the meantime, hapless US voters, to not point out quite a few MAM pundits all over the world, are cheering the top of USAID. Whereas, in lots of respects, some enthusiasm is comprehensible, it’s hopelessly misplaced. A privatised, darker deep state is actually not going to profit humanity, solely the oligarchs.

Because the DOGE units about utilizing AI to judge the effectivity of the human beings that work in authorities departments, it’s not with out justification that some have recognised the “post-human” nature of this new type of technological governance. The technocrats and the accelerationist neoreactionaries are remaking the US state in their very own picture absent any notable oversight. They’re utilizing artistic destruction to deterritorialize the extant Cathedral and reterritorializing the US state with an much more inflexible and authoritarian Cathedral of their very own.

In Half 2, we are going to have a look at extra examples that reveal how members of the so-called superclass that backs Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are exploiting their relationships with the US state to roll out a authorities coverage agenda aligned with their political ideology. In doing so, they’re knowingly laying the groundwork for a US gov-corp Technate match for a multipolar world order.

Correction: Initially I acknowledged that Jeff Bezos had posted a message on X to which Elon Musk replied. This was an error. That account seems to have been a spoof of Bezos. Although the true Elon Musk replied to it. The article has been up to date accordingly.