Lately Mencius Moldbug has been off his best, so, looking back to his greatest hits, here is a golden oldie
The democratic state needs votes, to give it legitimacy, so is always looking for ignorant stupid cheap voters that it can buy to bulk up its astroturf. And so the franchise expands. And when it can expand no more, then fresh voters are purchased from outside.
The article is full of wonderful gems
For the intellectuals, a tiny minority, to build a working majority with the tools of trans-democracy, they must discover and diligently exploit a vast pool of empty heads.
And these people, who are human beings, but not in any sense philosophers, will be alien to the intellectual. Friendship will be asserted – but the relationship is not friendship, for friendship is a relation of peers based on human affinity and human sympathy. The aristocrat has no genuine human connection to the coal miner, the ghetto criminal, the illegal day-laborer. They are, at best, his clients – his peons, his pets. This reality, sordid on its face, cannot be revealed. The aristocrat cannot accept it; the client cannot accept it; the bourgeois cannot be allowed to see it.
Thus the passion of the late 20th-century trans-democrat for, in Brecht’s word, electing a new people.
…
Are there any individuals who must be legally protected from disrespect? Is there any crime of lèse-majesté, per se? The answer is: no. America is not a dictatorship; the load-bearing pillar of political power is not a single human being; therefore, legally and in fact, Americans are free to laugh at anyone.
But are we free to laugh at everyone? There are no protected individuals. A search for protected class, however, produces quite a number of hits. Consider the penalties for disrespecting, singly or en masse, a member of a protected class. Do they not bear a strange resemblance to those for offending Stalin, in Kiev in the ’70s? Professor Volokh certainly thinks so.
Thus, Maine’s law. There is no crime of lèse-majesté in America; there never has been. Every day, however, Americans are prosecuted and/or persecuted for the crime of lèse-peuple.
Naturally, it is not a crime to disrespect the entire People. Not that anyone bothers – because, quite frankly, in 2010 it is almost comical to consider America as a single political community. No; it is only a crime to disrespect the sacred vessels of trans-democracy – the aliens among us. The workers and peasants, or such as we have these days; the human fuel of progressive government. By disrespecting the vessels, of course, we threaten the chemists, just as by disrespecting Stalin the young Professor Volokh threatened the entire Soviet state.
Is this a coincidence? How could it possibly be a coincidence? Hence, Maine’s law. Try it yourself. You’ll find it works all over the place.
For instance, we find that the worse the crimes of the dictator, the worse the penalty for disrespect. Stalin is a mass murderer of colossal scale, so constant adulation is required. Brezhnev is a mere corrupt bureaucrat, so no one is executed for muttering about him.
Through the prism of Maine’s law, we extend this principle, and what do we derive? Where are the American gulags, the mass graves, of lèse-peuple? Well, for instance, one could look on Wikipedia. Normally, when people flee, it means someone else chased them out. More broadly, we find that we have derived… Auster’s First Law.
Every day in every university in America, all injustices committed by Americans of tribe A against tribe B are wrapped into a ball, monstrously exaggerated, and thrust as a burden of guilt onto all members of tribe A. Who shudder at the load, but sigh and carry it. As for injustices (ie, crimes) committed by Americans of tribe B against those of tribe A, it is almost taboo to mention them, and certainly taboo to connect them. Each is its own random and inexplicable event – the responsibility of the criminal alone, and no one else. After all, it’s not like he was following orders – like some NKVD officer. And it’s purely coincidental that he’s so well-informed about the enormous crimes of tribe A.
And when we contemplate this strange and hideous spectacle, are we surprised that tribe A is the native, cis-democratic electorate, and tribe B the alien, trans-democratic votebank? We are not. And hence, the fundamentally suicidal nature of democracy unfolds itself to us. Well, it never hurts to know your fate.
Yes, it’s easy to forget how good Mencius was, there for a few years. His recent commentary has bordered on the over-wrought, to say no more. Let’s hope he gets back on track soon.
Every blog goes through a lifecycle. After a few years, the blogger is usually out of new ideas and is just rehashing old ones. This is true even of the best blogs. Many have turned back and no longer blog.
A comment by sconzey, on that actual post.
“I think MM stews; ferments; improving with age. It seems the longer he goes between posting, the better the post when it eventually comes.
I can honestly say this is the best I’ve read in quite a while.”
Good point. MM needs to quit reading so much old Bircher stuff from the 1950’s (I mean, when it gets right down to it, Ike wasn’t a Communist, and everyone damned well knows it, including MM) resist the temptation to get wrapped up in current events, and just reflect a bit. Maybe something a little more connected and coherent than blogging is called for, in order for him to keep going. If Moldbug wrote a book, I would certainly buy it.
That’s the reason I almost never write on current events.
I do like hearing Moldbug’s first instinct on events, though, because I want to check it against what my understanding/prediction of his interpretation.