The Paper of Record sat down in conversation with the third and ninety-ninth guest of my broadcast the Philosophy of Art and Science. The latter actually aired on MLK Day 2022, whereas the former aired June 2020. On the MLK episode he wanted viewers and hearers (whether they are listeners or not is TBD) to know that MLK’s advisor, financier, and speechwriter Stanley Levison is a well-documented card-carrying communist. The quip “correlation does not prove causation” is effective in many cases, but in this one I hope the reader will understand.
The once-fringe writer has long argued for an American monarchy. His ideas have found an audience in the incoming administration and Silicon Valley.
This is how he is introduced. He was once-fringe because he was a computer programmer turned blogger of the late aughts once he made some money and took some time off to think. He is a US foreign services brat who moved around a lot (including Portugal and Cyprus; his mom having lived under Spain’s Generalissimo Franco), but was ultimately disillusioned with post-WW II Liberalism after reading texts and tomes made available by Google Books and the beauty of the public domain. He exited from the bubble of presentism to a frontier a quarter millenium outside the Overton Window. To a time of kings and queens.
I learned of Yarvin first around 2018 from a friend sending me one of his articles whose prose bored me to death with seeming lack of a conclusive point and sheer length. Around the same time I read about him in Cody Wilson’s Come and Take It. Wilson is a market anarchist and the premier libertarian thinker, practitioner, and tinkerer who brought the world the 3D-printed gun and ghost guns first from 80% raw material (to follow the letter of the law) and later even more impressively from the raw material alone. And in writer and ghostwriter and anarchist Michael Malice’s The New Right.
Why are two anarchists writing about a monarchist? As I told Yarvin in POAAS 3, J.R.R. Tolkien helped me be open to both.
My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the an and process of governingnand it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang', it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that – after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world – is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. The quarrelsome, conceited Greeks managed to pull it off against Xerxes; but the abominable chemists and engineers have put such a power into Xerxes' hands, and all ant-communities, that decent folk don't seem to have a chance. We are all trying to do the Alexander-touch—and, as history teaches, that orientalized Alexander and all his generals. The poor boob fancied (or liked people to fancy) he was the son of Dionysus, and died of drink. The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hellas, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards. But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to…
The Zomians are thought-provoking people(s) that the late great anarchist anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott and essayist and reporter (and 2nd generation writer) Anne Fadiman (both of Yale) wrote about at length. Southeast asians (typified by the Hmong and the Montagnard) dodging the various tax-gatherers and tax-collectors of eight nation-states for centuries without writing and with slash-and-burn agriculture in the hidden hills thereof; where in the 20th Century 100 million people lived statelessly.
But Yarvin did not really click for me till early 2020 through the broadcasts of independent historian Thaddeus Russel and independent political scientist Justin Murphy, and Yarvin’s own resignation letter from Web 3 project par excellence Urbit. These three sources fed into my ethno-narcissism, because an alleged (according to legacy/prestige news media) white nationalist was singing the praises of historical Ethiopia aka Abyssinia aka Aksum.
I have extremely high trait-openness. I had to speak to the devil himself to find out his side of the story, and determine his devilry or sainthood for myself. The rest is history.
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