Is there any peaceful way out of the current Woken Empire? Curtis Yarvin says not, because the soft power of the many old foundations founded on oil and steel money funding liberals will outperform the new money of the tech lords. When it comes to power, the true believers always win, so if you want to matter, you have to be a liberal. And if you are a billionaire, why make trouble? Anyway “the tech billionaires are not actually interested in power.” If they were, they would be liberals. Then Yarvin goes off into the weeds, as usual.
But Jeffrey A. Tucker writes a rather affecting piece about the emptiness of power. He learned the lesson in elementary school, playing marbles. He desperately wanted to be in with the cool kids who excelled at marbles, and, starting from incompetent outsider, learned to play the game and become a master and insider. But what’s the point, he now realizes, quoting C.S. Lewis:
Every sector of life has an inner ring of knowledge and control from which everyone but a few are excluded.
Yes, we all want into the Ring, but what's the point? On the inside, we find that power is an empty vessel.
If your fear of being the outsider drives your decisions, all your victories will be temporary. No circle has the charm from the inside that it seems to have from the outside.
But is the arc of history always bending towards more concentrated power? The record of Communism surely is that, at some point, political domination leads to brittleness and breakup.
Isn’t that the situation in the Democratic Party today? The Old Guard of Schumers and Pelosis seems to be frozen in place while young educated-class radicals tear the place up catering to the woke-educated twentysomethings frustrated that they haven’t yet virtue-signaled themselves into the NGO grift.
Meanwhile, governors like Newsom in California and Polis in Colorado are using the administrative and regulatory state to dominate their states into breakup.
My faith is different from Yarvin’s. I agree that the tech lords are not that interested in power. But they are really interested in making things work. That’s what I got from Marc Andreessen’s trip to the Biden White House in May 2024 to talk about AI. Here’s what he heard from the senior staff.
Yes, the national agenda on A.I. We will implement it in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups.
Yep. The clueless Bidenoids were telling the tech lords that Bidenoids didn’t care how the tech business model worked and had generated staggering wealth over the last half century. The only way they knew to do AI was with the administrative and the regulatory state.
And that’s the day we walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and took one look at each other, and we’re like, “Yep, we’re for Trump.”
Agreed, the ancient foundations distributing grants to lefty intellectuals and fueling NGO grift machines may have the power. But do they have the wisdom and the vigor to enable the progressive machine to bend along the arc of history? Or are they following that other arc, of life from conception to birth to growth to maturity, ending in decay and death?
Enough! Today we are streaming “The Decline and Fall of the Woken Empire” while the show runners are rehearsing another world behind the scenes.
And Peter Thiel has been quietly advancing JD Vance, who seems to impersonate the new era of the ordinary middle class, as White Trash that made good.
Here’s another view. A powerful China renewed itself for a couple of thousand years from one dynasty to the next, and Sinicized various invaders into just another dynasty, until the rascally western Europeans tore the old order to pieces and China fell into its Century of Humiliation. I believe that a new culture is about to tear the current global order apart and toss the global educated class into its own Century of Humiliation?
Every empire in history is ein Tausendjähriges Reich, until it isn’t.
Wouldn’t it be great if the new age were founded on the wisdom that the culture of power is an empty vessel, and that humans need to limit power to fighting real enemies like Commies and Nazis, and not fake enemies like climate and COVID and your average racist-sexist-homophobe fascist next door.
It’s odd, isn’t it, that various cultural icons in the modern era, from Wagner to Lewis to Tolkien -- and very likely more -- reached back into the unconscious realm of ancient myth to warn us of the evil of the Ring of Power.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: Den Store Danske