One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:
1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.The Baffler
2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.
3. Appoint [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt CEO of America.
This could easily be written off as stunt, a flamboyant act of corporate kiss-assery, which, on one level, it probably was. But Tunney happened to be serious. “It’s time for the U.S. Regime to politely take its exit from history and do what’s best for America,” she wrote. “The tech industry can offer us good governance and prevent further American decline.”
Welcome to the latest political fashion among the California Confederacy: total corporate despotism. It is a potent and bitter ideological mash that could have only been concocted at tech culture’s funky smoothie bar—a little Steve Jobs here, a little Ayn Rand there, and some Ray Kurzweil for color.
Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream Of A Silicon Reich
Corey Pein
(h/t Izabella Kaminska at Dizzynomics)
14 comments:
I love the Dark Enlightenment guys. They are honest conservatives and anti-statist reactionaries par excellence. I love these guys.
They are what what right wing libertarianism becomes in the end i.e. where libertarianism goes to die. They so insane that they make Bob Roddis seem sane and rational with logic like "modernity and democracy has destroyed the traditional family and turned women into feminist whores"..."buy my Pick-Up Book about how to bang as many women as possible married or not to support the cause of Monarchy."
You have to admire the Strategery of the movement though. If you are a dangerous antisocial douche then find some evil money bag Plutocrats to join that cause with you and then rule as court jesters over the Circus. It's brilliant.
They aren't wrong about with ideas of the Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Circus existing as a distributed conspiracy. They only problem is they don't seem understand who's conspiracy it is or don't care.
Hehe...they think the Cathedral rules the Bazaar....idiots.
Kaminska: "want to take over the world (in the name of freedom no less!)"
Right this is like the Cliven Bundy libertarian people complaining about govt 'swat teams' and then they go out there and establish 'check points' with armed guards checking "papers please" on the public roads....
???????
The ability to comprehend contradiction/hypocrisy is a BASIC characteristic of intelligence...
"...in the vanity of their mind,
their comprehension being darkened.... because of the ignorance that is in them... because of the callousness of their hearts" Eph 4:17
I am soooooo thankful I am not a libertarian moron!
The Dark Enlightenment
Related:
The Man Bringing Back the Nazi Movement in America, Andrew Anglin and the Daily Stormer
"It is clear that Thiel sees corporations as the governments of the future and capitalists such as himself as the kings"
This is really what all these right-wing so called "libertarians" want.
They're all just different types of fascists, nothing more.
Peter Thiel, "The Education of a Libertarian," Cato Unbound (2009):
I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.
But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today....
In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”
The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom. Let me briefly speak to three such technological frontiers:”
But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.....
The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of technological utopianism — the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world.
A better metaphor is that we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.
Emphasis added
In his writings Murray Rothbard made it clear that his ideal society would be one controlled by a wealthy oligarchy or inherently superior aristocracy. This society would be strictly hierarchical and racist, with the 'inferior' races (by which Rothbard meant black people in particular) relegated to the lowest levels.
It's basically what these 'neoreactionary' fascists want, really.
Good you bring up Evola, y. He is in a separate and very important category that sees the Dark Side as a spiritual force rather than a material one. He is worth revisiting now in that I think that this is the Achilles heel of Narendra Modi as Indian PM wrt his association with Hindutva, RSS, and BJP.
For example, Modi professes to be a devotee of Ramakrishna's chargeman Swami Vivekananda, whose teaching he purports to espouse. But the quotes that Modi selects from Vivekananda are concerning in that many of them emphasize the Indian nationalism and "manliness" that is characteristic of the neo-fascistic cohort of Hindutva and its political arm BJP. This contradicts Vivekananda's universalist and inclusivist stance, which was also that of Ramakrishna.
Vivekananda did try to buck up the people of India who were sorely oppressed by the Raj at that time, but that was not the core of his message. I don't see an indication yet that Modi gets that, or if he does is willing to say it and possibly alienate some of his more extreme supporters, who are the one responsible for rise to power from being a tea boy on the street when he joined RSS.
But this issue is more about politics and religion, which was not Evola's focus. He was directly concerned with spiritual power. There are three columns of ascent. The right is the way of righteousness; the left is the way of power, and the central column is the way of love.
Pull yourself up by your brain-straps... They are the antithesis to the Piketty vision
Tom, I don't see what Evola has to do with Indian politics. Also I have no idea why you think this guy is 'worth revisiting now'.
Evola was a Traditionalist. Hindutva is similarly Traditionalist. but not precisely in the same way. Evola was largely expressing one aspect of that POV, and Hindutva another. The Hindutva view is unlikely to find much company in the West, but the other view has and is still a force, in fact, a growing force.
The opposite of this Traditionalism at the time Evola was writing was the Perennialism of René Guenon and Fritjof Schuon, which as yet has little or no political significance in the West. However, the two views are entering contemporary culture through the mythology of the light and dark side of the force.
These two views underly the "modern myth" as an adaptation of ancient expressed Stars Wars, Lord of the Rings, and The Matrix. It's also deeply embedded in gaming, and therefore much more culturally influential than many realize. Adolescent minds identify with the Dark Side, which is power personified — and you know how symbolized that in religious symbolism.
Dark Enlightenment didn't just come out of nowhere. It's ancient, extending back to shamanistic times in the dichotomy between white and black magic, "magic" signifying the instruments of power.
"It's the power, stupid." The dark side view of freedom is power. And you know what they say about power. "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." This is the danger associated with individual sovereignty.
Traditionalists understand this and therefore emphasize the need to balance freedom with order. That feeds into the leader that imposes order — as in Peter Thiel's, "The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism."
For "Sillycon Valley Libertarians, technology is modern "magic" and the technocrat the modern magician.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Evola#Philosophy for a summary.
BTW, it is necessary think dialectically to get this and how it unfolds. Thinking is always context-based and context encapsulates a POV. That POV includes what its assumptions and norms establish and permit and excludes what they do not. What is excluded is a basis for at least one other POV, and that POV or those POVs get posited as opposing POVs. History is the record of competition among conflicting POVs and the power structures that express them concretely.
Excellent Stuff Tom! I wasn't aware of the modern Perennialist opposition at the time. Most of what I'm familiar with is older medieval and enlightenment perennialism.
Interesting how even in the modern age the right and left hand are still in opposition.
You are also completely right about the influence of quasi-occultism in the popular media like video games. If only people knew...
Tom, I have to imagine that you are considered a odd bird for a philosophy of science academic to know so much about esotericism.
I guess it's the curse of being Heterodox that you simply don't except the ordinary.
It's well established now in psychology that there are different "abnormal" types of experience, both above and below normal in the sense of average as mean with the population thought to be more or less normally distributed on a bell curve seemingly with narrow tails. In fact, it's hardly new. William James dealt with it in Varieties of Religious Experience.
There have been mystics and occultists, sages and mages, since the record trails off into the mists of time when shamanism emerged. This is uncontroversial for anyone examining the data.
The issue is how to interpret it and there is considerable disagreement about this, with conclusions both dependent on assumptions and also difficult to establish empirically.
However, one faction gained in ascendancy for a long period and is still strong. As in economics an orthodoxy took over and Skinner's behaviorism reigned in psych departments until Abraham Maslow reversed the tide in the Sixties. Now humanistic and transpersonal psychology are recognized.
After the rejection of idealism, Anglo-American philosophy remained largely immersed in logic and analytic philosophy, preceded by pragmatism. Like heterodox economists today who must master orthodox economics, so too, philosophers Anglo-American have to know modern logic and analytic methods, and pragmatism still has a strong showing.
Logical and philosophical analysis are actually very useful methods, as it pragmatism, and they help the "odd balls" approach and state their position rigorously in a field that has been considered flaky. So I see no contradiction or conflict there.
Being an "odd ball" myself is how I stumbled into MMT in economics. After the GFC, I wondered how apparently smart people didn't see it coming when it was obvious. I happened to see a comment by Ramanan somewhere and while I thought it odd ball, I am open to checking out odd ball stuff. Fortunately he provided references and it didn't take long to figure out, especially with Warren's help in his comment section at the time.
Same in philosophy and other fields. I kept poking around until I found people that added pieces to the puzzle.
@ Septeus7
Here is another one for you, if you aren't aware of it.
http://www.ibtimes.com/heinrich-himmler-nazi-hindu-214444
On one hand it is a monstrous perversion of the teaching, and on the other it, too, is a part of the historical dialectic.
The amazing thing is that these people came to such power, Himmler in his twenties.
So we shouldn't brush off the contemporary manifestations as ridiculous or peripheral, especially when there are billionaires backing it.
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