Project Jacob

In the financial world, it is a reliable rule of thumb that the largest and most lucrative forms of arbitrage will be those that don't strike the average investor as being an arbitrage. If they did, they'd have been traded away already. So how would they be seen by the average person? Probably as just weird. The kind of thing that nobody thinks about very much, because it's too obscure. If they do turn their mind to it, they assume there must be some big reason that nobody else is doing this, even if they can't quite articulate what it might be.

So it is, I suspect, with society more broadly.

So with this in mind, before I get to the punch line, I want to start with a few assumptions, and see where we end up. If these sound like things you already know and agree with, please bear with me and keep reading – this is exactly the point. My aim is to show what possibilities flow from things we mostly agree on, because the conclusion might strike you as rather surprising if I started with it.

1. Genes matter a lot for individual traits, and individual traits define the society to a large degree

The first of Turkheimer's laws of behavioral genetics is that nearly everything is heritable to a significant degree. Overall political ideology has a significant genetic component – approaching 60%, by some estimates. The impact of WEIRDO political culture and the Hajnal line are just some of the many indications to this effect. A society is determined to a considerable degree by the distribution of who is living there. If reactionaries have more children, on average the future looks more reactionary.

2. Parenting, like all shared environment terms, matters much less than people think.

This is kind of a mish-mash of Turkheimer's second and third laws. Related to #1, people tend to significantly overestimate the effect of environment on outcomes, because they fail to control for genetics. I suspect that most readers of this august periodical are conversant in the findings of HBD, and one set of the most important is the twin studies. The general finding of most of them is that genetics matter a lot, and idiosyncratic environment matters a lot, but shared environment doesn’t matter very much for adult behavior. Once children can select their own environment upon reaching adulthood, the impact of shared environment drops a lot, often to almost zero. The environment that does matter is mostly idiosyncratic, which, frankly, we don’t really know what it is. Some combination of school peers, parasites, measurement error, etc. But most of what’s included in parenting is shared environment (school district, general attitude of parents), or gene-environment interactions. What matters most is who your parents are. How they parent seems to matter less than nearly everybody thinks. In most contexts, reactionaries are willing to embrace this idea.

3. Having more children is valuable, but very difficult to scale within the context of marriage

The injunction we are often told on the right is to marry and have children, as a means of propagating ourselves and our values. This is a very worthy enterprise, but one that is almost impossible to scale at an individual level. Unless your wife is young, there is a hard limit on how many children you can have. Unless you’re young yourself, finding a wife young enough to have many children is likely to be hard. Finding one willing and eager to do so is harder still. All of this is magnified if one lives in cities, where the cost of having many children is much higher. Bottom line – having more children yourself is important, but the impact that each of us can have in this respect is likely to be a drop in the ocean. The problem is simply one of scale. You and I could try to convince everyone in the west to have more kids, and that’s definitely worthwhile. But if we could convince everyone of whatever we wanted, we’d already be able to solve lots of problems. The issue is that convincing the populace of anything when one lacks power is very hard.

4. Even outside the context of marriage, having lots of children with lots of women is financially impossible for anyone with means, and generally promotes degeneracy.

The Bronze Age Pervert mindset, frequently joked about, is to take a group of elite Chads and send them out to impregnate thousands of hot teens. The problem, of course, is that if you do this, you end up with endless single mums and degeneracy, because you can’t marry more than one of the women you are impregnating. To make matters worse, the modern court system with ruinous child support makes this strategy catastrophically costly to anyone with any financial prospects whatsoever. The only people who can afford this strategy are those who are, as the lawyers say, “judgment proof” – they live on welfare and crime, so can’t be held to account for any child support payments, which makes them much more willing to impregnate lots of women. Because everything is heritable (see point 1), we end up with a significant expansion of the worst traits of criminality, low impulse control, and violent tendencies. This is dysgenics exemplified.

5. Subverting valuable but unguarded institutions is an important aim.

One of the genius moves of the left during the 20th century was to find resources that were important, but relatively unguarded, and take them over. Academia or the media, for instance. These were always decent jobs, but weren’t perceived as being quite as influential in the past as they later became. Fighting over things which everyone knows are important (e.g. Supreme Court nominations) is extraordinarily difficult. Subverting and taking over institutions which are important, but not yet realized to be important, is a much more promising strategy.

So far, so good.

So based on the above, the question is: as reactionaries, if we want to increase the number of children we have so as to propagate reactionary ideals, is there any way to do it that doesn’t involve getting crushed by the court system or increasing the amount of degeneracy in society? Is there an institution that we can subvert that will help us achieve this aim?

The answer is yes.

And the answer is shockingly simple.

Go to a sperm bank, and donate.

In evolutionary sperms, the unpopularity of sperm donation is simply mind-boggling. It is a colossal unguarded resource – the wombs of thousands of women, openly seeking to bear your children while you are legally shielded from any costs whatsoever of raising them. If humans were fitness maximizers, men should all be beating down the doors of these places to fight each other off. But we aren’t. We’re adaption executors instead, spending all our resources and energy into banging women (which evolutionarily would have produced lots of children) while simultaneously trying not to actually get those same women pregnant. Meanwhile sperm banks are just considered weird. The main people who go are idiot college students not really thinking about the consequences and just treating it like it’s an easy source of beer money. If reactionaries started going there en masse, we’d probably be a large component of the potential pool.

And it goes without saying that this project is enormously scalable. As the marketing goes, you can make a difference in the life of a family! What they don’t say, because it weirds people out, is that you’ll probably make a difference in the lives of dozens, if not hundreds of families. This becomes an enormous force multiplier to any group with small numbers.

Not only that, but this project is compatible even with a world view that thinks single motherhood is undesirable. The effect is not to increase the number of single mums in the world. Anyone going to the sperm bank has already made up their mind to have a child, whether it's a good idea or not. Unless the sperm banks get shut down, the change is entirely one in composition, not in number. The only question is whose children these women will be having, and what traits will these children have. Since everything is heritable (see law 1!), it's better if the children have reactionary fathers, than soy-boy loser fathers.

Moreover, this can be done alongside a traditional lifestyle oneself. Donate while young and single, or if your wife/girlfriend is okay with it. Doing it while single is probably easier – future wives may be uncomfortable with the idea, but if it is presented as a fait accompli, they’ll probably find a way to make peace with it, especially because it likely doesn’t impact very much in one’s day-to-day life. Then after that, get married and have your own children with your wife and raise them yourself, just as you were planning to before. Most young men masturbate for free. Instead, they could get paid to impregnate hundreds of women with almost no negative consequences to themselves. And yet almost nobody does. Go figure.

There are, however, at least two caveats worth mentioning (and probably more – these are the ones that came to my mind). First, in the age of genetic testing, it is increasingly unlikely that you will be able to maintain true anonymity to your donor children or their parents forever. Some places actually put any recipient adult in touch (anonymously) if they want to. Truthfully, this is probably better, as it’s preferable to have people email you than turn up at your office. There’s too many ways to track people down, from genetic tests to compiling scraps of information into endless google searches. If you go down this path, it’s worth trying to preserve anonymity with sensible steps (turn your 23andme to private, obviously). But you should assume that you may get some contact from the recipient mothers or their children, at least to some extent. Probably not a lot, and probably not most of them. But it’s worth assuming the worst. If this prospect is too uncomfortable to you, then it may not be a good idea. To me, the idea doesn’t seem that troubling, once I actually thought about it. Still, your mileage may vary.

Second, I imagine that some of you (maybe most of you, maybe all of you) will have ethical issues with the idea of having children that one doesn’t have contact with. This is a totally fair viewpoint. If one feels this way, particularly from a religious basis, then definitely don’t do it. But if one is less troubled by this aspect, then perhaps it’s not an insurmountable objection. There is certainly a strong qualified defense of the idea in the pragmatic angle – even if sperm banks should be shut down altogether as an abomination, in the world we live in, they’re not going to be. The main change we make is at the margin of what kind of children result. You might be tempted to wonder if your children will turn out badly because they won't have you there to raise them. But remember point 2! Parenting doesn't matter that much. Genetics do. Still, if one feels strongly that there is an ethical objection to the whole enterprise, then one might feel that this would be lending some kind of implicit support to it. Again, I don’t tend to feel as strongly on this point, but I imagine some of you probably will.

If you're thinking that this whole idea sounds really weird, it struck me as weird too when I first considered it, but it grew on me more and more as I thought about it. And the more it went on, it began to seem like it actually meets a large number of reactionary goals. The fact that it seems weird is exactly why it’s unguarded. Paul Graham once wrote a great essay about this in the context of startups. He said that the best startup ideas were the ones that sound bad, but were actually good. You don’t want the ones that sound good and are good – everyone is trying to do those ones, so you’ll have stacks of competition. But the ones that sound weird at first (turn your car into a gypsy cab! Let strangers stay in your house when you’re not there) but are actually really good are the absolute best prospects of all. I think this has the potential to be one of those. In the scheme of the trichotomy, this is much more techno-futurism than traditionalism – in family terms, it’s more neocameralism and less throne and altar. So be it. I think the ability to recognize these possibilities is one of the big advantages of neoreactionaries over paleoreactionaries.

More importantly, this might be the golden age in which to undertake this project. In another 5 or 10 years, we might get to the point where recipients get to select traits based on the full genome of the donor. To the extent that single women seeking donor sperm likely skew progressive, if they understood HBD, they might screen us out themselves. Right now, they can’t.

Even turning up for the initial tests is valuable – if it turns out your sperm count or motility is low and you can’t donate, this is almost certainly knowledge that you’d like to have so you can start trying to have children sooner.

I'm open to being convinced that I'm wrong on this. But so far, it makes a disturbing amount of sense to me.

George Lunt and the Tragedy of the Civil War

Apologies, my dear readers (if any of you still exist) for my extended absence. A combination of moving house, work being busy, and life in general contributed to my poor (read: nonexistent) showing of late. I was going to write something brief to this effect, but after long enough away, the only way back on the horse is a proper ride, not a symbolic hop-on-hop-off. So here we are at last.

I’ve been slowly continuing my way through the Moldbug Canon of primary sources. The most recent foray in this regard has been George Lunt's "The Origin of the Late War", the late war in question being the US Civil War.

At least for me, it was profoundly depressing reading. Not just for what it said about the Civil War, but for what it portends about the state of modern America.

Those of us of a reactionary bent are generally inclined to view history through a tragic lens, and to be vaguely attracted to lost causes.

It used to be acceptable to view the South (while regrettably tied to the injustice of the proximate cause of slavery) as nonetheless a lost cause of resistance to the overweening imperial might of Massachusetts, even if this was not the majority view. Then again, it used to be acceptable to have a statue of Robert E. Lee in your town as well. Increasingly, there is only one acceptable narrative of the Civil War, and Cthulu makes a few more strokes leftward.

But to me, the Civil War is still a tragedy even under the modern left's own terms. By these, I mean - that the only relevant issue was slavery, that it was a moral imperative that slavery be removed, and that any measures were sufficient to justify this end.

Discussions of the Civil War take place in a bizarre environment of historical illiteracy. Not about the Civil War itself, or of America's experience with slavery - Americans actually know quite a lot about their own history, even if they've only heard one version of events.

No, the ignorance that is more striking is the ignorance of the slavery experience anywhere else on the planet. Of which there was plenty. And in particular, the ignorance of the other ways that countries went about ending slavery. Because it somehow never occurs to people to ponder whether there might have been other, better ways to end slavery without resulting in 700,000 corpses.

For instance, if you were slightly more patient, you could try the Brazil option. After first outlawing the slave trade, they later passed a law to the effect that while current slaves would continue in slavery, the children of those slaves would no longer themselves be slaves. In this way, there wasn't a radical change in the labor supply overnight, but it meant that slavery had a use-by date, and would eventually become a smaller and smaller part of the economy, until at some point it could be eliminated entirely without being a massive disruption resulting in fierce and violent opposition.

To a lot of progressives, this gradualism is unacceptable because it takes too long. Slavery must not only be ended, but ended immediately, whatever the cost. In that case, you could do what the British did in Jamaica, and pass a law that not only abolished slavery, but provided for compensation to the slave owners, so they weren't getting all their assets (as they viewed it) confiscated with no recompense. Which is something people tend to strongly and violently oppose.

Because if you're serious about "whatever the cost", then it seems pretty likely that you could have simply bought every slave in the US for less than the cost of the Civil War. The 700,000 people who wound up dead might have been willing to contribute a fair bit towards the necessary tax, for instance.

But suppose you're an extremist who thinks that everyone in white America was so tarred by the injustice of slavery that their lives are literally worth nothing, even those of people in the North.

Even then, the Civil War and its aftermath resulted in the deaths of perhaps about a quarter of the slaves. Don't trust me, you can read it in famous reactionary papers like The Guardian:

Downs reconstructed the experiences of one freed slave, Joseph Miller, who had come with his wife and four children to a makeshift freed slave refugee camp within the union stronghold of Camp Nelson in Kentucky. In return for food and shelter for his family Miller joined the army. Yet union soldiers in 1864 still cleared the ex-slaves out of Camp Nelson, effectively abandoning them to scavenge in a war-ravaged and disease-ridden landscape. One of Miller's young sons quickly sickened and died. Three weeks later, his wife and another son died. Ten days after that, his daughter perished too. Finally, his last surviving child also fell terminally ill. By early 1865 Miller himself was dead.

Suppose this were a hostage rescue situation. You had proposed just paying the ransom, partly because in this unusual case it would come with a practical guarantee that this would be the last time you'd ever have to do it. Someone else decided that terrorism can never prosper, so sent in the army, who ended up inadvertently killing 1/4 of the hostages and a large number of their own troops to boot. Even if you hated the terrorists, would you view this as a triumph?

You may not like the idea of slave owners receiving money for freeing their slaves, still profiting one last time from their unjust system. Very well. Do you like the deaths of hundreds of thousands of slaves instead? Life is full of tradeoffs. Shut up and multiply, as Mr Yudkowsky put it.

It is against this background that the Origin of the Late War takes place. But the action of the book is not the war itself. Instead, the war stalks the narrative of the book, as the terrible tragedy just over the horizon.

And the unfortunate message, which Lunt emphasizes over and over again, is the following: if things had gone only slightly differently, all this could have been avoided.

And in Lunt's re-telling, it is amazing just how many places this could have happened. Some of these start long before the Civil War was even on the horizon. For instance, at one point he implies that the Whig Party's decision in 1840 to nominate William Harrison against the unpopular Martin Van Buren was a momentous one. Lunt claims, credibly, that had they nominated either of Daniel Webster (who "worked for compromises to stave off the sectionalism that threatened war between the North and the South") or Henry Clay ("the Great Compromiser"), the Whigs would likely have still won the election, and much of what followed might have been different. Instead, Harrison got elected, then died roughly a month into office.

Another aspect to this is the sense of slowly building antagonism that becomes self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling. People in both the North and the South were increasingly outraged by the violence in Bleeding Kansas. So they funneled money and support to their side, which outraged their opponents more. Or equivalently, the South seemed so shocked by John Brown's raid that they felt that there was little hope of reconciling with the North.

And you can see how they would have felt this. But the action is always haunted by the eternal elipses of the war itself. Lunt mostly elides over this, but the end of lots of the chapters dangles the implication: "Of course, this alternative didn't actually happen, and so..."

700,000 corpses are contained in those "..."

Because weighed against this, lots of other alternatives suddenly seem not so bad at all. Including, in Lunt's telling, for the South to just continue to take it. Not that this was the only option, but it certainly would have been a lot better for the South, even under their own preferences at the time, than the eventual outcome. The casualties for the whole Bleeding Kansas conflict amounted to perhaps 180 or so, according to La Wik. It is a horrifying thought to ponder how long it would have taken at Gettysburg to exceed this amount, and whether the time would be measured in minutes or seconds. And from the perspective of the South, the loss of slaves to Northern operatives sneaking them out through raids like those of Harriet Tubman is trivial compared with, for instance, losing all of your slaves everywhere, forever. Which is what happened.

As Lunt puts it, if the South had simply held their ground, the North actually had surprisingly little power to force the issue of emancipation. The vote to free the slaves during the Civil War barely passed as it was, and this was without any of the Confederate representatives in the room. Their presence would have been enough to make it a total non-starter. Lunt quotes Andrew Johnson from after South Carolina had voted to secede:

What is the reason for disunion ? Because one man was not elected ? If Mr. Breckinridge had been elected, nobody would have wanted to break up the Union ; but Mr. Lincoln is elected, and now they say they will break up the Union. He said, No. What was there to fear ? Mr. Lincoln was a minority President. Let South Carolina send her Senators back, and Mr Lincoln cannot even make his Cabinet without the consent of the Senate.

Lunt is no straightforward Southern apologist. While he is sympathetic towards the South's perception that they were suffering injustices at the hands of the North, his overall position is that open rebellion against the Government was both unnecessary and ill-advised. Towards this end, he often notes the ways in which Southern enthusiasm for confrontation led them to their own downfall. For instance, consider the relative glee and amusement with which Preston Brooks' caning of Charles Sumner was greeted in the South (he was, as the story goes, sent many replacement canes, including one inscribed "hit him again!"). But even to the most ardent southern supporter, it doesn't seem quite so funny in hindsight, does it? As Lunt notes:

The unlucky blow afterwards inflicted by Mr. Brooks, of South Carolina, upon Mr. Sumner, in the Senate Chamber, gave him a prominence which there is no reason to suppose that ho could otherwise have acquired. It also enlisted sympathy enough, on his account, to secure an indulgence to his extreme views, from persons to whom they had been hitherto repulsive ; and in this way powerfully seconded the general radical movement. Except for that blow, there is every ground for believing that Mr. Sumner's official course would have ended with his first senatorial term.

Relatedly, it is hard not to see the Democrats' decision to split their party into Northern and Southern candidates in the election of 1860 as a catastrophe for the South. By sticking to principle, they ensured that the Republicans, who lacked anything close to an absolute majority, nonetheless got into power.

Indeed, at this moment, the conservative masses of the country possessed an immense superiority of physical and moral force over their opponents ; and could that have been guided by prudence and patriotism, it must have resulted in the entire and permanent overthrow of the now concentrated elements of radicalism and discord. At the election for President, in the ensuing year, the Republican candidate, Mr. Lincoln, fell short of a majority by nearly a million of votes ; while his plurality, in the free States alone, was considerably less than two hundred thousand.' It needed now, far more than upon the important occasion to which Mr. Benton referred "in a note to the Debates in Congress, already cited in his volume, "the last words of the last great men of that wonderful time." There were many still upon the stage, inspired by as noble sentiments of patriotism as had ever animated the hearts of elder patriots ; but the latter had left few or no successors to the powerful influence which they personally exerted, and which had been found hitherto able to compose the stormy passions by which the country had at times been agitated. But, although the multitude, under the whip applied by a very inferior order of men, was fast getting possession of the bit, to run the sort of helter-skelter race which usually occurs under such circumstances, it needed, after all, but a very little of that true spirit of conciliation, among persons of substantial influence, on both  sides, which should have marked the conduct of fellow-citizens, in an enlightened and Christian age, to avert that terrible impending catastrophe, which, it is not to be supposed, that the great majority, upon either side, could have really desired to bring upon the common country. ...

As Carlyle remarks, somewhere, in reference to a certain period of English history, " The times were great and the men were small." 

Be very wary of giving up the reins of power for symbolic purity alone. There is, it seems, surprising value in being at the head of even a weakened and divided state.

And even up to the very end, the drumbeat of the counterfactual continues.

It is certain, however, that long after secession had begun, by the act of the South Carolina Convention, the breach could have been repaired without much serious difficulty. 

Indeed, Lunt argues that there is strong reason to believe that the Crittenden Compromise, if agreed to, would still have averted the war. He quotes a special reporter from the New York World on December 28th, 1860, eight days after South Carolina voted to secede:

"The Star (Washington paper), of this evening, says: 'Circumstances have come to our knowledge, within the last twenty-four hours, which lead us to hope that Mr. Seward will, ere the close of the current week, counsel a settlement upon the basis proposed by Mr. Crittenden.' 

"One word that way could instantly settle the controversy ; dethroning the disunionists per se at the South, whose power is but the result of the universal belief at the South that the Republican party made up its mind for war to the knife, from the start, upon the constitutional rights of the slaveholding States." ' 

It is very true, that a newspaper reporter may be mistaken both in regard to facts and to the conclusions which he deduces from them. But if an intelligent reporter, and the World at that time, a leading organ of the Republican party, was not likely to employ one who was not of that class, he could hardly make a mistake as to the opinion generally entertained at Washington, and especially among the Republicans themselves, with whom he would probably confer, as to the effect — and an effect how momentous ! — which " one word " from a particular source, and in a particular direction, might have exercised in the prevention of civil war. 

 But the "one word" was never spoken.

And so...

As irony would have it, I finished Lunt's book not long before the Charlottesville debacle. When having recently acquired a hammer, everything becomes a nail, and the temptation is to overfit the parallels.

But it did cement something that I had felt long before. One should be very hesitant before cheering on a rise in political violence, even when your side seems to be winning. Just read the stories of men stumbling blindly into a monstrous, calamitous war, whose consequences were far worse on all sides than the perceived slights over which arms were initially taken up.

Mr Lovecraft cautioned us to not call up that which we cannot put down. Political violence has a tendency to turn into one such aspect.

Compromise is always intellectually unsatisfying, and just continuing to take the abuse is undignified and maddening. More importantly, these are not the only options on the table, so it's not like defeatism is the only option, or the best one.

But be wary of stumbling inadvertently into open conflict. You may yet find out the horror of the elipses in some future narrative.

The Puritan Hypothesis Personified

We live in a period where Whig history is the only history that most people know. The west conquered the evils of Nazism and racism, and is moving towards a progressive utopia. People don't know the term 'Whig history', but they know the idea alright.

To me, the best summary of Whig history comes from our modern secular saint, Martin Luther King, who summed it up thus:

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

The history of this quote is a fascinating one.

The MLK quote is actually a paraphrasing of a longer quote by Theodore Parker, who said:

Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

I'd never heard of this guy before. I actually came across this while looking up the MLK quote as part of writing a different post, but ended up down this rabbit-hole instead.

The reason is that the story of Theodore Parker seems almost shockingly tailor-made to support Moldbug's puritan hypothesis of leftism - that it is primarily an offshoot of mainline American Protestantism that came out of New England Puritans, and over time gradually morphed to replace God with Social Justice.

First off, where would you guess that Theodore Parker was born? Where else, but Massachusetts! Lexington, MA, to be precise.

And for some reason, it wasn't a big surprise to find out that the rest of his life story fits almost eerily into place.

He was an ardent abolitionist, living from 1810 to 1860.

If I told those facts alone, what might you guess about his education and profession?

Would you guess, perhaps, a Unitarian Universalist preacher who had both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University?

Ding ding ding, we have a winner!

Even his ancestry is exactly on point:

His paternal grandfather was John Parker, the leader of the Lexington militia at the Battle of Lexington. 

Remember this the next time conservatives are revering the founding fathers. Their descendants, both literal and intellectual, are leftists. Skip the standard Jefferson and Washington hagiographies and read some Thomas Hutchinson instead.

Among his colonial Yankee ancestors were Thomas Hastings, who came from the East Anglia region of England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, and Deacon Thomas Parker, who came from England in 1635 and was one of the founders of Reading.

East Anglia, East Anglia, where have I heard that name before?

That's right, it's from David Hackett Fisher's book 'Albion's Seed'. It's where the English Puritans came from before they moved to Massachussetts.

But so what, a skeptic may say. Who cares about his background if he was able to perfectly capture the importance of aiming towards what is just and right?

Well, perhaps it might do to know exactly what the "justice" was that he thought the universe was bending towards. Because it looks an awful lot like "leftism".

First up, feminism! From Parker himself

"The domestic function of the woman does not exhaust her powers... To make one half of the human race consume its energies in the functions of housekeeper, wife and mother is a monstrous waste of the most precious material God ever made"

and from the mouths of others

Stanton called his sermons "soul-satisfying" when beginning her career, and she credited him with introducing her to the idea of a Heavenly Mother in the Trinity.

I'm no Christian, let alone a biblical scholar, but I apparently missed the Heavenly Mother part of the Trinity.

But don't strain yourself too hard trying to reconcile it, as Parker was pretty upfront about his perversions of Christianity. Next up, trying to bowdlerize the Bible to take out anything he perceived as inconvenient, leaving a mush of vague sentimental spiritualism:

  “I preach abundant heresies,” he wrote to a friend, “and they all go down—for the listeners do not know how heretical they are.” For years he had wrestled with the factuality of the Hebrew Scriptures, and by 1837 he was wishing “some wise man would now write a book…and show up the absurdity of…the Old Testament miracles, prophecies, dreams, miraculous births, etc.’”

In 1841, Parker laid bare his radical theological position in a sermon titled A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity, in which he espoused his belief that the scriptures of historic Christianity did not reflect the truth. In so doing, he made an open break with orthodox theology. He instead argued for a type of Christian belief and worship in which the essence of Jesus’s teachings remained permanent but the words, traditions, and other forms of their conveyance did not. He stressed the immediacy of God and saw the Church as a communion, looking upon Christ as the supreme expression of God. Ultimately, he rejected all miracles and revelation and saw the Bible as full of contradictions and mistakes. He retained his faith in God but suggested that people experience God intuitively and personally, and that they should center their religious beliefs on individual experience.

The Bible is all a metaphor filled with mistakes and superstitions, just go with what you feel, man. But I'm still Christian, don't you know.

It will not come as a shock to find out that Parker's successors felt less bound to utter the last part. But Parker himself was definitely ahead of the curve, as you have to be when you're deemed heretical by the Unitarian Church (of all organisations).

By contrast, if you want to find out what someone thinks who actually does take the bible literally and cares what it says about slavery, read Robert Dabney's 'A Defense of Virginia'. In it, you will find over 100 pages of exhaustive yet fascinating discourse on what exactly the Bible has to say on the slavery question, and it's probably not what you'd think. Dabney was well acquainted with men like Parker, and skewered them wonderfully:

The Socinian and skeptical type of all the evasions of our Scriptural argument has been already intimated. If the most profane and reckless wresting of God's word will not serve their turn to make it speak abolitionism then they not seldom repudiate its authority. One of their leaders, long a professed minister of the Gospel, declares at the close of a train of tortuous sophisms that if he were compelled to believe the Bible countenances slavery he should be compelled to give up the Bible, thereby virtually confessing that he had never been convinced of the infallibility of that which for thirty years he had been pretending to preach to men as infallible. Others more blatant and blasphemous when compelled to admit that both the Bible and the American constitution recognized slavery exclaimed "Give me then an anti slavery constitution, an anti slavery Bible, and an anti slavery God!" 

This is almost exactly what Parker did.

And even outside slavery, the list of causes Parker supported is almost straight out of modern leftist orthodoxy

As Parker's early biographer John White Chadwick wrote, Parker was involved with almost all of the reform movements of the time: "peace, temperance, education, the condition of women, penal legislation, prison discipline, the moral and mental destitution of the rich, the physical destitution of the poor" though none became "a dominant factor in his experience" with the exception of his antislavery views. He "denounced the Mexican War and called on his fellow Bostonians in 1847 'to protest against this most infamous war.'"

Let's just count up how many modern leftist causes this guy managed to hit - blacks, hispanics, pacifism (of a sort), education, feminism, criminals, poverty, hating the rich. Parker loses points, however, for not having the foresight to also agitate about homosexuality and the environment. Had he been slightly more visionary on these fronts, he'd be a shoo-in for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination.

But still, justice! Who can forget that famous arc of justice, to which the moral universe is inevitably tending?

Well, it might not hurt to examine how exactly Parker advocated pushing that moral universe on its way, because he certainly wasn't interested in letting the universe work things out in its own due course. Parker was unusually far-sighted in terms of how he applied leftist aims too. Behold a life full of civil disobedience, incitement to violence, funding of guerrilla violence, and general Alinsky-style agitation:

He wrote the scathing To a Southern Slaveholder in 1848, as the abolition crisis was heating up and took a strong stance against slavery and advocated violating the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, a controversial part of the Compromise of 1850 which required the return of escaped slaves to their owners. Parker worked with many fugitive slaves, some of whom were among his congregation. As in the case of William and Ellen Craft, he hid them in his home. Although he was indicted for his actions, he was never convicted.

Guilty as Sin, Free as a Bird. He's the Bill Ayers of 1850.

During the undeclared war in Kansas (see Bleeding Kansas and Origins of the American Civil War) prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War, Parker supplied money for weapons for free state militias. As a member of the Secret Six, he supported the abolitionist John Brown, whom many considered a terrorist. After Brown's arrest, Parker wrote a public letter, "John Brown's Expedition Reviewed," arguing for the right of slaves to kill their masters and defending Brown’s actions.

Obviously, the South were the untrammeled instigators of the Civil War through their reckless secession. They should have just stuck around to deal with guys like Parker who advocated for terrorism and slaves murdering their masters. Be reasonable, Southern slave owners!

Of course, you may think this is all just incidental to the original quote with which we started - the guy liked justice, even if in other arenas of his life he was a bit extreme.

But it turns out these ideas aren't incidental to the main point. They are in fact the essence of the idea. Here's the full context of the quote, from quote investigator

Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble.

In the context of everything he did and said, it is hard to read the last line as anything but a threat.

This was in 1853.

12 years and 620,000-odd corpses later, America had done a lot of trembling alright.

This is the context of the famous MLK quote with which we began. You will find a version of this quote on the MLK memorial in Washington D.C., which tells you how much the idea has become a source of bipartisan inspiration.

And this, incidentally, is the second Parker quote lightly paraphrased by a modern secular saint, and memorialised in Washington D.C. The other is even more famous. Parker, as well as agitating for violent overthrow of slavery, was a big fan of democracy:

A democracy — of all the people, by all the people, for all the people

And so at last, we see an odd correspondence between the old and the new.

For in fact,

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

in practice means

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward leftism. 

Which could be ever-so-slightly rephrased as:

Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left.

Indeed.

When stripped of the marketing, Parker, MLK and Moldbug can all agree on the trend, even if they disagree on how they feel about it.

It's not for nothing that they carve it in marble in Washington D.C.

Carlyle Considered

After a shameful delay, at last I have joined the Froude Society! Previous installments covered Froude's "The Bow of Ulysses: The English in the West Indies" and Maine's "Popular Government". Today's subject is Thomas Carlyle, the grand old man of reaction, and his "Latter-day Pamphlets".

Reading Carlyle is often quite surprising, because while he is indubitably reactionary, it's not always in ways that one might expect. For instance, Carlyle places a lot of emphasis on the great men theory of both history and government.

Indisputably enough the meaning of all reform-movement, electing and electioneering, of popular agitation, parliamentary eloquence, and all political effort whatsoever, is that you may get the ten Ablest Men in England put to preside over your ten principal departments of affairs.

This emphasis means that there is relatively less discussion of detailed policy positions on particular issues of the day. Good government, to Carlyle, is a long way from a set of conservative talking points. It arises by appointing the most competent men to power, and giving them the authority to actually rule.

Carlyle wants, in other words, an aristocracy. But this is an aristocracy of talent and character, not one of inherited class. Men of low birth but noble character are singled out for praise, Robert Burns being a prominent example.

Choose well your Governor;—not from this or that poor section of the Aristocracy, military, naval, or redtapist; wherever there are born kings of men, you had better seek them out, and breed them to this work. All sections of the British Population will be open to you.

To the modern mind, one is more apt to evaluate governments by whether they their preferences accord with our own (and hence whether we want the same things implemented as the leaders do ) and whether they have the competence to actually carry the plans out. In this reckoning, a competent leader carrying out plans we hate is considerably worse than an incompetent leader trying and failing to carry out plans we hate.

But to Carlyle, competence involves the ability to understand the decrees of Nature or Nature's God, and thus know what will cause justice to be done. As a result, the distinction between competent government and just government is not of primary significance:

To prosper in this world, to gain felicity, victory and improvement, either for a man or a nation, there is but one thing requisite, That the man or nation can discern what the true regulations of the Universe are in regard to him and his pursuit, and can faithfully and steadfastly follow these. These will lead him to victory; whoever it may be that sets him in the way of these, —were it Russian Autocrat, Chartist Parliament, Grand Lama, Force of Public Opinion, Archbishop of Canterbury, M'Croudy the Seraphic Doctor with his Last-evangel of Political Economy,—sets him in the sure way to please the Author of this Universe, and is his friend of friends. And again, whoever does the contrary is, for a like reason, his enemy of enemies. This may be taken as fixed.

Perhaps the reason that we no longer talk this way is that most of us no longer believe in God (or anything else), and hence don't think of the aim of politics as being to implement his justice on earth. As a result, there's just preferences.

The above quote also illustrates that the focus on competent leaders making competent decisions takes precedence over designing mechanical schemes to implement decisions. As I noted in the discussion of Maine, early Moldbug (in the form of ideas like neocameralism) is a scientist of government, seeking the truth of optimal arrangements. Maine is an engineer of government, grappling with the messy practicalities of what produces generally stable outcomes. But in this taxonomy, Carlyle is an artist of government. Governing is a skill to be learned by able men, appropriately apprenticed to their trade. The only interest in systems and mechanisms is in the extent to which they correctly select the right men, and elevate them to power.

For this reason, Carlyle is generally scathing about the modern implementation of democracy, but not because it is impossible to implement well. The main problem is the fact that the world is full of fools, most of whom know nothing about either government policy or selecting able men. The Laws of the Universe are not easily given up to every Tom, Dick and Harry, so averaging out their opinion with those of the wise is a recipe for disaster:

Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting. The ship may vote this and that, above decks and below, in the most harmonious exquisitely constitutional manner: the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigour by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how you vote. If you can, by voting or without voting, ascertain these conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get round the Cape: if you cannot,—the ruffian Winds will blow you ever back again; the inexorable Icebergs, dumb privy-councillors from Chaos, will nudge you with most chaotic 'admonition'; you will be flung half-frozen on the Patagonian cliffs, or admonished into shivers by your iceberg councillors, and sent sheer down to Davy Jones, and will never get round Cape Horn at all!

...
Ships accordingly do not use the ballot-box at all; and they reject the Phantasm species of Captains: one wishes much some other Entities,—since all entities lie under the same rigorous set of laws,—could be brought to show as much wisdom, and sense at least of self-preservation, the first command of Nature.

For democracy skeptics like me, there is much to enjoy. But Carlyle is not easily reduced to slogans, and gives a quite nuanced view on when voting will work better or worse. Latter Day Pamphlets is not wedded to a particular governing system.

For instance, the biggest surprise of the book was that Carlyle is relatively positive about Oliver Cromwell. To me, I had always thought of Cromwell as a disaster, the beginning of where things went badly wrong in English history, and the destruction of genuine monarchy in England. But this isn't how Carlyle portrays it. Cromwell's strong Christian belief is implicitly praised, as is competence in leadership. Remember, the key is greatness of leadership, not forms of government! In this respect, I part company with Carlyle in the importance of institutions and norms. Even if Cromwell were more competent than Charles I, the successor to Charles I would have been a much better bet than the successor to Cromwell. Institutions are not an idea that has much prominence in Latter-day Pamphlets, and the subject of Cromwell and Charles I is not covered in enough detail for me to fully understand the appeal or the implied argument, But the overarching point is still correct - having a crown does not make one a real king, and fake kings are a source of particular disgust to Carlyle. While he does not elaborate much on Charles I, he accurately predicts that constitutional monarchs will not be stable arrangement, nor should we wish them to be:

Imposture, be it known then,—known it must and shall be,—is hateful, unendurable to God and man. Let it understand this everywhere; and swiftly make ready for departure, wherever it yet lingers; and let it learn never to return, if possible!

...
The Kings were Sham-Kings, playacting as at Drury Lane;—and what were the people withal that took them for real? It is probably the hugest disclosure of falsity in human things that was ever at one time made.

...[The Common Englishman] has been used to decent forms long since fallen empty of meaning, to plausible modes, solemnities grown ceremonial,—what you in your iconoclast humour call shams,—all his life long; never heard that there was any harm in them, that there was any getting-on without them. Did not cotton spin itself, beef grow, and groceries and spiceries come in from the East and the West, quite comfortably by the side of shams? Kings reigned, what they were pleased to call reigning; lawyers pleaded, bishops preached, and honourable members perorated; and to crown the whole, as if it were all real and no sham there, did not scrip continue saleable, and the banker pay in bullion, or paper with a metallic basis ?"

Carlyle predicts, in other words, what I have mentioned before - that political arrangements which are no longer actively defended, which persist out of institutional habit and inertia, will not survive. The unprincipled exceptions, if not actively insisted on, will be made into principled disasters. My guess as to the big elephant in the room on this front is citizenship. With Politics as with life -  nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended, as Mr Emerson put it.

By contrast, Oliver Cromwell and the members of the Long Parliament were deadly serious. And Carlyle gives an outstanding Chesterton's Fence justification of what role Parliament actually used to fill (much better than my own poor efforts)

Reading in Eadmerus and the dim old Books, one finds gradually that the Parliament was at first a most simple Assemblage, quite cognate to the situation; that Red William, or whoever had taken on him the terrible task of being King in England, was wont to invite, oftenest about Christmas time, his subordinate Kinglets, Barons as he called them, to give him the pleasure of their company for a week or two: there, in earnest conference all morning, in freer talk over Christmas cheer all evening, in some big royal Hall of Westminster, Winchester, or wherever it might be, with log-fires, huge rounds of roast and boiled, not lacking malmsey and other generous liquor, they took counsel concerning the arduous matters of the kingdom.

...So likewise in the time of the Edwards, when Parliament gradually split itself into Two Houses; and Borough Members and Knights of the Shire were summoned up to answer, Whether they could stand such and such an impost? and took upon them to answer, "Yes, your Majesty; but we have such and such grievances greatly in need of redress first,"—nothing could be more natural and human than such a Parliament still was.

...For, in fine, the tragic experience is dimly but irrepressibly forcing itself on all the world, that our British Parliament does not shine as Sovereign Ruler of the British Nation; that it was excellent only as Adviser of the Sovereign Ruler; and has not, somehow or other, the art of getting work done

In the Carlyle telling, the Parliament worked for two reasons. Firstly, it was composed of men who were themselves Nobles and Rulers, and thus competent to advise on such matters. And secondly, it filled the role of discussing policy choices when there were few avenues available for this. As Carlyle notes, this task is much more competently carried out in modern times (both his and ours) in the press. But the presence of the press makes Parliament not only superfluous, but contemptible, as it turns Parliamentary speeches into performances marketed to the rubes, not serious policy debates. Parliaments, at best, make good advisers but bad sovereigns. Modern parliaments are bad at both. 

There are some parts of Latter Day Pamphlets, especially those that describe the actual workings of government, that read as eerily prophetic. One is forced to do a double-take when one reads the descriptions of how government in England actually worked at the time. For instance:

[I]t is felt that 'reform' in that Downing-Street department of affairs is precisely the reform which were worth all others; that those administrative establishments in Downing Street are really the Government of this huge ungoverned Empire

Much has been done in the way of reforming Parliament in late years; but that of itself seems to avail nothing, or almost less. The men that sit in Downing Street, governing us, are not abler men since the Reform Bill than were those before it.

The civil service, in the form of the Home Office, Foreign Office and Colonial Office was already thoroughly in charge of governing...in 1850. Not only that, but the civil service was also fast turning into a sclerotic mess of incompetent bureaucrats badly doing work that didn't really need to be done in the first place. Pause and let that sink in when you hear conservatives talking about how we need to scale back the size of bureaucracy. 

As a consequence, it doesn't matter much who is the Prime Minister, since the civil service makes all the important decisions anyway, and the election and political process is so chaotic and time-consuming that there isn't scope for much else for a leader to do. This is a point that Moldbug emphasises a lot, but the average democracy adherent simply cannot believe. The memorable description of being Prime Minister is that of trying to stay atop a wild bucking horse, with the effort towards not being thrown off crowding out any hope of controlling the direction:

[T]he Right Honourable Zero is to be the man. That we firmly settle; Zero, all shivering with rapture and with terror, mounts into the high saddle; cramps himself on, with knees, heels, hands and feet; and the horse gallops—whither it lists. That the Right Honourable Zero should attempt controlling the horse—Alas, alas, he, sticking on with beak and claws, is too happy if the horse will only gallop anywhither, and not throw him. ... This is what we call a Government in England, for nearly two centuries now.

...Really it is unimportant which of them ride it. Going upon past experience long continued now, I should say with brevity, "Either of them—Neither of them." If our Government is to be a No-Government, what is the matter who administers it? Fling an orange-skin into St. James's Street; let the man it hits be your man.

This has been the government ... for nearly two centuries before 1850.  If you think Carlyle might be right, rolling things back to the 1950's isn't going to cut it.

Yet despite these similarities in description of some parts of the world, one sees that Moldbug's description of Carlyle as a reactionary is entirely correct:

A reactionary is not a Republican, a Democrat, or even a libertarian. It is not even a communist, a fascist, or a monarchist. It is something much older, stranger, and more powerful. But if you can describe it as anything, you can describe it as the pure opposite of progressivism. True reaction is long since extinct in the wild, but it lives in Carlyle.

Indeed, reading through Latter Day Pamphlets, one continues to be struck by statements that defy description on the standard modern political spectrum. Authority is not only necessary, but wise and just:

I say, it is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise

Carve it in stone. This is so far outside the Overton Window that we barely have words to describe it.

But if you were hoping for a defense of mainstream capitalist economics, you will not find it here. Carlyle is shocked and appalled by the level of poverty evident in Ireland. But unlike the left, he is appalled not only because of the suffering, but mostly because the indigence and misery is a sign of a catastrophic failure of governance. The problem with poverty is not ultimately the money, but the wasted lives.

The Idle Workhouse, now about to burst of overfilling, what is it but the scandalous poison-tank of drainage from the universal Stygian quagmire of our affairs? Workhouse Paupers; immortal sons of Adam rotted into that scandalous condition, subter-slavish, demanding that you would make slaves of them as an unattainable blessing! My friends, I perceive the quagmire must be drained, or we cannot live.
...
If our Chancellor of the Exchequer had a Fortunatus' purse, and miraculous sacks of Indian meal that would stand scooping from forever,—I say, even on these terms Pauperism could not be endured; and it would vitally concern all British Citizens to abate Pauperism, and never rest till they had ended it again. Pauperism is the general leakage through every joint of the ship that is rotten. 

Carlyle is decidedly cool on the ability of markets, not only to solve these problems, but also to generate wise decisions in general. His scathing essay on the possibility of making a statue of railway baron George Hudson, who is presented as a seller of worthless scrip and dubious economic schemes, makes clear why. A democracy of dollars is not much more likely to recognise genuine human worth than a democracy of votes, for much the same reasons. This is not a matter Carlyle takes lightly:

If the world were not properly anarchic, this question 'Who shall have a Statue?' would be one of the greatest and most solemn for it. Who is to have a Statue? means, Whom shall we consecrate and set apart as one of our sacred men?

And he walked the walk too, founding the National Portrait Gallery to make sure that great men were properly commemorated too. 

One is also reminded in odd ways that the world itself was very different in 1850, and not just in the ways that get frequently remarked on. For instance, in an essay discussing the enormous prominence given to people who had the gift of good speech, Carlyle states the following:

Our English careers to born genius are twofold. There is the silent or unlearned career of the Industrialisms, which are very many among us ; and there is the articulate or learned career of the three professions, Medicine, Law (under which we may include Politics), and the Church. Your born genius, therefore, will first have to ask himself, Whether he can hold his tongue or cannot ?

Two questions arise, both linked. Firstly, what criteria do we now use to evaluate truth, apart from rhetoric, which gets little discussion in the essay? And secondly, what is the large class of learned careers not discussed in the above list?

The answer to both is: science. One can see that the intellectual impact of the scientific method had not yet permeated much of society, and that science itself was practiced by a small number of mostly independently wealthy people like Lord Kelvin. The rest of innovation was merely lumped in with industrialism, and not at all considered to be an important or primary method of understanding the universe. If you were actually transported back to the world of 1850, it would almost certainly strike you as utterly alien in far more ways than you imagine. As Moldbug said of Larry Auster, it is equally true of Carlyle - he is gone, and so is the country he was born in. To complain of either would be as superfluous.

But the underlying truth of his words still remains. To those of us skeptical about modernity, Carlyle speaks across the ages, addressing our misgivings and pointing a way forward through the morass:

My friends, across these fogs of murky twaddle and philanthropism, in spite of sad decadent 'world-trees,' with their rookeries of foul creatures,—the silent stars, and all the eternal luminaries of the world, shine even now to him that has an eye. In this day as in all days, around and in every man, are voices from the gods, imperative to all, if obeyed by even none, which say audibly, "Arise, thou son of Adam, son of Time; make this thing more divine, and that thing,—and thyself, of all things; and work, and sleep not; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work!" He that has an ear may still hear.

Just so.

The Leader as King, the Leader as CEO

Of all the ideas in Unqualified Reservations, perhaps the one I found most compelling is the comparison of the state with a corporation.

In the Moldbug view, the state, in any meaningful sense, already is a corporation - a group of individuals working for a shared purpose under an agreed-upon structure. It's just that the modern democratic state is a very oddly run corporation. This was satirised very well in the Moldbug theory of rotary management, where he described how bewildering democratic governance would look if applied to a regular company.

But behind the parody was a serious, and brilliant, point. Most educated people in the west think that the way we run corporations is approximately optimal, given their tasks. That is, being run with dispersed shareholders separate from the customer base, elections of board members who appoint an all-powerful CEO who is subject to board dismissal, and a share price to monitor performance. And most educated people in the west similarly think that the way we run governments is approximately optimal, given their tasks - that is, with democratic elections, a permanent civil service, judicial review etc.

But it is not at all clear that the tasks of the two organisations are that different. And since they are governed in such totally different ways, if you think that they are both optimal, it is incumbent upon you to explain what specifically about the differences between the organisational tasks requires such totally different structures.

The Moldbug answer is quite simple - there is no difference. Companies fill essentially similar functions to countries, and we can thus judge the expected success of difference governing structures by the relative success of different company structures. Sovereign corporations would likely outcompete sovereign democracies, in much the same way that regular corporations outcompete co-operatives (which is approximately what democracies are, but with more dysfunction). They just haven't been tried.

But there is another aspect to this metaphor that gets less emphasis.

Suppose we have a family-owned firm. All the shares are owned in their entirety by the male head of the family, the father. The father is both the sole shareholder and the CEO. He passes both the CEO position and his equity stake, simultaneously, to his eldest son upon his death. In this corporation, the two roles are inextricably linked by company by-laws - if at any point the father ceases his role as CEO and transfers it to someone else, then the shares and any cash flow rights are transferred to his successor, except those periodic payments given as a gratuity by the new CEO who may keep him on as an informal adviser. This has some beneficial effects, since the principal-agent problem is basically solved - the CEO now has the strongest possible incentives to maximise the value of his shares.

The father does not have to make every single decision - as CEO, he can hire advisers and delegate certain decisions, but ultimate authority must remain with him in order for him to retain his ability to reap the profits of the company. As both CEO and sole shareholder, there is no board to either evaluate his performance as CEO, or provide external opinions - the only opinions he will hear are those of subordinates directly employed by him, and who may be fired by him at any moment. Indeed, as CEO he is wary of delegating too much, lest people misinterpret these actions under the company by-laws as meaning that his delegate is actually the new CEO and shareholder. As a result, it is hard for him to reap the profits of the company without actively managing it. At first this works okay, but he has to keep doing this even when he is old and feeble - retirement means losing his equity stake.

Because the CEO must hold all the shares, he is prevented from raising outside equity. If he wants to raise capital for a project, only debt financing is available. As a result, if the CEO has a firm that is short in pledgeable assets, he may find it difficult to raise external funds for capital projects. This occasionally makes it difficult for him to ward off competitor firms.

While the father naturally has affection for his son and successor, he loves his other children too, and ideally would like to arrange to transfer his shares to a formal trust to provide for all of them. Unfortunately, company by-laws prevent the shares from being transferred to a trust. Most of the time, he can rely on his oldest son to treat the rest of the family fairly well, but it's always a gamble. In addition, he occasionally suspects that the total profits would be greater if he transferred power to his smarter, younger son, rather than his oldest wastrel son. But the by-laws are fairly strict on that point.

Every so often in the corporate history, the father becomes completely evil, incompetent, or mad. Since this threatens not only the value of his shares, but the livelihoods of his senior employees and the welfare of the customers, they occasionally take drastic action. But since the by-laws don't allow for the removal of a bad CEO, and since there's no way for the CEO to transfer control without impoverishing himself, this usually means that the current CEO has to be killed. Since this is a risky move, which the current CEO has the highest conceivable incentives to prevent, it's only attempted in the most dire circumstances.

There are other unscheduled transfers of power. Sometimes, the eldest son gets impatient, and kills off the father. Sometimes, a junior son will kill off the eldest in a deniable manner, in order to be further in line for the CEO job. You'd think that the by-laws would explicitly preclude someone from benefiting in this manner, and the shares and CEO job would be taken away, but oddly this isn't the case.

Because the parallels are more straightforward, and because I lack the cleverness and imagination of Moldbug, it's probably quite apparent that I'm describing a simplified version of absolute monarchy. I have defended absolute monarchy before, and think that it probably worked a lot better than people today tend to think. But like before with democracy, we can use the history of corporate governance to judge the merits of monarchy versus neocameralism, or sovereign corporations.

Reader, suppose that we unleashed our monarchical corporation into the world, to compete with the firms in the S&P 500. Do you suppose it would succeed? True, it has its advantages. If it started in office with a great CEO, it might do quite well for a while, since it wouldn't suffer from the standard principal agent problems of managers empire-building, or enriching themselves at the expense of shareholders. But how long do you think such an arrangement would last, especially past the first CEO? Most CEOs, even good ones, are only at the top of their game for a short number of years, and when they screw up, they have to get replaced by someone else, who is picked from among the top managers across the whole planet. The advantages here are fairly plain.

It seems quite apparent that our monarchical firm would struggle to compete. Most of the world's successful coprorations have structures that are nothing like the one we describe above. They look more like our regular, familiar public firms.

"But," you may protest, "there are successful family firms too!"

This is true. In the world today, there are large, successful family-run firms. But they tend look more like regular public companies than our monarchical corporation. Many of them are publicly traded as well, like Wal-Mart, with the family retaining only a controlling stake. Out of the rest, the shares can be distributed across family members or held a trust. The CEO job can be kept within the family, or transferred to an outsider (even if the outsider is "adopted" into the family, like in Japan). The firm can raise equity financing.

And for the families that own such firms, they don't seem to be in a huge hurry to change their corporate by-laws to those of a monarchical corporation. By revealed preference, they seem to prefer more modern arrangements.

Out of the various aspects of an absolute king, it seems beneficial that the executive has absolute authority over personnel, budget, operations, and other kinds of organisational decisions. Divided power in this regard mostly just causes problems and inefficiencies. But the linking of absolute organisational authority (which both the King and CEO share) with sole inalienable equity ownership (which only the King has) is not nearly so obviously beneficial. And the process of removing a bad CEO seems far preferable to the process of removing a bad king.

Moreover, if the CEO is not to be the sole shareholder, then it seems misguided to make the CEO the sole judge of his own performance. Having a board, who lacks any major organisational authority except the power to appoint and remove the CEO, along with other major structural changes, seems fairly benign as far as divided power goes, and is very beneficial in the event that you need to change the CEO. It's possible that the board might become meddlesome, but most of the charges against boards made by economists are that they rubber stamp the CEO's decisions too much, not that they're overly combative.

And finally, dispersed shareholders also go a decent way to combating the problem of an owner with perverse or evil preferences. When the sole shareholder in a country is the king, it's possible that the king just has preferences for evil, nasty stuff. Sure, he'd like more profit, but perhaps he's more interested in droit du seigneur, even though it's value-destroying and the citizens hate it.

But if we take the preferences of a multitude of shareholders, and ask what set of preferences can they agree upon, it's typically to just get paid more. In other words, maximise dividends, and let each shareholder buy whatever he wants. There's not usually cross-subsidisation of shareholders in their purchases from the company. It's possible that shareholder citizens in a sovereign corporation might also vote for droit du seigneur, but it seems easier and cheaper to just get hookers or groupies with the extra dividends.

Sovereign corporations have their problems, no doubt. But if your plan for how you'd like a government to be run varies wildly from how you'd like a regular corporation to be run, then you at least want to know the specific reasons why, lest the ghost of William of Occam haunts your country's fortunes.

Chesterton’s Fence and Democracy

Among those passages that resonate with those of a conservative temperament, one of my favourites has to be Chesterton’s Fence.

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

Do not, in other words, argue from a position of ignorance. It is not enough to know what you dislike about some existing arrangement. You have to know its strengths, especially those which might have justified the policy’s existence. This is the engineer’s version of the Ideological Turing Test. You need to be able to make the best case possible for the existence of the status quo. Only then will you know what is being given up.

As I have written about in these pages before, I find the democratic process to be ridiculous. It seems incredibly unlikely that this is the optimal way to govern a country, but since it’s been imbued with a religious and moral sheen, not many people are able to think seriously about the possibility of getting rid of it, let alone what might replace it (other than braindead answers like ‘tyranny’). As a result, there is extraordinarily little experimentation with genuinely different forms of government.

So we know what we don’t like. But we have to pass the Chesterton Critique. Do we know why democracy, at least in its modern incarnation of the civil service state, works as well as it does? Do we know what aspects we might be losing? This is especially important, because we need to know what kind of traits to try to include in a replacement system. Or if it’s not possible to include all the benefits, we need to know what should be included in the costs column of any reform.

Now, this is different from the Ideological Turing Test, because we are not asked to give the answer that its supporters will give. This is likely to be faulty and delusional. Rather, we want the engineer’s answer, like Maine. We want to know what defense Machiavelli might make. We want to know, in other words, not the democrat's defense of democracy in America. We want to know the reactionary’s defense of democracy.

Here is one answer. I propose to make another.

Democracy holds out the fig leaf of minor, token power to all citizens. Individually, you have a voice. “Your voice matters!”, it cries out. Of course, everyone knows that individually their voice doesn’t matter, but collectively perhaps their voices do matter.

That is the fiction. I, and Moldbug, suspect that the people’s voices collectively don’t matter that much. The permanent civil service and the rest of the cathedral hold most of the levers of power. We are, of course, about to see this idea tested in the Trump Presidency. I forget who exactly wrote this (apologies!), but if Trump wins and proceeds to rule, then Moldbug was wrong. It’s entirely possible, and something on which I’m agnostic (though my best guess is that it won’t happen).

But let’s take the Moldbug hypothesis for now. Voting collectively doesn’t matter. Why might it be useful to keep this mechanism in place?

One trick that the makes of air conditioners for office buildings figured out a while ago is that people have endless fights about the temperature of offices. At almost any temperature, some people find it intolerably cold, and others are roasting. But oddly, people got much happier when they had entirely fake thermostats installed. My office has one. There’s a temperature dial you can fiddle with, and even a button you can press that causes a light to come on for 30 seconds, just to show that it’s hooked up to something, if not actually the air conditioner. On further reflection, it's preposterous. What exactly is this button meant to do? Is it an 'on' button? If so, do I need to press it every 30 seconds, because it keeps going off.

But having these buttons and thermostats there makes people feel like they’re able to do something. It channels their complaints and rage, which previous would have been directed at each other, management, facilities and whoever else, into fiddling with a harmless switch, which they never quite know if it actually does anything or not. Even if they suspect it doesn’t, periodically they’ll fiddle with it, because why not try anyway? Maybe it's the mysterious button, perhaps I need to press it in addition to fiddling with the thermostat. Your voice matters for office temperature!

Voting for candidates in an election is the fake air conditioner switch of the political world. Instead of throwing rocks at the police, or burning down the capital, or plotting a coup, people keep fiddling with their individual political thermostat. This channels their energy into harmless pursuits. But it also increases actual satisfaction, even given the current policies! Often, people aren’t able to accurately perceive the world around them, so may not even know exactly if things have changed. But if they can do something, and see some minor visible effect in the world around them, such as the thermostat being higher or one of “their guys” in charge, they feel happier.

But viewed in this light, it’s easy to see that not all forms of voting will be equally successful at generating this pattern. A key part is that the choice space of actions must be fairly crude, and the measurement of consequences rather difficult. Direct democracy, such as through ballot initiatives, is very destabilizing in this regard. When citizens can form their own specific formulations, firstly they demand quite specific things (“No gay marriage in California”), which are easy to tell if they’re not being implemented. As a result, when the powers that be decide that the peasants’ games have gone too far, they must be explicitly cracked down on, when judges remind people who is actually in charge. Do that too often, and people might figure out that the thermostat isn’t actually connected to anything.

But if you only give people a periodic choice every four years, and they only get one single ‘A or B’ choice placed in front of them, AND their choice is only to launder what they want done through the will of a president or prime minister, who may or may not have been sincere, may or may not have just changed his mind after voting, may or may not have had enough support from within his own party… well, it suddenly becomes very hard to show definitively that the voting didn’t make any difference.

And so the system is stable. Dissent is channeled into harmless outlets, and it stays there because nobody can every quite prove that the outlets are indeed harmless.

But even more than that, there’s a genius that comes from the nature of voting itself. Specifically, it’s a participatory act. And not only that, it’s costly. You have to get off your butt, drive to the primary school, and fill in the damn form.

Cognitive dissonance being what it is, people who have wasted their time filling out a form will convince themselves that the form is actually a really important practical and moral act. Otherwise, why have I been doing it for so long, wasting my time on it? In other words, by making the action slightly costly, people are even more likely to tell themselves absurd stories about how voting can actually change the world.

Now, this is something that is harder to achieve in a monarchy. The King explicitly wants it known that he is in charge. If you dislike the King, stiff $*** – he’s the King, and you’re a peasant. Now, with a sufficiently stable power structure, this is okay. But it means that the peasants have to obey out of either a) inherent loyalty and love for the ruler, and/or b) fear of punishment. Do these right, and they should be enough. But there’s an extra insurance policy of having a system that fools some fraction of the potential mob into thinking that they either ARE already in charge, or can be if they just sit patiently and keep pressing the right button every four years.

Sovereign corporations offer people a different bargain – you can’t choose how the country is run, but you can choose if you want to stay. This may well be fine too.

Again, none of this means that we shouldn’t ditch democracy. We just should know what we’ll be losing, and ponder if there's any way to replicate it in what we'd like to create.

The second large benefit I can see is what I think of in my crude financial terms as the analysts consensus forecast problem, or the wisdom of crowds. Suppose every analyst observes the true earnings estimate with some independent error term. Then the average of many analysts will be more accurate than any individual analyst.

Now, you might think that I am arguing that the average person will be wise in what policies to implement, but that is not my purpose at all. Unlike the analysts version above, not all electors are equally informed about policy. If many of your analysts are morons, you probably want to exclude them entirely.

So what are voters actually good at knowing? Pretty much only one thing – whether their life has gotten crappy recently, or whether it’s improving. They may know something of the specific cause, or they may not. They are unlikely to have much useful to add about how things need to change. But if you just want to find out how the overall realm is going, a vote is not a bad option.

Think of voting it as a button labeled ‘Throw the Bums Out’. By voting for the incumbent, they’re saying they’re happy. By voting for the other guy, they’re not. Not only do you get information about the aggregate answer to this question, but with exit polling, you can approximately figure out who was unhappy, which might tell you why.

The problem for a king is that this kind of knowledge is dispersed over the whole kingdom. It’s the standard central planner’s problem, and why you want to rely on prices. Think of voting as like a very crude version of average opinion for the ‘Do things need changing?’ question.

Of course, viewed from this angle, what we really want is just an opinion poll. And ideally we'd like to ask a lot more detailed questions, rather than just one. Perhaps something more like the census. But if there’s one thing the Trump election showed, it’s that people sometimes falsify opinions to pollsters, especially when they have to answer in person. The trusted anonymity of the polling both means you get a) genuine answers, even if they’re misguided, and b) avoid the sampling error from limited polling.

Now, you definitely don’t want this kind of voting mechanism hooked up to the actual levers of power. But it’s the kind of information that a genuinely benevolent leader would want to collect in some form or another. It doesn’t need to look like voting, but something to achieve a similar effect is probably useful. It helps solve the hubris that comes along with absolute power – when you feel you’re a genius, and all your underlings are sycophants, how will you actually find out if your policies aren’t having the intended effect? Turns out it’s not so easy, until one day you're on the palace balcony giving a speech, the peasants start jeering, and suddenly the jig is up. Woe be to the leader who forgets to find out the real opinions of his peasantry.

These are surely not an exhaustive list. Out of the two broad classes, I think the ‘harmless outlet for dissent’ is considerably more important. But it’s a problem worth pondering.

‘Tear Down This Wall!’ makes for great rhetoric. But it should be the last stage of a lot of reasoning.

On Maine and Moldbug

Continuing my foray into the illustrious brotherhood of the Froude Society, I’ve been reading Popular Government by Sir Henry Sumner Maine.

To read these books is to see the genesis of Unqualified Reservations – not that these books exactly mirror Moldbug, but one can see where some of the ideas come from. Of course, part of what makes Moldbug so fascinating for most people to read is that the ideas are so radically different to what one normally comes across. One of the meta points of Unqualified Reservations, encapsulated in the dictum to ‘Read Old Books’, is that if one reads the same thing as everyone else, one is likely to think the same thing as everyone else. Sufficiently old ideas when sincerely expressed are apt to strike you as more shocking and new than anything else you will encounter.

And the strongest all-pervading sense wherein Maine (writing in 1885) departs from modernity is his willingness to view democracy with the cold eyes of a political engineer. In the starkest terms possible, Maine writes as if the entire democratic process has no moral component whatsoever, either positive or negative. Voting is not a sacred duty, a fundamental right, an ennobling and dignifying symbol of equality, or any of the other hoary notions that today have been attached to the term. So what is it then?

Political liberty, said Hobbes, is political power. When a man burns to be free, he is not longing for the "desolate freedom of the wild ass" ; what he wants is a share of political government.

Can you imagine a more bracing tonic than that? When you say “I want to be free” or wear your “I voted” sticker, you are really saying “I covet political power”. Not so ennobling when phrased that way, is it? There is nothing wrong with power, of course. Someone has to have it. But the pursuit of it is hardly considered a morally virtuous cause.

Democracy, then, is merely one of a number of possible ways of governing the state, whose outcomes should be judged solely on those terms:

There is no word about which a denser mist of vague language, and a larger heap of loose metaphors, has collected. Yet, although Democracy does signify something indeterminate, there is nothing vague about it. It is simply and solely a form of government. It is the government of the State by the Many, as opposed, according to the old Greek analysis, to its government by the Few, and to its government by One. … Democracy is best described as inverted Monarchy.

We have grown up viewing democracy with a diet of rhetoric that resembles the way that a love poem describes a human body. And here, for the first time, is an anatomy textbook. To a modern western audience, this is a somewhat jarring perspective.

Maine is also unsparing in pointing out where the democratic principle, when analysed, fails to make sense. Firstly, if the people are actually wise in their judgments, why do their judgments have to be laundered through the process of first electing representatives, to whom are delegated general decision-making authority? This argument becomes even more forceful as the possibility of online elections makes frequent plebiscites cheaper and more practical. As Maine notes

The arguments of the French Liberal party against the Plebiscite, during the twenty years of stern despotism which it entailed upon France, have always appeared to me to be arguments in reality against the very principle of democracy.

Indeed.

Similar important questions get raised by the existence of second legislative chambers, such as Senates, which have different electoral rules to the lower Houses.

Nothing brings out so clearly as does this class of contrivances a fundamental doubt afflicting the whole Democratic theory. It is taken for granted that a popular electorate will be animated by a different spirit according as it is grouped; but why should there be any connection between the grouping of the People and the Voice of the People? The truth is, that as soon as we begin to reflect seriously on modes of practically applying the democratic principle, we find that some vital preliminary questions have never been settled. Granting that the People is entitled of right to govern, how is it to give its decisions and orders? …
Vox Populi may be Vox Dei, but very little attention shows that there never has been any agreement as to what Vox means or as to what Populus means. 

Maine also has some brilliant analyses of the flaws of direct democracy, though a powerful comparison to the jury system. It is a long passage, but one worth quoting in full:

We have in England a relic of the ancient Popular Justice in the functions of the Jury. The Jury-technically known as the "country"-is the old adjudicating Democracy, limited, modified, and improved, in accordance with the principles suggested by the experience of centuries, so as to bring it into harmony with modern ideas of judicial efficiency. The change which has had to be made in it is in the highest degree instructive. The Jurors are twelve, instead of a multitude. Their main business is to say "Aye" or "No" on questions which are doubtless important, but which turn on facts arising in the transactions of everyday life. In order that they may reach a conclusion, they are assisted by a system of contrivances and rules of the highest artificiality and elaboration. An expert presides over their investigations-the Judge, the representative of the rival and royal justice-and an entire literature is concerned with the conditions under which evidence on the facts in dispute may be laid before them. There is a rigid exclusion of all testimony which has a tendency to bias them unfairly. They are addressed, as of old, by the litigants or their advocates, but their inquiry concludes with a security unknown to antiquity, the summing-up of the expert President, who is bound by all the rules of his profession to the sternest impartiality. If he errs, or if they flagrantly err, the proceedings may be quashed by a superior Court of experts. Such is Popular Justice, after ages of cultivation. 

Now it happens that the oldest Greek poet has left us a picture, certainly copied from reality, of what Popular Justice was in its infancy. The primitive Court is sitting; the question is"guilty" or "not guilty." The old men of the community give their opinions in turn; the adjudicating Democracy, the commons standing round about, applaud the opinion which strikes them most, and the applause determines the decision. The Popular Justice of the ancient republics was essentially of the same character The adjudicating Democracy simply followed the opinion which most impressed them in the speech of the advocate or litigant.

Nor is it in the least doubtful that, but for the sternly repressive authority of the presiding Judge, the modern English Jury would, in the majority of cases, blindly surrender its verdict to the persuasiveness of one or other of the counsel who have been retained to address it.

A modern governing democracy is the old adjudicating democracy very slightly changed.

This is one of the great damning critiques of the modern democratic process. It is obvious to all contemporary readers what a travesty of justice it would be to substitute the modern jury system for the old one. It is also quite apparent that Maine’s final point is right – modern voting for the president looks a lot like ancient Greek justice. Is the fate of an entire people less important than the fate of a single defendant?

It is the interest in these kinds of possible modifications that makes the engineering side of Maine most apparent. While Maine is highly skeptical of democracy by the standards of modernity, by the standards of Moldbug he is actually an optimist. He thinks that democracy can be improved, and its weaknesses at least tempered by good design. For instance, he is optimistic about representative government relative to direct democracy – as he notes, “the effect was to diminish the difficulties of popular government, in exact proportion to the diminution in the number of persons who had to decide public questions.” Similarly, Maine is also enthusiastic about US State constitutions which specify formal procedures for their amendment. This is viewed as being a superior process to the ambiguity of the British process.

With the benefit of 130 years of hindsight, of course, it is easier to observe the failure modes that Maine didn’t foresee. What if, instead of formally amending the constitution, legislatures simply passed laws that exceeded the initial bounds, and then further appointed compliant judges who were on board with the ruling ideology and believed in things like ‘living constitutions’?

Or, more radically, what if the ruling party simply decided to replace the electorate through mass immigration? This has been the story of the latter half of the 20th Century. Maine understood the incentives to modify the franchise, but modifying the population itself was a leap of imagination that even he didn’t consider.

And this is where the comparison with Moldbug becomes instructive. Moldbug is a pessimist about the entire democratic process. Cthulu swims left, as the now famous expression goes. Democracy is, in other words, a fundamentally left wing phenomenon that will sooner or later produce left wing outcomes. As a result, the failure modes themselves are inevitable (according to Moldbug), not merely possible. The franchise will never be stable, as the incentives to expand it will always be present. Maine, for instance, speaks with some praise about Belgian suffrage restrictions that limit the vote to those with an education. That this would be desirable seems highly likely. But would it be stable, even if it were passed? This is the crucial question which Maine doesn’t address, and which Moldbug does quite forcefully in the negative. And when suffrage gets expanded, the decisions will shift to the lowest common denominator, or be usurped by the constant meddling with public opinion. On this last point, Maine agrees – with the mass franchise, leadership will be by “the wire-pullers”, a wonderful description of modern democratic leaders and political operatives. But Maine doesn’t get to the point of outright condemnation. To an engineer, the building that is the American constitution has survived a lot longer than what would have been predicted, and so must have something going for it. In the later stages of the US Empire, this may strike us as optimistic, but we can’t fault Maine for not foreseeing the entire future.

But the comparison with Moldbug is not universally to Moldbug’s advantage. Because, despite the large overlap between their worldviews, the two writers have one important philosophical difference. If Maine is an engineer of government, then Moldbug is more like a scientist of government. A scientist aims to develop a theory that will help him understand the world, from which practical results can then be deduced. An engineer views scientific knowledge as a means to constructing something durable, but it is only a means to an end. Kludges and rules of thumb are acceptable to engineers, but are anathema to scientists, to whom they represent only incomplete understanding.

The engineering side of Maine, which overlaps with the historian side of Froude, depicts political power as something not entirely subject to formula. One can shape it and set rules, but, like an engineer’s buildings, governing structures will eventually collapse, despite the best of intentions. In particular, the question of who holds true power in Maine's descriptions is often difficult to ascertain at any point in time, and there can be considerable ambiguity on that point. For instance, consider Maine’s description of the history of the powers of the English King:

The powers over legislation which the law recognizes in the Crown are its power to veto Bills which have passed both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and its power to dissolve Parliament. The first of these powers has probably been lost through disuse. There is not, at the same time, the smallest reason for supposing that it was abandoned through any inconsistency with popular government. It was not employed, because there was no occasion for employing it.

As to the right to dissolve Parliament by an independent exercise of the royal will, it cannot be quite confidently asserted to have become obsolete. The question has been much discussed in the Colonies which attempt to follow the British Constitutional procedure, and it seems to be generally allowed that a representative of the Crown cannot be blamed for insisting on a dissolution of the Legislature, though his Ministers are opposed to it. It is probable, however, that in this country the object would be practically attained in a different way.

This is a very different world from the world of absolute power, or even absolute certainty about the distribution of power. Even if a King starts with a given set of powers, according to Maine, he may lose them simply through lack of use. And the most shocking word here is ‘probably’. Maine is implying that because the right to dismiss Parliament hasn’t been tested in a while, we actually don’t know if it still would be followed. His descriptions of how the Cabinet ended up arising out of nothing to effectively set the legislative agenda, while the House of Commons mostly ended up questioning the executive branch, is similarly fascinating and nuanced. You can set up a system in a way, and it can actually work in that way for a while, but then at some point things might change in practice, even as the same nominal roles are all there.

This kind of real world ambiguity and nuance is sometimes missing in Moldbug’s writing. The CEO of a neocameral state is described as being all powerful, subject to the possibility of board dismissal. Presumably he can order half the population shot if he wants, unless the board fires him before it gets carried out. He won’t have incentives to do this, of course, and Moldbug makes a convincing argument that this is the only real bulwark against abuses of authority. But if our CEO deems it to be value-maximising, the power is there. Of course, at the moment our neocameral CEO is only a hypothetical figure, and so it's easy to grant him hypothetical absolute power. But how do we know that things will actually work out that way? The critique of neocameralism that usually gets leveled is 'Do we want this to happen, or will it lead to undesirable outcomes?'. But there's a second possible question - 'Even if we do want this, can we actually create it?'. I don't mean rhetorically that it's obvious that we can't, merely that it isn't a given.

In other words, when the rubber hits the road, if the CEO gives the order to fire on the crowd at the football game because he thinks it will increase shareholder value, do the security forces actually shoot? And what happens next if they don't? Until you're a CEO commanding a drone army, there’s only human beings all the way down, and either they follow, or they don’t. Sometimes, you just won’t know until you give the order. And this is a problem that, no matter how much we might like it, I suspect we can’t simply engineer away with cryptographically locked weapons. Moldbug is brilliant, don’t get me wrong, and his imagination of how different forms of government might work is second to none. But there is sometimes an absolutism in his descriptions of how governing arrangements might work that doesn’t seem to fit Maine’s descriptions of the nuances of actual power.

Of course, with the extra century's knowledge to guide us, Maine sometimes falls victim to the same trap, he’s just enamored of different restrictions. In particular, his praise for the way that the US Federal Constitution sets out specific enumerated powers and structures (relative to the ambiguity of the British system) seems to have been optimistic even at the time. If he'd written the book after FDR, I suspect there's a few sections that might read quite differently.

And if there is a general delineation of where Maine seems to be more optimistic about how formal arrangements can limit and define government structures, it is regarding America. His analysis of Britain notes much of the deterioration of democratic governance, and he hadn't yet witnessed the full decline of the previous American governing structures (other than the Civil War, which he addresses relatively briefly, and seems oddly to think of as merely a temporary disruption to the same basic structure). Noting the big difference between the two countries, Maine attributes the relative success and consistency of American governing arrangements to the fact that its powers and structures were formalised, while Britain's were mostly established through tradition and tacit understanding. With the benefit of hindsight, this makes Maine overestimate how much the formal structures actually prevented the same trends, as opposed to perhaps just delaying them somewhat, or maybe even not achieving that. It turns out the piece of paper didn’t restrict government power after all, as Moldbug has been at pains to point out.

But doubt not that Maine is brilliant, and his depictions of the folly and stupidity of the democratic process are incisive and illuminating. Skip the travesty of election coverage these next two weeks and read some Maine instead.