Are you ready for Moldbug to say something intelligent? Are you sitting down? You should be:

The invention of [the right of rebellion — i.e., the idea that rebellion against established power is legitimate as long as it succeeds] was perhaps the first tiny crack in the philosophical girders of the classical European monarchies. Filmer deftly points out that this is an engineering error, the ancient political solecism of imperium in imperio — which is now, in a typical democratic propaganda maneuver, lauded as that bogus political panacea, “separation of powers”: Thirdly, [Bellarmine] concludes that, if there be a lawful cause, the multitude may change the kingdom. Here I would fain know who shall judge of this lawful cause? If the multitude — for I see nobody else can — then this is a pestilent and dangerous conclusion. Filmer, writing for an educated audience, does not bother to remind them of the basic premise of Roman law: nemo iudex in causa sua. Meaning: “no man can be a judge in his own case.” And no multitude, either. These political three-card monte tricks, in which sovereign authority is in some way divided, “limited” (obviously, no sovereign can limit itself), or otherwise weakened, in all cases for the purported purpose of securing liberty, have no more place in a Patchwork realm than they do at, say, Apple. They are spurious artifacts of the Interregnum[1]. Their effect on both a realm and its residents is purely counterproductive. Begone with them. In reality, no sovereign can be subject to law. This is a political perpetual motion machine. Law is not law unless it is judged and enforced. And by whom? For example, if you think a supreme court with judicial review can make government subject to law, you are obviously unfamiliar with the sordid history of American constitutional jurisprudence. All your design has achieved is to make your supreme court sovereign. Indeed if the court had only one justice, a proper title for that justice would be “King.”

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[1] “the Interregnum” is Moldbug’s term for the current period of liberal-democratic rule, between the absolutist monarchies of the past and the neo-cameralist sovcorps of his imagined future — “An interregnum is a period of discontinuity or gap in a government, organization, or social order. Archetypally, it was the period of time between the reign of one monarch and the next, and the concepts of interregnum and regency therefore overlap”.

In these five paragraphs, Moldbug has suddenly said more than he has in all the text previous to this. It feels as though he has been saving up his intelligence, to unleash it on us in a burst: one gets the feeling of a flash-flood in an intellectual desert.

What he is talking about, though I am almost 100% sure that he would under no circumstances describe it as such, is called “the problem of constituent power”. Graeber, in his essay Super Position (the expanded version of which is called ‘Batman and the Problem of Constituent Power’ — and my own essay referencing it is here) explains the matter as such:

Any power capable of creating a system of law cannot itself be bound by them. So law has to come from somewhere else. In the Middle Ages, the solution was simple: the legal order was created, either directly or indirectly, by God. God, as the Old Testament makes abundantly clear, is not bound by laws or even any recognizable system of morality, which only stands to reason: if you created morality, you can’t, by definition, be bound by it. The English, American, and French revolutions changed all that when they created the notion of popular sovereignty — declaring that the power once held by kings is now held by an entity called “the people.”

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“The people,” however, are bound by the laws. So in what sense can they have created them? They created the laws through those revolutions themselves, but, of course, revolutions are acts of law-breaking. It is completely illegal to rise up in arms, overthrow a government, and create a new political order… …laws emerge from illegal activity. This creates a fundamental incoherence in the very idea of modern government, which assumes that the state has a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence (only the police, or prison guards, have the legal right to beat you up). It’s okay for police to use violence because they are enforcing the law; the law is legitimate because it’s rooted in the constitution; the constitution is legitimate because it comes from the people; the people created the constitution by acts of illegal violence. The obvious question, then, is: how does one tell the difference between “the people” and a mere rampaging mob? There is no obvious answer.

Moldbug, though, is making the point that this problem of liberal democracies is also a problem of absolutist monarchies: after all, just as the people got their power from a mythologized revolution, the king gets his power from a legendary conquest.

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If God is considered to be around, such as in a divine-right monarchy or a theodemocracy, this is — in both cases — an easily resolved subject: God wanted one group to have power at one time, and another group to have power at another time.

However, if you are an atheist — as both I and Moldbug happen to be — this question becomes equally muddled in either case.

This becomes a practical problem because, yes, it absolutely does justify anything that the people might wish to do — absent God, or another source of external power, then what can stop the king, or the people? If they are the ultimate source of all power then yes, they absolutely cannot be subject to that power.