Moldbug founds a lot of his political views on his ideas of what medieval history was like. The issue with this is that Moldbug does not actually understand what medieval history was like:

One of the most common errors in understanding the premodern era is the confusion of monarchy with tyranny. Nothing like Stalinism, for example, is recorded in the history of the European aristocratic era.

Stalin was, and I cannot emphasize this enough, intensely continuous with past Russian rulers. Most of his worst excesses — readdicting the Russian workers to state-controlled Vodka, massively expanding the surveillance and security state — were also things that every monarchical ruler of Russia had done.

Why? Because Stalin had to murder to stay in power.

Everyone has to murder to stay in power, dipshit. That’s what a state is — a centralized monopoly on legitimate violence within a geographic area.

Even to take his less literal meaning — something like ‘Stalin had no real legitimacy, he had only violence to keep him in power’ — you think that Stalin wasn’t genuinely beloved by many?

You think that the Soviet Union wasn’t filled with true believers? I assure you that it very much was — and to show you that I am unbiased in this, I will assure you that Nazi Germany was equally full of true believers.

Nearly every regime is. Need I remind you that even the Haitian Revolution began with a slave revolt demanding not freedom, but merely Sundays free of labor and an end to whippings? Even the most brutal of states have their own justifying ideologies, and the majority of their populations believe them, no matter how subjugated.

Anyone, certainly any of the Old Bolsheviks, could have taken his place. The killing machine took on a life of its own. The tyrant, the mafia boss, stands at the apex of a pyramid of power, each block in which is a person who hopes to someday kill the boss and take his job.

I dunno about “the tyrant”, but I can guarantee you that mafia members exhibited supreme loyalty to each other. It is what made them so effective.

In a tyranny, murder and madness become part of the fabric of the State.

Murder and madness are always the fabric of the state. Don’t be so fucking dramatic.

In a monarchy, however, the succession is clear, and if by some accident of law and fate there are multiple candidates, they are at least each others’ relatives. This rules out neither murder nor madness, but they are the exception and not the rule.

Do you know how often succession wars happened? Here, let me show you. I’m going to restrict the list to only Europe, because I think that it will have the biggest impact for my audience, but there is a whole lot more: