I spent some time trying to understand what Reactionary Future is really saying. I mean, there is surely something interesting going on here but it is somehow hard to for me to get the meat of the argument.

Maybe let’s try a thought experiment. We have an island consisting of two people. One is Greg Government and the other is Peter Public. Greg is ruling Peter, obviously. Our challenge is find the form of government that makes it the most likely that Greg is going to rule in the public interest, i.e. going to rule Peter in a way that Peter’s utility, happiness, virtue, human quality or whatever we want to call it, is maximized.

(Maybe this is already a Liberal narrative, I don’t know, in that case I must admit I don’t know how to construct one that is not.)

(What exactly we are optimizing for matters, and there is a lot of a difference between happy-as-pigs subjects vs. focusing on human quality. But let’s leave that discussion for another time.)

If I get it right what RF is saying, and what RF is saying Moldbug and De Jouvenel are saying is that it will be the best for Peter if we basically make him Greg’s slave.

This is not actually as insane as it sounds. There are two ways this can be justified. One is saying just like as a shareholder is interested in maximizing share price and not profits or dividends, Greg is interested in not merely maximizing the flow of income from Peter to him, call it tax or something like that, i.e. not merely exploiting Peter, but maximizing the resale value of Peter the slave and thus trying to keep Peter healthy, happy enough to be productive and so on.

Putting it differently, it seems that every kind of harm, corruption and exploitation seems to imply turning non-property into property. Squeezing money out of other people, then that money is your property and you can stuff it into a Swiss bank account or buy a palace or turn it into some other form of permanent property.

Which would imply if something is already your property you will not care about exploiting it, because that is just like putting money from one of your pockets into another.

Putting it differently, if self-interest is defined as maximizing property, non-property will be exploited, and property will be fed and boosted and cared for.

Putting it differently, even beyond the financial resale motives, self-interest can be defined even in an emotional sense, that everything I truly own is in some emotional way part of my being, and thus I want to better it, if I own a garden I want it to be pretty not because I want to sell it but because it is mine, it is in a way part of me. So the publicly owned garden, or the garden I am merely a caretaker of, will be exploited in order to boost my own.

Putting it differently, it seems only two extremes are stable. Either Greg has absolutely no power over Peter, which means he is not government, they are living in a state of anarchy, which may or may not imply both being interested in trying to conquer each other and establishing a government, or if Greg’s power over Peter is unlimited, Peter is Greg’s slave, Greg is both interested in maxing out Peters resale value hence keeping him healthy and happy, and also as his property Peter is in an emotional sense part of Greg’s person or identity hence also emotional invested in keeping him well off. Something like a foster child, after all, slaves were commonly seen as children both in the Classic era and in the US South.

But any intermediate solution, any kind of limited power will just make Greg the Government want to exploit Peter the Public and turn the profit into private property, like buying a palace, over which Greg has unlimited power.

I am not sure if this is really what RF is saying and if this is what RF is saying what Moldbug and De Jouvenel is saying.

It’s not insane. It has logic to it. The root problem is that it is the political philosophy of Persia, not Hellas.

As in, it contradicts not only everything that was written in the last 300 years about political philosophy, maybe we can write that off as Liberalism. But it contradicts everything BEFORE the era of Absolutism either. No Baron in 1100 would accept being the slave of the King. In fact royal power during the Middle Ages was unusually strong in England, France and the Holy Roman Empire were far more chaotic.

And even more importantly it contradicts all our Classical legacy. Cicero would not accept it. Aristotle would not accept it – he considered freemen and slaves as clear different things.

I mean, rejecting this is at the root of the difference between Hellas and Persia i.e. the definition of “Western liberty” and “Oriental despotism”. Ancient Greeks refused to kneel before monarchs, and because Persians didn’t, they considered Persians the slaves of their monarchs and ourselves proud freemen.

Persia may have been right, after all. Who knows. But it seems to me rejecting that and having a certain amount of rebelliousness is the root of the identity of the West.

Maybe that is more trouble than it is worth, I don’t know. Chinese style conformism certainly has its advantages too, a society like Hong Kong, if and when not handed over to Commies seem to have what it it takes to be stable and prosperous forever and it has a lot to do with not rocking the boat and accepting basically any kid of power reality and focusing on business.

But can we really shed our identity and legacy as Westerners who pretty much defined themselves as the non-kowtowing people? Or should?