Jim's Blog

In a tranquil and orderly society a bunch of high status males work things out between themselves by means far short of actual violence, hence are “gentlemen”.  These gentlemen then present a unified and extremely violent front against outsiders.  Over time, their arrangement is apt to break down, their unified front against ungentle means of advancement dissipates, and it becomes increasingly possible to get ahead within the elite by using or organizing actual physical violence against fellow members of the elite, as for example Sonia Sotomayor and Ward Churchill did.  As they become less violent to outsiders, they find that increasingly those who have intruded among them are more violent to each other.

Elite politics then becomes progressively rougher, eventually resulting in a Sulla: rule by a single extremely violent man.

Contrary to Moldbug, societies ruled by a single strong man rarely prosper, since the single strong man has limited capability to shake down the society, and so tends to maximize his take, rather than maximize what is to be taken, thus under a single strong man, the state is apt to become more corrupt and violent, not less corrupt and violent.  Because one man is weak and vulnerable, the difference between stationary bandits and mobile bandits is less than advertised.  Moldbug is correct to argue that the weakness of the ruler is a problem, wrong to think it is soluble.  Stationary bandits are always apt to mutate into mobile bandits due to institutional decay.

Our elite is not all that violent, and exceptional cases, such as Sonia Sontamayor, are not all that elite, but is is apparent which way the wind is going.  Like a neighborhood going bad, the level of trust is going down, the level of corruption is going up, and actual violence, once quite unimaginable, is now, though still uncommon, entirely imaginable.  The Occupy rentamob was intended to physically threaten the financial elite and physically occupy their premises, though it instantly became apparent that the financiers and their rentacops were way tougher than the occupy rentamob.

Democratic politics is a mock civil war:  The side that could call out the most people were it to come to actual fighting is agreed to rule.  But the failure of the Occupy movement suggests that the inner party cannot, in fact, call out a significant mob.

Before the English Civil war, the state was Throne and Altar, what we would now call the right.  The state maintained slavery, enforced official religion, and everyone was required to pretend to believe in the divine right of Kings, much as today everyone is with equal plausibility required to pretend to believe that women are equal to men.

The English Civil war was intended to secure the rights of Englishmen, but to Englishmen’s dismay, what we would now call right dictatorship was replaced by a dictatorship of the predecessors of today’s left.

Holy leftists were continually outflanked by people even holier and lefter.

This is not some weird Moldbuggian reinterpretation of what leftism means.  Marx also traces the roots of the left to the movements holier than Cromwell and suppressed by Cromwell, the Levellers and the Diggers. A faction of the twentieth century hippy movement called themselves “The Diggers”, claiming to be continuation and revival of the seventeenth century Digger movement.

Cromwell became dictator and ended the left singularity, announcing that England had become sufficiently holy, and repressing those to his left equally with those to his right, much as Stalin declared the Soviet Union sufficiently socialist, and proceeded to kill everyone more socialist than Stalin, as well as everyone less socialist than Stalin. Threatened on the left, Cromwell took the royalist General Monck out of prison and gave him a high command, and his own personal right wing praetorian guard, now known as the Coldstream guards.

When Cromwell died, his son was to succeed him, but, since Cromwell and the holy left had been busily opposing monarchy and undermining monarchism, this failed to take.  General Monck then marched on London, defeating the New Model Army.  He set his Praetorians to “guarding” Parliament,  The puritan parliament immediately voted to dissolve itself and hold a new election with rules more favorable to the cavaliers.  A Royalist parliament was elected, still guarded by Monck’s Praetorians, the Coldstream guards, who continue to guard the British Parliament to this day.  The new Parliament restored the monarchy and Anglican theocracy.  For anyone to get near the levers of power, they had to swear fealty to the thirty nine articles, much as today you have to submit essays showing how progressive you are.

This loyalty oath remained in effect from approximately 1662 to 1826.

The restoration regime was an astonishing success.  It created the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and British adventurers conquered most of the world, forming what would later be called the British empire.

Under the restoration regime, science was high status – not official science, but real science, the scientific method.  Today, the scientific method is only carried out by subversive troublemakers, who are likely to be deemed enemies of the state, for example the climate skeptic movement.  Similarly, before the restoration, as today, the scientific method was largely carried out furtively.  The predecessor of the Royal Society was the invisible college, and the reason it was invisible is that they would rather not be seen.

I attribute the success of officially Anglican England to the fact that official Anglicanism was latitudinarian  In Bruce Charleton’s terminology, it tolerated heretics but not apostates.

Today, one must believe everything the state believes, one must believe all official truth, of which there is a great deal.  Deviation is tolerated amongst the lower classes, since they are deemed hopelessly ignorant, but the higher one is in society, the more precise and detailed one’s knowledge of the official truth is expected to be, and the higher one’s status, the more one is expected to agree ever more meticulously and in ever more precise detail.  In contrast, the thirty nine articles mostly focused on points where members of competing theocratic movements would disagree, mostly focused on the antigens of hostile enemy theocratic movements, permitting much greater intellectual freedom than can exist today.

Because the thirty nine articles were latitudinarian, they did not cause an ever rightwards movement analogous to today’s ever leftwards movement.  The requirement to enter the corridors of power was not to be sufficiently holy, which test Charles the Second would surely have failed, but to not be an adherent of Roman Catholicism, Puritanism, or Puritanism’s successor movements.