A Grey Enlightenment

Some aspects of the Dark Enlightenment are interesting and useful. But we need to retain liberalism's light.

Most people think the great compromise struck by Madison and Hamilton is the best we can do when it comes to government. The American founders cobbled together a framework of laws and norms based on history’s successes and failures. It was a brilliant effort. Given that the constitutional project is dissolving, we must ask what can change with underthrow.

What if a similar framework were administered and enforced differently?

Enter innovation and competition.

Elsewhere, we have discussed Strong's Law, which states that:

Properly structured free enterprise always results in higher quality, lower cost, and more customized products and services over time.

It's time we think of Strong's Law as being applied to the most important aspect of society: governance.

The Dark Enlightenment Looms

I can hear the howls of the High Minds whose hopes of becoming philosopher kings would be dashed by competitive governance. I can also hear the lamentations of patriotic pillar saints who wish to elevate Hamilton or think of the Constitution as perfect or having magical properties.

Some will stay trapped in the mental model that corporations are evil, with its attendant notions of exploitation. They will say we are just market fundamentalists and that we are evil, greedy, or otherwise benighted—perhaps scions of the Dark Enlightenment.

Then, they will prostrate themselves before the biggest corporation of all.

The lure of the Dark Enlightenment has been strong, as the pull of a black hole. But we are integral liberals prepared to stare directly into the dark and retain far much more of the light--perhaps from the safe side of the event horizon. Still, philosopher Nick Land's words are powerful:

"His awakening into neo-reaction comes with the (Hobbesian) recognition that sovereignty cannot be eliminated, caged, or controlled." 

We have expended effort to reckon with Hobbes. We have not yet reckoned with this recognition, which Land sees more as a blind, unstoppable process of power accretion that we are otherwise doomed to repeat. But he says the Leviathan will return anyway, in time:

The state isn't going anywhere because — to those who run it — it's worth far too much to give up, and as the concentrated instantiation of sovereignty in society, nobody can make it do anything.

We differ in our outlook, but only enough to make us cousins of the Dark Enlightenment.

Mencius Moldbug's solution is not altogether different.

To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a country. A state should be managed, like any other large business, by dividing logical ownership into negotiable shares, each of which yields a precise fraction of the state's profit. (A well-run state is very profitable.) Each share has one vote, and the shareholders elect a board, which hires and fires managers.

The customers are residents. Like any business, such a state will serve its customers better or go out of business. 

Although it is undoubtedly an improvement, the problem with the neocameralist formulation is that it continues to rely on certain unneeded assumptions about the firm's nature. We have already pointed the way to improvements in how firms self-govern. Though continuing our discussion of powershift takes us into a different zone of inquiry, let’s keep it in our minds.

Our conception is less dark by shades: A Grey Enlightenment.

The idea of the government as a corporation might not sit well with many people. Still, we can no longer deny the Eros Masculine as we can deny that powerful authorities can reconstitute themselves after a government’s collapse. Just look at the difference between Germany in 1919 and 1939 and Russia in 1991 and 2021.

World Wars and Cold Wars should not be the only checks on empires. Formalizing the state as a power-shifted corporate entity represents a possible means of checking political power and holding authorities accountable.

After all, democracy is a myth. In this way, we agree with Land. 

It is essential to squash the democratic myth that a state 'belongs' to the citizenry. The point of neo-cameralism is to buy out the real stakeholders in sovereign power, not to perpetuate sentimental lies about mass enfranchisement.

We also suggest that one way to deal with power is to create formal mechanisms for some aspects of the government to go out of business. Currently, informal processes, like wholesale collapse or revolution, are far too devastating. We seek to light a way through some of the shadows of corporate sovereignty. We think transformations after collapse can pull reality towards something a little more ideal than The United States of Google.

Embrace the Grey

Yet, we take the idea of markets in governance quite seriously, whereas the alternative is an unaccountable monopoly. People want and need governance. The question, as old as humanity, is: how can we have governance that puts compulsion in its proper place?

Those who say that might makes right will always be with us in some form—including those versed in the Dark Enlightenment. Only spiritually enlightened beings can imagine, much less instantiate, a society of angels. The question for any self-respecting liberal lies not in whether power ought to be restrained but in how we hope to restrain it. An ought uttered to the powerful is no different from a child's wish—a coin tossed into a well.

The integral liberal's experimental program assumes that we are humans and that humans are a mix of sinners and saints. So, ultimate authority should be reserved for neither sinners nor saints. Never mind that your idea of a sinner or a saint might not resemble mine. A saint will turn into a sinner just as readily as a white hat will turn black when she gets the ring. 

Those unfamiliar with our way of thinking probably wonder how corporations are not necessarily evil and that governments are not necessarily good. I hope any reader who has made it this far has let go of such foolish notions. Anyone prepared to shed Ms. Crabapple's social studies lesson is now invited to open her mind a little. A lot is counterintuitive about this direction, so bear with me. Hope for humanity after the American Fall lies in getting over any residual notions of seraphocracy.

Instead, let's work on reilluminating the world beyond the Dark Enlightenment—at least to take advantage of twilight.

Melt the Ring

One of the most vexing questions for the integral liberal is how humanity can melt the ring of power. Despite their sins and shortcomings, perhaps no better group of thinkers has ever been assembled to answer this question than those who came to Philadelphia to ratify the Constitution. Yet some of them left the convention feeling as if they had not done enough to rein in the excesses of tyranny, which, as we have suggested, is to tamp down the excesses of Eros Masculine and to put fetters on Leviathan.

Franklin's answer to what was happening in Constitution Hall still stands: "A republic, if we can keep it." But if we can't, so be it, as long as we can figure out how to melt the ring.

So how do we do that? It's a difficult problem.

Remember that Constitutions are statutes. Statutes tend to suffer from legal sclerosis in some circumstances and are vulnerable to corruption by interpretation in others. We need to be able to adopt the code, fork the code, and exit the code entirely in some instances.

We need law by agreement.

The difference is that the code should depend far more on network effects around value than the prospect of violent enforcement. That means that a new liberal order will have to be fashioned by sovereign individuals coalescing in new systems of agreement that are neither legislated nor managed by angels. What remains in those covenants' in-between spaces should be fair means to resolve disputes and protocols for good laws to emerge. 

Maybe the answer is not to melt the ring at all. Maybe the answer, following Michael Gibson, is to ensure everyone has a ring. 

The diffusion of the smartphone, strong cryptography, and peer-to-peer decentralized public ledgers will weld individuals, networks and voluntary hierarchies into single units of sovereign power capable of opt-out and opt-in governance without precedent.

Up to this point, the Westphalian nation-state has expressed its power within borders, which delineates the extent of its use of legal violence. That means the old power structures envelop citizens within geographies. In this order, you're mostly hemmed in or locked out. But we are racing headlong into an age where legal entrepreneurs will figure out how to decouple many governance functions from territories. We will opt-in or opt-out without leaving our bedroom slippers.

A new kind of citizen will come into being: the citizen customer.

And all of this, by the way, leaves little room for democracy as we currently think of it. Most of the American Founders saw democracy as a form of national suicide. And they should have. Majority rule needs to be kept in its place, that is, kept as a last resort when no other option for consensus is available. Given what we know now, I suspect such instances would be exceedingly rare.

Before going back towards the light, take a look at one more observation by Nick Land:

Given a population deeply infected by the zombie virus and shambling into cannibalistic social collapse, the preferred option is quarantine. It is not communicative isolation that is essential, but a functional dis-solidarization of society that tightens feedback loops and exposes people with maximum intensity to the consequences of their own actions. Social solidarity, in precise contrast, is the parasite's friend. By cropping out all high-frequency feedback mechanisms (such as market signals), and replacing them with sluggish, infra-red loops that pass through a centralized forum of 'general will', a radically democratized society insulates parasitism from what it does, transforming local, painfully dysfunctional, intolerable, and thus urgently corrected behavior patterns into global, numbed, and chronic socio-political pathologies.

Just think about the last ten bumper stickers you saw or perhaps the last fifteen social media posts. Are these the thoughts that form the demos? 

Whether it's a formalized mob (democracy) or a spontaneous mob that runs through city streets, tearing down what it had no hand in creating (rioters), mob rule should have no place in New America.