Ushering in the new era, Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister-designate, announced that he would not be sworn in, as tradition dictates, in the presence of Archbishop Iernonymos but would instead take the oath of office in a civil ceremony. At 40, he becomes the country’s youngest premier in modern times. […] The leftist, who surprised Greeks by speedily agreeing to share power with the populist rightwing Independent Greeks party, Anel, is expected to be handed a mandate by president Karolos Papoulias to form a government later on Monday. Earlier, Panos Kammenos, Anel’s rumbustious leader, emerged from talks with Tsipras lasting an hour saying the two politicians had successfully formed a coalition. […] “I want to say, simply, that from this moment, there is a government,” Kammenos told reporters gathered outside Syriza’s headquarters. […] “The Independent Greeks party will give a vote of confidence to the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras. The prime minister will go to the president and … the cabinet makeup will be announced by the prime minister. The aim for all Greeks is to embark on a new day, with full sovereignty.”

Anyone who thinks it odd that Marine Le Pen and Slavoj Žižek are both firm supporters is missing the picture entirely. As Žižek remarks:

This is our position today with regard to Europe: only a new “heresy” (represented at this moment by Syriza), a split from the European Union by Greece, can save what is worth saving in the European legacy: democracy, trust in people, egalitarian solidarity.

That’s what the Left means. Construct your ideological spectrum accordingly.

Mainstream, but sane:

Of course, politics is about emotion as much as reality. And here, socialism has one advantage in its favor: easy populism.

Socialism has one huge advantage: People are idiots.

… and while I’m slumming it at NRO, here‘s Andrew Stuttaford:

Fun fact No. 1: One of the two sons of Syriza’s leader was given the middle name “Ernesto” in honor of the murderer better known as Ernesto “Che” Guevara. […] Fun fact No. 2: The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn probably came in third with 6 percent or so. […] I, for one, continue to be grateful that the single currency has proved to be such a bulwark against extremism.

ADDED: Childish incomprehension from the Left (of which we will be seeing a great deal): “… Last but not least, while Mr. Kammenos and his sovereigntyist right-wing ANEL party [Independent Greeks] are certainly a lesser evil compared to formations like To Potami (whose stated goal was to force Syriza to stay within the narrow boundaries set by the EU and the Memorandums), they are nonetheless an evil. Their participation in the government, even with just one minister, would symbolise the end of the idea of an ‘anti-austerity government of the Left’. Moreover, this is a party of the Right, one that is particularly concerned to protect the ‘hard core’ of the state apparatus (it will be important to keep a watchful eye over whatever cabinet portfolio it might get). It will be no surprise if its first demands are for the ministry of defence or public order, though it seems that it will not get them.” (Relevant predictions from Jim.)

Chris Edwards puts together an impressive short (and implicit) demolition.

Fernandez’ summary of the Edwards post is even better (so I’ve left the link to him):

Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute believes there should be a National Museum of Government Failure. He argues that the displays at the Smithsonian would pale into insignificance if set beside the awe-inspiring sight of such things as the “$349 million on a rocket test facility that is completely unused“, the Superconducting Collider whose ruins include nearly 15 miles of tunnel and the ex-future Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site. Yet these artifacts, whose scale would surpass many a Lost City, are far from the worst failures. The biggest fiascos by dollar value are the various government programs designed to win the war on drugs or poverty which after having spent trillions of dollars fruitlessly, lie somewhere in an unmarked bureaucratic grave.

A price tag doesn’t do justice to these calamities, which are not only wasteful, but positively and perversely harmful, but it’s a start. The category of ‘waste’ itself fails here, because it would actually be less culturally toxic for all the resources squandered on social programs to be simply annihilated into hyperspace without remainder. Ruinous dependency incentives would then be hugely lessened.

Of course, the idea that dysfunctional political institutions will cooperate with their own public humiliation is also a piece of lunacy (and this time, one that beltway libertarians are peculiarly prone to).

ADDED: Highly relevant.

The founders of the Internet may have been slightly hippy-like, but they were mostly government-funded and fairly government-friendly. Cutting a deal with the Department of Commerce seemed like a pretty good idea to them at the time.

The core Bitcoin developers are cypherpunks who do what they do because they don’t trust governments or the global banking system and are trying to build a distributed and autonomous system, one that is impervious to regulation and meddling by anyone at any time. At some level, Bitcoin was designed to not care what regulators think.

ADDED: More Internet / Bitcoin comparison.

Gold balanced the forces of the world. As such, no matter where you went, gold was transferable to the local currency. Whether you were in France or Florence, your gold was good. In fact, if you weren’t in your own backyard, using your own community’s debt instruments, gold was basically the only thing that was accepted. So whether you wanted to buy a copy of the Bible, fight a foreign war, or build a palace, you needed gold.

The roots grew so deep that the electorate began knocking on democracy’s door, demanding more and more. Where once they were thankful for their new liberties and freedoms, they soon found themselves adrift at sea, lost and without cause. To unyoke this infinite expansion of wants from the finite, gold-bound resources of the state, the Revolutionaries had no choice but to take hold of the money supply of their nations, wresting it from the grasp of sound money and all the goodness and balance it had fostered. This was the only way to keep up the ruse and placate the electorate. So they instituted Central Banking at a scale never before seen. …

(The whole thing is glorious, including — in the original — footnotes.)

China’s rise has been psychologically disquieting to many in America and the West generally, because in China, capitalism flourishes without liberal democracy. This is regarded as somehow unnatural and illegitimate because it punctures the Western myth of the universality of certain political values and of the inevitability of the development of certain political forms. And unlike, say, Japan or India, China only wants to be China and not an honorary member of the West.

It is ahistorical because it ignores the inconvenient fact that every Western country was capitalist long before it was either liberal or democratic as those terms are today understood …

… much sanity follows.

Strangely so called Reactionaries coming to Fences marked Republic, Constitution, United States wish to obliterate these walls utterly. (9:09 AM, 7 January 2015.)

Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and professor at Yale University. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines a new global network woven by money and technology that functions almost like a world shadow government. Though it’s hard to grasp the full extent of this invisible network, Easterling argues that it’s not too late for us to change it.

If it’s not too late to ‘change’ it, it’s not too late to intensify and consolidate it. Tech-comm NRx is obviously doing OK, if it already looks this scary.

… just because the administration hides the risk from conflict using cutouts and proxies doesn’t actually mean the risk goes away. It only means the risk is hidden “off the books”. It only means you can’t easily measure it.

There’s a conservation law at work here, which is always a positive sign of realist seriousness. To publicly promote a political profile of peculiarly self-congratulating moral earnestness it is simultaneously necessary to feed the shadows. What happens unseen is essential to the purification of the image. The Obama Administration is only significant here insofar as it grasps the deep political logic of democracy — and its subordination to sovereign PR — with such exceptional practical clarity. Better by far to indiscriminately drone potential enemies to death on the unmonitored periphery than to rough up a demonstrated terrorist in front of a TV camera. It’s the future you wanted (Xenosystems readers excepted). To imagine anything fundamentally different working under democratic conditions is sheer delusion.

Adam Garfinkle has a thoughtful commentary on the US Senate torture report that wanders into the same territory.

Everyone seems to take for granted now that this was a “natural” CIA assignment of some sort, but it is passing strange that this should be the case. Not to belabor the background with a primer, but for those who have been watching too much crappy, self-righteous fiction on TV and in the movies, the CIA — before 911 at least — was a pretty small organization with a very minor percentage of its budget, personnel, and activity devoted to “operations” — dirty tricks, false-flagging, whacking people, and so forth. The Agency did wander off the reservation back in the day, which is what the Church Committee hearings and subsequent reforms were meant to set right. The vast bulk of CIA activity before and certainly after the mid-1970s concerned what is called collections and analysis, some of which falls under the rubric of (human) spying, but much of which is just fancified library work. As the morning of September 12, 2001 dawned, did the CIA have any significant experience with interrogating Islamist insurgents and terrorists? No. Did it have any experience with interrogating bad guys of any kind? Some; for example in Central America back in the 1980s, but nearly all of those involved in that business — and there were only a few — had long since departed the Agency. […] … So … why was the CIA anointed for the task after 911 …?

In its essentials, his answer is the same Fernandez gives. Rumsfeld’s DoD simply refused to accept it. US Mil. is a public institution, and there was no way they were going to handle people outside Geneva Convention protections, with the responsibility to extract critical intelligence from them. That would all have to happen off the books. The CIA picked up the tar baby.

As the Cathedral becomes ever more holier than Jesus, it produces — through systematic administrative necessity — a dark twin. This is a basic structure of social reality that NRx is uniquely positioned to acknowledge (although it is far more widely recognized). As democracy ‘matures’, reality is processed increasingly in secret. That, at least, we understand.

Dreher’s post is seriously interesting. One immediate hook:

Steve Sailer says that the Shallow State is a complement to the Deep State. The Shallow State is, I think, another name for what the Neoreactionaries call “The Cathedral” …

As a State Church, the Cathedral is essentially bound to publicity. Its principal organs — media and education — are directed towards the promulgation of faith. It tends towards an identification with its own propaganda, and therefore — in Mike Lofgren’s words — to the full manifestation of visible government. Perfect coincidence of government with the transparent public sphere approaches a definition of the progressive telos. Since Neoreaction is particularly inclined to emphasize the radical dysfunctionality of this ideal, it naturally presupposes that real government lies elsewhere. In this respect, NRx is inherently destined to formulate a model of hidden or occult government — that which the Cathedral runs upon — which inevitably coincides, in all fundamentals, with the deep state.

What then? Has there been a direct NRx address to the quesion, what do we make of the deep state? Moldbug even declares: “… the United States does not in fact have a ‘deep state.'” In context, this is a complex and suggestive evasion, but it is an evasion nonetheless. There can be no call upon neoreactionaries to articulate their relation to something that does not exist.

In contrast to the Master, I am thoroughly convinced that a US deep state exists, and that the problem of articulation is a very different one. Public articulacy is — at least — not obviously appropriate to the deep state, for transcendental philosophical or occultist reasons (which are the same), since it is the very nature of hidden government not to be a public object. Public representation of the deep state is exposure — an intrinsically political, antagonistic engagement. It’s Wikileaks. This is not to denounce such an operation, reactively, but merely to note that the question has thereby been missed. The righteousness of state sublimation into the public sphere is assumed (and this, to repeat, is progressivism itself).

Under the name of the Cathedral, Nrx depicts the state phenomenon as a degenerative abomination. The deep state (or state-in-itself), in contrast, poses a far more cryptic theoretical and practical problem. It’s worth puzzling over, for at least a while.

That’s an elementary proposition, as far as this blog is concerned. It’s worth stating nakedly, since it is probably less obvious to others. That much follows from it is unlikely to be controversial, even among those who find it less than compelling, or simply repulsive.

One major source of obscurity is the category of ‘high trust cultures’ — with which neoreactionaries tend naturally to identify. There is plenty to puzzle over here, admittedly. This post will make no serious effort to even scratch the surface of the questions that arise. Instead, it contends that the culture primarily commended for its trustfulness has been conspicuously innovative in the development of trustless institutions. These begin with the foundations of Occidental reason, and especially the rigorous criterion of logical and mathematical proof. A proof substitutes for trust. In place of a simple declaration, it presents (a demanded) demonstration. The compliant response to radical distrust has epitomized Western conceptions of rationality since classical antiquity.

The twin pillars of industrial modernity (i.e. of capitalism) are trustless institutions. Natural science is experimental because it is distrustful, and thus demonstrative. It raises the classical demand for proof to a higher level of empirical skepticism, by extending distrust even to rational constructions, in cases where they cannot be critically tested against an experimental criterion. Only pure mathematics, and the most scrupulously formalized logical propositions, escape this demand for replicable evidence. The ultimate ground of the natural scientific enterprise is the presupposition that scientists should in no case be trusted, except through their reproducible results. Anything that requires belief is not science, but something else. Similarly, the market mechanism is an incarnation of trustless social organization. Caveat emptor. Capitalists, like scientists, exist to be distrusted. Whatever of their works cannot survive testing to destruction in the market place deservedly perish. Reputation, in its modern version, has to be produced through demonstration.

Prior to its demotic ruination — through positive trust in the people — distinctively modern republican governance was similarly founded in distrust. As formulated by John Adams (1772): “There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.” It has not been an excess of distrust that has brought this sage recommendation to nought.

For those seeking higher authority, Psalm 118:8-9 (ESV): “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes.” (My usual fanatical trust in the KJV betrayed me on this occasion.)

An appeal for trust is a reliably fatal failure mode for all public institutions. Trustless transaction is the future, and its name is Bitcoin. The deep cultural momentum is already familiar. Total depravity is the key to world historical predestination, and it is routed through the blockchain.