I’m assuming this wasn’t intended as a Satanic argument for Monarchy, but it works as one:

Q: Why does the devil keep his deals?
A: As an immortal, he has an infinite time horizon of other deals he jeopardizes if he betrays any given deal. Therefore the opportunity cost of any betrayal is too high.
Q: What does that make politicians, then?
A: Lower in ethical reliability than the devil.

Even a demonic permanent government makes a better contractual partner than the most angelic temporary regime.

(Recalled by David Chapman).

I’m repeating an initial twitter interaction here because it seems quite critical to some of the plate tectonic rumblings working through NRx. My prompt was:

Does anybody really think America will have a king before it has a (positive or negative) techno-intelligence catastrophe?

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) February 11, 2014

To which Michael Anissimov immediately replied:

@Outsideness yep

— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) February 11, 2014

(Of course there was more — interesting stuff.)

For some suggestive remarks about social prospects and differential speeds, see Andrea Castillo’s latest (and excellent) article on the tech-economy at Umlaut.

“The economists are right about economics but there’s more to life than economics” Nydwracu tweets, with quote marks already attached. Whether economists are right about economics very much depends upon the economists, and those that are most right are those who make least claim to comprehension, but that is another topic than the one to be pursued in this post. It’s the second part of the sentence that matters here and now. The guiding question: Can the economic sphere be rigorously delimited, and thus superseded, by moral-political reason (and associated social institutions)?

It is already to court misunderstanding to pursue this question in terms of ‘economics’, which is (for profound historical reasons) dominated by macroeconomics — i.e. an intellectual project oriented to the facilitation of political control over the economy.  In this regard, the techno-commercial thread of Neoreaction is distinctively characterized by a radical aversion to economics, as the predictable complement of its attachment to the uncontrolled (or laissez-faire) economy. It is not economics that is the primary object of controversy, but capitalism — the free, autonomous, or non-transcended economy.

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