I should probably stress that this doesn’t mean the Protestants were wrong about priests being untrustworthy authorities, though.

Speaking of, strictly I should ask for your sources. However, what you’ve said seems more consistent with other things I’ve sourced than what you debunk, so I don’t actually feel the need.

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it is because the citizens of the Athenian demos recognized the virtue of civic investment.

This is probably not true. Either they effectively had an oligarchy due to the limited franchise, or they voted that way because it was socially embarrassing not to. As we can see, it is trivial to change what is socially embarrassing.

All societies made up of men with moral and civic virtue are successful regardless of their form of government

Temporarily. Reliance on virtue has been tried and it doesn’t work; it always erodes virtue. I’m not going to defend this properly, just consider it a possibility and keep your eyes open.

If the American residents were indeed more virtuous, it was because their environment punished those who weren’t. For purely pecuniary reasons, they would adopt more virtuous behaviours and then rationalize them.

Virtue often leads to riches. Riches make the environment forgiving. If a person steps into the environment’s former role, they are resisted and defeated in due course.

all human interactions, including those related to government, are defined in strictly material/economic terms.

Indeed a problem, but literally one step away from a solution.

The reason materials are valuable is because humans value them. Humans also value immaterial things. Indeed, usually the material is the means, not the end.

However, it is currently unfashionable to admit to wanting these immaterial things. As a loaded example, even if atheism is true, many wish it wasn’t, even atheists. So what does it mean about us that we want these things? Perhaps we should do something about it? These questions usually aren’t even raised, let alone investigated.

The utmost goal of this creature is not mechanical, material efficiency, but to be divine – to achieve supreme virtue.

Stated in a sublimely humanistic manner.

Why is supreme virtue the best? Because the creature feels it is the best. So, if some individual feels differently, for that individual, the best is in fact different.

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Wealth is one way to have the power to achieve your goals.

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children dream of being firefighters, astronauts, doctors, mothers – all professions which are afforded respect

They want to be admired. To the exclusion of things such as deserving to be admired. When told the fireman deserves benefits, they don’t check, they just do whatever it is that accrues the benefits.

Also, once again your point supports humanism, rather than opposing it.

If the men the boys grow up to be in fact think that firemen deserve benefits, then their wealth will go towards supplying those benefits, thus reducing their cost. If they in fact value firefighters above investment advisors, they will tend to open their wallets for firefighters and not IAs. Fortunately or unfortunately, the market responds to ideology.

If the men in fact have wealth to share, that is. If they’re living paycheck to paycheck, it doesn’t matter what they want.

(Is my theme clear? I kind of feel like I should make it clearer.)

The Biblical passages relating the difficulty of a rich man entering Heaven refer not to a man’s material success but to who he is – a “rich man”. A rich man is someone who is defined by his possessions: he has acquired them in order to become rich and not for some other purpose. Christ remarks that this essentially nihilistic state of being is not conducive to holistic spiritual health. By way of contrast, a man who for example works hard in order to provide a comfortable living for his wife and children may have the exact same material wealth but is not “a rich man” but “a good husband”. It is not the amount of material wealth but its immaterial purpose that matters. Thus, it is true that a virtuous poor man or slave can be morally good, but it is because of his virtue, not his poverty or submission. A man who defines himself by his material economic success – or lack of it – cannot find spiritual enlightenment.

The idea of rule by the materially-successful elite seems to me to be a recipe for total disaster. It is also simply more of the same. It clearly identifies the problem of modern liberal democracy: all human interactions, including those related to government, are defined in strictly material/economic terms. It then attempts to solve this problem with a steroidal injection. You are suggesting the replacement of Plato’s philosopher-kings with plutocrats. At least the philosopher-kings were born and raised to govern for the benefit of the city. This is Moldbug’s problem as well, and it is always the result of a fundamentally flawed secular humanist view of human nature. You treat human beings as ants which can be programmed by means of material incentives, with the goal of good government being to keep the ant-hill harmoniously scurrying through its motions. At least Plato’s polis realizes the human potential in its collective nature. You would build a polis of ants which in the whole is simply a larger mass of ants!

The purpose of human society, of human existence, is not material gain. The purpose of government is, as referenced in the U.S. Constitution which itself is derivative of de Vattel, to promote the general welfare. The bastardized modern corruption of the “general welfare clause” is completely at odds with its true meaning, which is that the entire point of engaging in the collective action of forming a government is to promote the good of “us” – the plurality. This presupposes the recognition that there is an “us” and that there are collective goods from which the “us” can benefit, which goods may require sacrifice on the part of the individual. This is the essence of virtue. It is also the basis of all successful religions, whether heathenry, Christianity, Hinduism, military esprit de corps or what have you: the true measure of a man, of his human virtue, is not in what he achieves for himself but in what he does to promote the collective good – the good of the participatory plural “us”.

You ought to read more Jack Donovan. Man does not want a comfortable existence: he wants his life to have meaning and importance. He wants to know that he matters, that his works will be remembered by his heirs and his community. Material wealth is a means to an end and nothing more: this is Christ’s message and the message of all religions which spiritually nurture successful societies. Man’s proper spiritual goal is virtue, not material success, and the symbol of virtue is the fasces.

You also ought to read the post by David Brin linked in this blog post. Brin, of course, doesn’t understand his own references, but that’s no reason to ignore what he says. He remarks that the citizens of democratic ancient Athens voted to invest silver in their future. Brin does not understand why: it is because the citizens of the Athenian demos recognized the virtue of civic investment. They understood there to be an “us” whose future ought to be considered. All societies made up of men with moral and civic virtue are successful regardless of their form of government, because to be virtuous is to understand one’s responsibility not to “me” but to “us”. Virtue is the sinew of the Way of the Gang, but the gang – the demos – comes first. The core of a multigenerational society is the family unit. Adam cannot be a virtuous husband without Eve; a man cannot be a virtuous member of society without a society.

This is the essence of the American Founders’ admonishment to the citizens of that new nation-state: in multiple speeches and writings they emphasized that effective republicanism requires a moral citizenry; that it is not a design of the Republic that it keeps the citizenry moral, but it is up to the moral citizenry to collectively keep the Republic. Contrary to the bromides of leftist-educated right-wing American pundits today, it is not the American form of government that was ever to be considered exceptional; after all, the founders seriously considered re-instituting a constitutional monarchy. What they thought exceptional was the moral virtue of the American people — a people whose morality was uncorrupted by the materialist trappings of European false-virtue, which confused manners with morals. When de Tocqueville later visited the country he remarked on the exceptional communal virtue of a frontier people who were both individually capable but constantly reminded of their communal dependence. American-style democracy, while it existed, was always in the spirit of the Athenian demos: independence not of the individual, but of the local community, bound together by means of the civic virtue felt by each member towards each of “us”.

Your deranged and unscientific allegiance to the false religion of secular humanism blinds you to the fundamental truth perhaps best described by the Biblical idea that man is created in the image of God. The utmost goal of this creature is not mechanical, material efficiency, but to be divine – to achieve supreme virtue. This fact is obvious to any observant student of human nature. What does a child dream of growing up to be? Not independently wealthy and able to live a life of leisure by means of winning a generous payment of damages in a trumped-up case of malpractice. No, children dream of being firefighters, astronauts, doctors, mothers – all professions which are afforded respect by even our degenerate society because the essence of their profession is to improve the collective good. A “beaver” capitalist, to use Carlyle’s designation, may indeed provide virtuous service to his community as a consequence of his quest for material wealth. But children do not dream of being beavers, they dream of glory: of the communal respect and its accompanying material benefits which accrue to the man or woman who is dedicated to collective good, not material gain. A boy doesn’t want to be a fireman because you get union benefits and an excellent pay package, and when told these accompany the job his assumption is not that this is because of the laws of supply and demand but because firemen “deserve” it.

A virtuous people does not care how government is funded because it doesn’t matter. For a people steeped in the virtue-destroying falsehoods of individualist liberalism, no mechanical design of a tax system can substitute for the loss of virtue. “No representation without taxation” falsely supposes that it is possible to create a virtuous society without a virtuous people. You make the same mistake as the proseletyzers of any temperance movement: you assume that by restructuring society so that people cannot drink, or smoke, or so that only those who work hard get to make political decisions, you will form the masses into a people who do not look for happiness in drinking and smoking, and who practice responsibility in their political governance. This mechanical solution appears the easier because you short-circuit the need to change people’s minds, and it is in fact impossible. The only way is to make the masses into a people who do not look for happiness in drink and smoke, or who practice civic responsibility, is to convince them that there is a meaningful, spiritual purpose to doing so. If you want to live in a good society you must convince the members of your society to be good. There are no shortcuts.

Nick, I don’t know if you’ve seen this yet but I thought this was clever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-33cuur-hTc

the original

Time.To.ReThink.That.One.

You see my Dear when you have the gun, you have the power. It’s a question of realizing it.

Perhaps there’s another Singularity …and you’ve missed it?

One -ary, -ist, -at, -an, -ian or another hopes for an enlightened despot, another hopes for an enlightened elite, yet another for enlightened masses. A nice continuum of hoped-for forms of (no doubt “permanent”) government. As with most continua applied to humans and their affairs, the extremes are likely the least tenable–relatively enlightened despots devolve within the space of a generation or so, and enlightening a relatively large enough swath of the masses to count as such is impossible even in the event of a relatively homogenous population.

So somewhere in the middle you have a muddle–perhaps something like “democracy” but limited in various ways (by the way, given recent trends in US campaign finance laws, things have moved in the direction of more money/property=more votes/political power quite markedly, by the way, though not in such a nice clean and honest way as proposed above; the so-called 1% or so seem to be doing more or less what you’re suggesting, admin, albeit relatively undercover); perhaps something like an imperial dynasty, also limited in its power in various ways.

“Dreams of an arising, ruthless, eugenically self-escalating, Sino-capitalist hegemony” come always already “dashed,” don’t they, just like dreams of any other “permanent government” (or even dreams of a permanent lack of government, because though one might think one doesn’t immanentize the eschaton, well, one does, really, even if one thinks one yearns for an anti-eschaton)? “Crystalline cyberperfection.” Reactionary crack, reactionary cyberporn. Have another hit, click another pixelated silicone tit. It’s the same release of happy-brain chemicals that commies and xtians and “warmists” and all the rest of us get from tickling our own individual political fantasy pleasure centers, innit?

And while speaking of victimology as a problem, seems to me that reactionaries come across time and again as inherently resentful self-identified victims seeking either to restore what was (imagined) lost and/or forge in the future that which will avenge (imagined) loss and install regime that will fulfill fantasies of what once was/will be again? Mad-Lib it: Are today’s “reactionaries” really any different/better than ___________? But I’m not a reactionary, so I’m certainly not right about any of this, right.

“We might be getting a little over-excited…” Oh, no, not at all.