The new aristocratic project seeks to dissolve the state by orchestrating conditions and situations that strain the system and give the appearance of invalidating democracy.
Like all political movements, a thought collective1 has grown around this goal; the Mont Pèlerin Society, for example, has had a “policy, as originally formulated by Hayek, of winning the battle of ideas as a prelude to victory in the political battle against the servile state.”2 The new aristocracy comes to the philosophical battlefield with a conceptual framework that is made up of a mix of rationalizations, speculation, and debunked concepts dressed in new clothing. However, its shoddiness does not make it ineffective: it is clever and deliberate in its parasitism, providing a structure within which people may align and work to dismantle democracy while extracting value from it.
In this piece, we will explore models of change that are foundational to the aristorcratic thought collective, such as the “singularity” and “political entropy.” These models of change are naïve and quaint, relying on clumsy pseudo-scientific metaphors. Models of change inform economics and policy, ultimately dictating how public activity is understood and controlled. Current paradigms about change encourage a worldview where public activity should be “encased”3 beneath an emerging international aristocratic class. These core beliefs also help to explain why the technology sector, with cooperation from leaders at both state and federal levels, has consolidated into one monolithic bet on cybernetics (marketed as “AI”).
A belief in “The Singularity” is a presumption that there must occur a discontinuous jump from one point in history (one describable state of affairs) to the next. Continuity—including continuity of human understanding itself—is de-emphasized in the model. In the mind of someone who believes in the “singularity,” the world is disorganized (often interpreted as unmeasured or uncategorized), but nevertheless partially “describable.” The future is seen as a generally-unimaginable state of affairs that is also unknowably achieved. Because the future must still be assumed to be forthcoming, it is said to occur by a “jump” called “singularity.”
Current paradigms about change encourage a worldview where public activity should be “encased” beneath an emerging international aristocratic class.
Von Neumann coined the term “singularity” and had a somewhat nuanced definition, focused on the technological.4 He conceived of the “singularity” as:
the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life[] which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.5
Friedrich Hayek, a contemporaneous thinker, espoused “singularity”-type concepts as well, though his phrasing emphasizes his belief in fundamental human limitations of understanding:
To talk about a society about which either the observer or any of its members knows all the particular facts is to talk about something wholly different from anything which has ever existed—a society in which most of what we find in our society would not and could not exist and which, if it ever occurred, would possess properties we cannot even imagine.6
Von Neumann and Hayek both emphasize ceilings: for von Neumann (via Ulam) the barrier is a technology which demarcates when “human affairs, as we know them, could not continue,” and for Hayek the barrier is when society “would possess properties we cannot even imagine,” specifically when “its members know[] all [] particular facts.” Note that Hayek’s view hints at the eschatological in that some fundamental transcendence of (his definition of) human limitation must occur.7
These misanthropic speculations were taken as mandates or rubrics about what the definitive “arrival” of a “futuristic-enough” future would look like.
The “singularity” as conceived in the modern period marries the worst of both paradigms: blending von Neumann’s definitional technological focus with Hayek’s view of human limitation into one fatalistic and fantastic mindset. With this context it is easier to make sense of cult-like Silicon Valley rhetoric about the “singularity” and its imminence: in part, these misanthropic speculations were taken as mandates or rubrics about what the definitive “arrival” of a “futuristic-enough” future would look like. The emphasis on discontinuity overly couples the idea of disruption with successful progress, which is at once an obvious truism and an unnecessary assumption. While the Silicon Valley mantra of “disruption” is undoubtedly a form of civilizational change, it obscures the more important question of whether it is a form of civilizational progress. The concept of “singularity” and its implied absolute “disruption” is a convenient cloak under which to effect an extreme anti-democratic changing of the guard.
Of course, these science fiction-like mandates are problematic for technical pursuits: brains are plastic, people adjust to technology quickly in the grand scheme of things, and the future is always simply the mundane present when it arrives. Concepts like the “singularity” seem built not to inform or provoke thought, but to create uncertainty, fear, and a sense of powerlessness and fatalism in the public at large and even in technologists themselves8. At the same time, the concept also discourages critique about technology’s impact or its integration into society, as any criticism can more easily be chalked up to technology illiteracy or a misinformed Luddism under their discontinuity paradigm.
Hayek’s vision of the future as nothing more than the capture and indeterminate use of large amounts of “particular facts” remains influential. As Hayek believed, “neither science nor any known technique enables us to overcome the fact that no mind, and therefore also no deliberately directed action, can take account of all the particular facts which are known to some men but not as a whole to any particular person.”9 In the current era we focus much societal effort on expanding the use of computerized systems, even when limiting disciplines to their computable data limits our overall ontology.10 Hence Hayek’s vision remains relevant both by the force of those carrying forward his ideology by hoarding vast amounts of computable data and by the inertia from its unexamined assumption that large collections of entities, such as facts, spontaneously generate useful things.11 If we purposely ignore what we cannot compute, then it is easier for a Hayekian to make the assertion that all “particular facts” that matter have been captured. Thus, if one accepts Hayekian assumptions, the sought after “futuristic-enough” future would look imminent; and if one wanted to project success in a Hayekian system, they would be incentivized to accelerate the collection and “use” of such data.
In addition to monetary gain, “ASI” systems as currently conceived would preserve the key Hayekian assumption that humans are hopelessly ignorant while opening a statistical loophole that enables technocrats to amass political power.
It is curious that totally absent from Hayek’s frame is the recognition of the human ability for various modes of holistic thought (among other modalities that would satisfy his concerns about handling facts). One must wonder whether he was biased by or gave preference to his own psychology and style of thought. Indeed, Hayek’s worldview is convenient for the profiteers and would-be technocrats among us because the total collection of “particular facts” that make up big data, in a literal-minded sense, are indeed too vast to be simultaneously held by any one “observer” or the “members” of society with current practices. However, such has always been the case with bare fact: higher orders of thought, creativity, and cooperation arose out of necessity from these conditions. Nevertheless, we hear sales pitches for AI systems as leading to a world-scale “information processor” (to borrow Hayekian terminology) such as an “artificial super-intelligence” (or “ASI”) which is needed to handle sundry “particular facts” after which society “would possess properties we cannot even imagine.”12
In addition to monetary gain for elites, “ASI” systems as currently conceived would preserve the key Hayekian assumption that humans are hopelessly ignorant while opening a statistical loophole13 that enables technocrats to themselves amass political power approaching that of a central planner. Remember that Hayek defines ignorance not by any practical measure but with his own particular slant; simply that there are “permanent limitations of our factual knowledge”14 and further that any higher attainment of knowledge above the merely factual, according to him, is better labeled a “synoptic delusion”15: “the fiction that all the relevant facts are known to some one mind, and that it is possible to construct from this knowledge of the particulars a desirable social order.”16 In his McCarthyite haste to prove that there should not exist a “central planner” in society because no person can possibly know all facts, he flattens the definition of higher knowledge to merely the collection of all facts.17 This act of reduction created an overestimation of the importance of statistical techniques, which indeed can handle large amount of data within certain limits.
Hayekian assumptions allow major players far too much gray area to define the potential of their tools and products by claiming that humans should defer to them. In the case of AI systems, it is suggested that humans should expect to be surpassed in “intelligence,” that they are therefore not owed explanations of how the systems work, options for better systems, or input into how these systems or data should be used. The AI mavens insist that we will either be too stupid to understand a future “ASI’s” workings or output, or the “intelligence” machines should remain oracle-like black boxes where answers are given, conveniently put into natural language outputs dripping with authority and confidence. All this follows from the incorrect assumptions that, because information as currently conceived and as currently implemented encodes all possible facts, and because humans cannot remember as many facts as a database can store, therefore LLMs must be more “intelligent.” And so while it may be possible via the statistical loophole for higher conceptual unities of facts to be admitted to exist and still remain in keeping with Hayek, human attainment of those generalities can still be assumed to be out of reach via a redefinition of generality to that which proprietary AI systems can produce. This could even lead to an “unrecognizable” future18, perhaps controlled by “ASI” (read: controlled by the owners of “ASI” solutions). All the better for those who’d like to sell products to intermediate between humans and understanding.19
The new aristocratic thought collective is centered around these future-focused anachronisms: quaint notions from the past about the future which have managed to escape particular notice due to their seemingly-vague and seemingly-overbroad claims. They persist well beyond the historical periods in which they may have been considered plausible due a variety of interlocking factors: political and financial reasons to obscure objective assessment of scientific and technical progress; the selection process of experts where, for example, there is an under-investment in and irrelevance of philosophy of science compared to an over-investment in and overly-credulous awe of science entrepreneurs; our gerontocracy, which consists of many senior members older than the Mont Pèlerin Society itself; and even simple sentimentality.
The “singularity,” especially as more recently defined in the Zeitgeist, is simply the application of Hayek’s assumption of human ignorance onto the state, be it democratically organized or otherwise. Walter Lippmann, for example, arrogantly claimed to see no difference between any form of the state during a time when it was very clear that democracy is indeed a fundamentally-better structure than authoritarianism. He makes this comment even after witnessing Hitler’s rise to power:
Throughout the world, in the name of progress, men who call themselves communists, socialists, fascists, nationalists, progressives, and even liberals, are unanimous in holding that government with its instruments of coercion must, by commanding the people how they shall live, direct the course of civilization and fix the shape of things to come .... The recently enfranchised masses and the leaders of thought who supply their ideas are almost completely under the spell of this dogma [of central planning or, more generally, state power]. Only a handful here and there, groups without influence, isolated and disregarded thinkers, continue to challenge it .... Conceivably there has come into the world during this generation some new element which makes it necessary for us to undo the work of emancipation ....20
The overzealous erasure of nuance evinced by Lippmann—painting all forms of state-based governance as forms of central planning above all else—wears thin when looking at the conduct taken by the Allies and the Axis that was already highly visible by the time he published these ideas: even given the “particular facts” available at the time, it should have come as no surprise that only one side conducted genocide and systematic human experimentation related to the war. Nevertheless, he goes so far as to entertain “undo[ing] the work of emancipation” in pursuit of his anti-state ideology; needless to say, the modern democratic state is the means by which emancipation was achieved and actively preserved in places such as the US.
The neoliberals, and the West itself, have adopted Hayek’s interest in what seems to be voluntary mindlessness and arbitrary limitation to human understanding; in many ways an explicitly anti-rational, yet still economically-profitable, position.
US democracy was already a structure meant to prevent central planning to the extent of a “supreme authority”21 with rigid “authoritarian” structure, to borrow Hayek’s terminology. Hayek, as Lippmann, overlooks the deliberate and careful construction of such states when he states: “Many of the institutions of society which are indispensable conditions for the successful pursuit of our conscious aims are in fact the result of customs, habits, or practices which have been neither invented nor observed with any such purpose in view.”22 This over-reliance on “norms” or “habit,” where they are presumed to be unchanging givens and pieces of infrastructure, is characteristic of the thought collective.
Clarity on this point, of course, takes particular prominence in the current period where the architecture of the Framers is being challenged daily by confederates both inside and outside US leadership. Undeniably, the United States governance system was built with very explicit purposes in mind regardless of whatever faults can be laid at its door; it is no understatement to claim that the US is architected, a novus ordo based on the strength of the rationalistic aim which emerged from the Enlightenment era. The Declaration of Independence itself was a response to an established order, not a pro-forma articulation of norms. There is no legitimate reason as to why the rationalistic purpose could not be applied to other elements of society, including economics: the outmoded concept of “central planning” is only one of many other rationally-informed structures which presume the presence and legitimacy of a state, and yet early neoliberals insist on an odd caricature of the state under cover of preventing planned economies.
The neoliberals, and the West itself, have adopted Hayek’s interest in what seems to be voluntary mindlessness and arbitrary limitation to human understanding; in many ways an explicitly anti-rational, yet still economically-profitable, position. As Hayek writes: “it is the utilization of much more knowledge than anyone can possess, and therefore the fact that each [person] moves within a coherent structure most of whose determinants are unknown to him, that constitutes the distinctive feature of all advanced civilizations.”23 By forcing the presumption of a human limitation that extends to a denial of the agency and higher thought of individuals, the legitimacy of the state itself and the deliberate work put into it is denied; all the more pernicious that so many are indoctrinated into Hayekian thought without a close, much less critical examination of its precepts, even worse that few participants in Hayekian structures know of Hayek at all—including technical researchers.
Along with the erasure of deliberate governmental architecture in Hayek’s worldview—a worldview, it must be reiterated, which has become widely adopted—he takes extra liberties that allow for an even deeper ingression of aristocracy. He draws a strong distinction between what he calls “public” law (administrative law, any proscriptive government mandate, and even the Constitution itself) and “private” law (so-called “common law,” norms of conduct, and the sundry collection of case law). According to Hayek, all manner of things that could be called “public” law can be confidently done away with due to an imaginary safety net provided by his notion of “spontaneous order” which itself is mostly elevated terminology for an unregulated market. As he writes: “what the spontaneous order of society provides for us is more important for everyone, and therefore for the general welfare, than most of the particular services which the organization of government can provide.”24
Even the norms and common law he leans on so heavily to prevent barbarism in his worldview are left up to an incredibly-naïve and ill-informed faith in the reasonableness of potential tyrants: “Even when as a result of revolution or conquest the whole structure of government changes, most of the rules of just conduct [] will remain in force ... because only by satifying general expectations can a new government obtain the allegiance of its subjects and thereby become ‘legitimate.’”26 Entirely missing from Hayek’s accounting are the incredible horrors and material damage any given regime may incur prior to its ultimate delegitimization. It is astounding seeing an Austrian make such blithe and cavalier claims after the “particular facts” provided by Hitler and the National Socialist regime; a regime which Hayek himself had previously condemned with some detail in one of his most popular works, The Road to Serfdom.25
What’s more, Hayek’s position is an over-investment of faith into the culture itself by implication. In an earlier passage of Rules and Order, Hayek explicitly rejects the Hobbesian approach of “rationalist political theory” that attempts “to make everything rational” in favor of his own “spontaneous order” theory, which supposedly permanently defies rational conception. He does so by rejecting the “desire to remodel society after the image of individual man” in favor of “culture,” which he equates with all “those unintended consequences of individual action which all the truly social represents.”27 In other words, the basis of culture itself is the resultant activity of a “spontaneous order” and is held to be properly distinct from government: “These spontaneously ordered activities of the members of society certainly could and would go on even if all the activities peculiar to government temporarily ceased.”28 Given Hayek’s over-emphasis on culture, his claim that its basis is that of “spontaneous order” can be seen as a metaphysical backing for a kind of neo-völksich movement29: where many original völkisch thinkers “argue[d] for the acceptance of culture and the rejection of civilization as a means for ending the alienation within German society,”30 a newer variation would be the acceptance of culture and the rejection of the state as a means of reconciliation.31
Interestingly, despite the minimization of deliberate order in Hayek’s worldview, he does not forbid the existence of his “supreme authority,” especially in large organizations:
In the most complex types of organizations, indeed, little more than the assignment of particular functions and the general aim will be determined by the command of the supreme authority, while the performance of these functions will be regulated only by rules.32
He has no issue, for example, with the organization of large firms “rest[ing] on a relation of command and obedience”33 but insists that, to remain “friends of liberty,” “supreme authorit[ies]” need only provide a “general aim” and “assign[] particular functions” to individuals.34 (Conveniently, we in the present period are now explicitly being told by AI leaders that “particular functions” can be “assign[ed]” to AI machines instead of people.)
If the alternative is abject tyranny or ludicrous interference in process, then Hayek’s ideas are hardly novel: he is describing something like a figurehead—someone with little actual functionary responsibilities that occupies the throne while people beneath do the actual thinking and do the actual work. Note, however, that Hayek’s model provides no structural guarantees for this non-interference: just as easily as the courtiers could run affairs while a king preoccupies himself with personal distractions, so too could a tyrannical leader choose to enforce Hayek’s supposed fear, “a hierarchical structure of the whole of society” where a “single supreme authority[] determines what each individual must do.”35 In the actual structure Hayek suggests, it is left up to the “supreme authority” to elect the “spontaneous order” model. In other words, because Hayek’s “spontaneous order” is not subject to the limits of, for example, the US Constitution, it does nothing to structurally enforce the preemption of tyranny in matters of governance.
Hayek’s “spontaneous order” does nothing to structurally enforce the preemption of tyranny in matters of governance.
Nevertheless, a number of prominent economists and social theorists, like those of the Cowles Commission,
eventually rebranded themselves as experts in “organization,” a term that assumed brash capacious dimensions so as to cover such varied phenomena as the internal structuring of large companies, the design of cost-plus contracts for the mobilization of industry during wartime, the evaluation of Soviet central planning algorithms, and the crafting of regulation .... [A] fascination with “organization” became conflated with themes of algorithmic reason and analysis of information across the immediate postwar social sciences.36
At the heart of the matter is where control ultimately lies. Hayek claims that, “[t]he more complex the order aimed at, ... the more dependent control will be on rules rather than on specific commands”37; this is supposed to imply some safe state of affairs in which there is no one person in control, especially at the level of government. But to justify this claim, Hayek must create a distinction that is plagued by relativism: exogenous38 control is exercised over a system of organization from the outside of some chosen bound, whereas endogenous control, from which springs forth “spontaneous order,” is a term for an order that supposedly appears within that bound; but all this distinction has done is encourage playing with where bounds are defined and making control as invisible as possible. Nowhere is there a means by which to guarantee that Hayek’s “rules” would be less faulty, oppressive, or non-constructive simply because they are not commands: a “supreme authority” for a firm volitionally chooses to adhere to the Hayekian program just as freely as they may elect a more traditional hierarchical approach at any time and for any reason. Empirically, there is less accountability for increasingly-distant leadership in Hayekian systems, such as our technically-legal but functionally-unethical and wholly-inefficient private health insurance system.
Note that a “supreme authority” of an organization necessarily has exogenous control as their supremacy by definition frames them as outside the system they govern, especially when their main role is to provide “the general aim” and install persons to fulfill “particular functions.” It is telling that, when it comes to the presence of a “supreme authority,” Hayek uses this term negatively when examining “authoritarian” governmental structure but positively when examining a firm—the structures in society that would be doing most of the heavy lifting in his system as a whole given his de-emphasis of the state. Hayek, for example, prefers to use the terms “‘society’ and ‘government’” and avoid the word “state” entirely because, to him, it is a “metaphysically charged term”39 over-affiliated with Hegel (as though Hegel suddenly invented the general model out of whole cloth). Hayek’s “spontaneous order” is little more than a woo description of the concept of delegation at best or an exhortation not to micromanage the serfs at worst. Like the Invisible Hand, “spontaneous order” is of dubious actuality, but even if “spontaneous order” were true, blind faith in it certainly falls under the naturalistic fallacy in which any “natural” thing is naïvely assumed to be good (which is also true of the Invisible Hand).
Hayek seems to have no ability to understand or appreciate the democratic structure as a solution to his fears about “central planning,” that is, of “authoritarian” systems. Far from it. His real motivation is the tired conservative diatribe against social services, which he insists can have nothing to do with “just conduct”: “it has chiefly been in the service of so-called ‘social’ aims that the distinction between rules of just conduct and rules for the organization of services of government has been progressively obliterated.”40
Were the role of the presidency, over a period of years, to be transformed both structurally and in the public mind into the Hayekian “supreme authority”—which dispenses breathing room and freedoms to the governed only on a volitional basis—then the United States itself would be transformed into something of a corporo-monarchical system. (As scholars note about the Hayekians: “With increasing frequency, these new organization theorists [] began to contemplate designing new institutions, ranging from novel legal regimes to ‘solutions’ for public goods provision to the reorganization of entire economies”41; why would such a broad project stop just shy of designing an alternative to the state itself given how explicitly it is despised by the Austrians at the root of it?) In Hayek’s model, freedom for those who exogenously control a system of organization is unconditional, especially. On the other hand, those who inhabit such a system have freedoms which are necessarily contingent upon the will of the “supreme authority” who voluntarily chooses to dispense them; for if there is no state, then how else could such freedoms be achieved?42
The surveillance state itself is perhaps explicitly Hayekian: gathering as many “particular facts” as possible about the populace in lieu of higher, more abstract models which likely would have made the actually-problematic members of American society clearer earlier on.
It should come as no surprise to find figures like Curtis Yarvin—one of the thought leaders of the neoreactionary movement and “brain truster” to Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon, and even Vice President-Elect JD Vance—espouse something very similar to these Hayekian structures: a monarchical system hybridized with viewing the state as a corporate entity where its populace are shareholders. Hayek does not reject a true “supreme authority” as such but rather publicly-controlled state enforcers who regulate and inhibit outsize private power. In the modern era, this could look like massive contracts or special economic rights given by state and federal agencies to firms owned and controlled by the aristocrats43. To guarantee their own local centralization of power44 in a nation with an already-centralized government, they would therefore need a national centralization of power—the monarch—to guarantee their outsize aristocratic rights and to prevent a state reaction to a direct threat to the state itself, all the more achievable if the monarch were installed via official state procedures such as the voting system. Such a “supreme authority” would be in place to modestly govern the “spontaneous order” and “self-generating” behaviors, which include the full independent actions of the localized aristocrats.45
(The surveillance state itself is perhaps explicitly Hayekian: gathering as many “particular facts” as possible about the populace in lieu of higher, more abstract models which likely would have made the actually-problematic members of American society clearer earlier on. Mass surveillance, of course, would pair well with a Hayekian “supreme authority” in government.)
Across multiple administrations we see continued failures to issue “specific commands”; rather, the government—which in Hayek’s framework is “the biggest kind of organization” and therefore should be maximally dependent on “rules rather than specific commands”—has become mired in technicalities, complications, bureaucracies, and, frankly, all manner of excuses to never have to effect justice or a vigorous defense of the public against private interests; worse still that it brings on those that actively collaborate with foreign enemies, attempt to crash the financial system, or incite insurrection. This volitional dereliction of their duty to govern—for it is unquestionably a choice made by our elected leaders—may give the appearance of some kind of natural failure of democracy and subsequent pending death of the state, but the reality is that there is an active attempt to destroy it, and our leadership, knowing or otherwise, actively contributes while usually enriching themselves. It is no wonder why the public has been offered those who are or will be octogenerians while in office by both major parties over recent election cycle; it is no wonder why charlatans currently inhabit and especially in the immediate future will inhabit some of the most important positions in the country, or why frauds have continually occupied some of the most important stations in leadership in technical industries.
The threat of the “central planner,” long used to justify deregulation, is merely a bogeyman, and even the fear of over-centralization, it seems, is a mislead. Instead, the end effect of the work of many new aristocrats, neoliberals, and their technocrat “brain truster” contingent seems to be against publicly-defined and publicly-controlled governance altogether.
Curtis Yarvin writes extensively about what he terms “political entropy.” “Political entropy” is the second influential model of change to come from von Neumann’s work and thoughts; it is a misapplication of statistical mechanics metaphors onto political analyses.
Political entropy, he claims, explains a “fundamental difference between” his idiosyncratic definitions of “right and left”: “Right represents peace, order and security; left represents war, anarchy, and crime.”46 He then assumes that those on the left are attracted to “power gained by sowing disorder and subverting natural hierarchy47, per the identification of ‘left’ as the direction of increasing political entropy.”
“Political entropy” is a misapplication of statistical mechanics metaphors onto political analyses.
There are countless things wrong with this construction. For one, his worldview allows for terroristic far-right individuals who “sow[] disorder” if they reinforce, rather than “subvert[],” a “natural hierarchy.” And yet he writes: “Progressivism is obviously entropic. Obviously, its enemy is order. Progressives instinctively despise formality, authority, and hierarchy.” What is actually obvious is the logical failing here. Anyone, whether progressive or conservative, can build a system and thereby reduce societal “entropy” by Yarvin’s own definition. The motive of a system has no bearing on its “measure of entropy.”
What’s more, his chosen frame of thermodynamic entropy is childish when compared to more sophisticated possibilities; for example, if one were to frame progressives and conservatives as rival coalitions in a game-theoretic model, then one could consider measuring the Shannon entropy of their respective strategies within the existing game structure; more interesting still would be some entropic measure of games themselves, modeled after how each coalition desires society as a whole to function. Such considerations, however, would require Yarvin to overcome his over-educated ennui and set aside his “third-rate authoritarian David Foster Wallace” writing style; instead, he puts all his effort into justifying his ideal “hierarchy.”
Yarvin’s worldview is a petty, fear-based mindset shoehorned into scientific jargon. As he continues: “Reactionary political theorists such as Hobbes liked to conceive of the state in terms of an ordered system, a sort of clockwork. Progressivism is sand in the gears of the clock .... So the progressive is, indeed, the polar opposite of the reactionary. Just as order and stability are essential to reaction, disorder and destruction are essential to progressivism.” (Regarding definitions of progressivism, we prefer to borrow from a general point by Whitehead: “In some measure or other, progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious.”48 Under this definition, Yarvin is correct to state that “the progressive is, indeed, the polar opposite of the reactionary” since he works with, and at his best provides, mostly only the obvious.)
Referring to Hobbes as a reactionary gives us a clue as to the lineage of Yarvin’s simplistic, quasi-scientific framing of politics. Where Hobbes wrote Leviathan in the face of the English Civil War—a war about the balance of power between royalty and representative politicians—and came to the conclusion that only a strong system of governance could prevent such occasions49, Yarvin views the exertion of order upon the masses, especially the exertion of order from hyper-conservative corridors, as a “reaction” to a manifest “disorder”: Hobbes views “natural law” as “anarchy and the condition of war”50 and “civil law” as that by which the former is “abridged and restrained ... without which there cannot possibly be any peace,”51 and Yarvin instead claims that progressives in particular—rather than humans writ large—are the source of social disorder. From here, Yarvin eventually concludes that democracy needs to be thrown out in place of his corporo-monarchical model. In this way, Yarvin’s “reaction” is a disciplinary action taken by supposedly more high-minded people than the rabble upon whom “order” is being imposed; these lessers conducting mindless activity not unlike the unagentive behaviors of thermodynamic systems.
Ironically, Yarvin’s simplistic antidemocratic stance is denigrated by Hobbes: “There be other names of government in the histories and books of policy; as tyranny and oligarchy; but they are not the names of other forms of government, but of the same forms misliked .... [T]hey which find themselves grieved under a democracy call it anarchy, which signifies want of government.”52 If we view Yarvin’s complaining about the “entropy” and “disorder” which exist in our system of governance as simply quasi-technical terms for “anarchy,” then perhaps Yarvin is “grieved” by “democracy” as a whole rather than by “progressives” in particular. Hobbes provides a clearer picture of a reactionary mind in the usual sense: one who simply advocates for the negative form of whatever is in front of their face.
Further, Bertrand Russell anticipated Yarvin’s fear of “anarchy” and Yarvin’s “reaction” of a repressive government decades ago:
In general, important civilizations start with a rigid and superstitious system, gradually relaxed, and leading, at a certain stage, to a period of brilliant genius, while the good of the old tradition remains and the evil inherent in its dissolution has not yet developed. But as the evil unfolds, it leads to anarchy, thence, inevitably, to a new tyranny, producing a new synthesis secured by a new system of dogma.53
There is a general problem of “tyranny” which forms as a “reaction,” to borrow Yarvin’s term, of an “anarchy.” Yarvin likely would claim that progressives alone are the sole source of “anarchy,” which implies, in Russell’s model, that progressives are therefore the sole source of “evil”; but if that were true, then why does Yarvin himself appeal to a “dissolution” of liberal democracy entirely? Russell’s solution to the problem of “dissolution” is unambiguous: “The doctrine of liberalism is an attempt to escape from this endless oscillation. The essence of liberalism is an attempt to secure a social order not based on an irrational dogma, and insuring stability without involving more restraints than are necessary for the preservation of the community.” It follows, then, that Yarvin must necessarily be an element of the “evil inherent in” our “important civilization[].”
The means by which Hobbes, Yarvin, and others are able to achieve their viewpoints comes mostly from a simplistic materialist conception of reality from which springs forth misunderstandings and misapplications of physics, engineering, and metaphor upon the human.
Yarvin’s entire premise possesses the vacuity of any evil enterprise, an emptiness hinted at in his own writing: “it is also quite easy to construct a very clean value system in which order is simply good, and chaos is simply evil. I have chosen this path. It leaves quite a capacious cavity in the back of my skull, and allows me to call myself a reactionary.”54 It is not a stretch to assume that such barrenness may also exist in Yarvin’s acolytes; that investors or politicians may be empty headed would surprise few, but that such individuals as Peter Thiel or Vice President-Elect Vance may have done so voluntarily would likely shock many.55
So by Yarvin’s own admission, his ethos is a simplistic shutdown of conscience; he freely admits that he “do[es] not think,” to borrow Arendt’s phrasing, and shows himself as an openly anti-state variation of the “scientifically minded brain trusters.” The main difference is merely logistical rather than conceptual, namely the changing source of funds; in Yarvin’s case taking investment from Thiel rather than from the state.
The means by which Hobbes, Yarvin, and others are able to achieve their viewpoints—that, without some kind of imposed order, humans as a whole are only subjects of “natural law,” in modern terms some kind of physical law like thermodynamics—comes mostly from a simplistic materialist conception of reality from which springs forth misunderstandings and misapplications of physics, engineering, and metaphor upon the human.
(Hayek, perhaps, is worst of all. E.g. some physics examples he provides “are instructive because they clearly show that the rules which govern the actions of the elements of such spontaneous orders need not be rules which are ‘known’ to these elements; it is sufficient that the elements actually behave in a manner which can be described by such rules.”56)
Hobbes, too, was guilty of the bad habit of grabbing any scientific concept available in his day and using it to justify his political beliefs. Here, we see him open Leviathan by erasing the distinction between a human and an “engine[]”:
For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the Artificer?57
As Hobbes develops his thoughts, it is easier to see the disturbing literal-mindedness that makes his proto-“brain truster” style of thought which is problematic and prone to overreach. Hobbes makes heavy use of the concept of motion, doubtless drawing upon notions introduced by his contemporaries Galileo and Descartes. But he closely ties the concept of liberty and free will to physical motion, limiting the discussion to a simplistically-materialist definition of freedom:
Liberty, or freedom, signifieth properly the absence of opposition (by opposition, I mean external impediments of motion); and may be applied no less to irrational and inanimate creatures than to rational. For whosoever is tied, or environed, as it cannot move but within a certain space, which space is determined by the opposition of some external body, we say it hath not liberty to go further.58
(Russell also identified this intellectual shortcoming when evaluating some of Hobbes’ claims in Leviathan: “Hobbes has not appreciated the use of [scientific] induction for arriving at general laws59, in spite of his admiration for Kepler and Galileo.”60)
As he goes on we see no sophisticated understanding of cause and effect, indetermination, or free will in his worldview. His desire to see a clockwork world leads to a strange leap in logic in which free will is actually a necessary consequence of a determinism set off by God:
[F]rom the use of the words free will, no liberty can be inferred of the will, desire, or inclination, but the liberty of the man; which consisteth in this, that he finds no stop in doing what he was the will, desire, or inclination to do .... Liberty and necessity are consistent: as in the water that hath not only liberty, but a necessity of descending by the channel; so, likewise in the actions which men voluntarily do, which, because they proceed their will, proceed from liberty, and yet because every act of man’s will and every desire and inclination proceedeth from some cause, and that from another case, in a continual chain (whose first link is in the hand of God, the first of all causes), proceed from necessity. So that to him that could see the connexion of those causes, the necessity of all men’s voluntary actions would appear manifest .... [T]hough men may do many things which God does not command, nor is therefore author of them; yet they can have no passion, nor appetite to anything, of which appetite God’s will is not the cause.61
Yarvin’s conceptual framework, such as it is, is simply a watered-down copy of Hobbes’ rhetorical approach, perhaps even the work product of some contrarian MFA-like program. He sifts through contemporary physics concepts and misuses them as political and human behavior metaphors to add false weight to his polemics. While Hobbes’ work at least leaves some room for interpretability regarding the structure of the state, Yarvin’s work is as blunt and unyielding as the physics to which he continually and clumsily appeals. For example, in addition to his “politcal entropy” concept, he also introduces concepts such as the “W-force: W, for Whig” which “behaves as an inverted pendulum, perhaps with a bit of a delay loop.” He also bombastically compares his mad pseudo-scientist plan which he calls the “Reaction”62—“an ideal plan for a discontinuous transition of sovereignty” which Yarvin makes sure to point out may be termed a “coup, or (more Teutonically) putsch”63—to “rocket science” that “demands [] cogency and care”: each widget in a rocket assembly “is designed to work perfectly on the first try. Often, all do. Sometimes, one or two fail. Then backups take over, and work a little less well.”
Noam Chomsky, in an influential essay published in 1967 titled The Responsibility of Intellectuals, identifies the common cause threaded through all these frameworks of thought: “the desperate attempt of the social and behavioral sciences to imitate the surface features of science that really have significant intellectual content”; game theory, perhaps more than any other single factor, is to blame for this. In fact, this attitude is common to the Austrian School writ large and, by extent, the larger neoliberal program; Yarvin himself is heavily influenced by von Mises’ and Rothbard’s work and, like Peter Thiel, is closely associated with Hoppe, a contemporary of that orientation who takes the pseudo-science treatment of persons to very extreme ends. Hayek, as shown above64, is merely imitative of intellectual methods; even in the case of Chomsky’s essay, we find that he is responding to Irving Kristol’s defense of Lippmann (having to remind everyone of nothing less than the “responsibility of intellectuals”).
What has significantly confused matters is the mathematization of “social and behavioral sciences” via game theory, particularly the misappropriation of scientific concepts found in von Neumann’s and Morgenstern’s foundational book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. The complication comes from their presumptions and motives.
Game theory represents a new class of problem to society: a work product that can be internally consistent and effective for certain applications but nevertheless may originate from those with ill motives who are clever enough to frame the concept in a way that hides its limitations to achieve ideological objectives.
Morgenstern’s doctoral advisor was von Mises himself, and indeed “[a] valuable preliminary description of the behavior of the individual is offered by the Austrian School,”65 which is to say that, as admitted in the text itself, the Genevans’ school of thought philosophically motivates the work. And, like Hobbes and others, von Neumann and Morgenstern also fall into the fallacy of being misled by the example of physical reality to generally explain human behavior and social activity. For example, they state: “It does not seem to us that [the notions of utility and preference] are qualitatively inferior to certain well established and indispensable notions in physics, like force, mass, charge, etc.”66 Their purpose in building game theory is explicitly to “subject” the entities under consideration—human beings and their behaviors—to “empirical control”: entities such as “force, mass, charge,” and “utility” “become subject to empirical control through the theories which are built upon them—and in no other way.” So we see here that the authors intended game theory to be a framework for mass social control.
Von Neumann and Morgenstern are actually technically competent—their sophistication sets them apart from the rest in the thought collective. More specifically, they do not literally pilfer from the available set of physics concepts as the others do; in fact, von Neumann and Morgenstern observe that “it is unlikely that a mere repetition of the tricks which served us so well in physics will do for the social phenomena too.”67 Instead, game theory represents a new class of problem to society over and above the nuisance of the typical “brain truster,” who usually leverages pseudo-science or pseudo-intellectualism as a cloak; rather, it is an example of a work product that can be internally consistent and effective for certain applications but nevertheless may originate from those with ill motives—those who are clever enough to frame the concept in a way that hides its limitations to achieve ideological objectives.
Indeed, von Neumann and Morgenstern’s relation to the notion of utility, which they make sure to emphasize, is “mainly opportunistic”68 which is achieved via an “attempt to simplify all other characteristics as far as reasonably possible.” The goal is very explicitly a reductive system which has highly-questionable application as a general model of human behavior and social activity: “We shall therefore assume that the aim of all participants in the economic system ... is money, or equivalently a single monetary commodity. This is supposed to be unrestrictedly divisible and substitutable, freely transferable and identical, even in the quantitative sense, with whatever ‘satisfaction’ or ‘utility’ is desired by each participant.” Careful and limited application of the theory can be—but is not necessarily—useful; but to ascribe to game theory universality is to be necessarily and arbitrarily reductive, even according to its creators themselves: there are many non-monetizable desires, and the unending monetization of anything and everything in our lives likely comes from the presumed universality of this framework by powerful figures in society.
Von Neumann’s and Morgenstern’s purpose in building game theory is explicitly to “subject” the entities under consideration—human beings and their behaviors—to “empirical control”: entities such as “force, mass, charge,” and “utility” “become subject to empirical control through the theories which are built upon them—and in no other way.”
Further, as modern scholars note, their system heavily contributed to the “reduc[tion of] the meaning of ‘rationality’ to the consistency of an empty set of formal relations[, that is,] the formal axiomatic component of rational choice.”69 This was no mistake. von Neumann’s and Morgenstern’s terminology was deliberately misleading in Theory of Games. They are familiar with the real definition of the word rationality, describing Newton’s work as a “rational discipline of mechanics,”70 using the term in the usual sense of dealing with the mental activity associated with representative entities. Nevertheless, they also claim that “the notion of rationality is not at all formulated in an unambiguous way”71 and that “the ‘philosophical’ use of the word ‘rational’” does not suffice for their purposes. While they identify that each agent in their system has a goal of attaining an “optimality” of the “utility” measure, the authors go on to interchangably substitute the word “rational” for “optimal”72; that is, every single instance of the use of the term “rationality” in a game-theoretic context should be replaced with the term “optimality” to understand the limitations of their work.
This conflation has seeped into the culture to the extent that many people use the term “rational” to mean “rationally self-interested” or “game-theoretically optimal,” erasing the original notion of rationality from the discourse. To be rational is a non-contingent universal valuation of a person and further has a binary “rational”-“irrational” possible value, whereas to be optimal leads to the questions of what is being optimized, to what degree, and, perhaps most importantly, why. One cannot be “partially rational,” and indeed the valuation of the relation of rationality is between a person and their very ability to judge, i.e. it approaches an existential statement about a person; however, one can easily be sub-optimal, as is implied by the already-established commonality of the term “sub-optimal” itself, and usually the relation of optimality is between a person and some external referent—such as “money”—which obviously leads to the conceptual possibility of a person electing to be sub-optimal along one metric to achieve optimality along other, distinct metrics or values which, again, may elude quantification entirely. Acknowledgement of this reality, however, would limit the reach of the reductive system outlined in Theory of Games, meant to be a new bag of “tricks which [will] serve[] us so well in” “empirical control” of population behaviors.
The pointed attack on language, on the nature of the person, on the nature of rationality, and on philosophy itself makes it clear that a worldview—or Weltanschauung, to borrow from the language of the Austrians—is at play, and its centrality in modern power structures has had no small effect upon global consciousness, as is suggested by the ramified consequence of climate change.
The attack on philosophy, in particular, has demonstrable motivation: as Ulam observed in his obituary, both he and von Neumann feared that science and technology would outpace mathematics, and that, in the end, they clung “to the hope that the mathematical method would remain for a long time in conceptual control of the exact sciences.”73 Contrast this to Whitehead’s position, that philosophy, rather than mathematics or physics, should comprehend sciences, e.g.: “The partially successful philosophic generalization will, if derived from physics, find applications in fields of experience beyond physics.”74 That is, mathematics and physics should provide tools for science, but interpretation—“conceptual control”—should not be the exclusive privilege of those particular toolmakers. (Furthermore, their concern is insipid since the purpose of the sciences is to discover previously-unknown particular facts, and therefore mathematics in the general case must always trail behind.75)
One cannot be “partially rational,” and indeed the valuation of the relation of rationality is between a person and their very ability to judge; however, one can easily be sub-optimal, as is implied by the already-established commonality of the term “sub-optimal” itself.
Von Neumann and Morgenstern even go on to implicitly compare their reduction of people to agents with Newton’s “masspoints,” i.e. “points [which] attract each other and move like the stars,”76 and, “[f]or economic and social problems the game[ models] fulfill—or should fulfill—the same function which various geometrico-mathematical models have successfully peformed in the physical sciences.”77 From here, all distributions of money “describe[] the ‘established order of society’ or ‘accepted standard of behavior’”78; this is to naturally occur since “[a]ccording to all tradition and experience human beings have a characteristic way of adjusting themselves to”79 whatever physical and social conditions they find themselves in.80 In the end, the “‘rules of the game,’—i.e. the physical laws which give the factual background of the economic activities under consideration may be explicitly statistical.”81 Further, their belief is that they have derived “a set of rules for each participant which tell him how to behave in every situation which may conceivably arise,” including those which do not “arise in a rational community.”82 Thus the statistical loophole is a Weltanschauung being put into practice: a culture program to reshape society itself—a Kulturmission83—replete with “standards of behavior” where philosophical interpretation should be replaced with mathematical strictures and complex human behaviors subordinated to fuzzy statistics: the human as mere billiard ball.
There is an agenda to redefine rationality as conformity and opportunism as dictated by game theory. Our “post-truth” reality includes an open war on science and actually-rational thought, a result of this scheme to center the discipline of economics in all conceptual valuation. In fact, appropriately evaluating new theories and acclimatizing them for introduction into the scientific world would require others of similar rarefied technical skill to be able to uncover potential plots; how peculiar that the current assault on academia, “viewpoint diversity,” is alternatively named “ideological diversity,”84 which in the end is itself of an ideology that weakens institutions and rigorous academic procedure.
It is clear how a sound but limited technical framework can be used inappropriately to manipulate perception and conceptualization itself, in this case starting first among the intellectual class and then filtering down to policies affecting the public as well as the public perception and conceptualization. Thus, the near-constant refrain we hear nowadays—that scientific and technical disciplines are apolitical and therefore are not subject to ethics—can never be true in the general case. In fact, due to the centrality of technology to all aspects of modern life—where scientific and technical elements pervade all communications, general-purpose processors are widely distributed to the point of commodification, and computerizable data takes on special emphasis—vast infrastructure is now in place through which a great many technical innovations can be rapidly and cheaply deployed to the public on behalf of harmful ideological campaigns.85
There is an agenda to redefine rationality as conformity and opportunism as dictated by game theory.
(This general problem suggests the necessity for some theory of intellectual security86 as a component of national security, perhaps eventually even as an element of a greater framework of international security given that all states are generally being targeted. In either case, were such a project devised, it must not impinge upon either the freedoms of academia or freedoms of the public; and in its formulation, perhaps existing tensions between state surveillance practices and freedoms of the public could also be resolved.)
As Chomsky writes:
Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions .... For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the “responsibility of people,” given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.87
In this way, the immiseration of academia—and especially the “class division” which has occurred between tenured and non-tenured researchers—can be seen as part of a larger project to further strengthen the “veil” identified by Chomsky. The trajectory from Hobbes’ clumsy metaphors to still-clumsier arguments such as those made by “brain trusters,” including their modern-day variants like Yarvin, has shown the damage that can be done by tolerating this particular brand of pseudo-intellectualism. As Chomsky concludes: “What is remarkable is that serious people actually pay attention to these absurdities, no doubt because of the facade of tough-mindedness and pseudo-science.”88
Another example of the misapplication of science concepts is the nascent work around political and economic “ergodicity,” which in many ways can be seen as an extension of—or, more ominously, solution to—Yarvin’s “political entropy.” An ergodic system will have particular states of affairs that recur infinitely-many times. In between such recurrences, no claims are necessarily made about how the state evolves over time—this concern is de-emphasized in favor of the (statistical) certainty that states can reoccur if the system, roughly speaking, is sufficiently closed, i.e. controllable. It is this idea of a controllable and “harvest-able” system that may attract some individuals to applying ergodicity to social concerns: it is a physical metaphorization for population “encasement,” i.e. a game-theoretic model of von Mises’ “ecumenical society”89 achieved by simply extending the “explicitly statistical”90 work of von Neumann and Morgenstern with von Neumann’s contributions to statistical mechanics.
For those who believe in the statistical Hayekian model of governance—where simple “rules” are applied to a closed system—then an ideal goal would be a system of organization which is ergodic.
Ergodicity is rooted in the Poincaré recurrence theorem, which importantly depends on finite measures, i.e. the theorem only holds for cases where all the valuations of a set are preserved even after changes of state occur and, critically, the measure valuations remain fixed to some degree. Insights from von Neumann and Birkhoff developed these ideas into what is called ergodic theory which has become the “core hypothesis of statistical mechanics”91; without a statistical interpretation of, for example, a gas held in a sealed box, “the number of variables [] is enormous, perhaps on the order of Avogadro’s number, and the equations are quite complex [even though] [t]he system is perfectly deterministic in principle.” The idea that a system defined by unbreakable constraints, given enough time, will have repetitive behaviors borders on tautology when applied to social concerns. This is to be expected of statistical modeling, which may give superficial description in aggregate but gives limited grounded-in-particularities explanation. While no doubt useful in its proper context—situations where “empirical control” is actually warranted—philosophically it remains unremarkable.
Tying this back to the Hayekian neoliberal view, the various “particular facts” examined miraculously disappear when viewed from the exclusively-statistical lens, providing a tempting workaround for Hayek’s definition of human ignorance. Indeed, for those who believe in the statistical Hayekian model of governance—where simple “rules” are applied to a closed (i.e. encased) system—then an ideal goal would be a system of organization which is ergodic. To again use Hayek’s own framing, such a system would be established “by forces outside the system (or ‘exogenously’)”92—a necessary consequence since, after all, the public has not explicitly agreed to these concepts and stances, as is suggested by Hayek’s own aversion of the term “state”—in an attempt to allow “equilibrium [to be] set up from within (or ‘endogenously’).” In this way, such a system of organization may have desirable properties of predictability when viewed exogenously while still allowing for “spontaneous” activity which occurs strictly endogenously; thus, elites could remain safely insulated and simply continue to provide “general aim[s]” as well as “assign[] particular functions” to representative individuals to uphold and enforce their fully-separated purposes. The end of history, in other words, would be the theoretical outcome, as would something approaching an ideological dictatorship93: in this case, more specifically an ideological aristocracy.
(Aristocracy, of course, is not only ideological but insane as well. It is the presumption that there exists a sub-population which supposedly possesses inherent properties that give them absolute power over the rest of the population.94 Yarvin’s position is that the “result” of such a political transformation “will be an actual sane government.” Via his examination of “Hitler’s shtick,” Yarvin proposes that his own “Reaction [program] is Hitler-free because its engineers understand the Hitler-phenomenon precisely”: Yarvin “provide[s] a complete engineering explanation of Hitler” which he claims “can produce reliable quality on the first try,” which was presumably the results of the 2024 election. As he states: “in the 21st century, Hitler is exactly what he is supposed to be—a lesson in what not to do.” Again, recall that Andreessen95, Thiel, Bannon, Vance, and others of the incoming administration are all followers of, if not friends with or financially tied to, Yarvin; by extent, that implies that the Vice President-Elect is himself interested in elements of National Socialism excepting the hasty leader whose poor judgment accelerated the regime’s downfall; apparently, appropriate “engineer[ing]” controls were not in place last time ‘round. That is, due to members of the incoming executive leadership’s alliances and influences, by all appearances it seems that the United States at present has committed to adopting a covert, “engineer[ed]” form of National Socialism. Thiel’s numerous comparisons between the United States and the Weimar Republic—the democratic system which led to the National Socialists’ seizure of power—certainly takes on new meaning under Yarvin’s light.)
Hypocritically, there is a belief nonetheless that the world can be governed by select game-theoretic “rational” designers who act only via market design and tinkering with market levers and not via Enlightenment principles.
The reader may also notice in the description of ergodicity parallels to the rhetoric surrounding “black-box” statistical behavior. If one assumes the universe, the world, and the brain are all “black boxes” of similar type—following some basic set of Hayekian-style “rules”—and if one believes that we have all we need to consider such matters generally solved using the power of statistics and “rules”-based models, then it would be plausible, for example, that running a large statistical model would manifest a “recurrence” of consciousness itself. And so it is no coincidence that Hayek and his ideas are so closely connected to what had once been termed “cybernetics.” As Hayek himself writes: “Only recently has there arisen within the physical sciences under the name of cybernetics a special discipline which is also concerned with what are called self-organizing or self-generating systems.”96 Again, we see the signature abuse of “physical sciences” here which is common to the “brain trusters.”
Under a “spontaneous order” worldview, members of the public are seen as a mushy collective which is “complex”: not in any flattering or cautious sense, but simply in that ideologues have given themselves permission to ignore details and “particular facts” to whatever degrees are most convenient to them (or to whatever limits are imposed by their cognitive shortcomings) via the centering of the statistical loophole in conceptual thought; and to the extent that they imperiously presume ability to construct consciousness itself, fashioning themselves gods by consequence. Individual humans—other than these ideologues themselves—are seen as insufficiently rational (in any sense of the term) and with little-to-no agency, simply because the angle of the chosen frame of reference makes them appear that way. All a simple cognitive bias: ideologues have been educated into this framework but lack the flexibility (or cognitive ability) to apply or sense its limits. Hypocritically, there is a belief nonetheless that the world can be governed by select game-theoretic “rational” designers who act only via market design and tinkering with market levers and not via Enlightenment principles; this is simply because of their chosen or indoctrinated frame which cannot account for Enlightenment ideals. Worse still, the outsize private benefit which is yielded from this approach leads to a vicious inherence.97 Thus, a framework becomes a worldview; a technique, an ideology.
We should see the outsize investments in and slavish dedication to the current AI approaches as the artifacts of what may be thought of as Too Big To Fail 2.0.
As some scholars have recently observed:
One explanation for economists’ recurrent tendency not to trust democracy [] is that they suspect the man in the street is an epistemic shambles; in their estimation, economists therefore deserve to be respected as experts in knowledge .... If markets indeed validate the truth, then the cadre that gets to construct the markets gets the final say on the nature of truth. The visible hand that fashions the auction believes it can govern the world.98
As we already see with the likes of market maker Sam Bankman-Fried’s spending spree among members of the legislative, these designers believe themselves to be exempt from popular control mechanisms due to their induction into neoliberal systems and their modern offshoots. It is entirely expected that these individuals view the voting process in a democratic system as fundamentally flawed and the democratic system itself as a structure needing encasement.
Short-term profits have convinced them that this frame of reference is sufficient to complete all tasks. Further, because they have raised the stakes so high—to the point of betting on the future of governance and, perhaps, even that algorithms may be considered members of society—we should see the outsize investments in and slavish dedication to the current AI approaches as the artifacts of what may be thought of as Too Big To Fail 2.0, where, because of irrational decisions made by our ideological leaders, Western civilization itself is now predicated upon the success of a badly-premised technical and ideological program.
And so we arrive at the end product, as the German ordoliberals were fond of saying, of “thinking in orders”99 from the very bottom to the very top, the old-world European dream of a clockwork world, but in our case it is a world ruled by the cuckoo who lives above the clockface. The neoliberal tinkerer, the technocrat profiteer, the libertarian “disrupter,” and the “brain truster” invaded the nest and were long ago illegitimately nurtured as princes of industry and of Western society; now, at the maturation, do we arrive at the peril of democracy by those who look back with fondness on older “orders” which remain antithetical to the democratic aim and to civilizational progress itself.
After all is said and done, they effect only a dissipating confusion rather than any kind of “order”: everything is and is not just a joke; the president both is and is not a king; our neighboring countries are both friend and enemy, are both sovereign democracies and are explicitly vassals. Our reservoir of built-up truths evaporates with each passing day; fact is now AI slop, each query a casino gamble, a merely-statistical calculation bereft of actual reason yet nevertheless always stated with authority; the very notion of work and labor is up in the air, as are the common notions of peace; the social contract is hostilely and voraciously ripped to shreds without regard of consequence.
This is not of any one mind but of a class; as Jouvenel writes: “The clannish aristocracy suffers, inevitably, from a split mind. While seeking to maintain its status of near-independence of, and near-equality with, the king, it cherishes also the position of superiority and authority which it holds in relation to other elements in the community.”100 Such is the conflict and contradiction of the local “supreme authority” when it goes unchecked and is allowed free reign; its poisonous nonsense is that which, in the end, is taken in by the rest.