UPDATE :

Mencius Moldbug, the author of the excerpted article, is a neo-cameralist or maybe even a monarchist. I’m not.  At least, not a monarchy on its own.

Neo-cameralists see no problems with the state as a joint-stock company. I do.

Further differences:

He does not believe in “natural rights.” I do.

He does not seem to believe in religion, although I’m not completely sure about that.

I do, at least, in my fashion, Cynara….

But, he subscribes to the position, “libertarianism is not enough.”

There, I concur.

I post him, because his writing is intelligent and not easy to put in a box. When that is a genuine stance, and not a pose worn simply for marketing purposes, I respect it.

ORIGINAL POST
A brilliant and searching indictment of our moral posturing over surveillance and civil liberties from the original mind at Unqualified Reservations:

“The Constitution is great, but Nature has laws as well.  One is that the fickle are generally not left in charge of armies, battleships or nuclear weapons.  If the Constitution declares that the fickle shall rule, too bad for the Constitution.  By contradicting Nature, the Constitution has contradicted itself.  And it shall not rule.  And that, dear Americans, is when you finally settled in under your new communist oligarchy.  Whether you knew it or not.  Not, mostly – but that’s what it is to be a chump.

Nature’s inflexible law is that if you want to hold power, you need to be competent to retain it.  Otherwise, it is no use getting power.  It will be taken away from you, for good and ill, by someone capable of defeating you.  And the only thing more ignominious and pathetic than being defeated in the eternal contest for power, is being so owned and not even knowing it.

Alas, dear Americans – “progressives,” ie, communists, and “constitutionalists,” ie, fascists – the both of you, this is your pathetic condition.  And you’re worried that someone is grepping your emails?

Since this last epic battle between the Congress and the Executive, your country, not to mention its gloriously liberated “allies,” ie, captured satellite states, has been run (with spasmodic, unserious, temporary attempts at resistance, but not reversal) by its permanent civil service.  This is what “democracy” means to you: government by permanent civil servants.  As for your elected officials, you could dismiss them all tomorrow, and not elect more, and your experience of government would not change in the slightest.

This bureaucratic oligarchy is a common historical form in large old states.  Regardless of formal status, a “permanent civil servant” is anyone who sets government policy, is funded by the government, or has privileged access to government secrets, and who cannot be fired by any practical executive action.  This definition includes essentially all professors and journalists – and all legitimate and/or respected professors and journalists.  It’s really quite sustainable.  For instance, for the last two millennia it’s been the normal condition of Chinese government.  It is unusual to have a figurehead People instead of a figurehead King, Pharaoh Emperor.  But since neither matters, the difference doesn’t matter much, now, does it?

And this is how you come to live in a world where there are these two separate concepts, “politics” and “democracy,” with opposite emotional valence.  Calling anything “political” is a harsh condemnation.  But if it is “democratic,” it is good and sweet and true.  But what is democracy without politics?

Nothing more than the American system of government – communism, ie, rule by the party of civil service. As Americans, we can at least be thankful that communism has done less damage here than elsewhere.  It’s great to be an exporter, especially when your product is dioxin.  It gives you the comforts you need to worry that someone is grepping your emails.

Thus, while I am not really one for purges, I’d be dismayed to see anyone who calls himself a real reactionary worrying at all that Obama is reading his email. Or whatever.

First of all, a reactionary is a gentleman (or a lady).  A gentleman (or a lady) doesn’t whine.  If he finds himself whining, it will be because his leg has been crushed by a truck and he’s in enormous fucking pain.  It won’t be because some meanie is denying him his universal human right to rule the country, or his 1/10^8 share in that right, or whatever.

My son actually thinks he has human rights.  It’s because he’s 2.  This morning he asserted his right not to take his amoxicillin – with some success, but not much.  I expect the critics of the NSA to have about the same luck.  When I became a man, I put aside childish things.

For a man or for a community of men, the right to rule is a function of the might to rule.  If the sound competent Midwest can get itself euchred out of its democratic right to rule by a bunch of slick Harvard men, the sound competent Midwest cannot maintain its authority and will get euchred by someone someday.  If it’s not Harvard today it’ll be Yale tomorrow.

As for your right to “privacy,” as if having your emails grepped affected you in any way, it is by accident.  Forget about the opponents of the government being persecuted.  If they are persecuted, which is not their decision of course, (a) it will not be by means of grep, and (b) they’ll have to learn to deal with it, like men, rather than whining like little girls.

Obviously, almost all of those complaining are complaining because they are better communists than the Obama administration.  A remarkable achievement, though it owes more to the complainees.  Power does season a man – maybe only Nixon could go to China, but only Eric Holder could crack down on the Associated Press.  (Hey guys – I know you’re big fans – don’t you like the way that red lightsaber feels in your hand?  Swing it around a little.  Well-balanced, isn’t it?  Nice test cut you’ve taken – maybe it’s time for some real rail-splitting? Take it home, use it for a week, bring it back if you don’t like it?  You’ll really enjoy working out with this little baby, I can tell you.)

But unfortunately, America is a communist country and Americans are not persecuted for being too communist.  Au contraire – they are petted and lionized.  They appear daring while taking no risks.   It’s perfect. It’s true that there were a couple of periods where as many as ten or twelve communists suffered mild professional consequences for cavorting too openly with the Soviet mass-murder cult.  Surely ten Americans a day are fired for racism.  Hitler has been dead for 70 years, and the Brown Scare rolls on – at a thousand times the maximum intensity of “McCarthyism” or the Palmer Raids.

So if you’re a good communist, you have only symbolic worries about your privacy.  These worries are simply a projection of your political penis envy. You react the same way to having your emails grepped as if someone said you weren’t allowed to vote in 2016.  In reality, this loss would not affect you at all.  Symbolically, however, it would represent a profound Freudian castration.  In fact, if you fail to express your symbolic political masculinity, preferably through a Facebook update, you will feel castrated by default. But gross public outrage restores your hypothetical testosterone.

Whereas out here on the “extreme right,” some of us actually do oppose the government.  I would be genuinely worried if I thought Washington was capable of persecuting dissident intellectuals.  One way to see where America is going is to look at where its satellites in Europe are, and Britain and other countries certainly treat jokes on the train and casual anti-Party tweets much the same way the Czech authorities in 1971 or the German authorities in 1937 treated unconstructive public comments about the Party or the Leader.

But really, these fools are easy targets.  Yo, don’t be an easy target.  Don’t blow shit up and don’t try to found any tax-exempt organizations, and you ought to be fine. The Cheka ain’t in the building.  And the process of turning our progressive bureaucrats into Chekisty would not involve making them more awful, but more energetic, manly and capable.  I won’t hold my breath.

It is obvious to those of us who actually have a reason to consider the government a genuine threat, that these surveillance mechanisms are not a genuine threat.  Rather, they are designed, probably not very well, to do the job they are supposedly doing, which is a hard job and really can’t be done well.

A prudently governed nation would not need to record everyone’s phone calls and emails.  A prudently governed nation would concern itself with its own affairs and no one else’s.  It would thus maintain either a culturally and politically homogeneous state in which terrorism was no more a concern than in the conflict between Vermont and New Hampshire, or a polycultural regime like the Ottoman one, in which every culture governs itself and knows it will suffer, not advance, if its members go crazy. But apparently the Orwellian panopticon creates more jobs in Virginia than the boring alternative of fencing the borders and enforcing consular law, so we can expect it to thrive. Americans prefer this ridiculous regime to any other.  Yet they still object to being blown up indiscriminately in public places as if they were Israelis enduring the “peace process.”  So there is really no alternative, especially as our impending defeat in Afghanistan will swell the jihadi supply.

Moreover, the fascist militarists who actually do this job are some of the best men in America.  American communism, for obvious reasons, loves to send America’s best men to Afghanistan to get their private parts Osterized by fertilizer bombs.  This is American war since 1945: State solving the problem of how it can get DoD to stick its dick in a blender.  Solving it rather well, I’d say.  Many of America’s best men are in the Pentagon, and good men know how to obey, and into the blender goes that dick.  Still, much testicle remains.

All this said, no nation is or ever has been perfect.  All have committed terrible crimes.  All men, of course, are sinners.  America is a communist country, the whole world is America, and communism is a religion of pure hate and murder with 100 million corpses on its conscience.  Still it continues.  Many, even most, “progressives” are perfectly nice people.  Libertarians, such as Edward Snowden (whose girlfriend, sadly, will have no alternative but to seek tingles in the arms of Roissy), are often even better.  I used to be a libertarian myself.  I didn’t realize my brain was doing the nasty with Roger Baldwin. Snowden himself seems like a nice guy, and future pressure-cooker bomb victims can only wish he’d found UR in time.
…………………………………..

Just as I have a genuine respect for Roissy’s honest, if foul, amorality, I have an enormous contempt for sham moral outrage. Can there be real outrage?  Absolutely.  But you cannot get from the sham directly to the reality.  You have to abandon it for pure cold cynicism, then work hard for even the smallest scrap of genuine human feeling.  Alas, it will not be as stimulating as your porn, your “civil liberties” and the like.  Hopefully in time you will nonetheless come to prefer it.