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Unironically talking about Moldbug’s “the Cathedral” is a dead giveaway that somebody is nearer the far end of the paleolibertarian to alt-right pipeline.
It’s something socialists and fascists and illiberals of all stripes have in common. Denial of the messy reality of a multipolar, complicated world in favor of an all-powerful cabal, a single malignant influence running everything.
It’s a dreary, ignorant way to explain things.
It’s a dreary, ignorant way to explain things.
Like most other versions of the same thing—the Illuminati or the NWO or the original classic, the Protocols—it can veer between very specific (and absurd) to a vague catch-all explanation for every thinker and institution to the left or right of the speaker, as the case may be.
The leftist version of it is the evil billionaire capitalists (cf. Koch runs the world!), but in classic horseshoe fashion the righty version of it has worked its way around to roping in “corporate liberals” along with all non-Trumpy professors and journalists and politicians.
The appeal of this narrative is always that it gives you a Manichean, monolithic The Enemy to hate, and that victory is as simple as defeating it.
It dismisses the reality of many competing ideologies and interests and power centers all vying with each other with no master plan
It dismisses the reality of many competing ideologies and interests and power centers all vying with each other with no master plan
It’s the conceit that ideology and its influence is somehow centrally planned, and that doing so is somehow possible. Not dissimilar from Hayek’s fatal conceit that the same is possible for the billions of individual choices that make up economies.
This manifestation has an ugly pedigree, coined by an advocate of pure authoritarianism out of his desire to overthrow all of Enlightenment liberalism and rule by unchecked Leviathan.
But it’s also a way to view the world that’s deeply at odds with libertarian insights.
But it’s also a way to view the world that’s deeply at odds with libertarian insights.
It seeks a justification for authoritarianism. There is no mere disagreement, no real give and take on the marketplace of ideas. There is only The Enemy, and its malign influence is behind any and all disagreement with those who fancy themselves its one true opponents.
It connects dots in everything from socially liberal LGBT acceptance to American military interventionism to conservative Republicans who won’t buy into election trutherism.
Anything outside the fever swamps is one irredeemable whole, explicable by a single grand narrative.
Anything outside the fever swamps is one irredeemable whole, explicable by a single grand narrative.
This is also why its advocates rely so heavily on cults of personality, and inculcates in its followers a kind of angry machismo misanthropy. There is no ideological persuasion in this view of the world; only converts to zealotry versus the mindless automatons of everyone else.
This view of the world not only can’t be harnessed to achieve libertarian ends. It’s diametrically opposed to the libertarian way of viewing the world in all its messy nuance and unplanned emergent order.
