A Repudiation of the Core Analogy of the Deep Right - 1
optional communism or a billion kings?
The Core Analogy
Curtis Yarvin uses the same analogy again and again to justify absolute monarchal rule. Look at your iPhone, your Tesla: these great technologies are made under absolute monarchies. Tim Cook is the King of Apple. Elon Musk is the King of Tesla. Look how great these work. By analogy, wouldn’t it be great to have a government that runs as well as an iPhone or a Tesla? Think of how much could be done if the basic social infrastructure of our society wasn’t fetid shit.
Why Does The Analogy Work
It works because it is based on a truth: the infrastructure of American society is fetid shit. No accumulation of statistics about drug overdoses, declining life statistics, increased loneliness, overwhelming monopolization has the same power as the image of an infrastructure made completely of shit. Not just the roads and the bridges, but the regulatory operations of the state, the mad and perverse commercialization of education and healthcare, the bloated and corrupt military industrial state, the artistically bankrupt culture industry: the whole American operation is stinking shit.
Guess What Isn’t Fetid Shit?
iPhones aren’t fetid shit. And not Tesla, either. These really work. These are amazing. There are billions of iPhones all around the world. These are real things that people need. Even under the fetid conditions of the current regime, how miraculous it is that we have iPhone and Teslas!
Imagine how much we could do if there was a real visionary running the US. A president with the power of a CEO. Maybe it’s Elon Musk. Maybe its Kanye West. Maybe it’s someone you haven’t heard of yet. Maybe its Madison Cawthorn. Imagine if America became the future again. If America, qua America, had a future. Maybe it isn’t too late for another American century.
All this excitement comes from the analogy between the absolute monarchal governing excellence used to create iPhones and Teslas and the (potential) governing excellence of an absolute monarch governing all of America.
What if the discipline, creativity, and intelligence that went into making algorithmically targeted advertisements went into creating the very basic operating system of the United States?
The Repudiation
For there to be a king of Apple and for there to be a king of Tesla there must be millions of nobles, petty kings, each lording power over subjects. Barons in the mines needed to rip the material from the earth to make the phone sand the cars. Counts in the factories where they make the phones. Dukes that control the oil. Princes that control each site where the oil is ripped from the earth. Like a king, cast in the mold of a king.
How do all these Kings survive?
Because they tell us that we need them. They tell us that it’s impossible to do things without Kings. They say that it’s either Kings or Wilderness. So if we just have one more king, a basileus who can coordinate all the petty little American kings (and queens) then America will again be king of Earth.
If the choice is between King and Wilderness, then we cannot repudiate the heralds of the new king. We need a better choice.
Here is another choice: Million Kings or Optional Communism? Million Kings is the choice that the Deep Right offers you, an allegedly sleek world ruled by great humans like Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel. When this type of great humans become Kings of America, they will surely enfeoff a whole rank of other great humans with petty tyrannies, and these minor lords will recruit a whole rank of peons to enforce security. Just like in Pinochet’s Chile the economy will be great. Yarvin promises us that the opponents of the new order will simply be “retired.” Naturally we can bestow full confidence in a tendency called the “Deep Right” to keep such promises.
But what is Optional Communism? It is this: you hear about 500 people somewhere who have all gotten collectively rich by starting something called a ‘bolo’ - that is, a form of completely consensual collective life which combines aspects of radical educational communities, design studios, monasteries, (and yes, even startups) but each in a unique and singular way. The premise of Optional is quite powerful—you are invited to become your own master in this way. Surrendering yourself to your purpose, as a king (a good one) surrenders themselves to the kingdom.
Why is Optional Communism not just a startup? Two reasons. One is teleological, one is ontological.
The teleological difference: homeostasis. The goal of the bolo is just that of a healthy cell: to thrive, reproduce as resources allow, and die in the course of living. The telos of the ‘startup’ is that of a cancerous cell, it is to reproduce without end, crowd out or appropriate other functions, and to consume. The startup is like this because there is no governing principle in its DNA, no telomere, no constraining principle or property. The world of economic activity is anarchic in the sense that borders are mutable and maintained only by a balance of forces, and not by underlying agreements about the sovereignty or inviolability. The bolo is the Westphalian solution for economics, writ maximally.
The ontological difference: fractality. The bolo is 500 sovereigns. By the time a startup reaches 500, it’s certainly had a few rounds of investment, and is likely cruising its way up the millions in valuation. There are not only hierarchies (a natural and essential part of organization) but there are fiefdoms and demesnes and a divine right ascribed to the king at the heart of it all. A bolo ascribes divine right to all 500. Each node in the network is equally liege and lord to each other node. This is the fractal part of it, at each level of zoom into the org chart, the whole is reproduced. Kings and queens who can always take the implied option and leave the system. This is the core of the Optional in this system of Optional Communism.
Bolos are a system envisioned due to the obvious tensions formed between the subjects of the Apple kingdom and the Musk kingdom. They are also, in competition, on the same footing as any other startup. Their success as a social form depends on the quantity and quality of the trying. There’s a reason they call billion dollar startups unicorns. Because the blood of their CEOs has magical healing properties. If the mythology of the current system is centered around a social organizational form Bolos are not without flaw, but a world of work where the mythology centers around highly autonomous workers,
Bolos are an alternative for how you related to making money and working—how most of life is lived for most. People start startups because they have an idea, and they organize their company based on what worked at the highest levels of success. So, imagine: perhaps you watch a video about this bolo online, highly successful, prosperous and thriving, or you go visit, and you find a link to bolos forming in your area. Within two weeks of watching this video, you yourself are starting one bolo. You’re now in the Bolo Basin—and then within a month, there are no more states nor corporations on earth; humanity’s form of wealth organization, its division of labor, its basic cellular structure has undergone a fractal transformation. Kings are now like dinosaurs.
