Against Yarvin's Absolute Monarchy

I recently watched the Yarvin interview on NYT. I want to argue against Yarvin’s position on monarchy. Yarvin makes his typical argument in favor of monarchy: ‘look around you, everything here in this room is built by a monarchy’ and ‘NYT is a 5th generation hereditary monarchy’ and ‘what if your macbook had to be made by the California department of computing ’.

However, this misses the root cause of good governance in the context of competitive free markets: governance is subject to a two level optimization algorithm. The inner optimization loop is how the CEO manages the company. The outer optimization loop in free markets, selects for competent organizations and causes incompetent organizations to lose market share or go bankrupt. This outer optimization loop is essential to selecting competent CEOs and organizations.

Therefore, taking the argument that effective institutions are run by CEOs to its limit, and arguing in favor of a Romanov style absolute monarchy misses the point. We can’t dispense with the need for an outer optimization loop.

In the context of the Westphalian nation state, nuclear deterrence and pax Americana, this outer optimization loop between nations doesn’t exist. But even if pax Americana hadn’t existed, a constant state of warfare and mass population movements wouldn’t be worth it to test the fitness of states. Revolutions, rebellions, civil unrest, coups etc. are also not ideal checks on absolute power. As such, we need an outer optimization loop inside states. Ah, back to enlightenment republicanism and our great constitution, comfortable ground. Then the path forward is to create pockets of greater executive power, still subject to checks and balances.

This form of greater executive power can happen through a stronger president, through stronger mayors / governors, through stronger bureaucrats, through deregulated markets. It can also happen through hypothetical future mechanisms. We could appoint dictators for a short term like the Roman Republic did. We could institutionalize the concept of a policy ‘czar’. Czar means caesar after all. We could try to go beyond greater executive power, for additional outer optimization mechanisms, for example, through sunset clauses for regulations / taxes and government departments. And do so much more.

So, TLDR, good governance requires a two step optimization process: sufficient executive power with appropriate selection mechanisms, not maximum amount of executive power.

You make some good points, anon. Curtis himself notes in the interview that the outer right agrees far more on the diagnosis of the incumbent regime than on the prescription for a new regime, and that even most of the people he is closest to don't agree with him about monarchy. It's one thing to observe the falseness of the ideological cult of democracy; it's another to say therefore a new regime should look like such and such.

In some of his writing, he has an analysis of power in which he attributes most bad governance to the dispersion of power ("sovereignty is conserved"). I think this is the weakest aspect of his argument. I think bad governance can arise for many reasons, of which the competition for power is only one. I think it's very unlikely that the concentration of power, by itself, would eliminate the other forces making our regime bad.

Agreed, and my intention wasn't to attack Yarvin in general. I like him and his histories, and have even been to his house once or twice. Rather I wanted to make a narrow counter-argument against his prescriptive program because I think he is making a mistake. Power subject to a good selection criteria, rather than mere power, is the source of good governance in my opinion. If I'm right, than Moldbug can make more compelling prescriptive arguments if he updates accordingly.

>>2455
I like your division of outer loop and inner loop, and its a good criticism of Yarvin’s stuff. The issue with the second half of your post where you justify republicanism and so on is that actually the outer loop cant be organized by the hand of man. If it can be organized by man it can be subverted by man, and it becomes just a bunch of encumbering structure in the inner loop. This is what has happened to the US constitution. The other issue is that to the extent that it tries to channel reality and mediate real power conflict, it can and will fail in bloody civil war (as it did in the us).

The outer loop is natural law, classic international law, the conflict of organized sovereign and semisovereign powers, which cant be territorialized like that. It is made by the hand of god.

The failure of the inner loop of USG cant result in USG becoming a well regulated outer loop. Rather the factions are going to loot the commons until one prevails and becomes a new sovereign, or the whole system settles into some more fragmented patchwork running more or less on natural law (which is a bloody and corrupt thing in its own right). This may take a while.

So on that grounds i think monarchism actually still makes a great deal of sense. There is a robust outer loop, which is the eternal struggle for power and sovereignty. We just happen to be in the unenviable transition period between one inner loop regime to another through a time if relative chaos. But for how we should organize ourselves and what we should aim for, monarchy is still very much in the running.

The point of monarchism isn't as much in the scale or concentration of power. The point of monarchism is in incentives for a monarch to think longer-term -- through the long-term value of hereditary succession. Great leaders breed offspring with a bias for long-term thinking and wise management. Look at the House of Habsburg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Habsburg

Meritocracy is so easily gamed by short-termist actors.

I don't think this is true; the mere presence of long-term incentives in the absence of selection effects doesn't guarantee long-term thinking.

Habsburgs after all, in the end destroyed their country and had millions of their citizens killed through bad policy. They didn't really breed offspring with a bias for long-term thinking, instead they often inbred and typically for short term tactical purposes. Many other dynasties e.g. Romanovs, Ottomans and Bourbons shared the same fate, (not inbreeding but) self-destruction due to incompetence and decadence.

I think your argument that monarchism is superior due to "incentives for a monarch to think longer-term -- through the long-term value of hereditary succession" is not rooted in empirical historical realities.

I may add another point on the Ottoman succession system. The Ottomans didn't practice primogeniture. Each (half-)brother had an equal claim. They would be sent to provinces with tutors, to become governors as teenagers. When the father died, there'd be a race to the capital, and jockeying for power, occasionally civil war. Whichever half-brother became the sultan would then execute his half-brothers upon his succession Around the late 16th and 17th centuries, the practice was put to an end. Primogeniture was adopted as the succession system, the sultans sons wouldn't be sent to the provinces, and the sultan would imprison rather than execute his half-brothers. The onset of this system roughly correlates with the onset of the stagnation and decline of the Ottoman Empire. So in my opinion even absolute monarchies require selection effects.

>>2461
The greek agonal aristocracy is another approach to selection effects for the monarch (and his peers). If the monarch is bred from an aristocracy that maintains a strong selection effect, he won't be a genetic degenerate at least. The children of the best marry the children of the king.

Of course in the long run any system decays. The old regime dies and there is a constitutional crisis exceptional situation in which a new regime comes in to take its place. It's futile to try to design for eternity; a few generations of high functionality at a time is plenty.

>>2460
Monarchy in Yarvin's sense (per OP) need not be hereditary and typically is not.

There many other possible mechanisms of selection / succession, such as election by a select group of electors (e.g., board of directors for a CEO, cardinals for the pope, etc.)

A rule of hereditary succession arguably has its own weaknesses that are orthogonal to monarchy itself.