Mencius Moldbug > Quotes

“[I]n many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.”
― Mencius Moldbug

“Reality is the perfect enemy: it always fights back, it can never be defeated, and infinite energy can be expended in unsuccessfully resisting it.”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn’t that interesting?”
― Mencius Moldbug, A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations

“In many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“The difference between a monarch and a dictator is that the monarchical succession is defined by law and the dictatorial succession is defined by power. The effect in the latter is that the fish rots from the head down — lawlessness permeates the state, as in a mafia family, because contending leaders must build informal coalitions. Since another name for a monarchist is a legitimist, we can contrast the legitimist and demotist theories of government. […] Perhaps unsurprisingly, I see legitimism as a sort of proto-formalism. The royal family is a perpetual corporation, the kingdom is the property of this corporation, and the whole thing is a sort of real-estate venture on a grand scale. Why does the family own the corporation and the corporation own the kingdom? Because it does. Property is historically arbitrary.

The best way for the monarchies of Old Europe to modernize, in my book, would have been to transition the corporation from family ownership to shareholder ownership, eliminating the hereditary principle which caused so many problems for so many monarchies. However, the trouble with corporate monarchism is that it presents no obvious political formula. “Because it does” cuts no ice with a mob of pitchfork-wielding peasants. […] So the legitimist system went down another path, which led eventually to its destruction: the path of divine-right monarchy. When everyone believes in God, “because God says so” is a much more impressive formula.

Perhaps the best way to look at demotism is to see it as the Protestant version of rule by divine right — based on the theory of vox populi, vox dei. If you add divine-right monarchy to a religious system that is shifting from the worship of God to the worship of Man, demotism is pretty much what you’d expect to precipitate in the beaker.”
― Mencius Moldbug

“sometimes I even regret my own inability to believe in God.​ But no one who knows anything about the 20th century can fail to believe in the Devil.”
― Mencius Moldbug, A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations

“In a fraudulent pseudoscience, there is no incentive at all for uncovering error, because the only result of a successful dissent is to destroy your job and those of your peers.”
― Mencius Moldbug, A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations

“In order to make an impact on the political process, you need quantity. You need moronic, chanting hordes. There is no way around this. Communism was not overthrown by Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky and Václav Havel. It was overthrown by moronic, chanting hordes. I suppose I shouldn’t be rude about it, but it’s a fact that there is no such thing as a crowd of philosophers.”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“In order to make an impact on the political process, you need quantity. You need moronic, chanting hordes. There is no way around this. Communism was not overthrown by Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky and Václav Havel. It was overthrown by moronic, chanting hordes. I suppose I shouldn’t be rude about it, but it’s a fact that there is no such thing as a crowd of philosophers.

Yet Communism was overthrown by Sakharov, Brodsky and Havel. The philosophers did matter. What was needed was the combination of philosopher and crowd—a rare and volatile mixture, highly potent and highly unnatural.

My view is that up until the very last stage of the reset, quality is everything and quantity is, if anything, undesirable. On the Internet, ideas spread like crazy. And they are much more likely to spread from the smart to the dumb than the other way around.”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“There is no way to receive a mainstream university education, read the Times every morning, trust both of them, and not be a progressive. Unless, of course, you’re an idiot. But”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“To be a reactionary is not to say we must reinstall the exact political structure of the fourteenth century tomorrow, although that would surely be an improvement on what we have now. To be a reactionary is to borrow freely across time as well as space, incorporating political designs and experience from wherever and whenever.”
― Mencius Moldbug, Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century

“In other words, Kant is assuming that since voters are generally reasonable people, they will vote for reasonable governments that will act reasonably, and only undertake reasonable wars.”
― Mencius Moldbug, Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century

“All revolutions begin as a fundamentally aesthetic break.”
― Mencius Moldbug

“Under this pattern, the intended effect of the policy is to inflict some good or other on America, the rest of the world, or both.​ The actual effect of the policy is to make the problem which requires the policy worse, the apparatus which formulates and applies the policy larger and more important, etc., etc.​”
― Mencius Moldbug, A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations

“For example, Britain today is suffering from an “epidemic” of “knife crime.”​ To wit: every day in Great Britain, 60 people are stabbed or mugged with a knife.​ (Admire, for a moment, the passive voice.​ Presumably the knives are floating disembodied in the air, directing themselves with Jedi powers.)​”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“In fact, we know exactly what Washington’s policies twenty years from now will be.​ They will certainly have nothing to do with “politics.”​ They will be implementations of the ideas now taught at Harvard, Yale and Berkeley.​ There is a little lag as the memes work their way through the system, as older and wiser civil servants retire and younger, more fanatical ones take their place.​”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“Only, you know what?​ For Gramps and Grandma, who were about the nicest people you could imagine, who certainly had no interest in the Devil or any of his works, not even Mick Jagger, progressive was a code word.​ A sort of dog-whistle.​ What they really were was Communists.”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“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. The progressive never sees it this way.​ His goal is never to produce disorder and destruction.​ Unless he is Alinsky himself, he is very unlikely to think directly in terms of seizing power and smashing his enemies.​”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“And so, for the failure of the Tories to suppress the American Revolution to be regarded as evidence for the Whig theory of conciliation, it sure would be nice to know that the reason that the Tories failed isn’t that the Whigs prevented them from succeeding.”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“And why, dear open-minded progressive, do you think your theory of government, which you did not invent yourself but received in the usual way, is anything but yet another artifact of power distortion, adapted to retain your rulers in their comfortable seats?”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“The reason USG is so stable is not that it is (a) structured militarily to retain power without the broad consent of its subjects.​ Nor is the regime (b) especially loved by said subjects.​ Rather, USG is permanent because there (c) exists no credible alternative to its services.”
― Mencius Moldbug, A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations

“This is the genius of classical international law.​ It is based on the concept of actual sovereignty.​ When you establish your Quaker “league for enforcing peace,” or even your British “balance of power,” you establish an international super-sovereign.​ Which is a world government.​ Which is not, in the hands of the Quakers, a workable design.​ It might be a workable design in the hands of the Nazis—but would you want it to be?”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“Because dependency is another name for power.​ The relationship between dependent and provider is the relationship between client and patron.​ Which is the relationship between parent and child.​ Which also happens to be the relationship between master and slave.​ There’s a reason Aristotle devotes the first book of the Politics to this sort of kitchen government.”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“Another word for private philanthropy, with different negative connotations, is charity. Charity was of course one of the principal obligations of the medieval ecclesiastical establishment, the other two being education and adult instruction. In consonance with the general 20th-century pattern in which State has captured the role of Church, thus effecting the merger of the two by different means, most of us today perceive charity as a sovereign function. And thus we trivialize any charitable establishment which is fully outside the State, as only the most hard-line of unreconstructed ecclesiasts are today. (Nonprofits in the US today tend to fund themselves via a mix of donations with government grants, contracts, etc.)”
― Mencius Moldbug, Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century

“If the Republicans could somehow dissolve themselves permanently and irrevocably, it would be the most brutal blow ever struck against the Democrats.”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“You’ll find that any sentence can be improved by replacing the phrase “international community” with “State Department.”​ State does not impose many obligations on its clients, but one of them is that you can’t be a military government—at least not unless you’re a left-wing military government with friends at Harvard.​ The roots of the present Burmese regime are basically national-socialist: i.e., no friends at Harvard.​”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“The first and most fundamental lesson Obama learned was to reassess his understanding of power.​ Horwitt says that, when Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others.​ Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: “You want to organize for power!”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“estimate climate sensitivity, all you need is an accurate model of Earth’s atmosphere.​ Likewise, to get to Alpha Centauri, all you have to do is jump very high.”
― Mencius Moldbug, A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations

“In government, selective disclosure creates a power network between the press and its sources.​ This network does not produce money, but just power.​ The power is shared between the sources and the journalists.​ The whole system is about as transparent as mud.”
― Mencius Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

“Conservatives, whose political motive is generally mere human altruism, and whose tightest point of natural agreement is an abstract, ill-defined ideal which has no clear recipe for implementation, is generally stated as vaguely as possible so as to attract the largest possible headcount, and exhibits patterns of error perfectly adapted to deflect the respect of the intelligent, cannot conceivably compete on any level playing field with the self-coordinating progressive movement, which has no ideals at all—being defined only by the willingness to swallow some drop, teaspoon, quart or vat of epistemic ordure, as a ticket to hop on the big bandwagon, inhale the party line and join the winning team.​”
― Mencius Moldbug, A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations