Since I started publishing Destroika, I have been bombarded with questions, both from my own friends and from strangers on the internet, as to the exact ideology of the publication and its author. This sort of questioning of “what exactly are you?” belies a deeper problem with the way in which Westerners, especially those who are Extremely Online, are encumbered with an absolute need to categorize.
Gone now are the days were people were understood as merely “left” or “right;” now the Twittersphere designates the ideology of an entity, or even the ideology of a statement, on the Cartesian political compass. It is not important to this subset of the populace that this compass was invented by an American libertarian (that’s “lib-right” for those who are particularly fond of such pedantry) named David Nolan, whose express purpose was to convince others of the correctness of his own ideology. Therefore, the political compass we have come to love is not particularly useful as a descriptive means of understanding ideology or philosophy.
Nevertheless, I feel that it is important to condense my socio-economic and political views into an ideological manifesto of sorts, which can be found in this essay, alongside my justification for that ideology, and a justification for ideological theory more broadly.
The Raven
“Beyond left and right but against the center.” This is how Russian political theorist and Kremlin advisor Aleksandr Dugin described the forthcoming political ideology of the world, or at least of the former Soviet sphere. Indeed, it is the tagline on his website, 4pt.su. From across the vast landscape of political theory, from the pseudo-Leninist1 “permanent revolution” of Trump’s Republicans or Orban’s Fidesz to the Eurasian idealism of Dugin, to even the insurrectionary anarchist collective The Invisible Committee,2 everyone agrees that the world is on a precipice. It is felt across the world in the cultural gestalt that something is changing. Brexit, Chinese trade wars, Crimea, Venezuela, and Kurdistan, the attempted overthrow of the American government after the 2020 election, the gilet jaunets riots, etc, are but prophecies, ravens foretelling the death of the West, or at least the West that we have come to know.3
How did we get here?
The history of the world can be divided into distinct ages, based on the political ideologies that underpinned them. From the Agricultural Revolution to the Age of Enlightenment, the primary mode of governance was a clearly autocratic one: the absolute monarchy. Monarchical states are based on a single axiomatic principle: the Crown derives its power from God. Whether this right is formulated as the “divine right of kings” or the “Mandate of Heaven,” the concept is the same: we lowly subjects must obey because the King was appointed by Heaven. Even though this idea is clearly despotic in nature, and offers a clear path to despotism and tyranny, the First Ideology had a saving grace: it provided the people with a clear enemy in the literal personification of the State: The Sovereign himself.
During the Age of Enlightenment, a veritable cornucopia of ideologies was formed in opposition to the First. The most influential of these ideologies was intensely utopian, in contrast to the harsh realism of absolutism, was socialism. Socialistic ideals were espoused first by Jacobin radicals during the French Revolution, and then later shaped into a cohesive system by Karl Marx. This Second Ideology requires no explanation as to its soulless evil: Marxism and its derivatives have led to pestilence, plague, famine, and war; all four of the Horsemen found their homes behind the Iron Curtain. Lenin attempted to form a system in which the people could genuinely control the slimy tendrils of the State hydra, but instead formed one where the State was so utterly ubiquitous in its existence that it subsumed the entirety of the society into itself, making it nearly impossible to oppose.
Marxism found its death at the hands of the West, after being locked in an eternal struggle with the Third Ideology, formed largely in response to the Second: fascism. Julius Evola,4 the godfather of right-wing authoritarians even today, described his ideology as one designed to protect the people of a nation, and only a certain class or ethnicity of the people, to the explicit exclusion of the rest. To that end, the governments of fascist nations are authoritarian, undemocratic, and deeply racist. Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, and Fascist Italy all persecuted their own people to the point that they all revolved. Regardless of the multinational coalitions that fought these evil states, ultimately, they were undone by internal uprisings. Hitler had absolute control of the Reich, but his subjects, citizens, and even his own party members were always either trying to undermine his efforts or outright kill him. Mussolini met his fate at the hands of anti-fascist partisans, not the Allies, after all. Fundamentally, fascism cannot work as a governing ideology because it requires the existence of a threat to organize the people against, and its governance can only hold on through abject fear. There is no productive authoritarianism, either right or left.
This brings us to the fourth and current ideology of the world: liberalism. Though born in the eighteenth century (and in that respect older than the Second Ideology of socialism), it did not reach domination until the global hegemony of the United States in the post-Soviet era. From the end of the Second World War, when fascism was defeated, until the fall of both the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, the Fourth and Second Ideologies were in a constant state of conflict in what we now call the Cold War. For several decades, they seemed evenly matched, each prepared to destroy the other in a worst-case scenario that would have made St. John of Patmos5 roll in his grave. Ultimately, the ideology that ostensibly stood for freedom and democracy defeated that which stood for community and the subversion of personality. At least, that is what the bureaucrats and the official historians would have you believe.
The great benefit of liberalism, at least from the ruling class’s view, is that it appears as ideology-without-ideology, ruling without an easily discernible meaning or societal direction. At least under Marxism, even when times are hard, the goal is known. Under liberalism, even when things are good, things seem listless to those who live on the other side of Oz’s smokescreen. We are objectively freer than at any other time in history, and yet we feel incredibly constrained. Capitalism, the freest and fairest socioeconomic system ever devised, reigns supreme, yet only a handful of ultra-wealthy individuals control both the State and the economy with ease, such that many people are never able to acquire the ability to escape the clutches of poverty. All the worst elements of the first three ideologies have been combined into an unholy chimera. The First Ideology had the nobility of the landed gentry; now, the ruling nobility is a technocratic elite who truly believes that they have “earned” their privilege, and even through the veneer of the democratic process, a few political dynasties still control a large amount of political power. The Second Ideology saw governments prop up entire industries; today, Amazon pays no federal taxes and billions of taxpayer dollars are funneled towards student loans and tobacco farms. The Third Ideology saw the destruction of individual liberties at the expense of the “volk;” today, we choose to couch the suppression of free speech and the slow erosion of freedoms in one of three packages: protecting against “hate speech,” “combatting terror,” or “protecting the children.” Instead of ideologies forming the basis of political factions, they are founded upon abstract concepts of “empathy” and “change.”
The victory of the Fourth Ideology is found in this: there is no longer any clear enemy for the people to direct their hatred against. There are no SS officers, no NKVD partisans, nor Royalist forces to oppose. They have been replaced by a sublime sense of unease, that “things just aren’t right,” and alienation so complete that solipsism has become the new theology of the age. Philosophy is meaningless drivel. Popular modern art reflects the confused nihilistic values of the age. The political theater that is our democracy has been laid bare before the masses, alternating endlessly from indistinguishable horrors of one form or another. Religion has been abandoned in favor of the church of self-righteous indignation. Truth is subjective. Reality is nowhere to be found. What is to be done, to oppose this soulless epoch? How may we ever find ourselves again, lost so entirely in the wasteland of modern liberalism?
I offer a solution: the Fifth Ideology, espoused by Destroika. To construct such a new ideology, it must be entirely different and offer a radical departure from the previous four. We must first the principles which underlie it. The First Ideology, monarchism, gave us an important economic concept that we have all long since forgotten: the entirety of wealth originates from the land. Without farmers, there would have never been any civilization. The Second Ideology, socialism, taught us the importance of our surroundings and the sustainability of our actions, which we ought to keep in mind going forward, as sea levels, ocean acidity, and global average temperatures continue to rise. Charity and kindness cannot be implemented on a political scale but should be kept as societal values. There is not much to learn from the Third Ideology except that people should share common cultural values. The Fourth Ideology created something that never truly existed before: the idea of the individual. The monarchy had “subjects,” the vanguard party “comrades,” the fascist state “volk,” but it took liberalism to give us the “citizen;” the unique person that can be understood in himself, rather than as a relation to others. Polite society began to emphasize our differences; our individual tendencies and peculiarities. This concept of individualism and its resulting economic framework, which has come to be called “capitalism,” are both ideals in the Fifth Ideology.
So then, what is this new political form? The Fifth Ideology creates a society in which the participation of individual people is strictly voluntary, taxes are minimized, and the people are truly free. This concept of participation can only exist because of recent developments in technology. In the ideal nation, the State has come to truly embrace its form as gaseous or liquid in nature, rather than solid, as power was in ages past. Governments come and go as needed; created and dissolved by the people who create them and adhere to them voluntarily, and with powers delegated by the consent of the same. This is the concept of what the ancient Greeks called a “holon,” which has been revived in a limited nature as a “decentralized autonomous organization,” or DAO. The Fifth Ideology extends this concept universally, creating “contract-governments” that are both a whole and a part of a whole; a sub-society or sub-government, and part of the whole greater society. People may choose to be a part of these holons, or choose to leave, pursuant only to the rules of the holon. The Fifth Ideology blends the concepts of statism and anarchy into a political philosophy of creative governance based on those governmental entities. This is the concept of holarchy, the Fifth Ideology: a society without top or bottom, both ordered and chaotic, both fair and free, both governed and anarchic.
Idealistic Basis of Holarchy
One of the great time-honored traditions of political philosophy is the creation of utopias. From Plato to More, dozens of books have been written from various points of view about that author’s ideal society. In the first real example of utopian literature, Republic, Socrates describes a highly stratified state. Sir Thomas More, the man who coined the term “utopia,” instead described a society in which no one owns private property besides their slaves. Communism, the most prominent of the utopian ideologies, has had perhaps the greatest influence on such discourse. Regardless of what any individual philosopher thinks the “perfect society” might be, the influence of utopian thought is so pervasive that one of the most popular forms of young-adult literature to this day is the dystopia, or anti-utopia, as exemplified by Susan Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy. Why do these books appeal so strongly to the West’s children? It is because we, as a society, are collectively fascinated by the idea of the ideal country and how those ideals can go so terribly wrong.
But what exactly is the usefulness of utopian thinking? Simply put, by imagining and discussing the ideal society, and the way those societies could be formed, we can better understand the way we look at the world as it is. Communist policies can only be understood in the context of a desire for pure equality, fascist policies only by understanding the ethnostate, and so on. Anyone who takes an interest in politics, no matter how small or large, how moderate or extreme, should consider carefully what their ideal world would look like, what kind of policies might result in that world, craft those policies into a cohesive ideology, and use that ideology to make careful and informed voting decisions. Hypothetical utopias are deeply important and can be used to formulate and hone ideological positions.
But if utopias are useful for forming ideologies, then what is the purpose of holding an ideology? We all understand the world through our own ideologies, whether personal, religious, economic, or political. Everyone looks through rose-colored glasses. Therefore, in order to understand modern life, we must understand the myriad ideologies that underpin our existence, and since ideology underpins existence, the problems with contemporary governance can largely be chalked up to unclear and inconsistent ideology beliefs. In the United States, the sometimes unclear and murky language of the Constitution has led to endless conflicts in the Supreme Court. The Second Amendment was supposed to be clear, and as far as the libertarian right is concerned, the phraseology of “shall not be infringed” is literal. However, many on the progressive left have made a political goal out of the repeal of such a core political right of the Republic, because they do not share the same understanding of that phrase. These same progressive politicians and their supporters would better appreciate their own ideology if they understood that the Marxism of the Second Ideology is predicated upon a perpetual conflict, not between the workers and the bourgeoisie, but between their own factions. Communists have spent the past two hundred years fighting not the rich, but each other. How many different types of socialists have emerged since then? Leninists, Maoists, Trotskyists, Hoxhaists, Titoists, Eurocommunists, council-communists, social democrats, and Christian socialists, all in a permanent state of inter-leftist conflict. While I am not in the business of defending a dead ideology, it is worth pointing out that had the followers of Marx remained unified, they may have had better success. Instead, their beliefs have been relegated to the dustbin of history, largely because of their factionalism. What can be learned from the failure of the communists and the eternal disagreement of American constitutional law is this: an ideology must be consistent and unified for the nations that are built on it to succeed.
To be sure, utopianism has led to profound errors in the past. Many nations and many more nation-building projects have been built on lofty ideals only to subject their citizens to unspeakable despair. In fact, even the most elementary students of history will understand with only a cursory glance that almost every dictatorial regime that wrought upon their people unholy atrocities did so in the name of the “greater good.” In order to secure his idealized future for a Greater German Reich composed entirely of “Aryans,” Hitler and the Nazis killed more than eleven million people during the Holocaust, and another 70 to 85 million6 during the Second World War, accounting for around three percent of the global population at the time.
While the Nazi atrocities of the Holocaust are well documented and remain front and center in the Western consciousness, other genocides have also sprung from utopian idealism. The Soviet man-made famine of 1932-1933 killed 7.5 million7 in Ukraine, as part of Stalin’s collectivist vision of agriculture. Between 1958 and 1962, the Chinese Communist Party caused the deaths of 55 million people8 during the Great Leap Forward by diverting crucial resources away from food and toward industry. Mao’s attempt to industrialize the Middle Kingdom was another case of utopianism gone bad.
Even when genocide is not involved, authoritarian rulers have found other ways to torture those they rule. Political purges, the persecution of dissidents, food and electricity shortages, and so on are the hallmarks of totalitarianism fueled by runaway utopianism. In order to maximize freedom and minimize the possibility of atrocity, the ideology of the ideal nation must be rooted in a solid moral foundation.
Every ideology needs a core moral principle, a single axiom on which to build the remainder of its policies. For monarchism, this axiom is “the King is dead, long live the King,” for socialism: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” for fascism: “tradition is not the preservation of ashes, but the worship of fire,” and for liberalism: “I am what I am.” For holarchy, the Fifth Ideology, this core principle is “laissez-faire et laissez-aller.” This Old France phrase was used at the start of medieval tournaments as a guideline for proper sportsmanship. It is not easily translated, though the first part is often used to describe a certain set of liberal economic governmental policies. Perhaps the best translation of the spirit of that phrase, if not the most literal translation (idiomatic translation vs. formal equivalence, for those familiar with Bible translation), is “a fair field and no favor,” indicating that no special benefit was to be conferred upon anyone. This is a good way of explaining natural law qua Georgism: society should be governed according to the principles derived from natural law, and the highest natural law is the non-aggression principle: the fundamental praxeological presupposition upon which a peaceful and honorable society can be built. Never violate another’s life, liberty, or property, except in retaliation. The initiation of coercive force is the greatest of all the evils.
The non-aggression principle implies the existence of fundamental natural rights. But in an age when such disparate and unrelated things as healthcare, education, and internet service are considered rights by both political pundits and the general American public, it is worth looking at what exactly we mean by a “right,” and what distinction should be made between moral and legal rights.
There are only three moral rights, which are universal, and their violation can only be acceptable in rare and select circumstances. Their existence exists as a result of the base assumption that force can only be used in retribution. These are the “Lockean” rights: life, liberty, and property. (Jefferson’s formulation of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is an intentional miswriting done for some complex historical reasons, but it serves as a valid introduction to the concept of unalienable, moral rights for the average person, especially the average American. For the purpose of this treatise, the three moral rights are life, liberty, and property.)
The first of the three moral rights is the right to life. This right means that the life, health, and well-being of a person are unalienable. The only time that the right to life may be violated by someone is according to the non-aggression principle. A person who is shot at has the right to shoot back or to protect another person who cannot be reasonably expected to protect themselves for whatever reason. This right comes first because it is the most important, and the one that proceeds most clearly from the non-aggression principle. A person cannot exert a right to own property if he is dead.
The second of the three moral rights are the right to liberty, which follows as a consequence of the right to life. The right to liberty means that the freedom of a person is unalienable, and a free citizen in a free nation should have the right to do what they want, so long as their exercise of that right does not infringe on the rights of others. A person is therefore not “free,” to kill or harm another person, because that would violate the right to life, or to kidnap or otherwise inhibit the freedom of another, a violation of the right to liberty, or to steal, a violation of the right to property. It is from this right that the legal rights primarily spring.
The third of the three moral rights is the right to property. The right to property means that a person’s money and personal possessions are protected, as well as the right for a person to acquire those things, so long as they do not violate the other two rights. A person is therefore not free to threaten a person for their possessions, a violation of the right to liberty, to own slaves, a violation of the right to liberty.
From these three core moral rights, which themselves proceed from the non-aggression principle, we can reason many political rights, as well as discern those things which, while good, may not be true rights. For instance, democracy and the right to vote can be deduced from the right to liberty. The right to defend oneself can be deduced from both the right to life and the right to property, and so on. Some rights, however, are debatable. The alleged right to healthcare has been a common rallying cry for the political left in recent years, sometimes justified that it is a logical outgrowth of the right to life. While the right to life is a moral absolute, universal healthcare requires a high rate of taxation, and taxation violates the right to property where such taxation is levied on production and things that can be truly owned since a person has no reasonable choice to refuse to give money to the government.
Given the core moral rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as the non-aggression principle, we can assume a few things about the ideal nation. Part of this is the ideological framework of voluntarism as a natural result of the right to liberty. Voluntarism is a philosophical framework that states that all forms of human interaction should be voluntary. The theory and the term have become increasingly popular among libertarians and anarchists.
The only economic framework that is valid under the concept of voluntarism is free-market capitalism with a Georgist understanding. Capitalism implies both the free and voluntary interaction of not only individuals but of firms. Socialism violates the moral right to liberty and property, but it also violates the principle of voluntarism. As far as political frameworks go, the concept of voluntarism implies a simple republican democracy with a detached and minimalist bureaucracy, the goal of which must be to eliminate itself through gradualism and agorism, which will be discussed later.
Despite the constant left-right paradigm that has permeated the political discourse of the Western World since the French Revolution placing the Girondins and Jacobins on the left and right benches of the National Assembly, there is a secondary debate that has been brought to the forefront in recent years. This is the anarchism-statism axis. Some anarchists argue that all statism, left or right, is the same because the existence of the State is in-and-of-itself evil and coercive, no matter the political orientation. Does it matter if the truncheon hitting you over the head has an R or a D on it?
Let us consider these two alternatives: a society with a state and a society without one.
The state’s violation of moral law and the non-aggression principle is far too clear. The anarchists are basically right: the very existence of the State is coercive because the citizens for whose interests it claims to represent have no choice in their participation in it. It is true that which state a citizen chooses to live under is a choice: a person can often emigrate to a different country if they so choose, but this is not always easy or even legal, the free movement of people is handily restricted by national borders and immigration laws. Unfortunately, it is not as though nations operate to compete for citizens in the same way businesses compete for customers, but it would be ideal if governments did compete in such a manner. A primary goal of the Fifth Ideology is to find a way to make this happen.
Aside from the mere existence of the state, governments engage in many activities which are also violations of moral law. The policy of mandatory conscription into a nation’s military is a policy that is far too common in modern political life. Such a policy not only violates the right to liberty since it deprives the individual of their freedom, but it also violates their right to property by not allowing them to pursue a career that is meaningful and profitable. And of course, it clearly violates the right to life by risking the conscripts’ health at war. Even in the most ideal of circumstances, the draft violates moral law.
Another example of the violation of moral law at the hands of governments is the continued existence of unjust legal regulations. Take, for instance, the prohibition of drugs and prostitution, common laws around the world. These laws have no basis in the moral law. The consumption of marijuana does not violate life, liberty, or property. However, the institutions of drug cartels and street gangs that provide these drugs do violate moral law. It is the existence of such institutions that justifies such prohibitions. Much crime is drug-based, after all. What is often ignored by these neoconservative drug czars is the fact these groups exist because of prohibition, not in spite of them. Instead, the laws that prohibit such consumption violate moral law because they imprison people for non-crimes, violating the rights to liberty and property.
Finally, let us consider taxation. While it is commonly accepted among libertarian circles that taxation is theft, it is not often made clear exactly why, and so it becomes difficult to convince the general public of this key point. Since taxation is not voluntary, it violates the right to property. The taxpaying public has no say in paying the state part of their paycheck, in much the same way that an extorted business has no real say in paying a protection racket to the mob. Regardless of the potential good that a governmental entity can do with the money raised from taxation, it does not change the fact that it is essentially derived from an immoral means. It is a fruit of the poisonous tree.
But is anarchy any better? To hear the hardcore libertarians tell it, their view of anarchy would be an idyllic paradise where even the seas would turn to lemonade. But, as it turns out in the real world, the immediate disappearance of the state often turns out quite poorly. Take Somalia as an example. When the Siad Barre government fell apart in the aftermath of the Somali Rebellion in the early 1990s,9 there was a span of time lasting roughly twenty where there was effectively no formal or central government in the country. In the absence of a unified authority, warlords, pirates, and temporary pseudo-states took control. While a few think-tanks have claimed that things in Somalia were not quite as bad as reported, it remains obvious that sudden anarchy is incredibly destructive to any kind of human development, or indeed human decency. It is quite easy to see that while anarchy in and of itself does not violate moral law, the lack of a state allows for private citizens to commit moral crimes and without any way to punish those who commit them.
Needless to see, neither the existence of the state nor its absence does anything to prohibit violations of moral law. What is to be done, then? It can be easily reasoned that the best way to safeguard against these kinds of crimes would be the existence of at least some form of organization, and the best kind of organization to do this is in fact some kind of microstate. The proponents of monarchism seem to be correct in their beliefs then. Robert Nozick called it the “minimalistic” or “night-watchman” state, having the following functions: a voluntary professional military, a police force, and a court system.10 In the ideal nation, these courts would only exist to prosecute crimes that are derived from the moral law and to enforce property contracts, including those contracts that manage the miniature governments that make up the nation, called “holons.”
Therefore, in the ideal nation, the government’s only purpose is to provide those services which cannot be provided by the market. In fact, the entire history of the free market can be summarized as progress in innovation that has allowed it to supply goods and services that had been previously supplied only by organized governments. For instance, in the nineteenth century, it would have been inconceivable that any entity other than the state would ever be able to provide infrastructure. Yet, in the twenty-first century, even Domino’s Pizza has been paving roads and filling potholes.11 Such a thing would have been absurd just a few generations ago. Therefore, since more and more services are increasingly being provided by the free market, it can be logically assumed that eventually, the government will cease to exist merely because it no longer needs to. This is the correct philosophical and political position: anarchism, but only eventually. This is the position of the “gradualist” school of anarchism, though that school is usually associated with socialist forms of anarchy.
By what means, then, will this sensible, gradual anarchy come about? Samuel Konkin III proposed the term agorism for such a means. According to Konkin, all economic activity can be divided into five distinct markets by two axes: legality (governed by the laws of the State) and morality (government by moral law).12 If an activity is morally acceptable and legal, like selling iPhones or growing corn, it is considered part of the “white market.” Immoral activities which are accepted by the state, such as compulsory education, tax collection, or war are considered part of the “pink market.” Illegal activities that are also immoral, like theft, human trafficking, and murder-for-hire, compose the “red market.” Those illegal activities which are banned for no good reason, like prostitution or narcotics and weapons trafficking are considered part of the “black market,” as they are referred to in the common consciousness. Finally, there are those exchanges that are morally acceptable but not regulated by the state: the “grey market.” These interactions, like helping to fix your neighbor’s porch for a few beers or children trading snack foods at lunch, may seem minor or trivial, but compose a large portion of the larger economy. This market, along with the black market, is collectively referred to as a “counter-economy.” Konkin believes that engaging in counter-economic activities are the most valid and effective way to both protest and undermine the existence of the State. In doing so, the parties to such sales cut out the government and deprive them of taxation, the lifeblood of the great hydra. The sustained practice of counter-economic activities could eventually create a stateless society along the lines of the gradualists. The ideal nation is therefore governed by a minimal state, with the people encouraged to participate in counter-economics in order to gradually reach a state of anarcho-agorism.
Capital in the Third Millennium
Parallel to political ideology runs economic ideology, so the history of this field ought also to be understood before the ideology of this publication can be elucidated.
In the course of human history, there have been only a handful of economic models which have been implemented in their entirety. Many dozens of economic theories have been proposed and pondered by the ranks of smug armchair philosophers who dot the ivy-covered hallways of Western universities, but only a few have genuine real-world examples to point to. Since the collapse of many of these has been observed, and as we observe the fall of another, it is quite useful to examine these, in order to determine what we must do better in the future. Not one of them has ever produced the results that it claimed to be able to.
The original economic order was the system now referred to by modern academics as feudalism. In the feudal societies, which (apart from Russian and Japanese holdouts) flourished during the High Middle Ages, the essential component of the society was a bond of loyalty. The king held all the land under an allodial title and could lend it out under a series of tenures, including for clergymen (frankalmoign), for knight-service, and most importantly, to a series of barons who could then subinfeud their land to their own vassals. There was a class of peasants, some of whom were freemen and could come and go as they pleased, and some of whom were bonded to the land (villeins and borders). Despite the social castes, all people save the king had some sort of feudal responsibility to their superior, to be paid in taxes, military service, or by some other means. While its grip on medieval Europe was absolute for almost half a millennium (longer in some places), this system was unsustainable precisely because of the immensely unfree social order it perpetuated. It would come to an end during the labor shortages caused by the Black Death. Despite this end, certain forms of neo-feudalism remain in the world today, as seen in the continued existence of regional warlords, pirates, work-living arrangements, and so on.
In the place of feudalism came the politics of the colonialists, called mercantilism. The stated aim of mercantilism was to acquire colonies from which great quantities of raw goods could be extracted for and traded, creating a positive trade balance for the mother country, which could then maintain a large monetary reserve at home. The mercantilists believed that there was a finite amount of wealth in the world. As a result, the only way a nation could become wealthy was to take it from another. High tariffs and export-oriented economies became the norm. From the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, this theory was the doctrine of the European colonial powers, as evidenced by the mass production of bullion by Venice, Pisa, and Genoa. Since the hoarding of bullion was considered the primary marker of economic development, and so a nation’s gold coins and ingots were considered the highest denomination of prosperity. Mercantilism stifled competition and free trade in the name of surplus uber alles. By proclaiming the trade surplus as the greatest thing for a nation’s treasury, Europe squashed technological progress and economic freedom. Mercantilism came to a collapse during the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century. As a new class of non-landed businessmen, the bourgeoisie emerged in opposition to the old, landed aristocracy, and the impact of state-controlled capitalism became more and more obviously detrimental to economic growth.
As the mercantile societies fell, first in the Netherlands, then England, and then France, a new economic order rose in its place: capitalism. This was the system of Anglo-Dutch market capitalism, which remains the predominant economic order in the anglosphere, especially in the United States in the aftermath of the Chicago school revitalization of the 1970s. The Industrial Revolution replaced the honor of the nobility with the honor of a new kind of man: the businessman. Under previous systems, the merchant was at the bottom of society: a swindler or a thief-by-proxy. For the first time in human civilization, the merchant became the ruling class. Now, wealth and power were no longer exclusive to those born into it. The new world of the capitalists democratized wealth acquisition. Anyone could be a captain of industry, regardless of background or upbringing. All that was necessary was the will and the desire to work as hard as one could. But, as incomes plateaued and stagnated, labor productivity decreased, and as national unity petered out in favor of the ideology unit, alternatives came to be proposed. While arguable the most successful of the economic models in absolute terms (the near eradication of absolute poverty in the anglosphere, wide-reaching civil rights, and freedoms, etc.), the repeated economic crises under this system underscore the need for a better system.
In response to the laissez-faire policies of the Anglo-Dutch market, capitalists emerged the Marxists. The various economic policy proposals of Karl Marx and his successors, from Stalin to Sanders, have failed utterly. The foundational concept of Marxism is simple: the value of a good or service is dependent on the amount of labor it took to produce it, and the inflation of the value of a good by a company that sells it amounts to exploitation, where the difference between the labor-value and the market-value was an exploitative fee stolen by the bourgeoisie. The Marxists believed that the lower classes under Anglo-Dutch capitalism, the rural peasants and the urban proletarians, had been degraded. This is of course even though even those in so-called poverty now have smartphones, high-speed internet, and cable television. American capitalism is especially decadent: what a fantastic society we have that our health concerns are caused by an abundance of calories, rather than a lack of them. Socialist societies, in their pursuit to alleviate the plight of the poor, instead caused them far more suffering than even the most severe of the capitalist crises.
As the twentieth century came around and as more and more countries emerged from the remnants of pseudo-feudal or tribalistic economic orders, a series of new systems emerged, largely as responses to both “pure” Anglo-Dutch capitalism and “pure” Marxism. In Asia, there emerged a form of mixed-market capitalism known fittingly as East Asian corporatism. The core tenets of this economic theory are like the Anglo-Dutch capitalist system: property rights, mostly lax business laws, and the encouragement of entrepreneurship. However, the corporatist economies of Japan and the Four Tigers have a key difference from the Anglo-Dutch economies: state control. Under the East Asian model, the central government of the nation often invests in certain economic sectors that are considered key to the success of the whole economy. Often these are new industrial sectors (technology in the 1990s), or ones that are considered classically exploitative in the Anglo-Dutch economies, like banks. These economies experienced massive growth in their early years of market liberalization but eventually came to see a great deal of degradation during the dot-com bubble burst and the Great Recession. Japan’s stock market index, the Nikkei, still has not recovered. East Asian corporatism suffers heavily from misallocation of resources and large amounts of debt due to government control and propping-up. Japan, for instance, has a debt-to-GDP ratio greater than 250%, the highest in the world.13 The other East Asian economies have not fared much better.
Another form of mixed-market capitalism emerged halfway around the world from Asia to Scandinavia, after the Second World War. This form of capitalism, known as the Nordic model, is primarily a free market in nature. However, like the East Asian model, certain economic sectors are controlled, either partially or outright, by the central government. The hallmark of the Nordic model, though, is its maintenance of a large social safety net. Universal healthcare, education, pensions, union membership, and tripartite collective bargaining. The cost for these programs is an oppressively high-income tax, with tax burdens north of forty percent. The principal error of this sort of economic model is that it fundamentally fails the people. By providing a large safety net, the government invites the lazy to take advantage of honest producers, the taxpaying backbone of the economy. Rhine capitalism, a watered-down form of the Nordic system with slightly lower taxes and slightly smaller social safety nets, has also emerged in Germany and France.
All these systems have failed to a degree. The Anglo-Dutch, East Asian, and Nordic-Rhine systems have arguably worked the best but have still fallen short of their projected expectations. No system has handled the natural cyclical nature of the free market with any sort of grace. They have left many people unemployed or at least underemployed. A society that leaves college graduates working at fast food chains has failed its populace, not because it doesn’t provide them jobs, but because those degrees should not be offered in the first place. All schools of economic theory, whether Marxian, monetarist, Austrian, Chicagoan, Keynesian, or otherwise, have failed at least to some degree.
Five Liberals Walk into a Bar
The joke is as follows: five liberals walk into a bar. One orders a milk punch, the next a Sapporo, the third a pilsener, the fourth a wheatgrass oat-milk shake, and the last an amaretto. Over the course of the night, they all realize they have nothing in common, and go their separate ways, the first to Martha’s Vineyard, the second to Washington, D.C., the third to Berlin, the fourth to Brooklyn, and the last to Miami. It’s not really a joke per se, but a commentary on what I term the five kinds of people who describe themselves as “liberals.” In order to unravel the real “liberal,” these five must be understood: the punch-drinking WASP paleo-liberal, the neo-liberal Beltway lover of foreign beer, the German ordo-liberal, the progressive and cosmopolitan post-liberal, and my obnoxiously self-inserted meta-liberal.
Liberalism as a cohesive ideology is often claimed to have first emerged during the French Enlightenment, and first to have taken power in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. However, it rapidly devolved into a particularly insane form of early socialism. I dispute this history. While some early strains of liberalism can be found as far back as the Ming dynasty of China14, true liberalism is a distinctly English phenomenon, first entering the written record in 1647 during the English Civil War with the Leveller manifesto An Agreement of the People, which advocated for an early form of popular sovereignty and natural law theory. The first truly liberal monarch was an Anglo-Dutch one: King William III. Despite what sundry Irish nationalists or Ulster unionists would have you believe, the Glorious Revolution was not a conflict between a Catholic monarchy and a Protestant usurper, but a conflict between absolutism and liberalism. In the wake of the Boyne—a battle whose history I am perhaps too well versed in as a consequence of my background and upbringing—the British people experienced a degree of freedom perhaps never experienced in any state at any time up to that point. Parliamentary sovereignty, the right to revolution, and human rights were enshrined in British law through the Bill of Rights Act 1688, a piece of legislation whose domestic and international importance cannot be understated. In the aftermath of this sociopolitical revolution, Locke, Montesquieu, and Jefferson would go on to codify this ideology, which later came to be called simply “liberalism.” Its ideology was built on the Lockean concept of natural rights: the notion that human beings are inherently granted certain privileges which cannot be abridged by the government except as necessary to maintain social cohesion, that governments are instituted by the social contract, and that a government which violates these rights is illegitimate, and can be overthrown. This early form of liberalism, which was popular from the establishment of the United States through the Second World War, was known in its time without an appellation, but is now separated from other forms by being called “classical” or “paleo-liberalism.” Future ideologues would often, despite their material differences in beliefs, claim some sort of historical legitimacy and continuity with these philosophers by appropriating the word liberal for their own purposes. It is these “liberals” who have walked into a bar alongside our punch-drinking paleo.
By the early twentieth century, it became increasingly apparent that the world was more complicated and interconnected than the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers could have imagined, and as a result, the liberal ideologues of the West would have to adapt. So emerged the neo-liberals in reaction to this new age. Paleo-liberals were concerned with the well-being of the nation-state; its norms, the rights of its people, its economic prosperity, and so on. The new liberals, emerging in reaction to and intertwining themselves with a growing strand of Tory conservatism, would be more concerned with the well-being of the international order. Paleo-liberalism was a national ideology, and neo-liberalism would be an international one. This is not to suggest that neo-liberalism was, or is, somehow a globalist anti-nationalist ideology, though some neo-liberals certainly are. The neo-liberals, at least by the time they came into the forefront of the political world in the post-war era, considered themselves to be building on the ideological foundations laid down by the paleos. Seeing the sociopolitical sphere as being largely “solved” or “answered” by the eighteenth-century understanding of natural rights and Rousseauan social contract theory, the neo-liberals sought, and continue to seek, a better economic system. In seeking and establishing economic freedom, the neo-liberals say, political freedom follows close behind. Whether or not this is true is irrelevant for our purposes, but what do the neo-liberals say constitutes economic freedom? Globalized free trade, economic deregulation, privatization of nationalized industry, austerity, social austerity, and Friedmanian monetarist policy. Unfortunately for the more honest neo-liberals, these beliefs were often integrated together with expansionist and imperialist foreign policy into a truly insidious ideology called neo-conservatism. Where such neo-conservatism is melded with statist favoritism towards certain businesses and a strong sense of ethnic nationalism, it becomes fascism. As such, the term “neoliberal” is more likely to make the layman think of Reagan or Pinochet, instead of Friedman, Fukuyama, and Pete Buttigieg.
The next term is one not often used in the Anglophone world, being of German origin, though I hope that it may one day enter common parlance. This term describes a particular form of centrist liberal ideology which, while it agrees with the paleo- and neo-liberal notions of economic freedom, holds that a compassionate state ought to ensure the maximum potential of the market and maintain a certain minimum living standard for the people through a robust safety net inspired by Catholic social teaching: the ordo-liberal, or Christian democrat. This group is a sort of inverse American left-libertarian: socially conservative, but fiscally progressive. We might call them “union liberals” in the United States, because of their support for organized labor and often, their opposition to liberalizing abortion laws and same-sex marriage. Indeed, arguably the most powerful member of the Senate, as of the 117th Congress, is an ordo-liberal union Democrat from West Virginia: Joe Manchin III. Until the decline of union membership in the post-Reagan years, these sorts of liberals were the most common in the United States, forming the core of the Kennedy Coalition of the Democratic Party. These days, as Mainline Protestantism has declined in favor of a more radical, apocalyptic, and deeply absurd Evangelicalism, Christianity has ceased to be a politically-neutral identity, and has increasingly been associated with the paleo- and neo-conservative Republican Party. As a result, post-1990s, the ordo-liberal is seldom found, even when called by a different name.
In the twenty-first century, the only type of person likely to call themselves a “liberal” is in fact not an economic liberal, and only barely a political liberal. I call these sorts of individuals post-liberals. They believe that the ideology of the paleos is at least to some degree outdated, because they are the beliefs of long-dead white slaveowners, and they may be right. To the modern Brooklyn liberal, politics is less about ensuring economic prosperity through globalized trade or political decentralization, but instead about lifting up the poor and disenfranchised through social programs. They may openly criticize capitalism, and some will even call themselves socialists, while still pretending to adhere to liberal ideology. I say this not to pass judgment on their ideology here, but only on their hypocrisy in self-description. Fortunately, since the emergence of politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders in the public consciousness post-2016, more and more of these post-liberals have come to call themselves “progressives,” which is a far more honest appellation.
Very few people call themselves “liberals” anymore, because the word itself has become a stain. Conservatives use the term as an insult to those they perceive as upsetting the social and economic order of the country, by contrast, progressives use the term as an insult to those who refuse to upset that order. It is an insult for conservatives to oppose the status quo, and an insult for progressives to maintain it (or at least to oppose their narrow concepts of what ought to replace the status quo).
I am one of the few who will openly describe themselves with this most tainted of political terms. I do not consider myself a paleo-, neo-, ordo-, or post-liberal, but rather something else more in line with the others who I find also call themselves liberal.
The few people15 who call themselves liberal tend to have a set of beliefs in common. They often self-identify as neo-liberals, though I do not consider this to be the best term for them overall. They are often Georgist in economic terms or at least support a tax on the unimproved value of land, even if they are not fully Georgist. They support LGBT rights, a free market, democratic norms, decentralization, and electoral reform. They are opposed to tariffs, income taxes, and NIMBYism. Often, they are more concerned with local politics as opposed to national and may be considerably involved in that sphere, far more so than other ideological groups online. A good chunk supports a value-added tax or wealth tax in addition to or instead of a land tax; this minority might call themselves “VATmen,” although they are sometimes disparagingly referred to as “twocels.” Perhaps the most divisive issue is that of cryptocurrencies: some, especially the more prominent among them like Yang and Francis Suarez are decidedly pro-Bitcoin, while others are opposed for environmental reasons. Environmentalism (though not left-environmentalism) is an important strand of thought in this group, second only perhaps to housing availability. These liberals, which I have come to call meta-liberals (“meta” because of the literary movement from modernism to post-modernism, to meta-modernism), are typically well-educated, especially when it comes to economics (they would describe themselves as “freshwater,” rather than Keynesian “saltwater”).
I have found myself part of this group of liberals, and it is this liberalism that I have written a manifesto for, though not all meta-liberals would agree with it.16
A Meta-Liberal Manifesto
As a logical conclusion of natural law, I propose the following Ten Precepts17 of Meta-Liberalism. I could have made it five, but ten seemed a more whole number. One will notice there is little mention of social politics.
I. Economic freedom is of paramount and ultimate importance.
II. The only encumbrance of capitalism is rent-seeking. The path towards a truly free market is by taxing land.
III. Technological advancements have all but rendered government useless and inefficient.
IV. Where government is still needed, it should be voluntary, holarchic, and local.
V. Constitutional monarchs should be installed to serve as a national symbol and stabilizing force.
VI. National governments should have five branches, not three.
VII. Money should be immutable in order to protect the livelihood of the public.
VIII. All information and records necessary for public functioning should be recorded immutably.
IX. Decentralize everything.
X. The current state of things is corrupt. Revolt by participating in the counter-economy.
The First Precept is that of neoliberal capitalism. Regardless of any socialist or conservative criticism of capitalism as a system-unto-itself, which may or may not be arguments in good faith, the free market remains the best framework for economic prosperity. Four hundred years of evidence confirm that the Marxist experiments are abject failures; I need not rehash the tired—if true—rhetoric of the right on this issue. Capitalism should be unrestricted and unregulated as much as reasonable, and global in scale, without tariffs. This globalization serves to prevent widespread conflict; who goes to war with their grocer?
The Second Precept is that of Georgism. The private ownership of land presents the greatest obstacle to the free market. While it might appear that land ownership is part and parcel of a capitalist system, even the earliest capitalists, the physiocrats, understood this to not be the case. “A fair field and no favor” means just that: no favor, not even the favor conferred by monopolization over part of Creation.
The Third Precept is that of gradualism. The general course of social progress is a tendency away from a need for governmental power. Private companies and individuals can now provide things that at one time only the State (or the Church) could. Meta-liberalism predicts that this will likely continue into the future, looks forward to this withering, and encourages the decline of state power, though not necessarily the state itself because a state is needed for the maintenance of the Georgist order.
The Fourth Precept is that of holarchism. Local government is the most important avenue for pursuing meaningful social change. That being said, local government is often incredibly corrupt because of its relative opacity compared to national politics. To prevent abuse, the best way to organize locally is through mutually agreed, voluntary communes, called holons, which can be managed effectively through blockchain-based decentralized applications.
The Fifth Precept is that of bonapartism. While absolutism is a decidedly backward ideology in the twenty-first century, it goes without saying that the post-Enlightenment republican ideal has often devolved into brutal authoritarianism of both left- and right-wing varieties. By contrast, monarchies, especially constitutional monarchies, have faired better, with their royal families being worth the (largely ephemeral) cost to taxpayers in order to maintain the political continuity of a hereditary sovereign—be they a King, Duke, Prince, Emperor, or Emir—provides. A monarch should be constitutional but should retain some limited power that can be exercised in times of utter crisis.
The Sixth Precept is that of neo-tridemism. I espouse Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People, also called Sun-min thought, or “tridemism,” at least the portion about the structure of the national state. Instead of dividing the political sphere into three branches—legislative, executive, and judicial—as is standard in most of the world, Sun advocated a pentapartite division. Oversight of the bureaucratic organs, usually a task left to the executive branch, the bureaucrats themselves, legislative committees, or some unholy combination of the three, is separated out in Sun’s system to a new examination branch. Management of the constitutional order (prosecution, defense of the government before the Courts, the office of the ombudsman, the census, and other purely constitutional tasks) should be left to the control branch, which I call the constitutional power as a better translation. The legislature should be bicameral, and elected through proportional or runoff means in order to encourage pluralism, rather than first-past-the-post. It also doesn’t hurt that Sun was an avowed Georgist.
The Seventh Precept is that of crypto-monetarism. The history of economic prosperity and political stability is largely one of monetary security. States with bad currency are more likely to be poor and warlike. To ensure the general peace and prosperity of all, the current fiat system should be abolished and replaced with sound money. The soundest of all money is cryptocurrency, even despite the recent price collapse.
The Eighth Precept is that of techno-historicism. Authoritarianism and repression often breed in opaque, byzantine, and Kafkaesque political machinations. The people oppose tyranny but might accept it if the processes of democratic backsliding occur in such a way that the populace cannot see them. Keeping the populace in the dark is a goal of brutal states. In order to force governments to be transparent, all records, even minor ones, should be enshrined in a publicly available and incorruptible form: the blockchain. Because space on the blockchain is priced at a premium, records would tend towards brevity and simplicity, as decentralized applications do now.
The Ninth Precept is that of anarchism. The consolidation of power results in its entrenchment, because power will always beget power. To combat this, power should be as decentralized as possible. In politics, this means localism, federalism, and the formation of holarchic communes. In economics, this means the establishment of cooperative societies, credit unions, and labor unions in the private sector. Decentralized societies without true centralized authority (even if there is a centralized false authority, like the Sovereign), are the most democratic and prosperous.
The Tenth Precept is that of agorism. The current order of things does not resemble or even approximate that order furthered by the preceding nine Precepts. How then, can we achieve such a world? Violent revolt seems a poor solution—how often do revolutionaries adhere to their revolutionary ideals once they have attained power? Electoralism is fine, especially on the local level, but it too is inefficient. The superior practical methods for attaining a better society are organization, resistance, and withdrawal. Organize labor unions, cooperative societies, and Georgist communities like Arden, Delaware. Resist against the relentless onslaught of authoritarian statism. Withdraw from the organizations that uphold the corrupt systems: buy Bitcoin and quit your government job.
This is the way forward.
This is the doctrine of meta-liberalism.
“Why Trump and the right-wing Leninists have Davos Man by the throat,” John Bew, The New Statesman, 2017.
Pseudonymous collective author of 2007’s The Coming Insurrection.
This entire section is derived from my first three essays, which I have repackaged into this one. “The Fifth Ideology” is stylistically and materially different from the remainder of the essays, and is turned into the section “The Raven.” “Capital in the Third Millennium” is partially revised into a section of the same name, while “The Wisdom of the Scroll” is revised into “A Meta-Liberal Manifesto.”
Fascism as Viewed from the Right, Julius Evola, 1964.
Author of The Apocalypse of John, referred to in the West as The Revelation to John.
International Programs — Historical Estimates of World Population — U.S. Census Bureau, 2019.
Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine, David Marples, 2007.
Da Yuejin Kurezi, Yu Xiguang, 2005.
Identifying Causes of State Failure: The Case of Somalia, Ahmad Rashid Jamal, 2013.
Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick (1974).
“Domino’s Pizza Unveils U.S. Infrastructure Project Filling Potholes,” Aarthi Swaminathan, The Huffington Post, 2018.
Proposed by Samuel Edward Konkin III at CounterCon I and II from 1974-75.
The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era, Edmund Fung, 2010.
I recognize that my data set is terribly limited to those I interact with on Twitter and in person in the ivy-covered halls of the university I attend.
An explanation as to the drinks the “five liberals” ordered: milk punch for the eighteenth-century aristocratic paleo-liberal, a foreign Japanese beer for the mid-century neo-liberal obsessed with the Japanese Miracle, a pilsener for the compassionate but patriotic German ordo-liberal who celebrates the Miracle on the Rhine, a vegan non-alcoholic oat milkshake for the well-off Brooklyn progressive post-liberal, and amaretto for me because I like amaretto. No other reason.
“Precepts” seemed less pretentious than “commandments.”