The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has led to one of the most robust propaganda campaigns of my life. It’s hard to use any online platform and avoid finding a headline about the ongoing war. I find myself mindlessly consuming what’s probably just troll-farm propaganda at the cyclic rate. I am hoping that I can continue to retreat inward and contemplate each party’s motivation to make sense of the conflict, but the emotional nature of the subject matter tugs me in one direction then in another.
It’s probably necessary for me to state plainly that I am pretty disillusioned about the United States’ grasp on jus ad bellum. Nayirah al-Sabah’s fraudulent testimony to congress and Collin Powell’s vials of an anthrax stand-in were enough to turn Iraq into a heavy bag for a few decades. I’m sure Saddam Hussein was not a good dude, but the power vacuum he left served no one, except maybe Lockheed stockholders and all of the government bureaucrats who used the invasion to fail upward in their careers. Giving all parties the benefit of the doubt and assuming they were acting with no ulterior motives still demonstrates the nature of unintended consequences.
I ask that my handlers, with this in mind, forgive me for not yet pledging my allegiance to Ukraine. Power loves conflict. It is a self-fellating ouroboros, and the State’s nature is to aggregate power to bolster its status quo. Americans have had a very difficult time grappling with State propaganda. I believe this is due to the decentralized nature of the Iron Polygon, otherwise known as the political status quo in America. Curtis Yarvin’s model of the vertices of power within American politics germinates from his ideology of formalism.
Minimalize Your Ideological Footprint
These days, I find it difficult to identify with many ideologies. I find myself plucking pieces and ideas from eras and movements history both forgot and remembered, constructing mental models in a way that’s best described as retaining Grahamian fluidity. There are some labels (positive or negative) which are basically inescapable, though. I’m not yet a post-modernist. I still believe in value hierarchies- I’ll even accept being a Kantian universalist (not to be confused with Christian Universalism, which is more closely related to the frequent target of “universalism” in the UR blog and by Yarvin at large). And I think, by extension, I might have to accept the title of “formalist,” on occasion, as well.
Formalism acts as an antidote from the Orwellian tradition of debasing the language. It seeks to objectively label structures for what they are, not what they aspire to be. The VC & startup culture born in Silicon Valley has given birth to some monolithic entities based around the idea of properly labelling problems and offering novel solutions. Often times, users don’t know what they actually want. The only thing they really know is that they have certain problems. As an entrepreneur, your goal isn’t to discuss the potential solution with a user. Nobody can predict the market’s reaction to a solution. Instead, you should focus on the user’s problem, and have the user describe in detail what they think the problem actually is. Naturally, formalism represents an extension of a process built atop the graves of many dreams and startups.
Properly labelling a problem is the most critical ingredient to supposing a solution, a radical departure from the current state of American politics. Try not to be mistaken. The conflict in Ukraine doesn’t have as much to do with the reunification of the Russian Empire as it does the conquest for nonrenewable energy & Putin’s red line. Putin’s probably not as crazy as some would like him to be. He’s just under the influence of power. Don’t get me wrong, the invasion is terrible, but that’s what your brain looks like on power. So, like, let’s just take a minute to step back and breathe before we start fantasizing about upping the ante.
Fighting our Urges
The EU needs Russian gas and the Iron Polygon wants a boogeyman, but there’s no reason for us to egg on any of the parties to pony up in this nuclear trifecta. What happened in Ukraine sucks. War always sucks. My heart breaks for the average Ukrainian, as it does also for the average Russian. Both nations are going to be reeling from this for awhile, but it does not mean we need to throw our hat in the ring also. Violence often begets only more uncertainty, and uncertainty is the formalist’s enemy.
The Iron Polygon’s resiliency comes from its ability to obfuscate its power. No actor within the polygon would ever refer to themselves as powerful, because power has evil connotations. Instead, the most you may be able to squeak out of the polygon is that they are responsible. From Yarvin’s Iron Polygon post:
Indeed, kids in school are taught that the US is balanced by a separation of powers. But the power structure they learn is the original design of the Constitution, as borrowed from Montesquieu—legislative, executive and judicial. This is like saying a Camaro has 250 horses under the hood. It’s true in a certain metaphorical sense, but it’s not actually true. In the same sense, the Roman Empire never thought of itself as anything other than the Roman Republic.
By my count, Anglophone North America ex Canada is on its fifth legal regime. The First Republic was the Congressional regime, which illegally abolished the British colonial governments. The Second Republic was the Constitutional regime, which illegally abolished the Articles of Confederation. The Third Republic was the Unionist regime, which illegally abolished the principle of federalism. The Fourth Republic is the New Deal regime, which illegally abolished the principle of limited government.
Yarvin paints a vivid and Darwinian picture, and notes that each derivative regime is dancing on the grave of its ancestor. This is representative of the evolution of power with respect to time.
The real legal nature of the Fourth Republic is that, like the UK, it has no constitution. Its legitimacy is defined by a set of precedents written by New Deal judges in the 1930s. These have obscure names like Footnote Four, West Coast Hotel, and Wickard v. Filburn.
These precedents establish the Fourth Republic as a universal and absolute government, subject only to a few isolated limitations, which in practice do not matter at all. For example, no European country has any clear equivalent of our First Amendment, either in its original meaning or in its Footnote Four restatement. If dissidents are being lined up and shot in stadiums in Europe, I have somehow remained ignorant of it. “Constitutional law” in the Fourth Republic is a very real and very substantial body of law, but its connection to the original charter of the Second Republic is entirely nominal.
No, the US government is the 800-pound gorilla. It sits wherever it wants. But “it” is not one entity. It is, again, a network of competing power centers.
The closest well-known equivalent to the way I see the Fourth Republic’s power structure is a concept that dates to the ’60s, the iron triangle. The iron triangle is certainly real, but for some reason—no doubt related to the agenda of the official intellectuals who created it—it’s missing most of its vertices. In fact, what we’re looking at here is an iron polygon.
The key to power in the Fourth Republic is that no one who has power wants anyone to think of them as having power. For example, in the traditional iron triangle, legislators do not have power. They are just expressing the will of the people. Civil servants do not have power. They are just making public policy. Lobbyists do not have power. They are just communicating their concerns.
This is a profoundly Orwellian situation. The root of the problem is that the modern English language has no word which means “power,” but carries only positive associations.
Perhaps the most important fact about power is that the powerful are almost always sincere. They honestly believe they are doing good. Every Sauron considers himself a Boromir. And—as Acton observed—every Boromir has an inner Sauron. Since this is widely recognized, and since “power” is generally associated with “evil,” the people in the US who have actual power do not and cannot think of themselves as having power.
However, there are euphemisms for it. Perhaps the most common is “responsibility.”
A good way to find the most powerful people in the US is to find the most responsible people. No one in the US is scheming for power. A lot of them seem to be working for change. No one in the US is brainwashing the masses. A lot of them seem to be educating the public. No one in the US is ruling the world. A lot of them seem to be making global policies.
Having power means you have a choice. Mandelstam’s poem on Stalin comes to mind—“he sticks out his finger, he alone goes bang.” Stalin was certainly one of the most powerful men in the 20th century, if not in human history. Most of us think he was evil. He would probably disagree. But if Stalin had woken up one day and decided that yesterday, he was evil, but today he would be good—by my definition of “good”—by definition, he would have used his power to do good. To be, in other words, responsible.
The New York Times is a paragon of “responsible journalism.” It, or at least its journalists, would like us to be concerned about global warming. We can tell this by the fact that they write many stories on the subject. Surely if they didn’t want us to think about the subject, it is within their personal discretion to avoid it. They don’t. And since many people read the New York Times, many of us are concerned about global warming.
Pragmatic Anti-Racism
Today, many in the Polygon would like you to be concerned with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This concern is completely at odds with how Ukraine legitimized the Azov Battalion. Is this how schizophrenic our system of governance has become? We spent the better half of 2020 trying to figure out how to become the most anti-racist versions of ourselves. We burnt down our cities to do so. Our generals have gone out of their way to categorically dismantle white rage. Now, no sooner than we’ve brushed away the ashes, we’re supposed to look the other way for literal neo-Nazis?
So listen, guys, I’m confused, okay? I want to destroy whiteness just as much as the next guy. But if you told me during the summer of love that the way to destroy whiteness was to support my local neo-Nazi outfit, I would have been REALLY confused. Almost as much as I am now. This is obviously a complicated story, so maybe a fact-checker at Facebook can explain it to me.
If you’ve recovered from your convulsion, be sure to wipe the foam from your mouth before I leave you with this alternative picture: the powers that be use race as a means to an end. Energy is the lifeblood of the economy, and just like America is dependent on Chinese manufacturing, the EU is dependent on Russian gas. Complacency must be a Western thing, so maybe it’s for the best if we just sit this one out.
Don’t get me wrong, the invasion of a sovereign nation has everybody up in arms and for good reason. The invasion decision by Putin was not made from a place of complete power. My impression is that he believes he can get away with it before the West can establish an effective immunological response. I’m not a Russophile. I am, however, skeptical of perfectly executed 3-point turns by the US’s legacy media when anything white supremacist is involved.
Maybe it’s my inner petulant child just trying to deviate, or maybe it’s the lifetime of lies. I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t care.