Secession

One big idea out there is that what we need is Exit. We need to allow secession, for different people to go their own way. We obviously can't get along. Some people want homosexuals teaching sex education in kindergarten. Others want to put statues to Hitler and Genghis Khan. Others want the liberty to do drugs, own guns, preferably at the same time. Others want soda taxes enforced by a mercenary army. Many want sharia law.

That's what other countries are for! Give us borders. A patchwork, a polyhedron of independent countries free to develop their own culture. That's a fine idea. Autonomy is a fine thing. Surely better than having faceless bureaucrats ruling from thousands of miles away.

Well ok, let's say we all get secession. What happens then? Fortunately Europe is experimenting with the idea. Plenty of secessionist movements going on in Europe. Scotland is one of the most advanced. Soon Scotland may be able to become free, and the Scots can do their own thing. So what are the Scots up to?

They are arresting people for making videos of dogs doing the nazi salute.

They are arresting people for complaining about "syrian refugees" on Facebook.

They are basically running the mother of all censorship campaigns by arresting anyone who says anything non-PC on the internet. Hate crimes, you see. Even the Chinese Communist Party isn't this blatant.

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It is often said that the secret of European dominance after the 16th century was that Europe was divided in many small states, which created a competitive pressure which resulted in, well, massive advances in shipbuilding, weaponry, science, and eventually the Industrial Revolution. I buy that. But you'll note that for all the political division of Europe there is such a thing as European culture. European countries had different governments different languages.Yet they dressed mostly the same, had similar economic systems, basically the same religion. The elite intermarried profusely, and intellectual life was international. Many linguists will tell you that European languages, for all their differences, are basically the same; vocabulary and other grammar patterns having diffused so much that automatic translation actually works! Try to run Google Translate to any slightly exotic language and it breaks down very fast.

Even if the Western elite were to go mad tomorrow and allow widespread secession; even if Europe and North America were tomorrow to divide in 500 sovereign countries; who says that the common culture would necessarily fracture? The Irish fought valiantly for decades to gain their freedom from the British, only to use their sovereignty to fill Dublin with African immigrants. The Scots are likely to use their newly gained sovereignty to pass a law giving 10 year jail sentences to those who oppose bringing 100k male Afghan immigrants per year. Which will make the British then bring 120k, to spite them. The same way Voltaire was a celebrity in both the Russian and Pussian courts, or Confucius roamed the Chinese heartland working for different lords, Sadiq Khan may end up as mayor of Berlin after he's finished with London.

I don't want to oversell this argument. Of course sovereignty does matter at some level. I'm glad that Slovakia or Hungary are sovereign and can refuse to open their borders to barbarians. If the EU could it would have forced the distribution of migrants across European territory. Still, sovereignty only gets you so far. The EU could plausibly engineer a regime change in some country in Eastern Europe in the middle term, and put some Harvard grad to implement EU policy.

The issue here is culture. Politics of course influences culture to some extent, but the arrow goes the other way around too. Any patchwork, no matter how sovereign, will result in the same insane liberal monoculture if trade dynamics stay the same, everybody learns English, the global elite all goes to American colleges, and everybody is discussing politics on Twitter. Sovereignty doesn't mean anything if the sovereign(s) doesn't want to use it. I've made that point about monarchy several times. It applies to republics all the same.

What weneedis...

The new religion is neoreactionary racist Christianity.

Where's the home church?

Secession? Exit? As an escape hatch from the Democalypse, the idea appeals. Maybe all you mean is to broach the idea, but let us suppose that you were wholly in earnest. Question: Was the EU not chiefly founded to resist Russian expansionism? Do the nationalist leaders of eastern Europe not still cling to the EU for this very reason? If so, then what is to deter Russia once the EU is gone? If the USA too broke up, the Americans would hardly thereafter deter Russia. Anyway, is secession not the likeliest way to set the table for comparatively strong secedents (states which have seceded), 50 years from now, to progressively gobble up the weak? In which case you'd have a new empire from which to secede! Some of us might wonder whether we should not save the trouble, avoiding secession in the first place. Admittedly, all this loose talk of ours is theoretical, detached from reality. I do not know whether I even agree with my own point, but it seems worth discussing, at any rate.

"Secession" as you're talking about in para 2 is not really secession in a sense of sovereignty. All we're talking about is provinces rearranging themselves upon their own say-so. So long as progressives run both countries -- which is to say, they both remain democratic -- they are part of the same overarching sovereign meta-politics. Progressives pretty much by definition are attuned to the Cathedral, and the Cathedral is one. Catholic. (It is interesting to speculate as to whether it would be possible to fork the Cathedral. It would not have been possible in 1945, but at least in theory could be done now.) True secession means sovereignty change, and sovereignty change in the modern West requires change of government type to something other than "democracy". So long as political ideation grounds out at Harvard, you have not changed the fundaments and the leftist craziness will continue to swell. This is basically what you're saying at the end. You need a new religion as a state religion; lacking that, you are Cathedral and "secession" is kabuki. Put another way: if USG can engineer a regime change in Hungary, Hungary is not in fact sovereign.

@Leonard: You say, If USG can engineer a regime change in Hungary? Did I miss something? For information: to what regime change do you refer?

A hypothetical one. I am not sure that current USG could do it. The information environment is a new thing. But neither am I sure of the opposite. Do note that the Cathedral, if not necessarily USG directly, did engineer one in 1949 and in 1989.

Moldbug covered this pretty well in his seasteading post:

A seasteading project that solves the first problem, but not the second - that becomes sovereign, but in a politically assimilated condition - has solved the hard and unimportant part of the problem, and ignored the easy and important part. It has established its temporal sovereignty. It has ignored the much more essential matter of intellectual sovereignty. The truth about Ireland, Sweden and Costa Rica is that each of these governments is physically capable of achieving far more sovereignty than it has. It just doesn't want to. Its body, while not especially free, is far freer than its mind, which is slave to the latest Harvard fashions.

The big question: how to get intellectual sovereignty?

Secession does have benefits - by increasing the number of states (within a formal superstate structure like the EU or an informal one like the US network of influence) it substantially increases the cost and effort to impose a political mono-culture widely. Merkel can convince Facebook to censor within all of Germany, but a convincing the rulers of fragmented German substates to all censor is a much slower and more laborious process. Having multiple states with different governments but the same language and culture allows ideas produced in even one dissident state to be spread into other states. In the fragmented Germany before Napoleon it was effectively impossible to maintain consistent standards of censorship - dissident professors and religious thinkers could always find one minor margrave who would take them in, or one of the free imperial cities who would let them publish heretical books that could then be smuggled to other places.

Religion. Somebody should make an abridged version of Moldbug's best posts, arranged by topic.

If the Hungarian illuminati (or some obscure secret society known only to Hungarians) can engineer a regime change in Hungary, is Hungary sovereign? If the Hungarian illuminati are part of a loose coalition of illuminati sects across the Danube, is Hungary sovereign? We can play this game forever. It's a fun game. Incidentally we now have a democratic monoculture; but we used to have a monarchical monoculture where the governments all across Europe looked mostly the same. Were they not sovereign? Does the whole system and intellectual underpinning of government have to be different? If that's the case then only different civilizations are sovereign.

It also has drawbacks. State policy is more efficiently enforced in most states, which tend to have a higher ratio of government workers to population. China was huge and centralized, but the state just didn't have the capability to enforce compliance in every single corner. Merkel couldn't have the police in Bulgaria arrest some kid for putting a dog-hitler video on Youtube.

I think the idea is that with sufficient physical separation, religious/cultural diversity can occur. This seems wrong/overly optimistic to me. Before exit has a chance, some religion will need a restoration to pre-enlightenment standards, and/or we need a messianic figure to undo the damage of the enlightenment. If the enlightenment was the inevitable result of information technology, severe censorship is likely a prerequisite.

It doesn't get any more remote than New Zealand, yet their politics are more close to Scotland than to the US even.

Secession from those that want sharia law seems to be an option. Afterall, they have a different religion. The alternatives seem to be conversion and war. In Jugoslavia they tried all three. Secession will only make a difference if you have different cultures that can secede. I'm still sceptical whether we need a new religion. Maybe a new culture would suffice; a new policy won't.

Well, establishing intellectual sovereignty and building a new religion amount to being the same exact problem.

Yeah. I agree. I think as long as the Internet exists, exit won't help.

I guess the clearer way to look at it is that "sovereignty" is not an attribute of countries or states, but of groups of people. So, yes, the Hungarian Illuminati are sovereign if they can change the regime. Of course, if they for some reason choose not to use their power to take over, or at least shape the policies of the existing state, then they are sovereign in abeyance. Sort of like the US Army. But US Army is carefully neutralized by their religion. The Illuminati exist for power; why would they forbear? There is a difference between monarchy and democracy as far as sovereignty goes. In monarchy, the monarch is the owner of the country. He is sovereign. Sure, 99% of his ideas are not original; he gets them from Harvard perhaps. But his position does not depend on anything except the facts of history and the ongoing loyalty of the security forces. In particular it does not depend on the state church (if any). If he implements a Harvard idea, or one of his own, presumably it happens in either case. By contrast, in modern "democracy", the sovereign group is a huge and amorphous blob of politicians, bureaucrats, judges, and NGO people, each of whom controls only the tiniest slice of sovereign power. Ownership of these microslices is not a matter of property, but rather by activism. (C.f. Moldy on Michael Mann, climate Stalin.) If the activist flags in his activism, eventually some sharp-eyed climber notices and out-holies him, taking the job. Once we start talking about people out-holying each other to gain power, we've entered the domain of religion, and that's where it matters what the state religion is. But furthermore, we've also entered the domain of Moloch. Competitive processes, not men, control the state. We face the left singularity.

the old religion was reactionary racist Christianity, and it already lost to the progressive Christianity that became progressive atheism, for reasons that have little to do with Jews (the Jews weren't in charge when this process started) or even fascination with the scientific method (if the scientific method is so important, why did we lose the racism?).

2008: The Plinth must (a) obey the principles of existential politics as described above; (b) conduct all operations in a perfectly democratic, transparent and responsible way; and (c) place its absolute confidence in the Antiversity and the Program. 2012: If the Cathedral’s evil consists primarily in heresy, in suppressing non heretical Christianity, on coercing all Christian churches to follow in its heresy, then you get the Theonomist Reaction… I admire the success of England under the restoration Church of England, an official state church which was much better than today’s official progressivism 2016: cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck (that's the sound of the alt-right pecking away at the intellectual order)

Autocephalous Orthodox Churches. By design there probably won't be another Ecumenical Council, so the dogma is fixed to be over a millenia old and most everything else is merely a matter of theological opinion. No Pope, no single point of failure. Bible and liturgy are translated to native languages. Clergy can marry. Has already survived both Communism and Islam, continues to survive under Pax Americana with good birthrates.