For a New System and the "Post Libertarian" Debate

Laying out the Solutions Part 1

For the non-believers in the Cathedral, life can be a living Hell. While entirely possible to live one’s life under the thumb of the Priests and the eyes of Parishioners, it’s not a very pleasant existence. Language must constantly be updated, certain religious holidays must be observed (or at least not derided), and implicit beliefs must be accepted. There are many people who wish to see a change, but have no idea what that change will look like, let alone how to bring about such a change. Without knowledge of either, something far worse can emerge.

While the knowledge of the 20th century can serve as guides for what we cannot allow to happen, stagnation must not be allowed either. Most of the Latin American continent is plagued with this stagnation, where the population has absolutely no direction or the governing structure is outsourced to the Western Cathedral. Stagnation is unacceptable. What’s needed, is forward change.

Thankfully, the structures built over the last one hundred odd years are extremely fragile. We should bear in mind that the Cathedral is best thought of as a system, with various interconnected smaller systems. The Cathedral is reliant more and more on technocracy, through food, medicine, and new forms of social control via media. The old tools of currency manipulation and weaponry are still extremely useful, although they are employed less on the domestic population, or at least, less effectively.

Out of all the systems in history, the 20th Century Western Cathedral has comparatively low vitality, meaning, it cannot continue to exist for very long. In less than a decade, America, the country which had earned the moral right in the eyes of many to rule the world after WWII, accelerated in decline rather than abundance. After another few decades, America is only the world leader because of its currency and cultural hegemony created after WWII, it has no solid core or ideology other than growth, which, it is desperately failing at.

That said, the weaponry used by the Cathedral is powerful, and can turn a rather prosperous nation into a slave trading shithole, or massacre dozens of people to obtain more funding for a subset of its governance cog. However, the Cathedral is also collapsing, and is very shit at maintaining complex systems. It exists almost entirely on legacy systems that the Priests no longer know how to maintain or control. The first election of Donald Trump, collapsing in shipping management, and existence of outright warzones in areas like Chicago are evidence of such. In zoomer gaming terms, the Cathedral is a glass cannon. It has a lot of power, but not a lot of vitality.

There are many reasons for the Cathedral’s defensive weakness, but that’s for another article. We should first lay out all the possible options for superior systems, and gradually rule out and learn from the useless ones, while updating and employing the useful ones. Seeing as the Cathedral’s primary strength is its offensive capability, we should look to something which has sufficient vitality (and, in later articles, systems that have can effectively wield weaponry to smash the Cathedral). Those are the types of systems which can beat the Cathedral, or at least withstand the violent lashing out which is happening and will only worsen.

The systems which are high in vitality, meaning they can last for long periods of time, are honor culture, religion, isolation, and ethnicity.

Honor cultures are cultures that attempt to reinforce natural hierarchy through social mores and rewards. They are some of the most long lasting precisely because the systems replicated the reality embedded into the animalistic machine that is humanity. Honor cultures do amazing gate keeping, and are difficult to infiltrate. However, they tend to be stagnant and do adapt well to changing circumstances. This allows honor cultures to be absolutely dominated by the more Machiavellian systems like the Cathedral, but inevitably outlast said systems. No matter how many times the English try to kill the Scotts, they’ll always find another in a bar somewhere.

Next, is religion. Religion is the pursuit of Truth under adherence to a higher moral law. Religion is a perpetual journey that a group of people embark on in order to achieve their heaven, nirvana, etc. Religions are similar to honor cultures in that they often mirror the animalistic nature of man, but are more adaptable to changing environments. The downside of religion is that as time goes on, the promise of heaven becomes less appealing than marginal increase in living circumstances, thus the religion tends to lose adherents. To makeup for the lack of followers, the rules become more liberal, which either splinters the faith, or allows for infiltrators from the dominant system to destroy it. Liberal rules are good for initial expansion of the faith, but bad for long term health. The originally gatekept religion has difficulty growing, and unless of a sufficient size (like Islam) can be wiped out.

Isolation is retreating physically from the areas where other systems dominate. Usually, the effectiveness of this system depends on the morality and the weaponry of the dominant system, but there are some exceptions. Vietnam, for example, has never, will never, and can never be conquered. American morality and politicking prevented the Vietnam war from being a success, and is what most people think of when it comes to the jungle country. It’s good to remember that both the far more militarily apt Mongols and the Chinese had repeated failed attempts to conquer Vietnam over the course of two thousand years. No civilization, no matter how competent, can ever beat the Vietnamese caves.

There are a few other unconquerable areas such as the Amazon and the swamps on the Ethiopian border, where the domesticate inhabitants (Amazonians and Twa) have lived and will continue to live until the Earth is hit by a comet. Even if you were to nuke Vietnam, the Amazon, and the Ethiopian swamps, the people would still manage to survive.

However, most of us are not Amazonians, Vietnamese, or Twa. Isolation for Americans would mostly consist of heading to remote areas in the far north or out in the ocean, both of which have their own issues. Barring the exceptions, isolation is only good so long as your enemy doesn’t deem you a threat, or thinks complete murder campaigns are immoral. Inuit in the far north are only around because the Canadian government hasn’t found a good use for their corpses.

Isolation also tends to have lackluster technology compared to the dominant system, although this is not always a downside, as seen in the dozens of Vietnam wars. Thus, isolation is heavily dependent on the competency of the dominant system, but can work in some notable circumstances.

The next system is ethnicity. The mere mention of ethnicity as a system should make those who still hold a semblance of liberalism to cast it into the fires of Mordor. Ethnicity has been, and continues to be, the dominant system in the Middle East, Judaism, Africa, Asia, and the ever so reviled populist uprisings across Europe. Despite being both genocided and genociders, the Jews maintain strong family bonds in the various permutations. With the exception of Spain, the countries which became Arabic before the fall of the original caliphates, remain Arabic, despite the clear physical differences between a Moroccan and a Saudi. In Europe, ethnic ties divide most of the East, while even in the anglosphere ethnicities divide Great Britain no matter how much Londoners deny it. Over in China, the Han started in the Han River Valley, have stayed in the Han River Valley, and, before expanding, make extreme efforts to turn the newly conquered sullen peoples into more Han before accepting them into Chinese society.

Because of strong gatekeeping, ethnicities do a poor job at expansion. Almost no one after the Caliphate fell is considered Arabic and there are very few new additions to the Chinese Han. How many Jewish converts can you name?

Further, building an ethnicity takes a unique set of circumstances reliant on extreme military power, or extreme oppression of a particular group over millennia. In America, ethnic ties bind some of the lower and immigrant classes, but are eventually done away with as ethnicities breed and the ties to mother countries are completely erased. Ethnic bonds therefore have high vitality, but are difficult to build due to the extreme barriers of entry and unique set of circumstances for their subsequent development.

All of the solutions which have vitality have one thing in common: they are ways of organizing relationships. Relationships between individuals, between classes, and between one’s relationship with the “end goal”, however defined. Thus, in order for any of the solutions to work, relationships need be paid fundamental attention (which is partially why Honor Cultures last so long, they follow the pre-built structure in the human psyche for relationships, however harsh that may be). Even deeper, relationships need at least one individual to function. So, the thing which must also be improved is the individual(s) in a given relationship. But none of these things are separate, and providing emphasis to one over the other is idiotic.

This highlights the debate between Post-Libertarians and Libertarians. The Post-Libertarians rank order their priorities as the self first, relationships second, and the system of the future as a distant, if at all, thought. Many of them completely dismiss the future as either hopeless or out of their control entirely. Meanwhile, the Libertarians have too much focus on the future of the system, the individual, and then maybe some discussion of the community/relationships needed for the future.

Criticism from both sides for another is correct, because both sides mistake what should be emphasized. The individual cannot be improved without a vision of the system in which he is trying to create (on earth, not heaven) and the relationships needed for such a future. Relationships cannot be improved without competent individuals partaking in the relationship, whose competency is shaped by the future he wants. The future cannot be built without either good relationships or competent individuals.

Importantly, both sides mistake the purpose of future planning. The Post-Libertarians hold that future plans are pointless, and we should live in the day to day. The Libertarians hold that future plans are the only thing that matter, but have no plan for the day to day.

Here, I think it’s best to speak in broad terms that future concrete plans are idiotic. The future is too dense a fog to penetrate. Learning from history we know that this Cathedral, like all systems, will collapse, but we don’t know how the rubble will fall. Thus, we should have an idea of the future, which is not so specific it limits us to a certain path, but not so hopeless or apathetic it renders the idea pointless.

Having an elastic future ideal allows us to set the groundwork for what relationships are needed. These relationships guide us to the type of competency we should have as individuals. But, in order to achieve that future, we should have competent individuals who can create such. By looking at the systems with high vitality, the systems which have been shown to live past the fall of empires, we can examine the individuals and relationships in said system, and attempt to build all three in congruence with one another.