2 A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations Mencius Moldbug 2009 2 Contents 1 The Red Pill 1 2 The American Rebellion 27 3 AGW, KFM, and HNU 45 4 Plan Moldbug 85 5 The Modern Structure 107 6 Brother Jonathan 129 7 The War of Secession 145 8 Olde Towne Easte 175 9 The Procedure and the Reaction 203 10 The Mandate of Heaven 225 11 The New Structure 247 i ii CONTENTS Foreword This manuscript is a lightly edited compilation of the “gentle introduction” se- ries from the blog Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug. It has been prepared with permission from the author, but it’s being distributed samizdat- style, so Moldbug is not responsible for any mistakes or deviations from the original text. All such deviations are slight, and have been made mainly so that A Gentle Introduction looks and reads more like a book. (This includes the chapter titles, which are an editorial addition and do not appear in the original.) In addition, a small number of typos and a large number of broken links have been fixed. Please report any remaining typos, broken links, or other errors to @lexcorvus or [email protected]. You can share A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations using the URL http://bit.ly/GI2UR. Readers of A Gentle Introduction might also be in- terested in the following: • An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) • How Dawkins Got Pwned (PDF only) • Moldbug on Carlyle (PDF only) iii iv CONTENTS Acknowledgments Thanks to Mencius Moldbug for granting permission to prepare and publish this document. Thanks to Surviving Babel for his assistance in obtaining a designer for the cover, and to Mrs. Surviving Babel for the cover design itself. v vi CONTENTS Copyright Copyright © 2009 by Mencius Moldbug. vii viii CONTENTS Chapter 1 The Red Pill I thought it’d be fun to kick off the year by retro-introducing Unqualified Reser- vations—for the benefit of innocent new readers, and crazy old ones as well.∗ Continuing UR readers: obviously, you are not crazy. It is everyone else who is crazy. Thanks for coming back in 2009. If you need a link to introduce your other crazy friends to UR, this may be a good one. New UR readers: unfortunately, I’m lying. There is no such thing as a gentle introduction to UR. It’s like talking about a “mild DMT trip.” If it was mild, it wasn’t DMT. UR is a strange blog: its goal is to cure your brain. We’ve all seen The Matrix. We know about red pills. Many claim to sell them. You can go, for example, to any bookstore, and ask the guy behind the counter for some Noam Chomsky. What you’ll get is blue pills soaked in Red #3. Since we provide the genuine article, UR is pretty much the anti-Chomsky. (As a broad generalization, UR’s stance in any controversy will be the opposite of Chomsky’s.) Take one of our red pills—heck, split one in half—and you’ll be in a completely different world. Like DMT, except that the DMT reality is prettier than your old reality. UR’s is uglier. Also, DMT wears off. Alas, our genuine red pill is not ready for the mass market. It is the size of a golfball, though nowhere near so smooth, and halfway down it splits in half and exposes a sodium-metal core, which will sear your throat like a live coal. ∗Unqualified Reservations is available at http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/, but see Moldbuggery and Works of Mencius Moldbug for more convenient ways to read the archives. 1 2 CHAPTER 1. THE RED PILL There will be scarring. What can we say? That’s what you get for being an early adopter. At least you didn’t buy a Newton. When we think about red and blue pills in the real world, obviously, we are thinking about the Orwellian mind-control state. We are not going to cure your whole brain. After the treatment, for instance, you may still be a Celtics fan. Our chemical interest is solely in the political lobe. Unfortunately, this organ is unusually large and proliferating fast. After the treatment, it will return to its normal marble-like size, and you may hear a hollow sound if you knock your fist hard on the back of your head. That’s because now you know the truth, and you never need to think about any of that crap ever, ever again. Since the shape of your skull is unchanged, the resulting void is percussive. When we think about the Orwellian mind-control state, we generally think of a few big, obvious examples. The Nazis. The Soviet Union. And so on. These regimes, of course, specialized in implanting bizarre, sometimes mur- derous, instructions in their subjects’ brains. If you must visualize these im- planted Orwellian modules, you can think of them as little worms, like in Wrath of Khan, that crawl into the ear and stay there. One imagines writing a letter to a dedicated National Socialist, explaining why he should expel his evil neural parasite and instead become a good lib- eral, signing it “Das Future” and emailing it through a time machine to 1938. Perhaps this could be the original red pill. Here at UR we have many sinister devices, but a time machine is not one of them. And fortunately, you do not live in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or 1938. And even more fortunately, your democratic education has vaccinated you to perfection against the first, and to an adequate if unimpressive level against the second. And most fortunately of all, your government is nothing like either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. All good. But— But in 1938, three systems of government were contending for global supre- macy. One of them is still around: yours. Anglo-American liberal democracy. Had military luck favored either of the others—National Socialism or Marxist– Leninism—we can also be sure that it would have discovered and reveled in its foes’ every misdeed, and that it would have approached its own, if at all, tentatively and ambiguously. 3 If only one can survive, at least two must be illegitimate, and irredeemably criminal. And the survivor will certainly paint them as such. But suppose all three are irredeemably criminal? If the third is an Orwellian mind-control state as well, its subjects are unlikely to regard it as such. It will certainly not prosecute itself. The third, our third, is very different from the other two. We must remember that American democracy is categorically distinct from National Socialism and the people’s democracies in too many ways to count. Since there are too many ways to count, we will not bother counting them. We remain entitled to notice parallels. (For instance, it is almost more aesthetic criticism than political or economic analysis, but do read Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Three New Deals.) But no number of categorical distinctions from the other two can alter our estimate of the third’s criminality. There are as many ways to be a criminal as there are crimes. That we hang the murderer does not mean we must award a prize to the thief. I.e.: the assumption that, since the Third Reich was Orwellian, and Barack Obama is not Adolf Hitler, Washington must not be Orwellian, is completely fallacious. Socrates is a cat; Ribbentrop is not Socrates; therefore, Ribbentrop is not a cat. (Comparing the totalitarian dictatorships of the mid-20th century to the OECD democracies of the early 21st is like comparing a reptile to a mammal, a propeller plane to a jet plane, or a flashlight to a laser. We may learn something about the latter from the former, but we may not, and we are easily misled. But they are what we think of what we think of Orwell, and the association must be tackled first.) Anyway, let’s define this vague charge. What do we mean by Orwellian? I’d say a fair definition of an Orwellian government is one whose principle of public legitimacy (Mosca’s political formula, if you care) is contradicted by an accurate perception of reality. In other words, the government is existentially dependent on systematic public deception. If it fails in its mission to keep the lie alive, it at least stands some chance of falling. The basic premise of UR is that all the competing 20th-century systems of government, including the Western democracies which came out on top and which rule us to this day, are best classified as Orwellian. They maintain their 4 CHAPTER 1. THE RED PILL legitimacy by shaping public opinion. They shape public opinion by sculpting the information presented to the public. As part of that public, you peruse the world through a lens poured by your government. I.e.: you are pwned. Thus the red pill: any stimulus or stimulant, pharmaceutical or literary, that fundamentally compromises said system of deception. That sounds very medical, but let’s be clear: you are not taking our pill as a public service. At least with our present crude packaging, the remedy is not accessible to any politically significant percentage of citizens. Rather, you are dosing up because you’d rather be high. Despite the agony of ingestion, it’s just too much fun to see your old reality from the outside. This, rather than “society,” is why you will return to UR again and again. Seen from outside, the Western democracies are particularly elegant exam- ples of Orwellian engineering.