I was intrigued by Merlin196357’s article on Elon Musk and Neoreactionarism. In the article, Merlin presented the idea of the “enlightened technocrat,” someone who has the knowledge and skills to improve the world, but who is unable to because sinister forces are aligned against him. The most sinister aligned against the enlightened technocrat are the State and the Cathedral. Therefore, in order to undertake the great advances the enlightened technocrat would make possible, the State needs to be destroyed–including all of its bureaucrats–replaced by a monarchy and the Cathedral needs to be brought down and replaced by an intellectual democracy. The ideology owes much to Curtis Yarvin. In Yarvin’s thought, in turn, relies on the Communist Antonio Gramsci and the Capitalist Ayn Rand.
According to Curtus Yarvin:
“The cathedral” is just a short way to say “journalism plus academia”—in other words, the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the center of medieval society.”
When looking at that portion of the cathedral which is academia, Yarvin makes an interesting argument about why some ideas are accepted in universities and others aren’t. Yarvin writes:
“First, let’s look at the soundest part of the building [The Cathedral]: math. In math, the marketplace of ideas is straightforward. Error is not tolerated. Priority is rigidly respected. Even the importance and quality of mathematical results is generally agreed on.” But when it comes to the humanities: “Which suggests that any problem is with the ideas—that bad ideas in the humanities have in some way flourished at Yale (and everywhere else)—like toxic green algae in a once-blue mountain lake. Now why would that happen?
“It must be related to the pattern of selective advantage in this marketplace of ecology. Maybe a nearby pig farm has unleashed a flood of sewage into the lake. Pig manure is a nutrient which alters the pattern of selective advantage in the lake, making it easier to exist as a stinking algal bloom and harder to flourish as a happy rainbow trout.”
Yarvis’s argument is based, not on the traditional metaphor of a marketplace of ideas, rather his metaphor is a Darwinian survival of the fittest. He asks the question, why do some ideas survive and others don’t? His answer is that in some disciplines, such as mathematics, there are standards which determine what ideas survive and which don’t. In the sciences, Yarvin claims, there still are some standards, but these, he thinks, are suspect. He presents climate change as one scientific claim based on suspect standards. When it comes to the humanities, there are no standards. One simply has a pig sty filled with manure, such as gender studies.
If there are no standards for what counts as knowledge in the humanities, how then are claims in the humanities justified? What is the criteria that determines what ideas survive? For Yarvin, the answer is power. Academics promote ideas, not because they are true, but because they have power, what Yarvin refers to as “sovereignty.”
“The professors and journalists have sovereignty because final decisions are entrusted to them and there is no power above them. Only professors can formulate policy—that is, set government strategy; only journalists can hold government accountable—that is, manage government tactics. Strategy plus tactics equals control.”
This argument echoes Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, the idea that the knowledge community–in Yarvin’s terms “The Cathedral ''--create an ideology which becomes the commonsense of the society and which, in turn, legitimates those with economic and political power. While Gramsci saw the ideology as legitimating the rule of the bourgeoisie, Yarvin’s sees the ideology as legitimating the bureaucratic state. Yarvin argues that ideas are either dominant or resistive. Dominant ideas are those which increase power; recessive ideas are those which reduce power. Within the Cathedral, the dominant idea will always be selected because it enhances power. The recessive idea will not be selected because it will decrease power. Climate scientists will push the idea of climate change because it will enhance their power, while climate deniers will be marginalized since it decreases the power of climate scientists.
So in Yarvin’s telling we have a Cathedral which claims to have knowledge, but really doesn’t, supporting a State, which has no legitimacy. As a consequence, Yarvin calls for the destruction of the Cathedral and the state bureaucracy. Which brings us back to Elon Musk and Twitter.
If we destroy the Cathedral, what will replace it? According to Yarvin, a democratic marketplace of ideas or what Musk would like Twitter to be. In this democratic marketplace there would be no sovereignty, no professors who lack accountability. How this marketplace of ideas would determine what is true is not explained.*
I would argue, however, that we already have a true marketplace of ideas. When billionaires can buy positions on university faculties or withhold contributions unless courses are taught in a specific manner, then we truly have a marketplace with ideas being bought and sold. When we have ideologically oriented think tanks designed not to promote truth but rather to use its resources to finance a point of view, then we truly have a marketplace of ideas. When a small college raises funds by selling its curriculum to charter schools to provide a patina of legitimacy to its ideas, then we have a marketplace for ideas.
*If you wish to understand how academia actually works, I suggest you read Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Brookings Institution, 2021)