Here’s a thread I posted on Twitter earlier today:
When a computer stays on too long, with bloated apps running and leaking resources, it stops working well. What do you do? You reboot it. If that doesn’t work, you do a factory reset.
You do whatever it takes to make a clean start.
What does a nation do?
Another problem for computers can be that an older operating system, designed for maximizing performance on the system it was written for, no longer runs on current hardware.
That can happen to a political “operating system” when “hardware” changes: when the people it was written for are no longer the people trying to run it.
For democratic republics, one of the system requirements is what used to be called “civic virtue”: an ability, and a willingness, to internalize the general social principles and restraints that the system depends on.
For government to be limited, it is necessary that citizens be able to govern *themselves*.
If this fails, then so does limited government.
If you can’t rule yourself, you will be ruled.
People fetishize democracy; they think that rule by the “consent of the governed” – in which the people themselves are believed to to be sovereign – is the only way to secure good government against a corrupt sovereign.
In other words, democracy is a kind of inverted monarchy. (After all, sovereignty has to rest somewhere.)
But if the people are sovereign, what protection is there against the corruption of the people themselves?
And when the people are corrupt, have lost their civic virtue, and have come to govern as badly as history’s worst weak, short-sighted, and selfish monarchs, what then?
How do they reboot the system?
No sovereign anywhere, ever, has ever overthrown himself. Why would a corrupt, sovereign people do so?
They won’t.
But if they fail to discipline themselves, to relearn the necessary virtues for making their operating-system work, things just go from bad to worse; the government will fail at its most fundamental tasks of stewardship, security, and justice.
Misery, despair, blame, faction, hate, strife, resentment, anger, dysfunction, apathy, infertility, vice, and frustration begin to tear at all of life, as opportunistic and parasitic cabals fatten themselves in the gathering chaos.
Eventually, in their weakness and desperation, the mass of the people, who have long since lost the blood-memory of strength, virtue, and self-government, turn to someone – anyone! – who will make the pain stop; who will promise them respite and safety.
The high abstractions of republican self-governing eras – which are no longer possible for a broken-down, degraded people – go out the window. The people are glad to be ruled, whatever the cost, because they have lost the ability to rule themselves.
Where are we in this great cycle of history?
Do we have a choice, America, about what will happen next? Or are we too far gone already?
5 Comments
Sometime computers get stuck in a reboot or shutdown routine, and won’t stop or budge. The power on/off button can be pushed and held down for some seconds, and it will sometimes quit. Failing that, pull the plug from the wall, maybe go pull weeds in the garden.
In any event, our social and civil algorithms are become very buggy and the only fix is system reboot. The future is as certain as the hot box detectors on the East Palestine railroad. It’s only a matter of time.
Sometimes I think ‘we the people’ may have become to civilized to fight for ourselves, our culture and our civilization.
A very clever comparison. A very worrisome situation indeed. It seems like we’re sliding down a very slippery slope and have come far from the standards our country was founded upon.
As the cliche goes though Malcolm, there’s a lot of ruin in a nation. From my vantage point in a relatively conservative suburban area of a Midwestern city, for instance, I sense absolutely no public desire to upend the rather pleasant existence most people have, irrespective of what residents might feel about the “stolen” 2020 election, homely adolescents ignored by the boys who decide to become men, or any other hot-button issue. Too many influential individuals have too much to lose to allow everything to just fall apart. Most people still want the system to work. Not that things couldn’t really go south in the near future, but there would have to be some major catalyst to generate a transformation, a metamorphosis that you seem to suggest.
A popular parlor game nowadays is to make comparisons to past regimes and countries. Is it Weimar before Hitler, 1936-1939 Spain, antebellum America a decade or so before the Civil War? If I were to pick an era it would be 1930s France, the so-called hallow years of that great civilization. Unlike the previously mentioned examples there wasn’t too much actual violence (although the Camelot au Roi of Action Française were not exactly boy scouts), but there was a great deal of paralysis and vituperation that should be familiar to any perceptive American observer (consider simply the uncanny resemblances between the attempted taking of the French Nation Assembly by mobs in February 1934 and our own January 6). Yet in spite of all the creaks in the machinery, things sort of muddled and squeaked along. Until May/June 1940, that is. God save us from a cataclysm that begat such interesting times as France’s Dark Years! (Although note well that even this watershed was contingent on certain historical realities, with Vichy in many ways being a very French reaction to the spirit of 1789. Such a historical consciousness seems to be lacking in guys like Yarvin, who perhaps too easily assume that you could just effortlessly foist a Caesar on the American people in spite of our strongly democratic and liberal political DNA.)
Jason,
Quite right, and a distinct possibility is many decades more of drift, decline, and gradual Brazilification. There are, if one is well-enough situated, still opportunities for comfortable life in senescent civilizations, though sooner or later the hammer always falls.
I might even go so far as to say that the slow rot of Brazilification is the likeliest future for a fat, exhausted, and deracinated America.
Looking ahead to where we are now, I wrote eight years ago that civil war is not a thing to hope for. Now, though, I’m not so sure; if we could really reboot America with a flareup of cleansing fire, at this point I think I’d be all for it.
The best we could hope for would be to break up the great Leviathan in Washington in a centripetal revolt that would redistribute power back to a more locally accountable and subsidiarian system of American government. Is that possible? What would it take?