In the comments at Nick Land’s Outside In blog, Foseti shows his support for a national ruler based on the model of a CEO of a joint-stock corporation:

Anissimov seems to actually want to restore some sort of old-fashioned monarch with a court and hereditary succession and so on. That’s certainly not molbuggian nor is it neo-anything.

Finally, the last key point you’re missing is that this structure is anything but abnormal. Indeed, when we stop thinking of governments as magical and think of them as if they’re any other large organization, we immediately see that a CEO running a joint-stock company is the rule, not the exception.

A CEO/king is simply the application of the most successful corporate governance structure in the history of time (the joint-stock corporation) to sovereign organizations. What’s crazy is that no one else is suggesting this.

One also quickly sees that the world’s least successful corporate governance structure (i.e. a corporation run for the benefit of everyone in the world) is the default answer for how a sovereign organization should be run. We’re all Marxists when it comes to structuring our governments, apparently.

Finally, it should be noted that Moldbug’s suggested organizational structure for a government (a profit-maximizing organizationg run by a CEO) is really just an application of Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand and the dominant form of corporate governance as determined by the free market. What sort of libertarian could possible be against that?

It is Moldbuggian to advocate monarchy, actually. Moldbug’s major contribution is a critique of the present situation. On the topic of positive recommendations, he was rather more wishy-washy and fanciful. Making a big show of wanting to bring back the Stuarts, for instance. It’s all well and good to bring back the Stuarts, but what about the rest of the world that isn’t the United Kingdom? Not too many solid recommendations there. Neocameralism, which involves handing over shares of government to the New York Times? I’ll pass. Such a suggestion only deserves respect as a thought experiment, not a serious prescription. As a blueprint for the future, it is only to be discarded.

I just showed in the previous post that traditional monarchy a la Frederick the Great is indeed an example of what Moldbug held up as a desirable form of government. So, when Foseti says, “monarchy [is not] neo-anything,” he is mistaken. The neoreactionary critique and worldview, applied thoroughly, leads either to advocacy of techno-commercialist city states, like Hong Kong, or something developmentally continuous (though possibly qualitatively superior) to traditional monarchy, like Prussia. To say that the former is more “neoreactionary” than the latter just because it sounds more superficially futuristic is nonsense.

Neoreaction can be a framework for analyzing political theory that leads to enthusiastic support for the Restoration of monarchy, and the language of Moldbug in many of his posts is in favor of exactly that.

It should be beyond question that advocacy for traditional monarchy is consistent with the neoreactionary perspective, but to make the point more clearly, I will spell out the advantages of monarchy over the techno-commercialist city state model.

1) Techno-commercialist SovCorp dreams are based solely on money and economics. They do not assign sufficient weight to higher values like culture, morale, thedishness, and loyalty. A typical citizen is going to feel more motivated by a cultural leader like Putin than a merely corporate one like Bill Gates.

2) Assigning stock in the government to designated parties makes a mockery of the sanctity of state sovereignty. Influence in a state should flow freely based on organic hierarchies, reputation, nobility of birth, who is useful at the given time, and who has cultural and charismatic as well as financial influence. Assigning “shares” on pieces of paper that can be bought and sold is just an invitation to hand over control of the country to an international financial elite with no conception of culture or thede. The value of a human tribe cannot be quantified in dollars and cents.

3) This is not libertarianism. The premise of neoreaction is a rediscovery of culture and identitarianism, accompanied by an unapologetic attitude that we are what we are. A formalization of government in its current form, handing out shares in GovCorp, would merely formalize the Cathedral in place. At least the Cathedral as it is today is merely an informal ideological structure with only an uncertain knowledge of its own existence. Imagine if it were formalized as an actual institution with legal shares in the government. You can nitpick this and say it already does have shares, but I would point out that it doesn’t own shares in the sense that a formalization of government would provide.

4) Government is not a company. It should not be subject to the winds and vagaries of the free market. A government is a representative structure for my thede. I want it to win, because I care about my thede. I don’t want it to engage in fair fights. I want the odds to be stacked in its favor, fairness be damned. Bureaucratic efficiency can be maintained with intra-governmental performance evaluation and filtering, not inter-governmental competition. If you lack sympathy for your own government to the degree that you see it in the same way you see a company, where it’s not the end of the world if it goes down the drain, you aren’t truly loyal to it. Most people cannot just pick up and leave if their government fails. They are stuck with it. So, success at any cost is more important than submitting to some Darwinian or capitalist framework.

5) Lastly, SovCorp is not intuitive to normal people in the way that traditional monarchy is. Traditional monarchy is inspired by intuitive, human structures like the family or warrior aristocracy, which engage the full spectrum of human social emotions. Corporations, on the other hand, only engage a narrow band of human intuitions–those related to making money. Life is not just about making money. It’s about relationships, about culture, about spending resources and time on things because they are fun and interesting, even if they aren’t profitable. A techno-commercialist structure does not engage these realities, these innate human needs.

In closing, there is nothing “non-neoreactionary” about traditional monarchy. It is merely a natural conclusion that one may come to after observing the neoreactionary critique of contemporary democracy and searching about for a realistic alternative. Moldbug provided us with a critique, he did not provide us with a concrete positive recommendation for how to proceed. After more than a year since the initial neoreactionary Renaissance, and millions of words written by this community, practically no one has stepped forward in favor of implementing neocameralism as a serious agenda item. Because it isn’t one. It is only a thought experiment about how we can be more pragmatic about the structure of government. For a serious non-democratic government that real people (not some tiny capitalist entrepreneurial elite) can rally behind, we can turn to something with an extensive track record of success–monarchy.