Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

by Elizabeth Sandifer

So when he indulges in philosophy as Moldbug he does it badly in two regards. Not only does he mistakenly believe that he’s good at it, the things he tries to do with it are fundamentally malformed, twisted beasts. That’s what’s at the heart of his most singularly bizarre declaration, that the purpose of government is profit. Its main appeal isn’t even that it’s a good idea—although he gloms onto a libertarian intellectual tradition that supports it. No, its real appeal is simply that it lets him objectively measure how well a government is doing, which makes it a lot easier to come up with a clever design for one. And that’s the heart of everything that’s dumb about Mencius Moldbug’s ideas—the problem that leads to his first facepalming idiocy. The reason Mencius Moldbug likes the idea of a king is simply that it represents an efficient and elegant design. That’s what his fundamental and absolute dedication to order over chaos is, really. And it leads him to look at slavery as an efficient design that just presents a couple of implementation challenges.