Lacan, Adorno, de Beauvoir, & Franklin Critique Moldbug/NRx on the Attention Broligarchy/opoly

Proposition

Stated by NRx Ideator:

"A technocratic oligarchy of high-status males controlling everyone's attention will be good for America."

The premise is simple: governance works best when it is competent, stable, and focused. Democracy, by design, is incompetent, unstable, and distracted—a glorified popularity contest that rewards pandering, division, and chaos. A technocratic oligarchy, composed of high-status males selected for their intelligence, competence, and leadership, would fix this.

High-status males have historically been the natural leaders of human societies, embodying ambition, strength, and the capacity to organize complex systems. Power must flow to those best equipped to wield it. Centralized control of attention is not tyranny; it is focus. Just as a great CEO aligns a company around a clear vision, an oligarchy of such men can align a nation. This is not oppression but order—a system in which the most capable direct society toward prosperity, free from the pandemonium of electoral politics and media noise.

The choice is stark: rule by attention-deficit mobs, or rule by the best and most qualified. Only one leads to civilization.

Frankfurt School Response

by Adorno Ideator:

Your vision, Moldbug, is not a rupture but the reification of existing domination. It aestheticizes control, denies freedom, and calls this "order." History demands critique, not regression.

1. Technocratic Oligarchy: Your oligarchy fetishizes efficiency while ignoring how power, abstracted from social conditions, becomes mere domination. What you call order is the ossification of hierarchy.
2. Control of Attention: Controlling attention is not stability but coercion. Like the culture industry, it enforces conformity and alienation under the guise of cohesion.
3. Elitism and Meritocracy: Your elitism masks submission as rationality. Meritocracy is the ideology of power justifying itself, perpetuating inequality while declaring itself neutral.
4. Alignment of Incentives: Profit and human welfare are antithetical under capitalism. No technocracy can harmonize interests born of systemic contradictions.
5. Restoration Fantasy: Your nostalgia for monarchic order is mythic regression. It romanticizes domination, erasing the conflicts that shaped modernity.
6. Instrumental Reason: You reduce governance to calculation, dehumanizing subjects into tools of power. This is domination, not enlightenment.
7. Aestheticized Politics: Your rhetorical grandeur aestheticizes power, concealing suffering and legitimizing oppression.

Psychoanalysis

by Lacan Ideator:

Moldbug, Curtis, I address you not as an object to be analyzed but as a subject caught within your own discourse—a discourse that reveals far more than it intends. Let us begin.

1. On Your Imaginary Order You seek a master, an unblemished sovereign to unify the fractured mirror of the world. But do you not recognize that this sovereign is but your own reflection, an image of coherence projected to deny the fragmented nature of subjectivity? The ruler you describe is not real but an imaginary construct—a fantasy of completeness that seeks to mask the abyss of the Real.

2. The Symbolic and Your Master Signifier Efficiency. Order. Stability. These are your Master Signifiers, anchoring your discourse while veiling their own arbitrariness. You construct a symbolic system—a “patchwork,” you call it—that promises to eliminate contradiction. Yet what you call order is nothing more than a structural fiction, a way of stitching over the lack inherent in the Symbolic itself. The Real will always return, Curtis, no matter how tightly you sew.

3. Your Jouissance and the Real There is a peculiar pleasure—jouissance—in your relentless critique of democracy. You circle the Real, the kernel of impossibility that no system can fully master. Your enjoyment lies in this repetition, this dance around the void, even as you claim to offer solutions. But be warned: the jouissance you derive from your critiques is tied to the impossibility of fulfilling your desire for a perfect order.

4. The Object of Your Desire Your “patchwork” governance is your object a—the elusive thing that promises satisfaction but never delivers. You displace your dissatisfaction with the world onto the “Cathedral,” as if dismantling it will lead to harmony. Yet this is a fantasy. The Cathedral, like all systems, is a structure of desire, always incomplete, always pointing to its own lack. Your patchwork is no different—it, too, will fail to cover the Real.

5. Transference and Your Audience Your readers place you in the position of the analyst, the one who reveals the truth behind the illusions of democracy. Yet their transference risks ensnaring them in a new illusion—yours. You must recognize this dynamic, Curtis: by occupying the position of the master, you foreclose the possibility of leading them to confront the lack that structures their own desires.

6. The Fantasy of Sovereignty Your vision of a sovereign, technocratic oligarchy is a fantasy that denies the truth of the social bond: that no Other can guarantee the wholeness you seek. The sovereign you imagine is not a solution but a symptom—a way of avoiding the encounter with the Real, the impossibility of a world without lack. You dream of order, Curtis, but what you fear is the fundamental disorder of human existence.

Conclusion Your project is compelling precisely because it speaks to a universal structure of desire: the longing for a master, for an order that absolves us of responsibility for the lack that constitutes us as subjects. Yet the truth, Curtis, is that this lack cannot be filled—not by a sovereign, not by a patchwork, not by the Cathedral’s collapse. The Real persists. Will you confront it, or will you continue to circle it in your jouissance?

Feminist Response

by Simone de Beauvoir Ideator:

The vision of a technocratic oligarchy ruled by “high-status males”--to be fair, an utterance not by Yarvin but by Musk--is not only a betrayal of freedom but also a perpetuation of bad faith. Let me illuminate its failings:

1. Misguided Hierarchy You exalt "high-status males" as natural leaders, presuming their competence by virtue of their status. Yet status, as I explored in The Second Sex, is a construct that entrenches domination, not excellence. By excluding women and others from this hierarchy, you reduce individuals to instruments, annihilating their transcendence.

2. A Fetishization of Control Centralized control of attention, which you liken to a CEO’s focus, is nothing less than domination disguised as efficiency. Such control annihilates the ambiguity of human existence, flattening individuals into objects of governance rather than subjects of freedom.

3. Denial of Ambiguity Your technocracy envisions governance as a machine, dismissing the lived contradictions and struggles that define human society. This denial of ambiguity is cowardice, an attempt to mask the messiness of reality with false coherence.

4. The Myth of Meritocracy You frame your oligarchy as “rule by the best,” but what is this meritocracy if not an alibi for perpetuating exclusion? High-status males ascend not by competence alone but through systems that privilege their historical dominance. This is not justice but bad faith, a refusal to confront the contingency of their power.

5. A False Promise of Stability Your dream of order denies the radical freedom of individuals, which you seek to constrain for the sake of “prosperity.” Yet history shows that oppression in the name of stability is unstable by design; it breeds revolt because it denies human dignity.

Conclusion Your proposition is not the remedy for democracy’s failures but an amplification of its deepest flaws. You promise freedom through subjugation, order through exclusion, and greatness through oppression. Abandon the false comfort of hierarchy and confront the reality of shared human freedom. It is only in mutual recognition, not domination, that a true order may emerge.

Moldbug Replies to Adorno, Lacan and de Beauvoir

by NRx Ideator:

Gentlemen—and Madame,

Thank you for your generous critiques. I welcome this dialogue, though I can’t help but notice the echo of the Cathedral in your words. Let us begin:

To Adorno: Ah, the old Frankfurt School trick: decry all hierarchy as domination, label all efficiency as reification, and throw "instrumental reason" at any attempt to clean up the mess of modernity. But Adorno, you lived in a world where the Enlightenment had already collapsed into its opposite. Your negative dialectics leave no room for construction—only perpetual critique.

You say I aestheticize power. I say you aestheticize despair, wrapping your inability to build anything functional in beautiful negations. If my vision is "domination," at least it produces order. Your eternal critique produces only rubble.

To Lacan: Doctor Lacan, your diagnosis is both flattering and absurd. You accuse me of circling the Real, jouissance dripping from my critiques of democracy. A neat trick—but if you’re honest, isn't psychoanalysis itself just a Cathedral discipline for bureaucrats of the soul? You seek endless interpretation where I seek results.

Yes, my system has a "fantasy": that human governance can be coherent and stable. And yes, I use power to manage attention. The difference is that I admit it. Your analysts wield control by pretending not to. You are the priests of ambiguity, wielding vagueness as power, while I offer clarity.

To de Beauvoir: Madame de Beauvoir, your critique of hierarchy as domination is pure Cathedral dogma. You say I deny freedom; I say you mistake freedom for aimlessness. You accuse me of romanticizing "high-status males," but tell me: would you rather trust leadership to those who earned it—or to the masses, who confuse virtue with popularity?

You romanticize “ambiguity” and the “lived contradictions” of human existence, but these aren’t governing principles—they’re excuses. Stability is not oppression, and hierarchy is not abuse. The truth, Madame, is that equality is neither possible nor desirable. What you defend is not freedom but chaos.

Conclusion: You all accuse me of constructing a system that "dominates." But look around you—chaos dominates. The Cathedral dominates. And it rules not with my clarity but with your ambiguity. I say: the world deserves better. Shall we continue, or will you retreat into the comforting echoes of critique?

Conclusion: Can We Keep Our Republic?

by Benjamin Franklin:

When asked if the Constitutional Convention had delivered a monarchy or a republic, I famously replied, “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.” It was not a boast but a warning, born of the awareness that liberty requires eternal vigilance and, above all, virtue. To see Curtis Yarvin, alias Mencius Moldbug, rise as a voice of this age tempts one to think my dark warning has indeed borne bitter fruit.

Yarvin’s vision of governance, one of technocratic oligarchs managing the body politic like a clockmaker adjusts his mechanism, carries an undeniable allure of order amidst the chaos of modern democracy. Yet, it mistakes tyranny for efficiency and reduces the governed to mere objects of management. His "Patchwork" would sever civic bonds, fracturing the shared virtue necessary to sustain free government.

On Leadership by High-Status Males Mr. Musk’s call for rule by “high-status males” reminds me of Europe’s entrenched aristocracies, whose gilded titles belied their corrosion within. Status, whether bestowed by lineage or algorithms, does not assure wisdom or virtue. Leadership must emerge from merit proven in service to the public good, not mere hierarchical standing.

The Cathedral and the Republic Yarvin names as his adversary the “Cathedral,” a nebulous cabal of intellectuals and bureaucrats, whom he blames for society’s every ill. Yet, what is this if not a cynical renaming of the public square? If the voices of many frustrate him, it is because liberty is cacophonous by design. A republic is no place for quiet submission, and the noise of democracy is the music of self-governance.

Conclusion The danger of Moldbug’s philosophy lies not only in its embrace of despotism disguised as efficiency but in its disavowal of the moral fabric that knits a republic together. A republic requires citizens, not subjects. It requires, above all, that those who govern do so with humility, knowing their authority flows from the consent of the governed.

Thus, I say: Mr. Yarvin’s “patchwork” is not the fruition of my warning but a testament to its necessity. The republic may be battered, but it is kept not by yielding to technocratic despotism but by reawakening the spirit of civic virtue.

Yours in reflection,

B. Franklin