Full Title: Chapter 7: The Ugly Truth About Government | An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives | Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug
Creator: Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin)
Publication Date: May 29, 2008
Alternate Link: Audio: An Open Letter to Open Minded Progressives - Chapter 7 - The Ugly Truth About Government - YouTube

Brief Summary:

• The great power center of 2008 is the Cathedral
• The Cathedral has two parts:
•  The accredited universities - Formulate public policy (make decisions)
•  The established press - Guides public opinion (manufactures consent)
• The Polygon or Apparat is the permanent civil service (all nonmiliGary officials whose positions are immune to partisan politics, plus all those outside of government whose goal is to influence or implement public policy (NGOs)) - aka The Deep State

The fruits of history

• We have been lied to regarding the “history” that we know
• Machiavelli - The Isaac Newton of political science [He who desires or attempts to reform the government of a state, and wishes to have it accepted and capable of maintaining itself to the satisfaction of everybody, must at least retain the semblance of the old forms; so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions, even though in fact they are entirely different from the old ones.​ For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often even more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.]
• When you attempt to take control, you have to give the new one the appearance of the old forms.
• You want it to look like there has been no change in the institutions
• Most of mankind cares only about the appearances and won’t look any deeper than that.
• Even if it is just a linguistic convention
• The Queen is said to “rule” even though she really has no true “power”
• So, who holds real power? Where is it hiding?
• Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent
• Argues that corporations hold power through controlling the mass media
• Similar themes in Walter Lippmann’s book Public Opinion - but he thinks it’s the journalists “A specialized class using the art of persuasion”

So, what kind of government do we actually have?

• Representative democracy - only in name
• We should fear and loathe democracy, including representative democracy
• It’s true name is politics
• Two parties is good, but one party is very bad
• Who rules whom?
• Public Policy
• Must not contradict physics, geology or mathematics
• It operates in the realm of law, economics, ethics, sociology, psychology, public health and foreign policy, etc.
• Progressives regard the fields of public policy as scientific
• There is no German or Catholic public policy. Or world domination. Only global governance
• [ When politics intrudes on the realm of science, it’s more than just a violation. It’s a kind of rape.]
• Current “Representative Democracy” really means government implements “scientific public policy” for the public interest
• There is a lot of corruption in our system.
• Lincoln Steffens was an author and close friend of Teddy Roosevelt
• He also propagandized the Soviets and Russia in particular
• At that time, a lot of the support that made the Bolsheviks successful was through the American intelligentsia
• Our understanding of the bond between the American aristocracy and the Soviets has been distorted by both sides.
• The Americans were always the senior partner in this
• FDR established a “brain trust” of advisors from universities and listened to them as opposed to the “big businessmen” that had been in that position in the past.
• Many of these were selected from radical or left-wing groups who were previously unknown
• The process of implementing this and setting up the New Deal is the birth of “public policy”
• This was the transfer of power from political democracy to the American university system (AKA the Cathedral)
• A consistent theme in public policies produced by the Cathedral is they tend to be very good at creating dependency
• Dependency is another name for power.
• Humans tend to fit well into dominance-submission structures
• The Master-Slave relationship is looked down upon, but we’re all headed in that direction. Slavery is government on a micro-scale
• Pattern: Patron owes client protection + subsistence. Client owes the patron loyalty and service.
• Consider the relationship between the US and a “client state” and you’ll see the pattern again.
• Consider the relationship between the Federal Government and the Cathedral
• What happens to politicians who attack the Cathedral?
• They don’t get supported by the official press and have no long-term success
• The MSM is part of the civil-service complex around the Cathedral - the Polygon
• An institution is in the Polygon if it defers to the Cathedral on all disputable questions
• American journalism was coordinated into a Department of Information in WWI and WWII
• The Cathedral’s Power:
• Educates the world’s most “fashionable” people
• Responds to dissident politicians in 2 forms:
• Fast response: “art of persuasion” or psychological warfare - convinces their supporters that the dissidents themselves are sick or weird
• Slow response: the Cathedral’s doctrine makes opposition to dissidents an explicit tenet of the “faith”
• A second class of opposition to the Cathedral includes Nixon, Thatcher and Reagan.
• They only attacked the Cathedral on a single point, on which they had overwhelming support
• They would prevail on the point, but only for a limited time

About Democracy and the 2 Party System

• The Inner Party and the Outer Party

The Inner Party

• Function is to delegate all policies and decisions to the Cathedral
• Persistently propagates the idea that the Outer Party is on the verge of complete takeover in a new fascist regime.

The Outer Party

• Function is to pretend to oppose the Inner Party while in fact posing no danger to it at all
• If they get elected and pass a few policies, the entire Polygon will unite to ensure these policies fail or are perceived to be failures.
• Never has the Outer Party even come close to damaging any part of the Polygon or Cathedral.
• The role of “Democracy” is revealed to be to provide a pressure release valve for dissent.
• They don’t usually spawn violent opposition parties because opposition parties always hope they can gain power through non-violent means
• The pressure relief valve may even be fake, because the Inner and Outer parties are really one and the same.

3rd Prong of the Public Policy Apparatus

• While appearing unconscious of its audience, it adapts to it
• This trend leads in an ominous direction
• Legislatures draft laws that are vague and then judges “interpret” them
• This transfers the power of legislation to a more private body (judicial branch) which is not subject to public scrutiny or politics
• This is also true of the US Constitution, especially in respect to “constitutional law” which we call the “Living Constitution”
• It always drifts to the left
• This is how Public Policy adapts - with the change in public opinion
• Unprincipled Exception - a policy that violates some absolute principle of ethics held by the policymaker, but is not openly acknowledged as such a violation
• We are all governed by people who are skilled at manipulating procedural outcomes

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