Review of Yarvin's _Gray Mirror_

This is a reprint of http://purl.org/whitespace/index.php?threads/review-of-yarvins-_gray-mirror_.2534

I will reprint further installments as they come out, and link to the comments to this thread so you can find them.

A lot of material is available at Kitsap, a private social medium: http://purl.org/kitsap

https://graymirror.substack.com

Since the book isn't written, but it coming out in drafts on substack, it is closer to the truth to say I *will* be reviewing the book, rather than have done so and am poasting my review now.  The _Mirror_ is a reference to the genre of 'A Mirror of Princes' -- a guide for statesmen, and the view, by the founder of NRx (Neo-Reaction, if you haven't heard of it) is primarily Machiavellian.  Or, rather Strauss' Machiavel.  What exactly this means I will enter in to later.

Gray, is because gray is neutral -- nihilist even -- compared to Red and Blue, the two polarities of our (i.e. American) politics, among other things.

The introductory essay, which is open and public, is here.  As you may know, substacks charge a subscription for some content, though most authors at least open a little to put their wares on display, and Mr Yarvin is no exception.

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/coming-soon

I will take the chapters in sequence as they have been written, a proceeding which began in May or June of last year, in the midst of course of COVID and Mr Floyd's breathing difficulties, and what ensued, as well as the 'election' of 2020 and its aftermath in January.  First, however I will deal with this essay:

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/political-strategy-of-the-2020s

partly because it is the most recent -- in medias res you know -- but also because of its local interest, as Salo Forum is frequently mentioned in the essay.  Not a primary topic, but not marginal either, and certainly not the first time Yarvin has mentioned Salo, or some of its members, or Niccolo -- who again? -- sans donkey though.  To be precise, the word occurs 10 times in the essay, half in a single paragraph and the rest scattered throughout.  I shant be discussing what he said about his forum.  No spoilers -- and you can pay a subscription if you want to read it.  It's not important to the topic, particularly.  Just interesting.

Given the references to Nihilism, the Chic (post-campy?) tone of some of the content,  the nods to the alt right, the persistent mention of Machiavelli, and of course the figure of the Prince, the princeps -- that is, a monarch -- one might, as Pooh said of the bees, think they *suspect* something.

The topic 'Political Strategy of the 2020s' is of course the heart of the concern -- why bother writing chapters and chapters of *analysis* if no action is to follow?  And why bother having a *plan* if it is merely tactical, and not a strategic one based on the analysis?

Yarvin wishes to discuss why he preferred, as a *strategic* outcome, a Biden victory viewed as illegitimate by Trump supporters.  The locus of the first part of the essay is a contrast between aesthetics -- which seems broadly to include memes, GenX and post GenX irony (I gather Yarvin is a mid to late GenX'r about a decade younger than myself, who am either the very youngest of Boomers or the very oldest GenXer depending on exactly when you think I was born) -- and strategy, which is not the supporting actor of the essay, but in the leading role.

Yarvin is no pure accelerationist, however.  Acceleration is, after all, an *operation* -- the derivative of a derivative of motion -- and cannot define an end state, only perhaps add some path dependence or (its adherents think) provide a sort of Principle of Least Action which hopefully translates into some form of Victory and that Soon [tm].

Of aesthetics, he delivered one of the finest lines in the essay: 'Art is your only bullet—art in every sense of the word. '  Art meaning Technics, one assumes, as well as Aesthetics, before those two were sundered by Romanticism.  (We'll be coming back to Romanticism and Hegel eventually though -- I think Yarvin has missed a thing or two in his analysis).

What is Yarvin's stated goal, his 'desired end state' in the jargon of strategy -- to prevent America from becoming a 'Third World country', or to at least mitigate -- slow, less thoroughly -- the impact, if that cannot be prevented entirely.  He has noticed, of course, that we now have single party rule.  Like any engineer, he is disgusted with the inefficiency and sheer incompetence of our current elites -- the nature of which I think he should delineate more than he does, but, as the saying goes, (((they need no introduction))).  Those marks mean reverb by the way, not specifically Jewish -- though Yarvin of course is a Jew, and of course there is talks of Marxism in his family, which is why we get the persistent sense we are talking with O'Brien.  Yarvin knows the Inner Party well, in every sense Yggdrasil (not to mention that Blair fellow) gave that term.

I'll come back to the Jewishness later because, as with Strauss (and Maimonides for that matter) it is important.  But it needn't distract us just yet.

Readers of the whole substack corpus (and I have by no means finished it yet, once, nor the mandatory second reading for the reviewer where you go back and *ruminate* on what you subject is saying, having seen where he led you the first time) will doubtless notice that Yarvin treats the American Presidency through most of its history as *ceremonial*, except when it isn't, in which case Schmitt kicks in and we have a real monarch -- a decider.  He has Washington, Lincoln, and FDR as the principle points this was true -- and believes we are preparing for fourth such episode.  *These* presidents, every 70 years or so, *make* constitutions (in the sense of the decrees of the Roman Emperor -- my observation, not Yarvin's.  I wish he would read up on the history of Roman Law because it would clarify for him a lot of things he's trying to say).

It is, of course, the American People who as sovereign, in a Republic, should utter such decrees -- and that is precisely why the elect such presidents.  Yarvin then goes on to discuss the descending sequence of Nixon, Reagan, Trump -- who are of course the principle *would be* reformers, or at least halters, of Garet Garrett's 'Revolution Was' of 1938, which Yarvin takes to be (at least as of FDR's death and Truman's succession) to be the origin of our current phase of the Republic.

Yarvin's estimation of the character and policies of Trump is interesting, but not relevant to our current essay, so I will earmark *that* topic as well, for later return.  His mention of the three failed attempts of Rebellion against the permanent, single party, government, now (and always) concentrated in the Democratic Party in practice, as the Institutional Party of the New Deal, which is to say the institutional form of Communism as we find it in America (AIACC remember -- pretty much, since Lincoln) -- is to frame the question which Strategy asks, How might /we/ win?

One of the characteristic elements of Yarvin's analysis in the Gray Mirror, though it is not particularly evident in the essay we are examining, is that he treats 'power' almost as if it were some sort of fluid -- Vril? -- it can 'leak', it 'flows' and so forth.  Likewise, he thinks like an engineer, as he examines his internet of tubes, or bureaucracies with power flowing through them, in a sort of systemic, mechanistic way.  Which is understandable but I fear we shall have to return to this topic as well.  Political Philosophy needs to rest on Metaphysics, and terms like 'power' or 'potency' or 'capability' are terms of art to the Aristotelian philosopher at least, if not many others over the years -- and what school is Yarvin writing in anyway?  He aims, it seems, to be of the Gray School of Thucydides or Tacitus.

(Now, History means, to do research by looking at things with your own eyes -- largely, what we think of as the *purpose* of the Research university, or thought of, in better times -- but again, more on that later).

But Energy.  We were talking about Energy.  Yarvin thinks there are two kinds of energy that might *propel* a revolution -- or whatever you call the thing that 'makes the hurting stop' in the modern American state -- there's not much of either and it will have to be quick.  The first, of course, is what powered the 'Trump Revolution' and the second is the self-loathing of the elites (and intellectuals who think for them in the universities) themselves.  He calls these, respectively, 'vegetable energy' and 'fungal energy'.  Now, the former is not Keynes' Animal Spirits *precisely* because it is acting in its own self-interest -- the interest of the middle class not to lose everything they *had* (or thought they had), from the time of the New Deal down to about the time Mr Yarvin was born (which is why Nixon happened, or rather happened a second time).

To wrap up his topic (which is, in a sense, an apologia for his strategy -- to count our blessings with Biden it would seem, since the country is apparently better off than with the 'Trump Alternative' -- a topic of several other essays so again we shall have to return to them) -- to wrap it all up, Mr Yarvin leaves us with a Plutarch like contrast of Trump and Biden (who could resist?)

The 'problem' with Trump it seems, is that his half-measures were just the tonic to halt elite decay, whereas the sheer *boredom* and futility of the Biden administration will fuel the elite self-loathing that causes the system to bring *itself* down -- Yarvin doesn't put it this way exactly, but perhaps Biden can be the Brezhnev who will give us, eventually, the necessary Gorbachev.

In any event, I hope this brief essay/review of mine will have given some of the *themes* we will be encountering in the _Gray Mirror_ as we read Mr Yarvin's evolving product together.