Residual Images of Empire (Peter Thiel & Curtis Yarvin's Goon Squad)

How the Deep Right is Coopting Conspiracy Consciousness, Part 3 of 3

(Audio version at the end for paid subscribers)

“Turn to the left! Turn to the right! We are the goon squad and we’re coming to town.” —David Bowie, “Fashion”

“one must choose one’s enemies well, for one will soon be just like them.” —Peter Thiel, “The Straussian Moment”

Fascinating Obstacles: The Art of Doubling

“The system that the gospel sets before us involves the suppression of any form of scapegoat, whether from God or from the law, and the recognition that a world with fewer and fewer fixed and institutionalized barriers will afford more and more opportunities for people to be fascinating obstacles for each other—for them to be a cause of reciprocal scandal to one another. . . . The historical process is inevitable, but it is human rather than divine.” —René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

Recently, at CoJ and elsewhere, I have been trying to understand and articulate (to understand by articulating, e.g. this audio clip) how social engineering strategies involve doubling. Doubles is a subject Girard wrote about, in relation to mimetic desire, as well as one Psyop Cinema has been circling around for some time, in relation to the Joker cycle.

Simply put, doubling is when a controlling faction splits itself in two. In order to ensure that its plans succeed, it must become its own rival.

Firstly, this prevents rivals from springing up organically, since the rival-space is already occupied. Secondly, it prevents the masses (from which rivals might otherwise organically spring) from realizing that they are under the oppression of a unified ruling system.¹

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I think we are seeing this in the lead-in to the 2024 US elections: so long as people believe there are at least two warring factions, they swing back and forth between them, believing that one of these factions is better than the other (a lesser evil), and therefore more worthy of support (viable as an “ally”).

People’s belief in a bipartisan system is thereby miraculously renewed every four years, despite the mounting bodies of evidence, over the decades, that national (and global) policies proceed more or less identically, regardless of which “side” assumes electoral power, and irrespective of any political candidate’s promises (which, as everyone knows, are never fulfilled by their actions once in office.)

Girard writes:

Scandal always calls for demystification, and demystification, far from putting an end to scandal, propagates and universalizes it. Present-day culture is caught up in this process. There must be scandal to demystify, and the demystification reinforces the scandal it claims to combat. The more passions rise, the more the difference between those on opposite sides tends to be abolished (Girard, THSTFOTW, p. 406-7).

This is a central, if seemingly paradoxical, tenet of complementary schismogenesis: the more two sides double-down against one another, the more similar their behaviors and positions become, the further they must double-down and oppose one another, to maintain the illusion of difference.

How the Empire Creates a Simulacra of Itself & Draws Enemy Fire

“Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots, we should consider Echelon, the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.” —Peter Thiel, “The Straussian Moment”

Restating: the more apparent it is that the two sides are basically the same, the more fiercely they have to oppose each other in order to assert their difference (which is finally illusory). This creates a vicious circle, a schismogenetic feedback loop.²

Hence we have the self-contradicting nature of ideology, in our current era of political correctness and identity politics, in which more and more contradictions proliferate: having zero tolerance for those who are intolerant, and persecuting those who are seen as persecutory, and so on.

This contradictory element actually intensifies the doubling down. Since it is evidence of a schism, it causes the schizoid behavior to become more and more compulsive, because the only way to not see the contradiction, the hypocrisy, is to keep being possessed by the thing that one is not willing to see.

The speck [in the eye] is certainly there but the critic fails to see that his own act of condemnation reproduces the structural features of the act deserving condemnation, in a form that is emphasized by the very inability of the perspicacious critique to see its own failings (Girard, THSTFOTW, p. 407).

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Scapegoating the patriarchy, therefore, blaming “the system,” is the way in which the system maintains its power. (Think of the ADL and antisemitism.) Hence we have the idea of “the deep state” or “the establishment,” apparently opposing what appears to be a different establishment, one that is also in cahoots with deep state apparatus. (Trump, RFK, Masters, Vance, and their Silicon Valley billionaire support networks, most prominently Thiel and Musk.)

Yet, as with Repubs and Dems (the Bushes and Clintons), if we start to peer behind the curtain, we will find the same protagonists, moving freely between camps.

Neoliberal Feudalism, in “Red lines of the counter-elite,” stated it simply enough: “this is a nation-state counter-elite forming, which is still subservient to the worldwide globohomo control grid; there is no counter-elite forming at the higher levels of power.”³

My question to NLF was: how authentic is such a counter-elite if, at the higher levels, it is a complementary instrument employed for the same ends as the elite it is countering? (One could also ask, how elite are these elites, if they are but instruments?)

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As I see it, the social engineering program proceeds, not by scapegoating itself exactly, but by scapegoating an image of itself (its past deeds). It creates an image out of what it once was, and then it invites condemnation and persecution of that image.

This image is made to seem current, or real, via a fictionalized faction that represents roughly one “half” of the ruling forces. Above all, the stoking of feelings of anger and resentment towards it act as fuel to animate it. Which half it is does not matter, because any actual ruling faction is by definition out of reach of the people being fired up.

The animosity, hostility, and mimetic violence, once directed towards this residual image of empire, only ever affects members of our own class, of the ruled, who support the image. Divide and conquer, and ever has it been thus.⁴

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do” (Karl Rove).

This, I think, is roughly how the Girardian (or Thielian) technology of the perpetual motion scapegoat mechanism functions, for social engineering purposes. This is the circular nature of mimetic violence, since Cain founded the first empire.

Moldbug the Mendacious

“From a Girardian perspective, the current political debates remain inadequate for the contemporary world situation to the extent that, across the spectrum, there remains a denial of the founding role of the violence caused by human mimesis and, therefore, a systematic underestimation of the scope of apocalyptic violence. . . . One may define a ‘liberal’ as someone who knows nothing of the past and of this history of violence, and still holds to the Enlightenment view of the natural goodness of humanity. And one may define a ‘conservative’ as someone who knows nothing of the future and of the global world that is destined to be, and therefore still believes that the nation-state or other institutions rooted in sacred violence can contain unlimited human violence. The present risks a terrible synthesis of the blind spots in that doctrinaire thinking, a synthesis of violence and globalization in which all boundaries on violence are abolished, be they geographic, professional . . . or demographic (for example, children). . . . The word that best describes this unbounded, apocalyptic violence is ‘terrorism.’ Indeed, one may wonder whether any sort of politics will remain possible for the exceptional generation that has learned the truth of human history for the first time.”  —Peter Thiel, “The Straussian Moment”

On this initial (I almost wrote initiatory) dive into the emerging new landscape of the “deep right” within US politics and culture, I still haven’t got to Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin). Yet of all these “deep right” characters, Yarvin is perhaps the most interesting to me.

That may be because he is the most approachable and seemingly human, and seems more or less like a peer, like someone I might have wanted (and even been able to) talk to, ten years ago.

When investigating conspirators who are one’s potential or actual peers, who in many ways may be more competent or more intellectually accomplished than oneself, a question that is always at the back of my mind about social engineers comes to the fore: what do they know that I don’t?

Specifically, if I had an equivalent overview of the social dynamics they are attempting to control (or of the world they are trying to engineer), would I have a different response to them?