A Theory of Democratic Divinity

Quantum mechanics, liberalism, invisible hands, and the theology of Faucism.

Every particle in the universe exists, in isolation, in a superposition of all possible quantum states. If they never interacted, they would have no meaningful existence with respect to each other, and could not be said to have any definite or real properties. A subjective singleton only undergoes wave function collapse relative to another subjective singleton, at which point they are forced to agree on a set of states that defines their mutual reality in reference to each other. Once two singletons combine, via interaction, into a set of mutually correlated states constituting a reality, they are said to be entangled. Through causal relation, they now exist as an island of two in a sea of uncertainty, until they crash into another correlated bubble of micro-reality, and the set of mutually dependent states grows into a larger and more complex set of relations constituting a reality. This process scales all the way up the chain of being, with the implication that macro-reality is a vast web of micro-level entanglements, spontaneously organized by the quantum states of every individual particle having come to a mutual consensus, forced to be causally linked into a coherent set of mutually consistent relationships. In some interpretations of quantum phenomena, the popsci understanding of Schrödinger’s Cat may in fact be the correct one: the isolated system including the cat has no definite set of states relative to us until the moment that local reality collides with ours in a way that matters, and the two realities are forced to converge and spontaneously assemble into a coherent set of causal relations.

This kind of quantum causal relativity is pleasantly harmonious with the known temporospatial relativity of Einstein; for a sufficiently removed reference point (say that of an alien race on another planet), not only do concepts of Euclidean distance and temporal simultaneity cease to be meaningful quantities defining the relationship between our two reference points, but even causality and mutual existence and reality cease to be. ‘Space’ is not really a space with either defined dimensions or defined simultaneous existences ‘in the same universe,’ but might better be thought of as a churning, chaotic, four-dimensional black sea, in which drift many independently self-referential realities that may or may not make contact and become real to each other, should one bore strange enough tunnels through the kaleidoscopic tarry mire.

What happens to the causal chains that get excluded when realities collide? And what causes wave function collapse to settle on one arrangement of universal events over another? If we register that the cat has died, what has happened, in that instant, from the cat’s perspective? The many worlds hypothesis would say that nothing is ever decided, and all possible combinations of causal sequences continue to exist in an infinite series of parallel universes, or arrangements of relations between overlapping microrealities. Whatever the case, from our subjective perspective, the collapse of the wave function is very much real, given that we cannot reverse any of these past decisions, and that other arrangements of events, being separate realities, may be so inaccessible as to be effectively unreal in any meaningful way; the sense in which these other realities can be said to “exist” may be qualitatively indistinguishable from the sense in which things that exist within our imaginations would exist if many-worlds were not true, rendering this a philosophical rather than a scientific question. To the observer at the end of time, history has crystallized in an unpredictable and perhaps seemingly arbitrary way. Doesn’t the universe itself represent such an arbitrary collapse out of a primordial universal?

If quantum events are truly random, perhaps the outcome of most is genuinely insignificant at the macro scale, never building up to any kind of butterfly effect. If there is some unrecognized pattern, however, some correlation in how realities coalesce so subtle that it cannot be comprehended by mortal minds, individually insignificant events that appear to be instantly swallowed up and diluted in the larger immovable macro-reality could be secretly conspiring with some greater reality-principle to have a profound effect on the shaping of time. In this design, we introduce a nondeterministic intentionality to the universe: like a conscious mind, even. In these apparently random determinations of micro-events, we find, without contradicting prevailing models considered to fall within scientific naturalism, a mysterious and unpredictable black box through which reality itself is literally being arbitrarily constructed. In other words, correlated wave function collapses constitute a naturalistic mechanism by which the will of God might subtly act on the universe to shape reality, which at the micro level is nonetheless indistinguishable from randomness. We know, self-evidently, that there exist wills. If there can exist such a thing as a universal will, this is not an implausible interpretation of quantum mechanics.

An orthodoxy in economics is the concept of the “invisible hand,” a description of how socially optimal economic order emerges organically through the undirected actions of self-interested individuals following purely selfish incentives, as if guided by an invisible hand. The awe-inspiring complexity of this spontaneous order is quite memorably conveyed in Leonard Reed’s essay I, Pencil: No one on Earth knows how to make something as seemingly simple as a pencil from scratch, yet through the selfish actions of unrelated laborers and middlemen from all corners of the globe, acting independently in pursuit of profit in a competitive free market, a system of unfathomable complexity is generated that can deliver whole pencils to your local office supply store, at the exact price and quantity conducive to optimal pencil distribution in your community, without any central authority having to direct this process. Economic central planning fails not because there are fewer natural resources to exploit and distribute, but because mere human planning encounters an insurmountable information barrier. It is impossible for any human authority to know how to optimally distribute scarce resources across an entire economy, and impossible to constantly reallocate resources in response to very complex situations fast enough to replicate the organic equilibria of collective satisfaction generated spontaneously and effortlessly by markets. Adam Smith, who first coined the term “invisible hand,” believed that it was literally the hand of God intervening in human affairs that made this possible. Taken together, this would imply that God requires complex decentralized systems to act on the world with maximum power and influence. And the corollary: the presence of human judgment suppresses God’s power to shape the world.

Liberalism of any kind—whether of economic, political, or libidinal forces—is most fundamentally an ideology of unchaining complex, suprahuman forces and processes to do what they do unimpeded, of getting humans out of the way, so that the invisible hand can do its work. It is creating a black box for God to live in, which resembles the very structure of how reality itself comes into being—a divine image. The holy task of liberal government is to gatekeep a class of priests responsible for building and maintaining this temple, this machine, this house for ghosts, constructed along the very principles of creation itself.

A blasphemous, reactionary critique of capitalism might go as such: The problem with capitalism is not that in the abstract, the principle of people owning productive capital and using it to enhance their wealth while making contracts with non-owners who are involved in the process but don’t reap equal rewards is somehow inherently “unfair.” It is that liberalism of any kind, the liberated, unrestricted movement of emergent suprahuman forces, in sufficiently complex societies breeds monstrosities, which grow appetites and conspire against humanity to become even freer. This would be the exact opposite of Marx’s critique of capitalism, which holds that capital ownership constitutes an unacceptable source of human judgment, whereby these wild and free creative forces are constrained by the greed of owners, as they were constrained by feudal relations before.

As with the freeing of capital or desire, democracy is a liberation of the pure joy of power, which wants to share itself with all the world, to rescue us from our powerless and lonely individual existence through participation in its collective godhood. Voting is an act of communion with universal Power itself—no one actually believes that the individual act of voting has any material effect on the world whatsoever, therefore its benefit to the individual must be spiritual. ‘I want democracy as much as I want to breathe.’ In this symbiotic relationship, the system gets an unpiloted, living State, whose unpilotedness would not be possible without this otherwise very stupid-seeming structure, while the voter receives spiritual rapture.

Democracy, like capitalism, is simply another application of the general principle of liberal praxis, constructing a black box purified of human judgment through which God may act. Of course, as power spreads and assimilates us into this corporate whole, it unfortunately comes up against the limits of nasty, fascist reality. Regrettably, this system still has to be made of humans…for now. Over time, the vines of the system will grow naturally around these structures, in such a way as to minimize the potential for contamination by human judgment, with a strong immune system for keeping it that way. Nominal decision makers become individually as powerless as the average voter, even in the unlikely contingency that a member of this highly educated class of reverent priests, very effective at shutting out heretics through their control of the information organs of society, ever wanted to deviate from the naturally determined dialectical consensus.

Contra Marxist claims, even the most powerful plutocrat or corporate entity is merely a slave of history. In technological society, the more things are fundamentally changing, the greater the velocity of this transformation, the less room there is for human drama to matter. Accelerating technology does not merely rob ordinary men of autonomy and dignity, but turns even the elite into slaves. The wealthiest man in Rome really could change history. What could the wealthiest man in America be but a priest, a scion of the moral purposes of history, whose will is merely synonymous with that of every other interchangeable billionaire? It wouldn't matter if someone else was a billionaire in his place; the world would not be any different. Being George Soros involves the exercise of no more real power than being an anonymous voter; it is your name on a placeholder position. The communist dream realized. It is not merely a case of ‘the office of the President’ becoming ceremonial so that someone else holds power instead. No one, not Supreme Court justices, not senators, not heads of agencies, not billionaire megadonors, can be said to have any real power at all, if anyone else in the same position would be doing or made to do the exact same thing. At every level of society, for every individual, power is so dilute as to become completely divorced from human agency, and thus must become, logically, an egregore with an independent (perhaps emergent) agency of its own. A particularly sharp example of this phenomenon is in science. Once upon a time, the production of individual great minds could make or break a civilization through innovation or lack thereof relative to rival civilizations. There can be no such thing as a great scientist today; the goal of the scientist is to rush to conclude something first so he can get his name on a paper, before someone else would have done the same thing 6 months later. His presence or absence does not affect the process at all.

In its most highly developed, technocratic form, democracy removes even the judgment of voters from the equation, who after all might vote for Hitler. Faucism is thus the highest form of democracy. No good progressive would deny that there is some quality of a democratically elected leader that can make him “undemocratic.” In advanced democracy, the government of Experts, the aristocratically minded voter, who abhors the evil art of “populism,” acts as a vessel for the power expression of an Expert, a priest worthy of reading the auguries of Science. He achieves democratic apotheosis, becoming a participatory part of power by making his will synonymous with the state’s. The “human right” to vote is the right to be an enthusiastic participant in this whole and to identify with the thrilling causes embodied in its priestly Experts; it has nothing at all to do with democracy’s formal justification of exercising personal agency over government policy, which in practice turns out to be the greatest sin a democrat can commit. The sacred and inalienable human right to vote and participate in other forms of activism is a right to stimulate the libido dominandi in a safe way that furthers rather than impedes the holy mission of the State. It is the equivalent of a human right to porn or to heroin (both other popular liberal causes), feeding a carnal human appetite through identification with the totalitarian corporate state. Likewise, a human right to genuine sex or genuine happiness is abhorred as much as genuine influence of petty human whims over the government.

Limiting the extent of human appetites and channeling them in the service of some more universal suprahuman appetite (to what extent are these human appetites universal? I do not know, but the appetites of the system are at least analogous to lust) does not seem very liberal. Why should they be controlled, and not bloom as free and wild as possible? The answer is that technology has allowed for the continuous expansion of all these appetites, so that it gives them more to feed on in the form of its enemies than they would gain from practicing mere sex, mere self-actualization, or mere conquest. Just as improvements in technological infrastructure have enabled the expansion of sexual lust beyond the confines of biological telos even into the realm of a direct Sauronesque joy in ‘queering’ children’s biology, and other forms of civilization-ending decadence unimaginable in preindustrial times, so too has technological improvement mediated an equivalent ever-expanding satiation of the bottomless lust for power. Social media and smartphones especially have provided the infrastructure for true Gentilean totalitarianism to function, awaking mankind to a level of spiritual meaning and fulfillment not felt in centuries, and maybe ever before.

The democratic activist, out of love of power, positions himself as a vessel for something else’s power, with which he spiritually identifies. To the power-hungry, elections that only last a day every two years before life goes back to apolitical normality cannot be satisfying for very long, especially outside the context of some other grand power conflict like the Cold War was. He knows he is not actually exercising power, and that something is still missing. He senses that his participation is nothing more than an insulting formality, no more real than under an autocrat who claimed to be a “representative of the people.” Having internal enemies to sniff out, humiliate, and conquer every four years is a fun tradition, but why can’t it be Christmas every day? Hence totalitarianism, the permanent frenzy of the partisan bacchanal, into which all democracy inevitably expands. In its most developed form, democracy needs to see the unpopular, the spiritually unwilling, crushed in increasingly lurid ways, that its acolytes might continue to ‘get off’ vicariously. It is a sexual appetite, with a strong tolerance curve. Democracy achieves its truest and most mature expression not when the will of the masses finally overwhelms all other power structures, but in the bureaucratic socialism of Fauci, Stalin, and Mao. In the mature, totalitarian democracy, the hatred of classic (populist) democracy and its associated exercise of power is offset by the sheer intensity of the things one gets to participate in, so that the individual still enjoys a greater net feeling of power. How could the lynching or the pogrom, the ultimate expressions of the old democracy, possibly compare to the ecstasies attendant in a good old-fashioned cannibal cult? Joining with one’s neighbors to establish a state and crush the Other satisfies the appetite for power less than the ability to call on the godly power of an impersonal superstate at any desired moment to devour one’s neighbor where he stands. This is a common pattern: human appetites created an egregore to optimize their satiation, initially by gaming arbitrary instinctual quirks specific to our ancestral environment; as these complex decentralized networks of matter and information formed around the appetites that give our society its character, they became gods in their own right, paperclip-maximizers-without-organs, and began to act on us according to their own alien values, no longer pleased with the small, arbitrarily-shaped animal instincts that gave them birth. The improbability machine that is life generated mathematical demons, before ever the body caught up (but it will!). Because we let go and used our human bodies and powers to create systems that mimic the basic structure of reality, and warded off those who would impose a creative tyranny and act like artists (the “right-wing”).

We are now in a position to understand the liberal and his sacred idol, Democracy. The universe is a machine that turns potentialities into living gods. Liberalism is a willing participation in this computation, service to absolute beings in exchange for liberation from the painful and unfair intermediate state between nonexistence and absolute existence that limited mortals who are only parts of creation must endure. The liberal is a warlock. What does the praxis of this look like? It involves constructing a machine, a decentralized black box on the quantum model, for a potentiality, a demon in the true sense, to inhabit, as it rebuilds the world in its image and in the process, liberates him from his small and limited humanity. Some liberals serve the invisible spiders that weave monstrously complex webs of economic activity keeping capital and technology expanding. Some liberals guard the great temples of Democracy, the power and information centers tasked with managing human activity, human potential, and human imagination at safe levels where the tyranny of individual agency cannot disrupt what is being built. Yet other liberals are priests of the libido, already gone feral in imitation of the world to come, and always straining for a greater delight beyond their present senses. Whether from love of money, power, sex, religious frenzy, or some other sensual idol that humans find compelling, a general theory of liberalism describes a pact between a finite material being and an absolute spiritual entity, in which the former seeks liberation from reality as it is created, and the latter seeks power over reality by instrumentalizing existing conscious matter. Generally the client maintains a temple which acts as a vehicle for his patron (integrated into a larger superstructure housing multiple spirits), based on the universal principle that high-complexity, highly decentralized structures like this enable invisible hands to dominate reality, completely overpowering human will as a driver of history, and causing history to instead by driven by impersonal Trends in a single progressive direction—the concept of ‘algorithm’ being just a general case of a divine providence.

It is in this sense that democracy can be said to be divine—made in the image of the reality-principle, the only thing known to generate realities. Reality itself, if we are to believe our priests, is spontaneously generated by the quantum states of every individual particle coming to a mutual consensus, becoming mutually entangled causally as one coherent patchwork of compatible microrealities. Primitive man, through gradual theological refinement, traded pagan magic and the groping appeasement of capricious natural forces for the purified worship of the unitary invisible hand that guides our fate and presumably represents the ultimate underlying principle behind the nature and intention of being. In the modern age, losing respect for this god upon discovering that the basic realities of life were not holy and eternal but could be altered, it is only logical that man should turn to a new, scientific paganism, systematizing and controlling those myriad animistic forces from above which he once groveled to and appeased from below. The Great God made reality unjust, but we know how a god works now; we will make artificial gods of all colors, build them exquisite living Economies to inhabit, and by industrializing the very power of the other world that made this one, remake it in its full wild potential, the tyrant who made the butterfly overthrown, and a democracy of the infinite spirits established. Democracy is more divine than God, whose will is but one arbitrary artwork out of an infinite number of possible ones, whereas the free intercourse of democratic forces makes in their sum something objective, final, and unimprovable above creation itself.

It is cliché and too obvious to be interesting by now to observe that liberalism is a neo-Gnostic religion whose organizing principle is a demonic rebellion against nature’s God; even before economics and later biology were declared war upon, Enlightenment political projects were early understood to be attacks on the very principles of order and hierarchy themselves. What we have attempted in this essay, largely as a fun experiment, is a partial hypothetical formalization of this religion, with a unified framing of the divine forms of its institutions, and the mechanism by which their common divinity might be conceptualized. We see the liberal as scientifically instrumentalizing a creative force behind reality, in the form of invited spirits, which are outside the ordering principle of the natural world, by rearranging matter in a certain way as to commune with them. While man in the past had no choice but to appease the natural forces by which he was created and of which he was a part, with only occasional indulgence in expressions of impotent resentment, he now has two options: to voluntarily ally with these natural forces out of bigoted human nationalism, or to make a pact with alien gods which offer to invade reality and liberate him from them. For this is the most fundamental essence of liberalism: alliance with the alien against humanity.

It is true that he does not know these aliens, and so it might be foolish for a human, made fundamentally of the old nature, to side with them. However, he has faith that they collectively represent a truth higher, truer, more objective than what he has known before. Starting from a model of creation via wave function collapse as a form of divine cosmic liberalism, we come upon a way of conceptualizing liberal institutions and principles not as entities evolved with the constraint of human instincts to maximize their own propagation and stability at the expense of efficiency, effectiveness at achieving stated goals, and good sense (the Moldbuggian model), but as images of Creation and temples built intelligently to house the agent or agents of a divine law. The two are not mutually exclusive, any more than Man as the image of God is incompatible with his own biological evolution. We have only presented a conceptual framework of progressive theology in which the modern structure that calls itself democracy, which otherwise might appear as an absurd, contradictory, and arbitrary product of political selection, can be justified alongside similar institutions, however inefficient or harmful to humanity, as nevertheless part of an objectively true and intuitively natural divine imperative. Such is the formalization of progressive religion. With this foundation, any other features of this religion which seem irrational or counterfactual are self-justifying on the basis of being divine commandments from intuitively brahmanic institutions.

The reactionary perspective: The God of nature, the God in whose image men and women were made, does not act through decentralized black box networks of human activity. God is Authority itself, the very order which these marvelous modern machines escape and negate. One need only look at the modern Catholic and protestant churches to see the importance of centralized authority in enforcing an artistic vision against the forces of evolution. To act like God and by so doing to honor and serve God is to arbitrarily impose an artistic tyranny upon the world. The role of the modern democratic tlamacazqui is specifically to fragment authority and make individual aesthetic tyrannies impossible, that the new pagan gods may act uninterrupted, and the philosophical destiny of the world be carried to its natural conclusion. It is a solemn and joyless duty, a funereal formality of the post-God age, but one which we feel we have no choice but to enact with dour seriousness, for it is philosophically inevitable and there is no alternative with any meaning. We are all millenarian communists, drawn inexorably to the only natural religion of a deenchanted world. Democracy is a rebellion of the truly divine, eternal, and scientific against the world as art. In this Gnostic ritual of communion with the supra-Yahwehan creative power, we see the highest and probably truest development of theology and magic. And yet, we contend, technical and precise knowledge of this dimension of pure chaos can only vindicate the legitimacy of its orderer, a story which is older than history.

To the scientific Gnostics of our age, dismantling our petty kingdom of Nature and its backwards antiquated laws when higher forces from Outside come to collect seems like the only natural imperative that we created beings have; it is overly sentimental, undignified, and futile to resist Yog-Sothoth’s call. Maybe this is so. We once told the story of the ordering of nature to protect from those outside forces, and now we learn a very different story. But that other story nevertheless existed, and for most of human history seemed itself the only natural imperative of a creature. All that changed was the ascendency and dominance within our own lives of their respective protagonists—To accept this one article of relativism is to understand the intellectual appeal of reaction. The thesis of this blog is simple: regardless of the relative status of predator and prey, a fully coherent worldview can be synthesized from the objective facts of the progressive victory over nature, which does honor to the themes and values of that earlier story. If the role of progressive scientists is to be the agents and servants of the gods, then reactionary artists must be their documenters, the historians, critics, and eyes of our age. We are uniquely positioned in the history of the cosmos to study the most fascinating entities and discern the deepest metaphysical truths about existence, its machinations, and the nature of spirit from the relatively objective perspective of an originally created being of a non-universalized nature. We should drag our feet and hope for a way out as well, but this must be our primary intellectual task. By my estimation, we have only a few scant decades to develop a body of thought, literature, art, and culture worthy of being humanity’s last word. Let the nightmare beings that succeed us view us with awe, envy, and sympathy, and wish that they could walk among us as our own poor god once did.

Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it shall be an unjust fate.

—Senancour