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Our rationalist-adjacent 'friend' and (perhaps?) sometimes lurker mister Curtis Yarvin has another new substack article out, titled The Situation and the Solution..
It's a long article, and follows his typical style of being quite doomer about the political situation, lamenting how weak modern men are, and generally telling us that for REAL regime change we need HARDCORE monarchy, with no letting up.
However, he does make an interesting point, which dovetails nicely with something @coffee_enjoyer said downthread, as I'll quote here:
Moldbug agrees that fun is one of the missing elements in modern white culture and politics. He recommends replacing a modern 'soft party' with what he calls a 'hard party,' partially by making things fun:
What I find most interesting is Yarvin's vision of a 'hard party app', where people sign up to an app for their preferred political party, and then the political party gamifies political action. If you sign up, download the app, and pay your dues, you get basic party affiliation. If you go vote in an election or two, you get a badge. If you go and engage in some activism or political volunteering, you get an even doper badge, level up, or whatever.
Yarvin sees this gamification as a way to essentially recreate the old, militaristic political parties of the past, for modern men's sensibilities. He understands that modern men are much softer and weaker, so instead of continuing to try and make people angry and pissed off, which hasn't worked, he wants the right to play towards the fun that it can be to band together to fight your enemies.
While I don't always agree with Yarvin's extremely pessimistic take on right wing politics, I have to admit that the app idea is incredible! This is one of those ideas I read and thought... huh, why don't we already do this in politics?
I'm sure there are some reasons, but especially now that Yarvin has posted about it, I wonder how long it will take for political parties to adopt this app-style, gamified setup. And, I wonder how that will change the political game as we know it?
Honestly, I think we should replace Congress with this app.
I think this is where I'm going to take a moment to shill my personal vision: let's amend the apportionment act of 1929.
I don't know if the house of representatives having 1,000 members would be an improvement, but I'd like to see what would happen.
A while ago I kicked around a concept of political representation that hinged on dunbar's number
Basically: You choose to join a group of 100 people. These 100 people can live anywhere, it's just the group you're a member of. You can leave your group if another is willing to accept you.
Every group, let's call it a "century" after the Roman military unit, is a member of a higher level group of 100 centuries (call that a "meta-century" for now), and each one elects a representative into the meta-century. Just like individuals, the representative can choose to make their century a member of a different meta-century, if that meta-century is willing to accept it. The meta-century chooses one representative into the meta-meta-century, and so on until you have one president.
Every century would be essentially sovereign with respect to every individual who is a member, including up and down the hierarchy.
I have no idea how well it would work but it would ensure that every single person is contained within a political unit below dunbar's number, which I think is a good property.
It might be slightly more practical to say:
A normal-size group comprises 71–140 people.
An undersize group comprises 51–70 people. Within one month it must become a normal-size group, by either merging with another group or taking on new members individually.
An oversize group comprises 141–200 people. Within one month it must become a normal-size group, by either splitting into multiple groups or bleeding off members individually.
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