Freedom and Control

[atreestump]

By the end of the 20th century, something strange had happened. The dream of freedom had curdled into a demand for control. The idea that politics should serve the people gave way to the idea that the people must be shaped by the state. And in the decaying echo chambers of power, a new kind of technocrat emerged—haunted by the ghosts of empire, and armed with a dream of software.

This is a story about that dream—and the men who sold it. It is about mercantilism, a centuries-old economic doctrine resurrected in the digital age; about Curtis Yarvin, a software engineer who wants to reboot the world like bad code; and about Donald Trump, a television character who became president by instinctively channeling the anger of a collapsing middle class. It is a story about the fantasy of running a nation like a firm. But beneath it all, it is about the deep fear that lies at the heart of our modern age: the fear that nothing is in control.

In 2006, Warren Buffett made a modest proposal. He suggested “import certificates”—a mechanism to balance trade by limiting how much a country could import unless it also exported. It was a policy that sounded clever, even technocratic. Buffett was no radical. He was the safe, avuncular billionaire. Yet this idea had all the hallmarks of an older logic: mercantilism.

Mercantilism had once ruled the world. It was the economic operating system of empire. Its rules were simple: accumulate gold, protect domestic industry, fear the foreigner. Trade was not an exchange—it was a war. And the economy was not a web of relationships—it was a ledger of loyalty and power. It died, supposedly, with Adam Smith and the rise of liberal capitalism. Smith argued that trade should be free, that markets would regulate themselves, and that the invisible hand of self-interest would produce collective prosperity.

But in the 21st century, as the promises of globalization failed and the elites stopped pretending to care, mercantilism crept back in—first as policy, then as mood, and finally as myth.

Curtis Yarvin was once a programmer. He worked on compilers and small software companies. But online, he became something else: a political philosopher of a new right. Under the name “Mencius Moldbug,” he proposed that democracy was a failed system—a legacy operating system corrupted by parasites. What America needed, he said, was a CEO. A monarch. A software update.

His vision was clean, digital, and cold. Democracy was inefficient. Bureaucracy was broken. What was needed was something simple: a sovereign corporation. A nation-state stripped of ritual and tradition, reduced to a stack of code and a chain of command. His influences ranged from Thomas Carlyle to obscure 19th-century economists, but his real inspiration was aesthetic. He wanted politics to feel like Apple packaging: elegant, inevitable, untouchable.

He found a kindred spirit in Friedrich List, the 19th-century German economist who believed the state should guide development. List had seen Britain’s free-trade doctrine as a trap: an ideology of the strong disguised as neutrality. He believed nations must first protect themselves before they could compete. For Yarvin, List was a prophet—one who understood that the world is not flat, but hierarchical. Not cooperative, but Darwinian.

But Yarvin’s vision had a problem. It required an enlightened despot—someone outside of history. A perfect king. What he got instead was Donald Trump.

Donald Trump did not read Friedrich List. He did not write blog posts about trade balances. But he had something else: instinct. His worldview was shaped by tabloids, real estate fraud, and the rituals of American celebrity. He understood branding, resentment, and television. He knew how to say what others only dared to feel. And he understood, deep down, that America was a place where power had collapsed into performance.

To his followers, Trump seemed to understand trade. He talked about China “winning,” about America “losing,” about bad deals. His language was crude, but his meaning was clear: the elites had betrayed the people. The foreigners were taking everything. The system was rigged. Trump did not believe in free trade. He believed in vengeance.

He slapped tariffs on steel. He bullied companies on Twitter. He promised factories would return, and the past would come back with them. It was not policy—it was a kind of theater. But it worked, because it made people feel something. Not hope. Not clarity. But revenge.

Curtis Yarvin, watching from the wings, applauded. He said Trump “understood trade better than all the economics professors.” It was, in its own way, a compliment—and a confession. Trump was not the philosopher-king Yarvin dreamed of. He was a chaos muppet, an animal spirit in a cheap suit. But he shared the instinct: that the nation should be a firm, and the world a marketplace of conquest.

But Trump’s presidency revealed something deeper. Despite the noise, nothing really changed. The trade deficit grew. The supply chains stayed offshore. The swamp, as he called it, was never drained. It turned out the CEO-president could not fire reality. And when COVID came, the emperor had no spreadsheet.

Yarvin continued to write, but his tone shifted. He began to rail not just against liberalism, but against measurement itself. GDP, unemployment, inflation—he dismissed them as lies. Constructs. Illusions of a decaying order. He proposed an alternative vision: to build a state not of numbers, but of beauty and hierarchy. To govern not through metrics, but through myth.

This is not as original as it sounds. The technocrats of the 1930s said the same thing. The planners of the Soviet Union tried to measure steel and smiles. The fascists of Europe built monuments and highways. The idea that the state must re-enchant the world, that it must discipline the population through labor and spectacle, is not new. It is very old. And it is always, in the end, a lie.

Because what Yarvin and Trump both sell is not power, but the performance of power. They offer the image of control. A CEO in the palace. A wall at the border. A tariff on the spreadsheet. But underneath it all, the machine grinds on. Capital flows where it pleases. Corporations offshore their taxes and their labor. The algorithm shapes the vote. The system eats its children.

And still, the dream persists. Because it is a comforting one. The idea that the nation is a firm, and the leader a manager, offers the illusion of clarity. It turns politics into accounting. It transforms democracy into a product. It lets us believe that failure is just bad management—and that salvation is a rebrand away.

But the truth is more disturbing. The truth is that the world is complex. That power is dispersed. That history cannot be rebooted. That no one is in control.

Adam Smith once warned that when businessmen gather, it ends in conspiracy against the public. But even he could not have imagined a future in which the conspiracy was so banal, so seamless, so automated. Or a future in which men like Yarvin would dream not of liberty, but of order. Not of citizens, but of subjects. Not of politics, but of firmware.

In the end, mercantilism is not a policy. It is a coping mechanism. It offers the illusion that by adjusting the dials of trade and production, the sickness in the body politic can be cured. But the sickness is not external. It is in the dream itself.

And so we remain, trapped between nostalgia and simulation. Between the yearning for a strong hand, and the spectacle of strength without substance. Between the spreadsheet and the crown.

And still, no one is in control.

[Whisper]

There exists a Right Wing Accelerationists reactionary "destroy impulse". You are absolutely correct in pointing out it is no longer ideology. Rather than the Christian Right, it is esoteric fascism.

[kFoyauextlH]

[kFoyauextlH]

There are people who constantly try to force people through bullying and worse to pick between two evils, and to pick the greater or lesser evil, but never to feel that their assistance in such is complicity and bloodying their own hands by helping in m*rderers into power rather than not choosing and resisting, even if that redistance causes a greater evil to defeat a supposed lesser evil, but Kamala Harris was a virulent Z (married to a J Z like St*rm*r, completely compromised in every way) who was going to do nothing to even slow the G*z* genocide which is ongoing:









There is no Freedom, only Control and these election systems are a win win for the people who want to crush humanity, neither well funded facade or so-called side even matters, they are all Hydra.



Americans and Westerners are seemingly increasingly becoming more mercenary and callous, now even interested in electing serial killer war criminals across their country and not minding how those people personally repeatedly volunteered to go again and again to foreign nations to massacre villagers (referring to G Platner and G Stoker among likely many other killer drone agents pandering with lip service and false words but working for the usual bad people that they were working for all their years killing civilians in the service of the Empire of Evil).

[kFoyauextlH]

Quite the situation between Freedom and Control depicted there.

The people are all against the person filming, and even being grotesquely racist in the comments.

The situation is totally taken incorrectly by the people, and their stupid knee jerk reaction of blindly defending messed up looking people.

The logical reasoning used was correct, and the defirmed person even knows to offer excuses and clarification, even knowing ehat is being addressed and trying to offer a cover up and clarification, meaning he probably gets away with a lot just by looking abnormal. It is practically like a hunchback criminal that people let steal whatever and commit crimes because they move weirdly and hobble around, totally dumb superficiality of people.

So I think that this likely adult with physical deformity and mild enough mental issues, who also looks like a member if a frequently vehemently racist ethnic group that aldo may be prone to gebetic issues due to close co-sanguinous relationships and genetic history, called this guy the N word, which even an actual child can be corrected about, and then this more than likely adult who only looks like a child offered excuses when his helper, like a vampire with their familiar and servant guard, is asked to maybe tell the person that they should try not to do that.

Anyway, all the racists came to the scene, some even going so far as to use terms like "chimpin out". Others blindly believe the excuses made by the clearly in their senses deformed person and insist that he was merely called "Migger Mouth" for Mickey Mouse, and that showed hiw sneaky and mischievous this person could be.

The comments demand that the deformed person be granted more liberty or freedom to say and do as they please, and that the freedom of this person talking be reduced, reversed, and revoked, and that he be punished for even questioning a deformed person or where they might be learning such things even if they are truly unable to understand things, though they clearly understood who to target, and if it is a school problem like this woman claims it is, how is that acceptable that a person with supposed learning issues is exposed to terminology like that, and that is what they are learning.

So the people who comment prove to me once again that they are thoughtless, unreasonable, imbecilic, and dangerous people who are ready to lynch all the wrong people without understanding how superficial things can effortlessly manipulate and alter their processing and the results, they were the biased and prejudiced and brainwashed people who could not think that some people can be more tricky than they might look and defirmity doesn't give a person a free pass on being corrected or helped to understand things if possible.

So I wish the worst for all those dimwits and racist freaks who wanted to chime in their with their braindead opinions, they are weirdly similar to the types who say that babies should be shot because of their ethnicity and their fear of whatever ethnicity rather than understanding that babies are not a threat, and they switch their opinions very fluidly, defending everything wrong always, never correct in what they decide to say.

This piling on incorrectness and amplifying it seems almost new or becoming more extreme, as anyone with different ideas seems to remain silent and not wanting to get involved or face the mob opposed to them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_pressure

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8712484/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog ... l-pressure

https://christianscholars.com/mimetic-t ... -conflict/

F*ck the Groupthink:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog ... ng-reality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism

https://shrink4men.com/2019/07/17/thats ... ct-target/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias

https://www.britannica.com/topic/institutionalized-bias

https://www.monash.edu/about/who/equity ... cious-bias

https://www.washington.edu/news/1998/09 ... onference/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8784036/

https://lifestyle.sustainability-direct ... reference/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice

https://disabilityrightsiowa.org/disabi ... criticism/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9179217/



https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ ... Jerkassery

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ ... advantaged

https://theautismcafe.com/autism-not-excuse/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_cr ... onsibility

https://criminalnotebook.ca/index.php/N ... l_Disorder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insanity_defense

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_disability

So many commenters on YouTube now seem to be intellectually disabled, formerly commonly considered complete and utter morons, who can not seem to reason anything clearly and are irrational, reactive, often intoxicated seeming, with very low intelligence, full of racism, prejudice, and a desire to see the innocent suffer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_health_law

Just about all of them, criminal as they are, and of obviously low intelligence, are still nasty, filthy, crooks and losers, despite their being by all means mentally r*t*rded, which is now a no no word, probably decided by these same types who aren't very messed up physically, but can be, but are at a level that they would still be considered responsible, even though their brains are melted.

Check out this book if you are interested:

"
Manifest Madness
Mental Incapacity in Criminal Law
ARLIE LOUGHNAN
"

https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/han ... sAllowed=y

Not a very common looking name.







Eccentric adult criminals "bullying back" complete children/teenager strangers they have no evidence did anything lol, this is the worst cartoon hell.