Mencius Moldbug begins with a great diagnosis of the modern state of affairs which calls back to the work of Debord and Castoriadis: nobody seems to 'own' (by which he means, to be responsible for) the state. He wishes to re-unite property with its owner, such that control and ownership once again become 'the same'.
>So this is the formalist manifesto: that the US is just a corporation. It is not a mystic trust consigned to us by the generations. It is not the repository of our hopes and fears, the voice of conscience and the avenging sword of justice. It is just an big old company that holds a huge pile of assets, has no clear idea of what it’s trying to do with them, and is thrashing around like a ten-gallon shark in a five-gallon bucket, red ink spouting from each of its bazillion gills.
>To a formalist, the way to fix the US is to dispense with the ancient mystical horseradish, the corporate prayers and war chants, figure out who owns this monstrosity, and let them decide what in the heck they are going to do with it. I don’t think it’s too crazy to say that all options—including restructuring and liquidation—should be on the table.
>Whether we’re talking about the US, Baltimore, or your wallet, a formalist is only happy when ownership and control are one and the same. To reformalize, therefore, we need to figure out who has actual power in the US, and assign shares in such a way as to reproduce this distribution as closely as possible.However in this argument he reveals his remaining faith in Hoppean natural law, which even Mises scoffs at in his book on socialism, quite blatantly admitting, like Kropotkin, that property *is* theft. The leviathan cannot be owned (in his sense of being equal to 'control'), as it's too large and bureaucratic. This is a phantom ideal. People will own/control what they can, and fail to own/control what they can't. The 'cathedral' he talks about is nothing other than the state of affairs in which the leviathan *cannot* be controlled. It cannot even be 'liquidated', because it is a huge Nothing, as all property is.
>A formalist is only happy when ownership and control are one and the same.reveals the implicit ideal that
>everything must remain under control!but it can't happen. Some things must always fall by the wayside. Ownership secretes anarchy. One must give certain attention to some things over others – one must make a 'choice' so to speak. The leviathan arises out of the inability to take care of one's business, not because we 'got the owners muddled up'.
Ironically this is the exact kind of vita activa Byung-Chul Han, Castoriadis and Heidegger are talking about in modern bureaucratic (and various strands of marxism) which must be overcome. It echoes back to the infamous phrase 'you will own nothing and you will be happy'. Dialectically speaking, the closer we get to the completion of the domination of nature by the will-to-power, the more relieved Dasein is being made *of their care*. The struggle for life is being killed. I think we need to just stop all of this in its tracks. A regaining of responsibility over one's property cannot involve a unified taking-away care via a mass bureaucratic movement (including democracy) but by a direct re-instatement of autonomy in pockets through a direct re-appropriation of property. Desert is prescient here. What this would probably look like is something akin to Stirner's union of egoists.
I like this quote from Castoriadis
>Revolution occurs on the factory floor.Proust wishes for us to engage in a search for lost time. In the same way, in response to the diagnoses of Moldbug's formalism, I believe we need a 'search for lost property'. It is the property that is lost, not the owner. The property has already ceased to exist as property, due to lack of care, lack of ownership. The present age seems like a lifeless desert, but it’s only here in these arid wastes where truly noble souls can burst forth. when even Being becomes Nothing, when we enter abject meaningless and there’s no truth, no revealing, all is concealed — which is the condition of possibility for the most radical shining forth ever to occur.
So in summary, Moldbug starts with an interesting analysis of the problems of society through the lens of a discussion of bureaucracy, the christian ascetics implicit in the 'progressive left', the growing disparity between control and ownership– but quickly projects his own nonsensical Hoppean moralism and Aristotlean idealism into the solution. also he has a weak chin
1.
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted/ (Formalist Manifesto by Mencius Moldbug)
2.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution (Mutual Aid by Petr Kropotkin)
3. [[The Imaginary Institution of Society]] (Cornelius Castoriadis)
4. [[The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking]] (Martin Heidegger)
5. [[The Scent of Time]] (Byung-Chul Han)
6. [[In Search of Lost Time]] (Marcel Proust)
7.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Mises/msS.html (Socialism by Mises)
8.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-unique-and-its-property (Unique and its Property by Stirner)
9.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-desert (Anonymous)