Liz Truss and the Dark Enlightenment

From UK Prime Minister to radical right podcaster interviewing Bannon and Yarvin

Readers from outside the UK may have already forgotten Liz Truss was our Prime Minister. She is the shortest serving PM in UK history, holding the office for just 49 days from September to October 2022, resigning amid a government crisis caused by her budget that sent markets into turmoil. She surpassed the previous record held by George Canning, who served 119 days before dying in office in 1827.

Truss’ response on leaving Downing Street was to blame everyone but herself, going into unhinged conspiratorial speeches about the deep state. With nowhere left to go she has fully embraced the alternative reality of Trump World, effectively becoming MAGA's pet former PM. She recently launched her own podcast, guests on these early shows have included the likes of Steve Bannon and Curtis Yarvin. Truss is mainly seen as a figure of ridicule, but its astounding that a former prime minister, who came to power with the backing of right-wing media, is having friendly interviews with such anti-democratic characters. A few years ago Truss was talking about “the will of the people” and respecting the results of the democratic process.

Bannon still denies the result of the 2020 Presidential election and served a prison term for refusing to engage with the investigation into the events of January 6. In a violent rant on his War Room podcast Bannon called for heads to be mounted on spikes on the White House lawn, and he has called for Trump to run for an unconstitutional third term.

Curtis Yarvin, is an ideological blogger associated with the Dark Enlightenment which has influenced Petet Thiel. At the core of the Dark Enlightenment is the idea that democracy has run it’s course and is no longer desirable

From a previous piece on Thiel.

Emails obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal Thiel was in contact with Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart and Curtis Yarvin a blogger who as part of the neoreactionary movement the Dark Enlightenment believes democracy should be replaced with a form of authoritarian feudalism. In the emails Yarvin told Yiannopoulos that he had been “coaching Thiel.”

“Peter needs guidance on politics for sure,” Yiannopoulos responded.

“Less than you might think!” Yarvin wrote back. “I watched the election at his house, I think my hangover lasted into Tuesday. He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”

Olivia Goldhill, in an article for Quartz in her role as Science Reporter described the Dark Enlightenment as “The neo-fascist philosophy that underpins both the alt-right and Silicon Valley technophiles.”

In the article Goldhill explains the Dark Enlightenment primarily focuses on a 2012 manifesto written by Nick Land, a philosophy professor from Warwick University who quit academia in 1998. Originally working on Cybernetic Culture Research, he believed in accelerationism, using all tools and technology available to “speed up capitalism”, which, similar to many libertarians, seems to take a reductionist and limited approach to capitalism where any form of regulation is considered anti-capitalist.

While Land’s 2012 writing is more artistic manifesto than political, reading like an alt-right rant of contradictions and lacking substantial policy, the Dark Enlightenment philosophy has influenced figures in the alt-right and white nationalist movements, with its themes of technology, warfare, feudalism, corporate power, and racism. “It’s an acceleration of capitalism to a fascist point,” says Benjamin Noys, a critical theory professor at the University of Chichester.

“It is a worship of corporate power to the extent that corporate power becomes the only power in the world,” says David Golumbia, a new media professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. “It becomes militarised, and states break down. For some reason that’s difficult to understand, they seem to think these highly weaponized feudal enclaves would be more free than the society we currently have.”

This is the core of Dark Enlightenment thinking, Capitalism has not yet been fully unleashed and corporate power should become the organising force in society. Democracy restricts accountability and freedom,the world should do away with political power, and society should break into tiny states, each effectively governed by a CEO. How removing democracy will increase accountability hasn’t been explained with any coherence.

With his interest in cybernetics and science fiction the stranger parts of Land’s manifesto around the future of humanity are focused on the creation of cybernetic super humans, almost like something out of Iain Banks best selling Culture books, the difference being that while Banks wrote about a utopian anarchy free from the constraints of resource scarcity, Land’s vision is of a divergence in humanity, seemingly influenced by the white supremacist research funded by the Pioneer Fund, of racial segregation as the “elites” will enhance their IQ by becoming increasingly insular. On racial divides, Land says the science is “an empirical question” but “that human population groups are significantly distinct, however, is a matter so self-evident to ordinary people that it makes for a natural default.”

I’m reminded of articles in the Spectator about “progressive eugenics”, of the “cognitive elite”, the “employment resistant” and the erosion of human stock worldwide due to healthcare and welfare. The “natural default”, again makes the false assumption we live in a genuine meritocracy, that the wealthy are inherently better.

Truss Yarvin interview

The interview is essentially a forty minute ramble to conclude that the solution to Britian's economic and cultural decline is a “prime minister with absolute authority”, “both inside government and outside.” This power was required in order to wipe the slate clean, Truss said there were over 440 quangos and institutions that needed to go, this includes any institution that could interfere with the absolute power of the prime minister, including the Supreme Court which Truss described as “an abomination”.

This power was required in order to remove the UK from the “worldwide blob”, but beyond this Yarvin and Truss were vague in regards to what should be done with this absolute power apart from the idea of remaking the system into something resembling a corporation with the prime minister acting as chief executive. Yarvin and Truss agreed that London could again become “the centre of the world.”

A remarkable journey

Truss began her political life as a Liberal Democrat while studying philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at Oxford University. In the UK PPE at Oxford is seen as the quintessential starting point for career politicians and civil servants who Truss now claims are part of the deep state that conspired to end her premiership. In 1996 she switched to the Conservatives and became an MP in 2010. She coauthored Britania Unchained, claiming the British people were lazy and workshy, she called for radical deregulation. Surprisingly she backed remain in the Brexit Referendum but quickly became a Brexit ultra after the results were in.

Truss thoroughly beat Rishi Sunak in the Conservative leadership race to replace Johnson as PM in 2022. Sunak was more popular with MPs but the right-wing media backed Truss, she had been a favourite of the media for several years as she cosplayed as Thatcher in a succession of photo stunts.

Its no suprise Truss was the prefered candidate for most the right-wing media, she's a product of the opaquely funded think tanks of Tufton Street. Tim Montgomerie, a Conservative pundit, approvingly stated that the IEA had "incubated Truss and Kwarteng during their early years as MPs," essentially providing them with a philosophical grounding and a policy laboratory. Montgomerie has since joined Farage's Reform.

The IEA free market think tank was founded in the 1950s by Antony Fisher who then travelled to the US and founded the influential Atlas Network which now spans over 500 organisations right-wing organisations in over 100 hundred countries.

When Truss entered Downing Street and prepared her disastrous budget the right-wing media cheered, with the Brexit ultras being her greatest supporters.

The same people who sold us austerity, Brexit, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, told us Truss was delivering the greatest budget in decades. Over the years Tufton Street and the networks around it had won almost every battle and Truss was going to give them the radical policies they'd yearned for.

The disaster of the budget proved the “pro-business” ideology of the free market fundamentalists was as much fantasy economics as the policies of the hard-left they ridicule.

So the only conclusion that Truss and her ideological mentors can come to is its not that the policies don’t work, it’s the system thats broken.

Of course there is some truth to this, but the antidote being offered; tearing everything down and letting the market decide, while bringing the courts and other vital institutions under direct political control, isn’t the solution. The main purpose of what Yarvin refered to as a year zero appears to be focused on the dismantling of international obligations.

In the wake of Trump declaring he will be running Venezuela, the desire seems to be for a world order where strong nations can do as they wish with weaker nations. While this may benefit a country with the economic and military might of the US, it’s harder to see how the UK would benefit from fascilitating the breakdown of international obligations, except perhaps as a subsidiary of the US.

Notes from the interview

While not a full transcript, here are the notes made while watching the Truss Yarvin podcast.

Truss, best days of UK were before creation of civil service, Northcote Trevelyan 1854

Yarvin tech founder and modern philosopher on what it will take to bring good government back to the UK

Blames universities as the brain of the blob, where the ideas start that can't be challenged, first example he gives is vaccines

Universities are connected, a globe, but a decentralised system

Well coordinated as though it has a centre, but it doesn't have a centre,

Uses covid as an example, February 2020 across the globe the political line was don't worry about it, worry about the real flu

Until Trump said don't worry about covid, this made the space for covid doves uninhabitable for the blob

But Sweden kept to the political line, and it's self evidently true this was better.

The marketplace of ideas sees attacking Trump as the route to power

Uses not wanting Putin in power as an example of this

Then talks about experts being relied on, and experts not choosing what's right, but what's powerful

Talks of gainer function being incentivised by grants, then describes NATO eastward expansion as gainer function diplomacy

Describes the experts as unaccountable power, then argues generalist venture capitalists in Silicon Valley who use a 15 minute meeting to decide funding is better because they are accountable to the market.

Truss, don't you think it's better to sell offices and be democratically accountable than what we have now

Yarvin, the problem is that democracy and democratic essentially mean legitimate

Rise of the bureaucratic state from 1854 was the start of the decline

Claims that the idea of representative democracy gave rise to the New Deal and gave rise to this “oligarchic meritocratic thing”

Truss, the entrepreneur class is the opposition, Musk is single handedly fighting the European deep state

Yarvin, Musk believes in popularism, which doesnt answer the deeper questions

Facebook mums are right about vaccines but they don't know how to fly the plane

Suggests a return to the executive model

Battle of two democracies, one who thinks the experts are meritocratic democracy

Truss, that model has failed

Yarvin, but when populism wins it doesnt know what to do, the got Brexit and didn't know what to do so they got the reverse, they wanted less third world immigration, and they got the Boris wave

No form of government works for all people, talks of Ireland being ruled like India with a good stout despotisim

Truss What we need is a chief executive prime minister

Yarvin, Britain is in a better place because the US has checks and balances, UK has tried to put this in place with things like the Supreme Court

Truss, Supreme Court is an abomination

Yarvin, golden age for UK was 18th century when parliament could do anything except turn a woman into a man, they actually said that. Laughter from Truss and Yarvin.

Yarvin provides Napoleon as an example of good government, background didn’t matter

We don't want a French Revolution

Truss, we want a Glorious Revolution

Yarvin, we don't want guillotine when we can do something like deportation people

We need a lot of force but little political violence, example of total year zero is allied Germany in 1945, I think they went too far, but the eradication of the old system was complete

Also uses East Germany as an example

Yarvin, the blueprint would look like a corporation, with finance director and personnel manager

The Chinese have a solution, a one party system, but not fully in favour of their system

We said we didn't want a one party state but what we ended up with is a one party state

Truss, we have two parties but one bureaucracy which is running things behind the scenes

Yarvin if you want a new regime it would be easier to do it from scratch

Need to ask why do you have aircraft carriers and nuclear subs, there are historical answers, but what are the answers today

To do this you need a prime minister with absolute authority, both inside and outside of government

You need to break away from the worldwide blob, and make London the centre of the world again.

Truss concludes the administrative state, the deep state, is tied to the mainstream media and has controlled and shaped the narrative, and this is what Musk and Trump are trying to take on. These people are powerful but they can be faced down, we can create alternative media and we can take them on in government

Further Reading