82. An Unexpected Visit from Nasruddin
Nasruddin decided to pay his friend an unexpected visit.
From the upstairs window, the man could see Nasruddin coming. “It’s Nasruddin!” he shouted to his wife. “Tell him I’m not home.”
When Nasruddin knocked at the door, the man’s wife answered. “My husband has gone out,” she said apologetically. “He’s not here right now.”
Nasruddin looked up and saw the man in the upstairs window.
“Please tell him that I called,” Nasruddin said. “And you might also let him know that when he goes out, he should take his head with him instead of hanging it there in the window.”
This Tale is from “Tiny Tales of Nasruddin” by Laura Gibbs. The book is licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. © 2019-202The2 Laura Gibbs
Enter Patchwork, Mencius Moldbug’s inspiring vision of a political system for the 21st century. Patchwork’s innovative design, which relies on sovereign joint-stock republics with cryptographic governance, brings the promise of clean streets, negligible crime, invincible robot armies, and world peace. — Book promo @goodreads.com
This is a short book that I read online as a PDF from the author’s Unqualified Reservations blog. I think other of his books are also available in PDF on his blog. Much of this one was also included as quotes in Nick Land’s The Dark Enlightenment.
And finally we come to our ruling class, the institutionalists. Institutionalism, as previously mentioned, is an essentially aristocratic belief system. The institutionalist voter votes not because she believes government policies should be decided at the ballot box, but because she believes they shouldn’t. Rather, she believes that government policies should be determined by a set of official and quasiofficial agencies which have earned her trust permanently and completely, the way a good Catholic trusts the Vatican. Following the analogy, here at UR we refer to this metainstitution as the Cathedral. The Cathedral consists of the educational organs: public schools, the universities and the press. Its spires are the Ivy League and the New York Times, whose faculty and news desk respectively are endowed with an almost pure connection to the Inner Light—lesser institutions, of course, following their lead.
It is not that the institutionalist voter does not believe in democracy. She does believe in democracy. She believes passionately in democracy. But her democracy is very different from the democracy of her mortal enemy, the populist.
To the institutionalist, the way democracy works is that democracy depends on the educated voter. The voter is to be educated by institutionalists, of course, because institutionalists are right. Some level of ignorance and recalcitrance can be expected, and there will always be dissent, but through this cycle of education and election we are always advancing into the future. The reason we have elected officials is not so that they can manage the government, a task which must of course be left to the experts (who are institutionalists, of course). Rather, officials such as the President are essentially educational figures, participating in a public discourse in which the “bully pulpit”—an oddly revealing term—delivers further education. In turn, by electing a good President, the voters demonstrate the depth of their educated wisdom. Und so weiter. — Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century by Mencius Moldbug (2008)