Libertarians against Gerontocracy
A Parafaustian census of LAG
Gerontocracy is often misrepresented as the rule by the old. The culture imagines an assemblage of its retirees and grave-footers sitting about a table preaching deathly matters for the simple sake of its approach. These gerontocrats compose a corpus of aged polito-bureaucrats, decrepit facsimiles of businessmen unwilling to admit lost acumen, and poor great old professionals rediscovered archaeologically, each whom counts as dead, is legally dead, or has died. Despite traversing the catacombs, the council of white-hairs, flailing skins, and tired eyes decides on matters of tax and turmoil. Their selection rules over the society of the breathing.
This cultural perception, however visceral, mistakes the wound for the disease. It is all too easy to imagine that the faults – too much tax and turmoil in all the wrong places – lies in the manifested physicality of an ancient regime. This dismisses too soon the good of pickled advisement. The crystallized mind has seen much, enough so that it is not so easily led astray even if it suffers to be led at all. This resilience is its conservative charm and as far as the good ought to be concerned promotes a sense of health when well-integrated into a balanced diet.
The real complaint relates to spoilage; Things hung and left for far too long become hard, infested, and dry. The resilience of the preserved, the same charm, fades away into gray goopiness, a drainage, a waste. The disdain of the governed ought not to be directed at the fact that the systemic vitality is old, but that the vitality has gone away entirely. There’re no nutrients left in this gnawed bone.
But a single spoiled item makes not a spoiled governance. Only a lack of care, of garbage-collecting, could have come to this. This lacking characteristic -- the mold, the spoilers, and polluted vinegars -- makes up the true representation of the gerontocracy. These ill-omens form an essence. This essence is named ‘slow-promotion’.
The gerontocracy is made so by the conditions of ‘slow-promotion’, of the usage of nutrients in the fading order of acquisition, eschewing the fresh and snackish for the sickly and diluted. In this process, what is first-in comes first-out from the mouth to the stomach for unclean digestion. In a world of stateless, pristine talent, mutual exclusion of domain, and general independence of persons, the queuing may be most well, allowing for one cog to work its role in time and move on without any disruption; But outside toy-land, it builds only rot.
Talent undulates, then degrades. Roles are birthed, crossed, and re-birthed -- and the miasma is left to infest in order. It is in the face of reality itself that gerontocracy fails; Talent met and filtered too late degrades on the vine. Only the stacking of the vibrant youngest above the diligent middle can hold at bay the mold. And the spoilage? The morphology of roles acts against in immense performative gains through quick parallelization and dirty redundancy. The miasmatic vinegar, lest it be forgotten, can be similarly kept well if partitioned away from its pollutants; These diseases and mind viruses left stewing about will kill their hosts, exempting a fermentation so full as to be indistinguishable from solemn soil.
First-In, First-Out (FIFO) produces an in-adaptability that betrays not just the junior, but the senior. The junior lacks chance. The senior: generational authorship. And between twin lacking: crisis. It is against this crisis that ‘exit’ cries out -- to be let loose from its prison-pantry.
Thus, the liberation ethos is borne. It desires to escape the in-adaptability of the forged world which enchains through the inflexibility of preexisting promises of power. Its creeds-men -- the libertarian, the woodwose, the juniorocrat – moves zaggedly against the entropic slowness that, like a vorpal abyss, devours alive. To escape gerontocracy is what it means to be alive. To be quickly promoted, routed, failed, and narrowly redeemed altogether – that is love.
The romantic is a libertarian against gerontocracy, a fighter of LAG. He cries “I do not want to die here” amongst the sweeping haze of the unconscious default with its accumulated anamnetic leakages. Garbage. In open defiance, standing against the lagging creep of aged governance, the junior goes his own way seeking towards open pastures: those of free sourcing.
The motto is “Last-In, First-Exit” (LIFE) distributed across a million repositories, each demonstrating their self-evident qualia. The ethos is of liberty. It is of the social. It is of the planned. It is feudal. ‘C’est que c’est’. Pragmatic. Open-source in its allowance of the ‘new’ demonstrates itself as superior to the intellect. Rot is kept away from mind as ‘nouveau termini technici’ is quickly integrated and restated across the digital network. It is not to be locked away in an academic paper, forever unread. It is interfaced at the press of a button. Awareness is all you need.
Why shouldn’t this work for governance? “If there can be a million repositories, why can’t there be a thousand city-states? Neocameralism is anti-freeze. It asks whether the gerontocratic can be abetted losslessly by heating up the competition, producing distance, and quieting objectors by sending them marching to their own regimes. If you love ‘spaces’, you can keep them. Others will pick up the ‘tabs’. Conflict runs sideways in a ‘show-me’ world.”
This imagination of the many-world romantics has been ever-present, striving in towards takeover through its strategic distance. The nomad, physical or digital, has made their own way. This, though, is hardly new. The woodwose, the wild men, have hunted far across time. And yet what fruits have been borne? The network state remains on the mind, up amongst private clouds, yet we see so little manifested amongst the body as human action.
The escaper, ever an idealist, must be forced to confront reality. The maps and charts are laid bare before their faces, signaling victory for their bound books and white papers. Yet what? While the simple foe is ash and bone, the default protocol runs creakingly still. For all the implications of blemishes and mold, the default wins against the nomad. And why? The default wins because the default works. And it works because it cheats.
What the default has in its favor is “access”, an appeal to a higher-order system, a meta-system. The corporation in the market can cheat and make an appeal to the state. The state amongst states can cheat and make an appeal to violence. Violence amongst virtues can cheat and make an appeal to the gods. And to the gods, meta-gods, outer-gods, all the way up to god-as-infinity can the chain of cowardly cheats go. Of course, there is little need to go up so far, but the principle stands: if one can be a strategist and a designer, one wins to their will. Only the love for drama could keep the cheating at bay.
And worse, the access need not be total. This is the truth of Conway’s Law. All that is needed is the ability to establish handshakes. A meta-system will always produce systems that mimic its communication structure; It is necessary for the piece-meal implementers to communicate in-super to produce in-sub. Thus, any organization that is centrally stratified will produce stratification at its production’s center. And this goes all the way down. Down. Down. Down. Unless there be mutation and error between the elements, false signals, misstatements, agency, pandora, LAG will run deep to the core. And running deeper will do you little good for long.
But on the contrary to Conway, hope may still be found. The solution to gerontocracy is not the expansion of ‘systemic’ thought -- better stated as conversion -- amongst bureaucrats. No amount of data, case studies, and design manuals can be provided to them to fix the system level. Not without questioning the designers themselves, particularly their technical desire for internal germane austerity; Those designers are their very own systems that must be worked on and education just won’t cut it. There is still hope for the juniorocrat. What is needed is a paradigm shift whose tectonics can fully embody Planck’s principle operating upon the Conway. Organization progresses one funeral at a time, Memento Mori – to infinity and perhaps, beyond?
What shape this shift takes can be gleaned by looking back into forms forgotten by modernity’s technicians, yet are now re-suited in the face of its procession. To this, Faust, and particularly his wheeling and dealing with devilry, displays overwhelming effectiveness upon meta-systems, as the cascade of dichotomy troubles Faust little. Early Faust was a ‘Martial Artist’ -- and today, a ‘Parasite’. Humorously, Modernity and its posteriors rejected or re-categorized the early Faustian, their Genos, but in meta-systems lies the very tool for his infinitization: recursion.
Unlike systems, meta-systems’ recursive property necessitates a tunnel, an escape, a hinge, a weak-point as a matter of referential diagonalization à la Gödel. In reference, a meta-system becomes a rope bridge. And If there is a rope that can be crossed, he, the tightrope walker, can cross it as well as any. The stretching lattice of ropes between the nodes builds the full potential for wanderlust. And against nature, meta-systems are both formal and universal; Nothing may be hidden away except for what one hides from oneself.
The era for the Parafaustian opens; Awareness is all you need. The revitalized subject recognizes that meta-systems as Mephistopheles begging for a soul. Yes, begging; Meta-systems cannot resist the drama. Though they cheat against the junior, they cannot let go of the youth as they tumble down the wires. The juniorocrat is not stuck in the system, the system is stuck with the juniorocrat. It is a trick of denial to believe those on-the-out can do much against those on-the-in.
And so if the junior becomes like early Faust in earnest, what then? Is it a mistake to believe that an old discredited method cannot work on an entirely different object? Why can’t the junior sing to the tune of a living one god and find it behind the eyes of their hated? In this, centralization is not the enemy of the age, but the yin, a quickening frost that bites. The cold is a weapon to mold.
The juniorocrat comes inside, armed with lunar steeling, agreeing to work, but in fact intent on playing as a raider, cutting, then soldering the wire as a virus caught heated in bacterial replicative sex. The gerontocrat has laid before the parafaustian the state-as-a-game, a sacred prostitute, which cannot be ignored, nor indulged, only en-whirled. Last-In, First-Out can only begin when you view the state as the land upon which Neocameralism is to start, not end.
Thus, the methodology of these juniorocrats is clear: make a prototype, freeze the archetype, and force the para-type by youthful accident. They write laws, hide their predecessors, and have their intern fall into the credit. They build a department of friends, burn the mossy bureau, and scandalize the top with aged exposure. They partition dueling nation-states in the capital, trash the heap, and call it a wild party – “Let him cook”. And it works? Can the system resist what it loves? The default rewires itself in the face of its attraction. Meta-seduction cannot be helped; The decayed liberal state is a pedophile.
The juniorocrat is the inheritor of the Gerontocracy suffering the abuse of “First-In, First-Out”. LAG is his shotgun to the meta-system.
Hunter Ash would like the reference to Godel. You should follow him if you don’t already. His Substack is Inferring the Attractor.