Because of the big expansion of the Alt Right, the Dark Enlightenment, and Neoreaction, we are getting a lot of people unfamiliar with the theory.
Know your enemy, know yourself:
The Cathedral is the Academic-judiciary-media complex. It is also priestly power, even if some of the priests are not actually in academia, the judiciary, or media. It the set of people, with actual privilege under democracy. All people are equal, but some are more equal than others. The Cathedral are the ones that are more equal than others. Jews tend naturally to priesthood, but the Cathedral is not entirely ruled by Jews, and in practice Orthodox Jews are normally excluded from the Cathedral as unbelievers, revealing the Christian roots of progressivism.
The Cathedral has organizational continuity with the state religion of Massachussets, in that Harvard was the headquarters of the state religion of Massachusetts. Harvard is a heretical offshoot of the Church of England, in that Harvard was founded by clerics expelled from the Church of England by Charles the second, clerics known at the time as dissenters or noncomformists, and the State Religion of Massachusetts was founded by clerics who fled England to avoid the authority of Charles the first, clerics known at the time as Brownists. The frequent name changes, which continue to this day, indicate that this religion keeps developing a dreadful reputation.
The problem is the priesthood of all believers. This is wonderful in theory, but in practice, some believers are more equal than others, so what you get in practice is what Moldbug calls informal power – power that is unofficial, secretive, insecure, conspiratorial, and based on lies and pretence, as illustrated by the Climategate files.
It used to be that Royal society decided what was science, what was the scientific method, and awarded prestige to some scientists more than others. Its motto was “Take no one’s word for it” – which meant that scientists that claimed X had to show how they knew X. When Harvard got supremacy over the Royal Society as a result of World War II, we got scientific truth determined behind closed doors on the basis of secret evidence that they will not show you even if you mount freedom of information requests. Peer Review is in practice the clerical synods that the State Church of Massachussets demanded. Similarly accreditation of educational (credentialing) institutions.
The British civil war (1640-1660) was a result of dissident/brownist clerics demanding that the authority of Bishops appointed by the King be replaced by the authority of clerical synods.
This led to riots against the King’s Bishops, which Charles the first failed at first to treat as full on revolution against the King and at first failed to crush with full on military power. The mainstream interpretation of events leading up to the British civil war is that Charles was too harsh, but my interpretation is the opposite – that the more revolution you allow, the more revolution you are going to get.
We are now entering a similar crisis, in that the permanent government claims to exercise authority and regulate not on the basis of what some mere president tells it to do, but on the basis of objective fact, where some people behind closed doors get to determine objective fact and others do not.
The permanent government has long been apt to commission “research” that makes it a moral and legal necessity to reward friends and punish enemies, and in the last months of the Obama regime has been aggressively claiming priestly independence similar to that of the judiciary, academia, and the mainstream media. It has also been organizing quasi military forces independent of the regular military. This is the priesthood of all believers all over again.
The priesthood of all believers would be fine if you added a little addendum that non religious authority gets to decide which believer may administer the sacraments – the family patriarch, the magistrate, or the King, as appropriate, so that we had formal, rather than informal, inequality between believers and priests. Arguably this is implied by Saint Paul’s remarks on divine right, and in the end Martin Luther took this interpretation. Secular authorities should be able to regulate the church provided that they are not hostile to the faith and do not demand repudiation of the doctrines of the faith.
Or we could go with apostolic succession, and holy oil. There is a sufficient supply of holy oil, because if you have a bottle half full of holy oil, and top it up with regular oil, you get a full bottle of holy oil. The holiness does not get diluted. (It is a miracle) But the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England has become rather shy about apostolic succession. Seems to me you cannot have apostolic succession, unless one apostolic successor who is a Bishop actually says to a candidate Bishop something like “By the power granted to me by the apostles, I appoint you successor to the apostles”, and sloshes him with holy oil, or something along those lines. A ambiguous pat on the head does not really count. By which standard, no one in the Roman Catholic Church or the Church of England has apostolic succession any more, so if we go with apostolic succession we will have to import some Bishops who do have apostolic succession from Mount Athos or Moscow. Mount Athos is safer. We don’t want Moscow to lose intellectual sovereignty to Harvard, and equally we do not want Washington to lose intellectual sovereignty to Moscow.
To deal with the problem, Trump is going to need to forbid heavy weapons and armored personnel carriers to any federal government agency other than the regular military, and then replace holy synods with Bishops – in other words re-organize the federal bureaucracy on das Führerprinzip.
He also needs to reduce the power of the Judiciary by demonstrating that an airforce commando outranks a supreme court justice.
And after he is done with the federal bureaucracy, do the same to Academia.
He needs to radically reduce the status of Academia by radical degree deflation- we need to reintroduce the bar exam and the civil service exam, so that you can take the exam without bothering with an accredited college, and create a viable apprentice + exam based model for doctors of medicine. And simply repeal all the other accreditation requirements, in particular and especially “disparate impact”.
Trump has already struck effectively at the power of the media without even being president. Now he needs to do to the rest of the Cathedral what he has done to the media.
After that, send a request to Mount Athos for some holy oil. We need to close off open entry into the priesthood. Even when disempowered, it is still an attractive nuisance that will attract the dangerously ambitious.
Some possible approaches to closing off open entry into the priesthood.
1: The priesthood of all believers firmly regulated by the state. The state gives them privileges and power, in return for them teaching loyalty and patriotism, but keeps them under tight formal and explicit control. (Luther’s later more conservative Lutheranism)
2: Bishops derive their authority from the King, combining apostolic succession with (1) as in the Church of England from 1660 to 1820
3: Full on apostolic succession, with appropriate respect for secular authority, as with Eastern Orthodoxy and today’s Russian Orthodox Church under Putin. Get some holy oil.
4: Hereditary priesthood, as in the Old Testament Israel.
5: Priesthood as private property, as in today’s Japan and saga period iceland, where private ownership of an official state endorsed shrine makes you a priest. We make the universities as independent in reality as they are in form, so that Academia tolerates, is unable to prevent, is incapable of suppressing, open dissent within Academia, shutting down the network of committees controlling committees that causes all Academia to speak with a single voice, that makes it a thousand loudspeakers all echoing one microphone.
Since the shrines are official, solution five always has substantial elements of solution one. Give them too much independence, they will conspire to create an informal and unofficial apparatus of coercion that enables them to speak with one voice, for the added power that this gives them. The state not only has to ensure that the priesthood is dependent on the state, but also ensure that the priesthood is genuinely independent from synods of priests, for synods of priests lead to wars and revolutions, exercising power without responsibility.