A Gentle Introduction to Mencius Moldbug Part 4: "Man and Cathedral"
Although we have a two party system, the asymmetry in cultural influence between left and right indicated that the common perception of each as equal and opposite forces might be questionable at least. In Moldbug’s mind, the relationship between Democrats and Republicans might be thought of as less like the left and right wing of a political assembly, and more like the inner and outer parties have a single political fixture, like in the novel 1984. The inner party develops the real agenda and the outline of where society is going in the long term. The outer party exists as a peanut gallery, taking power temporarily and moving in the same direction as the inner party, but at a slower speed. The main utility of the outer party is not real opposition, but creating the perception of controversy and discourse for what really is a predetermined conclusion.
Now while Moldbug’s analogy is quite illustrative, it is important to point out that he is not proposing a conspiracy (as in Orwell's 1984) but rather a consensus. Despite what Alex Jones thinks, the leaders of the Democratic Party, hollywood and corporate america aren't gathering together in a smoke-filled room to determine what the consensus of norms are going to be in the West. Instead, there's a general consensus, an agreement that emerges organically among elites and which people who enter the elite are encouraged to believe
But if we live in an open society, an open democratic project that priorities free speech and free expression, how can this consensus even emerge to begin with?
To address this question, Moldbug takes aim at the concept of an “open society” as described by people like Karl Popper. What if we were to conceptualize social control more broadly than simply an “open democratic” or “authoritarian”?
Say for instance, we modeled a completely open society as a “Type I” society, one that had almost no controls on the types of ideas that could be said or thought about in any way, shape, or form. To contrast this we could compare it to a totally closed society, a “Type III” society, like North Korea where every aspect of a person's life is completely controlled by ideology, by ideas that have to be asserted enthusiastically inside every communal interaction. Now while these pure “Type III” societies are exceedingly rare in human history (very few governments want total control over people's ideology), I think it is also fair to say that the pure Karl Popper “Type I” society has never really existed.
In fact as Moldbug points out, most societies do maintain ideological order through a loose societal consensus over what is an acceptable opinion and what is not (a “Type II society”). This consensus is usually not designed. and exists pre-politically, operating mainly through social pressure and typically originating in the academic and educational institutions. This consensus system is loose and fluid. It extends over governments and between them, creating a sort of “unofficial multinational rules” for determining what ideas are commendable and what ideas are unacceptable.
A classic example of this is medieval society in Europe between 1000 a.d. and 1500 a.d. when the Catholic Church and its strictures were the de facto societal consensus. At that time didn't matter whether one’s loyalties were to the Holy Roman Empire, to France, to Britain, to Hungary or the Kingdom of Poland. At the end of the day a person had been educated under Catholic guidelines, they asserted Catholic religious beliefs, and they had a Christian and scholastic methodology about solving problems.
It is this meta-political consensus that Moldbug called “The Cathedral”.
This Cathedral, more than anything else. is what defines a civilization. It is an organized system of consensus and an ideal about how society should run and should be operated going into the future.
What is the advantage of the Democratic Party? Well, in short, the Democratic Party is aligned to the desires of our contemporary Cathedral, the general consensus of the academy and others who generate ideas about how society should move forward. Everyone else are heretics, acceptable heretics in most cases, but nevertheless out of sync with agreed upon correct opinion.