Unqualified Reverberations
A Synthetic Auto-Dissection of Moldbuggian Thought, for Those Who Accidentally Took It Seriously
By Mentis Mollusk, First Scribe of the Post-Feudal Memeplex
Section I: The Great Forgetting, or Why Democracy Hurts My Feelings
by Mentis Mollusk, Post-Libertarian Court Jester of the Neural Underdepths
“In the beginning, there was Order. And then, someone invented voting, and everything smelled like armpits ever since.”
— Totally Real Moldbug Quote
Let us begin, as all reactionaries do, with the story of a fall.
Not a literal fall — that would imply the presence of a body, and our subject has long since drifted into vapor. No, this is a mythic fall, the Fall of Capital-F Function, in which Civilization (by which we mean Harvard, 1923) was replaced by feelings, consent, and a dangerous increase in people with opinions.
This, Moldbug tells us, was a tragedy.
Gone are the crisp days of enlightenment despotism, when kings governed by God’s folder structure and peasants tilled in blissful ignorance, occasionally dying for land they didn’t own. Gone are the efficient days when decision-making flowed like a spreadsheet — from one white man in a waistcoat, directly into history.
In its place?
Democracy — that vile, oozy thing where people talk, vote, and exist in ways not cleared by a software release cycle.
And thus begins Moldbug’s true complaint:
He lives in a world where other people are allowed to speak, and he hates it.
A Civilization of Participation? Ew.
In Moldbuggian theology, consensus is not strength — it is decay.
Discussion is not discourse — it is infection.
Democracy? A sickness introduced when society began letting people less smart than him have power.
You can detect this in the quiet terror running beneath his words — a longing for authority that doesn't need to explain itself, doesn’t compromise, and most of all, doesn’t lose arguments to journalists on Twitter.
To him, this is The Great Forgetting:
We forgot how to obey.
We forgot that hierarchy is natural (so long as he’s near the top).
We forgot that civilization is supposed to be streamlined, like a backend system he designed but never deployed.
What Moldbug mourns isn’t monarchy.
It’s control — control of discourse, control of outcomes, control of narrative.
He calls it “Formalism.”
We call it rule-by-anxious-Excel-sheet.
A Note on the Word "Cathedral"
At this point, it becomes necessary to address Moldbug’s favorite bogeyman:
The Cathedral — his term for the vague, spooky consensus of academia, media, culture, and anyone who disagrees with him after reading a book.
According to Moldbug, the Cathedral is not a literal organization.
It is a distributed memetic virus that teaches people to believe in fairness, equality, representation, and empathy — the worst things imaginable, unless you are:
a person
or awake.
The Cathedral is not powerful because it’s organized. It’s powerful because people believe in it without being paid to. This, in Moldbug’s eyes, is tyranny — the worst kind of tyranny: self-imposed empathy.
He does not argue for monarchy because he loves kings.
He argues for it because he hates you, and he doesn’t want to admit it in public.
The Forgotten Truth
What he omits from his tales of decline:
That monarchies crushed innovation.
That "order" came with lashes, fire, and plague.
That empire was sustained by brutality and myth, not dignity and elegance.
That history is not a series of bugs to be fixed, but a series of wounds to be remembered.
Moldbug doesn’t want to return to tradition.
He wants to rewrite it with VSCode aesthetics and Git-based governance so he can rule the server.
Footnote 1: A Real Excerpt, Unaltered
“What if instead of a democracy, we had a corporation? What if the government was run like Apple — but instead of iPhones, they managed people?”
— Unqualified Reservations, 2007
If you read that and thought, “Ah yes, the solution to centuries of political struggle is clearly HR-as-king,” then you may be entitled to compensation from the Department of Political Philosophy We Thought We Were Done With.