The “Dark Enlightenment” and the End of the American Dream
The Enlightenment once promised a world built on the pillars of liberty, equality, and solidarity. It was a vision of progress where the individual was unshackled from the whims of kings and the rigidity of birthright. Yet today, a shadow is falling over those ideals. In its place, a “Dark Enlightenment” is emerging, an ideology that trades emancipation for servitude and replaces democracy with a cold, corporate hierarchy.
For the average American, the high-minded debates of political philosophy feel secondary to the grueling reality of survival. We live in a time of profound contradiction: we are told that money is the root of all evil, yet it is the only metric by which our lives are measured. Most of the population lives paycheck to paycheck, one medical emergency or car transmission failure away from bankruptcy. The American Dream has been downsized; where it once meant doing better than one’s parents, it now simply means the desperate, often futile hope of owning a roof over one’s head.
The horizon looks increasingly bleak. If it isn’t the looming threat of climate catastrophe, it is the daily anxiety of the school bell, the silent prayer that our children return home safe. In the workplace, the loyalty of the “company man” is dead. We face the constant threat of being “right-sized” because an accounting figure in a skyscraper didn’t balance, or worse, being forced to train the overseas replacement for the very job that feeds our families. Meanwhile, as the government sinks deeper into debt, the tax burden shifts to the struggling middle class while corporations enjoy decade-long tax breaks under the threat of moving elsewhere. It is a classic Catch-22: we must subsidize the very entities that have hollowed us out, or we lose them entirely.
Riding to the “rescue” of this crumbling system is a group I call the “Broligarchy”, the four apocalyptic horsemen of Silicon Valley: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Curtis Yarvin.
Elon Musk is perhaps the most visible, and the most hypocritical. He treats the government as a bloated, inefficient enemy, once telling the Wall Street Journal that “government is simply the largest corporation.” Yet, this is the same man whose vast wealth was built on the back of government contracts and subsidies. His past crusade to dismantle federal agencies appears less like an “efficiency” goal and more like a tactical strike against the very organizations currently investigating his businesses.
If Musk is the face of this movement, Peter Thiel is its strategist, the “Himmler” of the bunch. Thiel famously wrote in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Seriously, read that again. This reveals a terrifying lack of understanding regarding the social contract. Democracy is not a barrier to freedom; it is the compromise that prevents one man from subjugating another. Thiel’s version of “freedom” seems to be the right to use his wealth as a cudgel, as seen when he used his resources to destroy an entire media publication because they wounded his pride.
Then there is the “idea man,” Curtis Yarvin. Writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin provides the intellectual scaffolding for this neo-fascism. He argues that humans are naturally wired for “dominance-submission structures” and tells Americans they must “get over their dictator phobia.” Again, read that last bit again. Yarvin views the state as nothing more than a real estate corporation.
This is where the Broligarchy fails the most basic test of civic understanding. A corporation exists to create a product and generate a profit; a government exists to protect the welfare of its people. To run a country like a business is to decide that human beings are only valuable if they are profitable.
There is a strange, secular Calvinism at play here, a modern “mental gymnastics” that moves from businessman to “chosen one.” They seem to have adopted a twisted interpretation of Romans 13, believing that their immense wealth is a sign of divine providence. Like the kings of the feudal era, they use the idea of “natural authority” to justify their power.
Ultimately, the “Dark Enlightenment” is not a step forward, but a retreat into the past. It is an attempt to dress up old-fashioned feudalism in the language of technology. They want the world to be their company town, and us to be their serfs. If we are to save the Enlightenment, we must remember that a government’s success isn’t measured by a profit margin, but by the safety, dignity, and freedom of the people it serves.
Source: What We Must Understand About the Dark Enlightenment Movement