9/28/2026

 Monday, September 28, 2026

1878 Pope Leo XIII published the encyclical Quod apostolici muneris (socialism)

1981 1st American test-tube baby, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, was born in Norfolk, Virginia

2015 Japan and South Korea reached an agreement over WWII "comfort women"; Japan apologized and paid 1bn yen compensation

In bed at 9, up at 6:45; 0700 203.4  117/74/69  122; 52/69/50, suuny

Morning meds at 8:30 a.m.  Entresto at 7:25 a.m. and p.m.

I finished The Nerd Reich by Gil Durán yesterday afternoon.  It was the scariest book I think I have ever read, about the takeover of government by wealthy tech elites.  That sounds preposterous, but we are partway there already with the election of Donald Trump to his second term.  It was no accident that the tech elites had the seats of honor at his second inauguration, in front of even his Cabinet members; that Christian Nationalist Russell Vought is his Director of the Office of Management and Budget; that Elon Musk and his crew of young technocrats were given extraordinary power to slash federal employees and programs like USAID, etc.; that the president and his family have become active in and enriched by entry into the Cryptocurrency market; or that David Sacks was appointed Trump's Artificial Intelligence and Crypto czar, and co-chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology; that the president has deployed troops to American cities and has created his own "brownshirts" to hunt down non-citizen immigrants; that the president and his minions have flouted the rule of law; and more.  The movement's chief villain is Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance's mentor.  Their intellectual guru is Curtis Yarvin, a brilliant but whacko software program designer/coder and right-wing dabbler and fantasist in political theory.   Their common target is liberal democracy; the goal is a technocratic autocracy, monarchy, or dictatorship.  

The book was slow-going for me at first, and I recommended to Geri that, if she reads it, she start with the last chapter, The Future, then move to the penultimate chapter, The Antichrist, about Peter Thiel's whacko theories, and to the last half or so of the preceding chapter, Apokálypsis, about the purpose of the cryptocurrency movement.  The chapter before that is titled The Unicorn and is about J.D. Vance’s rise from author and venture-capital figure to U.S. senator and then vice president, with particular emphasis on the role of Peter Thiel and the Silicon Valley political network in that ascent. The chapter’s subtitle is “JD Vance and the Road to the White House.”  The author uses “unicorn” in the venture-capital sense: a rare investment that produces an outsized return. His argument is that Vance became, politically, the equivalent of a venture-capital unicorn—someone whose career was helped by money, jobs, introductions, and ideological support from Thiel and allied tech figures, and who eventually reached national executive power.  Chapter 3, “Exit: Balaji Srinivasan and the Network State,” is where the author most directly develops the role of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as political technology, not merely as speculative finance. He argues that crypto fits the broader “exit” project: creating ways for wealthy technologists and their communities to route around governments, national currencies, regulation, taxation, and eventually territorial states themselves. 

I'm glad that I read the book.  It is well-researched and supported.  It is alarming, but not alarmist, and warns of catastrophe without catastrophizing.  On the other hand, it has led me to lead off today's journal entry with this sort of "doom and gloom" entry.

I want to return to my campaign against doom and gloom, to considering some of my favorite things, including poems, like Walt Whitman's Come Up from the Fields, Father.

Come up from the fields, Father, here’s a letter from our Pete,

And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

Lo, ’tis autumn,

Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,

Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,

Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,   

(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?

Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)

Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,   

Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.

Down in the fields all prospers well,

But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call,

And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.

Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,

She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.

Open the envelope quickly,   

O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,

O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!

All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,

Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,

At present low, but will soon be better.

Ah now the single figure to me,

Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,

Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,

By the jamb of a door leans.

Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs,

The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay’d,)

See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.

Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave and simple soul,)

While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,

The only son is dead.

But the mother needs to be better,

She with thin form presently drest in black,

By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,

In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,   

O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,

To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

But . . . is this even gloomier than The Nerd Reich?  For me, this poem, as much or more than any of Whitman's many others, illustrates his genius, his insight into life's realities, including the centrality of love, his wisdom and compassion.  It touches me deeply, reminds me of my own experience with Vietnam, of my mother crying in the vestibule of their 3-flat as she read my letter telling the family that I was headed there, and of my days as a Marine CACO for North Philadelphia and the northern suburbs.  It gives me heartache, a good heartache, every time I read it.  O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,  / To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

An eerie coincidence and similarity.  Today I started to read Benjamin Moser's historical and personal book, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History.  The opening chapter focuses much of its attention on Theodor Herzl, the modern founder of Zionism.  What strikes me as a bit eerie is the similarity between the kind of ideal state envisioned by Herzl in Der Judenstaat and the kind of state envisioned by Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and other techfascists:  From Moser's book:

Herzl’s mind was bursting with novelistic excesses. As he was composing Der Judenstaat, he confided his fantasies to his diary. A sympathetic biographer, Derek Penslar, recalls them: Herzl imagined himself as a great statesman, dictating terms to Hirsch and other wealthy Jews whom he had always envied and despised. He wrote that he would be an all-powerful leader and command unquestioning obedience in the future Jewish state. Bankers’ daughters would be given in marriage to “vigorous young men” for the good of the state and the “self-fertilization of the nation.” A “well-run secret police” would ensure Herzl’s security. The Jewish state would be run by a Herzlian dynasty; his father Jakob would be the first senator of the Jewish state, and his son Hans would be its doge. Herzl envisioned a coronation ceremony with cuirassiers, artillery, and infantry, “marching in gold-studded gala uniforms.” “The doge himself will wear the garb of shame of a medieval ghetto Jew: the pointed hat, the yellow badge…Only inside the temple we wrap a princely cloak about his shoulders and place the crown on his head.” Herzl wept at the grandeur of his own vision and the prospect of crowning his own son as doge. “Love and kisses to my Father-King,” Herzl wrote in a telegram to his son on the little boy’s fourth birthday. Moser, Benjamin. Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History (p. 11). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Herzl, like Yarvin and Thiel, is a fantasist.  They all dream(ed) of make-believe worlds where like-minded people live in harmony under a benevolent monarch or dictator, where all needs are satisfied.   What's so scary is that Herzl's dream came true in 1948, and the people living in his Beatific Vision have been at war ever since.  Yarvin's and Thiel's dream came closer to realization in 2024, when 77,302,580 American adults voted Donald Trump back into power, but instead of a benign dictator, we got a malign dictator.

Reading these fantasists' hypothesizing about Brave New Worlds ruled over by the likes of themselves made me think of a reference I noted about the political scientist Robert O. Hirschman writing about the writings of another political scientist, Adam Przeworski.   In the latter's Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government (2010),  Przeworski writes that politics begins from the fact that interests and values conflict. If they did not—if everyone wanted the same thing—then “anyone could be a benevolent dictator,” but literal self-government—each person living only under laws he personally chooses—is impossible once people disagree. Democracy is therefore a second-best arrangement: collective decisions reflect individual preferences imperfectly, and everyone must sometimes live under laws they dislike.  Hirschman wrote that Przeworski had emphasized a defining feature of democracy: uncertainty. In a democracy, no faction can be sure its preferred policies will prevail; parties and citizens must accept that they may lose today and have another chance later. Hirschman summarized the democratic virtue as valuing the democratic process more highly than getting one’s preferred program enacted every time.  Yarvin, Thiel, and the other techfascists don't value the democratic process at all.  Unlike technology, democracy is messy, sloppy, wasteful, and inefficient.  Thus, they fantasize about their technological Valhallas.  At heart, though, their methods, values, and goals are essentially fascist, and we see this in the real world that they have succeeded in creating by empowering Donald Trump's MAGA movement and government.  [It appears I can't stay away from the doom and gloom.]