Seeing like an NGO: On OPSEC and State Legibility
A. Montagnard
James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State, an anarchist classic, introduces a useful dialectic between legible and complex systems to explain why “high modernist” “schemes to improve the human condition” at the expense of indigenous ways of knowing fall short. Though we don’t think he understands exactly why the USSR had to fall into famine and collapse, the overall idea that States wish to make complex inputs legible is basically true.
“Historically, the relative illegibility to outsiders of some urban neighborhoods (or of their rural analogues, such as hills, marshes, and forests) has provided a vital margin of political safety from control by outside elites. A simple way of determining whether this margin exists is to ask if an outsider would have needed a local guide (a native tracker) in order to find her way successfully. If the answer is yes, then the community or terrain in question enjoys at least a small measure of insulation from outside intrusion. Coupled with patterns of local solidarity, this insulation has proven politically valuable in such disparate contexts as eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century urban riots over bread prices in Europe, the Front de Liberation Nationale’s tenacious resistance to the French in the Casbah of Algiers, and the politics of the bazaar that helped to bring down the Shah of Iran. Illegibility, then, has been and remains a reliable resource for political autonomy.”[1]
Reading this passage reminded me of Frog Twitter. In a hostile media ecosystem, accessibility fosters fragility and esotericism leads to durability. The craft of writing enigmatically and anonymously, as opposed to evangelically, marks not a retreat from politics, but creates the very condition for a politics which can endure normie repression. Personalities melt away for the engagement with pure Ideals. We extend a left-hand to initiate the worthy.
As J'accuse has attracted outside attention, due to its irresistible success, subbie critics like A.W. Merrick have tried to lump it in with “the New Powellites”. Theirs is a respectable conservative tradition but in terms of the Arguments and our House Epistemology, J’accuse is of an entirely different persuasion. J’accuse should be shelved by future historians closer to the work of the early, pre-Woke Fabians during the New Statesman’s infancy.
Standing against Trump’s first term as Queen Mary stood against Henry Tudor, Joe Biden’s presidency took on the air of France's ancien régime: a “despotism moderated by epigrams.” Trump’s subsequent victory, like the ascent of Reagan or Thatcher, marks a thaw and not our ultimate triumph over postwar shibboleths. A degree of esotericism remains necessary, especially in Masonic police-states like those of the Commonwealth, without formal or cultural free-speech protections. A memorable anecdote from Seeing Like A State makes the point that the Netherlands’ religious census allowed for the Nazis to round Jews up more easily than they could in secularist France.
Use metaphors. A discussion of Hobbes or Tacitus can serve as a mask for past and present disputes which filters out the truly plebeian. Indirection frustrates the decontextualised screencapping of Regime bloggers or conservative grifters. A sentence about Cromwell or the Peloponnesian War cannot easily be presented out of context for public outrage; its meaning is inseparable from the frame in which it appears.
The point of organisations like Hope not Hate, or even seemingly benign Con Inc Lobeans, is making the many currents of “our thing” legible to a normgroid audience. This would allow for our most striking insights to be dismissed, suppressed or co-opted. Theirs is the view of politics either as a perpetual replay of Cable Street, or a business brief handed out to attendees at the Anglofuturist Ad Executive’s meeting.
The accessibility of Nietzsche’s prose made his message echo through the ages, but it was mangled over time. A similar process is at work here. One of Scott’s more timely points, thanks to the “enshittification” of Right-Wing Twitter is that “large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids and heroic simplification as the state is.” It is somewhat trite but culture is distorted by the profit-motive when scavenging for lucre replaces technocratic goals. As Bengalis are paid in US dollars to post “Europe has fallen” memes, discourse is dragged down from the heavens to the proles.
These efforts at market-imposed legibility mean that the Online Right is no longer an underground force but a branding exercise. Canny marketers in the United States have cottoned onto the “chud” as a captive audience. In America, where the accumulation of the Accursed Share reaches its apotheosis we see the cultural flow-on: Ryan Gosling’s Barbie, Black Rifle Coffee, Dissident Soaps and Dimes Square.
I am concerned that this oversaturation of formulaic right-wing tropes will alienate the young, the intelligent and the socially-well positioned from our rough geography on the “everything app.” In an age of fashy mattoid cultural domination, of George Osborne and David Lammy inviting JD Vance to hobnob in the Cotswolds, it is critical we remain edgy and different.
“An illegible society, then, is a hindrance to any effective intervention by the state, whether the purpose of that intervention is plunder or public welfare.”
Feeding the Amadeus Music Drop meme to Palantir. Bril. A.I. is not threatening because it is so far unoriginal, and few have the wherewithal to use it to parse through long abandoned forums and dead links from the Dark Ages. That calls on the autistic human intelligence of an opposition researcher. By the same logic, textual esotericism demands maturity and curiosity of our audience and contributors.
The consequences of commercial legibility are both social and epistemic: an online community becomes governable, surveillable, and ultimately co-opted. In the interplay between conservative co-optation and NGO policing, the esoteric community functions as a crucible, preserving the integrity of ideas, discourse, and internal hierarchy.
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What drew me to J’accuse or the old Peter Hitchens blog was the fact that they made the Blairite Settlement legible. B.liar’s Britain is exoterically “technocratic” (we know it is not), and esoterically the sentimentalism of FBPE morons, Eurocommunism, and enslavement to America. Starmer’s cartel lord over the current crop of “Dark Alistair Campbell” student politicians or Corbynites because they are the last generation committed to “establishing a dictatorship to buy off pensioners while ethnically cleansing Britain.”
Not all historic efforts at homogenisation are bad. Political maneuvering relies on the development of Schelling points and simple slogans to organise the thrall masses. Britain became a powerful state by suppressing pointless feudal dependencies and subnational obligations sooner than the rest of Europe did; before it pounced on India and the Caribbean with its Anglo-Celtic officer corps. The Blairite state and its infant, devolutionary, multicultural moralisms is younger than the British nation it was designed to destroy.
Defenders will say Scott is not defending “traditional/indigenous” ways of knowing as such, rather a localised form of Mêtis, which overcomes the dogmatic rationalism of Tradition with an adaptive, hyper local form of evolving practical knowledge. Scott uses the decentralised evolution of language as an example. Oral cultures like our sphere’s endure through inflected inside jokes about those Bombay-Sapphire fuelled, unrecorded Twitter spaces, evading the dictatorship of the text. You had to be there.
Hayek’s Bastards shows that immigration restrictionists of the 1990s did not justify their arguments with wacky French-grad-student-wank appeals to “deracinating capitalism” or third position Gottfried Feder economics, but the market and lifestyle inefficiencies created by Afghan welfare loafers or subliterate Chinese international students. Irrelevant Tories like Oakeshott miss that simple, statist “high modernism has a natural appeal for an intelligentsia and a people who may have ample reason to hold the past in contempt.”
“A thoroughly legible society eliminates local monopolies of information and creates a kind of national transparency through the uniformity of codes, identities, statistics, regulations and measures.”
Our earlier requests for more thorough migration statistics reflect our confidence that the larcenous inequalities and overrepresentations evident in other European countries, regardless of historical context, will appear in British data. Revealing this should be a top priority for the next generation of Anglospheric right-wing governments.
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I don’t have the space to show you the entire history of esoteric writing, but Arthur M. Melzer’s book Philosophy Between the Lines is the definitive work on the subject. It mentions Leo Strauss’s final justification for the practice — that esotericism actively educates the student over the course of philosophical study. Strauss was smeared by the conservative historicist Paul Gottfried as reading democratic pluralist messages into philosophers past, but this is more true of later Straussians (Harry Jaffa’s work on Lincoln).
I have no truck with esoteric reading, but esoteric writing is essentially what we are called to today. It is “essentially related to a society which is not liberal,” as ours has been since 1945. Evading this panopticon is common sense. “Bronze Age Pervert” chose that nom de guerre so his opponents would sound ridiculous saying it out loud, reserving his message for “those with ears to listen” — i.e. those with a sense of humour and the basic intelligence to “lurk moar.”
The Greek word "polytropos” (πολύτροπος), another name for Odysseus, translates to “of many turns” or “well-traveled.” Ours is a tradition of cunning. The Anglo-Saxon is a deceiver.
[1] This also implies the NECESSITY of Privacy and Anti Doxxing Laws from any sympathetic legislators reading this…
J’Accuse stands athwart history, yelling “Notice me!”
I don't think the amount of non-normies ever increases in a proportional sense but there has definitely been a massive proliferation of cryptonormies ie gentiles who can 'pass' as non-normies in superficial ways. One of the few good things to come out of degraded mass culture is that the non-normie/gentile distinction is stark and there is virtually zero cross-pollination, 'soft victories' in a broad cultural sense always lead to some degree of porousness. The danger emerges when the adolescent non-normie is tempted to converge with his cryptonormie peers at a time when severe alienation is still something to instinctively flee from (polygyny is one way to solve this). It is imperative that non-normie spaces become increasingly uncompromising and obscure to combat this novel threat to our youth.