Make Aristocracy Great Again: Lost Roots of Techno-Feudalism
It is difficult to interpret the Trump administration’s wholesale attacks on governmental programs as anything other than accelerationist efforts to destroy basic features of the American political and economic systems. From DOGE’s Artificial Intelligence-rampage through federal bureaus, the destruction of agencies like the Department of Education, or Trump’s expanding ICE as his well-funded private domestic army and occupying Democrat-governed cities; the destruction of old standards of normalcy are clear. While documents like Project 2025 reveal elements of Trump’s game plan, there are serious open questions concerning the administration’s long game and exactly how far the oligarchs influencing Trump want to take this antidemocratic movement.
While the destruction’s end-goal is less than clear, ever since Reagan it has been a safe default assumption that whatever foolish things were done by Republican or Democrat presidents supported neoliberal capitalism’s drive to privatize governmental services, transforming public services into private corporatized commodities. It remains possible that this will be the most significant outcome of Trump’s pillaging of governmental agencies, as businesses owned by crony capitalists fill the gaps lefts by the annihilated governmental services Trump attacks. But there are other, even more worrisome, possibilities.
If we take seriously the writings and statements of several of the powerful crackpot tech oligarchs whose ideas permeate Project 2025 and who played instrumental roles in placing JD Vance one-congestive-heart-failure-heartbeat from the presidency, there are reasons to wonder if more extreme desires fuel this destruction of government and attacks on portions of our economy.
A wealth of books and articles, by authors on the left and right, recently argue that as old forms of capitalism crumble, we are rushing towards some new type of feudalistic-adjacent economy. Some call this neo-feudalism, others, techno-feudalism. Books like Joel Kotkin’s 2020 The Coming of Neo-Feudalism or Curtis Yarvin’s (written under the pseudonym, Mencius Moldbug) Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century, present visions of new anti-democratic political formations where local sovereign polities run by wealthy lords replace the crumbling American system. Peter Thiel’s anti-democracy statements align with these visions. Even Yanis Varoufakis sees some sort of techno-feudalism on the horizon. Yarvin and Thiel’s visions are sometimes called, the NeoReaction (NRx) or Dark Enlightenment movement and they have features familiar to fans of dystopian fiction storylines, where local fiefdoms ruled by all powerful lords emerge after a Great Collapse. The familiar fictional tropes range from The Duke in Escape from New York, to various Road Warrior warlords, outposts in The Parable of the Sower, The Walking Dead, or The Road, with lots of variations—though few fictional visions seem to have benevolent lords. Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century’s thesis longs for a world where after, “the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” These joint-stock corporate mini-countries would function a lot like less-restrained versions of the human rights abusing “company-towns” of American logging or mining history, but without even the pretense of a human rights or a legal system.
The influence of Peter Thiel and other tech-bros in Trump’s second term brings renewed attention to the anti-democracy views of Silicon Valley billionaires and their followers. The recent tragicomedy film Mountainhead, playfully shows these dreams playing out in ways that should make us wonder if some elites are cheering for a great collapse—or in the language of Yarvin (who “jokes” about using the poor as biofuel), a “hard reset” or “rebooting,” to rid the world of progressive notions of equality and provide opportunities for those with surviving wealth to buy up chunks of the world at fire sale prices.
Tech bros’ politics have always been weird. A few decades ago it was easy enough to roll our eyes at the simplistic libertarian screeds some predictably spewed as early online culture developed, especially as their libertarianism used to be committed to induvial freedoms for things like sexual identities, drugs, abortion, demilitarization, and some elements of social issues generally embraced on the American Left (while abandoning the poor to the brutal ravages of market forces). But this desire for capitalism as we know it to collapse and give way to a system of networked feudal enclaves run by billionaire lords is something different. The roots of these dark enlightenment dreams of a resurrected aristocracy have an interesting not-quite-forgotten (because it wasn’t ever really known) prehistory within a larger genealogy of American anti-democracy that is worth considering.
I am referring to Rudolph Carlyle Evans’ strange book, The Resurrection of Aristocracy, published in 1988 by one of my favorite presses, Loompanics Unlimited—now defunct publishers of a wide range of wonderfully wild books, on topics like lockpicking, con artistry primers, living on abandoned islands, or treatises on hiding things in public places. In this lost work Evans envisions replacing our collapsing American capitalist republic with independent feudal regions managed by aristocrats. In doing so he lucidly expressed a crazed vision that now resonates with our present age’s dark enlightenment call for medieval solutions to our postmodern world’s problems.
Sometimes the clearest expressions of a group under increasing public scrutiny and wariness can be found in past writings from a less guarded time, when self-censorship was at a minimum, and the logic of a movement could be nakedly expressed without the trimmings and justifications needed when others are closely watching. Evans’ kooky treatise, The Resurrection of Aristocracy is an unheralded uninhibited, unhinged, classic work hawking the dreams of those who would demolish the American republic and replace it with independent aristocratic fiefdoms. If this sort of world is part of the shared vision of the robber barons of a new gilded age, no matter how insane a vision it is, we ignore it at our parrel.
Limited information about Rudolph Carlyle Evans survives on the web. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1952, moved to England as a child, later graduated with a degree in sociology and anthropology from Hull College in 1976, later moving to the United States. While Evan’s work seems to largely be forgotten, the WayBack Machine records at least one brief, 2015, acknowledgement by an astute reader that his work prefigures much of the insanity of Mencius/Yarvin’s Dark Enlightenment pitch.
The Resurrection of Aristocracy has an unusual introduction by Robert Hertz (not, the famed French sociologist, who had been dead for seven decades), who frames the book in blunt insulting terms rare for any volume’s introduction, while complimenting its exploration of its utopian (for an elite few) vision for a world to come. Hertz explains that,
In Evans view, the main function of the common people is to beat the lily pads at night to keep the frogs quiet. That, and go to war when their well-rested masters demand it. Evans wants to see a two-tiered social morality: for the leaders—pride and booty and a chance to humiliate their enemies; for their enemies; for the mass of followers—at best, security, and a chance to take orders from those they fear and respect.
What Evans wants is a new feudalism. If the world once moved from castles and serfs into bourgeois cities and capitalism, he sees no reason why it cannot be reversed. Evans has read enough Karl Marx to appreciate his systemic approach to society, but he rejects Marx’s determinism and is frankly horrified by his egalitarian philosophy.
Hertz differentiates Evans views from those of his contemporary conservatives like William F. Buckley, because Evans rejects free enterprise, noting that Evans is “anti-Christian,” his political orientation is “somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun—and affectionately, too, because Evans has the clarity and courage to organize and articulate what I and other ‘reactionaries’ have been hinting at for years.”
Evans calls for a rejection of governance by efforts to achieve equality under the law to return to governance by “Great Men.” He insists that society is trapped in the “doldrums” and human efforts to solve social problems has been a complete failure, and the cure is a “new model of reality,” a model in which “not only must our modern ideals and values be overthrown, but our blind devotion to scientific rationalism must also be carefully reassessed and amended.”
For Evans, the source of all social problems is rooted in modern society’s efforts to give “equal opportunity to all even though all are not equally suited to succeed at being model citizens of modern industrial society. For those who fail to live up to expectation, alcohol and narcotics are two readily available alternatives, depending on age and circumstances.” Evans’ solution is to hasten “a transition to a new age, one more forthright and less complex than our own, an age based on the essentials of human nature which are known to us from history, rather than an idealized version of a good society, something which has been with us for the last hundred years and has almost succeeded in stifling our natural feelings and emotions.”
Evans’ blindness to less essentialized interpretations of the modern world and the self-assuredness with which he knows he has found solutions to society’s problems feels like reading a treatise on the problems of the modern world written by Confederacy of Dunces’ Ignatius J. Reilly. Yet, his neo-feudal vision expresses aloud the details of a desired anti-egalitarian world to come that increasing elites, and followers, increasingly express alignment with. Prefiguring Trump’s attacks on intellectuals and universities by over three decades, Evans preaches that,
Our much-praised access to education has probably done as much as anything else to make us susceptible to what I can only describe as the enfeeblement of the modern mind. We have been led to believe that the universal availability of education would solve many of the problems of western society and, despite setbacks, people still believe this. They believe it because modern industrial society continues to exist and so to believe anything else would be to turn one’s back on the only lifestyle and value system of which the individual, his family and friends are part. And yet, there is a certain amount of unease that runs through the worship of education; it has been most clearly apparent in the past decade during which the application of expert knowledge and careful reasoning (the hallmarks of our educated society) has utterly failed to come to grips with the most pressing problems of western society.
Evans declares universal education propagates an unhealthily unhappy citizenry, and he explicitly prescribes ignorance as the cure for this “enfeeblement of the modern mind.” Anything promoting equality or critiquing bias must be attacked using claims of bias.
To perfect society, Evans insists the existing political economic system must be replaced with a new feudal aristocratic age. These new aristocrats will do away with the “motto of justice for all, elevating the weak at the expense of the strong,” because mistaken views of human equality are “destroying life, not enriching it.” He promises that in the coming age of aristocratic rule with have clear cut gender rules as those
physical and psychological differences which distinguish men from women will once more come into prominence, the penchant of this age for the rights of women and others will be seen as a misunderstanding of the human condition. These days we speak about happiness as if it were the birthright of every man who lives, when in fact it is the birthright of no man be he rich or poor, brilliant or illiterate. The birthright of man is not happiness, but struggle and conflict with nature and with other men. This truism has receded well into the background but will one day return with a vengeance. The superabundance and lax social structure that characterizes western industrial society is, after all, just a brief interlude; it could never be a permanent way of life.
Not only has the modern world abandoned what Evans imagines are essentialized biological differences between male and female, but promises of equality left those he views as lesser-thans with unrealistic expectations. His Great Men have slunk away into the shadows, while society suffers from them not contributing to their full potential. Three and a half decades early, he’s says Trump’s quite part out loud:
The weak, the underprivileged and the indigent who expect happiness to be handed to them on a plate are living in a world of make-believe which is destined to be shattered. Not surprisingly, the strong-willed, independent-minded spirits no longer venture out in public. The one-sided stress of contemporary society on its fatuous attention to the needs of those least able to help themselves has worked hand in hand with our scientific materialism to denude our age of all those qualities which make for greatness. Instead, the popular ideals of contemporary western society embrace the most despicable and ignoble traits of mankind.
Even when the most qualified and gifted individuals became political leaders, their ability to affect change under our system is severely limited, Evans insists, because they become “subject to the limitations of his age” as he [yes, he] would “find himself re-echoing popular sentiment, or struggling vainly to keep an already hopeless situation from going totally out of control.” This leads to the “degradation of the finest intellects.” This is the inevitable outcome of our political system, because as Evans see it, democracy is “the system by which the unscrupulous are elected to office by the most incompetent.”
Even in the era when Ronald Reagan was attacking the common good and beginning the trajectory leading to the destruction we now live under with Donald Trump, writing thirty-seven years ago Evans declared he lived “in the tail end of an age which has become devoid of feeling. In our inane desire to stamp out all prejudices, all views, which do not conform to the fatuous ideals of late twentieth century liberalism, we are well on the way to draining life of all conflict, all sharp emotion; in fact, we are in the process of destroying the very essence of western civilization.”
Evans sloppily commandeers highly selected bits and pieces of social science literature for his analysis. Though he discusses biological and cultural evolution, he dismisses notions of “progress” as an ethnocentric distortion. He rejects August Comte’s notions of societal evolution ending in the age of positivism, but he admires Herbert Spencer’s approach to cultural evolution, which is unsurprising given Spencer’s nasty social Darwinism, his biological essentialist notions that certain people are inherently better than others, and that the poor must not be supported by society.
He uses Max Weber to critique the overbearing power of bureaucracy. In a passage that might have been written by Elon Musk to justify hacking apart large sections of the federal government, he declares “a bloated bureaucracy is one of the most consistent indications that a society has reached the limits of its development.” His Weberian analysis predicts shifts aways from legal-rational authority as his new aristocratic age “will be dominated by Traditional and Charismatic authority,” noting that such a shift to charismatic authority “indicates a serious loss of confidence in the established institutions.” Because of the “enormous human energy” these Charismatic leaders unleash, they are able to accomplish many of their goals, but as Weber established, these charismatic leaders don’t tend to last very long. Either this leader’s changes are institutionalized, or there is a reversion to former ways. Evans is convinced that once his predicted charismatic leader arrives, there will be no going back, and aristocracy will return humankind to its destiny—a destiny of haves and have nots, following the logic of eugenics.
He namedrops Horkheimer and Adorno supporting observations of shallowness of our modern age, as if they or others from the Frankfurt School might align with his vision of elites ruling without restraints. Not surprisingly, Evans’ failure to address more anthropological bodies of knowledge highlights his crude biological essentialism and social Darwinist models throughout, which seems odd given his background in anthropology. At one point he briefly discusses the Nuer of the Sudan and other societies without firmly recognized permanent hierarchal leaders; but this is only used to illustrate something lacking in what he designates as a lesser-developed society.
Explicitly rejecting Marxist critiques of class exploitation, Evans finds his intellectual inspiration in the works of Cecil Rhodes, whose colonialist conquests represent an ideal Great Man of History. The fervor of Evans’ admiration of Rhodes is striking and raises questions about just how much Evans would enjoy being a slave or a peasant in this brave new world he awaits.
Whereas Plato’s Republic dreamed of a world where the aristocrats ruling the masses had the best interests (or at least their conceptions of best interests) of society as a whole at heart, Evan argues elites should be allowed to do as they please, and the rest of society must follow, and this will be a better world because whatever these elites do will be good by virtue of them doing it. Evans fails to explain how this coming aristocracy would differ from an oligarchy—which at least Plato understood to be among the most corrupt and undesirable forms of governance.
Evans’ endorsement of E. F. Schumacher’s small is beautiful thesis is a surprising twist, and this vision significantly diverges from contemporary would-be techno-aristocrats, who generally have high tech infrastructure, controlled by elites, as a bedrock feature of their fantasies. Evans supports Schumacher anti-growth thesis that many of the planet’s problems come from capitalism’s need for eternal market growth. Evans incorporates portions of Schumacher’s critique, while insisting that the solution to capitalism’s problems is to replace it with feudalism, observing that, “the age in which we live compels us to pollute our environment, develop previously unspoiled open spaces, destroy our mental peace and break up our families.”
Churches in Evans’ coming Aristocratic Age will be dedicated to reinforcing and keeping people in their proper social roles and quelling uprisings. Evans assures readers that revolts will be rare, and that the “ruling class” won’t “have much need to suppress subversive ideas, for there will be very few of these,” as humanity’s consciousness easily adapts to this new, more naturally hierarchical social order. He assures readers that,
With the arrival of man’s complete [adaptation] to his environment, there will be no longer any need to strive for new interpretations of reality which would challenge the status quo. Intellectually, the mind of western man will at last be at rest; abstract theorizing and scientific investigations will no longer be of interest to him. As for those who believe a society lacking deep interest in science and technology would be an inferior civilization, they do well to remember the dictum that an unsubdued thirst for knowledge can lead to barbarism just as can extreme hatred of knowledge. This is especially so in an age such as ours when unlike the ancients who were content with theoretical speculation, we have an unstoppable urge to apply our knowledge, regardless of possible consequences.
Finally, humanity can stop asking all these bothersome questions as the end of history and class conflict arrives. Between the elites’ exclusive legitimate use of violence on the masses and the church’s total support for the new order, the new aristocracy will maintain order, as “the hegemony of the bourgeois world view will be broken by the new conception of reality.”
Evans eagerly awaits a period of social and economic upheaval. During this coming collapse “those who are successful in establishing supremacy within their area of operation” will “automatically distinguish themselves” as fit to become the new leaders. But those who “decry the fact that western society is destined once again to see the return of aristocracy” will fall by the wayside as new leaders seize power. While the majority of society has up until now been “brainwashed into believing that the utilitarian-humanist ideal of contemporary western society is the zenith” of western civilization, they will be shown the folly of their ways.
In Evans’ fantasized coming aristocratic new age a spirit of mutual aid will spread, as “neighbors will work all day in the fields side by side, help repair one another’s homes after damage by bad weather or other causes. Each individual will contribute to the community according to his strength, talent and experience…” A world where everyone knows their proper place, low on the pecking order with no assumptions of things like equal rights or inalienable human rights, brings social cohesion and eliminates strife.
…and so on.
You get the picture. While Evans’ embracement of a low tech small-is-beautiful ethos rather than high tech fiefdoms, his envisioned “utopia” foresaw many of the features that Yarvin and others advocating for techno- or neo-feudal futures incorporate.
Countering Aristocratic Fantasies
Maybe it was ridiculous for me to spend hours reading, digesting, note taking, then summarizing this odd long-lost crackpot book. But I found this worthwhile for several reasons, the most pertinent is that in our current moment of forgetting, there is value in critically considering these nonsensical ideas, portions of which apparently are attractive to contemporaries who have amassed great wealth and power. We should not ignore such insanity at a moment when various parts of our society that once housed intellectual critiques are under attack or struggling (universities, the fifth estate, public airwaves, presses, libraries, independent bookstores, etc.) while most Americans appear to have stopped reading anything longer than 75 words, outsourcing reading and writing to Artificial Intelligence systems designed by those positioned to become our new aristocracy.
While my reasons for writing this are to alert thinking people to the existence of this text and arguments, I wonder if unearthing this forgotten text could be used to empower this text to awaken the demons within it, much like Ash in The Evil Dead reciting, “khandar estrada khandos. . .” unleashed a torrent of deadites. May it not be so. Instead, I think we need to seriously critique this sort of bat-shit crazy philosophy, because our current stage of capitalism is facing enough contradictions that some elements of this deranged philosophy may well be where our elites want to drag us once they’ve demolished the broken world we now inhabit.
If it weren’t for the influence of Yarvin and others promoting notions of a techno-aristocracy to Vance and others in powerful positions, it would be easy to laugh off the lunacy of Evan’s book, but it reveals deep currents of anti-democratic thought in American society. Because Evans, Yarvin, Musk, Trump, and others cannot accept that stratification is created by society, not an expression of some sort of essential quality, they attack scholars studying the social creation of inequality as liars spreading propaganda. Fields like anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, labor studies, and gender studies are now under attack because of their research findings directly challenge elite supremacist views that hierarchy as an expression of natural abilities. These elites will never accept, as anthropologist, Jon Marks once observed, “perhaps the most important discovery of early anthropology was that social inequality was inherited, but not in the same way that natural features were. You pass on your complexion to your children and you pass on your social status to your children, but you do so by very different modes.” This is the sort of understanding that the current attacks on liberal arts programs hope to annihilate.
It does not matter how many peer-reviewed studies anthropologists and other scholars publish establishing that social forces, rather than trivial genetic differences, account for meaningful differences, racists cling to their beliefs of “natural” superiority. We regularly hear this in Trump’s rambling, as he insults women and people of color as having low IQs, or his claims of coming from a strong genetic background. While The Resurrection of Aristocracy has little chance of birthing the world it envisions, its bigoted assumptions align perfectly with the embrace of privileged anti-egalitarianist resonating with Trump World and the technocrats backing Vice President Vance and those charting the future course of the Republican Party. My concern with these present aristocratic dreams is less about these oligarchs achieving independent neo-feudal states anytime soon, my concern is that people harboring such anti-egalitarian fantasies are rapidly gaining unchecked power. I worry that powerful people holding such views can dismantle existing institutions, at least striving to achieve liberty, equality, and community. It should concern all of us who dream of a world where Americans have universal health care, food security, and meaningful work, that our oligarchs dream of a world where they have unchecked power and we are chattel.
Artificial Intelligence appears poised to bring waves of massive unemployment, and we can expect the victims of this techno revolution to be blamed for their fate, while those who own this new means of production declared worthy superiors. Such shifting economic conditions will be fertile ground for the sort of dangerous aristocratic false consciousness that Evans and more contemporary techno-feudalists pitch. As university departments housing the academics who spent careers studying the social basis of inequality are under attack, we need to be vigilant in our confrontations with this sort of elitist nonsense. Though such humane human views may become more difficult to access in a world where distorted tools like Musk’s Grokipedia becomes our social memory and arbiters of “truth.”
As an ideology justifying the elite’s “natural” supremacy, aristocracy fits the logic of capitalism. It maintains a socially-suspended-illusion which functions like a self-fulfilling prophecy as it obscures the roles of nurture, unequal opportunity, and chance in creating “winners.” Much like fascism, the problem with aristocracy worship is that its “logic” aligns with the social facts of capitalism. It embraces the values of a highly competitive political economy with decreasing opportunities for winners, and endless growth opportunities for the dispossessed–those growing numbers of dispossessed whom Evans and his ilk promise purpose and peace of mind as they become the human grease for the wheels of aspiring techno- or not-so-techno- feudal lords.
