The Coming Clash of Civilizations

From the Wilderness of a Recovering Technocrat

Photo by Madhur Chadha on Unsplash

The clash of civilizations is not between cultures but between hierarchies and citizens.

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I was a technocratic liberal centrist until very recently. I believed in markets, optimization, expertise solving problems through analysis. I looked at GDP growth and stock market performance and thought: the system is working. I succeeded in Silicon Valley and internalized the frameworks that made that success possible: innovation disrupts, markets allocate better than politics, the intelligent few should lead while building systems that lift all boats.

Then I started noticing something I couldn’t ignore. Smart people I respected—especially in cryptocurrency—were casually discussing feudalism. Not as history or provocation, but as serious proposals for organizing society. “Democracy and freedom are incompatible.” “Most people aren’t capable of self-governance.” “Elite overproduction is the problem—we educated too many people above their station.”

These weren’t fringe cranks. Peter Thiel writing that democracy and freedom are incompatible. Curtis Yarvin publishing blueprints for corporate monarchy. An entire neo-reactionary apparatus in Silicon Valley while I optimized payment systems. And they were explicit: the democratic experiment failed, constitutional constraints prevent necessary action, most people should accept subordinate roles, the intelligent few should rule.

This sent me into the wilderness. Not physically, though my career suffered. But intellectually—into space where comfortable certainties no longer made sense. Funny thing about speaking truth to power: the recruiters stop calling. I gave up friends, opportunities, insider status. Not because I wanted marginalization, but because intellectual honesty required it.

From this wilderness, I can see what I couldn’t before: we are heading toward a clash of civilizations. Not Huntington’s clash between cultures, but something more fundamental. A clash between incompatible visions of how humans should organize themselves—whether ordinary people possess the capacity to govern their own lives.

And the die is already cast.

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Much of my writing over the past year has analyzed how technocracy evacuated democracy—how expertise that should inform citizen choice replaced it instead, how complex questions became technical problems requiring expert management, how metrics measuring activity replaced accounting for whether that activity serves human flourishing.

But yesterday, watching a comedian speak for Gen Z about entry-level employment’s complete collapse, something snapped into focus that abstract analysis couldn’t capture. The visceral reality of a system producing educated people for jobs that don’t exist. Companies requiring years of experience for “entry-level” positions—obvious logical impossibility. AI screening somehow both “objective” and demonstrably racist. A generation doing everything right, discovering every promise was a lie.

The precarity isn’t theoretical. It’s young people with degrees and debt and no path forward, called lazy for not succeeding in a system designed to make success impossible. Systematic elimination of mechanisms—training programs, apprenticeships, genuine entry-level work—that used to allow dignified entry into economic life. Corporations claiming labor shortages while refusing to hire or train anyone.

And here’s what crystallized: Peter Thiel would agree with every word of that diagnosis.

The populist left and neo-reactionary right see identical reality. The system is broken. The promise of democratic opportunity through education and hard work revealed as lie. We’re producing educated people for jobs that don’t exist. Credentials lead to debt, not security. The metrics economists celebrate—GDP growth, stock market performance, low unemployment—completely miss what people experience: precarity, desperation, systematic elimination of paths to dignified adult life.

Both sides recognize the current arrangement is unsustainable. Both reject the technocratic center’s insistence that aggregate data shows everything is fine. Both understand something fundamental has broken.

But they reach exactly opposite conclusions about what comes next.

The populist left says: the promise was right, but we need to keep it. Reorganize economic life so productivity serves flourishing rather than extraction. Democratic control over structures shaping our lives. Expand the table, provide security and dignity for everyone, rebuild the social contract destroyed over forty years.

The neo-reactionary right says: the promise itself was the mistake. We created “elite overproduction“ by educating people above their natural station. Most humans aren’t capable of self-governance—democracy was always doomed. Stop pretending otherwise. Restore explicit hierarchy, let the intelligent few rule, have everyone else accept subordinate roles. Stop educating people who should be plumbers. Embrace natural order. Return to feudalism with better technology.

This isn’t reading between lines. When Thiel writes democracy and freedom are incompatible, he means it. When Yarvin publishes frameworks for replacing constitutional democracy with monarchical structures, he’s serious. When J.D. Vance—now Vice President—talked about going “extra-constitutional” and cited Andrew Jackson’s defiance of judicial review as model, he articulated explicit rejection of constitutional constraints.

These aren’t policy disagreements. These are incompatible visions of what kind of civilization we should be. Citizens or subjects. Democracy or feudalism. Self-governance or hierarchy. The belief that ordinary people can determine their collective fate, or conviction that such belief is dangerous delusion.

We’re heading toward clash between these visions whether we want it or not.

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I need to be clear: most corporate leaders aren’t conscious feudalists plotting hierarchy’s restoration. They’re making decisions that seem rational within internalized frameworks—frameworks producing feudal outcomes while feeling like sophisticated business practice.

When CEOs eliminate training programs, they’re thinking quarterly earnings and shareholder value, not deliberately blocking young people from workforce entry. When companies require bachelor’s degrees for jobs that never needed them, they’re not consciously implementing credential inflation—they’re using an obvious quality filter. When they flatten structures and eliminate middle management, they’re pursuing “efficiency,” not deliberately creating impossible career conditions.

Each decision seems defensible within frameworks saying: maximize shareholder value, minimize costs, optimize everything, trust markets to sort people naturally. The framework itself produces systematic cruelty while people applying it believe they’re being responsible stewards.

But some—intellectuals and billionaires building philosophical and financial architecture—know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve built frameworks others now apply without recognizing destinations. And when you listen to what they say, they’re explicit about ending democratic governance and restoring hierarchy.

This matters because we’re not fighting conscious villainy in every boardroom. We’re fighting normalized frameworks that most people operating within them don’t recognize as producing these outcomes. The CEO cutting training programs probably thinks: “I’m running my business responsibly,” not “I’m helping build neo-feudalism.”

Which makes this both more comprehensible and more dangerous. You can’t defeat this by replacing bad actors with good ones. You have to challenge the frameworks themselves—assumptions about what “good business” means, what economic activity is for, whose interests economic structures should serve.

And the sophisticated architects—Thiels and Yarvins building intellectual justifications for hierarchy and explicit arguments against democratic governance—provide cover for everyone else. They give appearance of serious intellectual backing to ideas that would otherwise be recognized as monstrous. They make it possible for decent people to participate in building feudalism while thinking they’re following best practices.

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Here’s what makes this truly revolutionary: everyone except the technocratic center now recognizes the current system is finished.

The populist left sees it. The neo-reactionary right sees it. And interestingly, libertarians, Bitcoin anarchists, and network state enthusiasts see it too—but they’ve arrived at feudalism through a different path. Their fundamental failure isn’t celebrating markets or individual liberty—it’s their childlike theory of power. They imagine that removing state authority naturally leads to human freedom, as if power itself would simply evaporate rather than immediately reconcentrate in private hands. They think you can eliminate politics by eliminating government, not recognizing that power concentrations simply reconstitute themselves in different forms. Their “voluntary” network states would quickly become company towns with better branding. Their cryptocurrency utopias would consolidate into oligarchies where early adopters rule. They’re not building alternatives to hierarchy—they’re building hierarchy without democratic constraints, which is just feudalism with blockchain. As Madison understood—and naive libertarians forget—power doesn’t disappear when you dismantle institutions designed to disperse it. It concentrates. We’re watching this happen in real time: Musk controls critical infrastructure through Starlink while the U.S. government reportedly raised the possibility of cutting access as leverage during negotiations over Ukrainian mineral resources. This is exactly the fusion of private and public power that Madison designed the Constitution to prevent.

Only establishment figures insist GDP is up, unemployment low, everything basically fine if people would just look at the data.

I was one of those people. I looked at aggregate metrics and thought they captured what mattered. I believed if numbers showed growth and stability, the system was working—anyone disagreeing needed better economic literacy.

I was catastrophically wrong. Not because numbers were false, but because they measured the wrong things entirely.

GDP can rise while human flourishing collapses. It measures economic activity, not whether activity serves people’s lives. Healthcare costs exploding means more GDP. People going into debt to survive means more GDP. Asset bubbles pricing people out of housing mean more GDP. The metric treats extraction and flourishing identically because it only tracks transactions, not human meaning.

Stock market performance tells you asset owners are getting wealthier. When the top ten percent account for approximately half of consumer spending—according to Moody’s Analytics analysis—the stock market rising means extraction is working as designed. Corporations successfully turning human life into shareholder profit. That’s what makes stock prices rise.

Unemployment rate only measures people actively seeking work who can’t find it. Someone with a PhD working three part-time adjunct positions with no benefits for poverty wages is “employed.” Someone driving for Uber and DoorDash while living in their car is “employed.” Someone who gave up looking because the job market is impossible isn’t counted at all. The metric was designed for a different economy and now obscures more than it reveals.

These metrics can all look “good” while people experience catastrophic precarity, impossible futures, systematic betrayal of every promise about how life would work if they did everything right. When people say “I’m struggling” and experts respond “actually the data shows recovery is strong”—that’s not bad communication. That’s the technocratic framework revealing itself as fundamentally broken.

This is why people feel the economy is bad when economists insist it’s good. “The economy” has detached from whether people can live decent lives. The metrics we track measure what serves capital accumulation, not what serves human beings. Defending those metrics while people’s lives fall apart validates the neo-reactionary critique that democratic institutions serve expert elites, not ordinary people.

They’re right about that. The technocrats really are dismissive. The metrics really do miss what matters. Democratic institutions really have been captured by people optimizing for the wrong things. The feudalists are correct in their diagnosis of institutional failure—which makes their monstrous prescription so dangerous.

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I keep thinking about how we got here. Not abstractly tracing forty years of policy, but practically: how did smart, well-meaning people build conditions that make feudalism seem like coherent alternative?

We replaced democracy with technocracy. Not in one dramatic moment, but through accumulated decisions that each seemed reasonable: complex problems require expert solutions, ordinary people lack knowledge for informed choices, we should let smart people optimize systems rather than subjecting everything to democratic inefficiency.

This sounds reasonable until you realize every important question about human life got redefined as technical question requiring expert management. How should we organize economic activity? Technical question—trust economists. How to structure healthcare? Technical question—trust policy experts. How to respond to climate change? Technical question—trust scientists and engineers.

But these aren’t purely technical questions. They’re value questions disguised as technical ones. “How do we organize economic activity?” really asks: what is economic activity for? Who should it serve? What obligations do we have to each other? What society do we want? Technical expertise can tell you what different choices achieve, but cannot tell you which achievement to pursue. That’s value judgment belonging to democratic deliberation.

I’m not anti-expertise; I’m anti-expert rule. Expertise should inform democratic choice, not replace it. We need experts to explain implications and trade-offs, to provide analysis of what different paths would achieve. What we cannot allow is experts making value judgments under the guise of technical optimization.

When you let experts make those value judgments as technical optimization, you’ve evacuated democratic content from democratic governance. People feel it—decisions affecting their lives made by people with credentials they don’t have, using criteria they didn’t choose, optimizing for outcomes they never voted for.

This creates the vacuum authoritarian populists fill. They promise to restore agency to people who’ve experienced its systematic removal. The promise works not because people are stupid, but because it addresses something real: you have been systematically excluded from decisions about your life. The system really is managed by people who dismiss your experience as insufficient understanding of their sophisticated analysis.

Neo-reactionaries exploit this brilliantly. They say: democracy doesn’t work because most people aren’t capable of self-governance. We need hierarchy instead—rule by the intelligent few who understand complex systems. And they point to technocratic elite as proof: look at these experts running everything, dismissing ordinary concerns, insisting their metrics show success while your life falls apart. We’re just being honest about what already exists.

This is why the technocratic center is completely clueless about the civilizational clash unfolding. Their framework literally cannot process regime change. They can optimize within systems but can’t recognize when systems themselves are under attack. When someone says “constitutional democracy is the problem,” the technocratic frame translates to “wants different regulatory approach.” When someone publishes blueprints for monarchy, they read “provocative intellectual exercise.” When someone invokes “extra-constitutional,” they hear “Trumpist rhetoric that will moderate.”

They cannot process that one side has explicitly rejected the entire framework of democratic governance. So they keep trying to find sensible compromises between actually incompatible positions. Keep insisting both sides went too far and we need balanced centrism. Keep believing norms and precedent will constrain people explicitly rejecting norms as constraints.

One side plays to win within rules. The other plays to eliminate rules. The establishment believes rules are strong enough to constrain both. Guess who wins that game?

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So what is the work that needs doing? What does the liberal project require in this moment?

By “liberal” I mean something specific: the belief that ordinary people can govern themselves through reason, deliberation, and democratic institutions. Not “liberal” as progressive cultural positions or technocratic management. But liberal in classical sense—we have no kings, we are citizens not subjects, self-governance is possible, democracy can work if we build institutions and create conditions making it possible.

This liberal project faces three urgent tasks.

First: contain neo-feudalist energies before they consolidate power. Not through persuasion—you cannot persuade people who’ve consciously rejected the framework making persuasion possible. But through institutional resistance making their project operationally difficult. Legal challenges forcing them to work within constraints they’re trying to eliminate. Building coalitions across traditional left-right lines around a simple question: do you think ordinary people can govern themselves? Making the actual choice visible: we’re fighting about whether to have citizens or subjects.

This requires recognizing that someone saying “constitutional constraints prevent necessary action” is not proposing policy reforms within the constitutional framework. They’re proposing to eliminate the framework. That’s not a negotiable position—it’s the position that must be excluded from democratic deliberation because it says democratic deliberation itself should end.

Second: actually address the socioeconomic mobility crisis. Not through technocratic metrics missing what matters, but through genuine democratic response to genuine suffering. The promise was that education and hard work lead to security and opportunity. We need to either keep that promise or acknowledge honestly we’re abandoning it. If we’re abandoning it, we’re conceding the field to people whose answer is: most of you should accept subordinate positions because the promise itself was the mistake.

This means reorganizing how we create and distribute economic value. Democratic control over economic structures shaping our lives. Public goods providing security—housing, healthcare, education without debt-induced servitude. Worker power over production rather than capital having unlimited power over labor. Measuring success by whether people can live decent lives, not whether GDP and stock prices are rising.

And crucially, being honest about what metrics miss. When people say the economy is bad and you respond “actually the data shows it’s good,” you’re validating neo-reactionary critique. You’re proving democratic institutions really are captured by elites dismissing ordinary experience. Stop doing that. Acknowledge metrics measure the wrong things. That economic structures serve extraction rather than flourishing. That the system really is broken in ways people say—and that democracy can fix it better than hierarchy.

Third: rebuild democratic institutions that technocracy hollowed out. Return value questions to democratic deliberation rather than treating them as technical problems requiring expert optimization. Make expertise serve citizen agency rather than replace it—experts should inform our choices, not make choices for us. Create genuine democratic participation in economic and civic life—not just voting every few years, but actual power over decisions shaping daily existence.

This is harder than it sounds because it requires distinguishing framework questions from policy questions. How should we make decisions together? That’s a framework question, and everyone committed to democracy should agree: through democratic processes giving everyone standing to participate. What should we decide? That’s policy question where disagreement is not just acceptable but necessary for democracy to function.

When you let policy disagreements become framework disagreements—when one side says “we reject the framework for making decisions together”—you’ve let authoritarianism into the room. The framework must be defended even while we disagree fiercely about policy within it.

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I keep coming back to something troubling me deeply: how did people I worked with in Silicon Valley—smart, creative, often genuinely idealistic—end up building and funding explicitly anti-democratic projects?

Part is genuine belief in meritocracy, and when you really believe in meritocracy, the logical conclusion is some people deserve to rule and others to follow. If success is purely about merit, then the successful are superior—not just at specific tasks, but fundamentally. And if fundamentally superior, why shouldn’t they rule? Why should superior intelligence and work ethic be constrained by opinions of people who haven’t demonstrated equivalent capability?

This seems reasonable if you believe the premise. But the premise is false. Success in our system is determined by many factors beyond individual merit: initial wealth and connections, access to education, timing and luck, operating within networks that open doors, being positioned correctly in value-extraction systems. When you attribute all success to pure merit, you’ve committed a category error making feudalism seem logical.

Part is enormous wealth, and when you have enormous wealth, you can either accept obligations to the society enabling your success, or convince yourself you earned everything through individual genius and owe nothing. The latter is psychologically easier—lets you keep everything while feeling good. Once you’ve convinced yourself you owe nothing, the idea that you should be constrained by people who’ve earned less seems obviously wrong.

And part is simple intellectual capture. When surrounded by people discussing neo-reactionary ideas, when those ideas come with sophisticated philosophical backing, when people advocating them are wealthy and successful and confident—it becomes easy to think there must be something to it. Especially if you’ve already made the first two moves: believing in pure meritocracy and convincing yourself you owe nothing.

But the outcome is that Silicon Valley, which once styled itself as building the future, now funds the return of feudalism. Not accidentally or through incompetence, but deliberately and with philosophical justification. The people with the most resources to shape the future are explicitly working to eliminate democratic governance and restore hierarchy.

This is why I couldn’t stay silent. Why I’m in the wilderness now. Because once you see what’s being built, you have to choose: maintain the comfortable position that comes with not making waves, or maintain intellectual honesty about what you’re witnessing. For me, there was no choice. The frameworks I’d believed in were being weaponized for something monstrous, and pretending otherwise would have required self-deception I couldn’t sustain.

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The establishment still doesn’t understand what’s happening. They think this is normal policy debate where both sides have legitimate concerns and we need balanced compromise. They think if they just run the right candidate with the right message and coalition, they can win an election and everything will return to normal democratic competition.

But this isn’t normal democratic competition. This is one side attempting regime change while the other pretends it’s just another election cycle.

When the Vice President talks about going “extra-constitutional,” that’s not campaign rhetoric. That’s explicit statement that constitutional constraints should be swept aside. When major intellectuals publish detailed frameworks for replacing democracy with monarchy, that’s not provocation. That’s blueprint. When billionaires fund politicians openly advocating for ending democratic constraints on executive power, that’s not just aggressive conservatism. That’s explicit rejection of constitutional governance.

The establishment cannot process this because their entire framework assumes everyone is operating in good faith within democratic norms. They can handle policy disagreements. They can handle partisan conflict. They cannot handle one side rejecting the premise making policy disagreements negotiable: the shared commitment to democratic governance itself.

So they keep trying to find middle ground between democracy and feudalism. Keep treating civilizational choice as policy position requiring compromise. Keep believing norms will constrain people explicitly rejecting norms. And in doing so, they’re normalizing what should be excluded, accommodating what should be resisted, enabling what should be stopped.

This is why the establishment’s response to neo-reactionary ideas is so dangerous. When they treat “maybe democracy and freedom are incompatible” as just another perspective to debate in good faith, they’re legitimizing the question itself. When they respond to explicit calls for monarchy with “let’s find common ground,” they’re treating regime change as negotiable preference. When they insist both sides went too far and we need sensible centrism, they’re positioning themselves equidistant from democracy and feudalism—as if those are equivalent extremes requiring balance.

They’re not. One is the framework allowing us to negotiate differences. The other is explicit rejection of that framework. You cannot compromise between them any more than you can split the difference between oxygen and vacuum. You can only choose which you’re defending—and not choosing is choosing feudalism by default, because feudalism is what emerges when democratic institutions fail.

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So here we are. The coming clash of civilizations—not between cultures or religions, but between visions of how humans should organize ourselves. Citizens or subjects. Democracy or hierarchy. Self-governance or rule by those claiming superior qualification.

Both sides see the same broken system. Both recognize the current arrangement is finished. Both reject the establishment’s insistence that everything is basically fine. The question is what replaces the failed system—and the answers being offered are fundamentally incompatible.

The neo-reactionaries have systematic answer: embrace hierarchy, end democratic pretense, let the intelligent few rule while most people accept subordinate positions. Stop educating people above their station. Return to natural order. This is monstrous, but it’s coherent—it explains why the current system failed and presents clear vision of what should replace it.

The democratic alternative is still being built. Yes, we need public goods providing security. Yes, we need worker power over production. Yes, we need economic structures serving human flourishing rather than extraction. Yes, we need actual democratic control over decisions shaping our lives. But these haven’t yet been integrated into systematic framework explaining how they fit together, how to get there, how to sustain them once achieved.

This is the work that matters now. Building intellectual infrastructure for democratic alternative to match the clarity feudalists offer. That means new labor power, public options for housing and healthcare and education, and institutions where citizens—not investors—set the ends. Showing why expanding opportunity beats restricting it, why citizens beats subjects, why democracy solves the crisis better than hierarchy. Not just opposing what they’re building, but articulating what we’re building instead.

The die is cast. The clash is coming. The current system everyone except the establishment recognizes as broken will be replaced with something. The question is whether that something expands human flourishing or restricts it to serve the few claiming natural superiority.

I’m in the wilderness now, but from this position I can see what I couldn’t see from inside the frameworks I used to inhabit. What I see is that the battle line is drawn. The fight is for self-governance itself. And the feudalists are ahead—not because their vision is better, but because they’ve built the infrastructure to articulate it systematically while the democratic alternative remains fragmented, uncertain, still emerging.

But it can be built. It must be built. Because the alternative is accepting that the democratic experiment failed, that ordinary people cannot govern themselves, that we should return to rule by those claiming to deserve power.

I don’t accept that. I won’t accept that.

The promise that ordinary people can collectively determine their own fate—that’s worth defending. That’s worth building for. That’s worth the wilderness I’m in now. And I know what it cost me to see this clearly. I know what it feels like to recognize that systems you helped build, frameworks you believed in, are being weaponized into something monstrous. I know what it means to give up professional success, comfortable certainties, the approval of people whose intelligence you respect—all because you can’t unsee what’s in front of you.

But I also know what it feels like to rediscover citizenship after years of thinking like a technocrat. To remember that democracy isn’t just a system for aggregating preferences or optimizing outcomes—it’s the radical proposition that ordinary people possess dignity sufficient to govern their own lives. That expertise should serve us, not rule us. That we are not resources to be optimized but citizens with standing to determine our collective fate.

That love of democracy—not as abstract principle but as lived commitment to self-governance—that’s what I found in the wilderness. And it’s what makes the choice ahead so clear.

From this wilderness, I’m telling you: choose which civilization you’re fighting for. The choice is binary. Citizens or subjects. Democracy or feudalism. Self-governance or hierarchy. There is no middle ground between them.

The establishment will insist you’re being too dramatic, that norms will hold, that this is just another policy debate requiring balanced compromise. They’re wrong. They’re catastrophically, dangerously wrong. They cannot see what’s coming because their frameworks exclude it from possibility.

But you can see it. Anyone paying attention can see it. The neo-reactionaries are explicit about what they want. The populist left is explicit about recognizing the same broken reality. The question is which response wins—expansion or restriction, citizens or subjects, democracy or feudalism.

I’ve made my choice. I gave up the comfortable position inside frameworks that serve extraction. I’m in the wilderness now, and from here the path is clear: we build the democratic alternative or we surrender to feudalism.

The wire still holds. But only if we walk it consciously, refusing both the establishment’s delusion that everything is fine and the feudalists’ promise that hierarchy is natural and inevitable.

We are not subjects. We will not be subjects. We have no kings—not now, not ever.

The coming clash of civilizations will determine which future becomes real. And I know which side I’m on.

What will you choose?

Citizens or subjects. Choose, then build.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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