With forms being thought of as technology and with the liquidity of produced values, its cycles of evolution accelerate.
— Škufca a18
The only salvation against chaos is form.
— Evola
Formalism is the ideology of formalisation. To make things formal. Not too formal. Just right. Such as contracts that secure your ownership, but are not too binding. Legalism is a type of Formalism, but Formalism is not reduced to legalism. Capitalism is based on features of formalism such as contractual ownership and Private Rights or Properties. Formalism properly should be a smart formalism, so as to be dynamic & personalized enough—i.e. not too restrictive.
Making laws is a type of formalization, and done for reasons of Formalism. It is the desire that Society have certain Form.
The basic idea of formalism is just that the main problem in human affairs is violence. The goal is to design a way for humans to interact, on a planet of remarkably limited size, without violence.
[ Moldbug, April 23rd 2007 ]
Mencius Moldbug’s concept of formalism runs roughly as follows: since politics is violence at a remove and violence is conflict plus uncertainty, both can be eliminated via the elimination of uncertainty. Since democratic politics necessarily creates uncertainty in government, democratic politics should be replaced by a feedback mechanism that doesn’t, i.e. neocameralism: a patchwork of sovereign corporations. [ nydwracu on June 11, 2016 ]
So this is the formalist manifesto: that the US is just a corporation. It is not a mystic trust consigned to us by the generations. It is not the repository of our hopes and fears, the voice of conscience and the avenging sword of justice. It is just an big old company that holds a huge pile of assets, has no clear idea of what it's trying to do with them, and is thrashing around like a ten-gallon shark in a five-gallon bucket, red ink spouting from each of its bazillion gills.
To a formalist, the way to fix the US is to dispense with the ancient mystical horseradish, the corporate prayers and war chants, figure out who owns this monstrosity, and let them decide what in the heck they are going to do with it. I don't think it's too crazy to say that all options - including restructuring and liquidation - should be on the table.
Whether we're talking about the US, Baltimore, or your wallet, a formalist is only happy when ownership and control are one and the same. To reformalize, therefore, we need to figure out who has actual power in the US, and assign shares in such a way as to reproduce this distribution as closely as possible.
[ Moldbug, April 23rd 2007 ]
Media[]
«A Formalist Manifesto», Mencius Moldbug, April 23 2007