The General Will vs. the Great Shrug: Why Dark Enlightenment Isn’t Good Enough

Strange Times

We live in strange times. On one hand, we’re witnessing the steady collapse of democratic trust, the rise of authoritarian flirtations, and the mainstreaming of political nihilism dressed up as new thought. On the other hand, the means to solve our greatest problems—psychologically, socially, philosophically—have never been more within reach.

The danger isn’t that we are failing to ask questions. It’s that we’re asking the wrong ones—or worse, settling for answers that masquerade as inevitabilities. The so-called “iron law of oligarchy” is one of these: the lazy claim that power inevitably concentrates, and resistance is futile. It’s used as a sigh of resignation, a great shrug dressed in systems theory.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

A Shrug in the Place of a Solution

Dark Enlightenment—particularly the version popularized by Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug)—has gained surprising traction, especially among tech elites and those disillusioned by the inertia of modern democracy. In essence, it offers a seductive claim: liberal democracy has failed, egalitarianism is a delusion, and progress means returning to a kind of techno-monarchy where a small ruling class of geniuses call the shots.

Let’s grant some of the premise. The liberal democratic order is flawed. It’s corrupted by wealth, manipulated by media, and driven by short-term self-interest. But to conclude from that failure that oligarchy is preferable—that we should simply choose new masters and abandon the pursuit of shared governance—is not just anti-democratic. It’s anti-intellectual.

The worst part? It’s lazy. It assumes that humanity can’t do better because it hasn’t yet. It makes no serious attempt to understand what human beings actually are, how minds work, or what kind of society might emerge if we designed our systems around psychological truth rather than economic convenience.

And it’s here that I’d like to revisit a forgotten idea: the General Will. Not as it’s been misunderstood in textbooks, but as a profound metaphysical principle of harmonized intelligence—and as the cornerstone of a better future.

The General Will Is Not What You Think

When Rousseau introduced the General Will in The Social Contract, he wasn’t describing a crude form of majority rule. He was describing the emergent will of a population once private interests are stripped away—a kind of collective rationality, born not from coercion but from shared truth.

Most interpretations of the General Will reduce it to a political abstraction. But in light of what we now know about cognition, coherence, and systems theory, it’s better understood as a metaphysical alignment: a harmonized state of mind among autonomous entities. It’s not unanimity. It’s resonance.

And this changes everything.

Because for most of human history, we’ve lacked the tools to realize such resonance. We’ve lacked the epistemology, the psychology, the technology. The General Will was always dismissed as a utopian ideal—beautiful, yes, but ultimately unattainable.

But that’s changed.

As I write about here and in my upcoming book, we now have a functional map of the human psyche—of thoughts as waveforms, of mind as an interference pattern of thoughts, of mental health as coherence, and of trauma as interference. With neurofeedback, ontological mathematics, and digital tools, we can begin to synchronize minds. We can synthesize wills. And that means the General Will is no longer theoretical. It’s practical. It’s even quantifiable.

We’ve moved from metaphor to model.

Coherence Isn’t Just About You

Neurotherapy has been used to treat ADHD, anxiety, depression, and trauma. But its deeper potential isn’t limited to healing individuals. It offers a scalable, structured approach to improving collective thought—aligning internal wavefunctions so they function together rather than fragment.

Why does this matter?

Because civilization itself may rise or fall based on coherence. Historically, societies collapse not because they’re invaded, but because they lose their internal integration. Corruption, polarization, inequality—all these are symptoms of phase breakdown. Social decoherence. And if there’s a better explanation for why empires fall, I haven’t heard it.

Dark Enlightenment accepts this collapse as inevitable—and then proposes that we simply lock things down harder next time, with “smarter” rulers and more obedient masses. But true coherence cannot be imposed. It must be cultivated. And that takes insight into how people actually function.

When coherence is coerced—when minds are forced to align without freely choosing to—it isn’t coherence at all. It’s suppression. What looks like order on the surface is often repression underneath. And repression doesn’t create harmony; it creates shadow. It pushes dissonant thoughts and unmet needs underground, where they gain pressure, complexity, and volatility. Eventually, the system collapses—not because it wasn’t ordered, but because the order was artificial. Imposed harmony backfires. Real coherence can’t be commanded. It has to be chosen, from within.

If we want a society that lasts, we need to understand how thoughts organize—and disorganize. We need tools to harmonize the minds of a people—not just medicate or manipulate them. Neurotherapy is one of those tools. So is education that teaches people how to think, not what to think. So is a metaphysics that makes sense.

Anything less is pretending.

Neurotherapy and the General Will

It’s one thing to talk about coherence in abstract terms. It’s another to ask: how do we actually get there?

This is where neurotherapy becomes more than just a promising clinical tool—it becomes a cornerstone of social evolution.

As I will explore in the book, neurotherapy (particularly EEG-based methods like neurofeedback and QEEG-guided brain training) offers a practical, structured way to reduce internal noise. It helps individual minds self-organize by reflecting back their own patterns—revealing dysfunctions not as moral failings but as signal interference. The brain, like the soul, is a harmonic system. It wants to self-correct. What it needs is clarity.

And when we use technology to give the mind real-time feedback about itself, we’re not just treating symptoms like anxiety or inattention—we’re refining the medium through which all thought flows.

But the real power of neurotherapy isn’t just individual. It’s collective.

When enough individuals begin to stabilize their mental systems—reducing internal contradiction, increasing pattern recognition, cultivating focused awareness—we lay the foundation for social coherence. This isn’t a metaphor. It’s physics. Coherent minds are more likely to resonate with one another. They are less reactive, more rational, and more capable of participating in a harmonized collective will. They don’t need to be manipulated or coerced into alignment—they naturally seek it.

This is the beginning of a scalable framework for actualizing the General Will. Not through ideology, but through waveform precision. Not through authoritarian control, but through cognitive liberation. The same tools that help an individual reclaim sovereignty over their psyche can help a society remember how to think together.

In this sense, neurotherapy is not just a form of healing. It’s a form of training for citizenship in a rational society.

The Inevitable Blueprint

Ontological mathematics shows us what the mind, or soul, is made of: it’s not magic, it’s a structured wavefunction—an autonomous point of reason in a sea of interference. Each mind strives for power—but not in the Nietzschean, zero-sum way. It strives for coherence: to bring its internal thoughts into resonance, and ultimately to align with others in collective mind.

This is the mathematical purpose of life: to evolve toward greater coherence.

Every system that resists that aim—whether a decaying democracy or a high-tech monarchy—is fighting an inevitability. It can delay progress, but it can’t stop it. Like entropy, incoherence is a ticking clock. Systems that don’t align with the logic of mental evolution eventually collapse under their own contradictions.

And that’s exactly what’s missing from “dark enlightenment.” It proposes no coherent epistemology, no rigorous understanding of the mind, and no metaphysical grounding. It’s pure pragmatism—expedient and cynical. You might as well be designing a video game where you get to be king.

What it lacks is philosophy.

In contrast, meritocratic rationalism begins with first principles. Not who should rule, but what kind of minds we need to become—and what kind of society fosters that becoming. It’s not about elevating an elite few, but about recognizing that leadership should serve a larger process: guiding us toward coherence, contribution, and shared ascent. The most capable are not those who dominate, but those who understand where we’re going—and help others get there, too.

This is what we mean by a social meritocracy.

The Most Suppressed Idea

Perhaps the most revolutionary—and threatening—idea of all is that a rational, harmonized society is not only possible, but inevitable. That history isn’t doomed to repeat cycles of rise and collapse. That coherence can be maintained if we understand its nature.

So of course this idea has been suppressed.

The thinkers who first envisioned this trajectory—those largely anonymous architects of revolutions past—have often been dismissed as mystics, radicals, or heretics. Not because their ideas lacked rigor, but because they posed an existential threat to entrenched power.

Time and again, they surfaced in moments of collective awakening—quietly influencing movements like the Enlightenment and the French Revolution—only to be vilified or erased.

Why? Because if the public understood that power could be earned, not inherited, that truth could be known, that it wasn’t for sale, and that unity was a matter of mathematics, not myth, the game of domination would be over.

In truth, the historical Illuminati’s vision of the future isn’t utopian. It’s just unfinished. It’s waiting for people with the courage—and clarity—to pick it up.

And that’s what we’re doing here.

Don’t Give Up Just Because It’s Hard

It’s easy to see why some people have given up. The world is complex, messy, and seems resistant to improvement. The dream of egalitarianism feels naive. But the answer isn’t to replace democracy with a more polished oligarchy. That’s just gilded defeat.

As Oswald Spengler noted, all civilizations fall. But what if the real reason they fall is incoherence—an inability to maintain a stable resonance among their constituents? What if the problem isn’t people, but the lack of structure?

What if the General Will isn’t a fantasy, but a signal we’ve never properly tuned?

And what if, paradoxically, the most promising new movement for human potential was sparked not by a politician or philosopher, but by a Silicon Valley blogger? If Curtis Yarvin’s musings—grounded in little more than historical cynicism and tech-world elitism—can influence so many, and even attract serious financial backing, then maybe the bar for launching a transformative paradigm isn’t as high as we think.

Maybe a better idea—one rooted in reason rather than resignation—does have a shot.

I should be clear: this is hard. A meritocratic, rational society won’t emerge overnight. But it’s possible. And more than that, it’s necessary. The alternative—shrugging, surrendering, and calling it wisdom—isn’t just lazy.

It’s irrational.

And incoherent.

And coherence, in the end, is the one thing the universe won’t let us live without.