Moldbug General

Who here /moldbug/?

Let's have a thread to discuss the ideas of Mencius Moldbug.

Essential reading:

>A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations
unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html

>Why I am not a libertarian
unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/12/why-i-am-not-libertarian.html

Other urls found in this thread:

twitter.com/CitadelMark
youtube.com/watch?v=QtFPdBUl7XQ
socialmatter.net/the-compendium/
scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3167
reactionaryfuture.wordpress.com/2016/01/18/what-the-hell-happened-to-neoreaction/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Order_No._11_(1862)
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

bamp

I like Moldbug and NRx stuff but at this point Sup Forums is likely too stupid and short attention span on the whole to have a good or interesting discussion on the topic.

Posting some condensed Moldbug:

Progressivism

Progressivism (also called Universalism) is responsible for the vast majority of the world's problems today. It is a non-theistic religion descended in a direct line from the various Dissenter sects of England. Although the belief in God was dropped during the religion's evolution in order to improve its ability to spread, the core of progressive beliefs are very similar to the Quaker beliefs of a few centuries ago. In short, progressives are dangerous and creepy religious maniacs who don't need to believe in God but that makes them no less dangerous, creepy or maniacal.

The conflict between progressivism and conservatism

Progressivism always wins in the long run. Conservatism can at most slow down the implementation of selected progressive ideas. This is because progressives dominate the universities, media and non-governmental organizations which allows them to mold public opinion. Progressives dominate those institutions because progressivism is a far more attractive ideology for people who are intelligent, ambitious and status-seeking. In the US conservatives are largely members of Protestant sects of American origin (mostly Evangelical sects) whereas progressives are the spiritual descendants of the English dissenters, so this conflict is essentially a religious one.

The US government

The Presidency and Congress are mainly ceremonial. The US is governed mainly by the permanent civil service bureaucracy although the real decisions are made at elite universities and then spread by the media and by non-governmental organizations. The universities, media and NGOs are all essential elements of the de facto government, which is referred to as the Polygon or the Cathedral. There is no conspiracy involved - the system is self-organized and self-perpetuating with no need for central leadership.

The military

Militaries are the only institutions with any importance or power which is not dominated by progressives. Because of this progressives burden the military with rules of engagement which make victory impossible and then use left-wing insurgencies or adventures in foreign countries to defeat the military in proxy wars.

Political parties

In a democracy with two major political parties, the more progressive party is referred to as the Inner Party and the more conservative party is the Outer Party. Supporting the Outer Party in any way is not an effective strategy against progressivism.

International relations

The US essentially runs the world since the aftermath of World War II. Many military conflicts around the world are usually best understood proxy wars in the struggle between progressivism and conservatism. What progressives refer to as independence means total dependence on the US. The current system should be replaced by a return to classical international law with all non-nuclear countries becoming client states of nuclear countries.

Insurgency

There has never been a successful right-wing insurgency in the XX century with the possible exception of Franco. Left-wing insurgencies can succeed as progressive auxillaries in the progressive-conservative in another (more powerful) country.

Activism

Progressive political activism is directed against the elected government and supports the unelected civil service bureaucracy. Anti-American political activism consists of pressuring the US to live up to its own progressive ideals, and therefore is more accurately called ultra-Americanism. Both are effective methods of influencing US government policy in the progressive direction.

Castes

In an earlier version, the population of the US was divided into five castes: Brahmin, Optimate, Vaisya, Helot and Dalit. In the new, simplified version we have Eloi, Morlocks and Proles. A caste is a large social group with its own internal rules for ranking social status. The Eloi or Brahmin are the well-educated progressive elites. The Proles or Vaisyas are regular people who work for a living. The Morlocks or Dalits are the underclass supported by crime and/or welfare. The Optimates are the remnants of the old WASP elites and Southern aristocracy, but they no longer are of any importance - in the simplified version they have either joined the Eloi or become Proles. The Helots are unskilled laborers, largely of Mexican origin - they've been split up between the Proles and the Morlocks in the simplified version.

Crime

The criminal underclass is a military auxillary of the progressives. The criminals see themselves as taking what's rightfully theirs and waging war against an unjust society. Progressives enable and support this war by supporting ineffective crime policy.

Removing a democracy

The removal of a democratic government is called a restoration. It cannot be accomplished by forming a political party and winning elections. It can be achieved either by military coup or by making democracy sufficiently unpopular. The latter can be done by convincing sufficiently large numbers of the public that progressivism is a harmful and untruthful ideology.

Replacing a democracy

Democracy should be replaced by a temporary government headed by a Receiver with plenary powers which acts similar to what is done in a corporate bankruptcy - sells off assets and restructures. The future shape of government is left up to the temporary government but in order to prevent progressivism from taking over the new government, all parts of the Cathedral should be dissolved.

I'm sure there's a handful of oldfags who appreciate Moldbug still lurking around before this place was swarmed by leddit .

Bump

Nrx is half decent once you add in that missing element that Yarvin denied was a thing.

Nrxers are allies of natsoc and the silly bickering needs to stop. No enemies to the right after all.

How's Urbit doing?

Newfags, please, PLEASE read this guy. Go to literally any post from any year on Unqualified Reservations and just start.

Keep in mind that Moldbug has some jewish heritage, and it shows. But if you can get past the occasional jewish bullshit and take these ideas as a thought-provoking starting ground rather than as the final word, you'll find some of the most rich, insightful, and delicious right-wing thought written in 60 years from a brutally intelligent mind.

bump

And into the archive the thread goes

Urbit is going through a controversial path atm because they decided to move their land registry data out of an internal Tlon database and up into the Ethereum blockchain to couple it with solidity contracts which release your planetary private keys automatically. They did this to get around a chicken and egg problem of Urbit where the private keys prove ownership of your urbit, but they have to be distributed to you in the clear in order to instantiate your new planet, which obviously could be intercepted before it starts, so they created one abstraction layer and put all the private keys in the blockchain to avoid this, but everybody is sperging out because they don't trust Ethereum for obvious reasons and it has led to the first Urbit fork known as Solri which is now banned from being mentioned on urbit.org

Also I like Hestia but they are total spergs and I don't want to be part of their organisation, it seems like it's all risk and pomp rather than anything real

Is social matters Hestia? All I know is they publish a shitload of high quality writing

social matter "is a project of the Hestia Society"

basically all the nrxers who matter, there's probably a dozen of them all know each other and co-ordinate

On the topic of NRx, anyone know what happened to Mark Citadel? His channel has no videos and his blog is locked down. I heard he was writing a book on NRx too but I don't know when that's due.

he's still here twitter.com/CitadelMark

i don't know where adam wallace went though

Adam just packed in the podcast and the blogs. I'm not sure of the specific reason but I have a feeling we'll see him resurface in one form or another in the future.

He's the most important guy on the right. His influence on important figures is greater than anyone realizes. Urbit could change the world

Moldbug's influences are so wildly better than him that I only really like him for his occasional humor and of course for promoting them.

I especially liked Albert Nock, who I had never heard of, and HS Maine. Pobyedonostsev, Froude, de Maistre, Filmer, the old Royalist whose name i forget, and of course Carlyle, are all great. I would probably not have read that stuff if he hadn't recommended it.

We can all hopefully agree that 'neo-cameralism' is fucking retarded. Also it is hilarious watching Moldbug avoid anything to do with Jewish culture or influence

Urbit is cool.

big fan. I think he diagnoses the problem better than anyone else

Give him a break, it's a miracle Moldbug became as right-wing as he is. His mother (and possibly his father?) were both blue voting state bureaucrats, his grandmother I believe was involved with the American communists, he went to Berkley which is about as prog as it gets in terms of universities, he's involved with the tech industry which tends towards progressivism with minor exceptions like Peter Thiel and he grew up in San Francisco. As I say, it is miraculous that such a man could hold the views he does given his background and the environment he grew up in.

I read a little moldbug, but his writing is just too annoying to get through. And it seems he takes 100000 words to convey what could be said in 1000. And all the NRx tards that spawned from his blog are cancer.

I like the reactionaryfuture/neo-absolutism guy, who seems to have distilled the essentials of moldbug but cut out all the autism/Jewishness/masturbation.

Urbit trivia: the Urbit OS "Arvo" is named after this minimalist Estonian composer Arvo Part: youtube.com/watch?v=QtFPdBUl7XQ

Oh don't get me wrong I respect him a lot. He did a lot of work reading all that stuff, and managing to break the conditioning. Guy is obviously very smart and quite honest.

I get that he can't quite approach the Jewish thing, I dont blame him, but it's still funny.

>all the NRx tards that spawned from his blog are cancer
Wew lad. It is probably one of the few strands of dissentient right-wing thought that has produced content of importance in recent years. There are a few spergs, granted, but places like social matter is full of top drawer theory.

(((moldbug)))

>Also it is hilarious watching Moldbug avoid anything to do with Jewish culture or influence

early Moldbug didn't even do this, he actively defended Jews and wrote against Kevin MacDonald back at the beginning with other Jew commenters on his blog, he later became much more ambiguous and stopped talking about it all together, and when he did he was equivocal and joking

I've always defended him on this and think it doesn't devalue the quality of his work, it's just there is a bit of a giant gaping hole which goes unaddressed throughout UR, even funnier in Dawkins essay when he talks about "parasitic memeplexes" he could just as easily transfer to other types of parasitism, but he of course doesn't.

"Polygon"?
I've read my fair share of UR but this one escapes me.

urbit is pure distilled autism that nobody gives a shit about.

yarvis is pretty useless when it comes to offering solutions; be they political or OS related. but his analysis of our current times is still breddy spot on. The Cathedral is a great term.

Got to say I was feeling pretty MAGA when i learned bannon read UR. First time I felt a sense of 'change i could believe in'. too bad hes gone and kushner is running the show now while daddy trump is fighting his ego battles on twitter.

>Moldbug's influences are so wildly better than him that I only really like him for his occasional humor and of course for promoting them
This too. Moldbug is a bad writer. All of the good on his blog comes from the influences, while all of his original ideas are bullshit and Jewish. It would be better to just collect a bibliography of his influences (Carlyle etc.) and read those rather than slog through moldburg.

>a few spergs
Pretty big understatement. The entire movement is vaguely autistic.
And I actually like NRx, it's entertaining as fuck. But honestly it is kind of nerd intellectual masturbation.

I still to this day don't even understand how he came to the conclusions he did, it is an almost superhuman exertion of intellectual strength to plow over everything in the mainstream and then go further and further out to libertarian thought to contemporary critiques of the new deal, to anti-communism, to carlyle, then to royalism and jacobitism, it's just too much, and most people would've turned back long ago but he made it all the way out there and was able to (mostly) stay sane as he went

its a joke at the expense of the autism required to even bother trying to parse such an obviously autism-laden diagram

the Polygon was the original name for the Cathedral

From the Social Matter compendium:

>Quoting from Moldbug’s post “The Iron Polygon” – The Polygon might be defined as the “extended civil service.” It consists not of those who hold actual formal GS rank, but those whose position demands a sense of civic responsibility—real or fake. The major vertices of the Polygon, by my count, are the press, the universities, the judiciary, the Fed and the banks, the “Hill” (congressional staff), the civil service proper, the NGOs and transnationals, the military, the Beltway bandits (defense and other contractors), and corporate holders of official monopolies (such as “intellectual property”).

socialmatter.net/the-compendium/

>moldbug
what an icky name, i'm out.

I wouldn't say Moldbug is a bad writer. You have to recall he's writing like 10 000 word blog posts, probably without editing them. Is it sometimes garbage? Yes. But he can definitely turn a phrase, and he makes reading him entertaining.

I would say his writing is actually better than his ideas, apart from basically his very first idea, that Leftism is just a religion, which is maybe not his originally, but once you realize that, you are down the rabbit hole forever. Doesn't even matter where you come out, once you see it as a religion, you can never go back.

Does Moldy bug still post anywhere?
I know he's involved with urbit, but is he still vocal in current
affairs/politics...whatever you want to call it.

>he backs out because of a name

This is how the wheat is separated from the chaff my friends.

he turns up every once in a while. someone posted this in the last Moldbug thread I saw

scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3167

A joke, a jest.

no, the last things he has done were the "Letter to France" published on social matter after the bataclan massacre which was credited as Anonymous, and the comments on Scott Aaronson's blog under the name "Boldmug" other than this he is just working on Urbit, wherein all politics discussion is not allowed and political correctness is enforced on the project at all times

His name sounds like that of a Harry Potter character.

Kek

>once you see it as a religion, you can never go back.
Agreed. This is why talk about secularism never interested me. I'm not particularly religious but when I see leftists arguing for secularism all I can see is a group of religious zealots putting forward the case that the historically rooted religion of the nation is flushed down the toilet and replaced with their own religion with the amorphous God "Progress" in charge, and which has its own morality, its own rituals and its own heresies.

>political correctness is enforced on the project at all times
Really? Isn't Moldbug in charge?

If you think Moldbug is too wordy, I'd hate to see you try to digest actually academic writing. It's a fucking internet blog, unless your idea of political thought is Youtube and Salon I don't see how UR could be considered bloated.

>hurr durr I want a techno-dystopia like we have now, but as long as it's not LIBRULS in charge
moldbug sucks

yeah...

he doesn't want it to get nuked by silicon valley SJWs, they already banned him from going to the Strange Loop conference, Urbit needs to be as clean from the stench of his politics as humanly possible because he wants it to actually take off, not collapse due to retarded ideological reasons

Some are good. As I said, I like the reactionary future blog, since I believe he has the best grasp of political theory in a realpolitik sense. Also good understanding of praxis. Social matter is okay but I wouldn't call it important or influential.

But my point was that for each one of these that is good or okay, there are about 200 which are retarded. Mostly those are more centered on Nick Land though. There are others, like the troo reactionaries (known by their avatars of 18th century fops), that are also really worthless and annoying.

What's wrong with that?

Just a pen name

That stuff was all in far right circles already long before moldbug. What moldbug did was take it and package it in a way that was appealing to computer science autists and libertarians

One of his best pieces of "Adore the river of meat" written after Obama's reelection: it's about treason, voter fraud and its utility to the left.

Moldy is a one of the last good rhetoricians. And he understands the roots of the decay.

When he gets into proscriptions he gets silly. Then again I'm a Spenglerian and I don't believe in proscriptions.

Nick Land and Moldbug are not White nationalists. They think that the only way to secure a Hoppean free market with liberty for all is a return to some sort of monarchy/aristocracy.

Mencius Moldbug is half Jewish, which made the enemy of most of the alt-right.

>tfw ywn see Bowden give a talk on Moldbug

you'll notice they're not exactly against the idea of white nationalism though

Bowden trying to explain Urbit would be an amazing sight to see

I like the one he wrote about Mitt Romney called "Romney! He sucks!" where he asks the GOP just what exactly they plan to do with the literally millions of completely mentally retarded and insane childish violent non-white parasites clustering America's cities who have been nontheless granted the privilege of suffrage

What they are is electoral robots, there to sit around for two years until election day, then get trucked to the polls to pull levers for the Democratic party.

I've only read through the "Gentle Introductions" over the summer, but the
>Journalists and Colleges are pretty much a church and rule the country
Thing rings entirely true, to a frightening degree.

they're there because the elite (left and right) want them to be there. you have to ask yourself what has changed from a government that under Eisenhower was doing things like Operation Wetback. The obvious answer is Jewish influence and Jewish power.

i don't necessarily oppose bringing the best and brightest from other countries to the US as long as they aren't Jewish. with that said, the Chinese and Jewish dick-sucking among NRx types is just remarkable. you'd have to wonder how we got anywhere at all without the Chinese or the Jews the way these people worship them. IQ nationalism will do that I guess. more people need to read Ways That Are Dark.

>If you think Moldbug is too wordy, I'd hate to see you try to digest actually academic writing
The difference is that academic writing typically has a clear thesis and gets to the point, whereas moldbug is 20% "point" with 80% rambling onanism and fluff. My complaint was that it is wordy without saying much. I would prefer something more focused and academic over moldbug's "style," which I find annoying. To each his own.

To be fair, that is perfect passivism.

btw
reactionaryfuture.wordpress.com/2016/01/18/what-the-hell-happened-to-neoreaction/

I like this article on Moldbug and his connection to NRx. I don't fully agree but I mostly do

>The difference is that academic writing typically has a clear thesis and gets to the point,
Is this a joke?

check out the Dawkins essay for a history into that specific religion and how it came about, and why it is dangerous and retarded (I'm sure you can probably think of your own reasons here)

America was fairly kiked even before then, check this story out: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Order_No._11_(1862)

I read about it in a book called "the Conquest of the World by the Jews" (lol) but he mentions it as significant, the Jews become extremely excited and happy when someone publicly attacks them because they all rise up as one man and worm their way to the white power structure's apex (here in the form of Lincoln) to beg and manipulate demand their will be enacted, which Lincoln eventually acquiesces to

Bingo. That's exactly what he gets that few other contemporary pundits do.

Academia + press = clerisy. Doctrine percolates down from there.

Moldberg is nothing but nondemocratic progressivism. He is a liberal in every way and so are his followers. They just sperg out about shit like private property, "low IQ" voters, and pc shit.

Moldberg:
>jewish
>pro gay marriage
>pro abortion
>pro corporate
>anti white nationalist
>brags about kike grandpa killing a German during the war
>obsessed with compooters and machine rule
>makes absurd embarrassing claims about his own company, like that it's a "copernican Revolution"
>delusional narcissist
>goes to gay rallies and gay tech conferences

"Neoreaction" does not exist because all it is is hardline progressivism and all the people who are into it are liberals in every way, they just have some annoying autistic superiority complex because they can code, or read some utterly irrelevant philosophical tracts that are a complete waste of time.

>Want to get friend into NRx, or at least introduce him to it
>Know he'll shut down the second the "science" part (with the climate change/not every race has the same intelligence) comes up

It'd be hard to just cut that part out when I send him the links too, because they're all numbered

sure, but the events of WW2 and resulting sympathy for Jews, and Jewish Communist consolidation of power in academia, was what really kicked off the Browning, since their entire ideology was about making whites feel bad about their history and pathologizing them, at least if you believe Kevin Macdonald

Moldbug wrote somewhere that the whacked out ideas of one generation of academics become the conventional wisdom of the masses in the next generation.

This was another of my complaints of moldbug and most of his followers. That most miss the point of "reaction" entirely and more embody the modernism they pretend to oppose. Really it seems more that they want to eliminate the contradictions from the enlightenment project and streamline it rather than "react" against it. They want the nonviolent technocratic utopia promised by enlightenment, they just see that it has failed to deliver and think they could do better.

Macdonald also says that Jews were trying to change the immigration law for decades before 1965, they were furiously working against it at the turn of the century too, it's just their efforts never amount to anything until they fully took over

He has some very interesting ideas. But he's way ahead of his time. People are in NO WAY ready to abandon their sacred dumbocracy.

>moldbug is 20% "point" with 80% rambling onanism and fluff

The only instances where I can remember getting this impression were the "introductory" pieces tailored for new readers. But it's definitely not a writing style that will appeal to everyone.

Why waste time talking to us nerds when you could be out there fighting for your race and cracking jew and nigger skulls?

My biggest problem, perhaps my only problem, with NRx is that achieving a new Royalist state seems absolutely impossible, at least in my time. It's like we see the proper end result but there's no path.

The"Democracy is good" meme is literally indoctrinated in all levels of society and the only people into alternatives are Commies or, rarely, Fascists (still the better of the two),

because the power structure enforces it, if they enforced a different meme, that would be supreme too

>Is this a joke?
No.

because he's Jewish. if you view Communism (or at least Marxism-Leninism) as an exhortation for the Jews to form a revolutionary vanguard and seize power, you can certainly read Yarvin through the same lens: the Jews need to form a revolutionary technologist vanguard and establish a Jewish dictatorship.

Seeing as the entire tech industry is Jewish-owned and actively works against the average white person, I think the whole techno-NRx thing should be considered a dead ideology at least when applied to a Western context, since it will just amount to a Jewish elite with absolute power. it's not as if the ideology of the ruling elite is going to change just because democracy has been abolished - if anything we have a fake democracy where all candidates are "vetted" through various NGOs, foundations, quasi-secret societies, and so on. almost everyone in the ruling class, not just Jews, agree on things that are bad for us, and I don't see how abolishing democracy would stop this. you would get Empress Clinton, forever, for the good of the Jews.

right, I think he actually says that Jews view the 1924-1965 quota as practically part of the Holocaust. it explains a lot about why they seem to want revenge on America.

>check out the Dawkins essay for a history into that specific religion and how it came about, and why it is dangerous and retarded (I'm sure you can probably think of your own reasons here)
Got a link or a title?

You sound like a hardcore follower of Neoreactionary Future/Journal of Neo-Absolutism, the sole person who'd ever accuse a man who's ideal political fantasy is restoring the Stuart monarchy as "leftist".

>clearly a secular Jew.
>Non-secular to the core, but I too am somewhat amazed how he can't see how the concept of love being the legitmating force for marriage and sex is cleary disastrous on a civilization. But maybe he needs some Dalrock for that.
>Eugenics and controlling the quality of your subjects is right-wing; again secular to the core, so abortion as a moral issue simply doesn't register.
>Yes pro corporate, but his writings weren't made when the most powerful corporations were overtly declaring themselves as a new group in the ruling structure of the Cathedral.
>Expressed some sympathies with the idea, but I just chalk that up to him being a Jew and not wanting his tribal enemies to organize in an effective manner.
>Don't recall Moldbug himself bragging, it was his grandpa himself bragging.
>Autism that makes him good enough money to live in San Francisco with a wife and child.
>Don't know shit about his company, can't comment. Sounds like marketing to me.
>muh opinions
>Has directly stated on his Web site that an essential element of passivism is submitting completely to the ruling class as power is ALWAYS respected.

(love Neo-absolutism btw, but the criticism leveled at the creator of saying "Everyone is liberal but me" is completely true.)

How Dawkins Got Pwned

part 3 is my fav thing Moldbug has ever written

>you would get Empress Clinton, forever,
This. NRx thought seemingly assumes that the people currently in power would behave differently if they were official tyrants instead of democratic politicians.

Also can someone explain how is North Korea not a neocameralist state? Moldbug is a knowledgeable thinker and a good writer, but his proposed practical solutions are complely divorced from reality (which is fitting for a self-admitted ex-libertarian).

But how would we get them to enforce the new power structure meme?

>My biggest problem, perhaps my only problem, with NRx is that achieving a new Royalist state seems absolutely impossible, at least in my time. It's like we see the proper end result but there's no path.

Moldbug would probably agree with you. His conclusion was basically that there was no way to defeat progressivism, but that one could strive to create and preserve the civilizational and philosophical foundation for stepping into the void left when liberalism collapses under its own contradictions. He's not an activist in any sense.

>Also can someone explain how is North Korea not a neocameralist state?

does it have a joint stock ownership and governance structure? no? then it is not neocameralist

I shoulda wrote prescriptions not proscriptions. If only we had proscriptions.

this is the million BTC question, my friend

Kike pushing conservatism without God.
Just another controlled opposition.

It's like Chesterton's axiom, once they disbelieve in God they'll believe in anything. Ideologies are substitute religions, and their adopters defend them with the zealotry of the converted.

Yes, liberalism is the state religion of the west. Or death cult, if you like.

you can't really disentangle Judaism from ethnic Jewishness. they will always see themselves as outsiders who have historically been persecuted even though they dindu nuffin, even if they don't practice.

>love Neo-absolutism btw, but the criticism leveled at the creator of saying "Everyone is liberal but me" is completely true
He gives good justifications for saying this though.

Does it need to be an overt structure? My point was about a common (in NRx circles and elsewhere) argument that a country openly run for the ruling elite's benefit and owned by such elite would be superior to a standard progressive democracy, since it's in elite's interest to maintain the country well and create conditions for economic development. He even posits a thought experiment about a Fnargl (my spelling may be off), an all-powerful being who comes to Earth in order to harvest gold; his conclusion is that a Fnargl would impose an almost libertarian society in order to maximize output and thus its loot. That's why I've brought up North Korea: it demonstrates that a rational choice of such a self-interested elite is slavery and exploitation of its subjects.

>I'm not particularly religious but when I see leftists arguing for secularism all I can see is a group of religious zealots putting forward the case that the historically rooted religion of the nation is flushed down the toilet and replaced with their own religion with the amorphous God "Progress" in charge, and which has its own morality, its own rituals and its own heresies.

This is probably the most useful insight you can gain from NRx.

Kim Jong Un doesn't maximise North Korea for his own personal profit and benefit, all their shit is done in the name of "the people". they're a mutated commie state still operating under demotism. Singapore is closer to what you're looking for.

>their own religion with the amorphous God "Progress" in charge

I've come to thinking that "History" is actually a prog deity of genocide whom they worship and revere as a Lovecraftian being. You don't want to be on the wrong side of Thor, just like you wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of History. He has magic powers which they believe imbues them with the ability to crush their enemies and stay on top forever.