Resistance Is Feudal
The neo-Ancien Régime of the PayPal Mafia requires medieval solutions.
The civilizational system Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and many of their ideological coattail-riders seek to establish is a form of neo-feudalism: a system of control where sovereignty is personal, obedience is currency, and survival is conditional. This is not a theoretical notion; it’s been engineered beneath our political awareness for decades—but it’s now attempting to operationalize its full power in the open.
For example, here are two posts from the alternate reality of Trump’s Truth Social account Monday morning that are aggressively neo-feudalist. This is not economic policy; it is redistribution of wealth according to obedience to the sovereign:
First, Trump wants to make a personal dividend of $2,000 per citizen from alleged “massive Tariff Income” and “SUBSTANTIALLY PAY DOWN NATIONAL DEBT” with whatever is “left over.” Second, he threatens air traffic controllers who have been working for 40 days with no paycheck—and offers a $10,000 loyalty payment for “GREAT PATRIOTS” who stood firm against the “FAKE DEMOCRAT ATTACK” of shutting down the government.
Those who are disobedient will be “docked” and “have a negative mark… against your record.”
“You will be quickly replaced by true Patriots.”
What Is (Neo-)Feudalism?
Feudalism is historically classified as a system of customs that controlled medieval Europe from about the 9th to the 15th centuries. It relied on a set of personal obligations and loyalty bonds from lord to vassal to fief that offered military protection and land use in exchange for labor and obedience. The society of feudalism is described as three estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the peasantry.
While parts of the system were swapped out over the centuries, e.g. taxes replaced labor as the primary extractive force, the three estates formed through classical feudalism continued to constitute the legal structure of France, the Ancien Régime, through the 18th century—until the moment they didn’t.
In January 1789, French Catholic priest Abbé Sieyès, published the pamphlet “What is the Third Estate?”:
What is the Third Estate? Everything.
What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing.
What does it desire to be? Something.
This was not a political statement; it was ontological. This was the vast majority, some 97% of the population, declaring not just independence, but existence. Six months later, the revolutionary National Assembly was formed out of the Third Estate. And on July 14th, 1789, the commoners famously stormed the symbol of aristocratic dominance, the Bastille.
In August 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was drafted and published based on the ideals of the Enlightenment philosophers, with the consultation of Thomas Jefferson, and adopted by the National Constituent Assembly.
Among the most famous of the revolutionary Enlightenment philosophers was a member of the bourgeois French Third Estate named François-Marie Arouet, pen-named Voltaire. Even as he moved socially among them, Voltaire spoke out against the tyranny of the First and Second Estates and was a proponent of human rights, separation of church and state, and freedom of speech.
One of his most famous quotes assailing the epistemological totalitarianism—the complete control of knowledge—by the clergy, the First Estate, has been widely translated as:
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
—Question sur les miracles (1765)
High Priest of the Techno-Clergy
Monday morning Elon Musk attempted to “paraphrase” Voltaire’s quote, by completely inverting it. Here, Musk positions himself as the First Estate—the technocratic clergy—by peddling actual absurdities.
He is performing the exact abuse Voltaire warned about, in Voltaire’s name.
According to Musk:
AI may become omnipotent.
Despite its omnipotence, it might be trained to believe absurdities.
To get the truth, you must follow his AI prophet, Grok.
If you don’t, you might become the victim of atrocities.
This is an argument for technocratic neo-feudalism, for blind loyalty to Musk’s version of reality, in exchange for his protection from the savage masses. Another version of this power dynamic is the mafia: “We will protect you whether you like it or not.”
Feudalist Antichrist
The South African apartheid regime was a form of revanchist neo-feudalism, the deliberate separation and economic oppression of the majority based on immutable characteristics, enforced by a small minority through the application of violence, and information control. Apartheid was not merely racist; it was a legal estate system. It was feudal hierarchy enforced with modern bureaucracy.
It is no coincidence that three members of the PayPal Mafia (Musk, Thiel, David Sacks) spent some or all of their childhoods being indoctrinated in the South African supremacist education system.
In April, Peter Thiel, who was educated in an apartheid Christian school where they still greeted each other with “Heil Hitler” told paid Russian propagandist Dave Rubin:
I think there was something about the Biden thing that was crazier than apartheid South Africa because apartheid South Africa by the 1980s, they knew they were on the wrong side of history. …it was like the Ancien regime. Right. We were revolutionary France. They thought it would go on forever. […] there are a lot of strings that can be pulled. If we pull enough of them, the fabric of the Ancien regime of liberalism will completely unravel. It does tell you something beautiful about our mechanism to reset to truth, right? That they couldn’t do it this time.
By invoking both South African apartheid—which Thiel implies originally thought itself on the right side of history—and the feudalist Ancien Régime, he is doubling up his favorite psychological technique, to project his inner plans on to others. He was not warning about a new Ancien Régime, he is trying to resurrect it. This strategy of projection recently reached a peak when Thiel gave a four-part series on the Antichrist in San Francisco.
For Musk and Thiel—and Trump—this is not trolling; it’s exactly how they get away with everything.
Neo-Ancien Régime: PayPal Mafia
The bubble in the American financial markets is a distortion in the reality of enough retail investors and financial professionals to be as dangerous as 1929—or France 1789. The problem is primarily focused around a specific sector of technologies being deliberately inflated by Musk, Thiel, and David Sacks—a sector amounting to a self-reinforcing matrix of nerd-friendly narratives about surveillance, warfare, crypto, electric cars, robots, Mars, and AI. It is 21st century tulip mania.
The brutal irony of this bubble is that for the valuations of two of the biggest beneficiaries, Musk’s Tesla and Thiel’s Palantir, to make any sense, they would both have to grow large enough to hollow out nearly everything else. You would have to believe that neo-feudalism is the future in order to buy into the rationale for these companies existing in a capitalist system. It is not economics it is political theology.
But this is exactly the win-win the neo-Ancien Régime of the PayPal Mafia wanted: even if they don’t get total control of the planet, even if they don’t get the feudalism they want, they have already pulled off the greatest pump-and-dump of all time. Literally trillions of dollars. Wealth distribution will have permanently tilted into their pockets.
Not Futile, Feudal
The lesson of the Third Estate, the 97% of France that escaped the feudalist aristocracy that ruled for centuries, is not the storming of the Bastille or the beheading of the king; it is that what it took to defeat the monarchy was not violence, but reframing. The question posed by Siéyes was exactly the right one. Not: “Why aren’t they listening?” Instead: “What are we?”
The greatest trick of Donald Trump and the PayPal Mafia has been to manufacture an alternate reality where the normal divisions that have always existed between us were inflamed into battle lines so intense that we failed to notice them stealing our wallets—and our friends and family. But underneath, call me naive—I think the Third Estate still exists. The vast majority who just need to ask themselves the question again, slightly rephrased.
What are we? What is the United States?
Are we a new peasantry—the subjects of a techno-clergy and its ordained nobility?
Or are we a collective supermajority of Americans getting our pockets picked and our futures squandered?
“Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed.”
—Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (1577)
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What still amazes me is just how many people actually believe in the Alternet Universe??! With the help of lie's and propaganda consumed , sponsored by Fox channel etc.. You've written a heavy duty essay this evening, it's given me food for thought,Thank you, and will reStack ASAP 🙏
Excellent article as always. That the PayPal Mafia companies like Tesla and Palantir need to absorb the rest of the economy to survive is why it's important to crush them 'in their youth'.