Will corporate states replace our democracies?

Innovative ideas such as social media and generative AI created by Silicon Valley’s knowledge workers have captured the hearts and minds of citizenry across the globe and, in the process, created hundreds of millionaires and billionaires.

However, there is one ‘innovative’ idea, a dangerous one at that, that is currently in play which is designed to keep these wealthy people wealthy and wield enormous amounts of power in the political and social arenas. What I am referring to is the idea that a person’s IQ and genetic makeup alone are responsible for success in life and that such people should be governing the masses.

The immediate consequence of such a mindset is the wholesale rejection of democracies and equal rights, only to be substituted by corporate states run by autocratic CEOs. The chosen few. Almost all white. The fact that Nazism and apartheid grew out of such loathsome ideas seems to have escaped the tech bros and their adherents. History books are always there for one to consult if only one bothers to read.

Who are the people advocating such ideas? Elon Musk, Peter Thiel (founder of PayPal and Palantir), and a whole host of right-wing writers and political pundits such as Stephen Miller, Curtis Yarvin, and Richard Hanania who are very close to the Trump administration. Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policies, was responsible for banning people from predominantly Muslim countries while Musk has been identified with Trump’s policy of admitting ‘persecuted’ white Afrikaners into the US and banning all others from parts of Southeast Asia and much of Africa.

Yarvin, identified early on as a mathematically precocious high-IQ youngster by Johns Hopkins University, blamed democracy for treating “high-IQ” and “low-IQ” individuals as equals and proposed a “psychometric qualification” for voting in South Africa, disenfranchising everyone below an IQ of 120. He called for the forcible sterilisation of everyone with an IQ under 90 and claimed that Hispanics “don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first-world nation”. According to Quinn Slobodian, such IQ fetishism has resulted in drawing distinct racial boundaries – Caucasians, East Asians, and Ashkenazi Jews on one side of the line with other Asians, Hispanics, and people of African descent on the other. That the US State Department has started issuing ‘Einstein’ visas to select individuals is a case in point.

Even more disturbing is Yarvin’s initial ‘suggestion’ that people who do not fit his IQ-based society be turned into pulp and used as biodiesel. Yarvin’s proposal is quite reminiscent of the main theme of the 1973 science-fiction movie Soylent Green where, by 2022, only the elite can afford spacious apartments, clean water, and natural food in walled-off communities patrolled by armed guards while the rest live in squalor and eat highly processed food wafers. These wafers, advertised as derived from plankton and labelled Soylent Green, are actually made from human bodies – ‘unproductive’ people scooped up by the police and turned into food at waste disposal sites run by the Soylent Corporation. Again, quoting from Slobodian’s essay, Yarvin retracted his original proposal and instead suggested that “the best humane alternative to genocide” was “not to liquidate the wards... but to virtualise them”. He envisioned the incarceration of the knowledge economy’s underclass in “permanent solitary confinement, waxed like a bee larva into a cell which is sealed except for emergencies”.

Playing the technology card, he stated that the captive’s cell would not be bare but would include “an immersive virtual-reality interface which allows him to experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world”. The foregoing material is laid out in Yarvin’s book Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century. There have been numerous verified reports of migrants in the US being rounded up and sent to horrific prisons in El Salvador, Rwanda, and elsewhere. Many countries have willingly agreed to take migrants deported from the US if only to obtain relief from tariffs imposed on them by Trump.

In opposing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programmes efforts, Peter Thiel writes, “DEI will never d-i-e from words alone – Hanania shows we need the sticks and stones of government violence to exorcise the diversity demon.” Hanania is the author of the book The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics which was published in 2023.

Privatising government functions and outsourcing product manufacturing to China, Vietnam, and India do result in huge cost savings on labour and material. As does outsourcing cruelty to El Salvador and Sudan, but with a difference – no moral and ethical considerations are involved. So it would seem.