The Autonomy Gambit
How Yarvin's Universe and Social Cybernetics Explain the Fight for a Nation's Soul
To the outside observer, and indeed to many of its own citizens, contemporary Poland is a spectacle of incomprehensible noise. An endless, screeching feud between two halves of a nation, seemingly locked in a death spiral over everything from judicial appointments to the meaning of a rainbow. The Western media, in its infinite wisdom, portrays it simply: a battle between enlightened, pro-European democracy and a backward, populist nationalism clinging to a bygone era.
This is a satisfyingly simple story. It is also a profoundly shallow, and ultimately incorrect, diagnosis.
To understand what is truly happening in Poland, we need to discard the simplistic headlines and adopt two powerful, unconventional lenses. The first is the darkly realist worldview of Curtis Yarvin, the Silicon Valley blogger better known as Mencius Moldbug, who diagnosed the hidden power structure of the modern West. The second is the cold, formal logic of Docent Józef Kosecki, a brilliant Cold War-era Polish scientist who applied the universal principles of cybernetics to the brutal realities of social control.
When combined, these frameworks reveal that the struggle for Poland is not a mere political squabble. It is a technical, systemic conflict for control. It is a cybernetic war between an autonomous national system trying to preserve its integrity and a dominant, suprasupranational super-system intent on total assimilation. And for Poland, this is not a new war; it is merely a new front.
Our Guides to the Machine
Before we dive in, we must understand our guides.
Curtis Yarvin is the intellectual godfather of the neoreactionary movement. From his blog Unqualified Reservations, he articulated a devastating critique of modern liberal democracy. His central thesis is that real power in the West does not reside with elected officials. Instead, it lies with “The Cathedral”—a decentralized but ideologically synchronized network of the nation’s most powerful institutions: its elite universities, its prestige media, its vast civil service, and its web of powerful foundations and NGOs. The Cathedral, Yarvin argues, is the true government. It does not need to conspire; its members, educated in the same institutions, instinctively work in concert to create and enforce a progressive orthodoxy.
Docent Józef Kosecki was a Polish scientist and student of Marian Mazur, the father of Polish cybernetics. Living under the thumb of the Soviet Union, Kosecki became obsessed with understanding the mechanics of power in a purely formal, scientific way. For Kosecki, any society is a “Social Control System” (SSS). Like any control system, it has a decision-making center (government), an information subsystem (culture, media), and an energy subsystem (economy, military). The ultimate goal of a healthy, autonomous SSS is to pursue its own goals. Kosecki gave this quality a crucial name: sterowność—the capacity for self-steering. A system without sterowność is not a system at all; it is merely an object being controlled by another.
The Rosetta Stone: The Cathedral is a Social Control System
The genius of this combined approach is how perfectly these two worldviews map onto one another.
Yarvin’s Cathedral is simply Kosecki’s dominant, supranational Social Control System.
The progressive ideology is the normative software of the Cathedral—an operating system it seeks to install in every subordinate system.
A sovereign nation-state, like Poland, is an autonomous SSS running its own historically-evolved, “legacy” software.
The conflict becomes brutally clear: it is a battle over whether Poland will continue to run its own code or have its operating system overwritten by the Cathedral.
1. The “Rule of Law” Conflict is a Cybernetic Steering War
The endless dispute with Brussels over the Polish judiciary is the most obvious front in this war. In the cybernetic-Yarvinist frame, it’s about something concrete: control over the national decision-making center. The Cathedral (via its EU institutions) sends powerful “steering signals”—court rulings, threats of withholding funds. The goal is to establish an unbreakable precedent: that the external signal from the supranational system always overrides the internal signal from the national democratic process. When a government in Warsaw complies, it proves it has been downgraded to a przedmiot sterowany (a steered object).
2. The “Polish-Polish War” is an Internal Information Attack
The bitter internal polarization is a direct consequence of the Cathedral’s successful infiltration of the Polish information subsystem. Large portions of Poland’s media, academia, and NGO ecosystem act as local receptors for the Cathedral’s normative software. Their primary loyalty is not to the Polish SSS, but to the supranational one. Kosecki called this an “information parasite,” an element crippling the host’s ability to act coherently by forcing it to expend massive energy fighting itself.
3. The Culture War is a Battle for the System’s Source Code
The visceral fights over LGBT rights, abortion, and the role of the Church are the deepest layer of this conflict. This is a battle over the fundamental operating code of the nation. The traditional values derived from Poland’s history constitute its “general norms”—the source code defining its goals. The progressive norms pushed by the Cathedral are a “malicious software update” designed to overwrite this code with a new, universal set of instructions. This is Yarvin’s “missionary” impulse in action—the drive to remake every society in its own image.
A Familiar Echo: The PRL as a Steered System
For Poles, this dynamic of external steering is not a theoretical abstraction; it is a deeply ingrained historical memory. The Polish People’s Republic (PRL) period from 1945-1989 was a case study in being a steered object.
Applying the same cybernetic model:
The External SSS: The Soviet Union.
The Normative Software: Marxism-Leninism.
The Steering Method: Unlike the Cathedral’s soft power, the Soviet method was a mix of hard and crude power. The Polish decision-making center (the PZPR party) was formally in charge, but key decisions were dictated by the Kremlin. The information subsystem (state media, censorship) relentlessly broadcast the Marxist-Leninist software. The energy subsystem was controlled through economic dependency (COMECON) and the ultimate backstop: the physical presence of the Red Army.
Yet, the assimilation was never total. The “Polish legacy code” proved incredibly resilient. The Catholic Church functioned as a powerful, independent information subsystem, broadcasting an alternative set of norms. The nation’s memory of independence acted as a cultural firewall. The Solidarity movement was the ultimate expression of the national SSS attempting to re-establish its own sterowność by building a parallel, autonomous information and decision network. This experience makes the Polish system acutely sensitive to the mechanics of external control. The methods of the Western Cathedral are more subtle—financial incentives instead of tanks—but for a system with deep scar tissue, the pressure to conform feels eerily familiar.
The Future Front: A War Between Two Cathedrals?
The unipolar dominance of the Western Cathedral is being challenged. For Poland, this does not mean a return to true autonomy, but the prospect of being caught between two competing external Social Control Systems. If Russia were to regain hegemonic power, it would attempt to install a new operating system.
The Western Cathedral steers with the soft power of ideological seduction and financial integration. Its software is progressive universalism.
The Eastern Cathedral (the Kremlin’s power bloc) would steer with the crude power of energy blackmail and military intimidation. Its software is a cynical blend of Russian nationalism, Orthodox traditionalism, and anti-Western resentment.
The future conflict might not be a choice between freedom and tyranny, but between two different models of external control.
The Bartosiak Gambit: A Path to Autonomy in a World of Giants
If Poland is a system under siege, how can it regain its sterowność? The answer may lie in the work of Polish geostrategic thinkers like Jacek Bartosiak and his Strategy & Future (S&F) think tank. Their analysis, born from the hard school of military logic and geopolitics, provides a pragmatic—if challenging—roadmap for a nation-state to achieve autonomy in an age of empires.
The S&F diagnosis is perfectly aligned with the cybernetic model. They argue that the emerging world order is a systemic conflict between the US and China, with Europe (and Poland) being treated as a mere “terrain of operations” or a set of proxies to be sacrificed. The US, acting like an empire, disciplines its allies to maintain control of its own “backyard” in its fight with China. This is the logic of a dominant SSS ensuring its vassals remain compliant. The core problem, as S&F identifies, is that Poland has hardware (tanks, planes) but lacks the sovereign “software of war”—its Command & Control (C2), intelligence, and situational awareness are almost entirely dependent on the US. It is a steered object by technical design.
The Bartosiak Gambit is a multi-layered strategy to break free from this condition:
1. Achieve C2 Sovereignty: Seize the “Software of War.”
The S&F mantra, “Who sees faster, understands, strikes, wins,” is a purely cybernetic statement. The first step towards autonomy is building a sovereign information subsystem for national defense. This means investing massively in national satellite constellations, reconnaissance drones, signals intelligence, and integrated command systems. Without its own eyes, ears, and brain, Poland’s military body, no matter how muscular, will always be a puppet on American strings. This is the technical precondition for sterowność.
2. Embrace the “Intermarium” as a Balancing Mechanism.
In a world dominated by the US-China rivalry, a medium-sized state like Poland is too small to act alone. The S&F solution is to create a regional bloc of states—the Intermarium or Three Seas Initiative—that can act as a cohesive system. This bloc would not be anti-US or anti-EU, but pro-itself. Its purpose is to create its own center of gravity, making it a valuable but independent partner, rather than a dependent proxy. By pooling its economic and military potential, this regional SSS could gain the mass necessary to balance between the larger powers, negotiating terms instead of merely accepting them.
3. Break the Mental Taboos: A Psychological Reboot.
S&F’s most profound contribution is its assault on the “internalized helplessness” of the Polish elite. As their discussions reveal, there is a deep-seated belief that it is improper or “crazy” for Poland to discuss certain tools of sovereignty, such as nuclear proliferation or a fundamental re-evaluation of alliances. This is the ghost of the PRL—the mental software of a steered object that has outlived the system that installed it. The Bartosiak Gambit requires an intellectual shock: forcing an open, pragmatic debate about every available tool of power. It is about fostering a mindset that sees Poland as a sovereign actor—a podmiot sterujący—that uses alliances as tools, not as a replacement for its own strength and will.
4. Leverage Geopolitical Position: From Shatterzone to Pivot State.
Poland’s location between Germany and Russia has historically been a curse. In the new era of US-China competition, it can become a source of immense leverage. A strong, independent Poland is valuable to the US as a bulwark against Russia. It is valuable to China as a stable gateway to Europe for its Belt and Road Initiative. It is valuable to Germany as a strategic buffer and economic partner. A Polish state with true sterowność would not pledge loyalty to one side but would skillfully play these interests against each other, extracting concessions and carving out space for its own autonomy in exchange for providing stability in a critical region.
Conclusion: Writing a New Code
Viewing Poland through this combined lens reveals the stark reality of its position. It is a system under siege from without and within, fighting a multi-generational, multi-front war for its right to self-steer—first against the East, and now against the West’s subtle but pervasive control.
The solutions offered by the Strategy & Future school are not easy. They require immense political will, vast resources, and a radical shift in the national mindset. But they represent the only viable path away from being a pawn in someone else’s great game.
The central question facing Poland today is not about which political party is in power.
It is the fundamental, cybernetic question that has defined its entire history: Is the Polish Social Control System an autonomous subject, capable of defining and pursuing its own destiny? Or is it a passive object, a program being run by a more powerful, external machine whose goals are not its own?
The struggle is not over who sits in the government buildings in Warsaw. It is over who gets to write the code that runs Poland itself.