Teleocracy & Prestige

How right-wing organizations attract elite talent

My article “Dissidents with elite potential must join liberal organizations” attracted a fair degree of controversy. It led to various discussions with entrepreneurs in our space who are cultivating elite talent, such as my conversation with Dr. Bennett on the EXIT podcast.  

In the original article, I argued that despite their spiritual corruption and pervasive wokeness, young men from our side who have elite potential should spend a period at organizations like the big tech companies. 

I proposed this on the basis that these organizations have a near-unique capability to bring young men to their full professional potential, due to the concentration of elite performers they surround you with, and a culture of rapid action and audacious projects. 

Personal transformation of this kind should be a priority for young men. But I do not contest the significant costs of working at these companies: the frustration of biting your tongue, the despair of being immersed in ugliness, the isolation of life in a spiritually barren land. 

The question becomes: is there an alternative? Can we construct a vehicle that will attract young elites and transform them to their full potential in both professional and spiritual capacities? 

GUSTAVE DORÉ, The Neophyte, 1876

We know that we cannot build direct competitors to the big tech companies. Over a certain size, organizations become subject to legal requirements regarding their human resources that essentially mandate that they turn woke. 

Nor can we merely build a thousand small tech companies. If our objective is to build fully parallel communities, we will need many different types of business to sustain our society, including relatively unromantic ones: accountants, landscapers, grocery chains. 

That these businesses can be profitable does not necessarily make them attractive to our young with elite potential. These people want status as well as money and independence. Further, aware of their potential, they want intellectually challenging environments that will draw it out. 

Nate Fisher of New Founding, which provides an essential service matching our talent with aligned institutions, told me in conversation a few weeks ago:

The biggest question for me is how to systematically channel such people into better spaces. The appeal of smaller businesses is there is some real arbitrage, I think. Historically these businesses haven’t attracted the top candidates, I believe for prestige/exit opportunity reasons, but if we can make these roles relatively more desirable by elevating factors like independence as more desirable than prestige, we can shift a lot of talent.

This, I think, is a worthy objective. It will help our aspiring elites build wealth and power, which is, after all, the central mission of Becoming Noble. I’d like to expand on what I see as the necessary process for success. 

We need to clarify a multi-dimensional view of what makes institutions attractive to elite talent, and then lay out a strategy to maximally embed these attractors in our organizations by leveraging our unique strengths. To perform this analysis, I will draw upon the business sociology literature on the theory of Perceived External Prestige (‘PEP’). 

If we approach this process intentionally, we can compete with the elite liberal institutions who provide many of these attractors as unintentional byproducts of the pursuit of profit.  

I propose that we need to demonstrate opportunities for prestige, independence, wealth, and growth, and to achieve this we need to center the concepts of mission, service, transformation, and recognition.  

In particular, I will draw from entrepreneur and corporate executive August Turak’s account of his time living amongst Trappist Monks (unless otherwise stated, quotations will come from his writing) and from the only successful recruiter in the United States Armed Forces: the Marine Corps.  

Let us turn to the monks and the marines. 

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