Maybe you're just not doing the Neoreactionary position justice, but it seems to suffer from the same problem as any other theory that does away with justice - it doesn't account for Stalin. You say Yarvin seems to assume that the "CEO" will "make it a good place to live because a happy territory is a profitable territory," but then you wind up with Stalin or Kim Jong-Un or Caligula, who may have interests beyond profitability. And while I have some libertarian leanings, I'm not convinced that "a happy territory" is always a "profitable territory," or at least a profitable territory for the ruler. I'm fairly confident that slavery is inefficient across society, but plantation owners seemed to benefit from it, and it's more of an open question whether the plantation owners in particular would have lived materially better lives if they had freed their slaves and started paying them.
While the "right to exit" provides some salve to this problem, as the CEO may want to keep his citizens/subjects happy to avoid their leaving, the typical dictator's solution to this problem is to immediately take that right away - it's how we got the Berlin Wall. I'm not sure by what magic Yarvin intends to guarantee the right to exist.
There's a monologue in High Fidelity where Cusack recognizes that he's always drawn to cheat on or leave his current girlfriend because he imagines the next woman in sexy lingerie while he sees his current girlfriend's actual granny panties drying on the rack in the bathroom, but, in reality that the next woman will also have granny panties drying on the rack in the bathroom. The same is true when it comes to government. It's easy to imagine alternative forms of government as better, but that's because we are only imagining them in sexy lingerie while we see democracy's actual (metaphorical) granny panties drying in the bathroom, but these alternative forms of government have their own metaphorical granny panties, and a lot of times, those metaphorical granny panties come in the form of mass repression, famine, genocide and torture. I'll stick with democracy.
Even if there were a way to guarantee a right of exit, it would be meaningless without a complementary "right to enter" one or more reasonable alternatives. History is very clear: we can't depend on that.
This is not really an argument for or against neoraction. Surely, there are times when you are right to leave your girlfriend because your relationship is unhealthy. Whether your next girlfriend will be better is a harder question to answer.
How toxic/unhappy should a relationship be before you are ready to leave it?That is the crux of the matter. I've yet to see a convincing argument for why the next political system after ours will be worse or better. Ultimately it may be an unknowable question.
However, your argument amounts to settling for the girl you are with because you think she is the best you can get. That may or may not be true, but I don't begrudge Yarvin for thinking that "you can do better".
It's an argument against revolutionary ideas in general (my first two paragraphs are more directly arguments against neoreaction).
It's true that if you are in a toxic/unhappy relationship, you should consider leaving it. I don't begrudge all revolutionaries. Tsarist Russia seemed like a pretty bad place, and I can understand why people there were ready to take a spin on the wheel of revolution. The problem with the wheel of revolution is that there are a lot of very bad outcomes, and if utopia is on it at all, it's a very small slice. You're much more likely to get Stalinist Russia or North Korea or Islamic Republic Iran or Reign of Terror France. While I can understand why the people living in Tsarist Russia were willing to take their chances, I'm not sure that even they came out ahead.
Now consider the fact that, assuming you live in the US (and Yarvin does), you live somewhere much better than Tsarist Russia. The US is one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in human history. While I wouldn't say it's perfect, most people throughout history (heck most people living today) spinning the wheel of revolution would be very happy to land on "Modern USA." Yet we have all these people living in the US on the left and the right just champing at the bit to spin the wheel. I blame this on what I discuss my last paragraph - they are comparing their utopias to a real life system that does have a few warts and blemishes. They need to realize that there is no such thing as utopia, that every system is going to have its own problems, and there are a lot of ways things can turn out that are a lot worse than our current system.
This doesn't mean that you shouldn't work to improve things, but it means you should be very hesitant before you move from trying to improve the current system to burning it all down. Personally, I think that Trump/Musk are in "burn it all down" mode and, when their done, people are going to miss just how good we had it.
The motivation for spinning the wheel of revolution in America is this: although Americans are richer than many other peoples have ever been in history, they are also lacking precipitously in dignity. In addition, they are not as rich as Americans were only a few generations ago, and sense that every intuitive indication is that they will be poorer, and their children will be poorer, the father one goes into the future.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "lacking percipitously in dignity," but the idea that Americans are poorer than they once were just isn't born out by the data. And even if it is true, you still have the US as one of the wealthiest countries today, so it's hard to conclude that it could be doing much better.
Its all wishful thinking, imagining the next government in sexy lingerie, when it necessarily will have its own granny panties or worse.
Lacking in dignity, in that Americans who once enjoyed being able to live in communities with a high baseline of trust in their neighbors and a significant degree of self reliance, now find themselves wholly under the magnifying glass of a government that is hostile to both concepts and has done a great deal to undermine them.
There are a great number of charlatans who are paid to cook up graphs showing GDP, or some other number growing up, and then to say that this means that your life must be better. A revolution could make things even worse, and probably unavoidably would in the short term, but so does staying the course.
Chasing Ennui has a point about things not being that bad. Ultimately, Yarvin believes that things must get a lot worse in order for a switch to a completely different system. Yarvin's point is, things have been getting worse, and that they will continue to do so. He does not necessarily argue that we are at the point yet where burning the system down now and building something new is worth it.
This is where his progressive critics get him wrong. He has stated multiple times that a system can keep getting worse for hundreds of years. The Roman Empire was in general decline for about 300 years before the western half collapsed. His critics have far too narrow a focus on the near-term future.
Actually, he does account for Stalin. Complaints about Stalin (and co) is usually a lib's first line of defense.
In Moldbug's view, modern dictators such as Stalin were the product of paranoia. And the paranoia reflected an absence of stable succession-mechanisms. When everyone is playing the Game of Thrones, everyone is subject to fratricide.
> Until you understand the difference between a king and a dictator, you will continue to confuse the timeless human institution of monarchy with these monstrous 20th-century abortions. In truth, the dictatorships of the 20th century were attempts to restore the vitality of the old regime. The bad ones were just bad attempts. Bad is bad; anything can be done badly, monarchy and democracy certainly both included.
> Hitler himself was a huge Carlyle fan. But Hitler was also Hitler. If you don’t understand the difference between Hitler and Frederick, it is not because you are ignorant of Hitler! The educated person of our time has a remarkably accurate picture of Nazi Germany. Of all the historical periods he understands, he understands the Third Reich best—usually, much better than his own present day. His view of the democratic regime, which survives, is shrouded in democratic euphemism; his view of the Nazi regime, which does not, is free from Nazi cant. And of the actual old regime, he knows nothing at all.
> There are many differences between Hitler and Frederick, but perhaps the key one is stability. Frederick, while not intrinsically secure from his foreign enemies, was quite secure from any domestic opposition. No one was trying to kill him; no one could have accomplished anything by killing him. He was, in short, a monarch. A dead monarch is replaced, automatically, by another monarch—the identity of whom is already known. If the old monarch was assassinated, God forbid, the new monarch is generally not the assassin (or his employers).
In this long-anticipated episode, Matt and Chris venture into the peculiar world of Curtis Yarvin—a reactionary blogger, tech entrepreneur, and self-proclaimed monarchist. Known to his early followers by the pseudonym "Mencius Moldbug," Yarvin has become a prominent figure in the "dark enlightenment" and neo-reactionary circles. Some have even hailed him as an "intellectual powerhouse" of the modern far-right, with endorsements from influential figures like Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance.
But what is Curtis really all about? In this episode, the decoders revisit the Triggernometry swamp to examine the political insights unearthed by the hard-nosed journalists Konstantin and Francis during their ferocious intellectual exchange with Yarvin.
Prepare for thrilling revelations, including the historical figures and movements Yarvin has catalogued in his encyclopedic memory, his pick for the best Elizabethan monarch, and the surprising number of non-monarchs he believes are secretly running monarchical regimes. True to form, Yarvin’s rhetorical style is nothing if not meandering. So get ready for a whirlwind tour through his "mind palace," exploring topics like Soviet Russia, Elizabethan England, Shakespearean conspiracy theories, and a fantasy world of reactionary and techno-libertarian musings—not to mention the obligatory lab-leak narratives.
Is Yarvin an edgy intellectual, a provocative contrarian, or just a verbose windbag with run-of-the-mill conspiratorial takes and a moody teenager's perspective on history? Matt and Chris tackle these questions, striving to decode Yarvin’s vision for society—and hoping, against all odds, that he might in the end just answer a single question.
I haven't listened to Decoding the Gurus, but I've listened to the 'Behind the Bastards' episode on him, and they did a pretty awful job of portraying his worldview imo.
I mean, those are both leftist podcasts funded to make propaganda. The owner of one was part of the mob that burned down a police station in Portland. What can you expect?
The seriousness of this good piece aside, I laughed at your Yarvin 100 vs. 10k words dig: A few years ago I did a deep dive into contemporary Leftist writing (the Jacobin set) and often found the same thing. Substance aside, the style was so aggravating I came up with a puerile definition of a Socialist: (n.) a dogmatist who generally needs 5000 words to say what could be said with 500.
It probably says more about the style of dogmatists than it does about extremists, though Yarvin seems more extreme than dogmatic. Of course, all proposed connection might be spurious.
It amazes me that this guy has become such a Pundit Phenomenon. It's as if I went to an obscure comedy club years ago and saw a performer who seemed weird but unimpressive, and then he's the Next Big Thing. I mean, I understand his appeal to a certain type of tech person. He sounds erudite and tells them they should have power, what's not to like? That's always a winning formula. But it's all such warmed-over blather. Maybe that's part of the popularity? Perhaps it's about winning a media lottery, right place right time.
I'm not a big fan of the leftist analysis about a tech-to-fascism pipeline. But sometimes I can see what they're talking about. It's not entirely in their imagination.
He is objectively a very smart and impressive individual. He got into Brown at 15 years old and was accepted into a comp-sci PHD program at Berkeley at 19. Say what you will about his ideas, but dismissing his intellectual firepower and writing ability shows you haven't really taken the time to understand it.
It reminds me of right-wingers who dismiss Marx. His ideas may have turned out to be wrong, but he was certainly ahead of his time and very perceptive in certain ways.
I wouldn't say that he's a stupid person's idea of a smart person. However, it does seem to me that he's a smart technical person's idea of an insightful political philosopher. I just can't take him seriously. Maybe it's my background going back to the days when wild tech theorizing was all over the Net in terms of pontificating on the nature of social organization (cypherpunk cryptoanarchy!). Again, its like a comedy club, I've seen a bunch of performers. But his act never struck me as very good. He wasn't at all ahead of his time, maybe it's more at riding the wave.
Look, if you haven't ever seen this stuff before, I can grasp that it seems to articulate something to you. That part isn't a mystery to me. It's the other side, where a whole section of prominent media types seem to have latched onto him as some sort bogeyman Svengali figure of Silicon Valley, which astounds me. I mean, just for example, Peter Thiel writes clearly and bluntly about "freedom and democracy" not being compatible. What you think about his ideas, his prose is readable. He's not the only SV person to write stuff like that. May it's all too clear in that form, and doesn't sound like an academic seminar.
>he's a smart technical person's idea of an insightful political philosopher
>some sort bogeyman Svengali figure of Silicon Valley, which astounds me
I'm not sure why it astounds you, in light of the first quoted statement.
SV and the left were ambivalent about each other the until around the middle of the last decade, when the relationship started turning increasingly sour.
Meanwhile the right has been pretty barren as far as insightful political philosophers are concerned for a long time, he's pretty much the best one (alive) they've got (Thiel is more of a doer than a talker), so SV is making do.
Moldbug is also older now, and only has the one life to live. Pure principles are much more appealing when you're young, as you age you really start to want to see results in your lifetime.
The thing about criticizing order because it's flawed, is that the criticism can just as easily be thrown at democracy or oligarchy. Looking at someone like Bukele, he seems to be overwhelmingly popular, because he restored order in a country that had descended to chaos. I think it's a very nebulous question, how much chaos one is willing to put up with, but I also see the flipside, what exactly is one willing to sacrifice in the name of order.
If these days, Yarvin really thinks Trump is capable of fulfilling his vision, then he's a charlatan, whatever Trump ends up doing, it's clear he can't build something enduring (and it would most likely be undesirable if he could).
This was a really intriguing and enlightening post! I am not priori inclined to 'Neorreaction' (I'd describe myself as a very centrist European with a strong animosity towards woke) but I really value ruthless truth-searching with complete indifference to ideological vetoes, so the 'Antiversity' idea does resonate with me.
> Its narrative falls apart for me in exalting order itself, never quite answering the "for what" to my satisfaction. Yes, it could lead to atrocities, Moldbug says—but other systems have, and most of the time human nature and the incentive structures in place mean it wouldn't. As a narrative, that can work. In practice, the question I think Moldbug ends up grappling least with is the one he has the most duty to answer. Why do people rebel against the perfect order of his Right? Why does his order descend into chaos? He attributes it largely to weakness.
Not just order, but *spontaneous* order.
Order as opposed to anarchy and entropy. E.g. your very body is a polity of cells. It's ordered. Under true biological anarchy, all organisms would be unicellular, if life were to even exist at all. All good things in life are ordered, in *exactly* the same sense that all good things in life exhibit low-entropy.
> But Luther nailed his theses to the church door for a reason. People opposed slavery for a reason. Communism gained a foothold for a reason. I left Mormonism for a reason.
And "spontaneous" as opposed to coerced. As in "bottom up". As in "people acting of their own volition". If e.g. Mormonism was tyrannical, it was definitionally coercive rather than spontaneous.
I feel like you missed his UR post where he explained that NRX is a generalization of Libertarianism.
The obvious answer is that Trump succeeded by embracing the WrestleMania reality tv nature of the American democratic process. Making it public knowledge that our elections are a scripted Harlem Globetrotters game is Moldbug's first step to delegitimizing democracy as a sacred institution. I'm sure you remember the metaphor from his 2016 post explaining the left's shock at the Washington Generals winning against the script.
Reading this was jarring, given the current funding freezes and illegal claw-backs:
"The first, and only, moral rule is contractual enforcement: promises made must be kept. Any breakdown in this law is a sign of degradation."
Also, I'm assuming Mont Pelerin is the exemplar for the Antiversity? Critique the status quo, propose an alternative, wait for a crisis, frame your alternate as the solution.
bro you are ending up to being the bill clinton of trying to make things work better but not addressing anything but how you can be correct while everything rots around you.
Yarvin is pretty nuanced and those that piggyback on his ideas are decidedly not IMO.
As to “Sophisticated window-dressing,” I think he was pretty clear in UR about what he’d like to see vis-à-vis democracy and representative government. Is this more an issue with his mainstream followers than the actual ideas in his writing?
I will say one of the things Yarvin tasks of his audience is that anyone willing to take on his ideas must first “become worthy” which also includes accepting the NWO.
I think Yarvin takes a lot of liberties with his assumptions, particularly about the “tactical benefits” but I honestly see his writing as a treatise than a how-to as it’s been taken online.
The passage that really jumped out at me was this one: "The first, and only, moral rule is contractual enforcement: promises made must be kept. Any breakdown in this law is a sign of degradation."
Judged by this standard, the Trump administration is the most degraded in living memory. Promises to allies, trading partners, government employees, grant recipients: all of it completely out the window on a whim.
At this point, Yarvin can:
1) continue to follow this belief without recanting it
2) be intellectually serious
3) consider Trump an improvement over previous governments
Yarvin's choice of analogy is often a corporation. In that vein, there is in fact a precedent for breaking promises. It's called bankruptcy. Were you to ask Trump whether the USG was in desperate need of a little "restructuring", I imagine he'd probably agree. C.f. Trump's recent quote of Napoleon: "he who saves his country, breaks no law".
It's also debatable whether those promises were really Trump's to keep, since Trump was not the person who made those promises to begin with. It's almost as if a revolving door begets myopia and instability.
Fascinating article! I think I read it already, some time ago, but worth rereading.
Other comments have covered many of my thoughts, so I will just (e: *first*) point out one thing that I think, with all due respect, you yourself got very wrong: building a whole 'nother internet is not as useful or clever as you make it out to be. We already have an internet. It's a heck of a lot easier to make another one of something that already exists: even if you have to reverse-engineer the internals, and even if you dramatically improve the functioning of those internals, you had the existing one to look at. The guy who thought of it first is cleverer, full stop, in my opinion.
Likewise with SpaceX: yes, it's very cool, the rocket engines are very sleek, and, I'm sure, ingenious. But -- and I once had a long argument with a violin player from Nashville in college about this -- SpaceX doesn't "prove we didn't need NASA." That may seem obvious to you or me, but some people don't think things through as thoroughly as they should. NASA is like the Wright brothers, and SpaceX is like Boeing -- Boeing has done a lot more work in total, and quite possibly one or more founders or employees of Boeing contributed "more" to flight than both Wright brothers combined, but who gets the holiday? The guys who risked their lives in a crazy contraption to do something no one had ever done before.
I also wish you would have elaborated more on the "fairy dust" you mentioned that would supposedly keep these amoral states from agglomerating. I'm surprised, in fact, that the man you discuss admits that that would be a failure case, and I really can't guess what that fairy dust would possibly be, considering there is an evident propensity for real-world corporations to agglomerate toward a unitary body if left unchecked, and yet unless he proposes some world-government-type "checking agent" to regulate "corporate states" I don't think there's a possible answer comporting with his system. To be clear, I wish you would have elaborated more when you originally wrote this article, and I am certainly not asking you to go back and read his materials on my account: if I really cared to know, I would look myself, I guess.
I would also like to ask an informal pair of questions: why, in your opinion, is the man you discuss so obviously out of shape and in poor health? Why would a man incapable of governing himself effectively think himself fit to discuss how to govern anyone else? Now, in a democracy, you can be four hundred pounds and get elected, because if the people pick you, that's the final word...just saying.
Ironically, I think the state that may function closest to his ideal is in fact the People's Republic of China, in which the National People's Congress functions quite similarly to a group of representatives elected by shareholders, meeting every few years (or as needed) to appoint a board of directors and various executive officers. (Now, in China, the military is under direct Party control, or something like that, so there are some differences, I think, but I'm not really an expert.)
Wait a minute...we're all pretty dumb, aren't we? The obvious and fatal flaw in his system is, if a state is like a corporation, where are the shareholders? If you consider a state as a corporation, with a board of directors instead of a legislature, what is the equivalent of the shareholder, whose vote elects the board of directors? The shareholder is the citizen.
This line of thinking makes it clear that he is specifically discussing a *private* corporate state, rather than a state operating like a *public* corporation. A private corporate state is literally and obviously just tyranny. We may also consider how corporations are taken private: a majority of the shareholders are bought out. That is remarkably similar to the installation of a tyranny through vote-buying, now, isn't it?
So, he isn't really a hypocrite at all -- I guess he thought Trump had enough money to buy out a majority stake in America, and take it private. Not a hypocrite, then, just a goofball who believed everything he saw on TV.
Now, plainly, Musk thinks he has enough money to buy a majority stake in America, and take it private. A bit less goofy, considering he has a bit more money, but he forgot one obvious thing: people can simply refuse to sell, no matter the price.
The antiversity and passivism plan don't seem accordant with human nature. Democracy conquered humans because they like action. So lowly humans started to make Yarvin's plans happen in an ugly way, through activism and democracy. But curiously, they aren't failing quite so much as they did in the past. So it may have been worth it in the end.
This is interesting, but I'm not sure about the claim at the end that yarvin's followers actually are the leaders of the new undisciplined right. Has yarvin himself come out in favor of Trump?
Maybe you're just not doing the Neoreactionary position justice, but it seems to suffer from the same problem as any other theory that does away with justice - it doesn't account for Stalin. You say Yarvin seems to assume that the "CEO" will "make it a good place to live because a happy territory is a profitable territory," but then you wind up with Stalin or Kim Jong-Un or Caligula, who may have interests beyond profitability. And while I have some libertarian leanings, I'm not convinced that "a happy territory" is always a "profitable territory," or at least a profitable territory for the ruler. I'm fairly confident that slavery is inefficient across society, but plantation owners seemed to benefit from it, and it's more of an open question whether the plantation owners in particular would have lived materially better lives if they had freed their slaves and started paying them.
While the "right to exit" provides some salve to this problem, as the CEO may want to keep his citizens/subjects happy to avoid their leaving, the typical dictator's solution to this problem is to immediately take that right away - it's how we got the Berlin Wall. I'm not sure by what magic Yarvin intends to guarantee the right to exist.
There's a monologue in High Fidelity where Cusack recognizes that he's always drawn to cheat on or leave his current girlfriend because he imagines the next woman in sexy lingerie while he sees his current girlfriend's actual granny panties drying on the rack in the bathroom, but, in reality that the next woman will also have granny panties drying on the rack in the bathroom. The same is true when it comes to government. It's easy to imagine alternative forms of government as better, but that's because we are only imagining them in sexy lingerie while we see democracy's actual (metaphorical) granny panties drying in the bathroom, but these alternative forms of government have their own metaphorical granny panties, and a lot of times, those metaphorical granny panties come in the form of mass repression, famine, genocide and torture. I'll stick with democracy.
Even if there were a way to guarantee a right of exit, it would be meaningless without a complementary "right to enter" one or more reasonable alternatives. History is very clear: we can't depend on that.
This is not really an argument for or against neoraction. Surely, there are times when you are right to leave your girlfriend because your relationship is unhealthy. Whether your next girlfriend will be better is a harder question to answer.
How toxic/unhappy should a relationship be before you are ready to leave it?That is the crux of the matter. I've yet to see a convincing argument for why the next political system after ours will be worse or better. Ultimately it may be an unknowable question.
However, your argument amounts to settling for the girl you are with because you think she is the best you can get. That may or may not be true, but I don't begrudge Yarvin for thinking that "you can do better".
It's an argument against revolutionary ideas in general (my first two paragraphs are more directly arguments against neoreaction).
It's true that if you are in a toxic/unhappy relationship, you should consider leaving it. I don't begrudge all revolutionaries. Tsarist Russia seemed like a pretty bad place, and I can understand why people there were ready to take a spin on the wheel of revolution. The problem with the wheel of revolution is that there are a lot of very bad outcomes, and if utopia is on it at all, it's a very small slice. You're much more likely to get Stalinist Russia or North Korea or Islamic Republic Iran or Reign of Terror France. While I can understand why the people living in Tsarist Russia were willing to take their chances, I'm not sure that even they came out ahead.
Now consider the fact that, assuming you live in the US (and Yarvin does), you live somewhere much better than Tsarist Russia. The US is one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in human history. While I wouldn't say it's perfect, most people throughout history (heck most people living today) spinning the wheel of revolution would be very happy to land on "Modern USA." Yet we have all these people living in the US on the left and the right just champing at the bit to spin the wheel. I blame this on what I discuss my last paragraph - they are comparing their utopias to a real life system that does have a few warts and blemishes. They need to realize that there is no such thing as utopia, that every system is going to have its own problems, and there are a lot of ways things can turn out that are a lot worse than our current system.
This doesn't mean that you shouldn't work to improve things, but it means you should be very hesitant before you move from trying to improve the current system to burning it all down. Personally, I think that Trump/Musk are in "burn it all down" mode and, when their done, people are going to miss just how good we had it.
The motivation for spinning the wheel of revolution in America is this: although Americans are richer than many other peoples have ever been in history, they are also lacking precipitously in dignity. In addition, they are not as rich as Americans were only a few generations ago, and sense that every intuitive indication is that they will be poorer, and their children will be poorer, the father one goes into the future.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "lacking percipitously in dignity," but the idea that Americans are poorer than they once were just isn't born out by the data. And even if it is true, you still have the US as one of the wealthiest countries today, so it's hard to conclude that it could be doing much better.
Its all wishful thinking, imagining the next government in sexy lingerie, when it necessarily will have its own granny panties or worse.
Lacking in dignity, in that Americans who once enjoyed being able to live in communities with a high baseline of trust in their neighbors and a significant degree of self reliance, now find themselves wholly under the magnifying glass of a government that is hostile to both concepts and has done a great deal to undermine them.
There are a great number of charlatans who are paid to cook up graphs showing GDP, or some other number growing up, and then to say that this means that your life must be better. A revolution could make things even worse, and probably unavoidably would in the short term, but so does staying the course.
Chasing Ennui has a point about things not being that bad. Ultimately, Yarvin believes that things must get a lot worse in order for a switch to a completely different system. Yarvin's point is, things have been getting worse, and that they will continue to do so. He does not necessarily argue that we are at the point yet where burning the system down now and building something new is worth it.
This is where his progressive critics get him wrong. He has stated multiple times that a system can keep getting worse for hundreds of years. The Roman Empire was in general decline for about 300 years before the western half collapsed. His critics have far too narrow a focus on the near-term future.
Actually, he does account for Stalin. Complaints about Stalin (and co) is usually a lib's first line of defense.
In Moldbug's view, modern dictators such as Stalin were the product of paranoia. And the paranoia reflected an absence of stable succession-mechanisms. When everyone is playing the Game of Thrones, everyone is subject to fratricide.
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/02/from-mises-to-carlyle-my-sick-journey/
> Until you understand the difference between a king and a dictator, you will continue to confuse the timeless human institution of monarchy with these monstrous 20th-century abortions. In truth, the dictatorships of the 20th century were attempts to restore the vitality of the old regime. The bad ones were just bad attempts. Bad is bad; anything can be done badly, monarchy and democracy certainly both included.
> Hitler himself was a huge Carlyle fan. But Hitler was also Hitler. If you don’t understand the difference between Hitler and Frederick, it is not because you are ignorant of Hitler! The educated person of our time has a remarkably accurate picture of Nazi Germany. Of all the historical periods he understands, he understands the Third Reich best—usually, much better than his own present day. His view of the democratic regime, which survives, is shrouded in democratic euphemism; his view of the Nazi regime, which does not, is free from Nazi cant. And of the actual old regime, he knows nothing at all.
> There are many differences between Hitler and Frederick, but perhaps the key one is stability. Frederick, while not intrinsically secure from his foreign enemies, was quite secure from any domestic opposition. No one was trying to kill him; no one could have accomplished anything by killing him. He was, in short, a monarch. A dead monarch is replaced, automatically, by another monarch—the identity of whom is already known. If the old monarch was assassinated, God forbid, the new monarch is generally not the assassin (or his employers).
The Decoding the Gurus podcast devoted over two hours to Curtis Yarvin not long ago. This is the hosts' description of the episode:
=======================================================================
In this long-anticipated episode, Matt and Chris venture into the peculiar world of Curtis Yarvin—a reactionary blogger, tech entrepreneur, and self-proclaimed monarchist. Known to his early followers by the pseudonym "Mencius Moldbug," Yarvin has become a prominent figure in the "dark enlightenment" and neo-reactionary circles. Some have even hailed him as an "intellectual powerhouse" of the modern far-right, with endorsements from influential figures like Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance.
But what is Curtis really all about? In this episode, the decoders revisit the Triggernometry swamp to examine the political insights unearthed by the hard-nosed journalists Konstantin and Francis during their ferocious intellectual exchange with Yarvin.
Prepare for thrilling revelations, including the historical figures and movements Yarvin has catalogued in his encyclopedic memory, his pick for the best Elizabethan monarch, and the surprising number of non-monarchs he believes are secretly running monarchical regimes. True to form, Yarvin’s rhetorical style is nothing if not meandering. So get ready for a whirlwind tour through his "mind palace," exploring topics like Soviet Russia, Elizabethan England, Shakespearean conspiracy theories, and a fantasy world of reactionary and techno-libertarian musings—not to mention the obligatory lab-leak narratives.
Is Yarvin an edgy intellectual, a provocative contrarian, or just a verbose windbag with run-of-the-mill conspiratorial takes and a moody teenager's perspective on history? Matt and Chris tackle these questions, striving to decode Yarvin’s vision for society—and hoping, against all odds, that he might in the end just answer a single question.
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The episode can be found here:
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-view-from-neoreaction/comments?utm_source=substack%2Csubstack&publication_id=863356&post_id=158055362&utm_medium=email%2Cemail&isFreemail=true&comments=true&utm_campaign=email-half-magic-comments&action=post-comment
I haven't listened to Decoding the Gurus, but I've listened to the 'Behind the Bastards' episode on him, and they did a pretty awful job of portraying his worldview imo.
This article is a much, much better summary
I mean, those are both leftist podcasts funded to make propaganda. The owner of one was part of the mob that burned down a police station in Portland. What can you expect?
The seriousness of this good piece aside, I laughed at your Yarvin 100 vs. 10k words dig: A few years ago I did a deep dive into contemporary Leftist writing (the Jacobin set) and often found the same thing. Substance aside, the style was so aggravating I came up with a puerile definition of a Socialist: (n.) a dogmatist who generally needs 5000 words to say what could be said with 500.
It probably says more about the style of dogmatists than it does about extremists, though Yarvin seems more extreme than dogmatic. Of course, all proposed connection might be spurious.
It amazes me that this guy has become such a Pundit Phenomenon. It's as if I went to an obscure comedy club years ago and saw a performer who seemed weird but unimpressive, and then he's the Next Big Thing. I mean, I understand his appeal to a certain type of tech person. He sounds erudite and tells them they should have power, what's not to like? That's always a winning formula. But it's all such warmed-over blather. Maybe that's part of the popularity? Perhaps it's about winning a media lottery, right place right time.
I'm not a big fan of the leftist analysis about a tech-to-fascism pipeline. But sometimes I can see what they're talking about. It's not entirely in their imagination.
He is objectively a very smart and impressive individual. He got into Brown at 15 years old and was accepted into a comp-sci PHD program at Berkeley at 19. Say what you will about his ideas, but dismissing his intellectual firepower and writing ability shows you haven't really taken the time to understand it.
It reminds me of right-wingers who dismiss Marx. His ideas may have turned out to be wrong, but he was certainly ahead of his time and very perceptive in certain ways.
I wouldn't say that he's a stupid person's idea of a smart person. However, it does seem to me that he's a smart technical person's idea of an insightful political philosopher. I just can't take him seriously. Maybe it's my background going back to the days when wild tech theorizing was all over the Net in terms of pontificating on the nature of social organization (cypherpunk cryptoanarchy!). Again, its like a comedy club, I've seen a bunch of performers. But his act never struck me as very good. He wasn't at all ahead of his time, maybe it's more at riding the wave.
Look, if you haven't ever seen this stuff before, I can grasp that it seems to articulate something to you. That part isn't a mystery to me. It's the other side, where a whole section of prominent media types seem to have latched onto him as some sort bogeyman Svengali figure of Silicon Valley, which astounds me. I mean, just for example, Peter Thiel writes clearly and bluntly about "freedom and democracy" not being compatible. What you think about his ideas, his prose is readable. He's not the only SV person to write stuff like that. May it's all too clear in that form, and doesn't sound like an academic seminar.
>he's a smart technical person's idea of an insightful political philosopher
>some sort bogeyman Svengali figure of Silicon Valley, which astounds me
I'm not sure why it astounds you, in light of the first quoted statement.
SV and the left were ambivalent about each other the until around the middle of the last decade, when the relationship started turning increasingly sour.
Meanwhile the right has been pretty barren as far as insightful political philosophers are concerned for a long time, he's pretty much the best one (alive) they've got (Thiel is more of a doer than a talker), so SV is making do.
Also, Yarvin has clearly had a big influence on Thiel's thinking process.
Moldbug is also older now, and only has the one life to live. Pure principles are much more appealing when you're young, as you age you really start to want to see results in your lifetime.
The thing about criticizing order because it's flawed, is that the criticism can just as easily be thrown at democracy or oligarchy. Looking at someone like Bukele, he seems to be overwhelmingly popular, because he restored order in a country that had descended to chaos. I think it's a very nebulous question, how much chaos one is willing to put up with, but I also see the flipside, what exactly is one willing to sacrifice in the name of order.
If these days, Yarvin really thinks Trump is capable of fulfilling his vision, then he's a charlatan, whatever Trump ends up doing, it's clear he can't build something enduring (and it would most likely be undesirable if he could).
This was a really intriguing and enlightening post! I am not priori inclined to 'Neorreaction' (I'd describe myself as a very centrist European with a strong animosity towards woke) but I really value ruthless truth-searching with complete indifference to ideological vetoes, so the 'Antiversity' idea does resonate with me.
> Its narrative falls apart for me in exalting order itself, never quite answering the "for what" to my satisfaction. Yes, it could lead to atrocities, Moldbug says—but other systems have, and most of the time human nature and the incentive structures in place mean it wouldn't. As a narrative, that can work. In practice, the question I think Moldbug ends up grappling least with is the one he has the most duty to answer. Why do people rebel against the perfect order of his Right? Why does his order descend into chaos? He attributes it largely to weakness.
Not just order, but *spontaneous* order.
Order as opposed to anarchy and entropy. E.g. your very body is a polity of cells. It's ordered. Under true biological anarchy, all organisms would be unicellular, if life were to even exist at all. All good things in life are ordered, in *exactly* the same sense that all good things in life exhibit low-entropy.
> But Luther nailed his theses to the church door for a reason. People opposed slavery for a reason. Communism gained a foothold for a reason. I left Mormonism for a reason.
And "spontaneous" as opposed to coerced. As in "bottom up". As in "people acting of their own volition". If e.g. Mormonism was tyrannical, it was definitionally coercive rather than spontaneous.
I feel like you missed his UR post where he explained that NRX is a generalization of Libertarianism.
The obvious answer is that Trump succeeded by embracing the WrestleMania reality tv nature of the American democratic process. Making it public knowledge that our elections are a scripted Harlem Globetrotters game is Moldbug's first step to delegitimizing democracy as a sacred institution. I'm sure you remember the metaphor from his 2016 post explaining the left's shock at the Washington Generals winning against the script.
Why would he not support that?
Reading this was jarring, given the current funding freezes and illegal claw-backs:
"The first, and only, moral rule is contractual enforcement: promises made must be kept. Any breakdown in this law is a sign of degradation."
Also, I'm assuming Mont Pelerin is the exemplar for the Antiversity? Critique the status quo, propose an alternative, wait for a crisis, frame your alternate as the solution.
bro you are ending up to being the bill clinton of trying to make things work better but not addressing anything but how you can be correct while everything rots around you.
Yarvin is pretty nuanced and those that piggyback on his ideas are decidedly not IMO.
As to “Sophisticated window-dressing,” I think he was pretty clear in UR about what he’d like to see vis-à-vis democracy and representative government. Is this more an issue with his mainstream followers than the actual ideas in his writing?
I will say one of the things Yarvin tasks of his audience is that anyone willing to take on his ideas must first “become worthy” which also includes accepting the NWO.
I think Yarvin takes a lot of liberties with his assumptions, particularly about the “tactical benefits” but I honestly see his writing as a treatise than a how-to as it’s been taken online.
The passage that really jumped out at me was this one: "The first, and only, moral rule is contractual enforcement: promises made must be kept. Any breakdown in this law is a sign of degradation."
Judged by this standard, the Trump administration is the most degraded in living memory. Promises to allies, trading partners, government employees, grant recipients: all of it completely out the window on a whim.
At this point, Yarvin can:
1) continue to follow this belief without recanting it
2) be intellectually serious
3) consider Trump an improvement over previous governments
But he has to pick two.
Yarvin's choice of analogy is often a corporation. In that vein, there is in fact a precedent for breaking promises. It's called bankruptcy. Were you to ask Trump whether the USG was in desperate need of a little "restructuring", I imagine he'd probably agree. C.f. Trump's recent quote of Napoleon: "he who saves his country, breaks no law".
It's also debatable whether those promises were really Trump's to keep, since Trump was not the person who made those promises to begin with. It's almost as if a revolving door begets myopia and instability.
Fascinating article! I think I read it already, some time ago, but worth rereading.
Other comments have covered many of my thoughts, so I will just (e: *first*) point out one thing that I think, with all due respect, you yourself got very wrong: building a whole 'nother internet is not as useful or clever as you make it out to be. We already have an internet. It's a heck of a lot easier to make another one of something that already exists: even if you have to reverse-engineer the internals, and even if you dramatically improve the functioning of those internals, you had the existing one to look at. The guy who thought of it first is cleverer, full stop, in my opinion.
Likewise with SpaceX: yes, it's very cool, the rocket engines are very sleek, and, I'm sure, ingenious. But -- and I once had a long argument with a violin player from Nashville in college about this -- SpaceX doesn't "prove we didn't need NASA." That may seem obvious to you or me, but some people don't think things through as thoroughly as they should. NASA is like the Wright brothers, and SpaceX is like Boeing -- Boeing has done a lot more work in total, and quite possibly one or more founders or employees of Boeing contributed "more" to flight than both Wright brothers combined, but who gets the holiday? The guys who risked their lives in a crazy contraption to do something no one had ever done before.
I also wish you would have elaborated more on the "fairy dust" you mentioned that would supposedly keep these amoral states from agglomerating. I'm surprised, in fact, that the man you discuss admits that that would be a failure case, and I really can't guess what that fairy dust would possibly be, considering there is an evident propensity for real-world corporations to agglomerate toward a unitary body if left unchecked, and yet unless he proposes some world-government-type "checking agent" to regulate "corporate states" I don't think there's a possible answer comporting with his system. To be clear, I wish you would have elaborated more when you originally wrote this article, and I am certainly not asking you to go back and read his materials on my account: if I really cared to know, I would look myself, I guess.
I would also like to ask an informal pair of questions: why, in your opinion, is the man you discuss so obviously out of shape and in poor health? Why would a man incapable of governing himself effectively think himself fit to discuss how to govern anyone else? Now, in a democracy, you can be four hundred pounds and get elected, because if the people pick you, that's the final word...just saying.
Ironically, I think the state that may function closest to his ideal is in fact the People's Republic of China, in which the National People's Congress functions quite similarly to a group of representatives elected by shareholders, meeting every few years (or as needed) to appoint a board of directors and various executive officers. (Now, in China, the military is under direct Party control, or something like that, so there are some differences, I think, but I'm not really an expert.)
Wait a minute...we're all pretty dumb, aren't we? The obvious and fatal flaw in his system is, if a state is like a corporation, where are the shareholders? If you consider a state as a corporation, with a board of directors instead of a legislature, what is the equivalent of the shareholder, whose vote elects the board of directors? The shareholder is the citizen.
This line of thinking makes it clear that he is specifically discussing a *private* corporate state, rather than a state operating like a *public* corporation. A private corporate state is literally and obviously just tyranny. We may also consider how corporations are taken private: a majority of the shareholders are bought out. That is remarkably similar to the installation of a tyranny through vote-buying, now, isn't it?
So, he isn't really a hypocrite at all -- I guess he thought Trump had enough money to buy out a majority stake in America, and take it private. Not a hypocrite, then, just a goofball who believed everything he saw on TV.
Now, plainly, Musk thinks he has enough money to buy a majority stake in America, and take it private. A bit less goofy, considering he has a bit more money, but he forgot one obvious thing: people can simply refuse to sell, no matter the price.
The antiversity and passivism plan don't seem accordant with human nature. Democracy conquered humans because they like action. So lowly humans started to make Yarvin's plans happen in an ugly way, through activism and democracy. But curiously, they aren't failing quite so much as they did in the past. So it may have been worth it in the end.
This is interesting, but I'm not sure about the claim at the end that yarvin's followers actually are the leaders of the new undisciplined right. Has yarvin himself come out in favor of Trump?
Yes: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-pleasure-of-error?r=br77s&triedRedirect=true