The View From Neoreaction
Explaining Curtis Yarvin's old writing
I originally published this essay in May 2020, when Yarvin was rather less relevant to contemporary politics than he is now. People who haven’t been paying far too much attention to extremely online politics tend to misunderstand and underestimate the dissident right and its role in politics. Yarvin is one of the most foundational figures on the dissident right, and while it has evolved well beyond the specifics of his ideas and while many of his specific predictions have been falsified, his frame is more relevant than ever.
This essay is deliberately a bit bloodless. It was written in an environment where people aimed to discuss a wide range of topics dispassionately, and I was more interested in providing a clear overview of what he was saying and why than in criticizing the implications. While Yarvin’s ideas are often extreme, his presentation has generally been genteel; the ugliness and the destructiveness of the dissident right can be better understood by examining the behavior and the words of his most committed followers.
Looking back four years later and with much more direct interaction with the ecosystem downstream of Yarvin, I think I was a bit too polite in this essay, treating the ideas as something other than the sophisticated window-dressing for raw power ambitions they have increasingly proven to be. Regardless of that, I hope it proves useful at providing a concise overview of the ideas animating much of the young intellectual right.
Lately I've taken to reading the founding texts of various ideologies, and having dived deep into a few forms of communism, I thought I'd veer hard in the opposite direction and take a look at Neoreaction instead. Moldbug can be frustrating to read because of his tendency never to use 100 words when 10000 will do, his inclination to quote old texts at length and then proceed confident his point has been made (or simply tell you nothing is to be done but read the whole of an author's corpus, akin to the "go read theory" exhortation prevalent among socialists), and his reminders every few words that he is presenting dark and forbidden truths in order to yank a parasite from your mind, but his ideas have seeped out enough that I thought it best to go to the source. As such, I read every text suggested on the "About" page of his site.
Having done so, I’d like to synthesize and regurgitate it. I suspect many here are rather more familiar with him than I am, but I may as well retain a grasp on the picture, and it may prove useful for others who, like me, have only seen the second-order impacts of his approach. My aim is not to argue for or against it (partially because Scott Alexander has already sort of done that), but to analyze it as a movement: what it teaches, what it wants supporters to do, and perhaps how other movements could react to it.
The first section covers the grand narrative of Neoreaction. The second focuses on Moldbug's outline of what Neoreactionaries should do, and the third contains a few of my own thoughts.
The Grand Narrative of Neoreaction
First, an aside: Moldbug tends to start with the shocking and provocative. Why? Partially for fun, partially because he expects his enemies (progressives) have inoculated everyone well against him as the devil incarnate. If you are the devil, act like it. Any skirting around motives will only make people suspicious. Front-load your worst and most outrageous ideas so that you can become more, not less, reasonable as people read on. If there's any lesson to take from him, it's that this approach works. He's also quite fond of noting that as a result of his approach, out of many emails he received about his website, not one was negative. That was in 2008 or so, when his ideas were more obscure. I don't know how long it lasted. Still, interesting to note.
I: The progressive virus
Some word association:
Right = order = Reaction = rule of one = hierarchy = oath-keeping = strong = freedom = hard truths
Left = chaos = Progressive = democracy = rule of all = anti-hierarchy = oath-breaking = weak = tyranny = noble lies
Democracy being inherently progressive, the whole path of democracy has been one of gradual societal decline accompanied by technological growth. Progressives want all the decline, conservatives want to slow that decline down. Nobody wants to reverse it. And yet, time being what it is, to find reactionaries all you need to do is return to the past. Everyone in the past was reactionary, some more than others. Carlyle was a reactionary prophet who foresaw the future with clarity, and has been rewarded for it with invisibility.
Meanwhile, this progressive virus has taken over the world’s public opinion system. It finds its home most naturally in the American university and press, the premier knowledge-driving institutions in the world. These institutions are more correct on the facts and attract more intelligent, knowledgeable people than anywhere else, but because they are all subject to the same virus, they are systematically incorrect in predictable ways. Their opposition is scattered, unfashionable, and usually wrong, united only in disliking them. America is the only truly sovereign state in the world, and virtually every other country is a client state in one way or another (primarily in their importation of American ideals and ideas).
This wrongness can be demonstrated in three specifics: the furor over global warming, the world’s acceptance of Keynesian economics over Austrian economics, and the myth of human intellectual uniformity. It can also be demonstrated by repeated failure of predictions that “democratizing” a place will make it function better–the Arab Spring, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, so forth. The march of ‘progress’ will lead to importing hordes of third-worlders and turning America into a third-world country, steadily increasing crime (particularly noticeable in a decrease in areas you feel safe walking around in), and an ever-expanding, bloated, ineffective government.
Not all Reaction is good. Fascists and Nazis were unarguably reactionary, but caused untold human misery. We all have a clear picture of just how bad they were. Socialism has caused similar misery. Both are caused in part by democracy, the rule of the masses (after all, Germany assented to Hitler’s leadership), but have been retconned as being fundamentally opposed to democracy, thus allowing democracy to present itself as pure regardless. Meanwhile, by the philosophy of “no enemies on the left, no friends on the right,” the progressivism controlling the US and by extension the world has inoculated everybody thoroughly against the dangers of fascism, while minimizing and obscuring the dangers of progressivism. Neoreaction needs a sure plan to avoid leading to Hitler or similar horrors.
Having established this image of progressivism and democracy as a virus, what does the world look like unsullied by that virus? What is the neoreactionary view of the world and vision for the future?
II. The view from neoreaction
Each government is a sovereign corporation. It rules a section of land. There is no "should" in ownership: Whoever happens to be sovereign over the land is its rightful government and has sole responsibility to handle its internal affairs, by virtue of might. People (or countries) under that government are serfs/subjects/clients. It is their master/patron. This is the current reality–democracy just so happens to be our chosen way of leading this corporation. The client’s primary concern should be: “How effectively is this being administered?” Forget about mode of administration. Neoreactionaries just want good administration. For them, this means safety and prosperity, but they welcome the idea of others having different goals. Democracy turns out to be horribly ineffective in their vision. City-states like Singapore and Dubai are flawed but come closer than other current places to fulfilling this vision. Strong government is best. The first, and only, moral rule is contractual enforcement: promises made must be kept. Any breakdown in this law is a sign of degradation.
The most efficient way of administering would likely be similar to a joint-stock corporation, with a board of directors installing a CEO, administering the land in such a way as to maximize profit. People would have no direct voice, only exit rights, but the corporation would be incentivized to make it a good place to live because a happy territory is a profitable territory. Part of that would be a robust defense/security system and the rule of law, the stronger, the better. If you reject the laws, leave, because the law is inviolate. Ultimately, the specifics are not theirs to determine, and so there is only so much use in speculation. Their role is to prepare the way for, and eventually install, the CEO. The CEO’s role is to lead. They are not experts in administration, so they will not presume to know better than an expert CEO.
(As an aside: The specific CEO is less important than the system. Barack Obama as CEO? Sure! Steve Jobs as CEO? Absolutely. Let pilots, and only pilots, choose the CEO? Go for it. All would be improvements over the present. The important thing is establishing that the system as a whole must go. Arbitrary leadership is fine, as long as it's strong, though of course some options are better than others.)
At times it feels similar to anarcho-capitalism. This is because it was derived from anarcho-capitalism, with the added observation that libertarians have no means to achieve their ideal society. They see it, in fact, as a means of achieving their libertarian utopia. To achieve freedom, first fulfill other needs: peace, security, law. Once this is reached, the state can and will improve by minimizing intervention into lives, allowing people to think whatever they want (while being safely and completely removed from the levers of power). The absence of law and order is chaos, not freedom.
The ultimate Neoreactionary vision is the world as Patchwork, a worldwide conglomeration of sovereign corporations not unlike Scott Alexander’s Archipelago, with each having iron rule within its own domain, competing for customers (people) by offering various visions and services, with a bit of fairy dust to ensure cooperation and prevent merging into one giant macrostate (which would count as a failure of the system). Each culture would be free to do its own thing without interference from others, guided by benevolent (read: profit-seeking) CEOs and boards of directors who care not at all what their citizens are doing as long as it is law-abiding and profitable.
That is the skeleton of neoreactionary doctrine. What is neoreactionary practice?
Neoreactionary practice
I. Passivism
What does this mean? As the word hints, the opposite of activism in all regards. No seeking official power. Zero. No press releases, no bombings, no sit-ins, no political parties, no assassinations, not even voting. Complete non-participation in the political system as it stands. Have no illusions as to your relationship to the government: you submit to its authority, you hope for its success, you play no part in its decision structure.
Why? Participation both activates the structure’s immune system and grants the structure legitimacy and power. Remember, democracy is progressive. You don’t win by becoming the enemy. Conservatives provide a useful foil to progressives, making them hyper-motivated and deadly. Again, for emphasis: Conservatives are not your allies. McCarthyism sought to make Communism political poison, and succeeded only in making itself political poison while Communism trudged on. Starve the parasite. Don’t feed it. Fade away, and make yourself maximally non-threatening. They will care much less about impeding you and will not be able to grow stronger via opposing you.
The other benefits: First, you avoid creating the next Hitler. Hitler was a reactionary who originated in a democratic party and gained power by stirring the people’s emotions. He sought power and found it. Don’t seek power. Don’t mix reaction and democracy, thus sullying both. Don’t create Hitler. Second, by staying out of the fight, combatants don’t have to swap tribal loyalties from red to blue or the reverse to join you. Your goal is peace, not victory of one tribe in the war. You want to remove all political power from both, not grant more to team red.
Again: Stay out of the democratic system entirely. It will bring you nothing but trouble.
II. Create a Credible Alternative
Why did the Soviet Union collapse? Not only because it was incompetent and reprehensible, but because there was always a bright red button nearby that said “Surrender to America”. There was, in other words, a credible alternative. This single, clear option formed a Schelling point for the regime’s opponents to cluster around. There is, on the other hand, no clear existing alternative to American democracy. The neoreactionary’s job: Create that.
Start with the brain: the university system. You must create an Antiversity, distinguished by only speaking truth. Its weapon is its credibility. Prudent silence in the face of ambiguity is an option for it. Spreading falsehoods is not. Recognize that the current system has built up cruft and non-truth-serving things like Chief Diversity Officers, so without none of that you will have some advantages in the pursuit of truth. Use every advantage. Create something pure, something good, something truthful. Ultimately, this institution will operate as advisor to the new leadership.
Once it has been well and truly established, use it to offer a comprehensive alternative to the democratic program–mapping your plan out fully and in detail–achievable from within the bounds of democracy. A constitutional amendment abolishing the Constitution? Perhaps. Create a shadow government, prepared to lead a transition to assigning ultimate power in some . Give people a boolean choice between the US government (which will presumably be faltering and struggling) and this new alternative. Make the alternative worthy of its charge.
The only barrier here is number of supporters. A massive barrier, but theoretically overcomeable. Start by offering truth and only truth, and thereby attract the weird sort of people who seek out pure truth. Offer victory alongside that, and when you become credible the bulk of people who are mostly seeking victory will eventually flop over to your side. Simple! Absurd, but simple.
“In short,” Moldbug puts it, “all the Reaction must do is convince reasonable, educated men and women of good will to support stable, effective and reliable government.”
III. Enact the plan
Okay, so you’ve got this engine in the Antiversity, and you’ve got a plan, but you’ve still got to convince the country/world. How do you go about doing that? Follow the example of previous groups who have taken over the world. Start with Marxists. They’re good at that stuff.
The Antiversity will be learning and outlining the truth. Once it has it, anyone is free to promote and share it. (“Certainly, by 2019, the Antiversity will have no trouble in communicating its truths to the People,” Moldbug says). The key to public communication, Moldbug proposes: “Move down the IQ ladder very cautiously and very steadily.”
You need an exclusive vanguard party holding an ideological standard, with a concrete program, rejecting all promises of partial authority. In other words: You’re not looking for quantity of supporters for a while, only quality, and you're willing to test for it and stay tiny at first to ensure that. You are promoting something clear and precise. You are not looking to integrate into the current system, only present a fully formed alternative to it. Your party’s “mind” will be the Antiversity (though it’s a distinct entity), and all people need to do is switch their intellectual alliegance from the university to it. Note that the party will dissolve entirely when it wins.
Teach and organize, teach and organize. No secret to it. Create a bunch of local cells, recruit people to them, possibly with tests. Practice Gramscian infiltration. Attract great people to your side. Build up legitimacy. Eventually: slide in, create a smooth transition of power, and fade out.
That’s neoreactionary practice as Moldbug envisioned it. What are my thoughts?
My thoughts
I: My core objection
Almost every ideology I know of claims to base its views on objective, impartial analysis of truth. Neoreaction is no exception. The leftist narrative is one of class struggle, and they aspire to inspire class consciousness and lead to a Revolution. They look at the world through Hegelian and Marxist lenses and point to Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and similar works to explain more mainstream takes. The democratic/progressive narrative Moldbug focuses so much on is one of history always moving forward as we discard the moral errors of the past, with a constant thread of lurching back into Reaction. The neoreactionary narrative is one of a world always crying out for order while Cthulhu swims leftward and drags us all into slow but persistent chaos.
I think a fact-first view of ideologies can be a mistake. Factual truth is important, but brilliant people have been convinced to follow every ideology under the sun. The narrative, the feeling of the whole thing, the itches it scratches... that's what convinces people. Some of Moldbug's examples are accurate. Others are exaggerated. Still others strike me as absurd. But the facts are not the key. Honestly, this may be where Moldbug loses me the most. I think his Antiversity idea would be interesting, but I don't believe for a second it would proceed from pure, unvarnished truth. It would just throw a different narrative coating over the underlying factual claims.
Like any other ideology, Neoreaction is fundamentally aiming to answer what ought to be, not what is, and like many others, it cloaks that in a claim to be sticking to the is. I don't think its factual claims lead obviously to its overarching narrative, but a narrative doesn't need to be perfectly coherent, only to be good enough to allow for stable belief.
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.
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. Something wasn't true. Some part was unjust. Something didn't fit. Some part of the system broke down and caused misery for someone or some group, and that injured party fought for whichever alternative they could find. Order is great... until it isn't. And no matter how patiently you explain to someone that, if you just look impartially at the evidence, you'll find that x or y is the best way to do things... if they're the one getting the short end of some stick, no amount of perfectly conceived order is enough to satisfy them. For one simple example, divine right more-or-less worked until people stopped believing in it, and once you lose the reason for the order, you lose its support. Neoreaction exalts order, but its response to the pitfalls of that order is lacking.
Having tasted both, I'll freely admit I prefer most of the fruits of order, but when I no longer fit into that order I saw no choice but to walk away. I can't fault the world for doing likewise, even though I still hold out hope for a better sort of order. As such, I reject Neoreaction's narrative and its vision, but some of its factual claims are still worth taking note of.
II: Neoreaction's value
For those of us who disagree with its overall narrative, Neoreaction is useful in the same way that the prosecution is useful in court, by the same logic that causes the Catholic Church to employ Devil’s advocates. Courts split into prosecution and defense for a clear reason: each side is only really motivated to emphasize part of the truth. Moldbug is democracy’s Devil’s advocate. He examines the same fact picture as the rest of us, determined to shape it into a narrative counter to the one most of us choose. By placing himself so clearly and unambiguously in opposition to a) progressives and b) democracy, he examines the traditionally unexamined, and is therefore likely to spot errors most others overlook.
This is compounded by his actionable advice and his real-world actions. Twelve years on, I don’t think an Antiversity exists, Moldbug's hopes aside. But I do think a Reactionary university would be a genuinely useful thing to have, equal and opposite to a Harvard or a Yale, able to cross-examine it and prepared to collectively arrive at a more complete truth. And, while that doesn’t exist and likely won’t, he’s the sort of person who has already created an alternative to the internet from the lowest possible level up. That may or may not catch on, but someone willing to put in that amount of serious work deserves a bit of serious consideration.
His work, in other words, has some potential to add or inspire genuine ideology-neutral value in the world. It encourages people to build useful things, and that encouragement is backed up by serious work in… building useful things. That's as it should be. The fruits of an ideological movement should provide clear evidence of the value of that movement.
III: On movement-building
Neoreaction’s path to power is an ideologically neutral one, and it isn’t senseless. Whether someone supports or opposes it, that pattern is worth paying attention to. Its focus on the far future parallels that of Communism and Christianity, calling for the Reaction instead of the Revolution or the Rapture. I do find that impractically ambitious in the sense that its goal is to change nothing until it changes everything at once, and that’s probably already enough to keep it from success by its standards (something that should be encouraging for those of us who would rather not see the Reaction). I like the idea of passivism, though, and appreciate that it says “create something better” before its “smash the system” step. Both of those make it less likely to turn into something truly nasty. The approach of aiming for a smart, focused, committed group toeing the party line first, then slowly branching out and becoming part of the broader fabric, is the sort of thing that can lead to lasting changes in the ideological ecosystem thirty or so years down the road if it succeeds. Has that approach succeeded? Ask me again in fifty years.
Examining the approach with an eye towards movement-building, I think it would be more effective if it encouraged people to make real, substantive, immediate changes in their lives, spelling out what those changes were. It sketches some of that out, but there’s no lifestyle inherent to it, only the future vision. “Build cool things” is a good step, but not enough alone to sustain a movement. It mentions organizing, but only as a means to an end. It lacks an inherent sense of community or commitment, even though it tries to hint at them, and perhaps that’s why ten years out it hasn’t gone all that far beyond getting some ideas out into the conversation. Unless, of course, they’re doing something massive just out of sight, and have organized much more than it seems, and/or if Urbit somehow gets Neoreaction to take off even though Moldbug has stepped away from the project.
In summary, I don't think Neoreaction has quite the organizational vision to become a serious force, nor the moral core to allow me to root for it even if it does, but I do think it has enough to bear some useful fruit and to act as food for thought to other aspiring movement-builders.
Rereading this analysis four years later, the part I find most interesting is the way Yarvin’s followers abandoned any notion of passivism as soon as they smelled a hint of power. Yarvin provides three steps, deliberately grandiose, to anyone seeking influence:
Become worthy.
Accept power.
Rule!!1!
Four years ago, I mentioned that of those three, step one seemed by far the most important, with the others being poisoned in its absence.
Yarvin claimed, as he was building the frame of neoreaction, that participation in a democratic system was antithetical to his goals, and that Hitler-like figures emerged in democracies by stirring people’s emotions with Reactionary promises, sullying both. His followers nodded along, then leaped—with him following—into democracy by passionately supporting Donald Trump. There was no period of becoming worthy, no serious effort at creating an independent ecosystem, no waiting for the old system to collapse, as Yarvin claimed to want. There was certainly no period of offering truth and only truth, and indeed his supporters gravitated towards a movement led by a man to whom truth is irrelevant at best. Yarvin’s claim to want peace, not victory of one tribe in a culture war, has been replaced by a crowd of young right-wingers determined to smash their perceived enemies and grind their institutions to dust.
As for what comes next? Yarvin’s been wrong about many of his predictions. We’ll see, I suppose, whether he’s wrong about what happens when, in his parlance, you mix wine and sewage.
To see further commentary on this essay, including some lengthy elaboration from me, please see the original thread on Reddit.
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.
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.