Kind Advice from One White Fascist to Another: Tikvah Tablet Hero Curtis Yarvin Explains How to Do Racial Terrorism Properly to the Buffalo Shooter

[David Shasha]

Letter to a Young “White Supremacist”

By: Curtis Yarvin

Why are you here? You’re here because you want to go shoot up a grocery store or something. But first, you have to finish your manifesto. (I always read all of these manifestos. This time I skimmed a little of the /k/ stuff. Guns don’t make me hard—could just be my age.)

You have to finish your manifesto. And you read somewhere that I “wasn’t allergic to white nationalism,” also that I once compared Anders Breivik to Nelson Mandela. So you came here hoping for some inspiration… some text to crib… a quote, at least.. maybe a link or two to drop in… real favor you’re doing everybody out here.

It is true that I said these things, and also that I have been reading the racist Internet since South Africa Sucks was a thing. Or, I guess, as the Beastie Boys put it, “since you were sucking your mother’s dick.” Let me tell you how to not be an Internet racist, and maybe even how not to shoot up any (more) grocery stores.

TLDR: you are suffering from what we Jews call “false consciousness.” Your ideas are not your ideas. They are your enemy’s ideas, twisted around backward. They are not worthy of your courage and innocence. They are weapons made to work against you.

Put them all in the recycling and then scrub your hands thoroughly. You’ll probably be fine. The Western world may or may not be fine—but you’re sure not helping. Please let me try to show you how to do this right.

You must not chimp

First, you have to define racist as the right thing. I long resisted this paragon of 20th century newspeak—but even newspeak has its uses. The trick is to use the definition that everyone uses, but make it work for you. Then, don’t be a “racist.”

A racist is a social race warrior—a person emotionally committed to the “huwhyte” side of the race war. (Black folks cannot be racist—only passionate.) A racist is someone who thinks about the white race the way a Dodgers fan thinks about the Dodgers. Or a Japanese soldier in WWII thinks about the Emperor. A racist is pro-white. Right?

For better or for worse, the human mind has a military module—which is inseparable from its model of politics. Chimps make war; the military mind is at least as old as the chimp-human split.

When we say that the essential political distinction is the distinction between friend and enemy, we say that the military and the political are one. The political war is a cold war in which certain weapons and tactics are restricted—not always rationally, and not always symmetrically.

One of my strongest beliefs is that everyone should turn their military emotions off—whether or not they are at war. You probably are at war—still, turn them off. This is not just the best thing for you—not even just the best thing for some poor schmuck who picked the wrong moment to buy groceries. It is even the best thing for your war.

Politics is war and, as Trotsky said, whether or not you are interested in war, war is interested in you—so you are at war, whether you like it or not. But even when at war, you should turn your military sense way down. Mostly it wants you to run screaming at the enemy, waving your hand-ax. This is not how humans fight—not at least for long.

You should not make war emotionally because you are not a chimpanzee. Actually you are something much more deadly than a chimpanzee: a man. As the gom-jabbar scene in Dune reminds us, the test of humanity is the power to overcome animal emotion.

A chimp is lethal in unarmed combat. A chimp would not make much of a sniper. A chimp could shoot up a grocery store. But there would be more wounded than dead.

When you and everyone like you is ready to practice unemotional politics, human politics—ironic, counterintuitive, Machiavellian politics—you will brush your real enemies (who are not who you think they are) aside like straw. You will be so much stronger than them that you can defeat them completely without harming them at all. You may even deserve to defeat them.

Neutrality

Civilization, regardless of whatever races did or did not invent it, introduced a third category into Schmittian chimp politics: neutrality. For the first time, between human individuals or groups, it became possible to escape the friend-enemy distinction.

Neutrality made it possible to address the outsider civilly, as neither friend nor enemy, but united under law—owing the due duties and respects due to a stranger under law. Neutrality is the source of all true peace—universal friendship is universal conquest.

For example, if you believe in the “great replacement,” by definition you believe that these replacing populations are not the cause of the replacement. They are not your friends. They are also not your enemies. Therefore you should be neutral toward them.

Neutrality lets you focus on the actual cause, which is your actual enemy. Moreover, this enemy may be abstract rather than personal—it may be a system or structure, not a set of human beings large or small. (Note that even if the problem was the Jews, even in this utterly retarded strawman philosophy, fragging their clients just excites them.)

The problem may in fact be a regime—and even the humans who operate this machine may be (and I believe are) entirely innocent and even well-meaning. They are just cogs in it. On the day after it breaks, they will be harmless—like former Stasi officers.

So in a sense you actually have no human enemies at all. Your Bushmaster is designed to kill humans. It is useless—far worse than useless, in fact—against systems. Sorry. Try just showing it to girls instead—a lot of girls actually love to go to the range.

Come with me if you want to win

Whereas—when you chimp, you are doing exactly what they want you to do. Everyone will call you some kind of spy, agent, “glowie”—this is all wrong. You are just a chump. Dude: please don’t be a chump.

There is in fact a Machiavellian sense in which Nelson Mandela, who did terrorism, is better than Anders Breivik, who did terrorism. The sense is that Mandela’s terrorism worked. It led toward political victory. Breivik’s terrorism led away from victory. (This is because there is actually no symmetry between left and right.)

The laws of war have always smiled on effective bloodshed, and frowned on gratuitous or even counterproductive bloodshed. To ban an effective military approach calls the concept of law itself into question, because the ban will simply be ignored—like the Pope trying to ban the crossbow.

Restricting unnecessary carnage is the best that any system of rules can do—and unnecessary carnage is inefficient carnage. Military efficiency hates anything chaotic. If the law is on the same side as the generals, it stands some chance of being obeyed. The original purpose of the law of war was to help generals keep their own soldiers from sacking and pillaging like Huns.

But even to want to chimp—even to have the emotion of a race warrior—even to be a racist—even this is wrong. It is wrong not because it is evil, but because it can’t work. It does not show the proper style; it is not cutting the universe at its joints; its soul is bad and erroneous, which is why it creates bad and erroneous results.

What is going on is not right. You sense that. You also have a will to prevail. This, too, is good. But you cannot prevail in the race war—since the race war is fake and lame. You can only prevail over this idea of a race war. You are neither a Dodgers fan nor a Giants fan; you do not follow baseball at all; you doubt baseball should even exist.

You do not see any essential conflicts between Americans today. You do not believe there is any essential conflict between black and white, red and blue, rich and poor, male and female, etc, etc, etc. You deny the whole framework that sets up these wars, hot or cold, and makes them feel like they make sense in the first place.

All these cold civil wars are epiphenomena of a broken political system. The founders were convinced that their republic would not have political “factions.” Every republic ever, modern or ancient, has had political “factions.” While factionalism in democracy was soon accepted as inevitable, it took Karl Marx to suggest that it was actually good.

Factionalism is not good. The first sign of a healthy regime will be that it disappears. Ideally there is no collective public action at all, whether along cultural fracture lines or not. No one is part of any Marxian army of the crowd—there is no army of Blacks, of women, of Christians, etc, etc, etc. I know—it sounds completely unrealistic. Sigh.

How to not have a race war

Here are two ideas that aren’t racist—or at least don’t have to be racist. One is that homogeneous communities work best by most measures of social health. Two is that there is no evidence for the global uniformity of any variable human biological trait, including socially and economically meaningful traits. These ideas are not racist (in the sense that they imply a race war), nor are any deductive derivations from them.

Yes, both these ideas can be and have been used as weapons of race war. This does not affect their truth. Obviously, true ideas make better weapons than false ideas. The way to handle a dangerous true idea, inherently a weapon, is not have a war to use it in. The way not to have a war is to figure out how everyone can live in peace and harmony.

Let us suppose that we live in an imaginary empire populated by 1/3 Somalis, 1/3 Jews from Jersey or Long Island, and 1/3 Mormons. If this empire is ruled by a deranged 12-year-old emperor, he may try to homogenize these populations—forcibly mixing them up geographically, making sure their kids learn the same lessons in the same schools, creating a new national religion which is Mormon-Jewish-Islamic, etc, etc—for much the same reason the same 12-year-old wants to mix all the sodas from the dispenser.

Whereas a normal, sane regime accepts that anyone who wants to be Mormon, Jewish, Somali, etc, prefers to experience a social environment consisting of other Mormons, Jews, Somalis, etc. Some people do not want a traditional cultural identity at all. These people are globalists. Unsurprisingly, globalists prefer the company of other globalists. And absolutely no one wants to be an Islamic-Mormon Jew—just like no one wants to drink the 12-year-old’s multi-soda.

To the extent that Mormons live in Utah and Somalis live in Somalia, there is no need to work out rules for how Mormons and Somalis can share one geographical space. To the extent that Somalia has been infiltrated by Mormons or vice versa, there is such a need. This problem is not actually all that hard—even the Dutch have solved it. And they are hardly alone in history.

Such rules are strictly practical and assume a rigid neutrality. There is no need to dust off the old skull-calipers and compare the sizes of Mormon and Somali brains. Either of these groups might be better than the other in any way—the law does not care. No regime has any sound reason to merge its tribes or nourish frictions between them. Sometimes their geographical distribution is very discrete, sometimes very mixed—either way, a capable regime can handle it.

The principle of neutrality between tribes does not admit any concept of superiority or inferiority, just as it does not admit any concept of sympathy or animosity. Between neutral groups there are no friends and no enemies—only peace and good manners. Ideally, trade between communities is financially balanced, so that they do not end up in each others’ debt. And the globalists (people like me!) are a people of their own.

The strawman heel

If the narrative is true, why are you here? If it is kayfabe, it needs its “heel”—its designated enemy. When a narrative can suppress all high-quality opponents, it is free to promote low-quality opponents. Giving them narrative oxygen does not feel dangerous—it feels essential. No narrative can be compelling without a villain.

(There is actually no such thing as a “white supremacist.” Scientists have identified the last serious person who used that term seriously to describe himself. His name was “Vernon.” Vernon won a Bronze Star in the Korean War and was 94 when he died in 2019 in a nursing home near Nashville. You ain’t reminding me much of Vernon.)

Especially when there is no obvious high-quality dissident narrative, the villainous narrative is often the most compelling and obtainable counternarrative around. It also includes large quantities of DNA from the winning narrative—right-wing terror is always a historical response to left-wing terror and tends to borrow its methods. In the war between Hitler and Stalin, Hitler is the student and Stalin is the master. This hybridization of heel rhetoric and the bizarre worship of revolutionary violence is the germ of right-wing terror from the OAS in Algeria to lone-wolf teen spergs in Buffalo. Everything declines over time, especially when it goes from France to Buffalo.

Here is an interesting fact about 20th-century history: the Holocaust was not part of Allied propaganda in WWII. War crimes featured prominently, but not death camps. There were two practical reasons for this. One, the idea that the Allies were fighting on behalf of the Jews was part of the Nazi narrative. Two, this type of propaganda was reminiscent of the widely-discredited “corpse factory” British WWI narrative.

But the death camps were actually a thing (even if human soap wasn’t). So in WWII, Germany actually becomes the Germany it was falsely accused of being in WWI. But at the time, when it matters, the Allied press cannot accuse it of doing the awful thing it is in fact doing—because the boy has already cried wolf. (Also, Jews were not yet super popular among all corners of the Anglo-American elite.)

Meanwhile, the power of the Anglo-American narrative is so strong that it can even compel its enemy—to the point where said enemy carries out an enormous project that without advantage to its war effort will blacken its name for literally millennia, seemingly only out of a psychological compulsion to assume the image of liberalism’s devil. To fit the dominant story is to be on stage—and everyone wants to be on stage.

TLDR: like, everyone wants to be a tool of power. Often in fucked-up backward reverse psychology ways. Just don’t be a tool, man.

Conclusion

It is true that importing populations as a long-term votebank is a terrible way to hack a democracy. It is true that populations have collective externalities on each other—especially when it is considered acceptable for some populations to inflict collective externalities on each other. It is true that one such externality is a shift in voting patterns, creating a shift in political power. It is true that this has happened here.

It is especially galling that the narrative insists on a total lack of purpose or intention in these systematic demographic changes—“a purely natural phenomenon, like the swallows returning to Capistrano.” Nothing could be more symptomatic of a ruling class that cannot see itself from the outside—its delight in this victory is obvious.

(The same governing narrative, including a young Senator Biden, tried to keep out Vietnamese refugees in 1975—either to protect American jobs in a difficult time of high unemployment, or because the Saigonese might turn out to be anticommunist rabid Neanderthuglicans. Future historians will have to make this tough call.)

All these issues point to fatal constitutional flaws which need to be fixed in the next iteration of the American political experiment. But first, there will have to be a next iteration of the American political experiment.

Unfortunately, my son, all your little terrorism spree will do is to shore up the current iteration—besides ruining your life, and your family’s life, and ending a few others if you actually know how to use that thing. Which, unfortunately, you usually do.

From Gray Mirror, author Substack page, May 18, 2022

 

Curtis Yarvin: The Red-Pill Prince

By: Jacob Siegel

In his first public appearance after five years of semiofficial banishment, Curtis Yarvin began to cry. It was late February 2020 and Yarvin was the special guest at a live podcast in Los Angeles. A graphic promoting the event shows the computer engineer turned political philosopher, then 46 years old, wearing his black leather motorcycle jacket and wire-framed glasses and staring out with practiced intensity. Over Yarvin’s left shoulder floats a bust of the deceased rapper Lil Peep.

The moody digital aesthetic is called vaporwave. Ma, Pa, have you heard of vaporwave? It is a very of-the-moment style that uses retro computer graphics to evoke the feeling of haunting nostalgia for a vanishing human presence.

The metaphor was apt. In 2014, Yarvin—who had spent seven years blogging about politics and society under the name Mencius Moldbug—went silent, shifting his attention back to his grand project of building a functional software stack called Urbit that promised to revolutionize computing. But his political pronouncements soon caught up to him. In 2016, after the second planned talk at a computer programming conference was canceled on account of his political views, Yarvin found himself writing lines like: “I am not an ‘outspoken advocate for slavery,’ a racist, a sexist or a fascist.” As anyone who’s been on the internet lately can tell you, a person who must publicly deny that they are a fascist has already lost. When the invitations stopped coming, Yarvin didn’t protest.

“When I invited him to be a guest at that event, he was truly radioactive,” the podcast’s organizer, a young intellectual entrepreneur named Justin Murphy, told me recently. The scene brought out LA art hipsters, connoisseurs of civilizational decline, and PayPal founder Peter Thiel. The billionaire, who was one of the first investors in Facebook and has been a longtime patron of Yarvin’s, drank Pabst Blue Ribbon and ate pizza. Thiel’s car idled outside the club, engine on, driver behind the wheel, ready in case the need arose for a sudden exit. Rumor has it that Thiel takes this precaution wherever he goes, but it was not out of place that evening. Murphy, who spent several years in his 20s participating in militant “black bloc” anarchist protests, was worried antifa might show up to protest the event.

The night went off without a hitch. Yarvin had chosen an ideal venue to reemerge, with podcasts providing one of the only channels left to reach the public now that the glossy magazines, publishing houses, and other arteries for circulating new ideas had been choked off by the narrowing band of acceptable opinions.

Depending on what circles you run in, it can seem like everyone now has an opinion about Curtis Yarvin—and that includes me. We were introduced in 2017 when I received a short, unsolicited email from him calling me a “fake writer” working in a “fake century.” The email arrived after I’d published an essay that mentioned Yarvin a handful of times and referred to him as “an architect of antidemocratic, Neoreactionary politics.” The brashness, it turned out, was just Yarvin’s way of getting my attention. Thus began an occasional correspondence that has included a handful of interactions over the last five years. And so, without giving it a great deal of thought, I added myself to the extended network of people being courted, outraged, and shaped by the man and his work.

Like Niccolò Machiavelli, to whom he is sometimes compared, Yarvin defines himself as an amoral realist who invented a new theory of government that upends established doctrines of political morality. Starting in the late 2000s, his name—not his real name, he was still known then by his blogging pseudonym—began to be whispered among some of the most powerful people in the country, a secret society made up of disaffected members of the American elite.

Shortly after Donald Trump entered the White House, reports started to circulate that Yarvin was secretly advising Trump strategist Steve Bannon. His writing, according to one article, had established the “theoretical groundwork for Trumpism.”

Yarvin denied the rumors, sometimes playfully and at other times strenuously. But he was consistent in his criticisms of the Trumpian approach to politics. Mass populist rallies and red MAGA hats struck him as merely a weak imitation of democratic energies that had already died out. “Trump is a throwback from the past, not an omen of the future,” he wrote in 2016. “The future is grey anonymous bureaucrats, more Brezhnev every year.”

What Yarvin is, if one wants to be accurate, is the founder of neoreaction, an ideological school that emerged on the internet in the late 2000s marrying the classic anti-modern, anti-democratic worldview of 18th-century reactionaries to a post-libertarian ethos that embraced technological capitalism as the proper means for administering society. Against democracy. Against equality. Against the liberal faith in an arc of history that bends toward justice.

Instead, neoreactionaries subscribe to the classical idea that history moves in cycles. In an era when the iconic Shepard Fairey portrait of Barack Obama captured the HOPE of the nation, Yarvin and his followers were busy explaining why liberal democracy was already doomed.

Unlike some of the other neoreactionary writers that emerged in the last 20 years, Yarvin possessed a style that, even when discoursing at great length on the gold standard or obscure historical matters, never suggested powdered wigs. He wrote like what he was: a hyperintellectual Ivy League autodidact and wiseass tech geek masking his childhood insecurities with an aura of infallibility, who shared the same set of subcultural and sitcom references found in anyone else his age. At its best, this approach made difficult ideas accessible—not to mention viral. In one of his earliest blog posts, Yarvin birthed the now-ubiquitous meme of “the red pill,” a metaphor he borrowed from The Matrix movies and turned into a worldwide catchphrase describing the revelation of a suppressed truth that shatters progressive illusions and exposes a harsh underlying reality.

In Yarvin’s worldview, what keeps American democracy running today is not elections but illusions projected by a set of institutions, including the press and universities, that work in tandem with the federal bureaucracy in a complex he calls the Cathedral. “The mystery of the Cathedral,” Yarvin writes, “is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.”

Living Americans might be able to glean a sense of the phenomenon Yarvin describes in the current public discourse. It has often seemed in recent years that every few weeks has brought a new instance in which journalists and experts instantaneously, almost magically converged on shared talking points related to the hysteria du jour—cycling through moral crusades to free children from cages at the U.S. border, save the post office from a fascist coup, label the filibuster a tool of white supremacy, and so on. The power of the Cathedral is that it cannot be seen because it is located everywhere and nowhere, baked into the architecture of how we live, communicate, and think.

The night that Yarvin reemerged onto the scene at the LA event, the story that moved him to tears concerned the life of the English writer Freda Utley, who became a communist in 1928—an era, he observed archly, when “anyone who was smart or cool was a communist.” Utley moved to the Soviet Union and a few years later her husband was arrested and shipped to the gulag never to be seen again. She fled to the United States with her infant son and tried to warn her friends that their imagined utopia was really a police state. “Of course, her friends are like, ‘Do I know you?’ Who is this anti-Soviet person knocking at the door? They’re like, ‘Fuck you.’” Yarvin arrived at the moral of his story: “You really shouldn’t expect the material rewards of success to come along with the spiritual rewards of telling the truth.” He swallowed a sob. “You really shouldn’t,” he said, and wiped a tear from his eye.

In Yarvin’s parable, he is both the betrayed figure of Utley, martyred for telling the truth, and the above-it-all narrator explaining how the world really works. To his readers, his immense, fortresslike body of work offers one of the only redoubts where they can glimpse the realities of power behind the political circus. To his skeptics, he is a minor fraud whose claims to be a truth-telling iconoclast belie a fundamental affinity with the status quo. Yarvin’s calls to do away with democracy and turn, say, Elon Musk into America’s new CEO king—that’s just the liberal technocratic system we already have on speed, an acceleration into the most dystopian aspects of the endless neoliberal present. To his critics, he is, as noted, a fascist. They point to a handful of his statements from a decade ago, including one in which he argued that certain races were better suited to slavery than others, and to the fact that the central pillar of his outlook is an avid opposition to the principles of democracy and equality. Yarvin, they say, is not a victim but the sender-off to the gulags; behind his tears, he plots to oppress minorities and tear down whatever remains of liberal democracy.

The essence of Yarvin as a historical figure begins not with his politics but his talents as a computer engineer, or programmer, the latter of which is his preferred label since he sees himself as a builder of things that work, not simply a manipulator of symbols. To separate his roots in technology from the politics he developed is to miss what is most powerful about him—his understanding of the hidden designs behind the systems of knowledge and power that keep both computers and societies running. The universal rule that he deduced is almost mystical in its simplicity: Order is good, not merely in an instrumental sense because it leads to virtuous outcomes; it is good in itself. Whatever leads to more of it is also good, while anything that produces disorder is bad.

While conservatives who have come to embrace Yarvin speak of restoring natural rights and using state power to direct the common good, for him, “it is impossible to go directly from hypocrisy to morality. A cleansing bath of amoral realism must intervene.” Yarvin is not a nationalist or a populist, nor even a conservative. Rather, he is the signature example of a political theorist born after the death of 20th-century mass political movements, on the unsettled terrain of the internet. Whether you like it or not, Yarvin is the philosopher of, at the very least, our near future.

The father of neoreaction was raised in the bosom of the American state. His paternal grandparents were Jewish American communists. Yarvin’s father worked for the U.S. government as a foreign service officer, which took his family overseas to Portugal, Cyprus, and the Dominican Republic. His mother was a Protestant from Westchester County who eventually also joined the civil service, as did Yarvin’s stepfather. The progeny of this Jewish-WASP-Stalinist, civil service, Cold War liberal American heritage was a child math prodigy and computer whiz who liked to write poetry. It didn’t make social life easy, especially when his family returned to the United States just as he began high school.

“I had already skipped one grade back in Fairfax County and they did an admission test, so I skipped two more and then I’m 11 in ninth grade,” he told me. “Then we come back to the States and I go to an American public high school in Columbia, Maryland, and I’m a 12-year-old sophomore, which is definitely wack.”

At 15, Yarvin entered college as part of Johns Hopkins’ longitudinal Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. A year later, he transferred to Brown University in Rhode Island as a legacy admission to the Ivy League liberal arts college, where his parents had met in the mid-’60s. After graduating, it was on to a computer science Ph.D. program at Berkeley. He dropped out after a year and a half to take a tech job at the height of the go-go ’90s dot-com era.

In late adolescence, Yarvin had a formative experience on an early internet message board called Usenet. “It was a decentralized system, and more importantly it had this amazing form of admission control because everyone on it was an engineering student or worked at a tech company or something,” Yarvin told me. He participated on forums like talk.bizarre, absorbing the inside jokes and new iterative patterns of thinking that were being developed on the outpost of a still-innovative and experimental digital culture. Occasionally he posted a poem or short piece of fiction to the board.

The end came in 1993 when America Online, the first mass internet provider, offered Usenet access to its subscribers—resulting in a flood of uninitiated, unwashed provincials overrunning the community. “You had this sort of de facto aristocracy that didn’t know it was an aristocracy, and then it fell apart.”

“After the dot-com crash, I was left with a newly acquired girlfriend (who would become my wife), a few hundred thousand dollars, and a place in San Francisco,” Yarvin told me of his early career. The buyout came from his job at a mobile software company that was founded in 1996 as Libris before changing its name to Unwired Planet, and then Phone.com. The settlement was “considerably less than ‘fuck you’ money,” Yarvin said, but enough to finance an extended self-education in history and political theory that was attained by searching through Google’s ‘library of everything, ever,’ which was brand new at the time.

“My ideas really came from reading the Austrian School—Mises and Rothbard—and then Hoppe. Hoppe opened a kind of door to the pre-revolutionary world for me,” Yarvin has said. A German-born political theorist and leading proponent of Austrian School economics, Hans-Hermann Hoppe has called himself an anarcho-capitalist, a title borrowed from his mentor Murray Rothbard. Hoppe theorized a distinction between monarchy, which he defined as “privately owned government,” and democracy, classified as “publicly owned government.” In the introduction to his 2001 book, Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe called “the transition from monarchy to democracy” a source of “civilizational decline.”

From Hoppe, Yarvin took the idea that “all organizations, big or small, public or private, military or civilian, are managed best when managed by a single executive.”

If democracy is so decrepit and ineffective, one might ask how it is that America became the world’s great superpower and maintained that position for the last century. Yarvin’s answer contains two parts: first, that nothing lasts forever. Second, while American supremacy may once have rested on innovation and growth, the country, now a bloated empire, has been surviving for decades on the power of myth-making and mass illusions.

Whether or not he can be compared to Machiavelli the man, it is correct to describe Yarvin as a Machiavellian, in the meaning given to that term by the American political writer James Burnham, a one-time follower of Leon Trotsky who later became a committed anti-communist. Like the historical figures chronicled in Burnham’s book The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, Yarvin believes that one of the worst aspects of democracy is the fact that it rarely exists. Because democracy is the rule of the many, and the rule of the many is inherently unstable, democracies rarely last long.

Burnham argues that all complex societies are in effect oligarchies ruled by a small number of elites. To hide this fact and legitimize their rule in the eyes of the masses, oligarchies employ the powers of mystification and propaganda. Indeed, Yarvin believes that America stopped being a democracy sometime after the end of World War II and became instead a “bureaucratic oligarchy”—meaning that political power is concentrated within a small group of people who are selected not on the basis of hereditary title or pure merit but through their entry into the bureaucratic organs of the state. What remains of American democracy is pageantry and symbolism, which has about as much connection to the real thing as the city of Orlando has to Disney World.

In place of a functional democratic system, Yarvin came to believe, there now exists an industrial-scale symbolic apparatus that generates the illusion of political agency necessary for society’s real rulers to carry out their business undisturbed. American voters still go to the polls to pick their leader, but the president is a ceremonial figure beholden to the permanent bureaucracy.

“The structure of democratic societies creates two tiers of power,” observed the French sociologist and eminent defender of liberalism, Raymond Aron, in his appraisal of Burnham’s book. While one tier of power is made up of industrialists, military generals, and other decision-makers operating in the shadows, in public their interests are represented by the second tier made up of “those who know how to talk.” The problem identified by the Machiavellians, says Aron, is that while the talkers are not necessarily competent leaders, they nevertheless gain power because “debating regimes oil the wheels for those who know how to use words.” There you have the two paths to power in a democracy: secrecy for the plutocratic persons of action, or, for those in the public political class, skill at deceit.

While Yarvin’s vision has as much or more in common with left critiques of the state dating back to the 1960s, his solutions are openly reactionary—looking back to the 17th century rather than forward to a promised socialist-utopian future.

In 2007, Yarvin, writing as Mencius Moldbug, started his blog Unqualified Reservations. His themes, now clearly established, were reflected in his earliest published work: “Democracy as an Adaptive Fiction,” “Why, When, and How to Abolish the United States,” and “Against Political Freedom.” At the time, Yarvin’s paid work was still with the San Francisco-based Urbit where, with funding from Thiel, he was immersed in a yearslong project to write a new programming language from scratch and decentralize the ownership of data. Even in the Olympian culture of Silicon Valley, where the microdosing transhumanists all had startups promising to engineer a brave new humanity, Urbit’s project was considered wildly ambitious, if not a bit mad.

The initial Moldbug audience was made up of fellow Silicon Valley misfits and disaffected amateur intellectuals with high-speed internet connections, the kind of people interested in his sardonic style and unconventional approach to history and political thought.

Everywhere one looked in the Moldbuggian scheme, things were not what they seemed. Beneath the surface of modern progressivism, for instance, Yarvin found that the sacraments and dogmas of America’s founding Protestant religion had been preserved. The now common criticism that the liberal activist culture of wokeness is a kind of secular religion picks up on arguments Yarvin was making in 2007 about mainstream liberal universalism, which he dubbed “CryptoCalvinism.”

This new techno-monarchist ideology of neoreaction developed in connection with other post-millennial intellectual movements in Silicon Valley like “post-rationalism.” By the late-2000s, while the U.S. culture and economy appeared stagnant, if not in outright decline, the technology sector was expanding its power and reach as apparently the only industry left in America still capable of innovation. The ideas coming out of the valley reflected that disparity and a growing feeling there that American liberal democracy was an obsolete operating system, impeding the tech sector’s growth and with it the march of progress.

Other key figures to emerge in neoreaction included the writer Michael Anissimov, and the British philosopher Nick Land, a former Marxist and devotee of French critical theory who gave the title Dark Enlightenment to his extended study of Yarvin’s oeuvre. Adjacent to neoreaction was the digital fascism of the “alternative right,” which emerged a few years later. The alt-right, as it was also known, was another internet-based ideological movement but one that emphasized anarchic nihilism, rabid racism, and demonization of Jews. Neoreactionaries, by contrast, while comfortable expressing their own racial and ethnic bigotries, tended to downplay their political importance and eschewed the online Nazi role-playing of the alt-right as dim-witted and self-destructive. In a series of early essays, “Why I am not a White Nationalist” and “Why I am not an Anti-Semite,” Yarvin offered an analysis of those ideologies that was not entirely unsympathetic before ultimately rejecting them.

How could he be a fascist, Yarvin protested, when he so clearly detested “the masses” and “the people”—two of fascism’s most celebrated subjects?

Perhaps the best known of the Silicon Valley democracy skeptics was Thiel. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009. “The great task for libertarians,” he declared, “is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’”

Yet for Yarvin, even though libertarianism may be right about the best way to organize society, it fails because it is unserious about power. An all-powerful state is necessary, a sovereign Leviathan of the kind envisioned by Thomas Hobbes, to impose order by force on a level of such absolute authority that it can then disappear from day-to-day life.

Having concluded that democracy is a failed and dying form of governance, one that increasingly produces more disorder than order, Yarvin provided a vision for what could come next: an enlightened corporate monarchy that would only arrive after a hard reboot of the political system. It was a vision of total regime change, but one achieved without any violence or even activism since those efforts were doomed to fail and would therefore only strengthen the system they sought to overthrow. For those who believed in it, the next step was to generate the ideas that a future elite would use to run the country once it seized power.

And who should the rulers be, exactly? Rather than a hereditary dynasty, Yarvin proposed the Elizabethan structure of the joint-stock company used by the British East India Company as the best means for selecting and overseeing the monarch. The state, rather than tyrannizing its subjects or being controlled by citizens who endowed its authority, “should be operated as a profitable corporation governed proportionally by its beneficiaries.” Elsewhere, he puts it differently: “I favor absolute monarchy in the abstract sense: unconditional personal authority, subject to some responsibility mechanism.”

Some readers may dwell on the weight that the rather vague “some responsibility mechanism” bears in this program for the enlightened monarchies of the future. For Yarvin, the answer is always more power.

While Peter Thiel has since disavowed his rejection of democracy—in public at least—and is now financing the U.S. Senate campaigns of a new breed of MAGA 2.0 populists like J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, Yarvin has not wavered.

Power, according to Yarvin, is like computer code, binary. It is either on or off; final and absolute, or merely a glorified form of servitude. Even the tech giants, which he considers the only efficient organizations left in the United States, are powerless. Facebook may be able to ban anyone it wants while controlling the flow of critical information to billions of people across the globe, but Mark Zuckerberg still has to answer to midlevel government functionaries—a relationship demonstrated by the Facebook CEO’s reluctant embrace of a Democratic Party approved fact-checking apparatus. Even if Zuckerberg wanted to raise an army to stage a coup, it’s not clear what target he could strike. “[F]or all practical revolutionary purposes,” Yarvin wrote in May of 2020. “the ‘deep state’ is as decentralized as Bitcoin, and as invulnerable—to ballots and bullets alike.”

Because the goal for Yarvin is to force power out of the bureaucratic shadows and make it visible, he sees the brute force approach of China’s government as a positive example. After all, what is the opposite of the U.S. deep state with its esoteric CryptoCalvinist dogmas, if not the overtly state-worshiping ideology of the Chinese Communist Party where the government’s capacity for violence is never far from the surface? It’s an analysis that for Yarvin and others of his ilk approaches its own dogma. As recently as last December, Yarvin maintained that China’s “zero-COVID” surveillance state approach to the pandemic, in which millions of people have been confined to their homes in citywide quarantines, entails ”fewer covid restrictions than citizens of the reddest American red state.”

What is bizarre about the reaction to the neoreactionaries is not the perfectly understandable revulsion at this adoration of China, or at their racial and ethnic bigotries, but the outrage over their attack on democracy. Philosophers and politicians like Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, to name only three among countless figures, including many on the left, have been outspoken in their warnings about democracy’s perils. That is to say nothing of the current American ruling class, which treats ordinary people with aristocratic contempt, openly conspires to suppress reporting that might get the “wrong” candidate elected, and organizes “shadow campaigns” to undermine popular elections—all in the name of democracy. If Yarvin’s political musings are a danger to the future of American democracy, as they may well be, one can only ask what that means for the actions and statements of the people who are currently in power.

The temptation to squeeze Yarvin into the premade villain costume of a contemporary morality play may be temporarily satisfying, but if its aim was to shut him down or curb his influence, it has failed. He’s back in the public sphere now with more time than ever after departing Urbit in 2019, and he has a busy schedule of podcast appearances. It seems likely, in fact, that ignoring Yarvin’s incisive diagnosis of the American political system, or reducing it to cartoonish villainy, will only benefit him and other opponents of democracy who are more than happy to see the American system continue its slow breakdown.

It also misses the fatal weakness of Yarvin’s ideology: For all of its power as a systemic analysis, it contains no place for human beings. The classic question in philosophy—what is the good life?—never intrudes on Yarvin’s pursuit of designing beautiful machines.

I once asked Yarvin whether he saw his computer programming and writing as drawing on different parts of his brain. “My love of computer science has always been in systems because it’s essentially architecture, you’re building something that has to have a very large component of aesthetics in it,” he told me. “You’re in a situation where maybe even more than in architecture, you know this works because it’s beautiful.”

Later in the conversation, he expanded on this point. “When you’re building system software, you’re in this position of this demiurge,” he said using the term from gnostic theology for a minor, and typically false, god. The matter of the individual, not as a political subject but as a sentient, feeling agent possessing intrinsic needs and desires, seems not so much a matter Yarvin avoids as one that almost never occurs to him in his political writing. Even where his designs are most immaculate, they are somehow bereft—like a beautiful but empty city.

Even where Yarvin’s designs are most immaculate, they are somehow bereft—like a beautiful but empty city.

On Feb. 1, 2020, before any COVID cases were reported in the United States and a few weeks before his comeback podcast appearance, Yarvin published an essay warning that the novel coronavirus could become a devastating global pandemic. He also predicted that it wouldn’t matter. He pronounced America a failed state, unable to envision, let alone muster the capacity to take the kind of decisive action that, according to Yarvin, was being modeled by China’s “zero-COVID” approach to the virus. “The hard truth,” he wrote a few months later, “is that the virus is not just a test of our government. It is a test of our form of government.”

The following summer, the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan while barely firing a shot. America’s trillion-dollar investment in the Afghan Security Forces was exposed as a Ponzi scheme and collapsed overnight. In the final chaotic days of the war, U.S. forces struck a deal with the Taliban, their sworn enemy of the past two decades, to provide security at the airfield where final evacuations were taking place. Shortly after that, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the airport killing 13 American service members and some 170 Afghan civilians.

No general or political leader was blamed for America’s longest war ending in humiliating defeat. No one was fired or resigned. Moreover, the total lack of accountability for a catastrophic systemwide failure is, according to Yarvin, not a problem that could be solved by electing better leaders or applying more political will, because it is an essential feature of the system’s design. “Why did this happen?” Yarvin asked. “Very simply: because no one is in charge of the government.”

Not the wrong people; no one.

Is that possible? If things were really that bad, wouldn’t we be able to tell?

Maybe not. Without losing your balance, try to work back through the many sharp reversals of public policy and elite opinion since the beginning of the pandemic. In February 2020, when Yarvin first issued his warning, it was considered a sign of right-wing racial paranoia to be worried at all about the virus in China. “The actual danger of coronavirus: fear may fuel racism and xenophobia that threaten human rights,” intoned The Washington Post. A few months later, the Great and Good changed their minds and declared the pandemic an unprecedented emergency demanding a nationwide shutdown. Schools and playgrounds were locked. Children were masked. The police were called out to break up weddings and prayer services held by religious communities that insisted on endangering the rest of the country by carrying on with their primitive rituals. Then the Black Lives Matter protests began that summer, and the switch was flipped again. Now, national leaders and public health officials donned the kente cloths of their own religious rituals and joined the throngs. A dazzling new form of Jesuitical argumentation was invented in which the crowding of tens of thousands of people together in the streets was not merely justified in spite of the risks, but redefined as a public health measure to combat the chronic threat of white supremacy and thus not in conflict with “the science.”

Witnessing this spectacle, I have found it easy to picture myself as the member of a captive audience watching a parade of soldiers march by in crisp uniforms, executing their synchronized movements to form images of hammers, surface-to-air missiles, and other icons of the glorious people’s republic. Only here it was not North Korean conscripts marching but the best fed and most thoroughly educated Americans––university professors, journalists, scientists, surgeons general––who clicked their heels and pivoted in unison. How, one had to wonder in amazement, did they always stay on message even as the messaging changed so often and abruptly?

Yarvin’s answer, of course, is the Cathedral. At one and the same time, the Cathedral is simply a name for the uncanny degree of agreement between the media, universities, and other organs of elite culture, and a theory explaining how the aggregate effect of that agreement is a system of Orwellian mind-control that projects an illusion of freedom so powerful it blinds people to reality.

The question many people have, of course, is whether such a structure actually exists. After two years of COVID, following the disintegration of the liberal state, and the emergence of evermore eccentric ideological impositions, coordinated on what seems like an hourly basis by an invisible yet apparently all-powerful hand, which has no need to account for its nakedly visible contradictions and failures, the answer seems obvious: Either you see it, or you don’t.

From Tablet magazine, March 31, 2022