Squint harder, ya dork
If you are anything like me, you are eagerly anticipating the day that either Trump drops dead (preferably slowly, and in agony), or that Congress grows a spine and asserts its constitutional authority to slap the old fart down. The former is probably much more likely. Unfortunately, just seeing Trump hog-tied or buried in a shallow grave on one of his golf courses does not solve our problems — JD Vance is waiting in the wings, and he might be even worse. While Trump is amoral and greedy, Vance has a terrifying ideology driving him. He’s an acolyte of Thiel, and Thiel is an acolyte of Curtis Yarvin.
Curtis Yarvin is almost incomprehensibly popular among rich Silicon Valley libertarian/authoritarians, but I would guess one source of their esteem is Yarvin’s constant sucking up to the wealthy. They should rule the world, he thinks; democracy is bad, and we should let tech parasites be our overlords. Only problem with his perspective is that he’s a moron. Daniel Drezner sums him up.
My considered reaction: at least with the likes of, say, Marc Andreessen, some effort is required to parse out his true-but-not-new points from his new-but-not-true points.1 With Yarvin, it’s much simpler: pretty much everything he says in this interview is wrong. There is no kernel of an interesting idea gone bad; there is just a bunch of half-baked analogies that fall apart if you have a decent liberal-arts education. It’s like listening to a stoned, first-year MBA student who read his father’s outdated history books when he was a teenager and half-remembers them.
I’ve read some of Yarvin’s online work, but not much. It’s self-serving drivel, and anyone with any intelligence will recognize that within a few paragraphs. I think Elizabeth Spiers recognizes the problem.
The most appropriate treatment of Yarvin is one that recognizes his influence on Silicon Valley billionaires who don’t recognize him as a shallow thinker bc they’ve never taken a single class on political philosophy or history or philosophy
So yeah, kids, get a liberal arts education or you might end up as stupidly blinkered as a Yarvin or Andreesen or Thiel or Musk. Maybe my university ought to consider that for a slogan (our current advertising mantra is “More Is Morris,” which is short but not very deep. Don’t worry, they’ll probably change it next year.)
There’s a longer article on Yarvin in the New Yorker, but he’s hardly worth the extensive coverage — my feeling reading anything about him is that anyone pays attention to him. Here’s a short summary of his agenda.
In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”
It wouldn’t be of much concern if Yarvin was just a crank with a blog, but he has become a crank with influence on some very powerful people.
A decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to élites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret. In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vice-President J. D. Vance, a former employee of one of Thiel’s venture-capital firms, cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and ignore the courts if they objected. Marc Andreessen, one of the heads of Andreessen Horowitz and an informal adviser to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has started quoting his “good friend” Yarvin about the need for a founder-like figure to take charge of our “out of control” bureaucracy. Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at the government’s Office of Personnel Management, has said that replacing civil servants with loyalists could help Trump defeat “the Cathedral.”
If Trump were to die, Stephen Miller’s influence might diminish somewhat (a good thing), but he’d be replaced by Curtis Yarvin as advisor, with every Silicon Valley venture capitalist breathing over his shoulder, urging him on to empower mega-capitalism. Yarvin is a scary extremist dude.
As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months fretting that the moment will go to waste. “If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,” he wrote two days after the election. “It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.” What many see as the most dangerous assault on American democracy in the nation’s history Yarvin dismisses as woefully insufficient—a “vibes coup.” Without a full-blown autocratic takeover, he believes, a backlash is sure to follow. When I spoke to him recently, he quoted the words of Louis de Saint-Just, the French philosopher who championed the Reign of Terror: “He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”
How does this bozo get the attention of media and influence so many of the assholes in power? I’ve been doing it wrong. If I want to be rich and popular, I really need to start praising the rich and popular, telling them that they deserve to rule the world.
I’ll try that right now.
…
Any minute now.
…
Urk…
…
…
Sorry, I just can’t bring myself to be that stupid and craven. Sorry. I’d rather just fade away into obscurity.
So Arasaka or Militech.
(Yes, I’m a Cyberpunk binge. I just finished Phantom Liberty and I’m closing in on completing the game,)
“Do you want to have a good time?” said a voice from a doorway.
“As far as I can tell,” said Ford. “I’m having one. Thanks.”
“Are you rich?” said another.
This made Ford laugh.
He turned and opened his arms in a wide gesture.
“Do I look rich?” he said.
“Don’t know,” said the girl. “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you’ll get rich. I have a very special service for rich people…”
“Oh yes,” said Ford, intrigued but careful, “and what’s that?”
“I tell them it’s okay to be rich.”
(Ford encounters a prostitute in “So Long, and Thanks for All The Fish”)
The thing that I will never get over is how universally, astoundingly, DUMB all these jerks are. 12-year-old jerkoffs for their entire lives.
Everything is wrong with Yarvin et al.
A few of the most obvious.
.1. Our current form of oligarchic capitalism has its own drop dead feature built in.
When a very small number of oligarchies control almost all of the wealth and the vast majority of the population are poverty stricken peasants, then who is left to buy anything and keep the economy running?
No one.
The US consumer spending makes up 70% of our economy right now.
.2. To put it in concrete terms, suppose you have a factory staffed by robots making cars. What good is it when no one can afford to buy those cars?
And, you can’t export them because everyone hates the former USA.
.3. The other problem is that the vast majority of US citizens like living in a democracy. The oligarchies may have the money, but we have the numbers.
If millions of people get out into the street and oppose them, that is it. They are gone.
The 3% rule works most of the time, if 3% of the population takes to the streets, they can get rid of an oppressive regime. It happened to the USSR, Romania, East Germany, etc..
Even calling out the army won’t help them.
The army is made up from the people and they aren’t all that interested in shooting their family members, friends, and neighbors.
The Shah of Iran tried staying in power by shooting the demonstrators. That worked until the army decided they didn’t want to kill any more unarmed civilians.
.1. Robert Reich is one of many that have analyzed the effects of wealth inequality.
The end of wealth accumulations are serf and slave societies.
And how well did those societies work?
We ended serfdom and slavery because they weren’t all that efficient.
.2. The other problem with wealth inequality is that as it increases, societies become more and more unstable.
And, as we have seen, as the wealth inequality has increased in the USA, we have been getting more and more unstable.
It’s to the point, that a huge number of us don’t even want to live here any more.
40% of young women would like to emigrate (or escape) if they can.
Ayn Rand was “successful” in a similar manner. So were the sophists that angered Plato. It is a business model that has worked for 2400 years.
After reading that, I can only think that we can’t eradicate ourselves as a species quick enough. I don’t have hope for the future if people like that asshole are taken seriously by those in the halls of power.
I’m currently reading “More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity” by Adam Becker and it shows the exhaustive bullshit these guys pass around to one another. It’s terrible ideas all the way down.
Man, the only way to make money as a philosopher seems to be to write a best-selling pop philosophy book (solid but not overwhelming money) or suck up to those in power. The rich sure seem to like people who can justify them being rich.
Oh, he wants us to have a CEO in Chief? To remind everyone, Mussolini intended to call his type of government ‘Corporatism’.
the thing that gets me about all these type philosophies and their proponents is how utterly short sighted they are. they are so enamored of their own thoughts and the wishful thinking it contains that they can not see further then yesterday. It is not like the ideas they propose as real have not been done by humans before and have very large flaws leading to unpleasant results for everyone eventually. Who among them ever does the simple test if we do that what happens next then what is after that……?
Currently Drowsy Donny is wheeled on stage and hopped up on cocaine just to appease the rubes and keep the illusion going that he’s running things. In truth it’s clear that Steven Miller is the one making policy and he’s a fucking nazi so I don’t see how switching in Vance for Trumpty-Dumbty would make things worse. In fact, considering Vance’s utter lack of charisma and inability to command respect, it would make it harder for the fascists to do their thing.