A quick fact sheet.
Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) is a New Right “neoreactionary” and “technolibertarian”. He is anti-democracy, anti-equality, and favors a new monarchy. He is anti-patriotism, anti-populism, and pro-“corporate feudalism.” He advises Peter Thiel. And he is growing in influence.
There are important tensions in Moldbug’s thought. He advocates hierarchy, yet deeply resents cultural elites. His political vision is futuristic and libertarian, yet expressed in the language of monarchy and reaction. He is irreligious and socially liberal on many issues but angrily antiprogressive. He presents himself as a thinker in search of truth but admits to lying to his readers, saturating his arguments with jokes and irony. These tensions indicate broader fissures among the online Right.
-Joshua Tait, “Mencius Moldbug and Neoreaction,” 189.
Notes
Joshua Tait. 2019. “Mencius Moldbug and Neoreaction,” in Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy, edited by Mark Sedgwick, 187-203. New York: Oxford Academic.
- Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, b. 1973 | US
- Computer/math whiz-kid turned tech-bro political digital activist / web “prototroll” (to borrow Tait’s turn of phrase on p. 199) [product of 1980s-90s Silicon Valley computers / web culture]
- 2007- popular blog ‘Unqualified Reservations’ claims to help readers ‘red pill’ their way to the truth of democracy-as-tyranny
- He is non-religious, anti-progressive, but socially liberal on many issues | Disparages values of equality and democracy on the Right and Left | Egalitarian talk is just the ruling group exerting power
- Neoreactionism (or ‘Reactionary Enlightenment‘)=authoritarian libertarian-inflected anti-progressive, systems-thinking anti-humanist nihilist futurism: epochal flows render human agency meaningless
- Past? Important and helpful–but unlike, say ‘MAGA’, this movement is futurist in orientation
- Upholds “enlightenment values” based on secularism, objectivity, and reasoning (v. Evola and de Benoist ‘irrationalism’)
- Calls for “hard reset” in politics v. progressive change
- Sees Technology + Private corporations winning out over current political frames
- Calls for a new political regime where the CEO-monarch rules supreme towards max profits leading to (he thinks) a utopian political outcome
- In the meantime, he calls on his followers to take up “The Steel Rule of Passivism” with no activism or voting: He thinks that progressivism thrives on and dies without opposition from the Right | He also thinks that a passivity from the neoreactive New Right helps prevent power-hungry or violent persons on the Right from rising to power
- Thiel and others have engaged his ideas of seceding from US for tech-CEO monarchy of the sort he advocates
- Writes in inflammatory politically incorrect style–including jokes and irony; trolling; transgressive breaking of taboo and social norms
- “The Cathedral”=his name for the “church” of liberalism – i.e. the hegemonic rule of progressivism /// “Universalism” as the tacit Protestant religion of secular liberalism
- Yarvin instead advocates for the real “universal truth” | [*notice that the critique of liberal universalism can sound lefty, but the overall move is committed to a single truth]
- Total privitization + authoritarian rule by a corporately elected CEO-monarch (e.g. Peter Thiel)
- Radical libertarian economics a la Ludwig von Mises + anarcho-capitalism of Murray Rothbard + Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God that Failed (Transaction Publishers, 2001) + Italian post-Marxist conservative “Elitist” James Burnham on “real politics” related to power and “iron law of oligarchy”: all political systems (including so-called democratic ones) are ruled by “elites”–so the real goal of politics (regardless of what you think it is) is to get elites to confer freedom and “civilization” on the rest of us
- Roots his penchant for authoritarianism in Scottish thinker Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) ideas, including re: order=Right=good (vs. chaos=Left=evil), and on heroes and hero-worship, hero as god, etc.
Thomas Carlyle on Heroes and Hero-Worship (ed 1873)
[Yarvin] proposes that the state is privatized to incentivize profit-maximizing governance by “shareholder” (large owners) who vote for a CEO-monarch…”
-Joshua Tait, “Mencius Moldbug and Neoreaction,” 197; on Yarvin’s “neocameralism”
