Curtis Yarvin

Notes

• Yarvin is a neoreactionary anarcho-capitalist technolibertarian monarchist
• Computer programmer turned political theorist
• Uses ‘Red pill’ meme to describe the ‘myth of democracy’ | Emphasis on democracy in decline– related to the mimetic structures of universities, news, press, mass media (which he calls “The Cathedral”)
• Here’s his (weak) explanation of why he thinks monarchy gives the average person more control than democracy.
• Talked early on about the ‘CryptoCalvinism’ of US politics | [Note: It’s useful here to compare/contrast with Carl Schmitt‘s “political theology”– i.e. the idea that political structures are rooted in [Christian] theological forms]
• Picked up by dark Enlightenment transhumanist neoreactionary Nick Land who takes up Deleuze & Guattari alongside Bataille (fact sheet coming soon)
• Picked up by alt-right anarchic nihilist digital fascism
• Friend of J.D. Vance
• Some of his writing: “Why I am not a White Nationalist” (2007) | “Why I am not an Anti-Semite” (2007)
• Anarcho-capitalist Austrian School economics Hans-Hermann Hoppe‘s 2001, Democracy: The God That Failed: all orgs do best when under a single manager
• Murray Rothbard: libertarian free market anarchism (“anarcho-capitalism”); co-founder of Mises Institute)
• Ludwig Von Mises | Austrian economist d. 1973; free-market capitalism; opposes socialism and interventionism.
• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (develops an anti-democratic version of social contract theory where the ruler has full sovereignty–and where that is the only way to look out for people’s best interests)

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.

• Yarvin is a 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.

Jacob Siegel, “The Red Pill Prince: How computer programmer Curtis Yarvin became America’s most controversial political theorist,” Tablet; 3.30.22

• “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.”
• “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.”
• “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.”