The Beginnings of Curtis Yarvin

This introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

Marcy points out that there is no policy in the Trump administration, only destruction, revenge, and palace intrigue. That’s a great start for Curtis Yarvin and the evil shits surrounding Trump, especially the destruction part. This post introduces Curtis Yarvin’s justification for that nihilistic approach.

The first post at The Substack Gray Mirror

Yarvin explains that the Grey Mirror substack is a sandbox for drafting a book. The book is intended to serve as a public policy manual for the leader of a new regime which will replace the current regime in the United States.

Policy is the art of the possible. Today’s possible is relative to an amorphous network of influential stakeholders. Any new idea must first be measured for relevance by its proximity to this meta-institution. The mirror’s abstract prince had no one to please but himself and God. His policy could and must be absolute.

I think the first three sentences are meant as criticism of democracy on the grounds that it spreads power among too many people, making it easy to block or affect policy. The meaning of the last two is clear: the new regime will be a one-man rule, and I do mean man . There will be be a new regime eventually because all regimes fail. And it will be under the control of a single man, because “if you want a completely different government, submitting to one person is the only way to get it.”

His prince has to start from scratch to build his regime. Most of the existing institutions can’t be remodeled to fit with the new regime. That leads to his idiosyncratic use of the term nihilist. His plan is nihilist because “… it’s a plan for building ex nihilo, from nothing.”

The new leader will emerge from the chaos of the deterioration of the existing regime.

From Rome to France to Rwanda, a monarch who emerges unchallenged from one side of a civic conflict does not enforce the civic dominance of his own side, but the civic unity of both sides. If he did otherwise he would be an idiot — which is statistically unlikely. Freezing the civic conflict, cold or hot, tends to be the biggest, quickest win of the whole transition.

There is no explanation for this statement. He goes on to say that the leader is accountable, but he doesn’t tell us how, except that a monarchy is a republic, and has a constitution.

Discussion

1. I’ve rearranged the order in which Yarvin lays out his ideas.

2. I flatly disagree with his statements about Rome, France and Rwanda producing leaders who enforce civil unity of both sides. Rome fell under the sway of emperors and as they degenerated, Rome slowly collapsed. Is he thinking of Napoleon in France? Has he never heard of the restoration of the aristos, or the Commune, or any of the history of the nation in the 19th Century? And Rwanda? Really?

The First Post in Yarvin’s Blog Unqualified Reservations

The first post in Yarvin’s blog is titled A Formalist Manifesto, dated 4/24/2007. It’s long, so I’ll cover it in two posts. In this post, I take up his objections to existing ideologies and his complaints about democracy. In the next I’ll discuss the content of his newly created ideology, formalism.

Current ideologies suck

He doesn’t like progressivism because he thinks its adherents, “,,, the vast majority of writers and thinkers and smart people in general…” are so steeped in it that they can’t see its problems. He doesn’t like conservatism because “… not all conservatives are cretins, but most cretins are conservatives.” The re-inventors of conservatism (the earlier version was destroyed by the “Roosevelt dictatorship”) have to appeal to the cretins, so conservatism is dumb.

He thinks moderates, centrists, independents, and non-political people are responsible for the death and destruction of the 20th Century, and presumably the early 2000s. They act like there’s a fixed “center” but it’s constantly changing. There’s nothing for them to hold onto, no controlling set of beliefs. It doesn’t even count as an ideology.

He thinks highly of libertarianism, but thinks it’s never been successfully implemented, because it’s impractical.

Yarvin’s problem with democracy

Yarvin says that the most serious problem people face is how to interact without violence against persons or property.

One conclusion of formalism is that democracy is—as most writers before the 19th century agreed—an ineffective and destructive system of government. The concept of democracy without politics makes no sense at all, and as we’ve seen, politics and war are a continuum. Democratic politics is best understood as a sort of symbolic violence, like deciding who wins the battle by how many troops they brought.

I think what he’s getting at here is that certain political disagreements can’t be resolved by compromise or live and let live policies. Murder is an example. There can’t be any compromise to the no-murder rule. He seems to think that most issues are like that, as if the regulatory preference for LED lighting over incandescent bulbs leads to violence.

Discussion

1. So far we’ve seen two objections to deomcracy. First, the dispersion of power demanded by democracy leads to unspecified bad things, because it slows or preventss technological improvements. That doesn’t  happen under one-man rule. Second democracy inexorably leads to violence. Yarvin doesn’t offer much support for these claims in the two essays I’ve read. Maybe there’s more ahead.

2. Yarvin’s criticism of progressivism, that its adherents can’t see its problems, seems wrong. I think some of Yarvin’s criticisms of our government have merit, and have been raised by progressives repeatedly.

3. Yarvin ignores our experience with one-man rule, going far back into history. People who have experienced democracy don’t want one-man rule. Like the American Revolutionaries, people want to have a say in their governments.

4. Almost all people want to live in a world free from violence. Violence is fairly low by historical standards in most functioning democracies. Even though we don’t have perfect security, our circumstances allow most of us to seek highe-orderr goals. So far, at least, Yarvin hasn’t engaged any of the complexities of humans of today, just as he hasn’t addressed any of the arguments of the proponents of democracy.

5. Here’s a story. My freshman year at Notre Dame, we were required to take a class in writing. My teacher was Mr. Yeltsin, who seemed to think it beneath him to teach writing to guys studying science and engineering. Mr. Yeltsin always wore a black suit, white shirt, black skinny tie, very much not the fashion in those days.

I was very proud of my first essay, about which I remember nothing except that when it came back, Mr. Yeltsin had written one word diagonally at the top: Jejeune. I had to look it up.

I wish Curtis Yarvin had taken writing from Mr. Yeltsin.

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42 replies
  1. CaptainCondorcet says:

    I am curious to see how he tries to resolve the Democratic Peace “Theory” (because it’s really an umbrella of several semi-competing theories). The data are clear: armed conflicts do not occur with any regularity between countries with BOTH fair and free elections. If nothing else (and there’s lots else), dead soldiers make for terrible photo-ops in the next election cycle. This was true in the US even for cases where the population was convinced in the “justness” of the cause.

  2. observiter says:

    My take —
    Another spoiled pampered “entitled” narcissistic guy, with little to no experience outside of his life-long manicured comfort zone, angered that no one understands how hellish his life has been.

  3. Gacyclist says:

    As if project 2025 wasn’t bad enough.

    I do believe a huge chunk of the maga base want an authoritarian leader as long as it’s trump.

  4. earlofhuntingdon says:

    Yarvin’s concern that “democracy,” rule by the people, allows too many people to participate is painfully ironic. But it mirrors the immediate post-Watergate concern among the elite, about, in Samuel P. Huntington’s immortal words, an “excess of democracy.” Both authors intended to be courtiers to their elites, who wanted only the appearance of democracy, not its reality.

  5. earlofhuntingdon says:

    I suspect Yarvin provides no explanation for his “Rome to France to Rwanda” paragraph because there is none. His formulation is nonsense on stilts. Competing “leaders” in a two-sided conflict seldom, if ever, adopt the “civic unity” of both sides. They enforce their own.

    • Ed Walker says:

      I checked the part of the book available on Amazon’s look inside feature. This draft of the preface didn’t make it into the book. Maybe someone told him.

      This kind of passage is common in what I’ve read so far. I put it in this post to show what I’m dealing with; see note 5 above.

  6. earlofhuntingdon says:

    The problem with the Yarvin’s, in effect, “no compromise with murder” example is that cretins like Newt Gingrich can manipulate any problem into a no compromise with the devil argument. That conveniently enrages the base and rigidifies a party, and forces all decisions to the top, which is where Gingrich and Trump want it.

    • Spencer Dawkins says:

      Yes, exactly. We’ve had FABULOUS experience with religious wars, so treating all disagreements as if they are religious disagreements (where the answer is critical for salvation, or lack thereof) is a marvelously bad idea!

  7. xyxyxyxy says:

    Foreman in Palin vs NYT (D): Defendants not liable.
    Judge in Alien Enemies Act hearing in SDNY: TRO is extended.

  8. Bob Roundhead says:

    Yarvin exemplifies why most religious texts warn that a camel has a better chance of passing through the eye of a needle than a rich man does to enter the kingdom of heaven.

    • dozer2222 says:

      So glad to see you going deep on Yarvin! I’ve been buttonholing fellow protestors at 50501 events asking them to read up on Yarvin. Too few people understand the big difference between Koch era Oligarchy 1.0 and the Silicon Valley spawned Oligarchy 2.0.

  9. RitaRita says:

    I read the first post at Grey Mirror substack.

    Sounds like he read the Classics Illustrated version of the authors he cites. The substack is full of contradictions and simplistic statements. Yes, democracy is messy, with differing stakeholders. That’s why the framers of the Constitution set up a structure to impose some order on the stakeholders. And this is precisely what he wants to do with his monarchy because he recognizes that a monarch could become crazy. He talks about the monarch being answerable only to God and himself. But then talks about a regime with advisors and a Constitution. A monarch who is answerable only to God and himself is likely to be deposed by his aides or his subjects or to become answerable to a monarch who actually has the people on his side.

    I can’t decide if he watched too much Game of Thrones or not enough. Maybe he should watch “Marie Antoinette” or the series about Cromwell and Henry VIII.

    My view of Yarvin so far is that he is the perfect philosopher for the “Greed is Good” crowd of shallow thinkers in the Tech Bro world. They just want someone who can give their lust for power a patina of intellectualism.

    • Rayne says:

      The “Greed is Good” crowd are morons who misunderstood that line was not a positive affirmation but the exposure of the psychopathic rot in Wall Street, both the movie and the financial industry.

      They’re the same morons who take science fiction as suggestions rather than warnings.

      Yarvin needs a dose of content like the John Adams limited series, for starters.

    • P J Evans says:

      It’s something that he should have learned in US History. It’s explicitly *why* we have the government structure set out in the Constitution. They people who wrote it had a decent education in history and knew they *didn’t* want a monarch of any kind.
      If he needs a simple version, there’s “Decision in Philadelphia” (Collins & Collins) and “Miracle at Philadelphia”.

  10. dozer2222 says:

    So glad to see you going deep on Yarvin! I’ve been buttonholing fellow protestors at 50501 events asking them to read up on Yarvin. Too few people understand the big difference between Koch era Oligarchy 1.0 and the Silicon Valley spawned Oligarchy 2.0.

    [Welcome back to emptywheel. Please use the SAME USERNAME and email address each time you comment so that community members get to know you. You attempted to publish this comment using what appears to be your RL name, triggering auto-moderation; it has been edited to reflect your established username. Please check your browser’s cache and autofill; future comments may not publish if username does not match. /~Rayne]

  11. john paul jones says:

    Couple of random thoughts.

    The “mirror” reference might be to the old medieval/renaissance genre, the Mirror For Princes, wherein the writer offered advice to the Prince for the better organization of the commonwealth. So in that sense, the Prince of these advice books is an ideal typical one, and the writers were free to dream of a well-run state because it was entirely in the realm of theory, thus, could be in that sense, absolute. But if that is what he meant, it isn’t well expressed, it’s a sort of telegram prose with much left out or simply presumed.

    The politics and war thing sounds like ill-digested Clausewitz; either that or ill-digested “Report From the Iron Mountain,” with Yarvin not realizing it was actually satire.

      • BRUCE F COLE says:

        From the blockquote in Ed’s post:
        “The mirror’s abstract prince had no one to please but himself and God. His policy could and must be absolute.”

        I took that as Yarvin self-identifying as our era’s Machiavelli.

    • Ed Walker says:

      Yes, he discusses the idea of mirror as you describe it; I omitted that in the interest of brevity.

      And yes, his monarch is an ideal type, not a person. He even says that the makers of the regime change have to create their leaders from the material at hand, and claims tht it is statistically unlikely that a stupid leader will emerge.

      • PeteT0323 says:

        The thought Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 just barged into my head. Not an improvement unless up is down.

        Much like the Cybertruck is not an overall improvement from earlier Tesla models (though since I brought it up – and sorry for the digression – it is a decent technology demonstrator for very limited automotive features – and Elon got it crowd sourced at $100K a copy.)

        PS
        And thanks again for the Yarvin dive.

      • John Paul Jones says:

        So I guess we can add statistics to the list of things Yarvin invokes but is too lazy to actually educate himself about. Calling the emergence of a despot statistically unlikely is just wishing it were so, rather than an actual statistical calculation. And what would the variables be?

      • RitaRita says:

        This is the kind of assertion that makes him seem really superficial. Has he never read history?

        He seems to be just looking for a way to justify the Tech Oligarchs dismantling the current form of government and replacing it with themselves and some “Enlightened One” who they have chosen as the Unitary Executive i.e. the Monarch.

  12. Sandor Raven says:

    “This post introduces Curtis Yarvin’s justification for that nihilistic approach.” Thank you Ed.

    Note well: What follows is only a suggestion for a place for you/others, much better equipped than me, to look for possible explanations for Yarvin’s thinking and objectives.

    When I see the word “nihilism” I think about Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Ethics of Ambiguity” (I’ve not gotten any further than the Wikipedia page.) where she describes nihilism as a “disappointed seriousness which has turned back upon itself.” Does this describe Yarvin in some way?

    In Part II, “Personal Freedom and Others” she describes various ways that we have in going about, and in justifying how we go about, our lives. These are the subman, the serious man, the nihilist, the adventurer, the passionate man, and those with genuine freedom (“To will oneself free is also to will others free.”). Among these I wonder where it is that Yarvin, Thiel, Vance, and Bannon would best be described as “fitting”? To know that might help us understand them better.

    In Part III, de Beauvoir said “the oppressed can fulfill his freedom as a man only in revolt ….” I am wondering how/why it is that Yarvin, Thiel, and others (many of whom despite having so much in the way of the riches of “God’s Green Earth”) can (apparently) feel so oppressed and a need to revolt. Again, to know why that is might help us understand them better. Mostly, I seem to get lost between the means (“flood the zone …”) and the end. Who benefits? At whose expense?

    Happy Earth Day.

    • Ed Walker says:

      As to your first point, recall that I described Yarvin’s use of the term nihilist as idiosyncratic. I haven’t read de Beauvoir, so I can’t really respond to the other points you make. The usual definition is something along the lines of a person who thinks that existence and values are meaningless.

      I don’t think Yarvin is a nihilist in de Beauvoir’s sense. Judging by the wiki page, I’d say he is either an adventurer or a passionate man.

      The book looks interesting; and blessedly short. I might try reading it. I generally agree with a lot of what Existentialists think about freedom.

      • Sandor Raven says:

        Thank You again. For those interested in more …

        I often struggle to understand just what it is that motivates people, especially those who seem to have so much. By describing the different ways that we have of going about living our lives Simone de Beauvoir gives me something of a category (subman, passionate man, etc,) by which I can be see, and so perhaps begin to better understand, “where others are coming from”—others, personal to me, such as: those who convert to Catholicism (despite its misogyny, etc.); those whose only goal is to be a “ski bum” (for as long as their body holds out); and those who want to climb to the top of Mount Everest (at great expense, personal risk, and despite its defilement).

        But most helpful to me is that by describing these categories, de Beauvoir gives a perspective for understanding her last category, one that appeals to those who aspire to adhere to the ideals of–among many examples–the bhodisattva (this, despite the pain that comes with participation in the suffering of others).

        FYI: I found this book helpful: “At The Existentialist Cafe”, by Sarah Bakewell.

    • Lostinmesa says:

      I think we are ignoring climate change / nuclear war as a factor here in influencing their thinking and nihilism.

      They are dooms day prepping for the future they see as inevitable. Musk needs his ‘legions’ for after the apocalypse, as an example. Praxis wants to practice terraforming in Greenland, supposedly as practice for Mars?

      The men invested in this shallow philosophy are just shallow people, who see Engineers (Atlas Shrugged) as the pinnacle of human intelligence. Their wealth is their own proof that they should lead. The coming Climate collapse is their proof of the ‘failure’ of Democracy.

      If all their plans and philosophies are centered around surviving an inevitable future collapse, it all makes a lot more sense. They want to rebuild in their own image, and are trying to set the stage for that now and accelerate the timeline for collapse.

      • Bob Roundhead says:

        I think you nailed it on the head here. The billionaire class has no interest in stopping climate change and the collapse of our environment because they believe they can position themselves in such a way that they will survive. It’s not just these American grown freaks either. I believe it is the entire class of people. They are the only thing standing in the way of us doing anything to save ourselves from the horror our children and grandchildren will experience. It sounds harsh, but tell me how I am wrong.

        • lostinmesa says:

          I don’t think they see themselves as ‘standing in the way’- I think they just see a coming collapse as inevitable and see themselves as ‘saviors’ of the human race.

          In order to be our ‘saviors’ they are hoarding all the resources possible- including data and government funding- to better ‘engineer’ the future of humanity.

          Any sort of human habitat on Mars is entirely unrealistic, but terraforming earth after war and climate collapse might be possible.

          They might just be planning to use EMPs, and/or biological weapons, preemptively at some point. Thats what would make sense to me. You want to stop/ reverse climate collapse? Get rid of a bunch of humans. What’s a viable number needed to rebuild? 1%?

          It’s the only way I can see their Network States as being viable, because they just aren’t when you have state powers as they exist now. You need a cataclysm to destroy the current structure.

      • P J Evans says:

        Musk isn’t even an engineer – he’s a salesman. He has no clue what he’s asking of others, he just wants Moar Power.

  13. TruthBtold says:

    Current issue Time magazine, feature article about Yarvin & US:‘What We Must Understand About the Dark Enlightenment’

    • TruthBtold says:

      Sorry, article title correction: ‘What We Must Understand About the Dark Enlightenment Movement’

  14. Antipodean59 says:

    “a plan for building ex nihilo, from nothing.” Sound’s like Pol Pot’s Year Zero, and we know how that turned out.

    • Lostinmesa says:

      I keep trying to figure out how they get to the ‘zero’ . I have settled on EMPs and a biological agent of some kind. They need a mass extinction .

  15. zirczirc says:

    From what you’re saying, I gather he believes in a benevolent dictator. The odds of such a being arising seem to me to be “statistically unlikely” to use his words. I couldn’t help but laugh at the paragraph that contains those words “statistically unlikely”:

    “A monarch who emerges unchallenged from one side of a civic conflict does not enforce the civic dominance of his own side, but the civic unity of both sides. If he did otherwise he would be an idiot — which is statistically unlikely.”

    It would seem the odds have caught up with us, Mr. Yarvin.

    • RitaRita says:

      Abraham Lincoln comes close to being a leader from the victorious side who didn’t enforce civic dominance from his own side but the civic unity of both sides.

      But for the most part in history, the ruler emerging from civil war takes care of the opposition by killing or jailing them.

      Whatever Yarvin is smoking, i don’t want it.

  16. Terrence Fuller says:

    I’ve never read any Yarvin, but listened to a gob of podcasts about him. He seems to embody the same sort of illusion as those held by Musk’s colonizing Mars project; we’re doomed and must start over. But here are some Mars problems from a non-scientist who gets his information from watching TV.

    Mars has no magnetosphere. There’s no magnetic field protecting the planet from cosmic rays or solar winds. Mars doesn’t have considerable amounts of known sources of water. Mars lacks an atmosphere and even if you “build” one, the solar winds would blow it away. Mars is really cold. Martian soil is toxic due to high concentrations of compounds containing chlorine. Martian weather produces large and prolonged dust storms which would be incompatible with human life and infrastructure development.

    Musk wants to solve life defying problems like colonizing Mars, but has no desire to solve the human caused problems on our own planetary paradise. Yarvin seems to suffer from the same kind of myopathy.

    • Lostinmesa says:

      My theory is that all the Mars stuff is actually just plans for surviving and recolonizing Earth after the coming apocalypse/ climate collapse.

  17. Terrence says:

    I’ve never read any Yarvin, but listened to a gob of podcasts about him. He seems to embody the same sort of illusion as those held by Musk’s colonizing Mars project; we’re doomed and must start over. But here are some Mars problems from a non-scientist who gets his information from watching TV.

    Mars has no magnetosphere. There’s no magnetic field protecting the planet from cosmic rays or solar winds. Mars doesn’t have considerable amounts of known sources of water. Mars lacks an atmosphere and even if you “build” one, the solar winds would blow it away. Mars is really cold. Martian soil is toxic due to high concentrations of compounds containing chlorine. Martian weather produces large and prolonged dust storms which would be incompatible with human life and infrastructure development.

    Musk wants to solve life defying problems like colonizing Mars, but has no desire to solve the human caused problems on our own planetary paradise. Yarvin seems to suffer from the same kind of myopathy.

    • RJames0723 says:

      Your description of Mars reminds me of an animated show called “Fired on Mars”. It shows a pretty bleak depiction of what a corporate colony on Mars might look like.

      • Magnet48 says:

        Somehow it sounds more like the ideal place to send those they round up for extradition whether they committed crimes or not. I can think of a few movies where that was the point.

    • lostinmesa says:

      If you operate on the assumption that the Earth is doomed with its current population and existing societies, there’s no reason to colonize Mars. You just need to control the destruction so that you and the other chosen are able to survive the coming apocalypse and then you recolonize Earth in your image.

  18. atriana smith says:

    Sarah Paine ought to be required lectures for yahoos like yarvin.

    She’s a naval academic who has fantastic lectures on modern warfare. She can tell yarvin all about Hitler, Mao and all the other despots and how the post WW2 rules based order was designed (and promulgated) democracy, peace, and technological/economic progress.

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