Yarvin Explains Why He’s Writing
The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.
Yarvin explains why he’s writing in this post. He opens with a poem by the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, Que Fecit — Il Gran Rifuto, which, roughly translated, is He Who Makes The Great Refusal. Here’s the text:
For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,he goes forward in honor and self-assurance.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he would still say no. Yet that no—the right no—
undermines him all his life.
Translation by Keeley and Sherrard. Writing in 2007, Yarvin says:
Journalists and professors are all associated with what is essentially one large institution, the press and university system. There are few, if any, ideological quarrels between major universities, or between universities and mainstream journalists.
He says that they all agree on practically everything. The differences between universities are marginal, as are the differences between professors at these institutions, and the differences between journalists. He doesn’t agree with this consensus.
He notes the recent rise of right-wing think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation , the Cato Institute, and the Manhattan Institute, but these are weak, and in no way competitive intellectually with the universities and their acolytes.
He says he’s trying to create an entirely new perspective. He reads Cavafy’s poem first as a paean to the dominant system, and second to the value in dissent. The dominant system rewards joiners, and accomplishes many things. A world of refusers would be a horrible thing. But he wants to be the one who refuses to participate in the Great Consensus, he wants to create an entirely new perspective.
What I’m trying to assemble here at UR is a view of the world we live in that is genuinely alien—at least, as genuinely alien as I can make it. By “alien” I just mean strange, different, or unfamiliar. …
Snip
An alien perspective is useful because it is not, at least not obviously, influenced by the ideas that are loose in the world today.
He says that there are two ways to do this. One is to start from scratch. This approach opens the door to appalling mistakes. One alternative is paleoconservativism. This is perhaps the most alien perspective on our times that he can think of.
Paleoconservatives evaluate the present by the standards of the past. He claims that their views aren’t taught anywhere, there is no education grounded in paleoconservatism. He doesn’t like present-day paleoconservatives, though. He thinks they’re too clubby, too esoteric, and probably too much in love with past regimes. Yarvin isn’t interested in recreating the Holy Roman Empire, or the Byzantine Empire.
He wants to look at 2007 the way people in 2107 do. In the end, he writes because he enjoys doing it and a bunch of people talked him into writing.
Discussion
1. I’m not wiling to read any posts based on Dungeons and Dragons. Or religion. And no more The Matrix, either. Checking ahead, no comparisons between humans and computer hardware.
2. I am sympathetic to the urge to look for different perspectives. I imagine that’s something everyone does when they’re dissatisfied with the status quo; and that academics do it in search of advancement. I’m also sympathetic to the idea of reading older books. Wisdom isn’t the special province of the present.
3. I don’t think it’s possible to start from scratch, as Yarvin claims he wants to do. There is no such place.
I also don’t think that we benefit from considering the present through the lens of the past. The wisdom of the past was directed at the conditions that existed when it was generated, and much of it was dreamed up to support the then status quo. We have to examine each idea in light of our present situation before we try to use it.
That means we have to identify the problem we want to solve carefully. Yarvin hasn’t precisely stated the problem that drives him to consider paleoconservatism. Based on what I’ve covered so far, I’d suggest some possibilities:
a. The people with power are unable to exercise all their power.
b.. Governmental regulation and public opinion are too cumbersome, and should be removed.
c. Democracy can’t solve irreconcilable differences, so civil war is inevitable.
d. The only serious problem facing our society is violence against person and property. Democracy won’t solve that problem so we need another system.
e. There’s something, as yet undefined, wrong with the way the universities and reporters pursue truth.
As to e., there is a consensus at the root of our education system, one shared with all academics and more widely across society. It’s what Jonathan Rauch calls the epistemic regime, the system we use to construct knowledge. I discuss it here, and in the three posts in that series.
We also use that system to construct and evaluate solutions to problems. Yarvin’s Heritage Foundation and other think tanks aren’t trying to solve problems. They exist to create justifications for undoing solutions currently in place as demanded by their donors. They have no new solutions, and their use of the epistemic regime is intellectually suspect.
Yarvin is toying with the idea of rejecting the epistemic regime but has nothing to suggest as a replacement.
4. As I wrote in the introduction to this series, I’m trying to take this guy seriously. That’s not easy. I have trouble ignoring the possibility that Yarvin is just a contrarian, a jolly gadfly, skittering about puncturing platitudes with outrageous claims like this: “Safeway will sell you a whole, salted rhinoceros head before Harvard will teach you that Lincoln was a tyrant.”
5. Yarvin seems to think that scholars are all liberals. Whatever. I don’t suppose Yarvin has read Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. I wonder if he would say that Foucault was a liberal, or that he was part of the consensus he so dislikes?
6. Finally, a word about the Cavafy poem. Here’s the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on the title of the poem:
The great refusal (Italian: il gran rifiuto) is the error attributed in Dante’s Inferno to one of the souls found trapped aimlessly at the Vestibule of Hell, The phrase is usually believed to refer to Pope Celestine V and his laying down of the papacy on the grounds of age, though it is occasionally taken as referring to Esau, Diocletian, or Pontius Pilate, with some arguing that Dante would not have condemned a canonized saint. Dante may have deliberately conflated some or all of these figures in the unnamed shade.
The canonized saint in ths passage is Celestine V. Here’s the Dante line:
After I had identified a few,
I saw and recognized the shade of him
who made, through cowardice, the great refusal.
Dante says the speaker of the Great Refusal is a coward. Cavafy thinks that the great refusal is right for some people in some cases. The world needs people who refuse to accept the dominant social narative. Yarvin makes a point of saying that he’s made the right decision for himself.
We should see Yarvin as the illustration of antisocialism in Wikipedia.
Ed,
Reading yarvin’s writing is from 2007 is excruciating. Thank you for taking the time to dry his written wet dreams and smooth out the papers they were written on so your readers may easily see the pomposity yarvin is chasing.
Mr. Walker, I appreciate that you’ve tackled the unpleasant task of trying to make sense of Curtis Yarvin’s “political philosophy,” a task made important only by his recent ascent to influence among the J.D. Vance and tech broligarch set (influence gained by telling them what they want to hear, not by being a deep thinker).
You sized Yarvin up accurately in point #4, where you entertained “the possibility that Yarvin is just a contrarian, a jolly gadfly…” and so forth. Political scientist Matt McManus summarized and took down Yarvin in a thoughtful article in Commonweal in 2023, which includes the blunt assessment that “Yarvin’s writing is of a very low intellectual quality, even compared with other neo-reactionaries like Paul Gottfried or Alexander Dugin.”:
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/curtis-yarvin-thiel-carlyle-monarchism-reactionary
Yarvin is a bright middle-aged guy who is also a bundle of insecurities and resentments, and he lacks the training and discipline to do serious intellectual work. If you take away his pretentious name-dropping, his vague and sweeping concepts and generalizations unsupported by facts, his trolling, and his patronizing sneer meant to bedazzle young libertarian pseudo-intellectuals, there’s not much left to talk about.
Hey now, that’s a new demographic to keep track of: young libertarian pseudo-intellectuals. They’re out there.
Thanks for the reference to the Commonweal article.
You’re most welcome. I hope to gently encourage Mr. Walker to not spend too much more time trying to make sense of Yarvin’s ideas. Yarvin’s appeal to J.D. Vance and the tech gurus is entirely because he’s telling them what they want to hear, not because of the quality of his ideas. If we spend too much time making Yarvin’s incoherent ideas into something organized and reasonable-sounding, we could be guilty of the same “sanewashing” that the mainstream media have committed so many times by tidying up Trump’s ramblings about sharks, batteries, and that big mythical water valve that Trump thinks is up in Canada, controlling all of California’s water supply. Sheesh!
Yarvin’s ramblings remind me of a critique of my company’s CFO’s rewrite of a Management Discussion and Analysis prepared by our outside securities lawyer. “His rewrite is unintelligible but he did manage to write in complete sentences and paragraphs.”.
…which leads me to share what Yarvin makes me think of – one night in college when a group of friends got some really intense weed, we smoked it and it made us very philosophical and deep. We were stunned at our depth! The next morning, we recalled parts of the conversation. At night, high as kites, we thought we were genius, had ideas as big as the universe and expansive as the sky. Totally sober the next morning, we realized it was all gibberish and pretty nutty. That is what Yarvin’s so-called philosophy sounds like to me – the morning after.
There’s a psychological phenomenon known as “pathological demand avoidance”. Yarvin strikes me as exhibiting something of this nature in the arena of political views. He quite says so in the post outlined here. He describe a compulsion to not agree, and then tries to justify and expand on his non-agreement. But it comes from an assumption of non-agreement.
Criticism consists of “You are wrong. You are wrong about X. Here is how you are wrong. Here is how you got to be wrong.”
This is not what he’s doing. He starts from “Everyone is wrong about everything. I will speak the truth.” I mean, it can kinda sound like he’s friendly to conservatives who are unhappy with universities and the press. But he thinks everyone is wrong. Including conservatives.
He also embodies a kind of person that thinks that demonstrating knowledge of obscure poets gives him more credibility. He’s a snob, hating on other snobs.
The more I read about Yarvin, the more I suspect he is neurodivergent and possibly possessed of a mild form of a behavioral disorder — perhaps autism paired with oppositional defiant disorder. Or perhaps plain old fashioned sociopathy or psychopathy, or a personality disorder like narcissism, because he not only misses or ignores social cues, he has a lack of appreciation for society and what is required to live as a member within a peaceful society to the point of rejecting society because it’s not constructed to his personal preferences.
Narcissism and solipsism?
(The guy who bombed the IVF clinic (and himself) had something like this – he was mad at the world because he didn’t consent to be born. One headline described him as “anti-pro-life”, which missed his whiny point.)
“efilism”
https://theintercept.com/2025/05/19/efilism-palm-springs-bomber-fertility-clinic/
My sense, in the reading I was able to get through, that he’s offended by people who might disagree with him, and finds them stupid. I’m willing to say that level of antisocialiality is at the very least a personality flaw on its own. But I also think he’s no principled hermit. I doubt he’s up for telling Thiel anything that Thiel doesn’t want to hear. That can still be narcissism, but it’s much harder to pull that off with several of the other possibilities.
There’s still some grift in all of this nonsense.
Yarvin has a lot in common with Reichsfuehrer Stephen Miller. Miller, though, has more street smarts than Yarvin.
This is in reply to Matt—B as there was no reply under his comment. My particular outlook on life is that it’s hard enough without giving yourself added problems like drinking to excess or abusing drugs or committing crimes. It never occurred to me that somewhere someone would seriously consider it best to never be born. I regret that lack of awareness.
Curtis Yarvin seems to think that being a math prodigy makes him a know-it-all about everything else, including the much trickier subject of human and societal relations.
Yarvin seems fond of reducing things to the absurd. Human society is founded on conflict, conflict can only end in violence, and violence in death. He doesn’t consider whether conflict always ends in violence or death, or whether it would be worse without committed attempts to avoid and stop it.
Yarvin’s simplistic solution is to remove restraints on the powerful, and let them remove from existence those with whom they are in conflict. Voila. The absurdity is painful, though it may have sounded less absurd in the original German. I can see why the super wealthy would add him to their list of courtiers.
Like Yarvin, I went through a Nietzsche stage but then I graduated.
To the extent that Yarvin has a coherent set of ideas, he starts with the notion that avoidance of violence is the raison d’etre for government. Ok. And judging from his ramblings, he would define violence as physical violence and deprivation of property, rather conveniently excluding the violence of poverty and the psychological, emotional and spiritual violence that comes when one is the slave rather than the master. No “Man is born free but everywhere he is chains” or “When, in the course, of human events…” thinking for Yarvin.
I can see why Tech Billionaires like Yarvin. He thinks the hierarchical corporate model is wonderful. It can be. But it can also be disastrous, especially if the Chiefs – CEO, CFO< CIO, etc and Directors are idiots or have mental or emotional disorders. Did Yarvin ever hear of Chapter 11? Techies and private equity people tend to think of people as just widgets. So Yarvin makes sense to them. It is as if he and they have managed to eliminate revolutions and uprisings from their history books. Revolutions don’t happen because there aren’t laws on the books defining rights.
Yarvin, above:
This is about as silly as the folks who say there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats, so they’ll vote Green or Libertarian or some other party.
The economics departments at the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Stanford, UC-Berkeley, MIT, and Princeton would be surprised to learn that there are “few, if any ideological quarrels between major universities.”
I wonder if there is any significance to using a poem from a homosexual, CP Cavafy, as the introduction Yarvin uses to explain why he writes. Cavafy could be pretty forthright about his desires and the objects thereof.
I haven’t read Yarvin. And all of you guys have talked me out of it. Thanks.