Curtis Yarvin: His Power Grows, The Cheapening of What US Citizenship Means, De-Policed Seattle, "Winning Ukraine" is Actually Losing, JFK Jr.'s George Media Experiment
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There are housecats who wield more power than Curtis Yarvin. Why so many electrons are wasted on these pseudo-intellectuals is an interesting question.
I find most of Yarvin's analysis spot on, and strikingly original when you come across it for the first time. I'm less convinced by his prescriptions though, especially seeing his support for China's zero Covid policy.
Well, this is addressed right to my doorstep, so I'll reply in kind.
Moldberg's writings were the last hurrah of the blogosphere for me. I suppose there's a bit of a comeback now with forums like Substack, but it feels different, like there is no time anymore for long-form discussion in all the tumult.
Yarvin's key messages were: read old books, and, in doing so, you will find that democracy not only doesn't work for this or that reason but is a fundamentally suboptimal way of making decisions. The Cathedral thing started as a lampoon of the religious aspects of progressivism -- even liberalism in the classical sense -- but fails as a useful theory about how the world actually works. Forgetting the confused ruminations about Protestantism, the big ticket factions that run the economies and governments of the world couldn't be more antithetical to "The Cathedral," as evidenced by, say, Pfizer and Moderna trying to kill you, to pick the most recent example. Not very progressive of them!
If you're interested in the political economy behind Yarvin's ideas, you would do better with Hans-Hermann Hoppe or David Friedman. The insight here, one that Yarvin has glossed over, is that putting someone in charge of increasing the value of land aligns incentives all the way up the government stack, captures all preferences about all possible uses of the land, taking into account the very health of the people and even their neighbors. The West is inevitably going to see more of a "Patchwork" system as corporations outcompete popular governments for control of land and management thereof, but it would help greatly if more professionals understood these concepts. Having pitched this to BlackRock, among others, I can tell you the understanding is very poor. When Yarvin himself hints at specific policy, it becomes embarrassing, and, with my deepest sympathies, his blatant attention whoring is getting tiresome. Read Hoppe or Friedman instead.
I was going to say more, but will just leave you with an alternative view of the US empire: it's over! The dollar will collapse and the country will break apart. Soon. It's an unavoidable business decision for states like Alaska, Texas, Florida, even California and New Hampshire. Rumor has it what's left of the 4th branch is quite concerned about this now. If the elites had their puppets waltz into these meetings in clown suits doing pirouettes and making balloon animals, I could at least conclude they possessed some insight into their madness. They're finished.
Apr 2, 2022·edited Apr 2, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo
Don’t trust people who predict the future they have their own delusions. History is not a straight line, it is not a plot, it doesn’t move according to plan, and most certainly it is not predictable. People who believe they can predict the future and take themselves seriously are dangerous. Democracy isn’t dying, America will not cease to be a superpower (we have the bombs), the Left isn’t taking over to impose socialism and the Right isn’t taking over to impose some sort of technofascism. Elon Musk will never be President. The great illusion is that people are planning our future, most of the time our leaders are winging it and dealing with the unforeseen consequences of their actions, just ask Uncle Joe and Vladdy. No one could wing it like Trump and then he spent four years dealing with the unforeseen consequence that he got himself elected. The only thing that is predictable about humans is that they will continue to talk out of their ass and delude themselves, be they on the Left or the Right.
What is history? It is a big pot of stew. Ideas fly everywhere good ones, mostly bad ones and sometimes insane ones and our leaders use them to try to create utopias – I believe that the fact that there is a word for utopia is proof that man is a failed species, it shouldn’t be necessary because it should just be. One thing the great thinkers who founded our country knew was that there are no utopias and the best thing to do was to design a system where people could live as freely as possible without tearing themselves apart. It has worked well so far, but it doesn’t mean you aren’t going to have to listen to a lot of stupid shit. Ideas are not weapons and people you disagree with aren’t enemies. Unfortunately, too many people today believe the opposite.
Man likes to tell tall tales, spin conspiracies and complicate simple things. Sometimes we go through periods like the Enlightenment and the Renaissance sometimes we go through the Dark Ages, one thing you can bet on is that the future will be something no one has thought of yet. We may be going to hell in a bucket but it’s better to just enjoy the ride.
While Ukraine is not "winning", Russia is definitely losing and kickstarted an open cold war with a renewed, no longer naive Western side.
And the West will from now on destabilize Russia just as Russia is trying to destabilize the West. The cards are now on the table, we are at war, and the East is our enemy, and everything it does is suspicious and probably part of its war efforts.
Much accomplishment for Russia yes?
As for Moldbug, just as I pragmatically would ally with deviants in the West that I deeply despise just to increase the probability my East EU country remains in its status quo and at peace, so would I enter similar alliances if people like Yarvin would try to run a country like a corporation as a monarch of sorts.
The current elites are evil enough. We don't need smarter, more perverse elites that are more capable to rule and more ruthless in crushing opposition and dissent.
Fuck them all, play them against each other so they waste their lives and resources trying to achieve power - it's the safest path for ordinary people to maintain a somewhat normal life.
Don't trust anyone, especially smart people, and rich people.
I'm still reading through everything, but I wanted to comment on this part of the article by Siegel you quoted. Some sections that immediately stood out to me:
"In Yarvin’s worldview, what keeps American democracy running today is not elections but illusions projected by a set of institutions, including the press and universities, that work in tandem with the federal bureaucracy in a complex he calls the Cathedral."
And this:
"The power of the Cathedral is that it cannot be seen because it is located everywhere and nowhere, baked into the architecture of how we live, communicate, and think."
That is *pure* Hegelianism. And it makes perfect sense that Siegel said it was a, "classic anti-modern, anti-democratic worldview of 18th-century reactionaries…" The Counter-Enlightenment continues driving the political sphere at top speed.
I understand why you (and Yarvin) think that because the elites appear united, GAE is strong and will persist. Leaving aside the Turchin-type question of whether elite overproduction is leading to increasing tensions within the elite, it seems trivially true that any elite remains united as long as everyone in that elite continues to benefit from the existing system. But that proves nothing about the future. The question of strength is tested only by crisis, and this elite has not faced any crisis for nearly a hundred years. I maintain that all evidence points to extreme regime fragility, which can easily co-exist with regime strength—until it doesn’t, when a crisis exposes both regime weakness and regime disunity. The classic pattern is at that point either elite unity fractures, or a new elite (say, one that understands and offers the old pattern of citizenship) arises and replaces the old wholesale.
Apr 2, 2022·edited Apr 2, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo
"... the president is a ceremonial figure beholden to the permanent bureaucracy."
When it comes to the US president, that's all you need to know.
It explains why Trump was unable to diminish US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and the phenomenon of 40+ "former US intelligence officials" who rushed to legacy media to tell us that the Hunter Biden laptop had all the appearances of "Russian disinformation."
It also explains why Obama was never able to end the Iraq war or close Gitmo, why Anthony Fauci never gets fired, why Rs and Ds both keep pushing to prosecute Assange and Snowden, why Google, Amazon and Facebook will never face serious regulatory headwinds from the DOJ or any other federal agency and why we'll never really take control of the medical/healthcare system away from large corporations and federal agencies.
1) There was some sign of politicians breaking away from the mono-thought of the Cathedral. I look at Scholz recently calling mathematical models for economics ''bullshit'' live on tv when asked why he rejected cutting Russian gas imports. If there's one field that's clearly theology backed by a pseudo-scientific aura created by mathematical models, that's social science, economics included. All the McKinsey style ''research'' about green transition or diversity that claim to be ''backed by science''. The entire model is based on ignoring all contrary statistical evidence and massaging data until they give you the ideologically preferred conclusion. Scholz admitted that the king is naked. We are far away from a broader acceptance, but at least some know, they just keep paying lip service.
2) Trump was part of the elite, the part needed for a hard reset. He failed because as soon as he won the election, he expected the rest of the elite to play fair and work with him, while they worked from day 0 to correct the mistake in the system. He failed because he stopped fighting them, while he should have utterly crushed them. Entire US state dept need to be dismissed, legislation undone etc. The fact that the liberal elite made Biden sign on day 1 multiple decrees to undo Trumpism is an example of how you do things. Otherwise don't bother.
“The erection of a parallel reality…” An intelligent opening to the obvious; and just as transparent are the reasons for it. All along - and I mean every step of the way - Russia bottom lined the following: A neutral Ukraine foreswearing NATO and nuclear weapons, recognition of Crimea as Russian and the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk from Kyiv. Whenever the recent unpleasantness ends, that will be the guaranteed result; and like we’ve seen it in the movies 100 times,: “we can do it the the easy way or the hard way”. The US gangster? “Go ahead, shoot her; don’t matter to me!” So really the only magnified wishful thinking was that Russia suffer as much as possible; and that is 50% of the transparent reason for the reality of this war.
But the other 50% is just as maddening. Why, when the gangster’s mentality is itself so transparent - think Libya, think Iraq, think Afghanistan - wouldn’t/couldn’t/maybe too late but maybe even now shouldn’t Zelenskyy just say, OK, you know what, I would rather lead a vibrant, functioning country than a shell. I know the eastern regions are mineral rich, but are they really worth this Diplomacy board game where the back stab is only a move away? It would be nice if someone - obviously not Bret Baier, or the rest of the hero worshipping main stream media - would make Zelenskyy deal with this simple reality and answer this simple question. I don’t agree with the military talking heads who opine that the US actually would rather not allow Ukraine to win, because the consequences of Russia losing would be disastrous. But someone should at least tell the poor guy that we really just don’t care.
Nicc, you really need to stop with the smug Yarvin posting. His posture, hippie hair, and twenty year out of date fashion sense is at this point a personal attack.
Excellent post, as uzh. The Curtis and JFK Jr. stories actually nicely compliment each other because they shine a light on how the cultural landscape amongst the elite is changing. Back then, when the upper echelons were made up of post WW2 Chads the cultural foundations of the regime were also representative of the establishment - you'd have JFK Jr. a Giga Chad talk about some politics and then babes and cigars. Now the World is run by a bunch of guys the Chads used to shove in lockers, but because they could do math and had a gruge against the jocks they came to seize control of the Cathedral and now their prophets are the same lameos as them, LARPING with political essays where they write on the subtle benefits of enforced monogamy and Bayesian approaches to moving out of your mom's basement.
P.S. браћа if you're Eastern European and support either Russia or the US, you're basically a cuck. Only in this instance it's also you that's being slapped, so get my hegemonic empire builders name out ya fucking mouth.
Hit the like button and use the share button to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you. And don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done so already yet.
There are housecats who wield more power than Curtis Yarvin. Why so many electrons are wasted on these pseudo-intellectuals is an interesting question.
Interview suggestions:
Helen Andrews
Michael Brendan Dougherty
Luka Misetic
Clint Ehrlich
I find most of Yarvin's analysis spot on, and strikingly original when you come across it for the first time. I'm less convinced by his prescriptions though, especially seeing his support for China's zero Covid policy.
Well, this is addressed right to my doorstep, so I'll reply in kind.
Moldberg's writings were the last hurrah of the blogosphere for me. I suppose there's a bit of a comeback now with forums like Substack, but it feels different, like there is no time anymore for long-form discussion in all the tumult.
Yarvin's key messages were: read old books, and, in doing so, you will find that democracy not only doesn't work for this or that reason but is a fundamentally suboptimal way of making decisions. The Cathedral thing started as a lampoon of the religious aspects of progressivism -- even liberalism in the classical sense -- but fails as a useful theory about how the world actually works. Forgetting the confused ruminations about Protestantism, the big ticket factions that run the economies and governments of the world couldn't be more antithetical to "The Cathedral," as evidenced by, say, Pfizer and Moderna trying to kill you, to pick the most recent example. Not very progressive of them!
If you're interested in the political economy behind Yarvin's ideas, you would do better with Hans-Hermann Hoppe or David Friedman. The insight here, one that Yarvin has glossed over, is that putting someone in charge of increasing the value of land aligns incentives all the way up the government stack, captures all preferences about all possible uses of the land, taking into account the very health of the people and even their neighbors. The West is inevitably going to see more of a "Patchwork" system as corporations outcompete popular governments for control of land and management thereof, but it would help greatly if more professionals understood these concepts. Having pitched this to BlackRock, among others, I can tell you the understanding is very poor. When Yarvin himself hints at specific policy, it becomes embarrassing, and, with my deepest sympathies, his blatant attention whoring is getting tiresome. Read Hoppe or Friedman instead.
I was going to say more, but will just leave you with an alternative view of the US empire: it's over! The dollar will collapse and the country will break apart. Soon. It's an unavoidable business decision for states like Alaska, Texas, Florida, even California and New Hampshire. Rumor has it what's left of the 4th branch is quite concerned about this now. If the elites had their puppets waltz into these meetings in clown suits doing pirouettes and making balloon animals, I could at least conclude they possessed some insight into their madness. They're finished.
Don’t trust people who predict the future they have their own delusions. History is not a straight line, it is not a plot, it doesn’t move according to plan, and most certainly it is not predictable. People who believe they can predict the future and take themselves seriously are dangerous. Democracy isn’t dying, America will not cease to be a superpower (we have the bombs), the Left isn’t taking over to impose socialism and the Right isn’t taking over to impose some sort of technofascism. Elon Musk will never be President. The great illusion is that people are planning our future, most of the time our leaders are winging it and dealing with the unforeseen consequences of their actions, just ask Uncle Joe and Vladdy. No one could wing it like Trump and then he spent four years dealing with the unforeseen consequence that he got himself elected. The only thing that is predictable about humans is that they will continue to talk out of their ass and delude themselves, be they on the Left or the Right.
What is history? It is a big pot of stew. Ideas fly everywhere good ones, mostly bad ones and sometimes insane ones and our leaders use them to try to create utopias – I believe that the fact that there is a word for utopia is proof that man is a failed species, it shouldn’t be necessary because it should just be. One thing the great thinkers who founded our country knew was that there are no utopias and the best thing to do was to design a system where people could live as freely as possible without tearing themselves apart. It has worked well so far, but it doesn’t mean you aren’t going to have to listen to a lot of stupid shit. Ideas are not weapons and people you disagree with aren’t enemies. Unfortunately, too many people today believe the opposite.
Man likes to tell tall tales, spin conspiracies and complicate simple things. Sometimes we go through periods like the Enlightenment and the Renaissance sometimes we go through the Dark Ages, one thing you can bet on is that the future will be something no one has thought of yet. We may be going to hell in a bucket but it’s better to just enjoy the ride.
While Ukraine is not "winning", Russia is definitely losing and kickstarted an open cold war with a renewed, no longer naive Western side.
And the West will from now on destabilize Russia just as Russia is trying to destabilize the West. The cards are now on the table, we are at war, and the East is our enemy, and everything it does is suspicious and probably part of its war efforts.
Much accomplishment for Russia yes?
As for Moldbug, just as I pragmatically would ally with deviants in the West that I deeply despise just to increase the probability my East EU country remains in its status quo and at peace, so would I enter similar alliances if people like Yarvin would try to run a country like a corporation as a monarch of sorts.
The current elites are evil enough. We don't need smarter, more perverse elites that are more capable to rule and more ruthless in crushing opposition and dissent.
Fuck them all, play them against each other so they waste their lives and resources trying to achieve power - it's the safest path for ordinary people to maintain a somewhat normal life.
Don't trust anyone, especially smart people, and rich people.
Fantastic, I’m really learning thanks to your sub stack
I'm still reading through everything, but I wanted to comment on this part of the article by Siegel you quoted. Some sections that immediately stood out to me:
"In Yarvin’s worldview, what keeps American democracy running today is not elections but illusions projected by a set of institutions, including the press and universities, that work in tandem with the federal bureaucracy in a complex he calls the Cathedral."
And this:
"The power of the Cathedral is that it cannot be seen because it is located everywhere and nowhere, baked into the architecture of how we live, communicate, and think."
That is *pure* Hegelianism. And it makes perfect sense that Siegel said it was a, "classic anti-modern, anti-democratic worldview of 18th-century reactionaries…" The Counter-Enlightenment continues driving the political sphere at top speed.
Great piece
I understand why you (and Yarvin) think that because the elites appear united, GAE is strong and will persist. Leaving aside the Turchin-type question of whether elite overproduction is leading to increasing tensions within the elite, it seems trivially true that any elite remains united as long as everyone in that elite continues to benefit from the existing system. But that proves nothing about the future. The question of strength is tested only by crisis, and this elite has not faced any crisis for nearly a hundred years. I maintain that all evidence points to extreme regime fragility, which can easily co-exist with regime strength—until it doesn’t, when a crisis exposes both regime weakness and regime disunity. The classic pattern is at that point either elite unity fractures, or a new elite (say, one that understands and offers the old pattern of citizenship) arises and replaces the old wholesale.
"... the president is a ceremonial figure beholden to the permanent bureaucracy."
When it comes to the US president, that's all you need to know.
It explains why Trump was unable to diminish US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and the phenomenon of 40+ "former US intelligence officials" who rushed to legacy media to tell us that the Hunter Biden laptop had all the appearances of "Russian disinformation."
It also explains why Obama was never able to end the Iraq war or close Gitmo, why Anthony Fauci never gets fired, why Rs and Ds both keep pushing to prosecute Assange and Snowden, why Google, Amazon and Facebook will never face serious regulatory headwinds from the DOJ or any other federal agency and why we'll never really take control of the medical/healthcare system away from large corporations and federal agencies.
The books are cooked.
Some thoughts:
1) There was some sign of politicians breaking away from the mono-thought of the Cathedral. I look at Scholz recently calling mathematical models for economics ''bullshit'' live on tv when asked why he rejected cutting Russian gas imports. If there's one field that's clearly theology backed by a pseudo-scientific aura created by mathematical models, that's social science, economics included. All the McKinsey style ''research'' about green transition or diversity that claim to be ''backed by science''. The entire model is based on ignoring all contrary statistical evidence and massaging data until they give you the ideologically preferred conclusion. Scholz admitted that the king is naked. We are far away from a broader acceptance, but at least some know, they just keep paying lip service.
2) Trump was part of the elite, the part needed for a hard reset. He failed because as soon as he won the election, he expected the rest of the elite to play fair and work with him, while they worked from day 0 to correct the mistake in the system. He failed because he stopped fighting them, while he should have utterly crushed them. Entire US state dept need to be dismissed, legislation undone etc. The fact that the liberal elite made Biden sign on day 1 multiple decrees to undo Trumpism is an example of how you do things. Otherwise don't bother.
“The erection of a parallel reality…” An intelligent opening to the obvious; and just as transparent are the reasons for it. All along - and I mean every step of the way - Russia bottom lined the following: A neutral Ukraine foreswearing NATO and nuclear weapons, recognition of Crimea as Russian and the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk from Kyiv. Whenever the recent unpleasantness ends, that will be the guaranteed result; and like we’ve seen it in the movies 100 times,: “we can do it the the easy way or the hard way”. The US gangster? “Go ahead, shoot her; don’t matter to me!” So really the only magnified wishful thinking was that Russia suffer as much as possible; and that is 50% of the transparent reason for the reality of this war.
But the other 50% is just as maddening. Why, when the gangster’s mentality is itself so transparent - think Libya, think Iraq, think Afghanistan - wouldn’t/couldn’t/maybe too late but maybe even now shouldn’t Zelenskyy just say, OK, you know what, I would rather lead a vibrant, functioning country than a shell. I know the eastern regions are mineral rich, but are they really worth this Diplomacy board game where the back stab is only a move away? It would be nice if someone - obviously not Bret Baier, or the rest of the hero worshipping main stream media - would make Zelenskyy deal with this simple reality and answer this simple question. I don’t agree with the military talking heads who opine that the US actually would rather not allow Ukraine to win, because the consequences of Russia losing would be disastrous. But someone should at least tell the poor guy that we really just don’t care.
Nicc, you really need to stop with the smug Yarvin posting. His posture, hippie hair, and twenty year out of date fashion sense is at this point a personal attack.
Excellent post, as uzh. The Curtis and JFK Jr. stories actually nicely compliment each other because they shine a light on how the cultural landscape amongst the elite is changing. Back then, when the upper echelons were made up of post WW2 Chads the cultural foundations of the regime were also representative of the establishment - you'd have JFK Jr. a Giga Chad talk about some politics and then babes and cigars. Now the World is run by a bunch of guys the Chads used to shove in lockers, but because they could do math and had a gruge against the jocks they came to seize control of the Cathedral and now their prophets are the same lameos as them, LARPING with political essays where they write on the subtle benefits of enforced monogamy and Bayesian approaches to moving out of your mom's basement.
P.S. браћа if you're Eastern European and support either Russia or the US, you're basically a cuck. Only in this instance it's also you that's being slapped, so get my hegemonic empire builders name out ya fucking mouth.