Curtis Yarvin's Nonsense in the New York Times
America's most famous monarchist can't seem to come up with much of an argument for his position.
A week ago, the New York Times published a long interview with Curtis Yarvin.
If you don’t know who that is then (i) congratulations on not being hopelessly online but (ii) here’s a quick summary:
Yarvin, who used to be better known by his nome de internet Mencius Moldbug, is a writer who advocates “monarchism” (although he can be quite slippery about what that word means to him). I did a debate with him a little over two years in Chicago. I wrote about that experience here.
Now, engaging with the anti-egalitarian arguments of various reactionary oddballs is a significant part of what I do. (As Doug Stanhope would say, it’s “not for everybody.”) So, it makes sense that I would have talked to him. But, from what I’ve said so far, he might sound like a pretty marginal figure. How did he end up getting a big splashy interview in the New York Times?
Basically, we live in a strange and broken world, and Yarvin has some very non-marginal fans. For example:
The current Vice President of the United States has “said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration. ‘There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,’ Vance said on a conservative podcast in 2021…”
Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who largely financed the early stages of Vice President Vance’s political career (one of his many acts of political generosity) called Yarvin an “interesting and powerful” “historian” in an interview with the Atlantic where he parroted many of Yarvin’s standard talking points (even while distancing himself from Yarvin’s “monarchist” conclusions).
Another Silicon Valley billionaire, Marc Andreessen, who seems to be a significant advisor to the second Trump administration, has called Yarvin a “good friend” and cited him (albeit in a slightly garbled way) in order to critcize the New Deal.
All in all, it’s not surprising that the Times thought its readers would be curious about the man and his worldview. But, the interview just makes it clear how little there is there.
If you’ve never encountered Yarvin’s particular argumentative style before, here’s a pretty good sample (the interviewer’s half of the conversation is in bold):
There was reporting in 2017 by BuzzFeed — they published some emails between you and the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, where you talked about watching the 2016 election with Peter Thiel and referred to him as “fully enlightened.” What would “fully enlightened” have meant in that context? Fully enlightened for me means fully disenchanted. When a person who lives within the progressive bubble of the current year looks at the right or even the new right, what’s hardest to see is that what’s really shared is not a positive belief but an absence of belief. We don’t worship these same gods. We do not see the New York Times and Harvard as divinely inspired in any sense, or we do not see their procedures as ones that always lead to truth and wisdom. We do not think the U.S. government works well.
And this absence of belief is what you call enlightened? Yes. It’s a disenchantment from believing in these old systems. And the thing that should replace that disenchantment is not, Oh, we need to do things Curtis’s way. It’s basically just a greater openness of mind and a greater ability to look around and say: We just assume that our political science is superior to Aristotle’s political science because our physics is superior to Aristotle’s physics. What if that isn’t so?
OK…what if it isn’t so? Then what?
Yarvin doesn’t tell us.
“Aristotle’s political science” presumably means his constitutional views. (I’ll charitably assume he doesn’t mean Aristotle’s belief that some people are born as “natural slaves,” though frankly I’d like someone to directly ask Yarvin, in so many words, what he thinks about that idea.1) Aristotle thought that the best constitutional type was a balanced mixture of elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. These days, most people will tell you that they believe in some form of democracy. Even dictatorial regimes tend to feel the need to justify their rule with an elaborate pantomime of popular elections. That basic shift in global politics has been accompanied by plenty of intellectual justification. The last few centuries of western thought include a multitude of pro-democracy arguments from a long series of philosophers and political theorists. Yarvin could pick one of those guys and try to refute their case. Instead, he constructs and dismisses a silly strawman (“because our physics is superior”). He’s not interested in engaging with the substance of the issue. He’s interested in striking a fun, combative pose, and giving his readers a nice sprinkling of high-brow references to make the whole thing feel substantive.
Notice, too, that there’s no pretense here to a positive argument for his position. Just an appeal to…like…open up your mind, man. Which is, of course, a game that can be played in any direction. I could really cut down on the length of a lot of the articles I write about economic issues if I thought I could get by with, “We assume capitalism is better than socialism. But, what if it’s not?”
Yarvin does, to be fair, give one and a half positive arguments for his position elsewhere in the interview.2 Let’s start with the half.
When you say to a New York Times reader, “Democracy is bad,” they’re a little bit shocked. But when you say to them, “Politics is bad” or even “Populism is bad,” they’re like, Of course, these are horrible things. So when you want to say democracy is not a good system of government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism is not a good system of government, and then you’ll be like, Yes, of course, actually policy and laws should be set by wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors. Then you’ll realize that what you’re actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy.
As it happens, from my own radically different perspective (as a democratic socialist who advocates exactly the kind of “left-populist” politics many centrists would tell you are just as bad as Trump’s “right-populism”), I don’t think Yarvin is entirely wrong to point out some commonalities between what he openly and proudly believes and what many professional-class liberals implicitly believe about the inability of ordinary people to govern themselves.
Yarvin’s ideas about “the Cathedral” (his term for, basically, the media and academia, which he blames for shifting society to the left) can sound like a funhouse-mirror version of Noam Chomsky’s critique of the corporate media “manufacturing consent” on behalf of the status quo. The crucial difference, though, is that Chomsky wants to broaden the range of perspectives Americans get to hear, because he trusts ordinary people to decide for themselves who’s right. This is a commitment that’s even led Chomsky (the son of Jewish immigrants, who came of age in the 1940s) to passionately defend the free speech of Holocaust deniers. Yarvin’s objection to “Harvard and the New York Times” is that they’re manufacturing consent for the wrong ideas. He wants the woke liberal elite to be overthrown, so the stupid masses can be guided by a better, more “fully enlightened” elite.
This is a point I hit in my Jacobin article about our debate in 2022:
[T]here’s a core of Yarvin’s stance on democracy that’s very much not foreign to the American mainstream. And I’m not just talking about Republican politicians who want to ban books and make it harder to vote.
Does Yarvin believe “Joe Sixpack” to be incapable of self-government? So does everyone who supports America’s economic status quo, in which most people take orders from unelected bosses during the eight hours a day they’re at work — in most cases without even the limited voice workers can get in capitalist workplaces by organizing a union.
Does Yarvin believe that ordinary people are too stupid to decide for themselves what to believe? So does every mainstream liberal who believes that it’s important that Twitter and Facebook and Spotify sort out truth from falsehood so they can censor “misinformation.”
I’m not suggesting that Yarvin is no worse than mainstream liberals — or even mainstream conservatives. In important ways, Yarvin is much worse… [But] Yarvin’s edgelord bluntness drives him to openly express what’s implicit in far more mainstream ideas.
…all of which is to say that, when he playfully points out the commonalities between his worldview and that of many Times readers, he’s not entirely wrong. The reason this is only half an argument for his own position, though, is that even if there’s a conceptual tension between rejecting Yarvinism in the name of a commitment to democracy and affirming technocratic-centrist liberalism, he still needs to tell us why that tension should be resolved in his direction.
Here’s the part where we finally get his answer. We can call this the Argument from Capitalism:
The thing that you have not quite isolated yet is why having a strongman would be better for people’s lives. Can you answer that? Yes. I think that having an effective government and an efficient government is better for people’s lives. When I ask people to answer that question, I ask them to look around the room and point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy, because these things that we call companies are actually little monarchies. You’re looking around, and you see, for example, a laptop, and that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy.
This is an example you use a lot, where you say, If Apple ran California, wouldn’t that be better? Whereas if your MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of Computing, you can only imagine it. I’m sorry, I’m here in this building, and I keep forgetting to make my best argument for monarchy, which is that people trust the New York Times more than any other source in the world, and how is the New York Times managed? It is a fifth-generation hereditary absolute monarchy.
This is, in a way, an exact reversal of Karl Marx’s point in Ch. 15 of Capital, where he assails bourgeois apologists for advocating a “division of powers” and a “representative system” in politics (when it’s a question of how the government rules over them) while running their factories (where it’s a question of how they rule their workers) like absolute monarchies. And Yarvin and Marx are clearly both right about their common premise.
Addressing this part of the interview a couple days later in his own column in the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie argues that Apple isn’t a monarchy because CEO Tim Cook “serves at the pleasure of its board.” But this is extraordinarily weak tea. Corporate Boards of Directors aren’t exactly known for checking CEO power (even in the name of discontented shareholders). And even when everything is running exactly the way it should from the perspective of the rights of shareholders, there isn’t even a pretense to the CEO or the board needing the democratic consent of the people actually being most directly governed (the workers), never mind the wider community impacted by the company’s decision. No matter how you slice it, a system where votes are literally bought and sold, and the wealthier you are, the more you can buy, is ludicrously undemocratic. But, saying that much leaves open the question of whether this is a bad thing.
I think democracy shouldn’t end when you enter the gates of the workplace. Yarvin thinks monarchy shouldn’t end when you clock out at the end of your shift.
The way the Argument from Capitalism goes is that “little monarchies” like Apple are good at producing products that match consumer preferences, and therefore a big monarchy, which he equates to “effective” and “efficient” government3, will be good for the population at large. But, there are (at least!) three problems here.
First, a tremendous amount of technological innovation is actually done in the public sector already. Yarvin can roll his eyes all he wants about the hypothetical “California Department of Computing,” but read Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State. There’s very little, for example, about what makes smartphones “smart” that didn’t happen in places like public universities, the Department of Defense, labs funded by federal grants, and so on. This dispersed real-life “Department of Computing” is already doing quite a bit of the legwork to produce the innovations Yarvin’s beloved “little monarchies” turn around and package in forms they can sell to consumers.
Second, one of these days Yarvin should look up Mondragon, the world’s largest worker cooperative (or, in effect, federation of worker co-ops) and one of the largest employers in the Basque region of Spain. It’s not a little monarchy but a little democracy, and it sure seems to work. It even does a decent amount of cutting-edge research and development. Given the basic set-up of capitalist markets where the means of production can literally be bought and sold by wealthy plutocrats, worker co-ops have considerable competitive disadvantages relative to traditional capitalist firms. For example, it’s way easier to move around your company in search of market advantage when the owners who approve these decisions aren’t adversely effected by the moves. Under these circumstances, co-ops are destined to remain a fairly small part of the economy. A workers’ movement would need to capture political power and start rewriting the economic rules of the road in order to change that reality. But, a successful coop like Mondragon that already exists under capitalism is nevertheless an important proof of concept for the possibility, as Marx said when he was discussing cooperative factories in 1864, that “production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science,” can be “carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands.”
Finally, whether governments doing things “effectively” and “efficiently” is a good thing from the perspective of the population being governed entirely depends on whether the government’s goals align with ordinary people’s interests. An effectively and efficiently run slaughterhouse isn’t good for the cows. One way of achieving even a rough alignment (or at least limiting misalignment) is by making decision-makers worry that their constituents will vote them out of office if they get out of line. Perhaps Yarvin has an alternative method to suggest. If so, at least in this interview, he’s too busy sneering about New York Times-reading libs and coming up with cute little one-liners about Aristotle to tell us what it is.
There are some flashes of ugly racial views in the Times interview. The interviewer (David Marchese) asks him about some insane comments Yarvin had made in the past about the South’s “War of Secession” and its aftermath, and he doubles down on them. I always encourage people who talk to Yarvin to press him about this stuff, and I’m glad Marchese did so, but I’ll leave it at that here since I have nothing to add on my end to what I said about Yarvin’s flirtation with race science in the last essay.
I’m not counting silly shit like his claim that FDR was “like” a monarch in the sense that Congress felt the need to rubber-stamp all of his initiatives in the early years of the New Deal. If a president who’s supported by a big majority of the public in a democratic election being able to push through wildly popular initiatives because Congressmen are afraid their constituents would vote them out of office if they didn’t get with the program counts as “monarchy,” then “monarchism” is both uncontroversial and deeply uninteresting. Obviously everyone on all sides of every political conflict would like their preferred politicians to be “monarch-like” in that sense sense. But, when Yarvin tells Marchese that some figure (preferably an actual Silicon Valley CEO) should be brought in to exercise the kind of power over the federal government typically exercised over startups by CEOs, and he analogizes this (as he often does elsewhere) to Augustus ending the Roman Republic by seizing imperial power, he clearly has something in mind that goes a bit beyond “be really popular and have lots of political capital with which to get stuff through Congress.” At the bare minimum, it’s safe to say that Yarvin would endorse full-on Dick Cheney-level “unitary executive” theory, and that the kinds of powers that the Bush/Cheney administration asserted (to imprison and torture terrorism suspects around the world without charges or trials, for example) are considerably less than what Yarvin wants his Augustus CEO to do, because we’ve already crossed those bridges and it wasn’t monarchical enough for him.
Many real-world monarchies have often been extremely inefficient, but whatever, let’s assume that the reign of whatever tech CEO Yarvin would pick as our Augustus won’t be like that.
On a different tack, Yarvin wrote recently that he is "still dreaming like a child of a sci-fi future, I hope Elon Musk never gets to Mars. Mars is a gnarly place. At this level of difficulty, does a planet buy you that much? Why not build L5 colonies instead? ".
This was promoted by the physicist Gerard O'Neill in the 1970's, and the CoEvolution Quarterly pushed the idea. In response, the novelist Ken Kesey wrote that "A lot of people who want to get into space never got into the earth. It's James Bond. It's a turning away from the juiciness of stuff. That's something that's lost its appeal for me. "
The historian, sociologist and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford wrote that "I regard Space Colonies as another pathological manifestation of the culture that has spent all of its resources on expanding the nuclear means for exterminating the human race. Such proposals are only technological disguises for infantile fantasies.".
The best, the most logical, detailed, mature, commonsense and human rebuttal of O'Neill's proposal came from the poet Wendell Berry. I loved Star Trek techno-utopian fantasies at the time and I hated Berry's arguments, but couldn't fault most of them. Stewart Brand, the CoÈvolution editor, came across as a naive child when he tried to support O'Neill.........
"Mr. Gerard O'Neill's space colony project is offered in the Fall 1975 CoEvolution Quarterly as the solution to virtually all the problems rising from the limitations of our earthly environment. That it will solve all of these problems is a possibility that, even after reading the twenty-six pages devoted to it, one may legitimately doubt. What cannot be doubted is that the project is an ideal solution to the moral dilemma of all those in this society who cannot face the necessities of meaningful change. It is superbly attuned to the wishes of the corporation executives, bureaucrats, militarists, political operators, and scientific experts who are the chief beneficiaries of the forces that have produced our crisis.
For what is remarkable about Mr. O'Neill's project is not its novelty or its adventurousness, but its conventionality. If it should be implemented, it will be the rebirth of the idea of Progress with all its old lust for unrestrained expansion, its totalitarian concentrations of energy and wealth, its obliviousness to the concerns of character and community, its exclusive reliance on technical and economic criteria, its disinterest in consequence, its contempt for human value, its compulsive salesmanship........
This brings me to the central weakness of Mr. O'Neill's case: its shallow and gullible morality. Space colonization is seen as a solution to problems that are inherently moral, in that they are implicit in our present definitions of character and community. And yet here is a solution to moral problems that contemplates no moral change and subjects itself to no moral standard. Indeed, the solution is based upon the moral despair of Mr. O'Neill's assertion that "people do not change." The only standards of judgment that have been applied to this project are technical and economic. Much is made of the fact that the planners' studies "continue to survive technical review." But there is no human abomination that has not, or could not have, survived technical review. Strip mining, fire-bombing, electronic snooping, various forms of genocide and political oppression - all have been technically feasible, and usually economically feasible as well.
Stripped of the glamour that we associate with adventures in "space" and of the romantic escapism left over from our frontier experience, Mr. O'Neill's project is clearly not a solution, in any meaningful sense, to any problem. It is only a desperate attempt to revitalize the thug morality of the technological specialist, by which we blandly assume that we must do anything whatever that we can do.
Mr. O'Neill's testimony is littered with the evidence of his moral bewilderment. His concern for the environment leads him directly to a plan to strip mine the moon. He says, "I have a deep suspicion of governments," but he does not hesitate to promote a scheme that would vastly increase the power and influence of government. He apparently sees no chance of political corruption in an expenditure of a hundred billion public dollars. He says that he "would far prefer to see a cooperative multinational program formed" to carry out his project, but only flve paragraphs later he speaks of the project as a way to return to the "traditional role [of the U.S.] as a generous donor of wealth to those in need." Nowhere does he see the absurdity of trying to solve on a grand scale by expensive technology a problem that can probably be solved on a small scale, and cheaply, by moral means (see E.F. Schumacher's article, same issue). Nowhere does he see the absurdity of trying to solve with existing technology a problem that, as Schumacher suggests, "has been produced by the existing technology."
Mr. O'Neill predicts readily that his scheme will promote diversity and freedom. But he neglects to consider that the machine is already a renegade concept that sees people as spare parts, and uses them as such. Exactly how, one wonders, is this to be corrected by building an even bigger machine and causing people to live inside it, in absolute dependence on it? What, exactly, would be the effect of a completely controlled environment on human character and community? What, exactly, would be the influence of space colonization on earthly political and social forms? Mr. O'Neill does not know, and he has no way to know. He is not, then, merely asking for a public subsidy in the amount of a hundred billion dollars. He is proposing that he and his colleagues should be permitted to experiment with fundamental values.This is the violence of the specialist. This kind of thing is familiar enough. What is new here is the scale.
Perhaps most important of all is Mr. O'Neill's failure to see that the so-called energy crisis is a moral crisis. He assumes that it is simply a matter of scarcity, which can be remedied by the time-honored method of getting more from somewhere else. But it has been obvious for some time that the energy crisis has at least as much to do with the uses of energy as with its availability. The world will tolerate the use of even less energy than it can supply. The question is not of how much energy we can get, but of how much we can use without destroying, at a minimum, our ability to enjoy the use of it. The question of restraint is much more pertinent to the problem than the question of supply. And Mr. O'Neill has apparently never thought to ask what good might be accomplished by the proliferation in space of a mentality that cannot forbear to do anything at all that is possible.
Mr. O'Neill has failed to think of these things because temperamentally he is a scientific super-star. His ambition can comprehend only the grandiose. He is a professional mind-boggler. With the apparent simple-mindedness of the true-believer, he sees himself as the evangelist of the next "giant leap for mankind." He makes the overwhelming presumption of the evangelist - that he knows better than we do what is good for us. And he is asking for an influence over the material means of our lives which will require our spiritual capitulation. Like an evangelist, he wants both our faith and our money......
Your promotion of the space colony idea is getting more and more irresponsible. Like O'Neill and Vajk, you begin with an air of critical reasonableness, and promptly resort to the glib logic of a salesman. None of you has yet foreseen a problem without at the same time foreseeing a more than adequate answer; indeed, as you represent it, a space colony will be nothing less than a magic machine that will automatically transmute little problems into big solutions. Like utopians before, you envision a clean break with all human precedent: history, heredity, character. Thanks to a grandiose technological scheme, nothing is going to happen from now on that is not going to improve everything; as you say, even if it fails, we will be much better off. You people are operating at about the cultural depth of an oil company public relations expert. All this prophetic-ethical computer-mysticism! What is wrong with it is that it is simply failing to make sense - unless, of course, one is looking at it as a sycophant of science, or from the point of view of a government agency or a corporation. That is exactly what worries me: that your coverage of this issue, whatever you mean it to do, will serve to recruit and train a company of intellectual yahoos to justify the next power-grab by the corporations and the government."
Haven't had time yet to read Yarwin's article in the NYT, but here's some thoughts on his work....
Yarvin previously wrote "My worship of Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian Jesus, is no adolescent passion—but the conscious choice of a mature adult." Carlyle toured my country, Ireland. during the famine, sneering at the poverty and starvation, and writing about how Ireland was a "human swinery..... a black, howling babble of superstitious savages........Can it be a charity to keep men alive on these terms? .....shoot a man rather than train him (with heavy expense to his neighbors ) to be a deceptive human swine...". 1 million died during the famine, another million fled the country within 5 years. We don't like people like Thomas Carlyle. I recommend "The Great Hunger", by the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith (Appointed Commander of the British Empire in 1960 by Queen Elizabeth II).
When Yarvin's "Victorian Jesus" wasn't calling Ireland a "human swinery", he was calling black people in the West Indies "pigs with pumpkins". He thought they had no right to own land, and needed to be forced by a "beneficient whip" to work for superior white people who were "born wiser". This white superiority was apparently, according to Carlyle, established by God. It's all making sense now - Trump, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin, Carlyle, Marko Elez ("Normalise Indian hate").
Yarvin thinks that "The [British] Empire had to die not because it didn't work, but because it worked too well. The quality of imperial rule was starting to present evidence against democracy herself." I recommend "The Brutish Empire" by Des Ekin, once, like me, a foolish, ill-ínformed believer in the basic benevolence of British imperialism outside of Ireland. Read about the massacres, the genocides, the man-made famines, the hunting of black human beings for sport after family picnics, the mass hangings without trial, the display of human heads on trophy walls, all carried out with utter arrogance.
I recommend reading about the tens of millions of Indians who died in famines during this barbaric empire that Yarvin claims "worked too well" : "mortality in the Great Bengal famine of 1770 was between one and 10 million;[6] the Chalisa famine of 1783–1784, 11 million; Doji bara famine of 1791–1792, 11 million; and Agra famine of 1837–1838, 800,000.[7] In the second half of the 19th-century large-scale excess mortality was caused by: Upper Doab famine of 1860–1861, 2 million; Great Famine of 1876–1878, 5.5 million; Indian famine of 1896–1897, 5 million; and Indian famine of 1899–1900, 1 million.[8] The first major famine of the 20th century was the Bengal famine of 1943, which affected the Bengal region during wartime; it was one of the major South Asian famines in which anywhere between 1.5 million and 3 million people died."
It's absolutely astonishing to me that intelligent, (half) educated people in the US and elsewhere can possibly be openly advocating a return to fascism or authoritarianism or imperialism or monarchy. Thank you for opposing this. Good luck to all in the US resisting Yarwin, Musk, Trump and co. It must be tough out there at the moment.