Bonus: The Yarvin Explainer

Even weirder than you thought

Barely a month into the new administration, the name Curtis Yarvin is suddenly everywhere as members of the media scramble to understand the ideological undercarriage of the the Trump 2.0 experience. And indeed, if you want to understand Elon’s turn as CEO-monarch or the logic of DOGE, Yarvin is indispensable. The irony is that—while Donald Trump is certainly no intellectual—the Right takes the online musings of their fringe philosophers far more seriously than one can imagine of a Democratic administration.

I began researching Yarvin in the fall of 2023 for a long essay and still remember how disoriented I felt after spending many hours with his arguments, which are almost child-like and yet uniquely captivating for the tech world and broader online right. I’m now able to share an excerpt of that piece with the Dr. Small Talk community. It stresses a few things that are mostly absent from the mainstream profiles, including Yarvin’s anti-libertarianism, revived imperial model, and millet-system cultural politics. It also explores how these ideas have spread to elected officials via the Peter Thiel Express, and how they relate to Thiel’s other pet project, Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism movement. I’m only excerpting the bits about Yarvin, so if you’re interested in the NatCon aspect or more on Thiel, please check out the full piece.

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Curtis Yarvin

The world would be better off had Curtis Yarvin stayed in his mother’s basement and written science fiction. Let us begin with that simple acknowledgement. Unfortunately, the frog man crawled out of the cave, not to enlighten the masses, but to assure them that the streaming shadows on the wall are real. The aristocracy will be redpilled, of course, but the demos must stay underground with their Netflix subscriptions.

For the uninitiated, Curtis Yarvin is a fifty-year old former computer programmer turned blogger and propagator of the very online movement known as the Dark Enlightenment, neoreactionarism (NRx), or the deep right – the latter being Yarvin’s preferred term. He graduated from Brown University in 1992 and began a PhD program at UC Berkeley, but soon dropped out to work in the booming tech industry. By all accounts, he began his political journey entranced by Silicon Valley’s signature form of techno-libertarianism, but he later took a sharp turn away from the democratic principles that, at least theoretically, were supposed to march hand-in-hand with the free market. In 2007, Yarvin began blogging under the pseudonymous name Mencius Moldbug, taking aim not just at various progressive pieties, but at the most sacred cows of them all: freedom, independence, democracy itself. Why, he asks, have we been conditioned to think these things are actually good?

Yarvin’s writing offers a mixed bag of historical anecdotes, dubious claims presented as facts, imagined dystopian technologies, and nostalgia for the days of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I. He exhibits both a deep yearning for the aesthetics and grandeur of the classical Greco-Roman era (“We are switching to Roman numerals,” he explained in a blog post in 2008, because “they are just classier”) and contempt for the elite educational institutions where one might spend serious time reading Homer, Cicero, Plato, or Virgil. His special blend of irreverence and irony both appeals to his fans and disarms his critics, who can always be accused of not being in on the joke. One sometimes gets the sense that he is aspiring to Nietzschean levels of shock while feigning ignorance about the genocidal uses that Nietzsche’s work was put to a few generations hence. As he writes in one post, “The West has just taken longer to corrode – always rusting, never burning. To rise among this tremendous trend, this multi-century disaster, will take an anti-hero of no less stature – a kind of man that appears only once in centuries, a man out of time, who nonetheless appears perfectly suited to his time – I refer, of course, to Trump.” We might as well compare it to the original:

It is true that in the midst of all this [the French Revolution] the most enormous, most unexpected thing occurred: the classical ideal itself stepped bodily and with unheard of splendor before the eyes and conscience of humanity – and once again, more strongly, more simply, more penetratingly than ever, the terrible and thrilling counter-slogan “the privilege of the few” resounded in the face of the old lie-slogan of ressentiment, “the privilege of the majority,” in the face of the will to lowering, to debasement, to leveling, to the downward and evening-ward of man! Like a last sign pointing to the other path, Napoleon appeared, that most individual and late-born human being there ever was, and in him the incarnate problem of the noble ideal in itself – consider well, what kind of problem it is: Napoleon, this synthesis of an inhuman and a superhuman…¹

Though less associated with the sort of vitalism celebrated by Bronze Age Pervert – a writer of self-published pseudo-philosophical tracts who teaches incels about the need to slough off the crippling Judeo-Christian moral synthesis in favor of a renewed homoerotic celebration of strength, beauty, and power – Yarvin absolutely embraces the anti-democratic, aristocratic elements that course through Nietzsche’s work: a concern for a world in which people grow mediocre because they have become more equal, such that exceptional humans of Napoleon’s sort can barely break through. Bad air! Yarvin’s work, in this way, is decidedly anti-populist – the people are idiots who need to be led, rather than fonts of untapped wisdom. And simultaneously, though he despises the progressive orthodoxies which serve as dogma for the liberal elite, his imagined future preserves and protects such hierarchies, which at any rate he regards as natural. (If the few people with the right biology to rule aren’t in charge, neoreactionaries believe, political social structures will inevitably degenerate.) As he writes in a post about how the monarch should handle competing factions, “A king also has a motivation to protect the aristocracy, who are in general his most delicate, refined, talented and fragile citizens. Nothing is so sad as a nation with a starving or oppressed aristocracy. The nobles are the flower of any country, and this flower must bloom forever. It needs absolutely no involvement with peasant children. A late-empire aristocracy should govern itself absolutely – and absolutely no one else.”

Yarvin’s career in the tech industry brought him into contact with Peter Thiel, whose Founders Fund invested in a company he co-founded in 2013. In his biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin characterized Yarvin as the “house political philosopher” for the billionaire’s network of admirers, and reporting for Vanity Fair, James Pogue has traced how Yarvin’s ideas – such as RAGE, retire all government employees – have entered the mainstream via Thiel-backed candidates like Vance and Masters.² The pledge to fire civil servants en masse has notably emerged as one of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign promises. But Thiel himself has also become a vehicle for bringing Yarvin’s ideas to a broader audience, and indeed it is striking to note just how much they sound like one another. The same cannot be said for Thiel and Hazony. Sometimes, particular obsessions and a shared vocabulary come to the fore in their public appearances that suggest a long Signal thread in the background (as when Yarvin and Thiel both began talking about “gain-of-function research” in a certain Wuhan lab). But nowhere is the overlap as obvious as in their enmity toward democracy and desire to either replace the existing government with some sort of CEO-monarch or, better yet, escape the nation-state altogether via the formation of new forms of corporate sovereignty.

Already in 2009, Thiel signaled his break with the politics of mainstream GOP libertarianism in ways that are quite significant for charting his intellectual movement toward Yarvin. In a Cato Institute publication, Thiel stated that while he remained committed to “authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good,” he had recently suffered a crisis of faith. In particular, he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”³ As he continued, “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” In short, Thiel was awakening to an insight not only accepted by Milton Friedman decades ago (“political democracy has elements which tend to destroy economic freedom”), but by scores of leftists as well. Historian Quinn Slobodian has recently chronicled this history in Crack-Up Capitalism, which charts the growing realization that the imperatives of maximizing profit run counter to those of democratic flourishing.

Perhaps the real power of the Thatcher-Reagan era was to moderate Friedman’s diagnosis among conservative politicians and intellectuals who, in an intensified Cold War context, argued that free markets and democracy went together like peanut butter and jelly. Any vision of fundamental conflict between these two forces could be shunted aside amid End-of-History celebrations and Bill Clinton’s rising tide. But, after the 2008 financial crisis, the oppositional logic of capitalism and democracy has become harder to deny; and Thiel, for his part, has stopped trying to reconcile them. He has sided definitively with a vision of explicitly authoritarian, anti-democratic capitalism.

Thiel’s idealized past is therefore not the same one invoked by the national conservatives – who look at the post-WWII era of relatively high wages, near full employment, and male bread-winner domesticity as the Golden Age. Golden Ages for the masses cost money, and robber barons would much rather not part with it. For Thiel, rather, “the 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics” – before redistributional pressures and New Deal-era social programs taught the vast unwashed that they could make demands on the state.

Peter Thiel

Not content to behave like a normal billionaire and stockpile his money in offshore accounts, Thiel instead turned against democracy in the name of ‘freedom’ (his). It is here where his path intersects with Yarvin’s neo-monarchism. Drawing on a corporate and specifically start-up idiom, Yarvin asserts that the United States – and Western democracies more broadly – have lost the ability to govern effectively. They have come to resemble Rome at the end of its republican period, plagued by civil wars and class conflict, and nothing short of a new Caesar with absolute power can right the ship. Importantly, Yarvin envisions this new all-powerful ruler as a CEO and the state he governs as a start-up. As he claims, “The entire regime must function like one big startup, which means it needs one CEO. This CEO can be accountable to some kind of board – possibly consisting of all voters, but ideally no more than nine people – but must not be micromanaged.”⁴ In terms of our evolving political theology, we have reached the age where it is the chief executive who has the true power to decide and thus mirrors God’s sovereignty on earth. Indeed, Carl Schmitt is central to Yarvin, both in his longing for a literal king-as-god figure who resides above the law, and in his view of politics as essentially war against one’s enemies. That is, contrary to the liberal notion of politics as a marketplace where buyers and sellers of different ideas mingle to work out a price, politics for Yarvin means “limited war” aimed at achieving “total victory” over your enemies both within and without. “Most Americans do not yet see their political system in these terms, though more and more are getting there.”

In contrast to Hazony, with his explicit rejection of market principles as the basis of government, Yarvin’s authoritarianism is laced with the libertarian view that the private sector is inherently more functional than the public one, and that the latter should be rebuilt in the former’s image. “Thousands of years of human history have proven at every scale that the pyramid-shaped hierarchy is the best way for people working together to get things done,” he claims.⁵ According to Yarvin, it is the authoritarian aspect of corporations that generates such efficiencies. “A government can only efficiently represent the interests of its own people if its operations are efficient. All large efficient organizations are absolute monarchies.” It’s useful to compare this language to that purportedly used by Thiel at a 2012 guest lecture at Stanford Law School (as admiringly recorded here by Thiel’s disciple Blake Masters): “A startup is basically structured as a monarchy. We don’t call it that, of course. That would seem weirdly outdated, and anything that’s not democracy makes people uncomfortable. But look at the org chart.”

In short, the new crop of ideologues have a vision that is not just anti-democratic but strikingly neo-feudal: a world beyond the nation-state, of new sovereign entities and colonies (either Martian, or, as Milton Friedman’s grandson proposes, at sea) optimized for profit maximization and managed by an authoritarian leader, with civic equality replaced by permanent hierarchies. Like Singapore or Dubai, it will be very clean and efficient – so long as you don’t pay too much attention to the abysmal conditions of the migrant workforce or the lack of individual freedoms. The goal, Yarvin notes, is to actively reduce the horizons of political agency and nurture an apathetic populace, one that does not meddle in the business of running the corporation. If the lights come on and the shows are streaming, why bother with politics at all? The visionaries pushing this anti-democratic agenda are willing to bet that, given a choice between dysfunctional democracies and authoritarian capitalism, enough people – if not truly most – will side with the latter.

It is telling that Yarvin reaches for a colonial model in sketching the virtues of the startup state and suggests that such “sovereign reboots” might first be tried in the Global South – El Salvador, for instance. A new single executive with total authority would dissolve the former organs of government, along with old laws and obligations, and rule over the state from afar. As Yarvin describes it, the new government would be staffed by “international ‘thugs’ (as Balaji Srinivasan likes to say) with world-class executive talent. These killers, who would mostly work remotely (Salvador [sic] is blessed by an American timezone), would be the best of North American YC [Y Combinator] founders, McKinsey veterans, Google engineers, SpaceX rocket scientists, hedge-fund masters, etc.”⁶ Once these neo-colonial overlords have reengineered the state to maximize efficiency, El Salvador would be entirely transformed – “the only 20th-century comparables would be Singapore or the Gulf States.” This utopia – a state run by McKinsey wonks and Y Combinator grads (who are presumably part of the work elite he otherwise despises?), with SpaceX rocket launch pads nestled in “the eternal spring of the Salvadoran volcanic mountains,” and remote working pods near the surf shuttle filled to the brim with disruptors and iterators of all sorts – is (A.) most of humanity’s literal hellscape, and (B.) painfully close to the system we presently have. Indeed, it takes a special kind of delusion to look at the present political and economic order and say, “Well, it could be great if only the tech bros, financiers, and consultants had a bit more power.”

For this scheme to work in practice, the state must seize and control every aspect of the economy, as Yarvin argued in a podcast appearance last July. The resulting developmental course would embrace what he calls turbocapitalism: “Under turbocapitalism, the state establishes a new private sector using public-sector energy, by first scaling up a high-efficiency productive sector, then privatizing it.”⁷ In El Salvador’s case, for instance, the new king establishes CoffeeCo and TouristCo to develop and maximize the country’s two major industries and offers the new companies the right to expropriate and nationalize land as they see fit. A few decades later, once the companies are on solid footing, the monopolies will be broken up and privatized a la AT&T – or, we might add, the East India Company. Indeed, if this set-up sounds familiar it is because Yarvin is merely describing a 21st-century version of the joint-stock companies that European monarchs established to colonize the globe. With that, he finally gives up the libertarian lie that profits depend on the absence of the state.

Coat of arms for the East India Company

Once the proof of concept is established, all one can do is hope for the right conditions to foment regime change closer to home. “The re-emergence of the monarchical form in the First World, after 250 years of experiments in disorder, is the only long-term hope for Europe and the European diaspora.”⁸ Yarvin’s insight, not fully appreciated by conservative critics of liberalism’s contractual principles, is that the corporation is not egalitarian and consensual but authoritarian and monarchical. Yes, the joint-stock company-turned-polity does include some element of accountability – just not to the people governed but to the board of trustees. Let us return again to Peter Thiel’s characterization of the start-up:

It is certainly not representative governance. People don’t vote on things. Once a startup becomes a mature company, it may gravitate toward being more of a constitutional republic. There is a board that theoretically votes on behalf of all the shareholders. But in practice, even in those cases it ends up somewhere between constitutional republic and monarchy. Early on, it’s straight monarchy. Importantly, it isn’t an absolute dictatorship. No founder or CEO has absolute power. It’s more like the archaic feudal structure.

Whatever one wants to call this deep right project – neoreactionism, neomonarchism, and authoritarian capitalism all get at some aspect of it – it bears only superficial resemblance to the national conservative one helmed by Jewish and Christian thinkers who contend that the traditional family is the core unit of political life. How do we reconcile these two visions for the future of conservative politics, both backed by the same man?

One thing that national conservatism and Yarvin’s deep right do have in common is that they keep busy fending off accusations of fascism. At NatCon London, writer Tim Stanley raised the semantic proximity of national conservatism to national socialism only to dismiss it on the grounds that the movement’s founder was an Israeli (oy!). For his part, Yarvin has disputed the comparison not because fascism is inherently bad, but because it is not achievable in the 21st century. Monarchism is the closest approximation, he argues in a post that sketches the difference between the two political forms. “It’s not fascism. But it’s still pretty based.”⁹ Beyond underscoring his radicalism, Yarvin’s musings on fascism are important because they hint at how the two ends of the New Right fit together.

Yarvin paints a picture of the monarch as fundamentally disinterested in the petty quarrels that animate his subjects; residing above the law, he is also above the scrum of class war or culture war or any other factional strife. This means that – and again in contrast to the national conservatives – the king does not use state power to enforce religious or other social norms. As he outlines in a post titled “Autocracy and cultural peace,” only a monarch who sits above the law will be able to enforce peace in the realm by giving each faction the power to decide for itself and only itself what type of social norms will prevail among its members. The result would be an Ottoman Empire-style millet system wherein Democrats and Republicans live by different legal codes. Take, for instance, the issue of trans rights:

Suppose, like many of my good friends, you have a red mind. What a blue mind would call “gender affirmation therapy” might, to you, be “child mutilation.” Let’s call the idea that an unemancipated minor can consent to this procedure, without parental consent, X. With your red mind, you abhor X.

Here is a question for red minds. Are you content with keeping X from applying to children of red parents? Or do you also want to impose your values on blue parents, preventing them by government power from “mutilating” their children in this way?

You should know that winning the second victory is much harder than the first. For the first victory, your enemies only need to give up their dominion over you. For the second, you need to take dominion over them.¹⁰

Abortion and gay marriage can thus be illegal for Republicans but remain legal for Democrats (government-issued ID cards will list which cultural camp you belong to, a proposal that underscores just how little Yarvin knows about the bloody history and legacy of sectarianism in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states). The economic carrots that national conservatism dangles before the working classes in support of family formation are nowhere to be found in this reconstituted state, nor even the traditionalist legislation that is central to the New Right platform. However far-fetched, this vision helps explain the seemingly incongruous fact of Peter Thiel’s support for the movement of Biblical family values. It might seem like Thiel, ever the speculator, is simply placing his bets on two different horses – but reading Yarvin reveals that he is actually riding one. For Thiel, it seems, national conservatism is the means to an altogether different sort of end – the gestures towards a welfare state give way, in time, to the permanent dictatorship of a neo-feudal tech CEO elite.

Here it is useful to return to Yarvin’s distinction between monarchism and fascism. “The leader must use the mass movement to win the democracy game, then demand and take absolute power. The mass movement must delegate absolute trust to the leader.”¹¹ In short, the transition to monarchy must have massive democratic support via an initial electoral victory, but that is where democratic participation ends:

Electing an absolute king is the essence of both the fascist and monarchist programs. But fascism conceives that king as a servant of the movement; monarchism conceives the movement as a servant of the king.

And once he is king, and commands the police and the military,¹² what does he need with a political movement? When politics itself is a thing of the past?

Fascism is in a way easier to get people to sign up for, because supporters of fascism keep their democratic power, or at least feel they have kept it. They are acting collectively through the leader; the leader is their instrument; if he does not perform, they would have to find a new instrument.

Supporters of monarchism use their democratic power only once – to give it away.¹³

Here we finally get a glimpse at how the pieces all fall together, how Thiel’s two-pronged assault on American democracy can square the circle of its seeming contradictions. National conservatism may offer ‘populist’ energy, but authoritarian capitalism – and not respect for national traditions, public morality, or religious devotion – remains the ultimate goal. Indeed, in laying out the principles of the “deep right,” Yarvin explicitly acknowledges that his is not a populist movement of any sort, but rather an attempt by a disaffected elite to rule both over and through the unwashed masses:

Not only does the deep right have no position in the red-state/blue-state American culture war, its members are (like me) more likely to have a blue-state background. If we define the indigenous core right as the core right, the deep right has a Coriolanus¹⁴ vibe. We are (mostly) defecting from our own tribe to defend our hereditary enemies.

But we are not submitting to these Volscians. The purpose of the deep right is not to follow the core right, but to lead it. The pattern of history will not be altered – and in this pattern, the productive classes are always governed by unproductive aristocrats. Every true revolution is the replacement of an old aristocracy by a new one. Since the core right is the party of the productive classes, it is desperately in need of leadership.¹⁵

The pattern will not be altered: the masses require not a champion but a leader. What will survive from this clash of New Right forces will undoubtedly be the anti-democratic and authoritarian impulses coming from both parts of the movement. But Thiel’s ultimate destination still lies somewhere beyond Athens and Jerusalem.

“Beyond Athens and Jerusalem” was first published in the Spring 2024 issue of Strange Matters.

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, First Treatise, section 16. Taken from the translation by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Hackett (1998), pp. 32.

2. James Pogue, “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets.” Vanity Fair (May 2022).

3. Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian.” Cato Unbound (April 2009). Available at: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

4. Curtis Yarvin, “Is effective altruism effective?” Grey Mirror (Aug. 31, 2022).

5. Curtis Yarvin, “Optimal autonomous organizations.” Grey Mirror (March 26, 2022).

6. Curtis Yarvin, “Salvador as a startup state.” Grey Mirror (Sept. 2, 2023).

7. Curtis Yarvin, “Salvador as a startup state.”

8. Ibid. The “European diaspora” is but one of many dogwhistles Yarvin employs to obscure the biological racism that sits at the core of his vision.

9. Curtis Yarvin, “Monarchism and fascism today.” Grey Mirror (Dec. 15, 2021).

10. Curtis Yarvin, “Autocracy and cultural peace.” Grey Mirror (April 25, 2022).

11. Curtis Yarvin, “Monarchism and fascism today.”

12. Yarvin envisions the use of blockchain-enabled permissive action links on all weapons, such that members of the military and police force can only fire their weapons with the CEO-king’s approval. See: “Optimal autonomous organizations,” Grey Mirror (March 26, 2022). Available at: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/optimal-autonomous-organizations.

13. Curtis Yarvin, “Monarchism and fascism today.”

14. Coriolanus was a Roman general who led an assault against the Volscians and then tried to become consul. Infighting among elites and his disdain for the plebians resulted in him being exiled from Rome and returning to lead the Volscians against the Romans.

15. Curtis Yarvin, “Principles of the deep right.” Grey Mirror (April 23, 2022). Available at: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/principles-of-the-deep-right?s=r.