Didn't have time to make it through the entire (long winded) article, but is it wrong to boil down his thinking to the simple idea that a benevolent, competent dictator is the best form of government? I ask as this seems like a very simplistic and obvious idea. The problem isn't that this is necessarily incorrect, it is how do you find this mythical figurehead? History has shown that we have never discovered a system that did this reliably and I didn't see any indication that he had solved this problem. How do you ensure you get a Sun King and not.. something else.
Yeah, he is also committed to race science, the belief that diversity is fundamentally bad, and that states "own" their citizens, and can do anything they want to them. None of that is just the basic idea of a benevolent dictator. Yarvin's views are repugnant and evil as well as reductive, childish, and unoriginal.
> The problem isn't that this is necessarily incorrect, it is how do you find this mythical figurehead?
That's exactly why the idea is incorrect. People wise enough and unbiased enough to be entrusted with unchecked power are few; ones that are incorruptible enough to be trusted with it for long are even fewer. And those who want such power are almost always the people who are least to be trusted with it.
So, yeah. The problem with this idea is that it doesn't work, which is a pretty good definition of "incorrect".
Yeah but you've said that the conclusion is correct by rejecting the premise of the question.
The conclusion could be correct given the premise, and also it could be moot because the premise is impossible, but those are two different claims.
Obviously I agree with you that the proposed system is unworkable because the premise is impossible. (This is a "duh" thing that really isn't worth debating, anyone who fails to see this is a fool.)
But I actually also think the conclusion is wrong even given the premise. I think it is wrong to deny people representative input into their government, even under the assumption of a perfect benevolent monarch. This is not for utilitarian reasons, but moral reasons.
It's true, a humble and selfless person would never take on such a job, because they understand themselves well enough to know they can't handle it. Only someone narcissistic would willingly take on that role, which is why we repeatedly see dictators of that nature.
I’d suggest reading it through when you have the time. This piece is a profile on Yarvin and doesn’t attack his thinking directly, other than pointing out inconsistencies and the occasional counter-example.
In the profile you’ll learn that Yarvin frequently uses the N-word, that he identifies the need for improved means of genocide, and that JD Vance literally embraced him with the exclamation “you reactionary fascist!”
What you should take away from this is that there are people closely associated with the current government whose goal is to find ways to upend the perceived ‘Cathedral’ of liberal thought through fascist means and eliminate democracy.
Whether or not a benevolent king is the best _theoretical_ model of government is really not relevant unless you are the type who thinks _actually_ replacing the democratic system with monarchy is worth another try.
Yarvin's analysis of a situation is often interesting and poignant, and occasionally quite fun to read, due to his erudition and irony.
His positive program though is underwhelming at best, and hostile at worst, literally against several key points of the US oath of allegiance, for instance. His idea of a benevolent head of a "sovcorp" ("sovereign corporation") is not even some virtuous king Elessar; someone like president Putin, capable, determined, and with very long horizon of planning, but sufficiently cynical, would fit the bill. For last 3 yeas we have a painful demonstration of how well that works.
The fact that Yarvin can publish and promote his views in a society that's formally built on ideas opposite to his speaks good about our society, its freedom of thought and speech. It also adds to its durability. Every authoritarian ruler knows how dangerous are subversive ideas that propagate covertly, while everyone pretends to be aligned to the official values.
I disagree that Putin has a long horizon of planning. He is very much medium term, waiting for opportunities to occur. He also has enough resources that if a bet does not work out, he can still double down a few times till he wins.
That is not a bad strategy unless someone figures it out and plans to bankrupt you.
The core of the issue is that a manager (President is just ultimate form of it) working in a peaceful and prosperous time period is not needed. He can be replaced with an automated set of scripts and mostly nothing would be affected by that replacement. In fact, we can't even correlate person's skills to a company/country performance if it was successful. Maybe that manager was incompetently hindering it, and it would have been even more successful without him.
Manager's skills are only shown during a conflict or a crisis. But no human has invented a way to test candidate on the crisis response. Partial solution is to hire/elect a person who manager crisis before, but because crises are always unique, their skills still don't translate to a new one.
So the answer is - it is impossible to do. Thus we shouldn't do that for the most critical positions.
I'm not an expert on Yarvin's ideas, but have read enough of his stuff to suspect you're not quite representing his position accurately.
In his opinion democracy is flawed in the same way a business owned by all its employees wouldn't have the right incentives to succeed, or how a plane piloted by the collective wisdom of it's passengers likely wouldn't make it very far beyond the runway.
I think his idea is that you want a system which selects a competent individual then align their incentives with the success of the nation. I think he has suggested a system similar to that of a board of directors in a company where the CEO would have executive power, but the board collectively retains the right to oust the CEO.
Whether this would work as a system of government I don't know, but on the face of it I think it would be an interesting experiment. It addresses issues that monarchical and autocratic systems have in that they often don't select for competency and have no checks and balances, while also addressing issues of democracy in that it's hard for leaders to make decisions and that the average voter is about as intelligent as the average person you'll meet on the street.
My guess is that it would be difficult to prevent corruption, but it's not like democracy perfectly solves the issue of corruption. Democratic systems are quite unstable outside the West and monarchy arguably didn't work out terribly for Europe over the centuries. Don't get me wrong, I like democratic systems, but I do think our systems are a little too democratic as it stands. One of the things I like about the US as a Brit is that money plays such a central role in US politics. I think this is the main reason why a US worker doing the same job as me today would receive at least 2x my salary while paying less tax. The economic incentives in US politics are completely different from that of the UK where the average household receives more from the government than they put in.
That could all be well and good in a vacuum, but you can't install this kind of system without some serious violence, since a large percentage of the population would not consent to being ruled in such a manner.
Growing up, one of my criticisms of Orson Scott Card's "Enderverse" was how unrealistic it seemed that children could literally rise to power simply through posting theories and arguments on the internet.
One thing I'll say for the current era is that it has made a lot of such fiction appear more realistic in hindsight.
Another example is the Silo book series, recently adapted to a series on Apple TV. I remember reading those books thinking it was insane than the people would act in such clearly counter-productive ways against their own interests, or that leadership would make up elaborate lies rather than just telling people the truth so they would see why certain actions were necessary. And now I'm watching the same plot a decade later, and it all hits home.
I’ve really enjoyed the TV series (so far). Would you recommend reading the books – either before or after watching future seasons?
While watching the first two seasons, I still haven’t understood why the creators of the silos wouldn’t just have told people the truth to avoid the dysfunctionality that results from the cognitive dissonance that the leadership has to maintain. Telling the truth would also preclude the rebellions that keep recurring because the people realise that they’re being lied to. Is the rationale for the elaborate lies and rituals clearer in the books?
On the other hand, I can understand why the leader of the post-apocalyptic bunker in Paradise goes to extreme lengths to lie to the residents about the outside world.
It should be studied how large (world scale) populations can flip with just the right amount of social struggle, populists, wealthy owners leveraging said populists, and new found gurus serving as grandiose ideal sources for the last two groups.
The effectiveness of propaganda has been known for a long time. The advertising industry is built on the foundations laid by Edward Bernays a century ago, who applied the same psychological manipulation tactics of propaganda to advertising, which turned it into the trillion dollar meta-industry we know today. The same technology built for advertising is used for any other kind of psyop. Considering most people in industrialized nations carry a personal device with them at all times that can feed them content engineered to be as addicting as possible, with an agenda to influence their thoughts and behavior, it shouldn't be surprising that we're seeing sociopolitical instability in many countries, and megalomaniacs taking advantage of this opportunity to grasp power, inflate their wealth, and establish autocracies.
This playbook was described well by an ex-KGB agent who specialized in propaganda in this 1984 interview[1]. I suggest watching the full interview. The timeline of what we're seeing today aligns well with the surge of adtech, social media, and smartphones. A nation can be fully destabilized in the span of a generation, and modern tools make this much easier and cheaper than Yuri Bezmenov could have predicted.
>“Does a normal Ohio voter read . . . Mencius Moldbug? No,” Vance reportedly said one night at a bar during the 2021 National Conservatism Conference. “But do they agree with the broad thrust of where we think American public policy should go? Absolutely.”
Apparently, if the right people read your ideas then they’ll get convinced that the rest of Ohio feels the same way?
But who actually did rise to power through posting? Trump inherited money, and spent years as a strange real-estate and projects guy (casinos, university), like Musk, who had more smarts for his projects, and so on.
Well, Hitler and Szálasi (crazy Hungarian Nazi guy) and Lenin/Stalin come to mind as the closest actually, so maybe that's where OSC got the idea.
Hm, now I'm curious who was the youngest elected head of state...
My philosophical excursions eventually led me to his writings, but I never found what I read to be inspiring or substantial. Pretty much like Ayn Rand in that respect.
Like a precocious undergrad who just discovered set theory and thinks he’s king of the… uhh sovereign corporation?
Lots of literary references though. Borges, of course gave him Urbit/Tlon[0], and wrote some racially spicy stuff in his day. Pretty sure Nock is a reference to a controversial libertarian thinker[1]. I bet you could find more anti-Semitic, pro-slavery and anti-democratic Easter eggs if you looked.
Clearly though, in person he managed to rub elbows with some pretty influential people… also like Ms Rand.
Wild guess. As far as I can tell this was the first such article: https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-trumps-reign-fits-c... I posted it here, but it didn't attract much interest here or elsewhere from what I can tell. But as you can see it had interesting things to say. Those who make money from peddling words saw an opportunity, re-wrote and posted it as their own work.
It's grubby process in some ways, but looking at it holistically, it's not a bad outcome. The meme has gotten the interest I think deserved, even it's creator didn't.
Because existing political theory has clearly failed us. People are interested in what else is out there, even if they aren't going to adopt it themselves.
I mentioned this previously, but I frequently think back to Gibson's "Jackpot" -- a cross-lashed, polycausal catastrophe: Lots of bad little things accumulating, building up a certain momentum.
I think that even as far back as 2009, an astute observer would have noticed that society is beginning to burn through its seed corn.
There's no way out but through, which means that politics are going to get extremely weird. Moldbug/Yarvin is one manifestation of this, and quite a benign and even harmless one. He's foppish and playful more than he is scary.
> society is beginning to burn through its seed corn
This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse, and that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time.
Other countries continue to invest in the future. China, among others, do not suffer the current American fatalism.
China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100. They're well on their way to a massive population shock if they don't thread the needle carefully.
There's also been lots of stories about bank closures and Chinese citizens losing their money.
Additionally, China, like the US and many other world powers, is a totalitarian authoritarian government which is hostile towards its people. Whether China has high-speed monorails or not, they continue to slide backwards as a country into the dark ages, increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.
> This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse, and that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time.
As an American immigrant, this does not seem at all true to me, from either angle - I don't think that this is a defining characteristic of Americans, nor do I think that other nations don't behave the same way.
>This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse
My view is basically the complete opposite: IMHO Americans have experienced things getting gradually better for essentially the entire duration of the American nation, with the result that we don't have the institutional capability to respond effectively when growth stops or when (as in the case of climate change) growth becomes the problem that must be addressed.
Western Europe has proven much better at running their societies in ways that do not depend on continued growth than the US has (at least in the period after WW II) which is why it has responded much quicker and more effectively to the challenge of climate change than the US has.
> in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief... that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time.
I mean, living in 2025 America that's not a bad default assumption to make, is it? By default when the solar salesman (or pest control salesman) comes to the door I consider it a scam because it generally is (same for phone sales, and most internet ads). Is everything a scam? No. But lots of things are and it's best to have your defenses up.
Demographic collapse? Sure, huge issue. But why is this happening? Why did it start happening before the other issues?
A rap group being critical of Churchill at an official event? Not really an issue. I don't think that is why Britain is failing. And I'll need citations for why moral introspection is demoralizing rather than uplifting and enlightening for a culture. Or maybe suggest something that the youth should feel good about rather than browbeating them for not being thrilled at the state of things.
Immigration? Not an issue for the USA after the great depression, which also had a massive welfare state.
I agree that Britain is collapsing, but not for those reasons. What a stunning lack of imagination.
e: Also, are migrants really to blame for Britain selling off all of its state capacity for pennies on the dollar since the 80s? Did migrants vote to violently eject Britain from the European economy in 2015? Any mention of that? Or would that type self-reflection hurt the cultural morale?
Maybe Britain would be better off with people who are a little less integrated with those values.
Is exactly the philosophical dead end that Nick Land and Curtis and maybe Mark Fisher arrived at. Accelerationism is like the FedEx arrow in that it’s both an unforgettable idea and easy enough that anyone can grasp it, some of the dumbest politicians of our time are ardent believers.
It’s fun to think about the possibility that belief in this conclusion was premature two decades ago when CCRU and NRx people were banging on about it but now maybe it actually isn’t premature. Which would annoyingly be a pretty compelling instance of hyperstitional time war
Accelerationism doesn't work because "accelerating" = "making things worse for the people."
People who imagine that they'll emerge victoriously from the chaos are really quite childish; odds are that the accelerationists will suffer like all the rest -- or worse. They're like children who read medieval history and imagine themselves princes and dukes, rather than dirt farmers laboriously clearing woods and plowing fields.
When I say that there's no way out but through, I mean that things are bad and getting worse, and there's nothing anyone can do about it other than develop the skills to survive by any means necessary. (For some that means survivalism, or moving to Fiji, or just hanging out here and making lots of money.) Do you think we can vote our way out of this mess, with representative democracy? The way things are today? lol, lmao even.
As to the second part of your comment -- I'm reminded of what Jack Womack wrote in the 2000 reissue of Neuromancer: Has "the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?"
This is a very unwise stance to take. Peter Thiel has teamed up with the Heritage Foundation to implement this plan. This is why A16Z and Musk put Trump in power, it is precisely to implement this plan.
The fact that Thiel backs him so hard is what worries me more than anything. Thiel has a way of making things happen when he's really committed to something on a personal level... (see the Gawker Media case)
Musk is on the outs. And what if there is no grand conspiracy?
We're extremely far from any of Yarvin's "plans" at any rate. Yarvin's most cherished plan was to create a shadow university called the "Antiversity" -- a sort of repository of all truths unbeholden to politics and fads. Is this a bad idea? Which other Yarvin ideas scare you so?
Rather the opposite, I think. To me it seems that the fact that he's an MP makes it all the more interesting. In the UK, as in the US and elsewhere, people across the political spectrum -- and at all levels, from MPs to "Gary the regional sales manager" -- are losing faith in democratic processes. (At least as they're currently implemented.)
As an aside, this is exactly what happens in Gibson's Jackpot.
> “Who runs it, then?”
> “Oligarchs, corporations, neomonarchists. Hereditary monarchies provided conveniently familiar armatures. Essentially feudal, according to its critics. Such as they are.”
That there's no way to vote your way out of this mess is most readily apparent in the UK, but it's true practically everywhere except Switzerland.
Switzerland, to some extent, shows that sometimes problems with democracy can be solved with. . . more democracy.
Is his opinion really weird when a strong centralized leader (kings, emperors, etc.) was the norm until very very recently? Seems like it's more a return of the political theory of of "enlightened absolutism" that was popular amongst philosophers in the 18th century, or maybe something like Confucius' ideas on government.
Yeah. You should read what Schopenhauer had to say about government, and this was barely 150 years ago, in the mid 19th.
> "In general, the monarchical form of government is that which is natural to man; just as it is natural to bees and ants, to a flight of cranes, a herd of wandering elephants, a pack of wolves seeking prey in common, and many other animals, all of which place one of their number at the head of the business in hand.
> "Every business in which men engage, if it is attended with danger — every campaign, every ship at sea — must also be subject to the authority of one commander; everywhere it is one will that must lead. Even the animal organism is constructed on a monarchical principle: it is the brain alone which guides and governs, and exercises the hegemony. Although heart, lungs, and stomach contribute much more to the continued existence of the whole body, these philistines cannot on that account be allowed to guide and lead. That is a business which belongs solely to the brain; government must proceed from one central point. Even the solar system is monarchical. On the other hand, a republic is as unnatural as it is unfavourable to the higher intellectual life and the arts and sciences. Accordingly we find that everywhere in the world, and at all times, nations, whether civilized or savage, or occupying a position between the two, are always under monarchical government. The rule of many, as Homer said, is not a good thing: let there be one ruler, one king.
In general, I think that those experiments in autocracy that have taken place between 1850-Present rather disprove this notion. (One of the rare things old Schop was wrong about!) The Athenians were right: The affairs of state must be the affairs of every citizen. England's problems won't be solved by a restoration of the Stuarts (I think that the current Stuart heir is a 50 year old banker who is exceedingly uninterested in the job) but they can possibly be solved by dispensing with parliament and enabling qualified citizens to vote directly on laws and regulatory matters. I dare say you won't end up with butter knife bans this way.
1. Yarvin's system may work well if you put perfect people in place, and keep perfect people in place. Well, that's true of a lot of systems. Yarvin finds flaws in democracy with imperfect people, but his system needs perfect people in order to work. That's... not an improvement.
2. Even if you have these perfect people, they're going to be rare. Who's going to put them in power? The mass of non-perfect people? Why are they going to do that?
3. Yarvin fails his own test. He's looking for people whose blogs create no negative reactions? Yarvin stands self-condemned; he's not worthy to say how things should be run.
the courts, legislature and executive could be a nice check on the imperfections of our elected officials, but unfortunately, they don't provide any check on the voters which is obviously unavoidable in any sort of elected democracy. In the US for instance, a full one third of the population are on board with crime sprees, and one third is enough when voter participation gets low.
We are in the midst of a major political party realignment. When that happens, both parties are split and elections basically create a broken legislature. When that happens, people start daydreaming: "what if my political group didn't have do deal with other people having influence on the way government should be."
Even trifecta states are dealing with this, as is obvious from the turmoil and wild animosity that exists in one-party California. The constitution gets changed willy-nilly to create effectively unchangeable advantages for certain groups at the expense of others.
The US is moving from a situation in which they had enough money (well, deficit spending) to solve most of our problems without upsetting too many constituencies. Those days are over and we're now trying to do something, anything, to avoid having to make tough decisions that might mean losing an election. Our electorate wanting something, anything, to prevent them from losing whatever preferential political goals they have are entertaining the same naive ideas.
Win once, and let the next generation deal with the fallout. Basic human selfishness par excellence.
He found patronage in the American oligarchy (look up his ties with Peter Thiel, for example) and as a result, his ideas are now directly implemented by the current administration, that is 100% subservient to capital.
To be fair I don't follow at all. Are you saying that it's more likely for the US under Trump to become a Yarvin-style ultracapitalist monarchy than, say, an Orban-style just-about-dictatorship? Despite the fact that the first is one crackpot's weird idea on the internet and the latter is a model with a playbook that's demonstrated to work extremely well in practice? (if your goal is to stay in power as long as you can) It just seems.. well unlikely at least?
I mean it's so weird, one day some Republican says positive shit about Orban and the whole left wing media screams "oh no they're going to pull an Orban" and now suddenly it's "well actually no, we heard Vance has once read a Moldbug rant so actually they're going to install a king-CEO". Next day Trump is a fascist, the day after he's "Putin's asset". It gets a bit ridiculous to be honest. Do we really believe the administration believes in anything at all? I'm not convinced anybody running the US right now has the attention span to read a Yarvin post all the way to the end. It just feels like obsessive fearmongering to me at this point, stack up all the bogeymen you can think of on one big pile and say that the Trump administration is all of them at the same time.
I say this as someone who thinks Trump is the worst thing to happen to the world in quite some time. I worry that all this panic actively hurts the opposition and that anybody who kinda sorta likes Trump is going to be very tired very fast of this kind of reporting.
My favorite observation about this was made on Twitter, of all places, when someone said that for all Yarvin's efforts to become the heir to Ezra Pound, the true 21st Century Pound is Kanye West.
Readit News
Ironically, he's jewish. He's a modern day tech-bro Clayton Bigsby.
That's exactly why the idea is incorrect. People wise enough and unbiased enough to be entrusted with unchecked power are few; ones that are incorruptible enough to be trusted with it for long are even fewer. And those who want such power are almost always the people who are least to be trusted with it.
So, yeah. The problem with this idea is that it doesn't work, which is a pretty good definition of "incorrect".
The conclusion could be correct given the premise, and also it could be moot because the premise is impossible, but those are two different claims.
Obviously I agree with you that the proposed system is unworkable because the premise is impossible. (This is a "duh" thing that really isn't worth debating, anyone who fails to see this is a fool.)
But I actually also think the conclusion is wrong even given the premise. I think it is wrong to deny people representative input into their government, even under the assumption of a perfect benevolent monarch. This is not for utilitarian reasons, but moral reasons.
I think, historically, the problem has also been: what happens when they die? Then you need lightning to strike twice.
In the profile you’ll learn that Yarvin frequently uses the N-word, that he identifies the need for improved means of genocide, and that JD Vance literally embraced him with the exclamation “you reactionary fascist!”
What you should take away from this is that there are people closely associated with the current government whose goal is to find ways to upend the perceived ‘Cathedral’ of liberal thought through fascist means and eliminate democracy.
Whether or not a benevolent king is the best _theoretical_ model of government is really not relevant unless you are the type who thinks _actually_ replacing the democratic system with monarchy is worth another try.
His positive program though is underwhelming at best, and hostile at worst, literally against several key points of the US oath of allegiance, for instance. His idea of a benevolent head of a "sovcorp" ("sovereign corporation") is not even some virtuous king Elessar; someone like president Putin, capable, determined, and with very long horizon of planning, but sufficiently cynical, would fit the bill. For last 3 yeas we have a painful demonstration of how well that works.
The fact that Yarvin can publish and promote his views in a society that's formally built on ideas opposite to his speaks good about our society, its freedom of thought and speech. It also adds to its durability. Every authoritarian ruler knows how dangerous are subversive ideas that propagate covertly, while everyone pretends to be aligned to the official values.
That is not a bad strategy unless someone figures it out and plans to bankrupt you.
Manager's skills are only shown during a conflict or a crisis. But no human has invented a way to test candidate on the crisis response. Partial solution is to hire/elect a person who manager crisis before, but because crises are always unique, their skills still don't translate to a new one.
So the answer is - it is impossible to do. Thus we shouldn't do that for the most critical positions.
Deleted Comment
Choose one.
In his opinion democracy is flawed in the same way a business owned by all its employees wouldn't have the right incentives to succeed, or how a plane piloted by the collective wisdom of it's passengers likely wouldn't make it very far beyond the runway.
I think his idea is that you want a system which selects a competent individual then align their incentives with the success of the nation. I think he has suggested a system similar to that of a board of directors in a company where the CEO would have executive power, but the board collectively retains the right to oust the CEO.
Whether this would work as a system of government I don't know, but on the face of it I think it would be an interesting experiment. It addresses issues that monarchical and autocratic systems have in that they often don't select for competency and have no checks and balances, while also addressing issues of democracy in that it's hard for leaders to make decisions and that the average voter is about as intelligent as the average person you'll meet on the street.
My guess is that it would be difficult to prevent corruption, but it's not like democracy perfectly solves the issue of corruption. Democratic systems are quite unstable outside the West and monarchy arguably didn't work out terribly for Europe over the centuries. Don't get me wrong, I like democratic systems, but I do think our systems are a little too democratic as it stands. One of the things I like about the US as a Brit is that money plays such a central role in US politics. I think this is the main reason why a US worker doing the same job as me today would receive at least 2x my salary while paying less tax. The economic incentives in US politics are completely different from that of the UK where the average household receives more from the government than they put in.
How wrong I was.
Another example is the Silo book series, recently adapted to a series on Apple TV. I remember reading those books thinking it was insane than the people would act in such clearly counter-productive ways against their own interests, or that leadership would make up elaborate lies rather than just telling people the truth so they would see why certain actions were necessary. And now I'm watching the same plot a decade later, and it all hits home.
While watching the first two seasons, I still haven’t understood why the creators of the silos wouldn’t just have told people the truth to avoid the dysfunctionality that results from the cognitive dissonance that the leadership has to maintain. Telling the truth would also preclude the rebellions that keep recurring because the people realise that they’re being lied to. Is the rationale for the elaborate lies and rituals clearer in the books?
On the other hand, I can understand why the leader of the post-apocalyptic bunker in Paradise goes to extreme lengths to lie to the residents about the outside world.
This playbook was described well by an ex-KGB agent who specialized in propaganda in this 1984 interview[1]. I suggest watching the full interview. The timeline of what we're seeing today aligns well with the surge of adtech, social media, and smartphones. A nation can be fully destabilized in the span of a generation, and modern tools make this much easier and cheaper than Yuri Bezmenov could have predicted.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr5sTGxMUdo
Apparently, if the right people read your ideas then they’ll get convinced that the rest of Ohio feels the same way?
Well, Hitler and Szálasi (crazy Hungarian Nazi guy) and Lenin/Stalin come to mind as the closest actually, so maybe that's where OSC got the idea.
Hm, now I'm curious who was the youngest elected head of state...
edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_youngest_state_leade...
Like a precocious undergrad who just discovered set theory and thinks he’s king of the… uhh sovereign corporation?
Lots of literary references though. Borges, of course gave him Urbit/Tlon[0], and wrote some racially spicy stuff in his day. Pretty sure Nock is a reference to a controversial libertarian thinker[1]. I bet you could find more anti-Semitic, pro-slavery and anti-democratic Easter eggs if you looked.
Clearly though, in person he managed to rub elbows with some pretty influential people… also like Ms Rand.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nock
It's grubby process in some ways, but looking at it holistically, it's not a bad outcome. The meme has gotten the interest I think deserved, even it's creator didn't.
That's the only thing they value anymore.
I think that even as far back as 2009, an astute observer would have noticed that society is beginning to burn through its seed corn.
In some places, things are now getting extremely acute: https://www.neilobrien.co.uk/p/the-confluence?r=h8x
There's no way out but through, which means that politics are going to get extremely weird. Moldbug/Yarvin is one manifestation of this, and quite a benign and even harmless one. He's foppish and playful more than he is scary.
This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse, and that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time.
Other countries continue to invest in the future. China, among others, do not suffer the current American fatalism.
There's also been lots of stories about bank closures and Chinese citizens losing their money.
Additionally, China, like the US and many other world powers, is a totalitarian authoritarian government which is hostile towards its people. Whether China has high-speed monorails or not, they continue to slide backwards as a country into the dark ages, increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.
As an American immigrant, this does not seem at all true to me, from either angle - I don't think that this is a defining characteristic of Americans, nor do I think that other nations don't behave the same way.
My view is basically the complete opposite: IMHO Americans have experienced things getting gradually better for essentially the entire duration of the American nation, with the result that we don't have the institutional capability to respond effectively when growth stops or when (as in the case of climate change) growth becomes the problem that must be addressed.
Western Europe has proven much better at running their societies in ways that do not depend on continued growth than the US has (at least in the period after WW II) which is why it has responded much quicker and more effectively to the challenge of climate change than the US has.
Here is one man's summary of this dynamic: https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligations
Oh, wait: could it be that you are disappointed with the US (and see China in a favorable light) because the US isn't becoming Leftist quickly enough?
I mean, living in 2025 America that's not a bad default assumption to make, is it? By default when the solar salesman (or pest control salesman) comes to the door I consider it a scam because it generally is (same for phone sales, and most internet ads). Is everything a scam? No. But lots of things are and it's best to have your defenses up.
Demographic collapse? Sure, huge issue. But why is this happening? Why did it start happening before the other issues?
A rap group being critical of Churchill at an official event? Not really an issue. I don't think that is why Britain is failing. And I'll need citations for why moral introspection is demoralizing rather than uplifting and enlightening for a culture. Or maybe suggest something that the youth should feel good about rather than browbeating them for not being thrilled at the state of things.
Immigration? Not an issue for the USA after the great depression, which also had a massive welfare state.
I agree that Britain is collapsing, but not for those reasons. What a stunning lack of imagination.
e: Also, are migrants really to blame for Britain selling off all of its state capacity for pennies on the dollar since the 80s? Did migrants vote to violently eject Britain from the European economy in 2015? Any mention of that? Or would that type self-reflection hurt the cultural morale?
Maybe Britain would be better off with people who are a little less integrated with those values.
Is exactly the philosophical dead end that Nick Land and Curtis and maybe Mark Fisher arrived at. Accelerationism is like the FedEx arrow in that it’s both an unforgettable idea and easy enough that anyone can grasp it, some of the dumbest politicians of our time are ardent believers.
It’s fun to think about the possibility that belief in this conclusion was premature two decades ago when CCRU and NRx people were banging on about it but now maybe it actually isn’t premature. Which would annoyingly be a pretty compelling instance of hyperstitional time war
People who imagine that they'll emerge victoriously from the chaos are really quite childish; odds are that the accelerationists will suffer like all the rest -- or worse. They're like children who read medieval history and imagine themselves princes and dukes, rather than dirt farmers laboriously clearing woods and plowing fields.
When I say that there's no way out but through, I mean that things are bad and getting worse, and there's nothing anyone can do about it other than develop the skills to survive by any means necessary. (For some that means survivalism, or moving to Fiji, or just hanging out here and making lots of money.) Do you think we can vote our way out of this mess, with representative democracy? The way things are today? lol, lmao even.
As to the second part of your comment -- I'm reminded of what Jack Womack wrote in the 2000 reissue of Neuromancer: Has "the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?"
This is a very unwise stance to take. Peter Thiel has teamed up with the Heritage Foundation to implement this plan. This is why A16Z and Musk put Trump in power, it is precisely to implement this plan.
We're extremely far from any of Yarvin's "plans" at any rate. Yarvin's most cherished plan was to create a shadow university called the "Antiversity" -- a sort of repository of all truths unbeholden to politics and fads. Is this a bad idea? Which other Yarvin ideas scare you so?
Neil O’Brien is a right wing anti-immigrant Member of Parliament… as with all politicians what he says should be taken with a pinch of salt
As an aside, this is exactly what happens in Gibson's Jackpot.
> “Who runs it, then?”
> “Oligarchs, corporations, neomonarchists. Hereditary monarchies provided conveniently familiar armatures. Essentially feudal, according to its critics. Such as they are.”
That there's no way to vote your way out of this mess is most readily apparent in the UK, but it's true practically everywhere except Switzerland.
Switzerland, to some extent, shows that sometimes problems with democracy can be solved with. . . more democracy.
> "In general, the monarchical form of government is that which is natural to man; just as it is natural to bees and ants, to a flight of cranes, a herd of wandering elephants, a pack of wolves seeking prey in common, and many other animals, all of which place one of their number at the head of the business in hand.
> "Every business in which men engage, if it is attended with danger — every campaign, every ship at sea — must also be subject to the authority of one commander; everywhere it is one will that must lead. Even the animal organism is constructed on a monarchical principle: it is the brain alone which guides and governs, and exercises the hegemony. Although heart, lungs, and stomach contribute much more to the continued existence of the whole body, these philistines cannot on that account be allowed to guide and lead. That is a business which belongs solely to the brain; government must proceed from one central point. Even the solar system is monarchical. On the other hand, a republic is as unnatural as it is unfavourable to the higher intellectual life and the arts and sciences. Accordingly we find that everywhere in the world, and at all times, nations, whether civilized or savage, or occupying a position between the two, are always under monarchical government. The rule of many, as Homer said, is not a good thing: let there be one ruler, one king.
In general, I think that those experiments in autocracy that have taken place between 1850-Present rather disprove this notion. (One of the rare things old Schop was wrong about!) The Athenians were right: The affairs of state must be the affairs of every citizen. England's problems won't be solved by a restoration of the Stuarts (I think that the current Stuart heir is a 50 year old banker who is exceedingly uninterested in the job) but they can possibly be solved by dispensing with parliament and enabling qualified citizens to vote directly on laws and regulatory matters. I dare say you won't end up with butter knife bans this way.
2. Even if you have these perfect people, they're going to be rare. Who's going to put them in power? The mass of non-perfect people? Why are they going to do that?
3. Yarvin fails his own test. He's looking for people whose blogs create no negative reactions? Yarvin stands self-condemned; he's not worthy to say how things should be run.
Even trifecta states are dealing with this, as is obvious from the turmoil and wild animosity that exists in one-party California. The constitution gets changed willy-nilly to create effectively unchangeable advantages for certain groups at the expense of others.
The US is moving from a situation in which they had enough money (well, deficit spending) to solve most of our problems without upsetting too many constituencies. Those days are over and we're now trying to do something, anything, to avoid having to make tough decisions that might mean losing an election. Our electorate wanting something, anything, to prevent them from losing whatever preferential political goals they have are entertaining the same naive ideas.
Win once, and let the next generation deal with the fallout. Basic human selfishness par excellence.
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I mean it's so weird, one day some Republican says positive shit about Orban and the whole left wing media screams "oh no they're going to pull an Orban" and now suddenly it's "well actually no, we heard Vance has once read a Moldbug rant so actually they're going to install a king-CEO". Next day Trump is a fascist, the day after he's "Putin's asset". It gets a bit ridiculous to be honest. Do we really believe the administration believes in anything at all? I'm not convinced anybody running the US right now has the attention span to read a Yarvin post all the way to the end. It just feels like obsessive fearmongering to me at this point, stack up all the bogeymen you can think of on one big pile and say that the Trump administration is all of them at the same time.
I say this as someone who thinks Trump is the worst thing to happen to the world in quite some time. I worry that all this panic actively hurts the opposition and that anybody who kinda sorta likes Trump is going to be very tired very fast of this kind of reporting.
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