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In the last few years there’s been a spate of articles published about Curtis Yarvin in left or left of center outlets. Part of this is that he’s increasingly engaged in public debates with such figures. But it’s also that he’s become a presence in the world – see his connection to the now Vice President J.D. Vance, his role in an edgy New York City art scene called Dime Square and even him getting featured in that outlet known for war-mongering and support for fascism historically, The New York Times.

I want to declare from the outset that I’m not particularly interested in thoroughly debunking Yarvin. People have already done that to death and the guy just isn’t very interested in meaningful conversation. As Ben Burgis, who publicly debated him, put it “[I] came away with the strong impression that he enjoys shock value a whole lot more than he cares about clarity or internal consistency.”

A similar lack of engagement can be found in response to Scott Alexander’s lengthy critique published in the early 2010s to which he called it “not bad enough to be funny and not good enough to be interesting” (this, coming from a guy notorious for writing voluminous posts is extremely fucking rich). Similarly with his response to Robin Hanson after they debated when he insisted that Hanson just needed to read James Burnham and Joseph de Maistre to properly understand Yarvin’s position.

I highlight Yarvin’s chronic lack of sincere engagement and good faith because from the outset I don’t really think he, or people who take inspiration from him, can be reached through argumentation. Sure if this reaches escape velocity and somehow gets read by millions then there’s a chance at least one person will be flipped, but that’s a pretty inefficient way of changing things.

No, I’m more interested in talking to leftists and liberals about Curtis Yarvin and his theoretical inconsistencies precisely so we can more effectively fight the project he’s a part of. In particular I am motivated by the fact many place him as some sort of libertarian which I think is wrong.

Now it’s easy to understand why people think this way. The libertarian-to-reactionary pipeline is a real thing and he fits neatly into that model. He’s openly been namechecked by various tech elites who have openly explicitly expressed a desire to bring about a libertarian cyberpunk world. And it is undeniable that libertarian ideas are frequently used to justify capitalist domination and abuse. Easy then to see him as a prophet of an Even Later Stage of Late Stage Capitalism, the dark mind behind neon-lit cyberpunk cities run on the blockchain, built on the backs of slaves with explosive collars constantly monitored by artificial intelligence all ruled by neo-feudal techbro CEO and venture capitalist kings who sit on thrones that double as quantum computers.

But what if he isn’t?

YARVIN’S TRAJECTORY

For those who don’t know, you can pretty easily divide Curtis Yarvin’s writing into two distinct phases. The first, starting in 2007 is at his old Unqualified Reservations blog. The second begins in 2020 on Substack and other outlets. In the first phase he is a reactionary libertarian (with some notable exceptions), but by the second he is definitely not libertarian.

Yet many tend to assume that his position has largely remained the same since his first round of writing. Take the description Joshua Tait gives of Yarvin for an academic compilation on New Right thinkers (Key Thinkers of the Radical Right, ed Mark Sedgwick) published in 2019.

Yarvin’s philosophy is hyperindividualistic, thoroughly deracinated from the regional, national, and religious identities conservatives traditionally emphasize. He rejects patriotism, constitutionalism, and populism. Most of the conservative Right venerates a narrow vision of America’s political tradition utterly distinct from Yarvin’s vision of corporate feudalism.

Once upon a time this described his views. But not anymore.

To give you a brief overview of how they changed, let's take his very first post on his old blog Unqualified Reservations, A Formalist Manifesto.

This is clearly libertarian. When he finally gets around to describing his “new” ideology about a fourth of the way into the essay (lol), he starts by declaring that the primary problem of politics is solving disordered violence and that all other problems are irrelevant until we sort that out. The way to solve this is to make sure that property rights are clear and perfectly defined so that disputes can be resolved. This means dispensing with national narratives so we can get down to things.

So this is the formalist manifesto: that the US is just a corporation. It is not a mystic trust consigned to us by the generations. It is not the repository of our hopes and fears, the voice of conscience and the avenging sword of justice. It is just an big old company that holds a huge pile of assets, has no clear idea of what it’s trying to do with them, and is thrashing around like a ten-gallon shark in a five-gallon bucket, red ink spouting from each of its bazillion gills.

To a formalist, the way to fix the US is to dispense with the ancient mystical horseradish, the corporate prayers and war chants, figure out who owns this monstrosity, and let them decide what in the heck they are going to do with it. I don’t think it’s too crazy to say that all options—including restructuring and liquidation—should be on the table.

Now, given the question of “who owns what” is something that has been the source of conflicts since time immemorial, tracing back some primordial property claims is impossible and would probably cause quite a bit of social upheaval when titles get assigned in a fixed manner.

Yarvin has two responses to this disorder. The first is overwhelming violence since that will make conflict unnecessary.

Violence of any size makes no sense without uncertainty. Consider a war. If one army knows it will lose the war, perhaps on the advice of some infallible oracle, it has no reason to fight. Why not surrender and get it over with?

(As anyone even vaguely familiar with military history over the last century knows, even overwhelming military capacity in no way implies an automatic victory – see Ivan Arregun-Toft’s paper How The Weak Win Wars for a summary. A significant part of why is that the metrics used to guide strategy can be challenging to determine and evaluate, see the challenges the United States faced in defining metrics for success while fighting in Vietnam for an obvious example.)

Having (theoretically) established an impervious monopoly on violence, Yarvin then claims that its role is to minimize conflict between people. And the way you do that is by making property claims unambiguous.

Of course given that disputes over property titles are a perennial source of conflict and that much of the world’s land is the result of many layers of conquest there’s an inherent ambiguity in existing relations already.

In response to this basic fact Yarvin admits that we should just take existing claims as a given and work from there.

Let’s figure out exactly who has what, now, and give them a fancy little certificate. Let’s not get into who should have what. Because, like it or not, this is simply a recipe for more violence. It is very hard to come up with a rule that explains why the Palestinians should get Haifa back, and doesn’t explain why the Welsh should get London back.

So we see a clear ranking of priorities: social order matters far more than any attachments people might have to tradition, place or legacy. A similar ranking of order over parochial attachments is also present for another idea that Yarvin is famous for – patchwork. This is his alternative to the present world order, wherein established governments across the world are replaced by a web of statelets where policy is decided entirely by the movement of people. As he writes.

The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions. If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move. The design is all “exit,” no “voice.”

Such a “logic” of patchwork precisely relies on the threat of “exit” by citizens and investors so as to prevent abuses by the government. Again, an emphasis on order over attachment to place or custom.

Patchwork realms can be expected to enforce a fair and consistent code of laws not for moral or theological reasons, not because they are compelled to do so by a superior sovereign or some other force real or imaginary, but for the same economic reasons that compel them to provide excellent customer service in general. Real estate on which the rule of law prevails is much, much more valuable than real estate on which it doesn’t, and the value of a realm is the value of its real estate.

In this vision of what the world should be there’s no room for patriotism, constitutionalism, and populism since that invites chaos. So if this is all there was to Yarvin, the labels that commentators like Tait give him would be correct.

But even in his first round of writing, we find something else. Take for example one of his final blog posts at Unqualified Reservations wherein he argues for very parochial policies that should be enacted by the American government.

We could eliminate imports, while maintaining exports. Of course, we would be admitting the mercantilist reality of world trade, something our Asian trading “partners” already understand. Does it hurt that much to say: “Friedrich List was right?” Let’s say that retaliation would cut our exports not to zero, but just in half. In that case, we have $0 in imports and $650B in exports, meaning a net gain in revenue to US businesses of roughly $1.2T—and that’s not counting a multiplier effect of money spent over and over again.

(Frederich List, for those who don’t know, was a German-American economist who was a critic of liberal economists like Adam Smith and advocated for state intervention in the economy to bolster industry both to become more competitive on the world market and also to bolster national security.)

Moreover Yarvin isn’t just arguing for trade restrictions to get one over on China. He also calls for the government to enact technological restrictions so as to create “meaningful” work for people:

Consider one targeted technology restriction: no plastic toys. If my children are going to have toys, these toys will be made from wood, with hand tools, by Americans, in America.

Results: (a) negative financial impact on parents who need to buy toys for their children, and might have to increase their toy budgets; (b) negative hedonic impact on children, whose toy bins are no longer filled with brightly colored Chinese plastic crap; (c) negative economic impact on China, which is not our country, so who cares; (d) gigantic economic boom in the American wooden toy industry, providing employment to any fool who can whittle.

It should go without saying that state restriction of technology for the purpose of providing work that improves the “quality” of the American population is not “hyperindividualism”, nor is it “deracinated from regional identities”. Moreover, it’s also a set of policies directly at odds with the patchwork solution Yarvin proposes. Wide-ranging tariffs, technological restrictions and wide-ranging government works programs require immense government intervention in the economy.

Hard to square that with competition for property values and talent incentivizing good governance.

And since his return to writing in 2019, Yarvin has doubled down on nationalism, increasingly shredding his cosmopolitan pretenses. In one of the first essays he wrote since his return to writing that was published at The American Mind he explicitly calls for sharp divisions to be enforced between states to maintain cultural differences.

Might not we say: our species is made richer by its differences? But, if we try to blend all of these ways to be into one way, we either destroy all but one—or end up with bland, beige mush. This rhetoric, although not orthodox, is mere inches from orthodoxy.

So what explains this seeming reversal of opinion? Well instead of continuing to trudge through Yarvin’s writing, I think a much faster path to understanding what happened is through briefly looking at one of Yarvin’s strongest influences, the great reactionary writer Thomas Carlyle.

ON CARLYLE

I find it odd how rarely Carlyle is brought up in discussions of Yarvin, particularly by those who emphasize his libertarian background. You’d think that the leading tech reactionary thinker claims that one of the fiercest romantic critics of industrialism as an influence would raise more eyebrows, but in all the criticism of Yarvin I’ve read over the years, I haven’t seen anyone actually address this connection in depth.

Particularly since Yarvin tries to blend Thomas Carlyle and the libertarian Ludwig von Mises. The first essay he writes that introduces Carlyle to his audience is straightforwardly titled From Mises to Carlyle. In it, he acts as though the two thinkers are more or less compatible since Mises is more or less right about economics, but has nothing to say about security. Carlyle then provides an answer as to what is to be done about the question of social disorder, namely the enforcement of martial law.

The most obvious rejoinder is that people are capable of achieving security without the state and that libertarians have actually thought about this quite a lot – see Peter Leeson who’s written several papers and books on how people without a state have managed to cooperate and trade.

But even if you want to operate in a minimal statist frame, well it’s much easier to achieve that when you have a robust civil society existing in place because people can just forgo having to deal with the formal legal system. It was enough for the British, after all – per economic historian Joel Mokyr in The Institutional Origins of the Industrial Revolution.

The Hobbesian view, that insists that order can only be achieved through firm third-party enforcement, may well be true for many societies, but it appears that for Britain in the century following Hobbes’s death (1679) it was becoming an increasingly less apt description of social reality in Britain. What this means is that we cannot really place the efficiency of the State at the center of the stage of institutional explanations of the British economic miracle.

Indeed, the argument that Britain’s advantage in leading the Industrial Revolution was due to its efficient enforcement of property rights after 1688 needs to be revisited. What mattered was that within the merchant and artisan classes there existed a level of trust that made it possible to transact with non-kin, and increasingly with people who were, if not strangers, certainly not close acquaintances

But it isn’t just that libertarians have thought more about security and social order than Yarvin admits, to say nothing of actual history. No the real problem with trying to meld Carlyle with Mises is that Mises was a ruthless critic of the project Carlyle sought to bring about! In the conclusion to Mises’ book Omnipotent Government, Mises straight-up fucking calls Carlyle “one of the greatest precursors of totalitarianism and Nazism.”

A significant reason why Mises is such a vehement critic of Carlyle despite the latter being dead for nearly half a century when he wrote that is that Carlyle hated liberal economics. He coined the phrase “the dismal science” to describe the discipline of economics while debating John Stuart Mill on the question of slavery because Mill made appeals to economics to attack Carlyle’s argument for slavery. And it wasn’t even because he thought it was efficient or because it provided material gain to the British Empire. Rather he believed that work and toil was holy and that enslaving people around the world was what was necessary to make them act more in line with what he claimed God wanted!

Carlyle’s writing is full of endless attacks on the liberal shift toward a more dynamic society that comes in tandem with a more dynamic economy built around people having more choices. Easy to see why a liberal like Mises would have hated the man.

Now I’m not saying you can’t be a libertarian who’s influenced by Carlyle. He is a major intellectual who has had influence on historians, philosophers and thinkers across the political spectrum from Gobbles to Gandhi to Engels. But even then there’s nuance. Engels, for example, did not praise Carlyle uncritically – in his review of Carlyle’s Past and Present, Engels praised him as a savvy critic of British industrialism but rejected Carlyle’s romanticism, emphasizing what he saw instead as the root cause of the horrors of industrial society – private property.

Yarvin has not addressed this fundamental inconsistency in his position. Instead, since his return to writing, has since jettisoned his libertarian pretenses and doubled down on paternalistic authoritarianism.

By way of example, let’s take some more recent writing wherein he advises some future ruler on what they should do which is concerned with the economic policy he wishes them to enact. Yarvin calls this “illiberal economics” which is predicated on economic activity that improves the quality of humans, rather than “liberal economics'' which is predicated on fulfilling the consumer desires of people. Yarvin claims that “liberal economics” encompasses both the aspirations of capitalists and communists, since according to him both “agree that the production of utility must be maximized; they differ only on its subsequent distribution.”

In practical terms these two approaches are first and foremost distinguished by the relation of the individual to the state. According to him in liberal economics individuals are served by the state, while in illiberal economics people are assets owned by the state.

Perhaps the most significant difference between liberal and illiberal economics is an accounting difference. To liberal economics, a government is a service provider. Its citizens are its customers. As customers they are kings. By definition, the purpose of customer service is to satisfy the customer’s desires—hence, luxus populi suprema lex.

To illiberal economics, a government is a sovereign enterprise. The tangible capital of this enterprise is the land and the people. Its subjects are its assets. Their proprietor’s purpose is to preserve and improve this human capital—hence, salus populi suprema lex.

To Yarvin, the role of an illiberal regime is to nurture and foster its population. And so again he advocates for makework that “improves” the “quality” of the population.

Humans are very unusual robots. A normal robot depreciates with use. A human robot appreciates with use—not equally for every use—and depreciates with disuse. If regular robots worked like this and you owned 300 million of them, you would invent weird, noisy ways to keep your robots busy: artificial difficulty.

Clearly Yarvin has moved a lot closer to Carlyle and much further away from Mises. But what explains this? Why has a seeming champion for markets and efficiency done a 180 and openly started championing restriction and deliberate inefficiency, despite the fact he still appeals to the success of CEOs to justify dictatorial control?

It’s here we can get to Yarvin’s most infamous claims about the effectiveness of corporations proving the necessity of a monarchy.

THE CATHEDRAL VERSUS “THE CATHEDRAL”

One of the many phrases that Yarvin managed to usher into our discourse is that of “The Cathedral”. It is a “self-organizing conspiracy” that converges on progressive values despite not being centrally coordinated and then propagates those values through institutions like the media.

Yarvin explicitly picked this term ironically. It comes from a short text by the libertarian software engineer Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar which was written after the explosive success of the Linux operating system in the 90s as a retrospective that tried to unpack why a bunch of ragtag nerds with significantly less capital had managed to outperform Microsoft at making software. Raymond’s conclusion was that self-motivated individuals, working autonomously in specific conditions, can do better than even billion-dollar corporations operating in a top-down fashion.

The irony of course is that “The Cathedral” which Yarvin describes works like Raymond’s bazaar.

But the label is making a point. The Catholic Church is one institution—the cathedral is many institutions. Yet the label is singular. This transformation from many to one—literally, e pluribus unum—is the heart of the mystery at the heart of the modern world.

The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.

Most notably, this pseudo-structure is synoptic: it has one clear doctrine or perspective. It always agrees with itself. Still more puzzlingly, its doctrine is not static; it evolves; this doctrine has a predictable direction of evolution, and the whole structure moves together.

This structure is the enemy for Yarvin. His diagnosis of why the modern world is so messed up is that academics and journalists have come up with and spread bad ideas because of bad incentives. Since, he argues, showing that you believe in the right ideas, regardless of whether they are true or not, gets you power and influence we have a runaway feedback loop where people are endlessly virtue signaling without reference to reality until things get so fucked up that society implodes.

The solution? Impose order on things wherein who spout ideas have some relationship to their effect. This is to be achieved by adopting the strict hierarchical structure of corporations and monarchies.

An organization which focuses responsibility toward the top, without leaking, is an organization structured like an army or a corporation. In this form of organization (used by almost everything that isn’t a government), your manager actually is your boss. Final authority and responsibility lands on one person.

In short, we need a return to the sort of organization you would use to build a “cathedral” to usurp the “bazaar” style organization that Yarvin has termed “The Cathedral”.

Got all that?

Of course, part of why this argument is in any way at all convincing is that we obviously live in a world dominated by hierarchies and so there must be some reason they exist. But my answer to that is not that capitalism is more or less defined by systemic power that redirect market activity toward preserving power. In particular, states benefits from having a smaller number of large firms that are hierarchically structured because both parties benefit in a symbiotic relationship – the state can more easily regulate and direct the firms to its ends, while the firms benefit from the state creating a simpler environment to operate within and through the provision of goods like infrastructure or educated workers.

Yes there is some filtering toward merit and efficiency within that system that gets rid of incompetence and inefficiency. But it is vastly overstated and people are able to get by despite making mistake after mistake thanks to being close to untouchable due to how much wealth and power they’ve concentrated.

But it isn’t just that capitalist incentives clearly fail to select the best and brightest. It’s also that there are fundamental problems with centralization itself, that beyond a certain point of complexity the center simply gets overwhelmed by the number of demands on it and so is simply incapable of engaging with the world in a nuanced fashion and so it doesn’t matter if you somehow find enough Einsteins and von Neumanns to be in charge of everything.

A go-to line of Yarvin’s is that “monarchies” built everything around us and that democracies could never do that. Such an assertion only makes sense if you exclude alternative ways of organizing. So don’t look at the effectiveness of workers cooperatives, the success of collectively managed commons, the fact Silicon Valley’s explosive growth was not driven by founders with dictatorial control over their companies but instead by workers sharing information between each other (similar to how innovation worked when the industrial revolution kicked off in Britain), the structural problems with large organizations that select for managers who are good at playing politics, not doing actual work, the various structural problems with monarchy as a form of government that explain its decline with the advent of modernity or the existence of societies like the Indus Valley Civilization that was large, had a division of labor and yet still maintained egalitarian relations for thousands of years, etc etc.

Sure democratic decision-making has problems, but that in no way rules out aspirations for relational egalitarianism. In fact the very same limits on communication that frustrate democracy also cut against autocracy.

And it’s here that we can get to the primary contradiction in libertarianism that are the crux of the matter.

NATURAL HIERARCHIES AND CONFLICTING LIBERTARIAN MOTIVATIONS

Once upon a time for those supporting hierarchies, the obvious institution and structure to defend was the ancien regime. But in the modern era where liberalism has seen significant success, reactionaries have had to adapt. Hence the obvious move by many was to start championing the hierarchies of capitalism as being the emergence of some new natural aristocracy.

Which was exactly the argument made by the original anarcho-capitalist, Murray Rothbard who was a significant influence on Yarvin.

Now Rothbard’s “anarchism” was largely confined to mere anti-statism and he was in fact for power relations outside that of the state. This is most clearly seen in his essay, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, he argues that egalitarian aspirations are not just challenging to achieve but impossible.

If an ethical ideal is inherently “impractical,” that is, if it cannot work in practice, then it is a poor ideal and should be discarded forthwith. To put it more precisely, if an ethical goal violates the nature of man and/or the universe and, therefore, cannot work in practice, then it is a bad ideal and should be dismissed as a goal. If the goal itself violates the nature of man, then it is also a poor idea to work in the direction of that goal.

Rothbard’s main evidence for the “impracticality” of egalitarianism is that any desire to achieve equality goes against nature precisely because equality means everyone has an equal amount of something and that such equality is 1) arbitrary in terms of what it decides should be the metric of equality and 2) impossible to enforce without coercion.

While it’s true that there are plenty of bad egalitarian aspirations that involve stripping people of talents or abilities to achieve a gray uniformity. But to assert that all aspirations necessarily end up there is laughable. An obvious rejoinder is relational egalitarianism, that we should relate to each other without systemic privilege biasing either party.

It’s here we get to the heart of the matter. Rothbard does not consider this to be “egalitarianism” because he believes that if we established proper relational egalitarianism, the proper, natural hierarchies would emerge as a consequence.

The great fact of individual difference and variability (that is, inequality) is evident from the long record of human experience; hence, the general recognition of the antihuman nature of a world of coerced uniformity. Socially and economically, this variability manifests itself in the universal division of labor, and in the “Iron Law of Oligarchy”—the insight that, in every organization or activity, a few (generally the most able and/or the most interested) will end up as leaders, with the mass of the membership filling the ranks of the followers. In both cases, the same phenomenon is at work—outstanding success or leadership in any given activity is attained by what Jefferson called a “natural aristocracy”—those who are best attuned to that activity.

Yarvin, unsurprisingly, believes something similar. As he writes in A Formalist Manifesto.

Even if everyone starts with equal everything, people being different, having different needs and skills and so on, and the concept of ownership implying that if you own something you can give it to someone else, all is not likely to stay equal. In fact, it’s basically impossible to combine a system in which agreements stay agreed with one in which equality stays equal.

Starting with these assumptions, it’s easy to see how you can see market relations as a way to give society the right aristocrats, the true elite. And so follows conservative libertarianism, right?

Well, no.

While people can and should vigorously critique reactionaries who appeal to biology as naturally resulting in predictable hierarchies, I want to sidestep that debate entirely. Why should we take the natural as a given?

In his essay Rothbard doesn’t just sneer at feminist aspirations for greater equality, asserting that women just naturally have tendencies toward desiring motherhood and nurturing. He explicitly takes aim at transhumanist feminist currents of his time, represented most vigorously in the work of Marxist feminist Shumalith Firestone who openly acknowledged that patriarchal relations had something of a biological basis and called for technological and social transformation to overcome these limitations and differentials.

Now it may be impossible to fully open source the human body. But we have clearly not reached the limits of what is possible in terms of reconfiguration. And so even if persistent relationships of domination naturally evolve out of biological differences (a premise I do not agree with, to be clear), we are not talking about a transhistorical phenomenon but rather something mutable that can be contested.

This can range from social practices like women banding together to sanction abusive men or gossip networks, to the emergence of novel technologies like the washing machine or the pill or firearms which reduce the need, significantly lower risks women face or even out the coercive differential between men and women. And while this has not ushered in a post-gender utopia, we have clearly moved in that direction over time, even as there have been setbacks and regressions.

Moreover, while feminism has been the domain in which we’ve seen the most straightforward sustained progress, similar dynamics have been playing out in arguably every domain of social domination like that of labor to capital and race.

Part of such an overall process of deterritorialization is the market. An overall increase in options that are available to people means that those who want to maintain hierarchies just have to work a lot harder. The ability for upstarts to undercut established orders, to give people the option to break away from some unpleasant state of affairs or to engage in boycotts is critical to this process. We can debate whether this institutional arrangement leads to hierarchies or should be supplemented by other mechanisms, but even among those who are more comfortable with inequality, there’s a frequent argument that the churn of markets means these hierarchies are far less stable than those of previous errors, that the successful bourgeois are far easier to replace than the aristocrats of old.

The two arguments for markets I just outlined – that they act as a sorting mechanism to create new elites and that they provide options which undermine hierarchies – have long been appealed to by those who make up libertarian movement. You’ll have people point out the role that boycotts played in ending Jim Crow, the penalties that bigots will face in the market when they discriminate and how meaningful choice can undercut oppressive situations without the need for a central authority to step in. Yet at the same time they will be part of the same movement with people who argue that the current arrangement of things is the consequence of natural market dynamics working themselves out and there is no need to fight further injustice, indeed that the only motivation to try and rectify things is a closested desire for statist absolutism.

(Indeed sometimes you find these contradictions within the same person. Rothbard himself called for workers to take control of the businesses they worked at that had significant government ties when he was close to the New Left in the 60s and also argued against laws stopping female employment in his manifesto For A New Liberty.)

The failure of libertarians to sort this out, to come down on one side or the other is part of how we got here and is a conflict playing out to this day – see for example how the reactionary Mises caucus has come to dominate the US libertarian party while at the same time the party elected Chase Oliver, a gay libertarian who is opposed to the police state as the presidential candidate in 2024.

However such incoherence is not just an abstract philosophical concern for academics to debate. The basic points about the problems of power relations point to weaknesses that can be leveraged. Which brings me to the question of strategy.

TO BUILD THE BIZARRE

The most important bit of strategic advice I can give to anyone concerned about the influence that Curtis Yarvin has is that you should not, under any circumstances, take his public positions on strategy seriously. Yarvin is infamous among reactionaries for his position of passivism, that people who desire his ends should not try to engage in any action to try and influence the government. Instead, they should build up a group who can engage in counter-intellectual activity to analyze and expose The Cathedral as what it is so that when it fails they can present a plan for how to easily install an autocrat.

In more recent years he’s also increasingly emphasized an aesthetic dimension to this project. See for example this piece on the culture war where he likens American politics to Lord of the Rings and argues that the “hobbits” that make up the base of the American right should not try to enact policies that harm the “high elves” that are the base of the Democratic Party and that they should instead support the “dark elves”, the people who have the habitus and background of liberal elites but are open to reactionary ideas. The point of “dark elves” is to undermine the morale of the “high elves” or even flip to the other side through cultural subversion.

The only culture war that matters is the culture war between the dark elves and the high elves. This war is not fought with bombs and bullets, or even laws and judges. This war is fought with books and films and plays and poems. It is still a savage war!

The first job of the dark elves is to seduce the high elves—to sow acorns of dark doubt in their high golden minds. Once these seeds become trees, the elf becomes a dark elf. This is obviously the optimal outcome of the seduction process. …

As a dissident, winning the culture war means establishing cultural dominance, which means becoming fashionable. Culture is still downstream from power, but your hobbit coup will go way better if you have a beefy fifth column within the elf ruling class—and a hidden cadre of dark elves who can emerge to rule the future.

To make dissident ideas more fashionable, it is not necessary to “water them down.” Just the opposite—it is necessary to make them more daring, more frightening and beautiful, more audacious and transgressive, more surprising and delightful. The strategy of the dark elf is to seduce the ruling high elves into losing faith in their own prestigious institutions—by showing them something that attracts them more—by painting a picture of an amazing and totally different future as a work of art.

That’s pretty cringe, but what’s really cringe is that the people he’s convinced of his position are just kinda mediocre. For all Yarvin’s posturing as some “dark sith lord” whose ideas are a “red pill” that will shatter the readers’ fragile liberal reality and corrupt their souls, every critic of remote substance who tries to seriously grapple with his writing agrees that he’s just kinda lame and exhausting and unoriginal. I started this essay with a couple examples but let me give one more. The most interesting art to come out of the Dimes Square scene in New York that Yarvin has embedded himself in is the writings of Mike Crumplar about how vapid and stupid it all is.

The scene was reaching new heights of insanity. Someone asked if I was a “tranny chaser,” and then others joined in, a taunting chorus asking if I was a tranny chaser from all directions, and even Yarvin’s ponderous voice, “Tranny chaser? Tranny chaser?” I had imagined he would’ve assumed some distance from all this vulgarity, with his pose of intellectual authority among these people, but I guess all fascists are really the same at the end of the day. Hobbits that think they’re dark elves, to use his metaphor.

But while it can certainly be cathartic to enjoy a breakdown of just why someone is fuckin wrong / cringe, but there is a very real sense in which arguments and appeals to popularity or status just don’t matter when the differential in power is just so vast. Okay so you’ve said some catty things about a reactionary dork on the internet. He still has influence on people inside the White House who are doing very real damage and if let free to pursue their aims could enact multiple genocides if not wipe out humanity entirely.

So what is to be done?

Well sometimes it’s worth considering a philosophical corpus not as a set of arguments, but instead as an aesthetic that will appeal to some and repel others. Instead of looking at the object-level arguments to predict their behavior, we can instead ask the meta-question of what are the sort of people who’ll be attracted to these arguments?

Yarvin’s audience no doubt appeals to many sorts of people's characteristics, but I suspect one trait they overwhelmingly share is an extensive drive toward motivated reasoning. He’s factually wrong about so much and logically inconsistent in so many ways that the only people who’ll stick around are those who are willing to look past all that for something else.

Or as he put it.

In many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.

You can’t just flip between cynically pushing propaganda to your followers or reassuring yourself with simple-but-wrong models of the world and accurately modeling the world for instrumental purposes – the set of habits, assumptions and relationships that you operate by carrying over from one domain to another.

Furthermore, this is not just anonymous weirdo followers. You see it among tech elites who read him. See Peter Thiel are openly spouting COVID conspiracies and Marc Andreseen claiming that Hillary was secretly the president from 2016 and that the median undergrad at Harvard is a Marxist. These are not cynical moves to convince the public of absurdities that strengthen their position, rather they are obvious signs that they’ve fallen down the conspiracy rabbit hole and are disconnected from reality. The various failures of the first couple weeks of the second Trump regime have stymied them from forming a durable (so far).

The size and commitment and capacity of an army are not the only variables in a conflict. To win a conflict you need to be able to leverage your capacity and that means intelligent decision-making. That means doing the work to understand the world as it is, as it changes and what your options are.

The stupidity of our enemies may well play a significant role in saving us this time around, but we should not be so complacent as to rely on that in the future. The conclusion to draw from one’s enemies being delusional is not some detached passivity that lies back and waits for the whole thing to implode. It is instead to be proactive about going out of one’s way to find exploits that leverage such ignorance.

And this is one thing that Yarvin, despite his claims that The Cathedral has created a shadow universe of nothing but lies and falsehoods, does not do. I’m not just talking about his embrace of passivism, but a broader refusal to encourage people to take risks that are perfectly acceptable within the framework of liberal capitalism. For example, despite being a climate change denier, he is not calling for insurance startups to undercut rising insurance premiums in Miami. If you think that climate change really is a myth but you aren’t trying to get ahead of very real movements in the market in response to it, well you’re just leaving alpha on the table.

In any conflict, a side that has more people who are willing to take calculated risks about something they believe in has a comparative advantage. And for all that reactionaries complain about how liberal society has sapped our courage, has made us complacent and that they’re the only ones presenting a vision of something bigger than just narrow hedonism, the vast majority of people who are willing to engage in extended self-sacrifice for ideals greater than themselves in developed countries are increasingly on the left.

Such a combination of self-sacrifice and insight is a significant part of why reaction has been lost historically. Sure broader structural factors matter. Monarchs got dumb ideas in their heads. Material deprivation resulted in majorities rising up. Modernization created complexities that were more challenging to navigate and provided more points of weakness.

But the basic asymmetry between those with power and those without in terms of the capacities either side can bring to bare can only be overcome if those without go out of their way to find ways to make up the difference, to find points of vulnerability that can be leveraged or develop capacities that are challenging for the powerful to replicate. Again, there are countless bad strategies and so if you aren’t actively seeking out good strategies, you’ll almost certainly employ suboptimal means.

Furthermore such inquiry has largely taken place outside established institutions of education. The most strategically fertile leftist thinkers and arguments of the last two hundred years happened either outside of formal educational institutions or at the very least existed in an oppositional stance to the academy instead of submitting to its incentives. In centering academia as a major part of “The Cathedral”, Yarvin is just wrong. Academia isn’t a breeding ground for radicals and idealists, it’s a containment chamber.

(This is not to say there is no good work that comes out of educational institutions! But the current structures actively frustrate those trying to do work that would benefit social movements or illuminate radical alternatives. Radicals are just playing a different game than career academics and so I judge them by different metrics.)

The problem is that liberals and leftists opposed to this shit haven’t integrated these insights in a systematic fashion. While most activists who are effective tend to be sharp tactically (if for no other reason than what they do is risky and/or demanding – hence people who aren’t don’t tend to stick around – skin in the game), this asymmetry is not reflected in a popular broader strategy for change. See socialist orgs where the median member has read enough to have informed takes on precise minutia of the Russian Revolution… only for all their strategic discourse to assume that there exists an organized workers movement they can intervene in and that in the absence of that they should organize endless rallies that do nothing. Or educated liberals who will point out time and time again that the right is fucking stupid… only to center all their attention on sloppy media strategies to reach the infamously inattentive median voter (to say nothing of those who claim our present crisis is caused by social media ignoring that such disengagement has been a perennial problem with American democracy since its inception).

A consequence of this is a small c-conservative sentiment among people ostensibly for “progress”. So often people do not have a coherent positive project or even a broad theory which can inform effective action. As a consequence people simply respond to events as they unfold. This is a reactive form of decision making and against actual reactionaries who have significant institutional power and are (currently) favored in our media environment it will lose.

Thankfully this is a state of affairs that is in part a consequence of bad ideas and so is something we can partially dig ourselves out of by changing people’s minds.

So as bad as our present moment is, I retain some degree of optimism for this reason alone. If we are in an asymmetric conflict and we haven’t been (consciously, systematically) playing to our strengths, that means there’s significant room for growth on our end. Conversely, there’s reason to think that the right is seeing diminishing returns in terms of their strategy of attempting to mainline stupid – outside of escalating to outright genocide, “create a funhouse world of delusion and hope that enough people sign on to that it starts to shift social reality” is running up against all sorts of barriers and can be eroded on any number of fronts. We have a far greater space of potentialities we can bring to bear, but that’s conditional on us building the collective capacity to do that.

Which means holding ourselves to far higher intellectual standards than that of the reactionaries. That doesn’t mean trying to do somewhat better, but instead aspiring to nothing less than total intellectual dominance over these bastards. This is not out of an elitist desire for detached superiority over the deluded masses and the knowledge that “this too shall fall”, but instead for the basic point that better mapping the landscape before us and how we might effectively intervene in it increases the likelihood of our success.

And that means taking seriously the inconsistencies in libertarianism and seeking to cut out whatever valuable ideas exist within that cluster of ideas, separating them from their reactionary associations and putting them toward better ends.