In case people don’t know who Curtis Yarvin is, he’s the intellectual engineer of what became the Trump revolution. He created the philosophical underpinnings of a massive turn away from the reigning liberal consensus long before Trump came onto the political scene. If Trump never existed , there would be somebody else to play his role because the ground was prepared. Paradoxically, Yarvin is the most influential American thinker of the past 20 years whose name is completely unknown in the American mainstream even when the mainstream now inhabits the reality that his thought brought into existence.
Regardless with whether one “agrees” with Yarvin, if this is not a phenomenon deserving study and interest, I don’t know what is. We are kind of behind on paying attention in the US but I was in an indie bookstore in Spain last month and as I was randomly opening books by contemporary thinkers (including very Marxist and very centrist ones), I kept running across quotes from Yarvin. I’ll talk about a couple of these European thinkers in the nearest future but first I need to introduce Yarvin because otherwise it’s confusing what people are responding to.
Clarissa's Blog 
“In case people don’t know who Curtis Yarvin is”
Worth putting into the post (if you can edit it) is that for years he was known more as Mencius Moldbug. I remember seeing references to that name long before he began using the name Yarvin.
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Oh! He’s *Moldbug*?
I thought I’d never heard of him– but thanks, now I know who he is!
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Yes. And Jon Keeperman, the founder of Passage Publishing, is Lomez.
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I’m glad you’re enjoying Yarvin. I find him completely insufferable and not nearly as insightful as he’s made out to be.
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“Yarvin. I find him completely insufferable”
I remember trying to read his old Mencius Moldbug blog a time or two and not being able to get very far. Very…. not blog-friendly style and the writing persona was, as you say, kind of insufferable.
And since he was using a pen-name there weren’t audio sources of interviews.
Maybe books are a better medium for him (not least because books usually have editors).
I think he has some good insights but there are a lot of holes in his ideas (which is fine, lots of authors have some good ideas that are incompletely or sketchy in places).
One thing I’ve heard from interviews is that he seems to fall into the trap of ‘the state is a company’ (not new it’s always floating around the edges of US political thought) but it’s a terrible metaphor and doesn’t lead to good places.
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No shit. I think he’s using the word “monarchy” instead of “dictator” like he should. We’ve had lots of that in recent history and it does not go well.
Like you said, there are so many wholes in his arguments. I watched part of an interview he did with the New York Times podcast and it was such a let down. Nothing of value in that interview. The interviewer himself was terrible at asking good questions and poking any holes. So far I’ve got nothing new from him. Hopefully Clarissa can do the heavy lifting for us and figure it out 🙂
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“using the word “monarchy” instead of “dictator””
More like Chief Executive Officer (answerable to a board of directors) though i don’t know how well he’s worked out the mechanics of the metaphor.
It’s also not clear who most citizens in this metaphor are… employees? customers?
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Have you seen his debate with Chris Rufo? Absolutely dreadful.
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But you have not heard him in my retelling which makes it so much better.
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I’ve taken a look and don’t see what is so novel about anything that he is saying. Seems his argument mostly just boils down to monarchy is good because corporations can run effectively and corporations are like monarchies. Is that it more or less? I must be missing something.
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“corporations are like monarchies”
that’s backwards. It’s far more accurate to say that monarchies (that is the raft of institutions that keep them running) are like corportations which is they British Royal Family is often referred to as ‘the Firm’.
I was disappointed in the series the Crown because they were too invested in invented narratives (like Margaret and her boyfriend in the 1950s, Charles and Camilla always loving each other) or just dwelling too much on side stories (almost half the last season was Diana moping in France).
The first seasons actually got into the day to day running of the Royal Family (as a business with a business model and structures that go far beyond any particular member of the family proper) and was far more interesting than the third-hand tabloid stories that took up more and more time as the series went on.
The closest they got to that in the last season was the Queen meeting with all the people working for her in weird positions she’d barely heard of (had I known in time, my life ambition might have been becoming the Warden of the Swans, probably just as well I had no idea such a position existed). And that was done as a montage…. sloppy storytelling!
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But monarchies are generational and lifelong. CEOs are not and get fired all the time. That’s why the word “monarchy” doesn’t seem to fit here.
This whole thing is still a complete black whole to me. I don’t see how any of it is any different than what’s already been tried plus some techno stuff added, or what the novelty is; seems to me like just authoritarianism with a makeover.
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Yarvin would agree, for him monarchy is the wise natural order and democracy is a fashionable modern cult. In his blog, he alternated between kings and CEOs, as the paradigm of a non-democratic executive.
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