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.

The conference talk for my trip to Germany goes unwritten, today’s meeting remains unprepared, emails unanswered, bureaucratic forms unfilled, and I’m hidden in the backroom, reading Curtis Yarvin who finally appeared in book form:

There has never, in the history of any country on earth, certainly including England and America, been a regime which abandoned its role of managing the public mind. When it appears that the public mind is going unmanaged, look for any organ or power which is managing the public mind, but is not formally part of the state. Add this organ or power to your definition of “the regime.” Nothing has changed and nothing ever can. Sorry. Yes, I do realize that this is contrary
to our entire national myth. It’s really a bummer.

If you don’t agree that this is more useful and enjoyable than filling forms and preparing meetings, I’m not sure you are still fully alive.

Just one more quote so that everybody can share in the backroom fun:

What would past societies make of us? Whom would Lincoln or FDR, retrieved in our time machine, support in the 2024 election? We have no idea who these people were. So we cannot imagine their advice and we cannot benefit from it. We have no real history at all—not the story of what happened, just a story we tell ourselves. On the other hand both of these men were racists. Which candidate do racists support? Maybe both Lincoln and FDR would be Trump voters? Because white supremacy? Why would their trip in the time machine alter such a core belief? What would you show them from the present to convince them, without coercion, to change their minds?

There are several pages preceding this quote that detail racist statements by Lincoln and FDR and tell the story of FDR entrapping young soldiers in gay relationships to destroy their careers. I had no idea about this, and it looks like for FDR at least half of the fun was setting these rapey situations for his marks and then enjoy public descriptions of gay sex, using them to shame and persecute the young men.

The point of all this is to question our current understanding of the entire human history as one gigantic mistake deserving of nothing but contempt.

Choices are great. They can also become exhausting when you have to make them all the time. Choice oversaturation causes choice fatigue.

The relief a human brain experiences when choices are removed from at least one area of life is addictive. This is why so many people move away from search engines with their “your search term resulted in 2,980,623 results” to a simple, clean AI app with one single response to every question. With AI chatbots there’s nothing to choose from. A question produces an answer instead of a list of potential answers.

This is extremely dangerous because users can have their worldview bastardized and rewritten without even realizing it. But the respite from choice fatigue is so alluring that most people simply won’t care.

Back in July I self-mutilated to avoid going to a woke struggle session and remained bedridden for a month. Woke struggle sessions have increased in number and intensity since then, and I realized that self-mutilation is not the way. I have now come up with an alternative approach.

Stickers.

I make sticker collages in my notebook. An hour of peeling and pasting stickers, and I feel like I’m in a bubble that emits streams of light. I come into the woke seminars with a glow of a person in the midst of a religious experience.

This is what people call meditation, and it’s powerful stuff, indeed. Of course, stickers work for me and will have no effect on other people. The trick is to come up with your own calming experience.

The present does not believe in the wisdom of the past at all. The present knows what the past was: a long global nightmare of slavery, homophobia and bacterial infections. Wisdom? What wisdom? Everything they knew, we know, but we know so much more. DNA. MDMA. iPhones. H-bombs.
Need we say more? Science, anyone? This is the conventional view—the sociology of the present is verified by its quantum physics. It is worth remembering that the USSR and even the Third Reich were pretty solid at the hard sciences, leaving this not so great a case for our liberal democratic open society.

Curtis Yarvin, Gray Mirror

This is one of the women raising Musk’s children. She’s not their mom because these are purchased babies. It’s clear from the messages that her role in their lives is more limited than that of a nanny:

Lovely people, these are. Just lovely. Curiously, Zelensky, with whom Musk seems stranely obsessed, is raising two normal biological children with his legally wedded wife who is simultaneously their natural mother. This kind of thing still exists, it seems.

Finally, it’s slooooowly beginning to dawn on him. It’s like pulling teeth, waiting for these people to catch on.

It’s not possible to know everything and understand everything but it is very possible to stay quiet and not run your mouth like a chirpy kindergartner.

I was walking down the hallway and ran into a colleague I haven’t seen in months.

“You are thin!” she yelled. “Wow, you are thin! What happened?”

I’m not in the least thin but definitely much thinner than I’ve been in a very long time. The funny part is that I have never in my life eaten as much and as often as since I became a diabetic. But since the food includes almost no carbs, I’m deflating.

I never thought I would say this but I’m really tired of all this eating. Especially since none of the stuff I’m constantly eating is the kind of stuff I want to be eating.

It’s also annoying that everybody will now think the weight loss is a result of meds and not an eminently respectable chronic illness.

The previous sentence is supposed to be a joke, in case it’s not clear.

Also, people keep asking why I use AI for information. I’m not sure if they are aware that pretty much everybody under the age of 25 uses AI for information about 99% of the time. Yes, I know how to find reliable sources. Moreover, I know that AI is ideological and manipulative. But young people don’t. My 19-year-old students have absolutely no idea. It’s important to know how they learn about the world.

This is a big change. Previously, young people got their answers from a newsfeed that by default included all sorts of voices. And now they moved to a completely different kind of social media and use ChatGPT for information. If that’s not disturbing, I don’t know what is.

People keep asking if on tomorrow’s show I will talk about Trump’s lunatic statements on Ukraine. The answer is no because they have a much more knowledgeable expert who already spoke about it today. I highly recommend this video that includes his analysis on my channel:

The expert in question is Andrei Illarionov, and I don’t remotely claim to have the same level of knowledge and insight. He’s saying this is probably another Operation Snow type of thing.