Curtis Yarvin

Curtis Yarvin (born June 25, 1973), also known by his pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American computer scientist, political theorist, and neoreactionary thinker. He is the creator of the Urbit computing platform and the author of the blog Unqualified Reservations.

Quotes

Nazism

It should be obvious that, although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff.

Cannot we marvel at what the Third Reich achieved, with the knowledge that it was run by a maniac? In the hands of a non-maniac, what might it have done? In the hands of an Augustus, for instance? Well, somewhere in Germany in 1933, there might have been an Augustus or two. Or even three. But Germany in 1933 was a democracy. And that democracy elected not Augustus, not Frederick the Great, not even Kaiser Bill. It elected — Wait. Who did it elect? Gee. I've forgotten already. I hate these migraines. An Austrian, I think. A sergeant? A private first-class? Someone like that. A man of the people, that's for sure. History is so confusing.

Perhaps the easiest way for a modern American or European to understand Nazism is to understand that a good Brown thought about preserving the Deutsche Volk in exactly the same way that today's Greens think about preserving the Environment.

The omnibus racism epithet

In fact the word "racism" is applied in almost exactly the same way, by almost exactly the same authorities, as "atheism" in 1811. It is an omnibus epithet for a tremendous variety of ideas and opinions which responsible authorities find dangerous or displeasing.

Benefits of martial law

There is no reason at all that a libertarian, such as myself, cannot favor martial law. I am free when my rights are defined and secured against all comers, regardless of official pretensions. Freedom implies law; law implies order; order implies peace; peace implies victory. As a libertarian, the greatest danger threat to my property is not Uncle Sam, but thieves and brigands. If Uncle Sam wakes up from his present sclerotic slumber and shows the brigands a strong hand, my liberty has been increased.

Progressivism

Most progressives are socially normal human beings, who in any political environment, would just be choosing the largest, best-appointed bandwagon for their personal conveyance. In Nazi Germany they would be Nazis, in Russia they would be Bolsheviks, in the kingdom of Louis XIV they would be all for Louis XIV. This is one of the many reasons there is no need to guillotine them.

It is not at all surprising that progressives hate corporations and the profit system. It is a natural consequence of the antipathy to order, the anarchism, the lust for entropic destruction, which is the foundation of their creed.

Dictator phobia

If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.

War in Ukraine

...Trump (if he is elected president in 2024) should give Russia a free hand not just in Russian-speaking territories—but all the way to the English Channel... The goal of a Trumpist foreign policy in Europe is to withdraw American influence from Europe. This will guarantee the defeat of liberalism on the Continent.

Terrorism

Anders Behring Breivik made war on communist Norway, just as Max Manus made war on fascist Norway, just as Osama bin Laden made war on imperial America, just as Nelson Mandela made war on apartheid South Africa. Terrorism is the normal mode of warfare in our delightful post-WWII utopia. That is, it is the most common way to use force to achieve political objectives. Condemning terrorism, as such, is in every case retarded.

Genetics of African-Americans

Not all humans are born the same, of course, and Carlyle (following Aristotle) takes the view that the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery. And others still are badly suited to either. These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins. Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. The discoveries of Charles Darwin (who knew Carlyle personally) suggest that this broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained, at least in part, by biological differences between groups. Indeed, there is no question that biological differences played a role in Europeans’ preference for African over Indian slaves in at least one respect: due to superior genetic resistance, Africans were much less likely to die of introduced tropical diseases like yellow fever and malaria. (Of course, by itself this observation offers no moral justification for slavery, and indeed Darwin strongly dissented from Carlyle on this point, writing in his autobiography that “his views about slavery were revolting.”)

Destruction caused by democracy

The world before nationalism and democracy was a world of mild wars, small and effective governments, personal freedom, and civilized high culture… Note that, before the coming of nationalist democracy, it was actually not a problem at all for wealthy, high-IQ people to live in the same society as poor, low-IQ people. It worked just fine. The latter served the former.

When we look at the astounding violence of the democratic era, it strikes me as quite defensible to simply write off the whole idea as a disaster, and focus on correcting the many faults of monarchism.

And while not all the crimes in this tragedy (crimes of the 20th century) were committed by democrats, democracy is indeed its prime and ultimate cause. It is not a coincidence that the century of murder and the century of democracy were one and the same.

A century and a half of democracy has wreaked unbelievable devastation on a place and people once considered by far the most promising on earth. No mere ecological pollution could possibly compare.

Politics can be defined as limited warfare. For example, you can see a democratic election as a form of civil war, in which both sides agree to settle the conflict by simply counting soldiers. While this is a long way from a war in which tank battles are legitimate but poison gas is not, the principle is the same, and no qualitative line can be drawn between the two.

It is very difficult for a modern American to construct the history of the last 250 years as a history of decay. Decay is especially concealed by the obvious history of technical and scientific progress. While this has no reason at all to correlate with political or cultural progress, the two are certainly not hard to confuse.

Our modern democratic elections are an extremely poor substitute for actual regime change. As we've seen, democracy is to government as gray, slimy cancer is to pink and healthy living tissue. It is a degenerate neoplastic form. The only reason America has lasted as long as she has, and even still has more than a few years left, is that this malignancy is at present encysted in a thick husk of sclerotic scar tissue - our permanent civil service.

United States of America

(The United States’) industries are gutted and vanished. Her finances are ruined beyond imagining. Her old cities, but for a few, are dirty, dangerous, unlivable. Millions of feral, armed savages, perfectly de-civilized, run wild in her streets. Her famous social fabric is shredded, her famous voluntary institutions defunct, her population bored, lonely, atomized. Her small towns have rotted, turned into strip-malls, or both. (Her birds, however, are remarkably well-protected.)

The American, being human, being descended from a long line of chimpanzees and their still more foul hominid spawn, craves status, importance, meaning, in a word: power. But power is hard, oh so hard, to come by in his whip-broken, fixed and empty life of pleasant boredom. The solution? Oh, solution there is none, for power does not grow on trees. Power is here in America, as everywhere; power in America is locked up tight as Katrina van den Heuvel's ass. It's open to someone, perhaps, but not to him.

I'm hearing some serious African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) (in the comments section of Second City Cop, a blog for Chicago police officers). That's reality for ya, dog. All I know about America in the 22nd century is that everyone, regardless of race, color or creed, will call everyone else "nigga."

McCarthyism

We are\The neo-McCarthyists. Our motto:\This time, we'll finish the job.\We have no chance of winning, but\We're not at least afraid to try…

There is a word in the American political vocabulary for the last struggles of meaningful representative democracy. The word is "McCarthyism." McCarthyism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that unelected and/or extra-governmental officials should be responsible to elected officials. The question of McCarthyism was whether the American people, by electing a Congress, could hold such august, bipartisan, professional and apolitical agencies as the State Department responsible to their fickle, uninformed wills. The answer, as it turned out, was no.

Minorities in academics

If you taught chemistry at a university, you taught chemistry at a university which had a chief diversity officer, a department of African-American Studies, etc, etc. You knew what these people were. You knew what these people did. At least, you knew that whatever it was, it was not scholarship. You said nothing. What kind of servant of truth are you, sir? You served not truth, but the Party. Sign the form, sir.

To get his Pyne Prize, he (David Germany) had to beat a lot of other very smart white guys. What did Sonia Sotomayor (co-winner with Germany of Princeton University’s M. Taylor Pyne Honor Prize) have to do? Whom did she have to beat? It is not at all clear. My judgment is that when we look at the career of a progressive race activist of the late 20th century, institutional records and personal endorsements tell us just about nothing. Every rule can be, and is, bent for these people. What's clear is that at Princeton, David Germany was first and foremost a student, and Sonia Sotomayor was first and foremost an activist. Why on earth would anyone expect her grades to mean anything?

Nelson Mandela

No one who condones Che, Stalin, Mao, or any other leftist murderer, has any right to ask anyone else to dissociate himself from a rightist who didn't even make triple digits. Anders Behring Breivik is a terrorist. Nelson Mandela is a terrorist. Nelson Mandela is the most revered living political figure on our beautiful blue planet… If you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you'd like to fuck.

”Mainstream media”

Much good ink is shed over the guilt of the innocent gullible Hitler voter. Who'd never even heard of Auschwitz, much less approved of it. But guilty he remains, eh? No one at Gawker is shooting anyone in the nape of the neck. On the other hand, no one at Gawker has the option to shoot anyone in the nape of the neck. So we can't really know whether they would or they wouldn't, can we? There sure does seem to be quite a bit of hate out there, however. My guess is that most wouldn't, but some would.

Our lovely "mainstream media" is not, of course, a hierarchical organization reporting to the hidden Elders of Journalism. However, modern journalism is descended from such a hierarchical organization. That organization was the Office of War Information, OWI.

Advantages of monarchy

Was royalism a perfect system? It was not. But if we imagine a world in which the revolutions and civil wars of the last four centuries had never happened, it is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant.

Civilized vs. the underclass

If this coalition of the middle and upper classes — the civilized classes — can be formed, victory is certain regardless of the numbers of the underclass. When the civilized classes are united, an underclass population of any size is not a political problem, but a security problem. And not a difficult one in this day and age. If the civilized coalition is outvoted, it can simply bid directly for the loyalty of the security forces, a contest it will always win. The civilized coalition is politically conceivable. Hints of it, for instance, were seen in the Giuliani era in New York. Of course "Giuliani time" in New York developed orders of magnitude less power than would be required for actual regime change. Nonetheless, it was found possible to appeal politically to the upper crust to perform the normal or healthy role of aristocrats, ie, cooperating to preserve civilized society.

Progressive thought and Nazism

One interesting case of an ideal shared by both the 1930s Nazis and the 2007 Progressives is the Environment. Nazi environmentalism was definitely a different thing from ours, but the family resemblance is clear, and although environmentalism was hardly the most important part of the Nazi program it perhaps provides a window into their worldview… Is it so impossible to imagine Environmentalism being used as the basis for mass murder?

Climate science

Sure, we can expect the standards of research integrity in climate science to increase. But this is not the patient healing. This is the tumor healing. As we've seen, the entire endeavor of climate science, as now constituted, is entirely sinister and without merit. We don't want the tumor to heal. We want the tumor to die. The entire tumor.

John Birch Society

If the truth exists, it is in books. Very obscure, hard-to-find and not unbiased books — often published by the John Birch Society.

The American university system, seat of political power

I date the Fourth Republic and the Progressive period to 1933. We can read this story in two ways. We can read it as the coming of modern, scientific government in the United States. Or we can read it as the transfer of power from political democracy to the American university system — which, just for the sake of a catchy catchword, I like to call the Cathedral.

In fact, we know exactly what Washington's policies twenty years from now will be. They will certainly have nothing to do with "politics." They will be implementations of the ideas now taught at Harvard, Yale and Berkeley.

Slavery reconsidered

Modern Americans have enormous difficulty in grasping hierarchical social structures. We grew up steeped in "applied Christianity" pretty much the way the Hitler Youth grew up steeped in Hitler. The suggesting that slavery could ever be or have been, as Aristotle suggests, natural and healthy, is like suggesting to the Hitler Youth that it might be cool to make some Jewish friends… We think of the master-slave relationship as usually sick and twisted, and invariably adversarial. Parent-child relationships can be all three. But they are not normally so. If history (not to mention evolutionary biology) proves anything, it proves that humans fit into dominance-submission structures almost as easily as they fit into the nuclear family.

It is in fact very difficult to argue that the War of Secession made anyone's life more pleasant, including that of the freed slaves. (Perhaps your best case would be for New York profiteers and Unitarian poets who produced homilies to war.) War destroyed the economy of the South. It brought poverty, disease and death… While material things are not everything, and the psychological impact of freedom was large and usually positive, you will find few slave narratives in which the late 1860s are remembered as days of wine and roses.

I don't think the conversion of Southern slaves into Southern sharecroppers made anyone much freer, because it created few practical options for the people involved. Before, you were an agricultural laborer who worked on the same farm for your entire life; after, ditto.

Arab Spring

I'll tell you what the real emotion behind the Arab Spring was. Actually, Beavis can tell you better. "Fire is cool," said Beavis. Fire is indeed cool. Americans were bored and needed some better CNN. They wanted to see shit burn. Shit indeed burned, and is still burning. Which was cool. So they got what they wanted. Not too different from the crowd in the Colosseum, just less honest about how they satisfy their very simple chimp/human needs.

Political power, a property right

Political power is a property right, however you slice it. It is owned, not deserved. It is not a natural or "human" right. And it has no more to do with freedom than brake fluid with fondue.

Here is yet another (idea for good government): restrict voting to homeowners. Note that this was widely practiced in Anglo-American history, and for very good reason.

Benefits of military government

In my opinion just about every country on earth today would benefit from a transition to military government…

The conservative, a tool of democracy

A conservative is someone who helps disguise the true nature of a democratic state. The conservative is ineffective by definition, because his goal is to make democracy work properly. The fact that it does not work properly, has never worked properly, and will never work properly, sails straight over his head. He therefore labors cheerfully as a tool for his enemies.

Civil liberties

While the civil-liberties geek of 2013 is a pathetic and even hilarious figure, it's not at all true that his passion has never gone requited. Actually, in its bureaucratic form, "civil liberties" helps keep the streets of San Francisco covered with turds and shambling zombies.

Democracy

As a people, we believe insane things, because democracy has driven us all insane. After all, it's had two hundred years to do so. Its edifice of magical thinking is a wonderful thing, ornate as a Disney castle, more worthy of admiration than destruction. Sadly, it is the castle of evil, and God's sweet fire will melt it in a flash.

The basic grim truth that Americans need to face up to is that American successes and victories in the 19th and 20th centuries did not happen because of America's unique political system. They happened despite America's unique political system. America became great not because American democracy was great, but because America was a great people in a great place. As such, it was uniquely resistant to the poison of democracy, and alone survived its own disease. Now that the bloom is off the continent's youth, we can see how well American democracy works in a normal country. Others have experienced this disappointment; now, it is our turn.

It was democratic power that executed Socrates; even lynching is a fundamentally democratic exercise of power. Lynching is mob violence; mob violence, unless the mob is an organized mob, is democratic violence. It is useless to pretend that mob violence was not an essential aspect of the American Revolution, for instance.

Democracy as the cause of World War II

Thus, Anglo-American democracy causes the war (World War II), and its resulting terrors and destructions, because the nascent system of global suzerainty it set up in 1919 forces Germany to either accept a position which is permanently subordinate to the Anglo-American system or "international community," effectively sacrificing her independence as a nation, or demonstrate its disobedience by violently attacking that community. The dog has been backed into a corner; it must either cringe and submit, or bite. It probably should have cringed.

The Democratic Party importing Mexicans

One way to elect a new people is to import them, of course. For example, to put it bluntly, the Democratic Party has captured California, once a Republican stronghold, by importing arbitrary numbers of Mexicans. Indeed the Third World is stocked with literally billions of potential Democrats, just waiting to come to America so that Washington can buy their votes.

Terminating democracy

Can democracy terminate democracy? Isn't this a contradiction in terms? Not at all. Here is one straightforward way by which Americans can terminate democracy: elect a President who has promised to cancel the Constitution. Once he is inaugurated, he can cancel the Constitution. Of course, the military must also support this autogolpe. This given, the operation is trivial and entirely safe.

U.S. State Department

Sponsoring murderous bands of thugs around the world has been, for the last half-century, State's (the U.S. State Department’s) job. It's a dangerous job. Everyone knows it. Obviously, they would like the thugs to be as un-murderous as possible. Especially toward their own people. And obviously, they do not see the picture through these glasses. They do not understand that the "men anywhere fighting" fight not because their grievances are unsatisfied, but because State itself has offered them the prospect of satisfaction through violence. State sincerely believes that the gasoline is water.

Geopolitics

Competing branches of the US government still engage in Third World proxy wars, in which the Defense Department and its political allies and satellites (the Republican Party, the arms and energy industry, Israel) face off against the State Department and its allies and satellites (the Democratic Party, the NGOs and universities, Europe, Palestine). The true nature of these conflicts, which would end instantly if the US was under unitary leadership, or even if both American factions could agree to cut off all "aid" to all their foreign satellites, is admitted by no one. It is considered entirely normal that the US often arms, and always talks with, both sides of these bizarre, incurable pseudo-wars.

America, a communist country

America has only one problem: America is a communist country… Alas, this beautiful, simple, horrifying reality is simply too difficult for most Americans to grasp, let alone do something about. If you tell an American of any political persuasion that his is a communist country, the poor fscker (sic) will simply laugh in your face… If you love your American, don't let him get away with it! Don't let him wallow in his denial! Hit him straight in the teeth with a fast overhand right. "Of course America is a communist country," you can say. "You just have to translate. For workers and peasants, read blacks and Hispanics."

America has no surviving intellectual tradition besides progressivism — which is no more than a synonym for communism… Communism is as American as apple pie, and America today is a completely communist country.

Barack Obama

What is the chance that a budding young politician of undeniable talent and promise spends his junior and senior years at Columbia, and no one remembers him? What is the chance that my right ass cheek, through spontaneous quantum vibration, suddenly transmutes into a hemisphere of polished gold? Don't you feel these probabilities are at least roughly comparable?… My guess — not because I have any reason to believe that this specifically is what happened, but just because every other explanation I can think of strikes me as less probable — is that Obama, as a young black radical with SDS credentials and obvious talent and potential, found it relatively trivial to earn quick admission to the inner circle, spent two years as a gofer, intern, catamite, or what have you for the (Bill) Ayers crime family, and was rewarded by the gift of a Columbia degree and a ticket to Harvard Law.

Again, I am confident that this document (his birth certificate) exists for Barack Obama. The refusal to disclose it is just as contemptuous and contemptible as everything else in the process that produced him. Stonewalling on all life records of this man — from birth certificates to college transcripts — is a classic Alinskyian maneuver, pure vicious hardball. It serves the exact purpose it achieves: to generate as many conspiracy theories as possible, most of which are false. Any actual dirt will disappear in this cloud of vain speculation.

Cancer of leftism

As in the late Roman period, declining official authority, declining personal morality, and increasing public bureaucracy are observed in synchrony. This is not in any way a coincidence. The combination is an infallible symptom of the great terminal disease of the polity — leftism. Leftism is cancer.

Crimes of the New Deal

It is impossible to count the New Deal's crimes. The list must include everything short of mass murder. And even that is arguable.

Until there's an election in which one box is a clear mandate for abolishing the New Deal, if not Washington itself, democratist conservatives are wasting time and annoying the pig.

Women, workers, and peasants in the workplace

For quite some time in America it's been illegal to employ racists, sexists and fascists, and mandatory to employ a precisely calibrated percentage of women, workers and peasants. Because America is a free country and that's what freedom means.

Tenets of libertarianism

In my opinion, anyone who has intentionally chosen to remain ignorant of libertarian thought, in an era when a couple of mouse clicks will feed you enough high-test libertarianism to drown a moose, is not an intellectually serious person.

But if there is one thing all libertarians do believe, it's that the Americans should get America back. In other words, libertarians (at least, real libertarians) believe the US is basically an illegitimate and usurping authority, that taxation is theft, that they are essentially being treated as fur-bearing animals by this weird, officious armed mafia, which has somehow convinced everyone else in the country to worship it like it was the Church of God or something, not just a bunch of guys with fancy badges and big guns.

Race confers privilege

It's a reality of modern American life that race confers privilege. As a reactionary, how can I possibly object? A society without hereditary privilege is like a cheeseburger without cheese.

CEOs as governors

Washington, especially since it governs not only the United States but also most of the world, is just too huge to serve as a good thought-experiment for government. It's easier and more fun to think in terms of California, if California could somehow be a sovereign state. Assuming security and responsibility, how could we produce effective government in California? The answer: find the world's best CEO, and give him undivided control over budget, policy and personnel. I don't think there is any debate about it. The world's best CEO is Steve Jobs. Which would you rather live in: California as it is today, or Applefornia? Which would you rather carry: the iPhone, or the Calphone? I rest my case.

Steve Jobs, RIP

And yet — there is a God in this world. There is right, at least, and wrong. In everything. In code. In a toy. And this is our special torture: as the planet rots, as fools rule and hyenas feast, as nations lie prostrate, churches decompose, and the Devil with a knife owns London, Paris, New York after dark, fell in our hairy hands the real work of a real King, an Able-man, Ken-ning — who served God, or right at least, and could bend small armies to obey. And make — a toy. So near we are to salvation; so infinitely far away. Rest in peace, Steve.

External links

• Unqualified Reservations
• Urbit
• Moron Lab
• Mencius Moldbug: Unqualified Reservations—chronological bibliography
• Moldbuggery—topical bibliography
• Unqualified Reservations e-books—collected writings
• Thomas Carlyle: Interview with Curtis Yarvin