Curtis Yarvin

Curtis Yarvin in 2020

Curtis Yarvin (born June 25, 1973), also known under his pen name Mencius Moldbug, is a Jewish-American computer scientist and quintessential political theorist of the neoreactionary movement. He is also creator of the Urbit computing platform and, currently, authors primarily the Gray Mirror blog.

Early Quotes (chronological)

2006

• Every society in human history that has ever given itself over to government by intellectuals has lived to regret it. Ours will be no different.
  • "Moral sentiments and Material Interests", Gene Expression (October 5, 2006).

• The history of ideas since 1789 is an endless record of mass murder in the name of the people.
  • "Moral sentiments and Material Interests".

• The relative peace of the last sixty years has been achieved only at the price of creating a university system which is an established church in all but name, and which suppresses any thought it finds even remotely disturbing.
  • "Moral sentiments and Material Interests".

• The most powerful people in the West today, measured strictly by their ability to influence the real world, are journalists and professors.
  • "Advertising to Kids" (October 23, 2006).

• When you create a category called "religion" which lumps together all the delusional traditions that people who are not like you have inherited unquestioned from their intellectual ancestors, you are making it harder, not easier, to question your own assumptions.
  • "Religion – definitions", Gene Expression (December 22, 2006).

2007

• "Not all Muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims. Similarly, not all conservatives are cretins, but most cretins are conservatives." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)

• "Moderation is not an ideology." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)

• "The main problem in human affairs is violence. The goal [of formalism] is to design a way for humans to interact, on a planet of remarkably limited size, without violence." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)

• "Formalists attribute the success of Europe, Japan and the US after World War II not to democracy, but its absence. While retaining the symbolic structures of democracy . . . the postwar Western system has assigned almost all actual decision-making power to its civil servants and judges, who are 'apolitical' and 'nonpartisan,' ie, nondemocratic . . . In other words, 'democracy' appears to work because it is not in fact democracy, but a mediocre implementation of formalism." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)

• Simplicity is the cure for violence. For example, if we postulate an imaginary oracle that could predict the outcome of any battle, we could eliminate war. The predicted loser would have no incentive but to concede to the demands of the predicted winner.
  • "Liquidity As Information", interfluidity (January 18, 2007).
    • To Steve Randy Waldman.

• Hominids crave power, and they rationalize it as responsibility. No one ever achieved power by promising to enslave his followers. It is always about improving the world, at least from the perspective of prospective supporters. And it is almost always sincere. Insincere leaders are very rare, because hominids are very good at detecting insincerity. It is much easier to delude others if at the same time you delude yourself.
  • "The Price of Muscle-Flexing", 2Blowhards (January 30, 2007).

• Democracy is to power as a lottery is to money. It is a social mechanism that allows a large number of hominids to feel as if their individual views affect the world, even when the chance of such an effect is negligible.
  • "The Price of Muscle-Flexing".

• [T]he ruling caste are the people who say "we" when they mean "the government". The ruled castes always say "they".
  • "Roberts and Easterbrook", 2Blowhards (April 11, 2007).
    • Paraphrasing Freda Utley.

• In fact, natural selection tends to favor the ascent of ideologies which not only are ineffective, but actually iatrogenic. In other words, the solution is actually causing the problem it purports to be trying to solve.
  • "Roberts and Easterbrook".

• In a society where scholars are the ruling caste, actual scholarship tends to disappear.
  • "Roberts and Easterbrook".

• Universities are no longer institutions of scholarship. They are revolutionary seminaries. Their product is cadre.
  • "Roberts and Easterbrook".

• The New York Times could print nothing but lies for a year, and it would still be the most powerful institution in the world.
  • "Global Warming -- Or Not -- Online", 2Blowhards (April 13, 2007).

• You think you're charging the matador, but you're charging the cape.
  • "Global Warming -- Or Not -- Online".

• Technical advances have masked, and continue to mask, the signs of decay that would otherwise be obvious.
  • "England R.I.P.?", 2Blowhards (April 19, 2007).

• The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.
  • "The Mencius Vision", 2Blowhards (April 22, 2007).

• Moderation is not an ideology. It is not an opinion. It is not a thought. It is an absence of thought. If you believe the status quo of 2007 is basically righteous, then you should believe the same thing if a time machine transported you to Vienna in 1907. But if you went around Vienna in 1907 saying that there should be a European Union, that Africans and Arabs should rule their own countries and even colonize Europe, that any form of government except parliamentary democracy is evil, that paper money is good for business, that all doctors should work for the state, etc., etc.—well, you could probably find people who agreed with you. They wouldn't call themselves "moderates", and nor would anyone else.
  • "The Mencius Vision".

• Replacing your own ideology is a lot like do-it-yourself brain surgery.
  • "The Mencius Vision".

• In fact, it's basically impossible to combine a system in which agreements stay agreed with one in which equality stays equal.
  • "The Mencius Vision".

• Democratic politics is best understood as a sort of symbolic violence, like deciding who wins the battle by how many troops they brought.
  • "The Mencius Vision"
    • See also James Fitzjames Stephen.

• The essential idea of leftism is that the world should be governed by scholars.
  • "The essential idea of leftism", Unqualified Reservations (April 27, 2007).

• That's always the trouble with history. It always looks like it's over. But it never is.
  • "Jaroslav Hašek and the kernel-monitor meme", Unqualified Reservations (April 28, 2007).

• All decent, reasonable men are horrified by the idea that the government might control the press.
  None of them seem concerned at all that the press might control the government.
  • "Journalistic independence", Unqualified Reservations (April 29, 2007).

• [E]very kind of human action has become shrouded in a vast cloud of something called "ethics", which no one can define, but no one is allowed to question. An actual holy book would be a serious improvement.
  • "What if there's no such thing as chaotic good?", Unqualified Reservations (May 1, 2007).

• [T]he hardest part of thinking clearly is recognizing false assumptions that are universally shared.
  • "He who refuses does not repent", Unqualified Reservations (May 2, 2007)
    • Paraphrasing George Orwell.

• There is no institution to which one can go in order to receive a sound paleoconservative education. Most of the people in the idea trade would simply deny that such a thing exists. Safeway will sell you a whole, salted rhinoceros head before Harvard will teach you that Lincoln was a tyrant.
  • "He who refuses does not repent".

• An alien perspective is useful because it is not, at least not obviously, influenced by the ideas that are loose in the world today.
  • "He who refuses does not repent".

• The genius of New Deal "liberal democracy" is that while it's somewhat liberal, it's not at all democratic. It is in fact designed specifically to resist democracy. The combination of this design with a civic creed that assigns unlimited positive connotations to the word democracy is simply brilliant. We may despise it, but we have to admire it.
  • "The genius of the New Deal design", Unqualified Reservations (May 2, 2007).

• I can't imagine counting the number of times I've heard someone say "we should…" when what they really mean is "the government should…".
  • "The Utley rule and the BDH alliance", Unqualified Reservations (May 8, 2007).

• [U]niversal faith in progress is evidence for, not against, decline.
  • "The Antisingularity", Unqualified Reservations (May 11, 2007)
    • Paraphrasing "Fewtril #196".

• The First Republic was the Congressional regime, which illegally abolished the British colonial governments. The Second Republic was the Constitutional regime, which illegally abolished the Articles of Confederation. The Third Republic was the Unionist regime, which illegally abolished the principle of federalism. The Fourth Republic is the New Deal regime, which illegally abolished the principle of limited government.
  • "The iron polygon: power in the United States", Unqualified Reservations (May 12, 2007).

• A good way to find the most powerful people in the US is to find the most responsible people. No one in the US is scheming for power. A lot of them seem to be working for change. No one in the US is brainwashing the masses. A lot of them seem to be educating the public. No one in the US is ruling the world. A lot of them seem to be making global policies.
  • "The iron polygon: power in the United States".

• In fact, rationalism is to reason as scientism is to science.
  • "Our planet is infested with pseudo-atheists", Unqualified Reservations (May 16, 2007).

• [T]he modern world has largely replaced religion, defined as the veneration of paranormal beings, with idealism, defined as the veneration of mysterious universal principles.
  • "Understanding racial idealism", Unqualified Reservations (May 20, 2007).

• Limited government is a recipe for corrupting the judiciary.
  • "Limited government as antipropertarian idealism", Unqualified Reservations (May 23, 2007).

• Since the ideal of limited government—that is, the idea that sovereignty cannot be the rightful property of anyone, individual, family, or corporation—has become general, we have seen an extraordinary level of violence, which appears to be connected to the question of who should control and receive the revenues of sovereignty.
  • "Limited government as antipropertarian idealism".

• [R]evenue-maximizing government is not a medieval atrocity from the past, but a permanent feature of human history whose rare exceptions are unstable and undesirable.
  • "Limited government as antipropertarian idealism".

• 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.
  • "The unlikely appeal of nonidealism", Unqualified Reservations (May 23, 2007).

• [T]he state is simply a real-estate business on a very large scale.
  • "Good government as good customer service", Unqualified Reservations (May 25, 2007).

• [T]axation is not theft. Taxation is rent.
  • "Good government as good customer service".

• It is a commonly held misconception that elected politicians hold any significant power in the current Western system of government. At best they represent figureheads around which power coalesces, and you can follow the power by following the name, as if it were a small and dusty bobber attached to a large and energetic fish.
  • "The Democrats: party of lies", Unqualified Reservations (May 29, 2007).

• In the twenty-first century, any writer whose work appears anywhere but his own blog is a shill. Or at least, he should be assumed to be compromised unless proven otherwise. The Internet has all the tools you need to write and be read without being beholden to anyone. If anyone rejects this independence, you have to wonder why.
  • "The Democrats: party of lies".

• The problem today is that the people who think they are the most daring are in fact the most obsequious.
  • "The Democrats: party of lies" (May 31, 2007).

• The artists of today produce kitsch because they're rebelling against a fictitious power structure by supporting a real one.
  • "The Democrats: party of lies".

• For obvious reasons of human psychology, journalists […] are likely to favor political systems in which they themselves are more important and powerful.
  • "Hillary fires back", Unqualified Reservations (June 1, 2007).

• Most people in the West don't think their entire system of government is fundamentally, irreparably corrupt. Nor did most people in the Soviet Union.
  • "The generalist's stone: a stable mind", Unqualified Reservations (June 2, 2007).

• [T]he replacement of religion by idealism has allowed people who are essentially religious fanatics to achieve positions of unprecedented temporal supremacy, not only without arousing the alarm of reasonable, scientifically minded writers, but in fact enlisting their enthusiastic support.
  • "Principles and platitudes", Unqualified Reservations (June 4, 2007).

• The secret of power is that power and responsibility are the same thing.
  • "The mystery of the gray government", Unqualified Reservations (June 6, 2007).

• In a democracy with a free press, the press is the government. Public opinion on any subject will naturally shift toward the opinions of those who explain that subject to the public.
  • "Why there's no such thing as "liberal media bias"", Unqualified Reservations (June 7, 2007).

• In the English language as we use it now, words like progressive and conservative are actually relative designations. Progressive means "left of the mainstream" and conservative means "right of the mainstream." When the mainstream shifts, these words have to shift as well, and the result is that many of the radical left-wing ideas of 1907 would be radical right-wing ideas in 2007.
  • "Why there's no such thing as "liberal media bias"".

• [T]he continuity of tradition from Plymouth Rock to the United Nations is quite unmistakable.
  • "Why there's no such thing as "liberal media bias"" (June 9, 2007).

• [I]n a free society, there is no such thing as official truth.
  • "Separation of information and security", Unqualified Reservations (June 9, 2007).

• Journalism […] looks like an unfree market because it is tied so closely to the unfree market of higher education.
  • "Separation of information and security" (June 10, 2007).

• [P]ower in a democracy is held by those who manage public opinion.
  • "Separation of information and security".

• [A]s long as the actions of two parties advance each others' interests, they can be considered allies, even if their philosophies of the world are so utterly opposed that they cannot afford the luxury of any such favorable reference.
  • "Friction in theory and practice", Unqualified Reservations (June 19, 2007).

• A common error […] is to identify tyranny and monarchy, which in fact are quite unrelated political forms—all they share is the coincidence of personal rule. We may not all know it, but we'd almost all rather live under the "autocratic" and "absolutist" tsars than under Stalin.
  • "Friction in theory and practice".

• [T]yranny is best seen as a sort of static civil war. The tyrant's office differs from the monarch's in that the latter's legitimacy is assured by law, whereas the former's is a matter of personal power and prestige.
  • "Friction in theory and practice".

• Tyranny […] is essentially informal and unstable. At least in the modern era, they tend to evolve into juntas, which tend to evolve into oligarchies, which tend to evolve into democracies. […] With each of these steps, legitimacy and internal security increase, and the state becomes stronger and harder to overthrow. Unless Gaza is your idea of fun, a strong and secure state is a good thing.
  • "Friction in theory and practice".

• Perhaps the principal error of modern libertarians is their failure to distinguish between weak government and small government. My ideal government is extremely small, extremely efficient, and extremely strong—its authority cannot be challenged. It does not repress its citizens not because it is physically incapable of repression, but because repression is, far from being in its interests, directly opposed to them.
  • "Friction in theory and practice".

• a foreign traveler in 1864 […] asked some random American to explain the war. "It's the conquest of America by Massachusetts," was the answer. Massachusetts, of course, later went on to conquer first Europe and then the entire planet, the views of whose elites as of 2007 bear a surprisingly coincidental resemblance to those held at Harvard in 1945.
  • "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat", Unqualified Reservations (June 21, 2007)
    • Paraphrasing Charles Royster.
      • Paraphrasing Auguste Laugel.

• Conservatives cannot admit that conservatism is futile, because then they'd have nothing to do. No man will willingly abolish his own occupation.
  • "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat".

• [T]he problem with genius is not promoting it, but suppressing it. It takes a very large and intricate system to perform the latter task, but it works pretty well as you can see.
  • "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat" (June 22, 2007).

• [L]eftism is Protestantism and Protestantism is leftism.
  • "Some objections to ultracalvinism", Unqualified Reservations (June 23, 2007).

• Are we really to believe that Marx, on his own, invented the idea that all men are brothers, despite living in a society dominated by a religion whose creed taught exactly that?
  • "Some objections to ultracalvinism".

• [N]ever trust a German when he tells you he's an atheist.
  • "Some objections to ultracalvinism"
    • Paraphrasing Ernest Renan.

• Power corrupts not by repression, but by seduction.
  • "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat" (June 23, 2007).

• If you have a rule that says the state cannot be taken over by a church, […] the obvious mutation to circumvent this defense is for the church to find some plausible way of denying that it's a church.
  • "The ultracalvinist hypothesis: in perspective", Unqualified Reservations (June 24, 2007).

• Academic politics is a murky and brutal game, and a small finger on the scales can steer it quite effectively, especially over time.
  • "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat" (June 25, 2007).

• I hope you can agree that the Harvard faculty in 2007 by and large believes in human equality, social justice, world peace, and community leadership, that the faculty of the same institution held much the same beliefs in 1957, 1907, 1857, and 1807, and that in any of these years they would have described these views as the absolute cynosure of Christianity. Perhaps I am just naturally suspicious, but it strains my credulity slightly to believe that sometime in 1969, the very same beliefs were rederived from pure reason and universal ethics, whose concurrence with the New Testament is remarkable to say the least.
  • "The Rawlsian god: cryptocalvinism in action", Unqualified Reservations (June 28, 2007).

• Cosmic righteousness and consistent, objective law are not just different things. They are actively opposed. Arbitrary rules whose derivation is entirely historical, but whose result is absolutely clear—such as property titles—are often the only way to define a consensus that everyone can agree on peacefully.
  • "The Rawlsian god: cryptocalvinism in action".

• This Rousseauvian idea […] that government is possible only when the governed love their governors has been responsible for literally centuries of bloodshed. It is killing people right now as we speak in Iraq. One hundred years ago, all sane people assumed that the purpose of the state was to enforce the law, not to be loved. The British governed half the world, with a much higher quality of service than exists almost anywhere today, under this theory, and did so quite successfully.
  When they were finally convinced to abandon it, […] the result was massacre, disaster, corruption, and poverty. Where would you personally rather live? In the Cairo of Lord Cromer, or the Cairo of Mubarak? The Basra of Gertrude Bell, or the Basra of Tony Blair?
  • "The Rawlsian god: cryptocalvinism in action".

• I distrust all velvet gloves. Take the abstract ideals off and show us government as it really is. Law enforcement is not a bad thing.
  • "The Rawlsian god: cryptocalvinism in action".

• Surely, after the legal realists plunged us into a century-long nightmare of litigation and government by judiciary, precisely as its critics warned, we can see the value of legal formalism.
  Law is inherently objective and consistent because it is defined as such. If it isn't inherently objective and consistent, it is not the rule of law but the rule of men. Which we have far too much of these days.
  • "The Rawlsian god: cryptocalvinism in action".

• You get rid of the system by making it fashionable, among the most fashionable people, to believe the system needs to be gotten rid of. It is certainly possible to build a system of government that can withstand, in a purely military sense, the disapproval of its own elites, but such is not the case with ours.
  • "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat".

• The system will be defeated when most intelligent people realize that The New York Times is a government gazette and Harvard is a government seminary, and when they form alternate institutions that fulfill the same role in a way that is genuinely independent.
  • "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat".

• In any conflict between X and Y, there are three paths to peace. X can prevail, Y can prevail, or X and Y can agree to leave the battle lines where they are now.
  • "The mystery of pacifism", Unqualified Reservations (July 1, 2007).

• Ultimately, a pacifist is just an activist whose strategy for victory is to suppress the military efforts of his enemies.
  • "The mystery of pacifism".

• The problem with the permanent bureaucracy is that any enterprise controlled by its own employees tends to expand without limit.
  • "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat" (July 2, 2007).

• [T]he moderate ideas of one generation are the extremist ideas of its parents, and the whole system shifts gradually over time.
  • "Why conservatives never quite catch the boat".

• [I]f you actually want to abolish politics, you have to deal with the existing power structure rather than the ideal form it pretends to be.
• "Why, when, and how to abolish the United States", Unqualified Reservations (July 3, 2007).

• A good test for getting rid of anything is: if we didn't have this, would we need it?
  • "Why, when, and how to abolish the United States", Unqualified Reservations (July 3, 2007).

• Stability is much underappreciated, especially by those who enjoy its benefits.
  • "The mystery of pacifism" (July 4, 2007).

• [T]he law itself is arbitrary—a product of history, just like all other distributions of property. We support it because it's stable, and we like stability.
  • "The mystery of pacifism".

• The entire intellectual system of the West was corrupted by its twentieth-century connection to government. Public opinion reflects press opinion, press opinion reflects academic politics, and academic politics are driven by power-struggles in which the attraction of the state is clear.
  The victory of Keynesian over Misesian economics, for example, is a classic case of this. Theories of economics which led to jobs advising the state were adaptive. Theories which didn't weren't.
  • "Why, when, and how to abolish the United States" (July 7, 2007).

• All the great crimes of the recent past have been committed by states which portrayed themselves as profoundly ethical actors. Removing this mask, eliminating the ability of the beast to portray itself as good, uninstalls an essential module in this perverse system.
  • "Why, when, and how to abolish the United States".

• [W]e have long since learned that offering any resistance to any kind of a mob is incompatible with our great American tradition of civil liberties.
  • "I wonder if Jonah Goldberg talks about this", Unqualified Reservations (July 6, 2006).

• Someday Westerners will learn that what matters about a government is what it does, and what doesn't matter is the race, creed, color, sexual preference, or country of origin of its employees. Unfortunately, I suspect we may have to learn it the hard way.
  • "I wonder if Jonah Goldberg talks about this".

• [P]lenty of perfectly stable and peaceful societies […] have been governed by a ruling caste which was culturally distinct from the body of the population.
  • "I wonder if Jonah Goldberg talks about this".

• It is physically impossible to win a war by arresting an invading army and trying each of its soldiers.
  • "I wonder if Jonah Goldberg talks about this".

• Iraq simply cannot be governed by a military effort, no matter how technically advanced, well-trained, and well-funded, that thinks of itself as a combination of a SWAT team and the Salvation Army.
  • "I wonder if Jonah Goldberg talks about this".

• The Western world certainly has all the physical and human tools it needs to restore civilization in the Third World and resume the work of Lord Cromer. But it lacks the legal and political tools, and until it has those it shouldn't even try. As in Vietnam, it ends up just handing victories to its adversaries, who use the result as simply one more piece of evidence that demonstrates their invincibility.
  • "I wonder if Jonah Goldberg talks about this".

• The entire intellectual system of the West was corrupted by its twentieth-century connection to government. Public opinion reflects press opinion, press opinion reflects academic politics, and academic politics are driven by power struggles in which the attraction of the state is clear.
  The victory of Keynesian over Misesian economics, for example, is a classic case of this. Theories of economics which led to jobs advising the state were adaptive. Theories which didn't weren't.
  • "Why, when, and how to abolish the United States" (July 7, 2007).

• All the great crimes of the recent past have been committed by states which portrayed themselves as profoundly ethical actors. Removing this mask, eliminating the ability of the beast to portray itself as good, uninstalls an essential module in this perverse system.
  • "Why, when, and how to abolish the United States".

• I'm quite happy to be an anti-intellectual, actually. It is the modern equivalent of anticlericalism, and it is long overdue. One can oppose specific institutions without opposing thought in general. In fact, sometimes it is even necessary.
  • "Hegel (III)", Eunomia (July 10, 2007).

• Everyone who spins a myth claims to be debunking one.
  • "Hegel (IV)", Eunomia (July 10, 2007).

• [I]f there is any constant in history, it is that philosophers are very bad at predicting the future. Even when the policies they propose are followed, the results tend to be quite different from predictions.
  • "UR-ICF #1: Carlyle, Montagu, Nock", Unqualified Reservations (July 11, 2007).

• The charge that universities are directly responsible for almost all the violence in the world today […] strikes me as essentially accurate.
  • "My Navrozov moments", Unqualified Reservations (July 11, 2007).

• [M]ost of the advances in Western scientific history, contrary to popular belief, occurred when scientists were not servants of the state.
  • "My Navrozov moments".

• [T]he university, which was established as a refuge whose purpose was to pursue truth without regard for the opinions of the world, has become a power center whose purpose is to impose its own opinions on the world.
  • "My Navrozov moments".

• [T]he tradition to which most sophisticated Westerners of 2007 conform is best seen as a sect of Christianity.
  • "Universalism: postwar progressivism as a Christian sect", Unqualified Reservations (July 17, 2007).

• Unless you are one hundred and seven years old and a veteran of the Austrian Landwehr, you probably associate democracy with peace, freedom, progress, and prosperity. Since I associate democracy with war, tyranny, destruction and poverty, we certainly have something to talk about.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction", Unqualified Reservations (July 25, 2007).

• A political formula is a belief that makes the ruled accept their rulers. Since the former tend to outnumber the latter, a political formula is, if not absolutely essential, an excellent way to cut down on your security costs.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction".

• Democracy means that popular opinion controls the state; intellectuals guide popular opinion; ergo, intellectuals guide the state.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction".

• [P]ublic opinion in a democracy is a sort of funhouse mirror that reflects—albeit inaccurately, imperfectly, and often quite reluctantly—the views of the governing elite. To be fair, it also has a certain filtering effect which discourages some of the nuttiest intellectual fads, if only because they can be positively incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't been to Harvard.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction"
    • Paraphrasing Walter Lippmann.

• The permanent contest for political power that democracy creates is an extreme case of limited war, in which no weapons at all are allowed, and battle is resolved by counting heads.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction".

• [A] free, prosperous democratic society is like a person who's so strong and healthy he can take a dose of arsenic every day—or at least, every four years—and still survive, sort of. The free, prosperous democratic society might be remarkably unfree and unprosperous compared to an undemocratic society that never took the arsenic, but so few of the latter survived the last two centuries that we have no basis for comparison.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction".

• [T]he undemocratic, tyrannous societies are not those which failed to take the democratic arsenic, but those which took it and found it fatal.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction".

• The temptation to reform, rather than abandon, the adaptive fiction is omnipresent.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction".

• The difference between a monarch and a dictator is that the monarchical succession is defined by law and the dictatorial succession is defined by power.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction".

• The royal family is a perpetual corporation, the kingdom is the property of this corporation, and the whole thing is a sort of real-estate venture on a grand scale. Why does the family own the corporation and the corporation own the kingdom? Because it does. Property is historically arbitrary.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction".

• From the perspective of its subjects, what counts is not who runs the government, but what the government does. Good government is effective, lawful government. Bad government is ineffective, lawless government. How anyone reasonable could disagree with these statements is quite beyond me. And yet clearly almost everyone does.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction".

• The reason it's so difficult to oppose lawful democracy is that we have so few alternatives to compare it to.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction".

• One of the classical symptoms of decadence is that young aristocrats spend all their time on political scheming, and it'd be hard to say we don't see this now.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction" (July 26, 2007).

• Limited government simply has no motivation to stay limited. And so it doesn't.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction".

• The war in Iraq is an American civil war by proxy. The real prize of this war is political power in the United States. If the US military wins, the Republicans win. If the US military loses, the Democrats win. We saw the exact same thing in Vietnam, and given that, in general, the Republicans are the Democrats' punching bag, the result is pretty inevitable.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction".

• Corruption in Third World countries is a case of the formalist pattern trying to reemerge. A Third World government, far more than ours, is a system for distributing dividends, which even in the worst countries on earth are nontrivial. It is just a hellaciously intricate and absurdly informal system.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction".

• The fact that governments are useful to the inhabitants of their territory is a purely secondary and emergent property. They need to be useful, because a government that does not provide at least basic security will not find itself with any rents to collect.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction" (July 30, 2007).

• Democracy was not a movement of peasants and artisans. It was a movement on behalf of peasant and artisans. Communism was not a movement of workers. It was a movement on behalf of workers. Civil rights was not a movement of African-Americans. It was a movement on behalf of African-Americans. If the only people who had supported these movements were the designated sufferers themselves, none of us would ever have heard of any of them.
  • "Universalism and original sin (guest post by Michael S.)" (August 3, 2007).

• Conflict is an inescapable part of life. Uncertainty is not.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction" (August 3, 2007).

• Law is impartial by definition. If it's not impartial, it's not law.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction" (August 4, 2007).

• Fairness is unachievable. Any distribution of rights will be perceived by someone as unfair. If it starts as equal, it will not long remain so. If you try to set it back, you can only do so by breaking the law.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction".

• The usual pattern is that tyrannies depend on supporters whose lawlessness they have to ignore, and whose depredations they are not powerful enough to formalize.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction" (August 5, 2007).

• Of course, since the government is sovereign, it can break its own laws any time it likes. But it will not do this unless it has a good reason, because the value of a lawless state is much lower than that of a lawful one.
  • "Democracy as an adaptive fiction" (August 6, 2007).

2008

• A good test for whether or not anything should continue to exist: if it didn't exist, would anyone invent it?
  • "Bagatelles", 2Blowhards (February 18, 2008).

• The only problem with colonialism was that it got nationalized. Which was enough. Colonialism chartered company–style is profitable. Colonialism as a government department is a disaster.
  • "Maybe there's a cheaper way...", 2Blowhards (March 4, 2008).
    • To Gregory Cochran.

• For example, 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.
  • "Open Letter 4: Dr. Johnson's hypothesis" (May 8, 2008).

• Restore the Belle Époque!
  • "Your generation was more violent", Gene Expression (June 23, 2008).

• History is a branch of literature, not a field of science.
  • "Your generation was more violent" (June 25, 2008).

• Progressives have created a vast set of puppet cultures which enable them to describe their monoculture as a multiculture.
  • "Post-Modernism and Stuff White People Like", Gene Expression (August 3, 2008).

• [F]ar from advancing toward tolerance for all, Western civilization is being overrun by an aggressive and intolerant monoculture.
  • "Post-Modernism and Stuff White People Like".

• The US military fails in places like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan because it is operating under a doctrine designed to fail.
  • "Andrew Bacevich, Reluctant Obamacon", 2Blowhards (September 9, 2008).

• If the US was a unified, effective actor which intended to conquer and civilize Iraq and Afghanistan, it would abolish the native puppet governments of Maliki and Karzai, place all lawless areas under martial law, create military formations with US officers and native troops, create civilian governments with US executives and native employees, and in general do what the British did in India, Egypt, Burma, etc., etc.
  • "Andrew Bacevich, Reluctant Obamacon".

• Of course empire works. Conquest works. It has worked for the entire course of human history. It is not only effective, it is profitable.
  • "Andrew Bacevich, Reluctant Obamacon".

• Yes, the US military should leave Iraq and Afghanistan. But it should leave not because it is impossible for a modern military to defeat a bunch of tribal warriors. It should leave because it is fighting an American civil war by proxy. One, this is just sick. And two, the right place to fight a civil war is always at home.
  • "Andrew Bacevich, Reluctant Obamacon".

• Did you ever wonder why nationalism seemed so similar, right down to the names of the parties in, say, Algeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam? What did Algeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam have in common? Certainly nothing that could be described as Algerian, Indonesian, or Vietnamese. Oh, no. What they had in common was that they all had friends—or, more precisely, sponsors—at Harvard.
  • "Andrew Bacevich, Reluctant Obamacon".

• Men fight because they expect to win. Period. When they know they'll lose, they surrender.
  • "Andrew Bacevich, Reluctant Obamacon".

• Who knows more about human biology? You, or James Watson?
  • "They Say "Racist!!" Your Reply Is ..." (October 7, 2008).

• In reality, progressives don't like actual Negroes any more than they like democracy. They have no love at all for the poor. What they love is to pick them up, turn them into feral barbarians, encourage them to devastate civilized society, and provide millions of jobs for themselves caring for the animalistic, burned-out shell of what was formerly one of North America's great cultures.
  • "They Say "Racist!!" Your Reply Is ..."

• If we want to end the era of chaos, democracy, and revolution, we need to deal squarely with the poisonous legacy of the Puritans.
  • "They Say "Racist!!" Your Reply Is ..."

• You are probably used to worrying about the crimes of your government overseas, but not in this way. You have an eagle eye for the crimes of the Defense Department. When it comes to the crimes of the State Department, you have the approximate visual acuity of the average snail.
  • "They Say "Racist!!" Your Reply Is ..."

• The strong government executes firmly and decisively. The weak one is fickle and inconsistent, and as a result has to be much more vicious to achieve any given level of security.
  • "They Say "Racist!!" Your Reply Is ..." (October 8, 2008).

2009

• This is how Rothbard so frequently reasons himself from Lockean absolutes to sheer insanity. He is a master of the reductio ad absurdum, but so stubborn that he defends the absurdum.
  • "City upon a Hill", Gene Expression (January 3, 2009).

The [British] Empire had to die not because it didn't work, but because it worked too well. The quality of imperial rule was starting to present evidence against democracy herself.

• The root cause of terrorism is liberalism.
  • "When I was a moron", Gene Expression (February 6, 2009)
    • To Gregory Cochran.

• [Y]ou don't want to be governed by a persistently unprofitable government any more than you want to eat in a persistently unprofitable restaurant.
  • "When I was a moron" (February 8, 2009).

• The [British] Empire had to die not because it didn't work, but because it worked too well. The quality of imperial rule was starting to present evidence against democracy herself.
  • "When I was a moron".

• A sovereign should never make any concessions in response to violence or the threat of violence, unless there is no alternative but surrender.
  • "When I was a moron".

• The free market isn't something that just happens. It needs to be designed and invented. The past is at best an inspiration.
  • "There’s no reason for non-recourse" interfluidity (February 25, 2009).

• Economically, a fiat monetary system works exactly the same as a metallic monetary system in which the sovereign owns an infinite gold mine.
  • "There’s no reason for non-recourse" (March 2, 2009).

• The definition of a sovereign is that a sovereign is above the law. Its will is its own law.
  • "There’s no reason for non-recourse".

• The righteous ruler has nothing to hide.
  • "Rethinking subsidized finance", interfluidity (March 7, 2009).
    • To Steve Randy Waldman.

• To debauch a people, debase their currency.
  • "Rethinking subsidized finance" (March 9, 2009)
    • To Steve Randy Waldman.

• To a true libertarian, "classical liberalism" is a moral imperative, not a prudent policy. To me, it is just a prudent policy, and it is only a prudent policy in those cases where it does not turn out to be imprudent.
  • "Degrees of recourse", interfluidity (March 27, 2009).

• How do you anesthetize a population? When it reacts normally, convince it that it's being hysterical.
  • "What does the decline in homicide rates look like?", Gene Expression (August 5, 2009).

• Today's American has no idea what it feels like to live in an atmosphere of genuine public safety and order.
  • "What does the decline in homicide rates look like?" (August 6, 2009).

• Reaction is the reconstruction or restoration of the civilized mind, through political power, from any form of progressive or revolutionary degradation. In order to be a great reactionary leader, you have to have made your subjects more sane through the exercise of force—probably through the drastic, but effective, method of curing them entirely of politics.
  • "Open thread…." (November 11, 2009).

2010

• The way to do political, rather than cosmopolitical, economy is straightforward: consolidate the national balance sheet, treating the entire nation as a single corporation. Current account deficits then appear as losses. The notorious decay of nations which run a chronic trade deficit appears as a parallel with the notorious decay of corporations which run at a chronic loss.
  Similarly, the old mercantilist strategy of accumulating precious metals—much mocked by Adam Smith—appears as no more than the accumulation of retained earnings by a profitable polity.
  • "Fixing “global imbalances” in three easy steps", interfluidity (February 11, 2010).

• One of the many divine paradoxes in our political formula is the double valence of democracy. This word, its declensions, its synonyms, carry positive associations well up in the sacred range. Deep in your medulla, warmth glows from everything democratic. Yet at the same time, we have a related family of words, such as politics and its declensions, which seem to mean exactly the same thing—yet reek of heinous brimstone. How is it possible to have democracy but not politics, or vice versa? What can the two be, but the same thing? Yet anything democratized is made good, and anything politicized is made bad. Of course, to the hardened UR reader, this is just one more sign that we are dealing with an essentially magical belief system. I will defy any Republican or Democrat to explain this paradox. He can only fall on his knees and worship it.
  • "Democracy, Cis and Trans; Maine's Law (November 4, 2010)

Later

• People think at least as much about breeding each other as they do about breeding animals.
  • POAAS 03 - Curtis Yarvin

• While there is no limited government, there is incomplete government; incomplete government means a vacuum made of anarchy; true anarchy is not even nothing, it is the billion tiny bubbles of local power we call crime; you don’t want to be anywhere near it; so, counting anarchy as governance, government power is absolute. A regime that tolerates crime has just chosen to share its absolute power with crime.
  • (May 31, 2022), "The Cathedral or the Bizarre: America’s experiments with democracy and oligarchy have both failed, leaving only one option", Tablet Magazine.

• The fundamental historical problem of the current period is why, though we can buy our ideas from any stall in a huge open-air bazaar, they all seem to come from the same manufacturer—exactly as if made in some cathedral. Yet there is no such conspiracy—and certainly no such agency. No person or institution is coordinating the party line.
  • (May 31, 2022), "The Cathedral or the Bizarre: America’s experiments with democracy and oligarchy have both failed, leaving only one option", Tablet Magazine.

• Objectively, an agency is official if it controls government decisions, or the government controls its decisions. A classic Orwellian state-controlled press is easy to recognize, even if the control path is informal—such as a financial subsidy. What about the other direction: a press-controlled state?
  ‘‘‘In the modern regime, government literally leaks power into journalism, by tolerating leaks: nominally unauthorized, but objectively permitted, disclosures of confidential information to the legitimate press. Leaking is both subsidy and control.’’’
  … On Wall Street, selective disclosure of material nonpublic information is a crime… If the government enforced this standard on its own employees, journalism as we know it could not exist.
  … Putting these camouflaged agencies together, we see a Department of Reality which is unquestionably the center of power in our regime. No other agency can withstand it—certainly, no elected politician can withstand it. Sovereignty equals unaccountability, and our Reality Department is accountable to no one.
  • (May 31, 2022), "The Cathedral or the Bizarre: America’s experiments with democracy and oligarchy have both failed, leaving only one option", Tablet Magazine.

Other Quotes (curated)

The Horrors of 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.

• 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.

• 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 Cancer abound

• 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.

• 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.

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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

The Conservation of Sovereignty

Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"But who is to guard the guards themselves?"

• On a historical timescale, the practical effect of the sovereignty of the press is just to play yet another whack-a-mole game of quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Who watches the watchdog? In the end, this chain must logically terminate in a dog you just… trust. Sovereignty is conserved.

• Who is the sovereign? Not a who but a what. The sovereign is the story. Of course, there is no story without a storyteller. There are a lot of storytellers. Professionals, even. They make a good living and they’re all quite replaceable. I actually have great sympathy for the professional. In a bureaucratic oligarchy like ours, the professional both rules and is ruled. At the top, there is no one on top of him. Yet he cannot change his mind. He would simply be replaced. There are always younger, more eager professionals. Sovereignty is conserved; it is always humans who rule; and yet, it seems that no one rules.

Nazism contra Progressivism?

• 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.

• 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?

• 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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

US 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

The Conservative, a Tool to its Enemies

• 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.

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.

• 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.

Race, Privilege, and the Historicity of Slavery

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Because dependency is another name for power. The relationship between dependent and provider is the relationship between client and patron. Which is the relationship between parent and child. Which also happens to be the relationship between master and slave. There’s a reason Aristotle devotes the first book of the Politics to this sort of kitchen government. 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. Their idea of Jews is straight out of Jud Süß. Our idea of slavery is straight out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. If you want an accurate perspective of the past, a propaganda novel is probably not the best place to start. [...] 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.

• 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.

Quotes about Curtis Yarvin

• If there is a germ of useful provocation in Moldbug’s posts—a glimmer of a productive idea that could be the basis of a discussion—those germs are more than vitiated by his sprawling, associative, and bombastically categorical writing.
  • Krister Friday, "Creative Destruction, Destruction of Creativity", Easily Distracted (December 15, 2008).

• Not only does Moldbug know such iron fists would rule best, allow emigration, not cheat their investors, and never ever accept manipulator payola, he apparently knows this deductively, as a noble philosopher, not like data-addicted corrupt pansy social scientists. And he has no interest in improvements in the status quo below his philosopher-deduced-best pinnacle.
  What more can one say to such a person?
  • Robin Hanson, "My Moldbug Debate", Overcoming Bias (January 20, 2010).

• To be as mad as Moldbug is an artform.
  • Jacob Lyles, "Moldbuggian Interlude", Distributed Republic (March 28, 2010).

• I regard Mencius Moldbug as one of the most important thinkers of our time […]
  • Bruce Charlton, "The salvation of Mencius Moldbug", Bruce Charlton's Notions (January 15, 2011).

• Mencius Moldbug's style is indirect, florid, and allusive, but […] he's essential reading.
  • John Derbyshire, "John Derbyshire’s Google Reader: Keeping Up With The Dark Enlightenment", VDARE (November 29, 2012).

• I am not a neoreactionary, but sometimes I think Mencius Moldbug is the greatest living political thinker.
  • Sam Bowman, "Where my beliefs come from", Sam Bowman's blog (2014).

• Moldbug is the most articulate and compelling reactionary I've ever read […]
  • François-René Rideau, "Qualified Reservations", Cybernethics / Cybernéthique (January 8, 2014).

• Moldbug is good medicine for genuine progressives, who more than most have an obligation to think through their beliefs. It's strong and possibly toxic medicine, but having your thought congeal into mindless ideology is even more toxic.
  • Mike Travers, "Moldbuggery", Omniorthogonal (June 6, 2015).

• [H]is writing seems designed to leave a reader guessing as to whether he's really serious or executing the most brilliantly satirical long-term troll-job in the history of the Internet.
  • Eric S. Raymond, "This may be the week the SJWs lost it all", Armed and Dangerous (April 3, 2016).

• For all his faults, Yarvin is an engaging writer with a very dry sense of humor, bringing the pompousness of a Silicon Valley know-it-all to abstruse eighteenth-century European political thought.
  • James Kirchick, "Trump’s Terrifying Online Brigades", Commentary (May 16, 2016).

See also

• Bertrand de Jouvenel
• Sam Francis
• Paul Gottfried

External links

• Unqualified Reservations – his old blog
• Gray Mirror – his new blog
• Bronski, Joseph (25 January, 2024). Why Moldbug was wrong about leftism: It's genes, not memes