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Irish Times
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Irish Times
What a surprise to learn this powerful wizard of the Dark Enlightenment is just another needy dork
This week's issue of the New Yorker features a long, fascinating profile of the rightwing blogger and software developer Curtis Yarvin, by the writer Ava Kofman. Yarvin has, for about a decade and a half now, been a highly influential figure on Silicon Valley's anti-democratic right – a once fringe cohort that has lately become its political centre of gravity. Initially published under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin's ideas are extreme even by the standards of the American right. His central claim is that democracy is inherently unworkable, because the vast majority of people are simply not smart enough to collectively direct the course of their nations. He himself has labelled his political philosophy – and I can barely type these words without cringing – 'the Dark Enlightenment'. The ideal form of government, for Yarvin, is a kind of neo-feudalism, in which a CEO-monarch, advised and assisted by a 'cognitive elite', rules over a populace who are granted precisely one right: if they don't like their lives under the rule of that particular CEO-monarch, they can move to another that better suits their idea of the good life. Naturally, Yarvin is also a firm believer in so-called 'race science' – the entirely unscientific belief that humans can be divided into races, and that there is a correlation between intelligence and genetic traits such as skin colour. I first encountered Yarvin eight or nine years ago, when I was writing about the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, whose anti-democratic beliefs were becoming increasingly influential in Silicon Valley. Yarvin's software company Urbit was funded by Thiel, and he was at that time viewed, as Kofman puts it, as the 'court philosopher of the Thiel-verse', exerting a strong rightward pull on Thiel's own political views. Yarvin has become an increasingly mainstream figure in recent years. His centrality to the American new right was the focus of an article in Vanity Fair in 2022, and last year he was the subject of a lengthy interview in the New York Times Magazine, for which he was photographed in a leather motorcycle jacket, affecting an air of strenuous moodiness. JD Vance has cited him as a political influence, and his ideas about dismantling the federal government – mass firing of civil servants, cessation of formal international relations, ending all foreign aid – are generally recognised as an inspiration for Elon Musk's Doge. Mountainhead, the new film from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong about four tech billionaires plotting to overthrow the US government, is scattered with recognisably Yarvinian ideas that have been barely tweaked on the satire dial. READ MORE And yet for all that, I was sceptical of the idea of a magazine profile of Yarvin – especially when that magazine was the New Yorker. This is a publication whose cultural prestige, and reputation for intellectual seriousness, can't help but rub off on even the most critically handled of subjects. I suspected that the form itself was somehow ill-suited to the subject matter, and that such a profile might only serve to further legitimise Yarvin, and to popularise his profoundly contemptible ideas. (Readers who are familiar with my own work outside of this weekly column – and, now that I think of it, even within it – might find themselves concluding that this concern about directing attention toward dubious subjects is a bit rich coming from me. Fair point, I suppose.) [ A Thread of Violence by Mark O'Connell: A brilliant exercise in the uncanny Opens in new window ] But as soon as I read the profile, those concerns mostly disintegrated. Part of what has long made Yarvin a seductive prospect for the right was the sense, until fairly recently, that he was an aloof and elusive figure, issuing transgressive political ideas from the shadows like a reactionary pamphleteer. Kofman's article is valuable, and compelling, because it dismantles this myth without even particularly seeming to go out of its way to do so. She paints a closely observed portrait of a deeply unappealing man, whose self-aggrandisement and apparent insecurity emerge as two sides of the same narcissistic coin. The article illustrates, among other things, an important truth: that an over-investment in the idea of intelligence per se, and in particular the obsession with IQ as a measure of personal worth, is almost always a symptom of a stunted intellect. As a kid, Yarvin attended a summer camp for 'talented youth', and his general affect – his former trivia champ's insistent display of general knowledge, his mistaking blunt-force debating skill for a lively and subtle mind – remains very much that of the superannuated precocious child. Though it's hardly the point of the article, it functions as a dire warning to any parent who might be tempted to skip their child ahead in school. (Yarvin was initially homeschooled, and later skipped three grades ahead of his peers, a formative experience which seems to have proven all but fatal to his personality.) As a PhD student in Berkeley, we learn, he was sometimes referred to as 'helmet-head', because he often wore a bicycle helmet in class; the joke among his peers was that it prevented new ideas from penetrating his mind. One of the most perceptive insights in the profile comes from Yarvin's ex-fiancee. She suggests that his embrace of a provocative ideology might be a 'repetition compulsion', a psychic defence allowing him to reframe the ostracisation he felt as an unpopular, nerdy kid. 'As America's most famous living monarchist, he could tell himself that people were rejecting him for his outre ideas, not for his personality.' [ Donald Trump should kill off the myth of the first 100 days for good Opens in new window ] Kofman takes Yarvin's ideas seriously, not in order to inflate their value, but to put them in their proper place, and to lay bare their flimsiness. She never does anything so obvious as outright ridiculing Yarvin's undercooked reactionary philosophy; she merely describes it. In the neo-feudalist system he delineates, for instance, problems such as legitimacy, accountability and orderly succession would be handled by a secret board of directors. 'How the board itself would be selected is unclear,' writes Kofman, 'but Yarvin has suggested that airline pilots – 'a fraternity of intelligent, practical and careful people who are already trained on a regular basis with the lives of others. What's not to like?' – could manage the transition between the regimes.' Reading Yarvin's plan for his ideal polity, as the English writer James Vincent put it in a social media post, 'is like listening to an imaginative child explain how their Lego fort is governed'. One interesting subtext of the profile is Yarvin's apparent distressed realisation – and here again, the reader must read between the lines – that he is being outmanoeuvred by a writer who happens to be not just smarter than him, but also a young woman. Kofman quotes a series of texts he sends her about her reporting, telling her that her 'process is slack', and that she may be 'too dumb to understand the ideas'. The problem, of course, for Yarvin is not that she doesn't understand the ideas, but that she understands them perfectly well – and that she understands him, too. As risible as his ideas might be, they are increasingly influential, and increasingly dangerous. And there is real value in exposing those ideas to proper scrutiny, in pulling back the curtain to confirm that the great and powerful wizard of the Dark Enlightenment is in fact just an insecure and needy dork wearing a bicycle helmet in class.
Time of India
5 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Curtis Yarvin: 10 things to know about 'mad philosopher' behind Trump 2.0
Once upon a meme, in a faraway land called the Internet, a man named Curtis Yarvin wrote 120,000 words calling for the end of democracy. Most people would've laughed. But billionaires don't laugh—they fund. And now, the man who once described San Francisco's underclass as potential biodiesel is being taken seriously by people who carry nuclear briefcases. Yarvin—formerly Mencius Moldbug, currently the "Dark Elf" of the dissident right—isn't just an edgelord with a blog. He's the house philosopher of Silicon Autocracy. From whispering sweet nothings to Peter Thiel to influencing J.D. Vance's wet dreams of a bureaucracy-free America, Yarvin has become the Rasputin of the red-pilled. If you're still catching up, here are 10 things you need to know before the crown lands on his head. 1. The Blogger Who Would Be King Yarvin's empire began with a blog—and a manifesto longer than War and Peace. Back in 2008, when Obama still symbolised hope and change, Yarvin was quietly uploading screeds under the alias Mencius Moldbug. His pièce de résistance? An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives—a 120,000-word hand grenade tossed into the cathedral of liberal consensus. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Esse novo alarme com câmera é quase gratuito em São Paulo (consulte o preço) Alarmes Undo Yarvin argued that democracy was a bug, not a feature; the American Revolution a tragic mistake; and that we'd be better off under a corporate monarchy. His ideal ruler? Not Plato's philosopher-king, but a startup bro with nukes and a board of directors. 2. The Cathedral Must Burn Yarvin's biggest idea is that liberalism is a religion—and Harvard is its Vatican. According to him, America isn't ruled by elected officials. It's ruled by 'The Cathedral'—an unholy alliance of media, academia, and bureaucracy. Not through conspiracy, but through soft consensus. NPR, Yale, the Times, and your HR department are all saying the same thing, because they all worship the same gods: Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion. And like any heretic, Yarvin wants the Cathedral razed, its priests defrocked, and its temples converted into data centres. 3. From Nerd to Neo-Reactionary He was once a liberal coder with a ponytail. Then he took the red pill—and never came back. Yarvin didn't always fantasise about abolishing elections. He started as a leftie tech bro who dropped acid, read Foucault, and dated sex-positive feminists from Craigslist. His pivot to fascist adjacent came post-9/11, post-Iraq, and post-pat-on-the-head career path. Disillusioned with liberal consensus and wired on Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Yarvin stumbled into the Dark Enlightenment—an internet rabbit hole where monarchy, race science, and Austrian economics coexisted peacefully, like tax havens and startup founders. 4. Urbit: Coding the Kingdom He didn't just want to build a regime—he wanted to program one. Literally. Urbit was Yarvin's dream of a digital feudalism: a decentralised computer network where every user owns a 'planet,' governed by a new coding language he invented himself. Investors like Andreessen Horowitz gave him millions. It didn't work. Urbit is now mostly a libertarian Discord with stars and galaxies. But the point wasn't usability—it was theology. Like Yarvin's politics, Urbit is elegant in theory, cultish in practice, and unusable by anyone with a day job. 5. Philosopher to Billionaires Peter Thiel liked what he saw. So did Vance. Now Yarvin's whisper is public policy. Thiel gave Yarvin his nod of approval, Marc Andreessen calls him a friend, and J.D. Vance openly cites him as inspiration. For the first time in modern politics, someone who believes elections should be abolished is influencing people who can abolish them. When DOGE—Trump's Department of Government Efficiency—purged civil servants en masse, it echoed Yarvin's RAGE plan: Retire All Government Employees. When Trump called Gaza 'the Riviera of the Middle East,' it sounded suspiciously like a Yarvin Substack post. 6. The Red-Pilled Rasputin He wants to seduce the elite—one 'high elf' at a time. In Yarvin's Tolkien-infused self-image, he's not a tyrant—he's a Dark Elf, sent to whisper forbidden truths into the ears of beautiful elites. Liberals are 'high elves,' conservatives are 'hobbits,' and he is the enigmatic sage showing them how to burn down Mordor and replace it with a charter city. He doesn't want MAGA rallies. He wants salons with QR-coded footnotes and neoreactionary art hoes sipping biodynamic wine. 7. He Cries at Lunch, But Fantasises About Genocide His affect is fragile intellectual. His policies would give Genghis Khan pause. Yarvin cries. A lot. He cries about Baltimore's homeless, about his kids' future, and sometimes while quoting obscure 18th-century monarchists. But behind the tears lies a worldview in which the state should have the power to exile, isolate, or digitally sedate entire populations. He once suggested putting San Francisco's underclass in solitary VR to avoid 'the moral stigma of genocide.' His ideas are brutalist architecture for the soul: cold, sharp-edged, and antiseptically inhumane. 8. The Style Is the Substance Yarvin isn't read for truth. He's read for transgression. You don't read Yarvin to be convinced. You read him to feel naughty. His prose is baroque, sarcastic, and full of italicised rants that feel like a very smart person talking down to you at a BDSM dinner party. He doesn't argue—he overwhelms. Like a one-man DDOS attack on liberal sensibility. He weaponises footnotes, memes, and 19th-century philosophers to convince a disaffected Zoomer that maybe, just maybe, freedom was a mistake. 9. Courtier to a Counter-Establishment He failed at building a product. So he built a vibe. Urbit flopped. His blog fizzled. But Yarvin thrives in the cultic vibe economy of the dissident right: Dimes Square, Substack, Thiel-funded salons, and MAGA masquerades. He reads poetry at fascist-adjacent film festivals. He writes love letters to crypto-lords. He poses for moody portraits while decrying democracy as 'a lie told by clerics to peasants.' And like any good aristocrat, he never lets anyone forget that he's read more books than you. 10. The Joke's Over. He's in the Room Now. For a while, Yarvin was performance art. Then the performance became policy. In 2008, he was the punchline. In 2025, his ideas echo from the Oval Office to ICE holding cells to Harvard funding withdrawals. Trump's blitzkrieg of civil society, Elon's reign over federal agencies, and Vance's plans to bulldoze the courts all bear his fingerprints. The dissident right no longer needs to form a vanguard. It is the establishment. The Dark Elf got invited into the tower—and now he's rearranging the furniture. Postscript: The Philosopher-King of Nothing Yarvin is a man of ideas with no workable blueprint. His brilliance lies in diagnosing the rot, not fixing the structure. He romanticises kings, cosplays monarchism, and mourns Enlightenment liberalism like an ex-girlfriend he'd still insult in group chats. But give him credit: he saw the appetite for authoritarianism long before the rest of us. And while liberals were busy fact-checking, Yarvin was vibes-crafting. In the age of aesthetics, the crown goes not to the competent—but to the most convincingly unhinged.
