Curtis Yarvin - The Anti-Democracy Blogger Influencing Elon's Politics

The self-described "neoreactionary" has a cult-like following among right-wing extremists

We’ve talked a lot recently about the anti-Democracy thinking of Peter Thiel and his disciples, Elon Musk and JD Vance. Together, these three men are responsible for much of what’s been accomplished by the new administration in the United States.

It’s fundamentally Libertarian, with a hard overture of what I’ve deemed “techno-fatalism”, this idea that technology will make self-governance irrelevant. When AI makes all decisions for the overall good of humanity, what the individual wants to do with their lives is unimportant.

In current politics, this brand of nihilism aligns perfectly with Christian Fundamentalists who believe the world will end in armageddon and a return of their God at any moment, so individual suffering is similarly unimportant. Many of them believe that suffering is part of what will make the end times a reality, so they’re either in favor of it or are actively looking to create more. Paradise awaits them.

When two groups of people who don’t care about normal people's suffering come together to assume power, you end up with a lot of suffering and people in power being indifferent to the consequences.

Curtis Yarvin is in the first group but is beloved by people in both.

Yarvin began blogging in 2007 under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. The title of his blog was “Unqualified Reservations” and his first post was entitled A Formalist Manifesto which sounds like the title of something a Batman villain would write.

He begins this post with an explanation of his grievances about conservatism and progressivism, how both are failures because they promote violence, and how most people consider themselves moderates or centrists. This raises it’s own problems, because moderation is difficult to control and define:

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.

No, if you were a moderate in Vienna in 1907, you thought Franz Josef I was the greatest thing since sliced bread. So which is it? Hapsburgs, or Eurocrats? Pretty hard to split the difference on that one.

In other words, the problem with moderation is that the “center” is not fixed. It moves. And since it moves, and people being people, people will try to move it. This creates an incentive for violence—something we formalists try to avoid.

His ideology, which he deems “formalism” is far more applicable to the modern world and much closer to libertarianism.

Yarvin really, really loves libertarianism. He fawns over it during this manifesto with lines like “I love libertarians to death” and “I would love to live in a libertarian society” and refers to FDR’s administration as “the Roosevelt dictatorship”. He does acknowledge that libertarianism has never been implemented in practice and that’s where his formalism version of it comes in.

It’s tech-branded libertarianism created to erase all violence, something Yarvin sees as its main benefit:

Formalism, as we’ll see, is an ideology designed by geeks for other geeks. It’s not a kit. It doesn’t come with batteries. You can’t just pop it in. At best, it’s a rough starting point to help you build your own DIY ideology. If you’re not comfortable working with a table saw, an oscilloscope and an autoclave, formalism is not for you.

That said:

The basic idea of formalism is just that the main problem in human affairs is violence. The goal is to design a way for humans to interact, on a planet of remarkably limited size, without violence.

Yarvin then addresses pacifism (something I’m a big fan of as a Taoist) and how it’s built to fail. If everyone is a pacifist except one person then that one person can use violence to rule everyone else, and Yarvin sees this as an insurmountable barrier.

He continues on with his examination of violence as a concept and how it can be used both to steal from others and as punishment against those who have committed theft. Both of these outcomes are outlined as immoral failings of a too-progressive society.

But then Yarvin begins to examine the theory of law and morality in an exceedingly banal and outright obtuse way. At first, I thought he was intentionally misunderstanding, but perhaps there’s something more going on here:

Where do all these rules come from? Who makes them unbreakable? Who gets to be the oracle? Why is the wallet “yours,” rather than “mine”? What happens if we disagree on this? If there’s one rule for every wallet, how can everyone remember them all? And suppose it’s not you, but me, who’s got the Glock?

What we have is actually not rules at all, but agreements. Surely, agreeing to something and then, at your own convenience, un-agreeing to it, is the act of a cad. In fact, when you make an agreement, the agreement itself may well include the consequences of this kind of irresponsible behavior.

We are starting to see two kinds of agreements here. There are agreements made with other specific individuals—I agree to paint your house, you agree to pay me. And there are agreements like, “I won’t kill anyone on the street.” But are these agreements really different? I don’t think so. I think the second kind of agreement is just your agreement with whoever owns the street.

This is the gist of Yarvin’s thinking, and it extends all the way through what we see today from those who adhere to his thinking. The rules in place are meaningless because their origins can’t be defined (this is not true, it’s simply what they have declared about our current political system), so they should be disregarded.

Elon especially has been very critical of judges through the years, and some statements recently have continued this. If you don’t recall what happened between Elon and Alexandre de Moraes, the Chief Justice of the Brazilian Supreme Court, I made a whole video about it you can watch here.

More recently, Elon has called for the impeachment and removal of any judge attempting to hold up this administration’s actions:

This, of course, is completely untrue. Judicial review was established in 1803 and gave the judiciary the right to overrule any decision made by the Legislative and Executive branches. It’s why Roe v. Wade gave women the ability to get an abortion, and why Dobbs took it away. Brown v. Board of Education, Obergefell v. Hodges, Cooper v. Aaron (which rules that states cannot nullify decisions of the federal courts), and many more.

But if you’re one of Yarvin’s formalists, knowingly or unknowingly, it starts to make a lot more sense.

If you don’t believe that the courts SHOULD have this ability because laws are only agreements people make between each other and not based on moral standards and common law history then the ideals of libertarianism start to make a lot more sense.

Yarvin’s manifesto finishes with his views on ownership. For him, the idea of equality, that everyone should get to start on equal footing, get equal chances at success, and have equal amounts of resources is incompatible with reality:

One is that many of these nice things are not directly comparable. If I get an apple and you get an orange, are we equal? One could debate the subject—with Glocks, perhaps.

Two is that even if everyone starts with equal everything, people being different, having different needs and skills and so on, and the concept of ownership implying that if you own something you can give it to someone else, all is not likely to stay equal. In fact, it’s basically impossible to combine a system in which agreements stay agreed with one in which equality stays equal.

I should also mention that Yarvin brings up “Glocks” quite a lot during this manifesto, and for those of you who don’t know, it’s a racist dog-whistle that was quite popular in the late 2000s, specifically when paired with discussions on equality, but I digress back to our main event.

Yarvin’s concentration on ownership is quite important to him and his new ideology.

[L]et’s figure out exactly who has what, now, and give them a fancy little certificate. Let’s not get into who should have what. Because, like it or not, this is simply a recipe for more violence.

It’s at this point where he does away with a lot of the sovereign citizen philosophy that was gaining a lot of ground around this time-period. He acknowledges that libertarians tend to believe the US is illegitimate, but formalism has no such hang-ups.

Modern Americans are “corporate serfs” because the US is “nothing but a corporation” according to Yarvin. This isn’t so bad but it does bring up a question he struggles with:

I have no idea what the purpose of the US is.

I have heard that there’s someone who supposedly runs it. But he doesn’t appear to even be able to fire his own employees, which is probably good, because I hear he’s not exactly Jack Welch, if you know what I mean. In fact, if anyone can identify one significant event that has occurred in North America because Bush and not Kerry was elected in 2004, I’d be delighted to hear of it. Because my impression is that basically the President has about as much effect on the actions of the US as the Heavenly Sovereign Emperor, the Divine Mikado, has on the actions of Japan. Which is pretty much none.

Obviously, the US exists. Obviously, it does stuff. But the way in which it decides what stuff it’s going to do is so opaque that, as far as anyone outside the Beltway is concerned, it might as well be consulting ox entrails.

Again, I have to wonder if he’s being intentionally obtuse or genuinely doesn’t understand why societies form governments. Is he unaware of the Enlightenment and why self-governance was adopted instead of the theocratic rule that dominated the Western world at the time? He’s either ignorant or willfully ignorant and I haven’t been able to decide which.

He goes on to praise the existence of independent city-states like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai (remember this was written in 2007), completely ignoring how the establishment of Western democracy through U.S. soft power allowed such places to flourish.

His anti-democratic philosophy expands with this paragraph:

Formalists attribute the success of Europe, Japan and the US after World War II not to democracy, but to its absence. While retaining the symbolic structures of democracy, much as the Roman Principate retained the Senate, the postwar Western system has assigned almost all actual decision-making power to its civil servants and judges, who are “apolitical” and “nonpartisan,” i.e., nondemocratic.

Again, ignoring or unaware of how Western democracy shaped those systems versus what came before.

The final paragraph sums it all up like this:

In other words, “democracy” appears to work because it is not in fact democracy, but a mediocre implementation of formalism. This relationship between symbolism and reality has received an educational if depressing test in the form of Iraq, where there is no law at all, but which we have endowed with the purest and most elegant form of democracy (proportional representation), and ministers who actually seem to run their ministries. While history does no controlled experiments, surely the comparison of Iraq to Dubai makes a fine case for formalism over democracy.

Look, I am not one to ignore the terrible things the U.S. and other powers have done across the world in the name of democracy. It’s certainly not perfect in implementation and many who have claimed democratic rule have, in practice, implemented things far darker (Russia comes to mind).

However, Yarvin’s insistence that the ideals of self-governance come from nothing, that the fundamentals of democracy itself are unfounded and should be discarded in favor of a system that is ownership-based is not a step forward into something new. It is despotism and authoritarianism by other means and with new definitions.

Yet, his manifesto is the guiding document behind every decision being made by those who hold power in the United States today, and where they intend to take us in the future.