1. Introduction

Curtis Guy Yarvin (born 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American political theorist, blogger^[1] and software developer.^[2] Yarvin has been described as a neoreactionary^[3] and "neo-monarchist".^[4][5] His ideas have been associated with the alt-right.^[5][6][7] From 2007 to 2014, he authored a blog called "Unqualified Reservations", which argued that American democracy is a failed experiment,^[8] and that it should be replaced by monarchy or corporate governance.^[9] He is known, along with fellow theorist Nick Land, for developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind the Dark Enlightenment.

Yarvin has links with the website Breitbart News, the former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and with the billionaire investor Peter Thiel.^[10] Ideas of his have been particularly influential among radical-right libertarians and paleolibertarians, and the public discourses of prominent investors like Thiel have echoed Yarvin's project of seceding from the US to establish tech-CEO dictatorships.^[11][12] Journalist Mike Wendling has called Yarvin "the alt-right's favorite philosophy instructor".^[13] Bannon, in particular, has read and admired his work.^[14]

In 2002, Yarvin founded the Urbit computer platform.^[5] In 2013, he co-founded Tlon to manage and develop Urbit, and helped lead it for six years before leaving in 2019.^[2]

2. Biography

2.1. Early Life and Education

Curtis Yarvin was born in 1973 to a highly educated, liberal, secular family^[15] and is paternally Jewish.^[16] He has two children with his late wife, Jennifer Kollmer (1971–2021), who died in San Francisco in April 2021 as a result of complications caused by hereditary cardiomyopathy.^[17] Yarvin spent part of his childhood abroad, mainly on the island of Cyprus. In 1985, he returned to the US and entered Johns Hopkins' longitudinal Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. He attended Brown University from 1988, graduating from Brown in 1992, then dropped out of the Computer Science Division of UC Berkeley.^[18] He states on his blog that his parents and stepfather were career officers in United States Foreign Service,^[19] and that he returned from abroad to attend public high school in Columbia, Maryland at age 12.^[20] Yarvin also writes that both of his father's parents were Stalinists and members of the Communist Party USA during the U.S. Red Scare.^[21]

In the 1980–1990s, Yarvin was shaped by the libertarian tech culture of the Silicon Valley.^[18] Online, he pursued his study of right-wing thought, reading numerous prominent thinkers of mainstream American conservatism. The libertarian University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds introduced him to libertarian tradition, especially Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. The rejection of empiricism by Mises and the Austrian School, who favored instead "deductive reasoning from assumptions about human behavior and economic principles", influenced Yarvin's own "engineering mind-set" and vision of societies.^[22]

2.2. Computer Science and Urbit

Yarvin's university research included works on operating system network primitives and compiler optimization including peer-reviewed conference papers.^[23] In 2013 he co-founded Tlon to build out Urbit further and released the code under an open source license.^[24]

In 2015, Yarvin's invitation to speak at the Strange Loop programming conference about Urbit was rescinded after other attendees complained due to his political writing and views.^[25][26] In 2016, he was invited to present on the functional programming aspects of Urbit at LambdaConf 2016,^[24] which resulted in the withdrawal of five speakers, two sub-conferences, and several sponsors.^[27]

Yarvin worked with and helped lead Urbit development at Tlon before stepping down in January 2019.^[2]

2.3. Neo-Reactionary Blogging

Yarvin's reading of Thomas Carlyle convinced him that libertarianism was a doomed project without the inclusion of authoritarianism, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe's 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed marked Yarvin's first break with democracy. Another of his influences was James Burnham, who thought that "Real" politics occurred through the actions and power manipulation of the elites, beneath what he called apparent democratic or socialist rhetoric.^[28] In the 2000s, the failures of US-led nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan strengthened Yarvin's anti-democratic views, the federal response to the 2008 financial crisis strengthened his libertarian convictions, and Barack Obama's election as US president reinforced his belief that history inevitably progresses toward left-leaning societies.^[29]

In 2007, Yarvin began the blog "Unqualified Reservations" to promote his political vision.^[10] He largely stopped updating his blog in 2013, when he began to focus on Urbit, and in April 2016 he announced that "Unqualified Reservations" had "completed its mission."^[30]

In 2019, Yarvin began writing under his own name when "The American Mind",^[31] an online publication of the Claremont Institute, announced he would write five essays to "set the record straight on his thinking, his critics, and his radical challenge to all political frameworks competing for dominance in American life."^[32] He wrote two essays for "The American Mind" before, in May 2020, he began a blog called "Gray Mirror" on Substack and announced he was writing a book.^[33]

3. Views

3.1. Dark Enlightenment

Yarvin believes that the real seat of political power in the United States is an amalgam of established universities and the mainstream press, an entity he calls "the Cathedral."^[34] According to him, a so-called "Brahmin" social class dominates the American society, preaching democratic and progressive values to the masses. The basic assumption of Yarvin and the Dark Enlightenment movement is that humans desire power, which is uselessly fragmented by the cathedral's commitment to equality and justice, eroding at the same time order in society.^[35]

He argues for a "neo-cameralist" philosophy based on Frederick the Great of Prussia's "cameralist" administrative mode.^[6] In Yarvin's view, inefficient, wasteful democratic governments should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose "shareholders" (large owners) elect an executive with total power, but who must serve at their pleasure.^[36] The executive, unencumbered by liberal-democratic procedures, could rule efficiently much like a CEO-monarch.^[36] Yarvin admires Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping for his pragmatic and market-oriented authoritarianism, and the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime. He sees the US as soft on crime, dominated by economic and democratic delusions.^[35]

Yarvin justifies authoritarianism on right-libertarian grounds, contending that the division of political sovereignty eventually expands the scope of the state, whereas strong governments with clear hierarchies remain minimal and narrowly focused.^[35] According to scholar Joshua Tait, "Moldbug imagines a radical libertarian utopia with maximum freedom in all things except politics."^[37] In fact, many of his views on social issues are deeply influenced by radical-right libertarianism in the United States. He has favored same-sex marriage, freedom of religion, private use of drugs, and written against race- or gender-based discriminatory laws, although Tait reminds that "he self-consciously proposed private welfare and prison reforms that resembled slavery."^[36] Acoording to Tait, there are "important tensions in Moldbug's thought. He advocates hierarchy, yet deeply resents cultural elites. His political vision is futuristic and libertarian, yet expressed in the language of monarchy and reaction. He is irreligious and socially liberal on many issues but angrily anti-progressive. He presents himself as a thinker in search of truth but admits to lying to his readers, saturating his arguments with jokes and irony. These tensions indicate broader fissures among the online Right."^[18]

Drawing on computer metaphors, Yarvin contends that society needs a "hard reset" or a "rebooting," not a series of gradual political reforms.^[36] However, he has distanced his movement from "violent or harmless, legal or illegal" activism. He advocates instead "the Steel Rule of Passivism" reasoning that progressivism is nourished by right-wing opposition and "starves" without a necessary enemy.^[38] Yarvin originally called his concept of aligning property rights with political power "formalism," the formal recognition of realities of power,^[37] a term Yarvin said was "borrowed from legal formalism, which is basically the same idea in more modest attire."^[39] The label "neo-reactionary" was applied to Yarvin's ideas by Arnold Kling in 2010 and adopted by Yarvin's followers;^[40] Yarvin has said he prefers the label "restorationist".^[41] His ideas have also been described by Dylan Matthews of Vox as "neo-monarchist."^[4]

3.2. Nazi Germany and World War II

Under his Moldbug pseudonym, Yarvin gave a talk about "rebooting" the American government at the 2012 BIL Conference. He used it to advocate the acronym "RAGE," which he defined as "Retire All Government Employees." Acting as a provocateur, he highlighted perceived discrepancies in the popular attitudes toward fascism and communism, identifying what he felt were flaws in the accepted "World War II mythology" and alluding to the idea that Hitler's invasions were acts of self-defense. He argued these discrepancies were pushed by America's "ruling communists," who invented political correctness as an "extremely elaborate mechanism for persecuting racists and fascists." "If Americans want to change their government," he said, "they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia."^[42]

3.3. Views on Race

Yarvin's opinions have been described as racist, with his writings interpreted as supportive of slavery, including the belief that whites have higher IQs than blacks for genetic reasons.^[26] Yarvin himself maintains that he is not a racist because, while he doubts that "all races are equally smart", the notion "that people who score higher on IQ tests are in some sense superior human beings" is "creepy"; he also disputes being an "outspoken advocate for slavery",^[26] although he has argued that some races are more suited to slavery than others. In a post that linked approvingly to Steve Sailer, Jared Taylor, and other racialists, he wrote "[i]t should be obvious that, although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff."^[6][43] In 2009, he wrote that since US civil rights programs were "applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber", the result was "absolute human garbage."^[44] Tait notes that "Moldbug's racial comments suggest a broader trend: the anonymity of the internet allows him and others who have followed in his wake to revel in taboo language, ideas, and activities. Violating social norms is a kind of liberation for Moldbug: entertaining these ideas is to break from the Cathedral."^[45]

4. Relations with Other Communities

4.1. Alt-Right

Yarvin and his ideas are often associated with the alt-right.^[6] Yarvin came to public attention in February 2017 when Politico magazine reported that Steve Bannon, who served as White House Chief Strategist under U.S. President Donald Trump, read Yarvin's blog and that Yarvin "has reportedly opened up a line to the White House, communicating with Bannon and his aides through an intermediary."^[46] The story was picked up by other magazines and newspapers, including The Atlantic, The Independent, and Mother Jones.^[6][47][48] Yarvin denied to Vox that he was in contact with Bannon in any way,^[4] though he jokingly told The Atlantic that his White House contact was the Twitter user Bronze Age Pervert.^[6] Yarvin later gave a copy of Bronze Age Pervert's book Bronze Age Mindset to Michael Anton, a former senior national security official in the Trump administration.^[49][50]

Yarvin and other Dark Enlightenment thinkers have tried to publicly distance themselves from the alt-right. However, a private message he sent to Milo Yiannopoulos, then a Breitbart reporter, suggests that this may be a tactical move. Yarvin counseled Yiannopoulos to deal with neo-Nazis "the way some perfectly tailored high-communist The New York Times reporter handles a herd of greasy anarchist hippies. Patronizing contempt. Your heart is in the right place, young lady, now get a shower and shave those pits."^[7]

Tait describes "Unqualified Reservations" as a "'highbrow' predecessor and later companion to the transgressive anti-'politically correct' metapolitics of nebulous online communities like 4chan and /pol/."^[11]

4.2. Radical-Right Libertarianism

According to Tait, "Moldbug's relationship with the investor-entrepreneur Thiel is his most important connection." Peter Thiel was an investor in Yarvin's startup Tlon and gave $100,000 to Tlon's co-founder John Burnham in 2011.^[11][12] In 2016, Yarvin privately asserted that he had been "coaching Thiel."^[11]

Thiel and investor Balaji Srinivasan have echoed Yarvin's ideas of techno-corporate cameralism. Thiel wrote in a 2009 essay that he "no longer believe[d] that freedom and democracy are compatible... Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron," and Srinivasan advocated in a 2013 speech a "society run by Silicon Valley (...) an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology."^[51]