A few weeks ago, I attended Hereticon in Miami, an annual conference dedicated to “thoughtcrime,” hosted by Founders Fund, the legendary investment vehicle steered by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who helped Donald Trump win in 2016 and funded JD Vance’s Senate campaign. I am not sure why I was invited. Probably because the event has a Doomsday / Apocalypse theme and I wrote books on that topic. I will write more about Hereticon later. Topics discussed included biotechnology, geo-engineering, “start-up cities,” trad wives, rape orgies, UAPs, and why the N’avi were actually the bad guys in Avatar. For those who don’t much about Thiel, this is a great introduction:
While at Hereticon, I met Curtis Yarvin, a 48-year-old Berkeley-based intellectual who is almost my diametrical opposite in terms of political beliefs and ideology. Interestingly, Yarvin and I come from somewhat similar backgrounds, products of East Coast liberal culture and the Left. His grandparents were members of the Communist Party and his parents were civil servants. His mother worked in the Department of Energy, which apparently fueled his enormous disdain for government bureaucracy. My mother was an unaffiliated Leftist who published “movement” books such as Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It and Julius Lester’s Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama. Both of us, also, cut our teeth in the early days of largely text-based Internet culture. While Yarvin was a frequent contributor to Usenet, I spent a lot of time debating in online forums, BBS’s, like Echo and The Thing. Yarvin is a hard-core atheist, while I have had many direct mystical and paranormal experiences that led me, over time, to abandon my initial skepticism and arrive at a monistic idealist, Gnostic/animist worldview.
Founder of Urbit, a software company that attempted to realize his political ideas, Yarvin is known for writing the Unqualified Reservations blog under his pseudonym, Mencious Moldbug. He currently publishes Gray Mirror on Substack. Yarvin has been given a great deal of credit by journals such as The New Republic, Vox, Verge, and The Baffler for shaping the ideology of the dark enlightenment, neoreactionary or NRx movement. According to The Verge: “Yarvin is most commonly associated with the neoreactionary movement, whose adherents believe — as Thiel wrote in 2009 — that freedom and democracy are incompatible and that democratic governments and bloated federal bureaucracies should be replaced by enlightened autocratic regimes…. Perhaps no one online has shaped [JD] Vance’s thinking more than the neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, a former programmer with ties to Vance’s friend and benefactor Peter Thiel.”
The Behind the Bastards podcast covered Yarvin thoroughly in this episode.
According to The New Republic:
Yarvin’s disturbing manifestos have earned him influential followers, chief among them: tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his onetime Silicon Valley protégé Senator J.D. Vance, whom the Republican Party just nominated to be Donald Trump’s vice president. If Trump wins the election, there is little doubt that Vance will bring Yarvin’s twisted techno-authoritarianism to the White House, and one can imagine—with horror—what a receptive would-be autocrat like Trump might do with those ideas.
Trump’s first campaign was undoubtedly a watershed moment for authoritarianism in American politics, but some thinkers on the right had been laying the groundwork for years, hoping for someone to mainstream their ideas. Yarvin was one of them. Way back in 2012, in a speech on “How to Reboot the US Government,” he said, “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”
Vance later parroted Yarvin’s phrase in a speech, saying Republicans “need to get over their dictator phobia,” as Rachel Maddow documented here.
Although we have opposed political views, I understand how Yarvin, as a relatively ignored thinker, ended up acting as what Buckminster Fuller called a “trim tab,” as Fuller discussed:
Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, “Call me Trim Tab.”
I was a “trim tab” for the psychedelic movement, refocusing society on the potential of plant shamanism and the visionary experience via my first books. Yarvin’s once-fringe ideas about a technocratic monarchy without Democratic controls are now on the verge of being realized by his students, Vance and Thiel.
I appreciate Yarvin for being open to engaging me in this dialogue. I look forward to holding more discussions with him, as well as other members of the dark enlightenment or neoreactionary movement, which has now moved, convulsively, from the periphery to the mainstream. We discussed many topics here — please feel free to ask clarifying questions in the comments. One mistake I made toward the end: I mentioned a millionaire, Eugene Lang, who offered scholarship money to sixth-graders at a disadvantaged school in Harlem with a high dropout rate if they made it through high school and got accepted at a college. I recalled the percentage of students who made it through was 90%, but according to The New York Times, it was only 50%, which is still remarkable.
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