In purely interpersonal terms, Mr. Yarvin comes across as dour, dyspeptic, sardonic and as possessing an unearned arrogance - unearned because based in a vast overestimation of his own perspicacity and intellect, as I will indicate below. And it's not clear that dialogue based in terms such as "pilled" and shitlib" are as nuanced and erudite as Mr. Yarvin believes.
The first argument Yarvin presents for the sagacity of monarchy is the example of the New York Times. The New York Times is no longer readable because it has become divorced from the ecological reality engulfing the planet. Read the "Business" section of the paper and ask yourself if it appears to be tethered to material reality or if it is based in pure cowardly delusion and denial of the fact that we are at 1.5 Celsius over preindustrial global temperature levels and carbon emissions continue to rise each year. Were the paper run in a more dispersed and democratic way, this might not be the case. The NYT is an institution that serves to legitimize corporate power, while this corporate power - in the form of Yarvin's other heroes Apple, Exxon, FoxConn etc. - immiserates workers and strips the planet of its ability to sustain life. For a reality check to Mr. Yarvin's utterly selective and distorting portrait of contemporary society and of history, one can read about the life of Foxconn worker and poet, Xu Lizhi, who leapt to his death from a factory building in Shenzen in 2014 after failing to endure the unbearable conditions in the factory and its dormitories. https://libcom.org/article/poetry-and-brief-life-foxconn-worker-xu-lizhi-1990-2014
Indeed, one can do this exercise with every example of supposed monarchic brilliance that Yarvin presents.
- Elizabethan England. Speak to the peasants and the people on the receiving end of British imperialism about how great Queen Elizabeth was. Ask the Africans who began to be kidnapped, trafficked & enslaved by Brits under Queen Elizabeth about the wonders that she worked. And why only Queen Elizabeth? Britain has had several dozen monarchs. It would be interesting to hear Yarvin try to wax poetic about the monarchic brilliance of Henry the Eighth. Monarchists routinely dismiss the very basic fact that such power structures frequently deposit the most demented and ruthless souls imaginable into the top positions. The most cursory glance at the sequence of debauched and bellicose psychos that served as Roman emperors readily confirms this observation.
- The atomic bomb built by "communists" of the Marxist Leninist variety, suggests Yarvin. Wow. Great project. A marvel of engineering, as Yarvin reminds us. Counterpoint: It is the most evil and wretched piece of technology humans have ever conceived and should never have been built.
- The Apollo Project. Realized by Nazis for the US state. Another winner. Good thing we sent people to the moon to walk on dead dust while the our nation's cities were burning down in race riots after actual great American leaders were killed fighting for the most basic human rights.
We could go on and on like this. In example after example, Yarvin presents vast, complex projects that were realized, but - like the very monarchic structures realizing the projects - he lacks the perspective to question the wisdom and the morality of the projects in the first place.
It is a wonder that someone of Curtis Yarvin's purported intellect could look at the last 2500 years of history and say: "What worked and what we need now is more top-down power structures managed by elites" -- when it is exactly the deficit of democratic control that has permitted the catastrophes of imperialism & its genocides, the vast nightmare of the Transatlantic slave trade, the misery of lives of millions spent toiling in mines and sweatshops, and finally, the aforementioned planet-threatening ecological crisis.
All in all, a highly unconvincing set of thinly thought-out arguments presented by Curtis Yarvin. He is an object lesson in what happens to one's thinking when one limits oneself exclusively to mass-scale notions of human organization and anachronistic notions of what constitutes progress.
Thank you for this detailed reminder of the dangers of the mind (and will) divorced from the heart. Our educational system has been actively complicit in exacerbating this trend, at creating a society that has forgotten to ask the fundamental question, "What are people for?" (as posed by Kurt Vonnegut in I forget which novel.)
yes, and the thing is, his arguments are so easily refuted, if he could bother to listen for a few seconds. I would be shocked at how much influence he has gained, if I didn't realise that his philosophy is simply a useful framework for billionaires to justify even more centralised control and extraction of everybody else, by them.
Concur with all points here but are we seriously going to even discuss Queen Elizabeth as some sort of actual template for how to run a country of 330 million people in the year 2025? Harkening back to a time of slavery, indentured servitude, and debtors prisons, where women were treats as little more than brood mares and complicated pets?
"unearned arrogance" ... hit the nail. Why/how is anyone taking Yarvin seriously? I appreciate, Daniel, you taking time to introducing this character to us, but really, he doesn't bring any interesting arguments worth spending time on.
The argument that American Gov would love to have the Chinese systems for a week to get all the things passed that have been stuck in partisanship is such an old and tired arguments
I haven't listened to the conversation (not sure I have the stomach for it) but I want to give you a heads-up that you called Yarvin "Curtis Vance" in your introduction to the interview, an understandable mistake (or maybe it was deliberate?). Without listening, I find myself wishing that more people were familiar with the concept of Ahriman, as I have found Steiner's characterizations of Lucifer and Ahriman extremely helpful to me in my attempts to understand and navigate the bewildering world in which we are currently incarnated. And about the "trimtab" image - its a wonderful analogy, and I think those of us who are praying for our world to become more whole, more compassionate etc. would do well to own our personal potential to be trimtabs.
As intelligent as guys like Yarvin are, they come off as really imbalanced--which, in their eyes, is probably considered a good thing. They are all brain and absence of soul--the absolutely apogee of the prevailing consciousness driving our death-cult society. It also seems to come off as socially awkward and "cringe"--this is like teenage boy stuff where the highest aspiration is to be the Master Edgelord. I mean, look at Yarvin's scowling "I've got dark thoughts" Substack profile picture.
yes, he's the Edgelord In Chief, and that's fine if you're 15 and haven't got any power, but he's over 40 and should probably know better. but what do we know? we're shitlibs so that settles that argument
You’ve been red pilled. Or was it the blue one I was supposed to take. He is simply, the “If Then Else” of of our new digital reality, without the “Else”. No sense of complexity or uncertainty at all.
Just read this and have yet to listen to the conversation, but a can tell right now that the girls are going to go through some rough things in the new episodes of season 2 of the Trump show.
Reality TV on a national, global scale. Screenagers an apt decriptor. Swipe left, swipe right. The never ending scroll of the shelf help salesMEN. The winning narrative? The purported myths of the delusional, as they rewrite history on prime time TV.
Yes. Lets talk about the rest of the world sometimes too. ICBM’s, it’s as if earth has become a military test zone for international arms dealers. Ukraine has become a “proof of concept” world war zone. War drone robot technology. Syria, Iran, Gaza. This is not a fictional movie kids, a cell phone screen one can swipe aside. Sigh. I am an old woman, but I have not looked in the box to see if I have a cat or not. Dead or alive.
I am extremely disappointed in the purported intellect of Mr. Yarvin. If these are the half baked ideas fueling Thiel, Vance and the like, then they are all phenomenally lower IQ than I would have assumed. Poor reasoning, poor critical thinking skills and a complete inability to consider, much less answer any question than negates his faulty reasoning.
Argh this is painful to watch. Thank you for doing this though! Yarvin is right to point towards the democratic freedom of the US (and the UK) as, oftentimes, a facade, and yet it seems to me that what he calls for is an implementation of exactly those kinds of systems that are forever threatening to erode what little freedom we have managed to maintain and on which we are attempting to build. Furthermore, his arguments about the unequal judicial treatments of left-wing and right-wing ‘criminal’ protests presupposes an equality of morality. For example, he compares protests calling for swifter climate protection measures with a hypothetical protest based on nationality and ethnicity. One is rooted in a desire to see the best possible outcome achieved for the greatest number of people; the other in an individualistic desire to protect one’s own interests. Typically left-wingers will reject ideas that privilege individual interests over societal, and I see no convincing argument against this position. If you are not willing to abandon this basic foundational attitude, the arguments of people like Yarvin come crashing down.
Yes John, exactly. I want people to feel the pain, recognize it, so we can try to deal with the situation. These truly terrible ideas have now been fed upstream to people like JD Vance and Peter Thiel, providing them with a veneer of justification to undertake a demolition project.
[Sorry to comment spam, but I’m watching this in small increments] So many of Yarvin’s foundational principles are built on straw men. For example, the Jane Austen argument against UBI is utterly meaningless, as there is no equivalence between a community-wide implementation of UBI and a sole recipient of a (very handsome) allowance, particularly when that sole recipient also wields tremendous power over vast swathes of the community. Also, to characterise every person who attends Burning Man as seeking self-actualisation above all else is a sweeping and unhelpful generalisation, which also suggests a false dichotomy between those who attend and those who don’t, allowing a confirmation of unspecified (until further notice) others as lower down on Maslow’s pyramid. In this segment, he seems to simultaneously point towards systemic racism whilst also somehow confirming its rightness, if only in the subtext. The arguments are confused at best, destructive at worst. [this is not a criticism of Burning Man, only his strange use of the festival to justify bizarre understandings of social structures]
The frequent dismissal of your counter arguments and the paternal ‘recommendations’ are poor attempts to obfuscate an inability to engage meaningfully with very legitimate alternative perspectives to the reality he sees around him.
I’d second the comments made elsewhere that you have the patience of a saint.
Sorry, last one! To paraphrase Yarvin: democracy doesn’t work because there are fewer scientists talking about climate change than there are housewives talking about how climate change doesn’t exist. Misogyny/sexism aside, this is a laughably weak assertion, especially when considered in the light of Yarvin’s statement about making things truer. He obviously doesn’t live by his own advice. Even if it were true that there are countless housewives fighting against climate protections, what’s missing is the entire story about why those individuals are not better informed. A democracy can’t function properly if there’s an information industry which serves a corporate class which benefits from the erosion of those very democratic freedoms. Again, the bedrock of Yarvin’s thesis is the softest of sand and the fallacies are immediately evident.
I finally read all of the transcript, having started a few days ago (I couldn't face too much of the video, my nervous system can't take it).
My slightly sardonic summary:
DP: So what about climate change, we're fucked, right?
CY: Have you read Trollope, Daniel? If you look at the early eighteenth century you'll find that the elite also had a primitive form of Twitter where they used to carve messages to each other within the wood-panelled cloisters of Oxford University colleges....
DP: ...so what about climate change Curtis?
CY: Covid was created by mashing up a bunch of monkey DNA...
DP: But-
CY: Let me finish please! Aristotle made the very salient point that-
DP: China and Saudi Arabia?!
CY: I don't actually know but I'm hoping to put you on the back foot by mentioning old books that you either have read, thus underlining your elite credentials and somehow proving my point, or you haven't, thereby making me look cleverer than you. This all serves to constantly derail the discussion and makes sure that fairly simple things are obfuscated...
DP: Please let me say something!!
It was something like that anyway. The impression I get is that he's not a sociopath, he's just wrong. He genuinely thinks that having some sort of monarchy might fix things. But by pointing to Elizabethan England constantly, he's undermining his own argument. QE1 had an army, sure, and fewer people to manage, but she didn't have nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, rocket launchers, AI surveillance drones, massive disinformation, etc etc. You can't compare apples to oranges.
Respect for history is great, and I agree with him on that, yet one of the great lessons of history is that massive concentrations of power are bad, because absolute power corrupts absolutely, so returning to that will make things worse, not better.
I did find him appealing in the sense that he's willing to criticise Musk quite harshly, and Vance and Trump to some extent. I think they will have to sweeten the (red) pill quite substantially if they want him to be their pet philosopher, and he might reject the opportunity even then, which shows he does believe what he's saying, and has integrity.
But as I say, his arguments would be quite easily refuted if one could get past his constant obfuscation and tendency to endlessly expand on the point he's making.
For example, his criticism of 'all men are created equal' - that's like Richard Dawkins thinking he's clever by refuting the fundamentalist claim that every word in the Bible is literally true. No serious Christian thinks every word is true, so refuting that doesn't really score a point. And in the same way 'all men are created equal' doesn't mean that everyone is exactly the same in terms of ability, IQ, etc. That would be absurd. What it means is that everyone should have equal access to justice, opportunity, education, free speech, and so on. That a tiny elite should not make all the decisions. So like Dawkins, he's refuting a straw man argument and then patting himself on the back for it. There are various examples of that, but clearly he's got this far with his rhetorical tactics and kudos to him for being willing to talk about everything.
Overall I hope that his influence on the world goes no further than it's already gone, and we can utterly refute his claims that a monarchy would be a good idea.
No. This is absurd. But I do appreciate your engagement even with absurd ideas -- we should always be able to talk to each other. Rather than moving toward technocratic monarchy we need to go the other way toward tech-enabled direct democracy. The wisdom of the crowd is an empirically-verified thing and we can govern ourselves. That's the rational and compassionate Left Libertarian solution -- not the rather bizarre extreme right libertarianism that Yarvin seems to espouse.
Thanks for doing the interview! I thought it was really fascinating to listen to and personally I think one should never stop engaging with those who have very different opinions, especially through personal conversations.
I only learned about him through your recent posts and I thought this interview offered a lot of context to his ideas and disentangled him from other people in the Trump orbit.
I don’t agree with many of his conclusions but I thought he raised some valid issues. Having applied for scientific grants myself, I would wholeheartedly agree that academic funding mechanisms create unfortunate incentives. I find it very hard to believe that that’s the main reason for the findings of climate scientists though.
I’d be curious to follow your exchanges with him and hope you’ll do a second interview after you read the proposed reading lists.
PS: I was surprised that he didn’t use Rwanda as an example. Many people call Kagame a „benevolent dictator“ and when you visit Kigali, the capital, the difference to other (East) African countries is stark. They call it Switzerland of Africa for a reason. Having been there three times over several years, I don’t think people are as limited in their expression and lifestyle as in other dictatorships, but when you look closely you’ll still notice the symptoms.
It is interesting that you use the term “benevolent dictator.” It makes me think of Singapore. That is an experiment like no other. I wonder how that society will do when their “benevolent dictator” dies.
Okay just as I suspected from following his X account for while: the guy is a smug tool with truly bad and poorly researched ideas. Kudos to you for entertaining him Daniel. Just letting him talk exposes the shallowness and vacuity of the so-called "Dark Enlightenment."
Regarding the debate y'all have at 1h03m about climate where Yarvin references satellite data as being supposedly more accurate - that sounds like a Judith Curry talking point which I believe many in the climate space have critiqued pretty well over the years.
(Edit: Listening further, he confirms this by mentioning her at 1h20m. )
His eyes are hard and dead. He is smug, arrogant. His ideas are half-baked. He seems to have no empathy, no wonder he is popular with certain politicians. He can justify anything. Seeing him was disturbing.
Oh my, Daniel, you have the patience of Job. I’m glad you kept corralling him to let you speak - but I wish he would have responded to your points more thoughtfully - such as your key reference to Jane Mayer’s book revealing the elite’s 35-year commitment to destroy 1960’s human rights gains, education, and more. Thus - we are here in 2024 having lost many gains in democracy from deliberate elite crimes against Americans. Thus - our free press and freedom of speech are hanging on by a thread.
On some levels, Yarvin is insufferable and reminds me of bad dates I had with men who loved to hear themselves talk. His amoral response to your questioning of obscene wealth in America was especially telling, not to mention his ramblings about IQ levels.
He comes across as a cynic who enjoys attempts at being clever - such as asking you on scale of 1-10 your reaction to the name Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Really?
So, I hope your future conversations with him involve him listening more to what you have to say - and letting your views sink in - before he retorts with his oh-so-clever certainties.
Thank you for letting us listen in on this person who has “influenced” Peter Thiel and JD Vance. Heaven help us.
In purely interpersonal terms, Mr. Yarvin comes across as dour, dyspeptic, sardonic and as possessing an unearned arrogance - unearned because based in a vast overestimation of his own perspicacity and intellect, as I will indicate below. And it's not clear that dialogue based in terms such as "pilled" and shitlib" are as nuanced and erudite as Mr. Yarvin believes.
The first argument Yarvin presents for the sagacity of monarchy is the example of the New York Times. The New York Times is no longer readable because it has become divorced from the ecological reality engulfing the planet. Read the "Business" section of the paper and ask yourself if it appears to be tethered to material reality or if it is based in pure cowardly delusion and denial of the fact that we are at 1.5 Celsius over preindustrial global temperature levels and carbon emissions continue to rise each year. Were the paper run in a more dispersed and democratic way, this might not be the case. The NYT is an institution that serves to legitimize corporate power, while this corporate power - in the form of Yarvin's other heroes Apple, Exxon, FoxConn etc. - immiserates workers and strips the planet of its ability to sustain life. For a reality check to Mr. Yarvin's utterly selective and distorting portrait of contemporary society and of history, one can read about the life of Foxconn worker and poet, Xu Lizhi, who leapt to his death from a factory building in Shenzen in 2014 after failing to endure the unbearable conditions in the factory and its dormitories. https://libcom.org/article/poetry-and-brief-life-foxconn-worker-xu-lizhi-1990-2014
Indeed, one can do this exercise with every example of supposed monarchic brilliance that Yarvin presents.
- Elizabethan England. Speak to the peasants and the people on the receiving end of British imperialism about how great Queen Elizabeth was. Ask the Africans who began to be kidnapped, trafficked & enslaved by Brits under Queen Elizabeth about the wonders that she worked. And why only Queen Elizabeth? Britain has had several dozen monarchs. It would be interesting to hear Yarvin try to wax poetic about the monarchic brilliance of Henry the Eighth. Monarchists routinely dismiss the very basic fact that such power structures frequently deposit the most demented and ruthless souls imaginable into the top positions. The most cursory glance at the sequence of debauched and bellicose psychos that served as Roman emperors readily confirms this observation.
- The atomic bomb built by "communists" of the Marxist Leninist variety, suggests Yarvin. Wow. Great project. A marvel of engineering, as Yarvin reminds us. Counterpoint: It is the most evil and wretched piece of technology humans have ever conceived and should never have been built.
- The Apollo Project. Realized by Nazis for the US state. Another winner. Good thing we sent people to the moon to walk on dead dust while the our nation's cities were burning down in race riots after actual great American leaders were killed fighting for the most basic human rights.
We could go on and on like this. In example after example, Yarvin presents vast, complex projects that were realized, but - like the very monarchic structures realizing the projects - he lacks the perspective to question the wisdom and the morality of the projects in the first place.
It is a wonder that someone of Curtis Yarvin's purported intellect could look at the last 2500 years of history and say: "What worked and what we need now is more top-down power structures managed by elites" -- when it is exactly the deficit of democratic control that has permitted the catastrophes of imperialism & its genocides, the vast nightmare of the Transatlantic slave trade, the misery of lives of millions spent toiling in mines and sweatshops, and finally, the aforementioned planet-threatening ecological crisis.
All in all, a highly unconvincing set of thinly thought-out arguments presented by Curtis Yarvin. He is an object lesson in what happens to one's thinking when one limits oneself exclusively to mass-scale notions of human organization and anachronistic notions of what constitutes progress.
Aho!
Thank you for this detailed reminder of the dangers of the mind (and will) divorced from the heart. Our educational system has been actively complicit in exacerbating this trend, at creating a society that has forgotten to ask the fundamental question, "What are people for?" (as posed by Kurt Vonnegut in I forget which novel.)
yes, and the thing is, his arguments are so easily refuted, if he could bother to listen for a few seconds. I would be shocked at how much influence he has gained, if I didn't realise that his philosophy is simply a useful framework for billionaires to justify even more centralised control and extraction of everybody else, by them.
Concur with all points here but are we seriously going to even discuss Queen Elizabeth as some sort of actual template for how to run a country of 330 million people in the year 2025? Harkening back to a time of slavery, indentured servitude, and debtors prisons, where women were treats as little more than brood mares and complicated pets?
Oh this is so good. Thank you.
"unearned arrogance" ... hit the nail. Why/how is anyone taking Yarvin seriously? I appreciate, Daniel, you taking time to introducing this character to us, but really, he doesn't bring any interesting arguments worth spending time on.
The argument that American Gov would love to have the Chinese systems for a week to get all the things passed that have been stuck in partisanship is such an old and tired arguments
I haven't listened to the conversation (not sure I have the stomach for it) but I want to give you a heads-up that you called Yarvin "Curtis Vance" in your introduction to the interview, an understandable mistake (or maybe it was deliberate?). Without listening, I find myself wishing that more people were familiar with the concept of Ahriman, as I have found Steiner's characterizations of Lucifer and Ahriman extremely helpful to me in my attempts to understand and navigate the bewildering world in which we are currently incarnated. And about the "trimtab" image - its a wonderful analogy, and I think those of us who are praying for our world to become more whole, more compassionate etc. would do well to own our personal potential to be trimtabs.
You can also read the transcript if you don't want to watch / listen.
Yes to spreading the word on Ahriman!
How do I find the transcript?
As intelligent as guys like Yarvin are, they come off as really imbalanced--which, in their eyes, is probably considered a good thing. They are all brain and absence of soul--the absolutely apogee of the prevailing consciousness driving our death-cult society. It also seems to come off as socially awkward and "cringe"--this is like teenage boy stuff where the highest aspiration is to be the Master Edgelord. I mean, look at Yarvin's scowling "I've got dark thoughts" Substack profile picture.
yes, he's the Edgelord In Chief, and that's fine if you're 15 and haven't got any power, but he's over 40 and should probably know better. but what do we know? we're shitlibs so that settles that argument
You’ve been red pilled. Or was it the blue one I was supposed to take. He is simply, the “If Then Else” of of our new digital reality, without the “Else”. No sense of complexity or uncertainty at all.
Just read this and have yet to listen to the conversation, but a can tell right now that the girls are going to go through some rough things in the new episodes of season 2 of the Trump show.
Reality TV on a national, global scale. Screenagers an apt decriptor. Swipe left, swipe right. The never ending scroll of the shelf help salesMEN. The winning narrative? The purported myths of the delusional, as they rewrite history on prime time TV.
We need more discussions like this. Well done to both of you for making it happen.
Yes. Lets talk about the rest of the world sometimes too. ICBM’s, it’s as if earth has become a military test zone for international arms dealers. Ukraine has become a “proof of concept” world war zone. War drone robot technology. Syria, Iran, Gaza. This is not a fictional movie kids, a cell phone screen one can swipe aside. Sigh. I am an old woman, but I have not looked in the box to see if I have a cat or not. Dead or alive.
I am extremely disappointed in the purported intellect of Mr. Yarvin. If these are the half baked ideas fueling Thiel, Vance and the like, then they are all phenomenally lower IQ than I would have assumed. Poor reasoning, poor critical thinking skills and a complete inability to consider, much less answer any question than negates his faulty reasoning.
Argh this is painful to watch. Thank you for doing this though! Yarvin is right to point towards the democratic freedom of the US (and the UK) as, oftentimes, a facade, and yet it seems to me that what he calls for is an implementation of exactly those kinds of systems that are forever threatening to erode what little freedom we have managed to maintain and on which we are attempting to build. Furthermore, his arguments about the unequal judicial treatments of left-wing and right-wing ‘criminal’ protests presupposes an equality of morality. For example, he compares protests calling for swifter climate protection measures with a hypothetical protest based on nationality and ethnicity. One is rooted in a desire to see the best possible outcome achieved for the greatest number of people; the other in an individualistic desire to protect one’s own interests. Typically left-wingers will reject ideas that privilege individual interests over societal, and I see no convincing argument against this position. If you are not willing to abandon this basic foundational attitude, the arguments of people like Yarvin come crashing down.
Yes John, exactly. I want people to feel the pain, recognize it, so we can try to deal with the situation. These truly terrible ideas have now been fed upstream to people like JD Vance and Peter Thiel, providing them with a veneer of justification to undertake a demolition project.
For those who haven’t seen it, I recommend Sam Kriss’ article on Yarvin. https://open.substack.com/pub/samkriss/p/curtis-yarvin-does-not-live-in-reality?r=2wrdbq&utm_medium=ios
[Sorry to comment spam, but I’m watching this in small increments] So many of Yarvin’s foundational principles are built on straw men. For example, the Jane Austen argument against UBI is utterly meaningless, as there is no equivalence between a community-wide implementation of UBI and a sole recipient of a (very handsome) allowance, particularly when that sole recipient also wields tremendous power over vast swathes of the community. Also, to characterise every person who attends Burning Man as seeking self-actualisation above all else is a sweeping and unhelpful generalisation, which also suggests a false dichotomy between those who attend and those who don’t, allowing a confirmation of unspecified (until further notice) others as lower down on Maslow’s pyramid. In this segment, he seems to simultaneously point towards systemic racism whilst also somehow confirming its rightness, if only in the subtext. The arguments are confused at best, destructive at worst. [this is not a criticism of Burning Man, only his strange use of the festival to justify bizarre understandings of social structures]
The frequent dismissal of your counter arguments and the paternal ‘recommendations’ are poor attempts to obfuscate an inability to engage meaningfully with very legitimate alternative perspectives to the reality he sees around him.
I’d second the comments made elsewhere that you have the patience of a saint.
Sorry, last one! To paraphrase Yarvin: democracy doesn’t work because there are fewer scientists talking about climate change than there are housewives talking about how climate change doesn’t exist. Misogyny/sexism aside, this is a laughably weak assertion, especially when considered in the light of Yarvin’s statement about making things truer. He obviously doesn’t live by his own advice. Even if it were true that there are countless housewives fighting against climate protections, what’s missing is the entire story about why those individuals are not better informed. A democracy can’t function properly if there’s an information industry which serves a corporate class which benefits from the erosion of those very democratic freedoms. Again, the bedrock of Yarvin’s thesis is the softest of sand and the fallacies are immediately evident.
Great comments! Keep them coming.
I finally read all of the transcript, having started a few days ago (I couldn't face too much of the video, my nervous system can't take it).
My slightly sardonic summary:
DP: So what about climate change, we're fucked, right?
CY: Have you read Trollope, Daniel? If you look at the early eighteenth century you'll find that the elite also had a primitive form of Twitter where they used to carve messages to each other within the wood-panelled cloisters of Oxford University colleges....
DP: ...so what about climate change Curtis?
CY: Covid was created by mashing up a bunch of monkey DNA...
DP: But-
CY: Let me finish please! Aristotle made the very salient point that-
DP: China and Saudi Arabia?!
CY: I don't actually know but I'm hoping to put you on the back foot by mentioning old books that you either have read, thus underlining your elite credentials and somehow proving my point, or you haven't, thereby making me look cleverer than you. This all serves to constantly derail the discussion and makes sure that fairly simple things are obfuscated...
DP: Please let me say something!!
It was something like that anyway. The impression I get is that he's not a sociopath, he's just wrong. He genuinely thinks that having some sort of monarchy might fix things. But by pointing to Elizabethan England constantly, he's undermining his own argument. QE1 had an army, sure, and fewer people to manage, but she didn't have nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, rocket launchers, AI surveillance drones, massive disinformation, etc etc. You can't compare apples to oranges.
Respect for history is great, and I agree with him on that, yet one of the great lessons of history is that massive concentrations of power are bad, because absolute power corrupts absolutely, so returning to that will make things worse, not better.
I did find him appealing in the sense that he's willing to criticise Musk quite harshly, and Vance and Trump to some extent. I think they will have to sweeten the (red) pill quite substantially if they want him to be their pet philosopher, and he might reject the opportunity even then, which shows he does believe what he's saying, and has integrity.
But as I say, his arguments would be quite easily refuted if one could get past his constant obfuscation and tendency to endlessly expand on the point he's making.
For example, his criticism of 'all men are created equal' - that's like Richard Dawkins thinking he's clever by refuting the fundamentalist claim that every word in the Bible is literally true. No serious Christian thinks every word is true, so refuting that doesn't really score a point. And in the same way 'all men are created equal' doesn't mean that everyone is exactly the same in terms of ability, IQ, etc. That would be absurd. What it means is that everyone should have equal access to justice, opportunity, education, free speech, and so on. That a tiny elite should not make all the decisions. So like Dawkins, he's refuting a straw man argument and then patting himself on the back for it. There are various examples of that, but clearly he's got this far with his rhetorical tactics and kudos to him for being willing to talk about everything.
Overall I hope that his influence on the world goes no further than it's already gone, and we can utterly refute his claims that a monarchy would be a good idea.
Very funny!
No. This is absurd. But I do appreciate your engagement even with absurd ideas -- we should always be able to talk to each other. Rather than moving toward technocratic monarchy we need to go the other way toward tech-enabled direct democracy. The wisdom of the crowd is an empirically-verified thing and we can govern ourselves. That's the rational and compassionate Left Libertarian solution -- not the rather bizarre extreme right libertarianism that Yarvin seems to espouse.
https://www.noozhawk.com/tam_hunt_something_new_under_the_sun_part_i_20140612/
https://www.noozhawk.com/tam_hunt_something_new_under_the_sun_part_ii/
It is absurd but it could be where we are heading... Musk seems to want to be American monarch. Who is trying to stop him?
Thank you for this interview. Your ability keep the dialogue open at all is impressive. Enlightening.
Thanks for doing the interview! I thought it was really fascinating to listen to and personally I think one should never stop engaging with those who have very different opinions, especially through personal conversations.
I only learned about him through your recent posts and I thought this interview offered a lot of context to his ideas and disentangled him from other people in the Trump orbit.
I don’t agree with many of his conclusions but I thought he raised some valid issues. Having applied for scientific grants myself, I would wholeheartedly agree that academic funding mechanisms create unfortunate incentives. I find it very hard to believe that that’s the main reason for the findings of climate scientists though.
I’d be curious to follow your exchanges with him and hope you’ll do a second interview after you read the proposed reading lists.
PS: I was surprised that he didn’t use Rwanda as an example. Many people call Kagame a „benevolent dictator“ and when you visit Kigali, the capital, the difference to other (East) African countries is stark. They call it Switzerland of Africa for a reason. Having been there three times over several years, I don’t think people are as limited in their expression and lifestyle as in other dictatorships, but when you look closely you’ll still notice the symptoms.
It is interesting that you use the term “benevolent dictator.” It makes me think of Singapore. That is an experiment like no other. I wonder how that society will do when their “benevolent dictator” dies.
I wonder if he knows that Queen Elizabeth I never married and never had children. I wonder. Did she have cats?
Okay just as I suspected from following his X account for while: the guy is a smug tool with truly bad and poorly researched ideas. Kudos to you for entertaining him Daniel. Just letting him talk exposes the shallowness and vacuity of the so-called "Dark Enlightenment."
Regarding the debate y'all have at 1h03m about climate where Yarvin references satellite data as being supposedly more accurate - that sounds like a Judith Curry talking point which I believe many in the climate space have critiqued pretty well over the years.
(Edit: Listening further, he confirms this by mentioning her at 1h20m. )
His eyes are hard and dead. He is smug, arrogant. His ideas are half-baked. He seems to have no empathy, no wonder he is popular with certain politicians. He can justify anything. Seeing him was disturbing.
Smart but not wise
Oh my, Daniel, you have the patience of Job. I’m glad you kept corralling him to let you speak - but I wish he would have responded to your points more thoughtfully - such as your key reference to Jane Mayer’s book revealing the elite’s 35-year commitment to destroy 1960’s human rights gains, education, and more. Thus - we are here in 2024 having lost many gains in democracy from deliberate elite crimes against Americans. Thus - our free press and freedom of speech are hanging on by a thread.
On some levels, Yarvin is insufferable and reminds me of bad dates I had with men who loved to hear themselves talk. His amoral response to your questioning of obscene wealth in America was especially telling, not to mention his ramblings about IQ levels.
He comes across as a cynic who enjoys attempts at being clever - such as asking you on scale of 1-10 your reaction to the name Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Really?
So, I hope your future conversations with him involve him listening more to what you have to say - and letting your views sink in - before he retorts with his oh-so-clever certainties.
Thank you for letting us listen in on this person who has “influenced” Peter Thiel and JD Vance. Heaven help us.