Curtis Yarvin: The People Are Never Right

I've been postponing this article for about five years for reasons that are obvious to me but not to you. Luckily, you don't live inside my head. The reasons share characteristics with the text: they are very obvious.

All the time that has passed since the first time I read Unqualified Reservations until now, I preferred the path of indirect references. It always made me a bit uncomfortable having to explain jokes. Even more so to the authors. But in terms of reading volume, explaining the joke is what worked best for me. This is how my previously modest journey in professional writing (just a few notes in a national newspaper supplement) took an exponential leap with the article on the meme language of 4chan (2019) and eventually led to the publication of the book “Is Democracy in Danger?” (2023). Explaining jokes sells, ¿but who’s buying?

All the time that has passed since the first time I read Unqualified Reservations until now, I preferred the path of indirect references. It always made me a bit uncomfortable having to explain jokes. Even more so to the authors.

In short, I will try to explain some concepts that inhabit the Internet and that seem obvious to me, but for a lot of people, they are not (and they don’t have to be). Some might even find pleasure in reading something they already knew, but written from a different perspective. For another part of the readers, I will probably just be a latecomer to extinct phenomena. Almost like an astronomer who dedicates himself to seeing the light that emanates from a universe of stars that has already gone dark. Perhaps, in the end, all these observations are true.

Talking about Curtis Yarvin in the year 2026 is almost like discussing a museum piece of the Internet. But here we go.

Mencius Moldbug

The first person to tell me I had to read Curtis Yarvin (when he was still using the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug) was Santiago Chamé, a philosophy classmate, one afternoon over pints of beer in the microcenter when craft breweries and the microcenter still existed. We had gathered to chat about one of my articles, and I was telling him about my readings of extremist manifestos like Anders Breivik’s “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” and how, pulling at the thread, I had ended up reading “Industrial Society and Its Future” by Ted Kaczynski. Beyond the radicalized positions of both figures, we particularly discussed the section of Kaczynski where he raises the concept of “over-socialization” and how the left from an academic university background tends to accept social conventions without question, which in turn pushes them to become political commissars of their application.

“By ‘over-socialization’ we refer to the process by which society subjects individuals in such a way that their thoughts and behaviors are conditioned by social norms, to the point that any deviation from these norms causes the individual a feeling of guilt or self-reproach.”

Kaczynski (1995).

As a result of this, Santiago suggested I read Mencius Moldbug, the pseudonym of engineer and writer Curtis Yarvin, who had a much more developed theory about these types of personalities and their role in democratic states. That’s where my journey began, reading almost the entire blog, sometimes piecemeal, or jumping from one book to another. This is how I discovered the original source of the concept of red pill, neoreaction, dark illustration, and other nomenclatures I had picked up from my journey through imageboards. Again, what seemed like a novelty to me back then (2019) had already enjoyed at least a decade of popularity among fat internet circles. Before long, I started quoting him in some articles and posting excerpts from his texts on the now-defunct Twitter. This brought me into contact with a small group of users who were also readers of the crazy fat guy and discussed him openly in the forum. It worked like a password.

I can almost quote Leandro Ocón, Rodrigo Baraglia, Sasha Pak (back then still @fullmetalsofi), Reaxionario, and Iris Speroni. Additionally, Lady Astor would occasionally message me that she was in touch with him or his partner, and that she always told them they had to come visit Argentina. Speroni used to translate Yarvin’s texts on his blog Restaurarg. The trajectory of that group is quite remarkable. Reaxionario works for the government, Iris I believe is an advisor to Villarruel, Sasha continued on as a publicist and cognitive warfare analyst after a brief stint in public office, Ocón left the defense sector and became a DJ. Baraglia programs in Rust (I think) and is a father of two, and the beloved Chamé I believe has settled into the German academy to study Aristotle.

As for me, I continue on my path to becoming a media mogul.

Blogger from cradle to grave

In these past years, Yarvin has ceased to be a curiosity for fat forum-goers and has somehow become a symbol of the neoreaction: a very overused label to explain, among other things, a movement of retraction to the last progressive wave that would later be labeled as woke. The issue with revisiting cultural debates from the United States is that one always ends up making a sort of taxonomy of neologisms. Neoreaction may or may not, depending on the analyst, include the rise of Trump to power, his particular way of managing it, the emergence of the “alt right” (the alt right doesn’t exist), and all that contemporary right-wing ideology that marked a break with the previous right (the Reagan-Bush-Bush Republican experience), at least understood in the context of the United States.

It is true that Yarvin made headlines in the New York Times, profiles in the New Yorker, Washington Post, etc., etc. Something typical of the American press: the relevance of an author is consolidated when someone in power cites their ideas, in this case, J.D. Vance, now a disgraced vice president (Hello, Marco Rubio). However, Yarvin’s influence was, for years, underground, in different strata of the Internet and outside the focus of traditional media, only trafficked as a currency of exchange among fat forum-goers. From that surreptitious and marginal place, he built his relevance, totally ahead of his time, until the time found him.

Yarvin’s influence was, for years, underground, in different strata of the Internet and outside the focus of traditional media, only trafficked as a currency of exchange among fat forum-goers.

With a simple blog, titled “Unqualified Reservations,” Yarvin launched a critique of political correctness, of the “government of scientists,” of climate change, of egalitarian movements like Black Lives Matter, even long before the meteoric rise of fourth-wave feminism. Yarvin only needed to write against the government of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to become a beacon of the reaction to a wave that had yet to reach the shore. With the concepts of “Red Pill” and “Cathedral,” he anticipated the reaction to progressivism even before the term “woke” existed. This concept is, to a large extent, a popular version of Yarvin’s Cathedral idea (which we will see later).

Having been absent for years and dedicated to developing incomprehensible software (Urbit), he reappeared in 2021 from Substack (Gray Mirror), establishing this new space as the native intellectual agora of the Internet and, moreover, fulfilling the dream of any fat forum-goer: to live off subscriptions from a permanent audience from a trench on the Internet. Thus, very slowly and almost managing the speed of memetics at which his ideas replicated, Yarvin built an ideological relevance outside of classical circuits. He became the great forum-goer and model of an Internet intellectual.

This article does not aim to show why Yarvin is relevant or how he built his relevance. That is something that, at this point in the game, has already been said. In this article, we will try to organize Yarvin’s thought, based on three of his texts, which I believe are the most relevant, and attempt to outline what subset of ideas make up his “neoreactionary” thought. I find it amusing to write neoreactionary; I think it’s the type of label that the journalistic common sense and the publishing industry love. A label that with enough lobbying power can get you a book deal. Oh, yes, buy my books on memes and alt right. Alt Right in Big 2026.

Land, Sloterdijk, and Yarvin

Unlike the other two characters that make up this triad of thinkers, such as Nick Land and Peter Sloterdijk, Yarvin never had an academic phase, nor does he have one now. Despite coming from the most progressive city on the planet, San Francisco, and the most progressive university, Berkeley (which may well explain his animosity towards academic progressivism), Yarvin has always been a fat blogger. And from there, he built his persona and the way his ideas circulated. The success of his theoretical program is intrinsically linked to this fact. He is aware of this himself. Yarvin is one of the first authors to use the concept of meme as an analytical category, who wrote seriously about bitcoin (one of the best texts I've read on the subject, by far), who used the concept of psychological operations (psyops) and the dissemination of political ideas as memeplexes, which made him particularly aware of the potential reach of his own ideas. As can be seen, he is a person of a wide variety of tastes, to whom I owe a lot. Yarvin seemed to be aware of what he was proposing and how to do it. I think of blogs from that time like “The Oatmeal” or “Wait but why?” and things of that sort, completely mimicking the spirit of the era (Kickstarter, changing the world, and the cheerful nonsense of collective intelligence, with all due respect), and I’m sure that, as a contemporary and on a completely opposite side, Yarvin already knew what his best move was. Respect.

On the other hand, this article complements the other two mentioned, in that it provides us with a contemporary theory of power. While Land gives us a hypothesis about the functioning of capital, and Sloterdijk about cultural reproduction over time, Yarvin completes the triad. That’s why at the time I dubbed them the three horsemen of the “wake up,” because they are really three guys who provide a prism through which to understand our era. Having an adequate theory of power helps us know how to confront and negotiate with that power, in addition to being able to develop a technique for viable collective survival, while we surf the unstoppable wave of capital replicating itself in increasingly intense positive feedback loops. With this article, the series is complete.

Having an adequate theory of power helps us know how to confront and negotiate with that power, in addition to being able to develop a technique for viable collective survival.

Many people on Twitter got angry when I recommended reading these three authors years ago (for being “far-right”). The reality is that both Land's and Yarvin's visions, as well as Sloterdijk's idea of anthropotechnics, enable more elaborate (and useful) interpretations of the world than those of their leftist contemporaries, who are obsessed with ideas of stagnation, repetition, and apocalypse. Largely a product of the influence of Mark Fisher, the great intellectual beacon of this historical moment.

Perhaps the last fruitful intellectual novelty from the “left” was the concept of populism formulated by Ernesto Laclau, as it allowed for the characterization of a concrete phenomenon (the populist governments of the early 2000s), while also serving as a tool for political participation (the calibration of electoral fronts based on the concept of “unmet demand” and “chain of equivalences”). What remained afterward, broadly speaking, was composed of Mark Fisher's somewhat depressive theory and his idea of the canceled future, the thought of Slavoj Zizek (who has very good books and concepts, but none since 2010), which has devolved into philosophical slop, and all the derivatives of the left's posthumanist deconstructive Nietzschean machine, also known as sensitive veganism. Movements against which I have no particular animosity, but which I believe are not fruitful in terms of reading the world. Well, they may be in a sense that at least doesn’t interest me. The critical deconstructive task against macho-carnivorous-phallogocentrism has led to the flourishing of diffuse identities like Furries or Therians. In this sense, I continue to uphold the centrality of the human being and of the human as a philosophical concept.

The only one who had any kind of lucidity was the Korean Han, now turned into editorial slop and shameful consumption, the first (or the most well-known) to develop the concept of psychopolitics. Many of his ideas, it’s worth noting, were already present in “Postscript on the Societies of Control” by Gilles Deleuze and in the entire saga of philosophical tensions between humanity and technology by Heidegger.

There’s another movement that contributed to the debate of ideas on the left: the rise of fourth-wave feminism. But I believe that much of the theory supporting the movement was developed several years before it became the current social phenomenon. I also don’t know its theoretical genealogy, and I think it would be an important addition for 421 to trace that to understand the feminist evolution of the last ten or fifteen years. Undoubtedly, it was the last leftist movement strong enough to, once again, shift the axis of society to the left. Today, in relation to concepts like femicide, gender equality, and so on, discussions are framed in the terms that feminism managed to impose through a massive and transversal political construction.

Yarvin and Land, in particular, were two characters who were indeed thinking about the short- and medium-term future, with a vision that had very little to do with that of the philosophers on the other ideological side. That is to say, they posited that capital continues to advance, even in stages where it seems “stagnant.” And each new capitalist version has the capacity to annihilate the previous one, due to the feedback of the system itself in its permanent quest for survival. If AI has to cannibalize everything previously built to establish itself as the new technical hegemon, there’s no doubt that this will be the path. However, and although they are often presented together, the differences between the two thinkers are significant. While Land believes in the supremacy of capital over any other human organization, Yarvin is a staunch defender of political sovereignty. However, he does so not in the way we are accustomed to, but from a completely different angle. Yarvin was directly thinking about a reset of liberal democracies or, directly, a definitive closure of the historical stage that began with the French Revolution.

Yarvin for beginners

But let’s get to Yarvin’s “thought” or what constitutes the core of his ideas and why he became so popular on the Internet, or at least one of the most relevant voices on the right side of the Internet. This category also includes, of course, Nick Land (more for his trajectory than for being online) and Costin Alamariu AKA Bronze Age Pervert. We’ll eventually dedicate a text to him as well, given that he is the last reference of purely rightist thought on the Internet with esoteric overtones or, rather, with reminiscences of the tragic poet Yukio Mishima. Telluric nationalism or, well, right-wing Nietzscheanism. Yes, it’s all a big internal struggle among Nietzsche followers, but that’s a topic for another article.

We can add some more marginal figures like the very Varg Vikernes or the Breivik line, but we’re talking about much more marginal cases. In Breivik's case, perhaps his greatest triumph was the popularization of the great replacement theory and all the variants that exist today on the subject.

But let’s get back to the topic. To delve into Yarvin’s “classic” thought, we will rely on three of his texts: “A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations,” “Patchwork,” and “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” All the bibliography is in English. Additionally, we could read “How Dawkins Got Pwned,” where he elaborates more on the idea of memeplex and a certain variety of contemporary atheistic culture as a variable of classical American dispensationalism, but I never finished reading it completely and it seems more tangential, although it’s a good book too... Well, fun.

The key is this: Yarvin is a fun guy to read. He has good analogies, he has witty remarks, he’s quite funny, and the reading is enjoyable despite the things he proposes. It’s clearly a blog language, but with different levels of thematic depth. And also of repetition... Something that happens to me when I read his books is that they always seem like the same book. While I was rereading his texts this summer in a tent at Playa Grande in Mar del Plata, I occasionally cursed the air when I had to read the same idea for the umpteenth time. It’s like a stone that slowly but steadily bores into the same thing. The three books could be one if, instead of being a compilation of blog posts, they had been a systematic search to organize the author's thought.

But, well, enough of the preliminaries, let’s get to the point.

A gentle introduction

In “A Gentle Introduction,” the first thing Yarvin proposes is the need to change the perspective of how we view history based on what he calls a “red pill,” a concept from the movie The Matrix. Beyond the book's proposal (a complete review of American history to conclude that the country is an Orwellian theocracy), what became extremely popular in online discussions was the concept of “red pill,” as a metaphor for the exit from Plato's cave. A meme whose effectiveness of transmission was also associated with a sort of ideological conversion.

“Thus, the red pill: any stimulus or stimulant, pharmaceutical or literary, that fundamentally undermines that system of deception.”

Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), “A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations,” 2009.

Yarvin (in the manner of José Bonacci) states in this book that democracy doesn’t work. Unless, as in the well-known meme of office workers, if this is stated by Bonacci, we call Human Resources, but if Yarvin says it, we find it “interesting.” Ah, the price of being ugly and not living in California.

The reasons why democracy doesn’t work are numerous, and a large part of Yarvin's intellectual project is to inventory all of them. In short, the democratic state is, for him, a rather ingenious way to dilute the sovereignty of the monarch. The result is an opaque bureaucracy in which there is no ultimate responsibility for the decisions made. The division of the three powers of the state produces a constant struggle among them, and politics, in the exclusive sense of the political clique, replaces good governance. That is the fundamental problem for Yarvin, who, in the manner of the old Aristotle from Politics (4th century BC), writes for a polis in inexorable decline. The solution is then an autocratic government where all political responsibility is exercised unilaterally by a single person. But isn’t that what happens in a dictatorship? What happens if the monarch goes mad, or simply fails as such? Isn’t that precisely what republics and democracies were born to avoid? Well, Yarvin proposes the creation of a system that allows for the removal of the CEO/Monarch and replace him with another. To prevent coups, the entire military arsenal is isolated under cryptographic locks. Only authorization from the government shareholders, AKA Citizens, would enable the possibility of using the weapons to oust the rebellious Monarch/CEO. As always happens in technocratic utopias, technology solves a distinctly political problem: that of loyalty. A problem that has plagued Javier Milei with leaks of his audios, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner with a vice president who votes against her, or the Roman emperors assassinated by the praetorian guard sworn to protect them. Not to mention the headbutt that John F. Kennedy took from the lead projectile allegedly fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. In short.

The democratic state is, for Yarvin, quite an ingenious way to dilute the sovereignty of the monarch. The result is an opaque bureaucracy where there is no ultimate accountability for the decisions made.

However, Yarvin's proposed solution, under the name patchwork, is not the strong suit of his work. As always, the best part is the diagnosis. The factions involved in the democratic process are only interested in occupying elective positions, which causes the cycle to repeat over and over again. Efficient, good, virtuous governments operate in the same way as successful, virtuous businesses: executive authority without any division; a CEO or Monarch, it makes no difference. A responsible person in charge, according to Yarvin, with a simple goal: to make the price of the land where their subjects live rise. Since there is no place where real estate is expensive and insecure or politically failed, the price of real estate serves as a parameter for the success of a government's management. Ah, if only the whole country were like the cobblestone streets of San Isidro...

In “A Gentle Introduction,” Yarvin uses the concept of the red pill (which would later be hyper-popularized by the Internet to the point of exhaustion) to shift the perception of how one thinks the government works to how it actually works. The criticized position is one that we could cite as akin to think tanks like FUNDAR, where good governance is the result of applying public policies built from “data” and “science.” For Yarvin, all this “science” is merely the mechanism adopted by a particular type of human (the institutionalized leftist) to tell the government what it should do. All the science is designed to satisfy the infinite demand of the State and to sell it solutions on a permanent basis. This scheme of expert consultants functions as a large decentralized system where different institutions play their part. The media needs experts to validate their opinions. And the experts need the media for their theories or hypotheses to reach a wider audience and get to the right officials. In this way, the universities and the media feed off each other and gain validation from officials who build their policies (and non-solutions) based on what they read in the media. According to Yarvin, there is no easy way out or simple solution to this problem. A regime change is needed. The current regime of ideological control through the triad of media, NGOs, and universities is the famous

The Cathedral” and, along with the concept of the red pill, is the most publicized aspect of his work.

“And the left is the party of educational organs, led by the press and universities. This is our version of the established church of the 20th century. Here at UR, we sometimes call it The Cathedral, although it is essential to note that, unlike an ordinary organization, it has no central administrator.”

Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), “A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations”, 2009

American history is Whig history.

Yarvin proposes a complete revision of American history from his own reactionary perspective. He writes from 2008, during the height of Obamaism and also the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s. Coincidentally, the way out of that crisis marks, for Yarvin, the consolidation of a change in direction, already latent in the historical evolution of the American state. For the thinker, Roosevelt plays the same role as Perón for an Argentine gorilla. The entire model of government designed by professional bureaucracies, NGOs, and think tanks is a product of Roosevelt's government, at a time when the United States was closest to a socialist dictatorship. Patience with this argument.

For Yarvin, the United States is screwed, it's done for. But it's been done for since its very constitution, since its origin. How does he justify this argument? Basically by comparing the lifestyle of centuries ago with the current one. He proposes a basic premise: imagine the world of the 17th century with our technology. In other words, let's say, the Palace of Versailles with satellite Internet (the pandemic dream of cocaine and enlightened monarchy). But how did everything go to hell? Simple. Mob Politics or Politics by force. The story of the American Revolution is the story of the triumph of criminals and the immoral over the forces of order. The core of the problem comes from then. The triumph of the revolution is the consolidation of a movement that historically has been pushing the limits of what is acceptable year after year, always moving leftward.

For Yarvin, the American Revolution is the export of an inherent conflict from the United Kingdom and its factional politics: Tories and Whigs. The Tories, defenders of order, of the status quo and a more or less cordial relationship with the provinces of America. Against them stands another force that includes all the founding fathers: the Whig movement. The left of the English parliamentary bloc transformed into a permanent ideology of a new State: constant sanctioning of new laws to push a trend of reform towards a more just state of affairs. An asymptotic movement towards the “left,” Yarvin would say. A movement he also calls “Cthulhu.”

“Cthulhu can swim slowly. But it only swims to the left. Isn’t that interesting?”

And also:

“The right represents peace, order, and security; the left represents war, anarchy, and crime.”

Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), “A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations”, 2009.

Let's compare society from that time with today. It is clear that in terms of social policies, the movement is entirely leaning to the left. The need for constant reform as a moral imperative was leveraged by the most representative line of American Protestantism: the Presbyterian church, or the founding church of the United States. And, fundamentally, by the Quakers. A left-leaning version of the Protestant church. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau. The ideology of the State of Massachusetts. Pacifist universalism with social justice.

The current heirs (and responsible for carrying out the policy of the American state) are, as we said, called The Cathedral. They are a kind of theocratic oligarchy (the values of progressive Quaker universalism) and are articulated as an Orwellian ideological device, although anyone who has taken sociology in the CBC can recognize the concept of “ideological state apparatuses” from the French Marxist academic and femicidal Louis Althusser. Moreover, the name comes from the well-known text “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” by Eric S. Raymond.

“We do not live in something vaguely resembling a Puritan theocracy. We live in a real, genuine, functioning Puritan theocracy — though hardly healthy — of the 21st century.”

Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), “A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations”, 2009.

The devices that support the ideological unity of the Cathedral rely on universities, the media, and Hollywood. Universities are the great creators of ideology and provide sustenance to all advanced, progressive social theories, acting as a battering ram for the chtulhic progressives. Next come the media, particularly the New York Times, which serves as a kind of programmatic validator of what academia indicates and also as a sounding board. “Hey, there’s this problem, let’s consult the experts.” The last leg is Hollywood, which takes everything and weaponizes it into “feelings”: from entertainment narratives to the performative politics of the star system (just look at what the Avengers' anti-Trump campaign was).

With the triad established, what remains is the creation of the monster. Or, fundamentally, according to Yarvin, the core of the problem. The government of experts, the designers of “public policies” are the same intellectuals responsible for pointing out problems and, therefore, designing solutions. But this system does not obey a kind of cabalistic conspiracy like QAnon. It simply responds to its decentralized power scheme design. At some point, it is an equivalent system to what Noam Chomsky described in “Manufacturing Consent,” but in reverse. There is no one who effectively plays the role of political commissar or censor within the academic consensus. Simply put, ideas that may be too foreign to the corpus are left out, and then, those who want to belong simply adjust to the tacit norms.  So, this becomes the guiding principle of Yarvinist thought: American history is the story of the triumph of the Whig project, that is, the left wing of English parliamentary politics, which systematically won all its political battles through the double strategy of mob politics. The political arm establishes a program of demands. Generally, it is a program of progressive reforms (relative to each era). On the other side, the crowd, the mob, the masses, the populace, THE BLACKS, function as the armed wing of those demands, exercising political violence against anything that opposes them. The only way to stop the violence is to yield to the demands. Thus, the decentralized system works perfectly, pushing common sense a little further to the left each time. The main engine of the Whig movement is the idea that it is necessary to “change the world” to make it fairer. For Yarvin, this is the cause of the perversion and deplorable state of affairs.

In "An Open Letter," the thinker expands his argument and develops a comprehensive diagnosis of the failures of the democratic order, as well as a transition program that will later be described in detail in Patchwork. What is wrong, Yarvin says, is believing that the State can consistently solve its own problems. That is impossible: the very design of the democratic State makes it inherently inefficient, primarily due to the separation of powers. Authority tends to function better when it has no rivals or competition. This is why businesses and armies obey hierarchical structures with a leading head. Distributed sovereignty leads to poor or terrible decisions. In the case of modern republics, it is never clear who has the authority to enforce a law: a body legislates it, another executes it, but the final authority for enforcement is the Supreme Court. And it doesn't even have absolute power; it only intervenes in specific cases.

What is wrong, Yarvin says, is believing that the State can consistently solve its own problems. That is impossible: the very design of the democratic State makes it inherently inefficient, primarily due to the separation of powers.

The sovereignty of the modern tripartite State is diluted, destroyed, and turns the government into an inefficient entity where no one has ultimate responsibility for decisions. It is the worst of all possible worlds. The dissolution of sovereignty into multiple responsible parties gives rise to political cronyism. Politics ends up consuming everything, as anyone aspires to occupy the position immediately above them. If one thinks about the local scenario and the amount of time that Argentine politics, the media, and society dedicate to the exegesis of the “internals” in each government, we could agree with Yarvin that something is functioning poorly or, rather, functioning well by design, just not in the way society requires. The politics of cronyism is, therefore, for this conception, a byproduct of diluted sovereignty. The solution, then, is maximum concentration. This text is a sort of second version of “A Gentle Introduction,” with less emphasis on the concept of the red pill, but much more on the concept of The Cathedral, and on how a transition to the Patchwork system would look.

Patchwork: a final solution for politics

The solution, for Yarvin, is the total liquidation of the current State through a transition program towards a corporate government. But not one, rather thousands. Each city and its area of influence must become an independent State. Thousands of independent States. In other words, what is commonly referred to as “balkanization.”

“...they should be replaced by a global web of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own corporation without regard for the opinions of the residents.”

Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), “Patchwork: A Positive Vision,” 2008.

What may sound like a privatization of the State is, in truth, the total reduction of it to an entity that can provide secure, efficient, and responsible governance. Yarvin envisions highly prosperous micronations, such as Monaco, Liechtenstein, or Luxembourg. Although all have unfortunately become constitutional monarchies, for the author. In fact, Yarvin's solution for Great Britain is to abandon the constitutional monarchy and restore the House of Stuart as the legitimate heirs to the crown. More precisely, to their current descendants. This stance is known as Jacobitism (not to be confused with Jacobinism). Remember that the Stuarts were deposed and executed by Oliver Cromwell, who, coincidentally, was also a Puritan.

But to carry out any transition program, the current State needs to be declared bankrupt. Then, it must essentially be managed by a trustee who acts as a manager during the transition and ultimately paves the way for the new microstate in which each citizen (owner) becomes a shareholder of the government.

In the case of the United States, Yarvin proposes that the government convert all its debt into cash, liquidate state assets (after assimilating The Cathedral, which functions as a quasi-state entity), and then become a minimal State governed by a CEO and a board of representatives (a chamber, hence the concept of neocameralism) with the power to depose him if he does not fulfill his primary function, which is to increase the value of the properties of all citizens of the nation.

“The kingdom profits by making its real estate as valuable as possible, whether it’s Manhattan or some ranch in Oklahoma.”

Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), “Patchwork: A Positive Vision,” 2008.

What Yarvin never mentions is how to transition from a single government to a thousand regional governments. I assume it’s just repeating the same thing but on a larger scale. Then the form of government described in Patchwork seems like something out of a science fiction story. All of Yarvin's argument, I understand, is not for someone to actually do it, but to demonstrate that it is possible, at least in the world of abstraction, to have a government like the one he envisions. The solution is a restoration because revolution, for Yarvin, is a source of anarchy, that is, chaos and disorder. Anarchy is the foundational enemy and is behind all Whig history. In their quest to “balance” power and avoid “tyranny,” the Whig movement and its successors created a system that systematically prevents any government from having centralized power and unity of action in the Executive. For Whig thought—meaning liberal—the enemy to be conjured is tyranny. For Yarvin, it is exactly the opposite: “The cause of revolution is not oppression; the cause of revolution is anarchy.”

The great problem with this transition program is that it lacks someone to execute it. In other words, the imaginary solution lacks the social subject to embody this titanic task. In several passages, Yarvin thinks of the United States military, as it is ultimately the last repository of real sovereignty, that is, the firepower.

However, the United States military is one of the great beneficiaries of this order of things. It has the ability to somewhat steer the country's foreign policy, possesses one of the most advanced scientific and technical frameworks on the planet, has almost infinite resources, and best of all: it is not accountable for it, as the entire republican system functions as a protective shield. Why would it give up this privileged position? On what grounds?

The great problem with this transition program is that it lacks someone to execute it. In other words, the imaginary solution lacks the social subject to embody this titanic task.

So, if it is not the United States military that leads the Patchwork-style solution, what other historical subject could it be? Will it be the neighbors of Coral Gables tired of the caimans? The great silent majority? Who will be the political force with enough capacity to carry out this plan of radical reforms remains an enigma throughout the book. I believe that Yarvin's bet is on a president who has the total backing of a silent majority to enact a total reform. The odd thing is that this “silent majority” is too American to support a candidate whose promise is the balkanization of the United States. At the very least, it’s strange. However, it’s incredible material for a science fiction novel. In fact, Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, written several years before Yarvin's books, features a balkanized United States made up of millions of micronations sustained under the unilateral power of a pizza franchise. Top. Basically, it’s better to read Snow Crash than all of Yarvin.

Why is Yarvin read?

Why the hell is Curtis Yarvin read if he is ultimately a mix of José Bonacci and an old gorilla from Belgrano? First of all, the meme: both sides of the coin. Democracy works like crap. And while it’s hard to think of another system today, the truth is that we coexist with successful (China) and failed (Cuba) non-democratic regimes, and throughout history, we have ample examples of both. In fact, most of the time, humanity lived under non-democratic systems, and both Athens and the current liberal democracy (formatted, according to Yarvin, by “The Cathedral”) is more of a historical exception.

However, this is the part of Yarvin's theory that has had the least impact or is just now reaching the mainstream audience, but through other channels. What is, if not a return to this idea, the new book by Alex Karp (the partner of Peter Thiel) about the re-founding of the United States? The yarvinian tragedy (or his success) lies in what the most lucid Italian of the last century said, not Benito Mussolini, the other one, Antonio Gramsci in “Historical Materialism and the Philosophy of Benedetto Croce,” when he asserts that the only way for the people to understand a philosophy is as if it were a religion.

On one hand, this is what Yarvin denounces, and at the same time, it reflects what happened with his ideas. All the young influencers and streamers who are “anti woke” are nothing more than the yarvinian version of the deconstructed ally. This is what we mean when we talk about death by saturation. Today, Yarvin's notion of reaction is popular enough to show signs of irretrievable stress. His ideas, after their explosion into the mainstream, will fall back into the well-deserved ostracism of any proposal that emerged from a marginal blog. Perhaps they will resurface in a future wave, when democratic states have further failed in their mission to provide a better quality of life for their citizens.

What I take from Yarvin

A preliminary note: for those who are not interested in the entirety of Yarvin's work but want a brief firsthand glimpse, I recommend his article on Elves and Hobbits in Gray Mirror, and his explanation of why the right is destined to always lose the 'cultural battle.'

Now let's get to the point: among the things I take from his thought is, first and foremost, the idea that unified power is much more effective than divided power. I have no doubt about that. From managing a company to running a government (and here all the experts will jump in to say “you can't compare”), there is something common to all human organizations. Let's look, for example, at the power of the CGT during Moyano's era against this diluted version of the Triumvirate. Let's remember the AFA of the post-Grondona era (with its normalizing commission, a total farce) and the results obtained from the Absolute Monarchy of Chiqui Tapia. Let's also observe the permanence of the Catholic Church, one of the last absolute monarchies on the planet.

I also reread Yarvin's phrase: 'the cause of the revolution is not oppression, it is weak government.' It's something that seems so obvious once you notice it. Dictatorships exist precisely because they are effective. When they lose effectiveness (oppressive power), they fall. Rereading history through Yarvin makes you think about the successive authoritarian governments, in light of the strength and weakness of each one. I think about the last dictatorship, which fell precisely when it was in total debacle post-Malvinas and riddled with internal factional struggles (that is, the most miserable political maneuvering. Oh, the irony). Onganía withstands the Cordobazo, but the execution of Aramburu leads his own to demand his resignation. Faced with the loss of support from the army, he leaves the government.

Dictatorships exist precisely because authoritarian regimes are effective. When they lose effectiveness or oppressive power, they fall.

I also think about the Chinese model and, fundamentally, about Lee Kuan Yew, perhaps an example that Yarvin himself could have used as the ideal archetype of his political proposal. The quasi-eternal president of Singapore transformed his country into a first-world nation, pulling it out of the significant backwardness it was in when he took office. His unipersonal policy demonstrated the effectiveness of the authoritarian model of government, combined with a free-market system (thus breaking with a long tradition of equating liberal democracy with free-market). Unified power and total control of the reins, always from Yarvin's perspective, led to a 'good government,' in terms exclusively of improving the material conditions of its governed, often going against their opinions.

In this regard, I find the anticipation of Javier Milei's government imploding to be quite trivial, as despite having his opposition and staunch detractors, no one can say he is weak. I also think about the constant waiting for a repeat of 2001, which never happens because, thank God, Argentina hasn't had a president as foolish as Fernando de la Rúa again (even though we've been very close more than once).

Lastly, I think about the governance model of Nayib Bukele, who, with a hyper-centralized presidential model, launched the entire state into a fight against the various branches of gang violence from Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13 and Barrio 18). He categorized them, first and foremost, as a terrorist organization, and then employed a series of repressive methods that proved completely effective in reducing annual homicides in El Salvador to almost zero, though heavily criticized by human rights organizations. It remains to be seen whether Bukele's model is enough to lift El Salvador out of its underdeveloped status or if it is limited to the area of security.

For all the reasons stated, from a rather superficial reading, some fantasize about a positive opinion from Yarvin regarding the Peronist experience. But when one delves into the depths of his books, the direct objections to the concept of social justice and, especially, to the type of government led by Franklin D. Roosevelt (from whom Perón took many things), make it quite obvious what his judgment would be.

And finally, regarding the idea of Patchwork, beyond the particular and problematic issues (how the territory would be divided, what social force would accompany the transition program, etc.), I remain convinced that the main problem of government, politics, and any human institution is loyalty. And that is the weak point of technocracy, as it cannot fully assimilate this element that, in a sense, is irreducible and constitutes part of the human nature.

Yarvin does not cease to believe that every political organization is, ultimately, the one that holds ultimate sovereignty. Or, better said, that any entity that is sovereign eventually becomes a state. This sets him apart significantly from Land.

And finally, an insurmountable difference with Land regarding the fate of human organizations. Despite his somewhat country+apartheid model, Yarvin does not cease to believe that every political organization is, ultimately, the one that holds ultimate sovereignty. Or, better said, that any entity that is sovereign eventually becomes a state. This sets him apart significantly from Land and the accelerationist camp on one hand, but also from naif libertarian thought.

Ultimately, Landian thought is truly reactionary and anti-democratic because what has failed is democracy in its entirety, not something specific about its design. And, as a corollary, it does not do so by virtue of a betrayal 'to the people,' but rather believes that the concept of popular sovereignty is an aberration, given that the people, ultimately, always make mistakes. Or rather, truth and virtue are not the product of trying to average out popular will. Rather, the truly virtuous man who governs rightly often does so against the majority. Hence, there is an ontological impossibility of reconciling yarvinian thought with Peronism.

With not much more to say, it's up to you to draw your own conclusions. For my part, I'm grateful for using memes as an epistemic tool, for seriously discussing bitcoin and money as technology, and for using metaphors from Tolkien to talk about politics, and for forcing me to think deeply about the foundations of what I consider political.

Everything that is said by a fat guy from end to end.