An intro to Yarvin’s political philosophy as he laid it out writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, as well as a critique of a conceptual vibe shift in his recent works written under his own name
Good assessment and critique of Yarvin (in this post and the last one). It's important to remember that the new UR site gives only half the story of the blog, since it omits the high-quality comments that were made on the original Blogspot posts. After a while, Yarvin ceased to read or respond to these comments (a bad habit he has retained into the present day), but this was not the case in the first two years when he was working out neocameralism and patchwork.
If you search the old site (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com) to find the early posts on these topics, and use the Wayback Machine to restore them, you will see that the more erudite commenters – notably the libertarian Nick Szabo – made some pretty strong objections to the whole notion of governance-for-profit. Some of the debates got technical, but the gist of their objection was that the rulers of a sovereign state would have a totally different set of incentives from the managers of a private corporation. This post has one of the less heated threads on the subject:
Although Yarvin defended himself at the time, he never really addressed the objections satisfactorily (nor did he give good reasons for rejecting the Burnhamite 'managerial revolution' thesis, according to which there is no essential difference between corporate managers and government bureaucrats), and as time went on he simply stopped talking about the governance-for-profit element of his scheme. In later UR and his current writings, all that is left of it (other than practical details of implementation such as the orderly coup d'etat, techno-assisted surveillance state, non-metallic hard money, etc.) is a much more simplistic version, in which the absolute power of the CEO-monarch is relied upon to keep the bureaucratic class from getting out of control. This is hardly convincing, since as Mosca said "all government is oligarchy", and without governance-for-profit the additional incentives for restraining that oligarchy are all gone.
Yarvin was right to be influenced by the early criticisms, but he was wrong to simply attenuate his theory without explaining his reasons, and continue serving up the inadequate remnant to his audience without acknowledging the need to go back to the drawing board. Yet most of his readers, unlike you, do not even seem to have noticed the problem.
I actually wrote the first part (except for the opening paragraph) back in 2017, which is why all the footnotes are now dead links to the original blog. I tried to keep it very much an intro so I didn’t wade into the comments threads. But I totally agree with everything you say and point out. Thanks for fleshing out this useful context in your comment.
I didn't notice you were using the original links! That's a long time to wait between writing and publishing. Maybe I need to start releasing some of my own notes on UR.
“To achieve spontaneous order: first, achieve ordinary, down-to-earth, nonspontaneous order. Then, wait a while. Then, start to relax.
Here is the Carlylean roadmap for the Misesian goal. Spontaneous order, also known as freedom, is the highest level of a political pyramid of needs. These needs are: peace, security, law, and freedom. To advance order, always work for the next step—without skipping steps. In a state of war, advance toward peace; in a state of insecurity, advance toward security; in a state of security, advance toward law; in a state of law, advance toward freedom.”
These low effort nerd gotcha type argumentation tactics are ridiculous and humiliating. Go back to Reddit if you want to talk like this.
Ultimately the liberals won and plunged the world into darkness and chaos, but Carlyle is describing a system that operated in Europe for >1000 years, brought order and civilization to the continent and created the countries and populations that were able to participate in the industrial revolution / free trade etc.
I've never had a Reddit account. Nor do I accord Carlyle any credibility. The world is better off than it was in Carlyle's time rather than "plunged into darkness and chaos".
I think Yarvin’s work on Urbit changed him a little bit since he took on a massive technical project as his own king, though my disappointment is more in his writing of the same article; I would rather him write of Urbit than repeat ‘monarchy > democracy’ over and over again.
I feel there is also a void in analyzing the type of person who actually gets markets making stuff well — the personality of the “good king”. There seems be stable industry personalities for success, but there is a natural inclination towards gamification that I am not sure has been well touched on.
I’d also be interested to see him speak more on Urbit, which I suspect is more closely tied to his earlier patchwork theory than his current neomonarchism.
Yeah the seeds are already largely sown in the UR era. The distinction I make between the old Yarvin or Moldbug and the new Yarvin is more a matter of emphasis (of the monarch’s absolute power over the competitive pressures of the patchwork) than of a total qualitative phase transition or complete conceptual speciation.
But he was aware that North Korea granted total power to their dictator, and this still led to bad results, which he explained away by arguing that the dictatorship was not truly secure and thus needed to go to great lengths to stay in power. Trump isn't really MORE secure, as he was replaced by Biden not long ago (and let a riot against that change persist for a long time).
I don’t see this shift as drastically as you, perhaps because I encountered Yarvin through Nick Land, so for me it was obvious what direction his neocameralism would logically take. Perhaps the intellectual relationship between the two is important to note here as well.
Good insights. I do get bored of people who champion this naive, MacBook libertarianism. Though I think the intractable issue of anti-trust might be solved by an all powerful monarch.
>It is not absolute power, then, but competitive pressures that obliges capitalist corporations to relentlessly optimize
Unsure of this. It is the monopolist who is uniquely capable of actually capturing all the gains of the schumpeterian rent creation that we call "TFP Growth," and the monopolist who maximally enjoys the slack that makes speculating in such innovation rational. Competition entails optimization intensively rather than extensively. Patchwork gets you a large sample of firms and so more players in the broader game, but you don't really need a sovcorp to be embedded in a network of competition for it to pursue rent-maximization on UR's reading ("seek rents without rent-seeking" is the NRx Koan), you just need it to have credible exit right protections and for-profit governance. The fully developed patchwork-market would have different, perhaps more immediate pressures for making desirable cities and prosocial governance, as their customers will have pull rather than merely push factors in weighing exit-options, but the lone patch still has a a unique, aligned incentive for rent creation.
Guy’s a loser who your average man on the street would push into a locker. His ideology is what happens when you never have to do any manual labour growing up.
But the new Yarvin is much more focused on discussing the internal power rulers than emphasising that kind of external competitive dynamic, even though the latter should actually be the key to the system’s success. What you say is closer to the old Yarvin, though even there “nation vs nation” isn’t exactly “a global spider web of tens, even hundreds, or thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries.”
In my view there is no contrast or vibe shift between early and recent Yarvin. There is no contradiction between totalitarianism and the anarchy of patchwork. They are two sides of the same coin.
From this post, it would seem that you have an extremely democratic, so to say, view of capitalism; that you believe capitalism exists to satisfy the needs of "the people". But as a reader of Land you must understand, capitalism does not exist for the people nor even for the human being. Its the other way around. The "democracy" of neocameralism is exit. The Scarface CEO-monarch will lose his customers, that is, his citizens. But this democratic agency is of course reserved only for those sovereign individuals who can afford it. The aim of the CEO-monarch is to maintain and increase his tax revenue. He does not need "citizens" per se, but people who are able to pay him maximally. It is to those people that he must cater. This is what constrains his decisions. It is why neoliberalism followed globalism and the free movement of corporations among legislations of their choosing.
The kind of capitalistic democracy you are evoking is inherently elitist and tends towards elitism as capital accumulates upon itself increasing inequality. Votes are not distributed equally. The asymptote of the patchwork is, therefore, an increasingly small oligarchical class enforcing its claim to private property through imcreasingly authoritarian and "undemocratic" means. This is precisely the post-libertarianism of Hoppe which Yarvin develops to its logical conclusions.
PS. As is probably clear, I am not defending the views of Yarvin or Hoppe. In my last post, I try to show how their thinking follows from a fundamental misunderstanding regarding the nature of monarchy and aristocracy, and in Yarvin's case, a misreading of de Jouvenel.
I don't think he talks about it much anymore. In a GM post from a few years ago, How to govern the libs, he critiques exit or secession as a political strategy, arguing instead for reset, a more RAGE approach to "rule the libs". I think the shift of emphasis from exit to reset corresponds to diminishing of nuance in his thinking which is why Lê sees him now as less "democratic". Nevertheless, I think there is a clear continuity and I think the post demonstrates it: exit and reset are two strategies, two means towards the same end (safeguarding property rights and "order" amidst rising social tensions and inequality), which is why the latter can be judged as being better than the former.
What does "RAGE" stand for? And if they are two strategies toward the same end, WHAT causes one to be evaluated as better than the latter? I can think of plenty of examples of the virtue of exit (east vs west Germany, north vs south Korea/Vietnam, Communist China vs Hong Kong & Taiwan, Cuba vs Florida, early US vs Europe, French Huguenots moving to Britain, middle eastern & eastern European Jews moving to Israel, Venezuelans & Zimbabweans fleeing to their neighbors). But when I think of "reset", the example of the Khmer Rouge and "year zero" strike me as complete disasters.
Retire all government employees. This shift is similar to that of Peter Thiel when he went from seasteading to funding Trump and Vance campaigns. Exit is only not losing, not victory. And history is written by the victors.
Not all government employees are retiring. DOGE hasn't actually made that much of a dent in the budget. Despite all the headlines, deportations aren't even higher than prior admins. Garett Jones has been snarking that it's a "skills issue" https://x.com/GarettJones/status/1916493242037653941 For all Trump's gloating about "winning so much you'll be tired of winning", he's lost every general election he's run against a man, he's sabotaged the Republicans by telling people not to vote in Georgia and later endorsing a streak of primary candidates who got trounced in their general elections. He's made immigration & free trade more popular by opposing them and becoming unpopular himself. The Liberals were on track to lose in Canada, but polarization against him has somehow brought them back (though admittedly they did replace their unpopular leader, as the Dems did with Biden). Louisiana was a heavily pro-Trump state, and Republican turnout recently crashed in their referenda https://pathgolden.substack.com/p/gop-rolls-worst-electorate-ever-asked Trump does not look like a victor who's going to get to write his own history.
Good assessment and critique of Yarvin (in this post and the last one). It's important to remember that the new UR site gives only half the story of the blog, since it omits the high-quality comments that were made on the original Blogspot posts. After a while, Yarvin ceased to read or respond to these comments (a bad habit he has retained into the present day), but this was not the case in the first two years when he was working out neocameralism and patchwork.
If you search the old site (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com) to find the early posts on these topics, and use the Wayback Machine to restore them, you will see that the more erudite commenters – notably the libertarian Nick Szabo – made some pretty strong objections to the whole notion of governance-for-profit. Some of the debates got technical, but the gist of their objection was that the rulers of a sovereign state would have a totally different set of incentives from the managers of a private corporation. This post has one of the less heated threads on the subject:
http://web.archive.org/web/20101016022302/http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/limited-government-as-antipropertarian.html
Although Yarvin defended himself at the time, he never really addressed the objections satisfactorily (nor did he give good reasons for rejecting the Burnhamite 'managerial revolution' thesis, according to which there is no essential difference between corporate managers and government bureaucrats), and as time went on he simply stopped talking about the governance-for-profit element of his scheme. In later UR and his current writings, all that is left of it (other than practical details of implementation such as the orderly coup d'etat, techno-assisted surveillance state, non-metallic hard money, etc.) is a much more simplistic version, in which the absolute power of the CEO-monarch is relied upon to keep the bureaucratic class from getting out of control. This is hardly convincing, since as Mosca said "all government is oligarchy", and without governance-for-profit the additional incentives for restraining that oligarchy are all gone.
Yarvin was right to be influenced by the early criticisms, but he was wrong to simply attenuate his theory without explaining his reasons, and continue serving up the inadequate remnant to his audience without acknowledging the need to go back to the drawing board. Yet most of his readers, unlike you, do not even seem to have noticed the problem.
I actually wrote the first part (except for the opening paragraph) back in 2017, which is why all the footnotes are now dead links to the original blog. I tried to keep it very much an intro so I didn’t wade into the comments threads. But I totally agree with everything you say and point out. Thanks for fleshing out this useful context in your comment.
I didn't notice you were using the original links! That's a long time to wait between writing and publishing. Maybe I need to start releasing some of my own notes on UR.
From “from Mises to Carlyle”
“To achieve spontaneous order: first, achieve ordinary, down-to-earth, nonspontaneous order. Then, wait a while. Then, start to relax.
Here is the Carlylean roadmap for the Misesian goal. Spontaneous order, also known as freedom, is the highest level of a political pyramid of needs. These needs are: peace, security, law, and freedom. To advance order, always work for the next step—without skipping steps. In a state of war, advance toward peace; in a state of insecurity, advance toward security; in a state of security, advance toward law; in a state of law, advance toward freedom.”
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/02/from-mises-to-carlyle-my-sick-journey/
Hugo Chavez was a fan of Carlyle, but this did not lead to spontaneous order, peace, security, law and freedom.
Lots of people were inspired by Carlyle, he was a really important philosopher. We should consider what Carlyle would say about Chavez.
Which of those people brought about spontaneous order, peace, security, law and freedom?
These low effort nerd gotcha type argumentation tactics are ridiculous and humiliating. Go back to Reddit if you want to talk like this.
Ultimately the liberals won and plunged the world into darkness and chaos, but Carlyle is describing a system that operated in Europe for >1000 years, brought order and civilization to the continent and created the countries and populations that were able to participate in the industrial revolution / free trade etc.
I've never had a Reddit account. Nor do I accord Carlyle any credibility. The world is better off than it was in Carlyle's time rather than "plunged into darkness and chaos".
I think Yarvin’s work on Urbit changed him a little bit since he took on a massive technical project as his own king, though my disappointment is more in his writing of the same article; I would rather him write of Urbit than repeat ‘monarchy > democracy’ over and over again.
I feel there is also a void in analyzing the type of person who actually gets markets making stuff well — the personality of the “good king”. There seems be stable industry personalities for success, but there is a natural inclination towards gamification that I am not sure has been well touched on.
I’d also be interested to see him speak more on Urbit, which I suspect is more closely tied to his earlier patchwork theory than his current neomonarchism.
I didn't read Gray Mirror, where you'd need to pay in order to comment, but I recall him changing his tune even when he was at UR. He started fantasizing about a "True Election" https://web.archive.org/web/20101016024137/http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/03/true-election-practical-option-for-real.html of Sarah Palin https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/09/sarah-palin-proletarian-candidate/ exactly the sort of demotic populism he'd been earlier rejecting.
Yeah the seeds are already largely sown in the UR era. The distinction I make between the old Yarvin or Moldbug and the new Yarvin is more a matter of emphasis (of the monarch’s absolute power over the competitive pressures of the patchwork) than of a total qualitative phase transition or complete conceptual speciation.
But he was aware that North Korea granted total power to their dictator, and this still led to bad results, which he explained away by arguing that the dictatorship was not truly secure and thus needed to go to great lengths to stay in power. Trump isn't really MORE secure, as he was replaced by Biden not long ago (and let a riot against that change persist for a long time).
I don’t see this shift as drastically as you, perhaps because I encountered Yarvin through Nick Land, so for me it was obvious what direction his neocameralism would logically take. Perhaps the intellectual relationship between the two is important to note here as well.
I think Twitter Land is more critical of the new Yarvin’s writings too along not dissimilar lines (namely patchwork drops out of the picture).
Good insights. I do get bored of people who champion this naive, MacBook libertarianism. Though I think the intractable issue of anti-trust might be solved by an all powerful monarch.
MacBook libertarianism - that’s a good one.
>It is not absolute power, then, but competitive pressures that obliges capitalist corporations to relentlessly optimize
Unsure of this. It is the monopolist who is uniquely capable of actually capturing all the gains of the schumpeterian rent creation that we call "TFP Growth," and the monopolist who maximally enjoys the slack that makes speculating in such innovation rational. Competition entails optimization intensively rather than extensively. Patchwork gets you a large sample of firms and so more players in the broader game, but you don't really need a sovcorp to be embedded in a network of competition for it to pursue rent-maximization on UR's reading ("seek rents without rent-seeking" is the NRx Koan), you just need it to have credible exit right protections and for-profit governance. The fully developed patchwork-market would have different, perhaps more immediate pressures for making desirable cities and prosocial governance, as their customers will have pull rather than merely push factors in weighing exit-options, but the lone patch still has a a unique, aligned incentive for rent creation.
Guy’s a loser who your average man on the street would push into a locker. His ideology is what happens when you never have to do any manual labour growing up.
Have you missed that the power rulers of the sovcorps still compete with other sovcorps? Basically like nation vs nation
But the new Yarvin is much more focused on discussing the internal power rulers than emphasising that kind of external competitive dynamic, even though the latter should actually be the key to the system’s success. What you say is closer to the old Yarvin, though even there “nation vs nation” isn’t exactly “a global spider web of tens, even hundreds, or thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries.”
In my view there is no contrast or vibe shift between early and recent Yarvin. There is no contradiction between totalitarianism and the anarchy of patchwork. They are two sides of the same coin.
From this post, it would seem that you have an extremely democratic, so to say, view of capitalism; that you believe capitalism exists to satisfy the needs of "the people". But as a reader of Land you must understand, capitalism does not exist for the people nor even for the human being. Its the other way around. The "democracy" of neocameralism is exit. The Scarface CEO-monarch will lose his customers, that is, his citizens. But this democratic agency is of course reserved only for those sovereign individuals who can afford it. The aim of the CEO-monarch is to maintain and increase his tax revenue. He does not need "citizens" per se, but people who are able to pay him maximally. It is to those people that he must cater. This is what constrains his decisions. It is why neoliberalism followed globalism and the free movement of corporations among legislations of their choosing.
The kind of capitalistic democracy you are evoking is inherently elitist and tends towards elitism as capital accumulates upon itself increasing inequality. Votes are not distributed equally. The asymptote of the patchwork is, therefore, an increasingly small oligarchical class enforcing its claim to private property through imcreasingly authoritarian and "undemocratic" means. This is precisely the post-libertarianism of Hoppe which Yarvin develops to its logical conclusions.
PS. As is probably clear, I am not defending the views of Yarvin or Hoppe. In my last post, I try to show how their thinking follows from a fundamental misunderstanding regarding the nature of monarchy and aristocracy, and in Yarvin's case, a misreading of de Jouvenel.
How often does Curtis write about "exit" nowadays? I haven't read him since the end of UR, so I don't actually know.
I don't think he talks about it much anymore. In a GM post from a few years ago, How to govern the libs, he critiques exit or secession as a political strategy, arguing instead for reset, a more RAGE approach to "rule the libs". I think the shift of emphasis from exit to reset corresponds to diminishing of nuance in his thinking which is why Lê sees him now as less "democratic". Nevertheless, I think there is a clear continuity and I think the post demonstrates it: exit and reset are two strategies, two means towards the same end (safeguarding property rights and "order" amidst rising social tensions and inequality), which is why the latter can be judged as being better than the former.
What does "RAGE" stand for? And if they are two strategies toward the same end, WHAT causes one to be evaluated as better than the latter? I can think of plenty of examples of the virtue of exit (east vs west Germany, north vs south Korea/Vietnam, Communist China vs Hong Kong & Taiwan, Cuba vs Florida, early US vs Europe, French Huguenots moving to Britain, middle eastern & eastern European Jews moving to Israel, Venezuelans & Zimbabweans fleeing to their neighbors). But when I think of "reset", the example of the Khmer Rouge and "year zero" strike me as complete disasters.
Retire all government employees. This shift is similar to that of Peter Thiel when he went from seasteading to funding Trump and Vance campaigns. Exit is only not losing, not victory. And history is written by the victors.
Not all government employees are retiring. DOGE hasn't actually made that much of a dent in the budget. Despite all the headlines, deportations aren't even higher than prior admins. Garett Jones has been snarking that it's a "skills issue" https://x.com/GarettJones/status/1916493242037653941 For all Trump's gloating about "winning so much you'll be tired of winning", he's lost every general election he's run against a man, he's sabotaged the Republicans by telling people not to vote in Georgia and later endorsing a streak of primary candidates who got trounced in their general elections. He's made immigration & free trade more popular by opposing them and becoming unpopular himself. The Liberals were on track to lose in Canada, but polarization against him has somehow brought them back (though admittedly they did replace their unpopular leader, as the Dems did with Biden). Louisiana was a heavily pro-Trump state, and Republican turnout recently crashed in their referenda https://pathgolden.substack.com/p/gop-rolls-worst-electorate-ever-asked Trump does not look like a victor who's going to get to write his own history.