Curtis Yarvin Contra Mencius Moldbug (Part 1)

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

In January 2025, during the leadup to Trump’s second inauguration, Curtis Yarvin went viral once again in the wake of his New York Times interview. In the first part of this essay, I want to provide a clear and accessible introduction to Yarvin’s “neoreactionary” political philosophy as he originally laid it out on his blog Unqualified Reservations (2007-09) while writing under the pseudonym of Mencius Moldbug. In the second instalment, I want to identify and critique a conceptual vibe shift in his more recent writings on his substack Gray Mirror (2020-present) published under his own name, as well as in the New York Times interview. I’m going to show how the old Yarvin or Moldbug can provide a critique of the new Yarvin, proving once again that the original is always “better”—or at least has less conceptual plot holes—than the sequel. There are of course left, right, and other critiques that can and have been made of him, but this one is immanent.

Between 2007-2009, Yarvin—writing under the nom de guerre of Moldbug—developed a new political philosophy on his blog Unqualified Reservations, which soon garnered a sizeable following among Silicon Valley’s tech bros. Moldbug started his blog in 2007, just before the Global Financial Crisis and what many libertarians condemned as the biggest government handout in history to the banks responsible. While he agrees with libertarians’ theoretical understanding of the bank bailouts as a state socialist intervention in the economy, he rejects their impotent response of either cynically complaining that everything is going wrong or dreaming of a libertarian utopia without actually contesting the State’s advance in any practical way. “Libertarianism is, as its detractors are always quick to claim, an essentially impractical ideology. I would love to live in a libertarian society. The question is: is there a path from here to there? And if we get there, will we stay there?”[1] Nor does Moldbug see the rising white nationalism on the far right as a genuine solution. For the hoods over their heads prevent white nationalists from seeing that the fundamental problem is not so much immigrants as it is democracy, whether the populace is all white or not:

I am not a white nationalist because I don’t find white nationalism useful or effective. I don’t feel it helps me accurately perceive reality. In fact, I think it distorts reality. And I believe white nationalism is a very ineffective political device for solving the very real problems about which it complains.[2]

Whatever thought crimes he can be legitimately charged with, Moldbug can neither be fairly mistaken for your run-of-the-mill libertarian like Ludwig von Mises or F. A. Hayek, nor a white nationalist like David Duke or Richard Spencer.

In place of tiki torches and utopian daydreams, Moldbug proposes a political solution that he calls “formalism” or “neocameralism.” Not unlike Hobbes, he holds that the fundamental evil that government should be designed to prevent is disorder, anarchy, and violence. This chiefly arises when there are no clear-cut rules for deciding which property belongs to whom. “We need a rule that tells us whose wallet is whose. Violence, then, is anything that breaks the rule, or replaces it with a different rule. If the rule is clear and everyone follows it, there is no violence.”[3] To that end, Moldbug proposes that we formalize the current oligarchies that already exist as having an absolute sovereign right over what is presently only implicitly theirs. “Formalism says: let’s figure out exactly who has what, now, and give them a little fancy certificate. Let’s not get into who should have what.”[4] Moldbug thinks this can be achieved by permitting capitalist corporations to purchase and own towns, states, and even whole countries as their own private property. Enabling capitalist corporations to buy entire cities and states not only pragmatically takes into account the current entrenched power relations, but it is even rather ideal. If the government is run like a business, it would have to attract residents to its territory to produce goods and services. The sovereign corporation—or “sovcorp” as Moldbug calls it—would thus have to provide top customer service in the form of creating a safe, clean, and prosperous place to live. In return for getting to live on the sovcorp’s land (what he calls in the following quote “Fnargland”), the residents would perform services and labour that would then be appropriated as a rent tax: “Fnargland is a business. Like any business, it has no reason at all to alienate its customers. Does the barista at Starbucks spit in your coffee? The happier Fnargland can make its residents, the more it can charge them. This is basic economics.”[5] Seeing as a sovcorp can only attract residents if it provides good customer service just like your favourite local coffee shop, Chinese restaurant, or under-the-counter vape store which remembers your name and order, it would have little incentive to oppress its residents despite its newfound sovereign powers.

From time to time, Moldbug characterizes the sovcorp setup as a “neocameralism.” Much as kings and queens owned their kingdoms as their sovereign property, so would the sovcorp own the city, town, or country as its private property. The crucial difference between a trad monarchy and a neocameralist sovcorp is that the latter’s profit motive incentivizes it to hire the best and brightest to manage the realm. In this way, the sovcorp avoids traditional monarchies’ hereditary principle of passing on ownership of the realm to the incestuous king’s sons, whether they be fit for the job or too inbred to rule competently. “The best way for the monarchies of Old Europe to modernize, in my book, would have been to transition the corporation from family ownership to shareholder ownership, eliminating the hereditary principle which caused so many problems for so many monarchies.”[6] Whereas the “cameralism” in neocameralism refers to the way that the sovcorp owns the State like a king or queen is sovereign over their realm, the “neo” denotes the way that the lives of the realm’s residents would be vastly improved through the modern free market economy’s competitive selection process.

To be propelled by competition into maximizing its customer service and hence rent tax, a sovcorp cannot exist in a vacuum or echo chamber where Moldbug believes those who currently run our democracies can alone thrive. It must be embedded in what he calls a global “patchwork” where it competes with many other sovcorps for residents by providing the best living conditions, attracting more residents, and so maximizing profits by taxing those residents:

The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spider web of tens, even hundreds, or thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions. If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move. The design is all “exit,” no “voice.”[7]

For the patchwork to function, each sovcorp would have to permit its residents a “free exit” to leave its realm whenever they wished. Moldbug argues that sovcorps would be inclined to do this where trad monarchies and dictatorships are not. If a sovcorp were to prevent its people from leaving, its reputation would soon be in ruins. They would consequently suffer a declining rate of new residents and tourists, and hence a loss of profits. The road to Pyongyang is paved with zero exits:

A realm that pulls this kind of crap cannot be trusted by anyone ever again. It is not even safe to visit. Tourism disappears. The potential real-estate bid from immigrants disappears. And, while your residents are indeed stuck, they are also remarkably sullen and display no great interest in slaving for you.[8]

Through a patchwork in which all agree to a free exit for their residents, the sovcorps would compete with each other and in doing so maximize the prosperity of their lands to attract new residents.

While Moldbug sees the sovcorps through rather rose-tinted glasses, he does qualify that they are likely to encounter a surplus of unemployed people on their territories for whom they have no use. As callously as a titan of the tech industry talking about “human capital” at Foxconn or a military commander moving pawns on a map that represent real soldiers, he concludes that the sovcorps would naturally have to sell these surplus people’s homes, paradoxically forcing them to “freely exit”: “what do we do with them? Sell their slums out from under them, obviously; demo everything, spray for roaches, rodents, and pit bulls, smooth the rubble out with a bulldozer or two, and possibly a little aerial bombing; erect new residential districts suitable for Russian oligarchs. Next question?”[9] Moreover, while everyone is free to leave a sovcorp, this does not necessarily mean that another sovcorp in the patchwork will take them in. Given surplus populations will be forced to leave without any other sovcorps being willing to welcome them, the patchwork condemns many to a no man’s land of permanent homelessness:

Since their customer-service contract gives them the right of exit, these people—call them bezonians—can of course emigrate to any other realm in the Patchwork. This presumes, however, that said realm is willing to accept them. And why would it be? If our design does not provide for the existence of a larger number of human beings whose existence anywhere is not only unprofitable, but in fact a straight-up loss, to that realm, it is simply inconsistent with reality.[10]

To ensure law and order, Moldbug argues that sovcorps must also develop an immense security system straight out of a big budget dystopian science fiction movie, surveying everything its residents do. He thinks that the residents would accept this so long as it resulted in a virtually total absence of crime.[11] For many, however, the patchwork system will by now sound rather less than ideal as vast numbers of people are condemned to permanent refugee status while those living in the sovcorps are watched over by all-seeing corporate surveillance States. If this is not a problem for Moldbug, it is because he sees a good, prosperous society as one which is able to maintain order and security rather than freedom—at least for its residents. As far as he is concerned, the deportation of surplus populations and the constant surveillance of residents is a price worth paying.

The main obstacle in the sovcorps’ way is not in his view the vast numbers of refugees or surveillance States it would produce. It is the dogmatic belief that the current Western democracies are the best and only game in town. Moldbug contends that democracy has become a religion, and more precisely an “ultra-Calvinist” sect of Protestantism, as it affirms the four Calvinist tenets: the universal “equality” of all men; the “futility of violence”; “social justice” or the “fair distribution of goods”; and a “managed society.”[12] This is not to say that ultra-Calvinists can’t be atheists. But this is only on condition that they still believe in the equality of all men, and hence state management over the fair redistribution of goods. In an infamously long series of blogposts called How Dawkins Got Pwned, for instance, Moldbug argues that, although evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is a rather virulent atheist, he is also a cultural Christian in that he still has faith in Calvinism’s four moral tenets. While “Dawkins is an atheist,” his “Einsteinism exhibits many synapomorphies with Christianity. For example, it appears that Professor Dawkins believes in the fair distribution of goods, the futility of violence, the universal brotherhood of man, and the reification of community.”[13] Religions require a Church to tell people what articles of faith to believe in and which prescription blue pills or holy wafers to swallow. In much the same vein, democracies rely on what Moldbug calls the “Cathedral” of the government bureaucracy, the mainstream legacy media, and the educational and especially university systems. As Moldbug sees it, the only thing standing in the way of his neocameralist utopia is the Cathedral’s matrix of the Academy, the Press, and the State, particularly their universal dogma that democracy is the last society standing at the end of history.

Though Moldbug wants to overthrow democracy, he does not advocate a violent revolution to do so. Instead, he suggests that, since democracy is sustained like the fairies in Peter Pan simply by people believing in it as what Churchill called the least bad political system possible, neoreactionaries must discredit democracy by showing how the patchwork of sovcorps would provide greater prosperity, security, and order. “All the Reaction must do is convince reasonable, educated men and women of good will to support stable, effective, and reliable government.”[14] Moldbug tells us that this cultural coup d’état ought to be staged through the establishment of an anti-university or “antiversity.” Its mission is to develop an alternative network of information that counters the Cathedral by contesting democracy’s legitimacy and proffering a sovcorp as the only way to restore peace and prosperity. In something that sounds in hindsight like the playbook for Trump’s presidential election campaigns, the antiveresity would begin by developing alternative media networks and think tanks to counter the Press and the Academy. Introducing red pills into the water supply, these would then reshape public opinion such that it is conducive to the emergence of a new political party which seeks to enact a neocameralist program. Finally, the party ought to cohere around an individual leader—preferably an experienced CEO—who can bring their business tactics to the art of governance by dismantling the democratic State from within. “So here is how the Program starts: the Party holds power for only as long as it takes to hire a qualified administrator—an experienced corporate CEO, perhaps. It then presents that administrator with (a) a conflict-free responsibility structure; and (b) absolute sovereign authority.”[15] Sound familiar?...

Such are in any case the foundational pillars of Moldbug’s neocameralist political philosophy: the critique of democracy; the proposed solution of a patchwork of privately owned States or sovcorps; and the means of getting there through an antiversity carving out enough cultural hegemony to hurl a CEO-king into power.

To be continued in Part 2…

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[1] Mencius Moldbug, “A Formalist Manifesto,” Unqualified Reservations, April 23, 2007, accessed June 14, 2017, http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com.au/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted.html.

[2] Mencius Moldbug, “Why I Am Not a White Nationalist,” Unqualified Reservations, November 22, 2007, accessed June 14, 2017, http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com.au/2007/11/why-i-am-not-white-nationalist.html.

[3] Moldbug, “Formalist Manifesto.”

[4] Moldbug, “Formalist Manifesto.”

[5] Mencius Moldbug, “Good Government as Good Customer Service,” Unqualified Reservations, May 25, 2007, accessed July 5, 2017, http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com.au/2007/05/good-government-as-good-customer.html.

[6] Mencius Moldbug, “Democracy as Adaptive Fiction,” Unqualified Reservations, July 25, 2007, accessed July 6, 2017, http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com.au/2007/07/democracy-as-adaptive-fiction.html.

[7] Mencius Moldbug, “Patchwork: A Positive Vision (Part 1)”, Unqualified Reservations, November 13, 2008, accessed July 7, 2017, http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com.au/2008/11/patchwork-positive-vision-part-1.html.

[8] Moldbug, “Patchwork (Part 1).”

[9] Moldbug, “Patchwork (Part 1).”

[10] Moldbug, “Patchwork (Part 1).”

[11] Mencius Moldbug, “Patchwork 2: Profit Strategies for Our New Corporate Overlords,” Unqualified Reservations, November 20, 2008, accessed July 7, 2017, http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com.au/2008/11/patchwork-2-profit-strategies-for-our.html.

[12] Mencius Moldbug, “The Ultracalvinist Hypothesis: In Perspective,” Unqualified Reservations, June 24, 2007, accessed July 6, 2017, http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com.au/2007/06/ultracalvinist-hypothesis-in.html.

[13] Mencius Moldbug, “How Dawkins Got Pwned (Part 2)”, Unqualified Reservations, October 4, 2007, accessed July 5, 2017, http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com.au/2007/10/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-2.html.

[14] Mencius Moldbug, “A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations (Part 9b)”, Unqualified Reservations, October 11, 2009, accessed July 9, 2017, http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com.au/2009/10/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html.

[15] Mencius Moldbug, “A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations (Part 9d)”, Unqualified Reservations, November 19, 2007, accessed July 6, 2017, http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com.au/2009/11/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html.