Unqualified Reservations, Vol. 01

by Curtis Yarvin, Mencius Moldbug

Volume 1 of 3 of the print version of Unqualified Reservations.

Volume 1 includes:

Formalist Manifesto – UR’s first-ever post and a brief summary of the the main themes found throughout the remainder of the work.
An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives – Over 250 pages detailing the history, meaning, and internal contradictions of the ideology of progressivism. The text that gave us “the Cathedral.”
How Dawkins Got Pwned – A critique of the politics of Universalism, its foundations in both English and American strains of Protestantism, and its present manifestations in modern liberal secularism. The first analysis of Wokeism as a religion, a decade before Wokeism was ever conceived.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction

502 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2023

About the author

Curtis Guy Yarvin is an American political theorist and software developer. He is known for advocating the replacement of democracy with a monarchy headed by a CEO or dictator, often using the pen name Mencius Moldbug.

Reviews

[Bryce]

Decline to give it a rating, because while i find the general idea that bourgeois democracy being rotten to the core agreeable, the pernicious gang of Liberal journalists and academics inside Yarvin's Cathedral stirring away at a noxious brew of worm-laden soup to feed the ineffectual politicians that propel their bureaucratic hellscape fairly accurate, I seriously detest the solution (Jacobite-style reaction)

I think Yarvin is a sly propagandist for a particular view of western political evolution and history. One that is about two hundred years late to the party. I mean this in a nice way.
There are lots of 3/4-truths embedded in his prose. For example; the American Revolution is not some triumph of freedom over despotism, the Civil War was not necessarily fought for antislavery reasons, Obama Kinda Sucks, Actually, and that Protestantism is a general stain on human advancement (just not in the way dear Mencius thinks).

He uses a term "sincere mendacity" about 2/3 of the way through the text to describe a New-Deal era journalist's comparison of Nazi Germany and the USSR. I think our good Mr. Moldbug is also sincerely mendacious about a lot in his screed (FDR is a diet bolshevik, Pinochet was based, Lenin is evil as hitler, apartheid is good, broad economic and social progress is bad). I could continue. Lastly, there is a reason Moldbug does not elaborate, or dare to even mention the spectre of capitalism in his historiography, or the ways in which elites (like those who support Yarvin) corrupt this system even further, and stifle any attempts to buffer the cycle of Bullshit that emits from our political environment. No matter how hard these silicon valley reactionaries try to will it into existence, I fail to see how a Russia-in-the-90s style crack-up of our public institutions, & the government changing into a joint-stock company with them at the head of a new artisocracy (and new cathedral) is..good?

[Alex]

Already reviewed the individual segments of this book but now it's hear I may aswell give it a rating.

A good book containing writings from a simpler age (the mid 2000s) ahead of it's time as far as political philosophy on the internet goes, Elitist thought and in-depth revisionism that writes very similarly to modern blogs on the subject just with ancient cultural references. In particular the connection made in this book to protestantism in America and the progressivism of modernity is incredibly intriguing to me and noone writes about it quite like Yarvin. Give it a read.

[Daniel]

Essential reading for anyone that seeks to understand the world we live in today

[Deema]

If you haven’t paid attention to Yarvin’s writings, you are not a serious intellectual of the 21st century

“Replacing your own ideology is a lot like do it yourself brain surgery. It requires patience, tolerance, and a high pain threshold. And very steady hands. Whoever you are, you already have an ideology in there and if it wanted to come out it would have done so on its own”
Curtis Yarvin
UR, formalist manifesto

[Sebastian Loftus]

Yarvin is interesting. That isn’t true of most political thinkers today.

[Peter]

Will be remembered as one of the greatest pieces of Political Science ever written.

[Tadek]

Mind-blowing for people who've never considered things like the American Revolutionary War having dissenters, having another side who believed they were as correct as the separatists and so on.

Maybe it was more interesting in 2007. It cites some interesting contemporary writers I was unaware of which is good.

That this guy was a libertarian before reading Thomas Carlyle (his words) explains a lot.

[Dylan]

Translating blog posts to a book is no easy feat but they nailed it. I hope more of the blogosphere of the 00s and 10s is saved in hard cover format. So much of the good writing has happened online at this point and it will be extremely sad when we lose it all when we are forced to EMP the Earth to stop the AI god.

[slater heil]

Yarvin may be extreme in his prescriptions, but the ideology has proven a much needed antidote to many the over corrections of progressivism by influencing tech elite.

Thinking through extremes is how we find reasonable balances. And, he's often unassailably correct about the diagnostic.

It's a good book to one-shot people who are otherwise curious about the world, but have been indoctrinated to one side or another. The nuanced context he sets for issues force one's mind open about a wide range of important ideas.

[J. Johnson]

If you had desired to run misshapen circuits around anything resembling a useful commentary on contemporary politics, whether to waste time or deceive yourself, Curtis Yarvin spits out more editions of his magnum opus for your browser, kindle, filch-paperback and cardboard-cover than you could ever want or need. I would send a copy of An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives to someone as a way to smoke out whether they could read an overly long article and disagree with it. Yarvin concocts a complete and at first glance plausible alt-history for the atheist neoreactionary moment in which modernity is a kind of failed offshoot of Christianity and begins sometime in the medieval period, which lets creed-fluid attendees of their local Reformed seminary feel justified in saying in the same breath that the Catholic Church created modernity while maintaining that the answer to 1776 is 1536. All the while we can gather that something as flat and sticky as a Western civilization is in trouble, and we need to correct it through techno-Girardianism. Once you sign onto this policy network, your guides will be a bob-haired Yarvin, Facebook founder Nick Land and blubbering perspirer Peter Thiel leveraging esoteric symbols incorrectly to convince you that something is happening. Ogling at hayyim will placate you more than ever, because once you're thinking of yourself as a pig headed for slaughter, the only thing left to do is eat up. Let the 'dark elves' handle the knife.

[Jack Skorzeny]

This book belongs to a genre called "political horror."