An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

by Mencius Moldbug

This open letter challenges everything you thought you knew about politics and history. We all like to think our minds are open—but is yours open enough to proceed?

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Economics, Essays, Cultural

421 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 10, 2015

About the author

Pen name of American political theorist and software developer Curtis Yarvin.

Reviews

[Alice Nilsson · Rating 3 out of 5]

looooooooooooooooong winded af.
essentially progressivism is a religion disguised as secular so moldbug thinks we
need stock-corporations run our world.
good analysis; wrong answers

[Charles Haywood · Rating 3 out of 5]

My project here is to analyze, in the detail required for all necessary understanding, the thought of Curtis Yarvin, who wrote under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin is the most prominent figure of what has been called the Dark Enlightenment, one thread of modern reactionary thought. My short summary is that he offers mediocre analysis with some flashes of insight. Even so, his thought is ultimately mostly worthless, because his program for political change is silly, since it fails to understand both history and human nature, and is ultimately indistinguishable from the program of the Left. Overall I was very disappointed, and this write-up is shorter than I expected when beginning my project, since there is not all that much interesting to talk about.

As I read and write on Reaction, I continue to divide its modern thought into three basic groups, at least as far as its American incarnation. The first is those who endorse the Enlightenment and merely think that the American experiment has gone wrong from its ideal position, either in 1787 or 1866. Generally, this is associated with scholars who follow the late Leo Strauss. The second group, what I call Augustans, take a dim view of democracy and focus on power and its uses; they are ambivalent about or hostile to the Enlightenment. This group has a major sub-group, what I call “civil institutionalists,” who reject the Enlightenment but focus on the revival of society, not the uses of power. The third, who like to call themselves the “Dark Enlightenment,” a name that encapsulates both their objection to the actual Enlightenment and their atheist perspective, is a loose confederation whose most prominent philosopher is probably Yarvin. It is the Dark Enlightenment (also self-called “Neoreaction” or “NRx”) we are examining today, through the prism of Yarvin.

My own purpose in bothering to do this is to, ultimately, offer my own program for Reaction that is achievable, rational, and comports with reality and human nature. My premise is that our current Western structure is in terminal decline—though the decline I see is very different than the decline seen by Yarvin and his allies. Thus, I don’t care about the Dark Enlightenment as such, and am most definitely not going to join the team. I am merely using it as a mirror, to construct my own thoughts. If I were a betting man, I would say my own final program will be Augustan in nature, rejecting much of the Enlightenment and pushing a combination of Christianity and human achievement as a unifying force. Its avatars will be men like Ferdinand Magellan, Robert Gould Shaw, Hernán Cortes and Ignatius Loyola. Still, seeing what the Dark Enlightenment has to offer is actually clarifying for my program, since it shows the blind alleys one can go down.

This may seem like a lot of effort to put into something, the Dark Enlightenment, that is not an important movement, if measured by actual numbers of people who are paying any attention. Certainly, in the ten years that it’s been extant, it has accomplished nothing of its goals and has no political traction. In fact, it seems to mostly be dead or dying, having been overtaken by real events on the right wing of the political spectrum. So, I think of the Dark Enlightenment thinkers as mostly creators of thought experiments. Some of the thinkers are simply useless or bizarre, such as the very significant transhumanist/“accelerationist” contingent. None of them are leaders or have any charisma at all; they aspire to be Rousseau, perhaps, but without the magnetism, social acceptance or lionization. Still, given that our present situation is bad in many ways (though good in others), and it is both unsustainable and increasingly harming, rather than helping, human flourishing, thought experiments may be useful.

This present analysis is the entirety of the time I intend to spend on the Dark Enlightenment, since I have already reached the point of sharply diminishing returns. But to create the present analysis, I have spent quite a bit of effort. It has not been easy or particularly pleasant—not only have I read much of what Yarvin has written on his blog, I have also read various other prominent writers in the Dark Enlightenment, none of whom can actually write (notably Michael Anissimov and Nick Land), as well as writers outside to whom Yarvin points his readers, both modern and older. I have also read criticisms of Yarvin, and of the Dark Enlightenment more generally, ranging from Scott Alexander’s (of Slate Star Codex) semi-famous (in these circles) Anti-Reactionary FAQ to science fiction author David Brin’s rants. As dim a view as I have of the Dark Enlightenment’s program, and much of their analysis, those few on the Left who actually engage with it generally suffer from a complete lack of reasoning or interesting things to say. What they offer is basically a compilation of false and unexamined statements combined with personal insults, usually using what Scott Adams aptly calls “linguistic kill shots.” The sole exception seems to be Scott Alexander’s extended attempted factual takedown of Anissimov, which is not very good, just the best of a bad lot, and of limited value to any overall analysis, since Anissimov is a transhumanist believer in the Singularity, which makes him invincibly stupid and thus an easy target.

Even after this effort, it has not proved easy to engage with the Dark Enlightenment. Yarvin’s writing, which is the best among its thinkers, has numerous debilitating deficiencies. First, the organization is atrocious; while any given paragraph is usually written reasonably well, and the flow of discussion is more or less in one direction, there is no clear organization on argument. It is mostly musings, bordering on conversation, something the blog format tends to encourage. Musings have their place, but they have no point in political manifestos, and the reader suspects obfuscation. I haven’t read any Lenin, yet, but I’m very sure Lenin didn’t muse in his writings. Second, the snarky tone of ironic superiority grates on the reader, both just because it’s a bad tone, and because there is no reason for the reader to believe that Yarvin has earned it. Third, he beats metaphors to death; if I have to hear about the "Matrix"’s “red pill” one more time I’m going to scream. Fourth, and the single worst structural element of Yarvin’s writing, is that he will frequently create a link to refer to a third-party source, but the link will not specify what he is trying to show, and so any point simply hangs there unless the reader goes hunting. Or he will quote something with a link to it, not specifying the author and expecting the reader to go figure it out and then return. This would be bad enough, except that maybe 70% of Yarvin’s links are to Wikipedia, and of the remaining 30%, maybe 80% are dead. So, the reader reading a printout or a Kindle version offline is left mystified at critical points, trying to parse out what Yarvin is trying to say. If he is reading online, any flow of thought is continuously disrupted by the need to click, only to find that, in the case of Wikipedia, Yarvin could have summarized his point and omitted the link, and in the case of dead links, that he is baffled. This is, again, no way to write a political manifesto. Fifth, Yarvin pretty frequently shows that he is not as educated as he likes to think. For example, he repeatedly ascribes to Machiavelli the phrase “if you strike at a king, you must kill him,” though it really comes from Emerson (admittedly, a vastly inferior mind to Machiavelli). And it was not Edmund Burke, but Adam Smith, who said “there is a lot of ruin in a nation.” Such errors, rarely fatal but always irritating and undermining Yarvin’s claim to have a macroscopic view, crop up with metronomic regularity.

All Yarvin’s writings were written as posts on his blog, Unqualified Reservations, which is now dormant. It was active from 2007 until 2016, though the majority of writings took place between 2007 and 2009. The blog itself is wide-ranging, but Yarvin offered four multi-part writings, written as serials, totaling approximately a thousand pages in standard text, that seem to encapsulate most or all of his philosophy. The most talked-about is titled "An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives." The second, which has significant overlaps with the first, is "A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations." Both of these I have read, twice, along with at least some reading of most of the (obscure) books he links to within those writings, and those two will be the focus of my analysis. Two other writings are more focused: "How Dawkins Got Pwned," a shorter screed attacking Richard Dawkins for being insufficiently dedicated to actual atheism and true unbiased inquiry, and Moldbug on Carlyle, a set of admiring essays about the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle. The first is unreadable; the second not terribly interesting. For all the attention Yarvin has gotten of late, it is not at all clear to me that any significant number of people have actually read anything Yarvin has written. All his four serial writings are available for the Kindle and have been for years; they have an average of two brief reviews on Amazon, from fans of his. The number of comments on his posts isn’t high—maybe an average of a hundred, with most of those coming from repeated comments from a handful of people. And his personal Blogger profile, prominent on his site, apparently over all time, has 60,509 views—of which ten are from me, since every time you go or hit “Refresh,” another is added. My conclusion is that if the more mainstream press had not occasionally mentioned Yarvin, nobody would ever have heard of him. Which does not show he is wrong, but does suggest delusions of grandeur, which is buttressed by his habit of stating that what he says is, once revealed, self-evident and irrefutable. Yarvin, like all Dark Enlightenment types, regards himself as a genius. It gets tiresome.

But Yarvin does offer a competent and half-original political typology. First, he defines progressives and reactionaries. To him, a reactionary is nothing more than “a believer in order.” Progressives have a more complex definition, because they are self-delusional liars. They “see themselves as the modern heirs of a tradition of change, stretching back to the Enlightenment. They see change as inherently good because they see this history as a history of progress, i.e., improvement. In other words, they believe in Whig history.” Progressivism’s real raison d’etre is being “a way for people who want power, to organize,” while at the same time being able to “rationalize this ruthless, carnivorous activity as a philanthropic cause. The real attraction is the thrill of power and victory—sometimes with a little money thrown in.” And so the core distinction between right and left is that “Right represents peace, order, and security; left represents war, anarchy, and crime. . . . The left is chaos and anarchy, and the more anarchy you have, the more power there is to go around.”

Yarvin calls the “Synopsis” the received wisdom of Progressivism at any point on any particular matter, which wisdom always changes in the direction of being more left-wing. More left-wing means movement towards entropy, toward the opposite of order. Presumably the pursuit of egalitarianism and emancipation, the core values of the Enlightenment Left, aligns with entropy, although Yarvin does not make this argument explicitly (suggesting a failure to understand actual Enlightenment thought). According to Yarvin, this slide toward entropy began with the radical Protestants, Dissenters, which led to the Enlightenment, which has led to nothing good. Finally, Yarvin’s most famous definition, and neologism, which has achieved mainstream use among conservatives, is the “Cathedral”, which is “the set of institutions that produce and propagate the Synopsis—mainstream academia, journalism, and education.” This is a form of spontaneous coordination, “Gleichschaltung without Goebbels.” Effectively, “the press and universities control the State,” through the vehicle of the Cathedral. It is not a coincidence that the term has religious overtones, as we will see below, though Yarvin is a hardcore atheist.

I think this is mostly exactly right about Progressives, and certainly the Cathedral is a compelling and accurate image, although as I have delineated elsewhere, there are multiple types of power that attract, and they should be distinguished. Yarvin notes “The progressive never sees it this way. . . . Usually there is some end which is unequivocally desirable—often even from the reactionary perspective. But if you could somehow design a progressive movement that could achieve its goal without seizing power or smashing its enemies, it would have little energy and find few supporters. What makes these movements so popular is the opportunity for action and the prospect of victory.” “The continued existence of reactionary [i.e., Right] phenomena provides evidence that progressives are struggling against dark forces of titanic and unbounded strength. . . . So it is reality itself that progressivism attacks. Reality is the perfect enemy; it always fights back, it can never be defeated, and infinite energy can be expended in unsuccessfully resisting it.” This explains the unhinged nature of late-stage Progressivism—having successfully overcome the Right on any issue that could plausibly be tied to reality, they have moved on to wholly fantasy political programs waged with increasing shrillness, such as the demand that mentally ill people believing they are really the opposite sex be praised and accommodated, including by surgery for children against the parents’ wishes, or that we pretend a child can have two fathers, one of which bore him. I can hardly wait for their next few crusades, because my guess (not Yarvin’s) is that their reach has exceeded their grasp.

Whether that is true is really the key question for our future. Yarvin correctly identifies that history has moved in a Progressive way for two hundred years (he would say longer, but his grasp of history is poor). To Progressives, of course, this is because they are correct and on the right side of history. More likely, it is because they have a unifying, simple theme attractive to a wide range of people: you can be granted power over others, and, with respect to the natural world, ye shall be as gods. Whatever the reason, this process has accelerated in recent decades, creating a centrifugal force that will, I think, force a fragmentation that will be an opportunity. Needless to say, for Yarvin, democracy is not desirable in the abstract; it was a failure when tried, and now we do not even have democracy; rather, now, “the government implements [the Cathedral’s] scientific public policy in the public interest.”

Back to the analysis. Most progressives are part of the ruling class, what Yarvin calls Brahmins. Opposed to them are Townies. Brahmins are, on average, richer, more fashionable, tied to elite jobs, and viewed as superior. This is basically the red state/blue state distinction; or Joan Williams’s “professional-managerial” elite, or any of the many other variations on classification of Americans that have lately become fashionable. Over time, Progressivism always wins in America, and the Right always retreats. Progressivism, since it is merely the desire for power manifested as the demand for change, is a predatory phenomenon, both inside the country, where Brahmins prey on the Townies, and outside, such as in World War II, where the worldwide Progressive alliance started the war and crushed non-Progressive movements, a process that has continued globally since. Yarvin is continually spitting epithets at Nazis and fascists, the latter poorly defined as “neomilitarism” in the Wilhelmine mold, while admitting that they are reactionary movements opposed to Progressives, which creates what may charitably be called a feeling of dissonance.

So that’s the modern world of Curtis Yarvin. On to normative claims. The core premise of Dark Enlightenment types is that Western society has gotten worse on every relevant objective measure, most especially in personal security against violence, but also on other measures. But this is false. What Steven Pinker gets wrong is not that the world has gotten better on certain measures; it is why it has gotten better. As I have demonstrated at length, the Enlightenment has nothing to do with it, and in fact the Enlightenment project has reached its inevitable end. But that says little or nothing about the future potential for human progress and human flourishing, although to be sure the West will need to be released from the idiot dead end into which the Enlightenment has led it, which is now actively generating the opposite of human progress and human flourishing.

Anyway, Yarvin’s core claim is that the only reason for a government to exist is to ensure peace, order, and security. According to him, all modern governments fail, and fail increasingly, at this. Around the world, from the United States to Naples to Guatemala, peace, order and security a hundred years ago was much greater. It really cannot be overemphasized that all Yarvin cares about is personal security. He does not mean national security (he wants to return to what he incorrectly labels “classic international law,” basically might makes right, in international relations), he means lack of violent crime. He claims that crime in America and England (he never says anything relevant about the history of any other country, other than occasional cherry-picked narrow pieces of data) has exploded over the past century. I am not sure of the truth of this, other than that crime in America has decreased significantly in the past twenty years, and crime in England increased.

Regardless of the statistical truth about crime, this is a pauperized vision of government, ignoring thousands of years of political philosophy on the question of the purpose of government as it relates to human flourishing. It is, however, a vision of government that fits well (though by no means perfectly) with the only pre-nineteenth-century political philosopher Yarvin cares about: Machiavelli. The Dark Enlightenment is all in with Machiavelli—not with the details of his thought, with which they cannot be bothered to engage, but with Machiavelli’s rejection of virtue as having any relevance to governance. Yarvin has no different view of human nature or human teleology than Progressives. For the Dark Enlightenment, it is instrumentalism all the way down, and the sole desired fruit for the populace of that instrumentalism is personal security against non-state violence. As far as I can tell, few of the major Dark Enlightenment figures have any moral vision at all. They don’t even have utilitarian morality, although they generally view the world through a utilitarian lens. This leads some of them into openly endorsing eugenics (which was, of course, a Progressive invention widely implemented once already in the United States), and I suspect all of them would endorse it in practice. I further suspect they’d endorse all sorts of things in practice that would be very unpleasant. There is some truth in the claim that Yarvin makes, which I discuss below . . . .

[More, if you're interested, at my blog, www.theworthyhouse.com]

[YeastOfEden · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm pretty close to the intended audience of this book. And it is a book, despite taking the form of a series of blog posts. I consider myself pretty open-minded, or I try to be. And I’m a progressive, certainly by the author’s definition, because his definition of the word seems to be “anyone who likes democracy”. An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives was written in 2008, and while obviously dated, is even more fascinating to read in 2021. There was a resurgence of interest in this work in 2017, at the height of paranoia about the “alt-right”, because Steve Bannon, former White House Chief Strategist and founder of propaganda machine Breitbart, admired the book and recommended everyone read it. The writer, Curtis Yarvin, who used the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, has gone out of his way to distance himself from the alt-right and Bannon, proclaiming many times that he wants nothing to do with them, and I believe him. But if Yarvin doesn’t like them, they certainly like his ideas: the idea of being “redpilled” originates from this book, and many on the dissident right cite him as the intellectual powerhouse of anti-democratic thought. I have a sneaking suspicion that most people who read this work secretly agree with it already, but as a left-wing, liberal, multiculturalist, bluepilled cuck, how did I take it? Well, simply put, the Open Letter is a work of poetry. It’s a very interesting poem with some neat themes and wordplay, like the works Yarvin read at a poetry slam back in the 90s, and it offers a quaint and interesting way of looking at the world. But it is not the serious work of political analysis it claims to be.

But what is the Open Letter? Basically, the main thrust of its argument is that democracy, as a political system, is a failure. It should be destroyed, Yarvin claims, and the ideal government is a cross between a dictatorship and a libertarian utopia, with a country run like a CEO running a corporation. Interspersed throughout are a lot of digressions, anecdotes, and complaints about how horrible, awful, and stinky the twentieth century was. I wouldn’t judge the Open Letter so harshly if it wasn’t so hyped up online. The top of the blog’s current site proudly proclaims that reading it will “cure your brain”. Another seemingly popular blog makes the even bolder claim that “if you have not read Moldbug, you do not understand modern politics or modern history”. I will admit that, despite being a progressive cuck, I have a fascination with unorthodox or taboo thought. I think there’s a certain personality type that enjoys exploring the best, most steelmanned arguments for all ideologies, no matter how horrifying society might find them. It’s almost like a game, a test of how “open-minded” you truly are, to be led through the crucible of ideas you find repulsive at first glance, and either emerging on the other side even stronger, or becoming radicalized. How thrilling, for a very specific and weird kind of person at least. I happen to be that kind of weirdo, and I was expecting that such a lengthy work from a clearly intelligent and well-read author would be the biggest, fattest redpill of all. But there’s so much wrong with it I scarcely know where to begin, and would only be able to scratch the surface in this review.

I think that in some ways, Yarvin is a gifted writer. But his biggest weakness is his inability to stay focused. He meanders from subject to subject, claiming that a chapter is going to be about practical instructions about how to go about installing his corporatist utopia, and instead rambling about Adolf Hitler the entire time, of whom his take is “He had some good ideas, but he went about it all wrong.” He finally gets to the subject in the next chapter, but not without going on an extended and unrelated ramble about how people actually agree with him because some random comments about deporting illegal immigrants on a news article got a lot of likes. Yarvin claims to love data, logic, and evidence, but makes his case entirely in anecdotes, extended quotes from 19th-century statesmen, and rants. Yarvin thunders through the pages of history, labelling some people brilliant wonderful redpilled geniuses, like Lord Macaulay and Enoch Powell, and others evil horrible cowardly stuck-up jerks, like Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, and really anyone who disagrees with him. In particular, he has an unhealthy obsession with Timothy Burke, some random professor who happens to run a blog (which is, oddly enough, still going in 2021), and who Yarvin uses as a punching bag to represent the evil, all-encompassing religion of progressivism, which he calls the Cathedral.

Before I proceed, let me say some nice things about the Open Letter. It’s not like the work left me cold and dead - it’s written with such obvious passion that it practically demands that the reader react and respond to it in some way. Like I said, it’s a pretty good poem. And Yarvin’s theory of the Cathedral, while sometimes incoherent, is genuinely interesting to me. He claims that progressivism takes the form of a religion, with universities and the press taking the place of the scriptures, and that kind, educated, well-rounded people are expected to take it as “common sense” or “just reality”, the same way medieval Catholics would have seen their religion. It might sound ridiculous, but I think there’s a kernel of truth in this theory, particularly when applied to the modern-day ideology of antiracism. What started out with noble intentions has become, in 2021, a fanatical religious creed. And think about it this way: modern scholars, perhaps justly, see the scholars of 1921 as bigoted, hateful, and brainwashed by the institutions of patriarchy and white supremacy. But who’s to say that the scholars of 2121 won’t dismiss our own time just as harshly, by standards just as alien to us as our modern notion of “white supremacy” would have been to people a century ago? Do we really think that our morals and values will stand the test of time, and that we’ll always be on the “right side of history”? It’s food for thought, and it’s a fun thought experiment to try and step outside your own time and see how future or past generations might characterize you. Yarvin’s Cathedral isn’t well thought-out and leads him to some crazy conclusions, but it’s a cute idea, and maybe the future will apply similar labels to things we now take as common sense. The main problem is that, if you’re really paying attention, you will notice that his theory of the Cathedral is a complete non-sequitur from his main argument. And he does get a few good hits in on democracy - just a few. He points out how unstable democracy is, how it’s constantly “progressing” but also shifting the goalposts of what it’s progressing to. And he points out how the mental fluctuations of the mob are useless when it comes to the intricacies of running a government. Both solid points, and I wish there were more like them. But here’s my main objection to his argument: okay, sure, democracy has its problems, but as opposed to what?

Yarvin says so many times that democracy is bad, it’s terrible, it’s inefficient, it’s stupid, it doesn’t work. But he rarely gives specific reasons why. I’m no stickler for sources, I don’t think every word of a book needs to be peer-reviewed and footnoted, especially if it’s unpublished. But if you really “need to read Moldbug to understand politics and history”, shouldn’t he at least attempt to take a glance at any studies on this subject, or some data to back up the reams of wild claims he makes? Or is that all just untrustworthy propaganda produced by the “Cathedral”? By my memory, the only piece of hard data he cites is the claim that crime in the UK increased by a factor of 50 from 1900 to the current time. Okay, that’s interesting, we can talk about that. But rather than using that to start a discussion about the claim he seems to be making, like that democracy leads to crime, he just starts ranting about gangs and quoting newspaper articles that add nothing but shock value. Right...as if there weren’t roving bands of gangs during his beloved nineteenth century, and there wasn’t a solid historical literature that suggests crime was worse back then? Does he really think monarchies were more stable, more secure, happier, and healthier than democracies? Rather than considering any possible objections to his claims, he just rambles about whatever he wants and expects the hapless reader to follow.

Yarvin has his own idiosyncratic way of speaking, and he doesn’t slow down for anyone. He uses the word “Whig” to refer to anyone who likes democracy. Democrats are the Inner Party and Republicans are the Outer Party. Wikipedia is “La Wik”, an odd bit of late-2000s blogspeak. Barack Obama is “The Good One”, a term that can’t disguise his hatred for the man. He wants to use a hard reset to liquidate the Cathedral and replace it with a neocameralist utopia organized by the Receiver and ruled by the Director. All this sounds straight out of a YA dystopian novel. Yarvin seems sincere in his convictions, but given the dissident right’s history of disguising themselves in layers upon layers of meta-irony, I can’t help but wonder if parts of this book are deliberately satirical, or exaggerated, or kitsch. If so, I applaud him for it, he got me. If not, I sincerely hope this man’s mental health has improved since the day he wrote these lines:

Dear open-minded progressive: frankly, progressivism is just creepy. Do you really want to associate yourself with it? And if the answer is yes, do you think you’ll you still want to be associated with it after the Good One’s vigorous, musky buttocks have spent a year or two in George W. Bush’s Aeron?

It’s just like Curtis Yarvin to accuse other people of being creepy two sentences before describing Barack Obama’s ass as “vigorous” and “musky”. And yes, whenever the topic of black people comes up, he uses the same weird, racially charged language. In the last chapter, he makes a solid point that when progressives see right-wing violence, their brains connect it to all the ideologies, institutions, and politicians they hate, but at violence done by racial minorities, they only see the individual. This is a solid point, but right after that, Curtis reveals the exact same cognitive bias in himself, just flipped the other way, and he doesn’t even notice. He discusses black gang violence, and gets so angry that he launches into a tirade about a supposed epidemic of black-on-white violence, and connects it to Obama, progressivism, the Cathedral, all the usual suspects. Yarvin has a good critical eye when it comes to the biases and hypocrisies of progressives, but he fails to turn the same critical eye on himself. He mocks progressives for “seeing fascism everywhere”, but he genuinely believes that the US is a communist country. His only problem with McCarthy is that he didn’t go far enough, and at one point, he casually explains that Obama is a Maoist and the New Deal was Stalinist, defensively adding “These are not controversial assertions”. I guess that’s what happens when you lock yourself in an echo-chamber of fellow reactionaries who all agree with you. If progressivism is a religion, Moldbuggery definitely is.

It’s also interesting to read this work in light of our 45th president. Of course, it’s quaint to see Moldbug talking as if George Bush was the worst thing to ever happen to the Republican Party, we’ve gone through so many horrors since 2008. While I don’t like critical race theory, I cling to the left because they’re the only thing standing against the soulless abomination known as the current GOP. Whether it goes down the conspiratorial rabbit holes of Trumpism and QAnon or the nihilistic do-nothingism of Mitch McConnell, I will stick with the Dirty Dems, and will accept a few radicals if it means getting things done. Anyway, in chapter 7, Moldbug describes two types of conservatives, one that tries to break away from the Cathedral completely, and another that tries to coexist with it and pull it in directions it didn’t want to go. The first group includes people like Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace, and the second group includes people like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Trump fits in perfectly with the first group, and the way he describes this group, it’s like he had future-prediction powers or something. And note this bit from chapter 8:

Fourth, there is another way to succeed in the Outer Party. This might be called the Huckabee Plan. On the Huckabee Plan, you succeed by being as stupid as possible. Not only does this attract a surprising number of voters, who may be just as stupid or even stupider...it also attracts the attention of the Cathedral, whose favorite sport is to promote the worst plausible Outer Party candidates.

Of course, he failed to predict that such a presidential candidate could actually win, and that attacking the credibility of the “Cathedral”, namely the press and universities, would become such a common pastime for mainstream conservatives. Also, he declares that “Thatcher got Britain inextricably into the EU”. Yarvin describes conservatism as a wimpy, ineffectual, halfhearted movement that can never resist the onslaught of progressivism. But right-wing populism has won some major victories that Moldbug here declared impossible.

I could go on for an eternity about the Open Letter. Overall, Yarvin had some genuinely interesting things to say about the nature of social progressivism, but his arguments against democracy were weak, and his attempt to make up a “better” system of government were laughable. He talks through the whole work about how much he values order and stability, and I think that’s ironically a perfect argument to use against him. Why not stick with democracy, as imperfect as it is, because it brings order, and order is better than disorder? Why go with his insane plan of firing all civil servants and dissolving the government, which even he admits could easily devolve into fascism? Is it really worse to live in a democracy than a monarchy, or in complete anarchy? These questions and more go unanswered, but I'm approaching my character limit. Long story short, Yarvin asks you to follow his statements rather than look at the data, which is why I describe this as a work of poetry, not analysis. At best, it's a neat poem to get you out of your comfort zone, but it's primarily fodder for people who already agree with it, not progressives. Oh no, I'm almost out of chara

[Vagabond of Letters, DLitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moldbug, while being an atheist, goes to heights and lengths to defend Jews and mock anyone who thinks the tribe holds power disproportionate to its numbers. He's also a Statist who assumes the falsity and impossibility of anarchocapitalism without refuting it.

The book is still well worth reading as an exercise in hypothetical politics, and if not for that his chapters defining the Cathedral (the educational-media-State complex).

He also foreshadows, in HD technicolor, my own analysis - one that's become almost mainstream - of secular religion and leftism as the dogmatic religion au currant. He even adds something to it by deriving leftism and traditional conservatism both from a theistic Christian predecessor, viewing it as a religious schism.

[Paul Conroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind blowing!

A fantastic intellectual trip, taking the reader through the underworld of ideas that have shaped our current crisis of identity in the US and the West. The author offers a coherent way to escape this labyrinthine world and provides hope of emerging to a brighter future.

[Owlseyes · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...

"I am not a progressive, but I’m not a conservative either. (If you must know, I’m a Jacobite.)"

"Who are these strange people? Briefly, they are America’s ruling class. Here at UR we call them Brahmins. The Brahmin tribe is adoptive rather than hereditary."

"The natural enemy of the Brahmin is, of course, the red-state American."

"Progressive celebrities, for example, are everywhere. Conservative ones are exceptions."
(in the book)

"There are no Republicans in the State Department"
On YouTube: DEBATE! Curtis Yarvin (“Mencius Moldbug”) vs. Ben Burgis on Democracy.

Sometimes Yarvin sounds revolting: "In war, neutrality is the highest form of pacifism. In an example from the current year: the deep right is not rootin’ for Putin, nor does it have Ukraine on the brain. When we see an “antiwar rally” whose platform is shipping more guns, bombs and tanks to one side of a war, or we hear a phrase like “no justice, no peace,” we laugh sadly. “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” *
-How can one possibly stay neutral?

"Are you an American or European? Do you have feelings about the war in Gaza? Stop. You shouldn’t. You should be totally clear on the question—in the Scientology sense."**
-Come on Yarvin! No feelings allowed? what's the stuff your heart is made of? stone?


(moi-même, prince de la pilule rouge)

I have been watching a few videos about Yarvin. Both his sayings and writings are full of erudition. He lacks praxis, though. His writing is filled with intellectual amusement. But, without praxis, or even feeling, it runs the risk of being good for automatons only. Hardly for humans. Sorry, Yarvin.

The present book seems to be set out on the promise to convince open-minded progressives to change their minds. I don't believe Yarvin is convincing enough. His proposal of a Monarchy regime for present-day America is outlandish, it makes little sense. America, the independent nation, was formed by fighting the English King.


(King George III)

Plus, it's unrealistic to ignore that America has in its "identity DNA" one very salient characteristic: religion. Most Americans are believers [Yarvin is not]***. Yarvin's mockery of Christians, Mormons, Scientology (etc) seems not to take into account that characteristic.

Sometimes he takes inspiration on leaders of small nations like Lichtenstein or some unknown sultan, or even Elisabeth I. America is a big nation and someone like FDR, greatly admired by Mencius Moldbug, is hard to find these days. Mencius Moldbug admiration for Deng Xiaoping totally puzzles me. But, maybe he's right by saying contemporary America is an oligarchy; Britain too****.

His reset is unrealistic. His Mencius Party is to be found nowhere. There's still a lot of mold in his writings. They are mostly theoretical.

Democracy (still) rules.

UPDATE


In: The Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview
Post-liberals, “crunchy cons” and monarchists.
BY POLITICO

UPDATE



Interesting interview:
-"...F.D.R." ran the New Deal as a start-up"
-"Trump is very reminiscent of F.D.R."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/ma...

UPDATE

Well, Moldbug, dreams may come true...
Long live the king


UPDATE
9th May 2025
https://imgur.com/a/rY7Koq5

UPDATE

"Rioters" is LA? Check on Yarvin!

https://imgur.com/a/GTMqWuu
In Süddeutsche Zeitung, June the 12th, 2025

P.S. I am very curious about the Moldbug opinion on the German Reichsbürgerbewegung. Any similarities with his thought? Maybe some day he'll answer. I mean, is Germany still under "Occupation"?


*IN: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/pri...

**https://graymirror.substack.com/p/cle...

***https://news.gallup.com/poll/358364/r...

**** YouTube: Curtis Yarvin: Welcome to the Dark Enlightenment

[Count Gravlax · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wow oh wow, this is not very good. The self-serving and pompous design of the text might make you think this has some conceivable structure, but it doesn't. Under the plethora of hyperlinks, the text is basically a long-winded rant from Moldbug about progressiveness, democracy and everything that's bad.

Let's perfectly accept the Mencius mindset. Let's assume that, in fact, left stands for progress and the right stands for order and safety (where does Walter Benjamin, James C Scott, David Graeber, Deleuze and other critics of the progressive mentality and Whig history stand here? I don't know either). There might be a case to be done for the reactionary mindset if your focus on what constitutes a great society refers to the moral health of a country, regardless of the economic impact this might cause. This by itself, I can't make any opposition to.

However, that's not it. Mencius Moldbug's grief is directed towards utilitarian objectives - personal and propriety safety and national stability. For this, he recommends an absolutist* restoration where the ruler is also somehow a CEO controlled by a board of directors. This has some prior implications, one: that ancien regime societies were somehow stabler and that they were also safer. Both prior suppositions are wrong. Perhaps the memory of the Two World Wars are too fresh in our mind so that we have forgotten all the constant warfare and succession wars in Modern history - the period that gleams in Mencius mind - but luckily we have "Le Wik" to remind us about them : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_.... Regarding personal safety, a glance through Manuel Eisner article "Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime" will demonstrate how violent crime has successfully lowered from the scale of the 100's per 100.000 to a minuscule quantity in modern times. And if you are a hardcore reactionary and squirms by the sole mention of the European Union, I would regardless recommend checking Eurostats information on criminality, in order to verify that this downward trend is continuous until now.

But there's a reason why this supposition is taken as truth - Mencius Moldbug has no methodology, nor is he partaking in any kind of serious research. He is not dumb nor unknowledgeable, but due to the structure of the text and how it develops, it is clear that this Open-Letter was written by him simply recalling a bunch of information he read and thought might be interesting, and trying to construct a linear thread with them. His knowledge of economics is laughable. His mischaracterization of "Classic International Law" as Uti possedetis not even wrong (with countries creating mutual contracts forbidding violence against civilians and POWs from even back the early 19th century I wonder where does his theory of pre-WWI conflict as "do what you want war" stands). One of his historiographical crimes is, consequently, to confound recent historical phenome with natural truth. He qualifies criticism against the criminal system, borders or marriage as "fighting against reality", even though all these systems as they are today even in their most conservative constitution are quite recent innovations, dating from the 16th century at best, to the first two decades of the 20th century (in the case of border control).

He seems as lost on his solutions as he is on his predicament. "Let's impose an absolute ruler controlled only by a board of directors! How we choose the controller? How the board is instituted? How does a country stop acting like a country and more like a company with central planning at the same time? I will tell you, I will tell you real soon - right after this tirade about unrelated themes". His proposition of creating a bureaucracy based not by contract but by a mandarin like system of exams exists already, the country that develops it is called Brazil and it works wonderfully. In the end, we leave not knowing more how this system would work than we did when we started reading.

And that is because Mencius, like the ones he hates the most, does not see the world as it is, but as it ought to be. In Brazil, there's a history about when the national team was playing against the URSS in the '60s. The coach of the national team went to Garrincha, one of the stars of the day, and told him of a masterful and complicated plan that he had to close the score against our opponents in the twenty-first minutes of the game if only Garrincha would follow a series of steps. Garrincha listened to it carefully, and by the end of the lecture e said: "That is great, now we just have to settle it with the Russians". Mencius plan will go out great and stay great, we just have to settle it with the Russians. Like any millenarist plan of paradise on earth (or at least, paradise for them) it only has the small problem of being too complicated, too convoluted, depending on too many variables and ignorant of too many small, local contexts.

The worst is, I'm not even particularly in discordance with many of the thesis put forward by Moldbug. I do belive that democracy and freedom are opposites. I am not particularly against of associating with a non-democratic form of government, if said association is voluntary. I believe that democracy suffers from a serious information problem where nbody can know everything, and thus everybody is incapable of choosing a correct administration, making all voting an act of idiocy. I'm very pro the right of secession of reactionary, slightly white-supremacistic individuals to build their very own Utopia. Arise, Republic of Minerva from the sea of Tonga! Carpenters, raise high the roofbeam! Fare thee well, all hands on deck to the Libertarian paradise! Why would I want to live in the same neighbourhoods of a bunch of skinheads, anyway? And I bet if the Islamic State could be peacefully settled in some island off the coast of the Indian Ocean with free tickets for anyone that wants in, we would have a lot less problems.

(By the way, how does the voting with one's feet and mutual county competition proposed by Moldbug works if all immigration is discouraged? Mmmm).

But Moldbug doesn't want to live alone in his society, and he is very aware that a lot of people don't want to go with him either. He takes clear offense that people actually change opinions through time, not realizing that the absolute state is not a natural state of society, but one that's also the consequence of historic PROGRESSION with its own apparatus of justification. Goddamnit, just read anyone from the 18th century pissed about this nivelty called "standing armies". Again, he naturalizes a result of hsitorical context because he is so happy about hearing the good news, he wants everyone in in the good news. Mencius Moldbug is a socialist, a weird kind of socialist living in the Upside Down world, but one no less.

If you wanna read good reactionaries, just go directly to Carl Schmitt. Or Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who furthermore was not a racist.

* What's the obsession with Liechtenstein anyway? Did someone forgot to mention to him that even tough it is a powerful monarch type of country, it is still a democracy? Why the avoidance of mentioning Swalizand, or Brunei? Not enough white? And if the question is safety, why not mentioning Iceland? or New Zealand? or the French Polynesia? Or Slovenia? Or, you kno, any country with a population larger than a small neighbourhood? There's literally more people in closed housing states in Rio than there are in Liechteinstein, for God's sake.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pro-tip. If you're in college and are interested in a career in government service, it's best not to mention, like or promote this book on social media. In fact, do a search right now and delete any connection with this. Even if you don't agree with one bit of the work, background investigations may red-flag as through guilt by assocation.

[Sean Chick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an odd book, or really a series of blog posts strung together as a book. Its thoughts are meandering, and Moldbug (referred to as Yarvin for the rest of this review) is good at considering history in its broad strokes, complete with quotations drawn from obscure thinkers and historians, men little read today who nevertheless can be quite illuminating. That said, not every historical reference works or is accurate. His being dumbfounded on why Howe did not simply strike Valley Forge is sheer stupidity or at least ignorance of how linear musket combat works.

Yarvin is at his best when he blazes a path. His take on the Nazis' role and position in history is original and incisive, as is his honesty in accepting that Nazis are fellow reactionaries, but ones who did everything wrong. His views are even left in some regards. He thinks colonialism never left Africa and that ours is a sham democracy run by elites. Yet, he considers the left elite power structure, dubbed "the Cathedral," as the dominant force, constituting, as it did in 2008, the press and the universities. In his summation, we do not live in an open society, but one of restricted thoughts and punishable blasphemies. The Progressive Left is not scientific and empirical but rather a religion, and furthermore one with base desires, as he writes here:

"Here is my theory about progressivism: it is a “Relationship Built on Self Interest.” It is exactly what Alinsky says it is: a way for people who want power to organize. It brings them together around the oldest human pleasure other than sex: ganging up on your enemies. It lets them rationalize this ruthless, carnivorous activity as a philanthropic cause. But the real attraction is the thrill of power and victory—sometimes with a little money thrown in."

I was impressed by how many trends he perceived in 2008. The rise of racial tension, Maoist tactics on the Left (complete with an antifa reference), Internet surveillance and censorship, the Progressive rejection of free speech, the call for open borders, and the breakdown of the neoliberal international order (although he does not use that term). He is at his best seeing the errors, logical failures, and dogmas of the Left, and these became more apparent after 2012. His point about Robert A. Williams is well made. In this regard, it is a superb book.



Yet, I can only give it three stars, for while it is long, Yarvin misses much. In fact, the holes in this book are a mile wide. He barely mentions capitalism. Like, at all. It's a gross oversight if one is considering the sweep of history. Then again, this was written before "woke capitalism" arrived and corporations "betrayed" the Right. Indeed, his idea of a monarchical corporation seems even more ludicrous now than in 2008. In addition, his understanding of the Cold War is shoddy. He inflates the degree of communist penetration of American government but leaves out the billions spent to defeat communism and our ultimate victory. I get that the Left has an uncomfortable relationship with communism. If I call myself a communist, most lefties do not become indignant, despite the very large body count, because there is a feeling of loss with communism. It is their ideal, and it failed. However, Yarvin treads into questionable conspiracy theories. Indeed, he all but says everyone on the left is a communist. It is perfectly puerile.

In the end, he never quite convinced me "the Cathedral" is wrong. Flawed and error-prone, sure, but his remedy and those he alludes to from history just don't stack up. The idea of living in a monarchical corporation has no charms for me. His argument is that the w-force (w is for Whig) is a form of entropy. That to embrace it is to embrace your undoing, like a king who allows his power to be restrained. Better to die fighting like the Stuarts than suffer the pointlessness of the Windsors. Yet, I cannot see his method doing any better; in fact, it would likely do worse. He is too flippant about absolute monarchy. To be fair, I suspect he is dealing more in abstractions, rather like Plato in The Republic. I should mention I do not like Plato.

The best part of this book is that Yarvin sees where "the Cathedral" is weak and brittle, and he wrote this before the financial crash really hit home: "If it breaks—if it starts distributing sewage along with the rosewater—it loses its credibility. If it loses its credibility, the government loses its legitimacy. When a government loses its legitimacy, you don’t want to be standing under it." The last 10 years have panned out much as he said they would, while the Progressive predictions of the future, circa 2008, have been consistently wrong. That said, "the Cathedral" is saved mostly by the lack of a cogent and persuasive alternative. Neo-reaction is certainly not the alternative, but it is a worthwhile mental exercise.

Lastly, there is no mention of Robert Filmer or Paul Gottfried, even though their fingerprints are all over this work. I kept waiting for them to pop up. Did I miss them somewhere?

[Vladivostok · Rating 5 out of 5]

A big, fat, redpill. I suspect even the most open-minded of progressives would liken reading this to chewing an entire bottle's worth of smelly fish oil pills.

I myself have often babbled doubtless of a foolish past; Babble, babble; our old England may go down in babble at last. Truth for truth, and good for good!​ The Good, the True, the Pure, the Just; Take the charm ‘For ever’ from them, and they crumble into dust. Gone the cry of ‘Forward, Forward,’ lost within a growing gloom; Lost, or only heard in silence from the silence of a tomb. Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and space, Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage into commonest commonplace! ‘Forward’ rang the voices then, and of the many mine was one. Let us hush this cry of ‘Forward’ till ten thousand years have gone. France had shown a light to all men, preached a Gospel, all men’s good; Celtic Demos rose a Demon, shrieked and slaked the light with blood. Aye, if dynamite and revolver leave you courage to be wise: When was age so crammed with menace?​ Madness?​ Written, spoken lies? Envy wears the mask of Love, and, laughing sober fact to scorn, Cries to Weakest as to Strongest, ‘Ye are equals, equal-born.’ Equal-born?​ O yes, if yonder hill be level with the flat. Charm us, Orator, till the Lion look no larger than the Cat. Till the Cat through that mirage of overheated language loom Larger than the Lion,—Demos end in working its own doom. Those three hundred millions under one Imperial sceptre now, Shall we hold them?​ Shall we loose them?​ Take the suffrage of the plow. Nay, but these would feel and follow Truth if only you and you, Rivals of realm-ruining party, when you speak were wholly true. Trustful, trustful, looking upward to the practised hustings-liar; So the Higher wields the Lower, while the Lower is the Higher. Step by step we gained a freedom known to Europe, known to all; Step by step we rose to greatness,—through tonguesters we may fall. You that woo the Voices—tell them ‘old experience is a fool,’ Teach your flattered kings that only those who cannot read can rule. Tumble Nature heel o’er head, and, yelling with the yelling street, Set the feet above the brain and swear the brain is in the feet. Bring the old dark ages back without the faith, without the hope, Break the State, the Church, the Throne, and roll their ruins down the slope. Do your best to charm the worst, to lower the rising race of men; Have we risen from out the beast, then back into the beast again?

[Matt K · Rating 1 out of 5]

Truly embarrassing that anyone would be convinced by this stuff.

What Mendicant Moldbug has presented here is a meandering list of semantic games*, bizarre non-sequiturs dressed up as rhetorical flourishes*, and the kind of grievance politics you'd get from the average youtube comments section*.

Moldbug promises to draw the reader into a world of secret, esoteric knowledge, encouraging them to see themselves as members of an elite intellectual club who aren't sucked in by the easy lies of progressivism but are brave enough to accept the gritty reality of reactionary politics. I suspect that this is where most of his appeal comes from. He delivers on his promise of esoteric knowledge by rapid firing literary and political references at his audience like a roadie holding a t shirt cannon. The problem is that the constant references to people like Czeslaw Milosz and Antonio Gramsci just seem silly to anyone who has read these authors before, because they are so often misrepresented, or presented in a way that is tangential to the point. Knowing who Thomas Carlyle is might have impressed the silicon valley audience he was writing for in 2008 but, as Moldbug's references do so little to prop up his teetering jenga tower of an argument, to anyone else the habit comes across less as persuasion than as an advanced form of intellectual masturbation.

Most tellingly, in almost 250 pages dedicated to convincing "open minded progressives" to overthrow democracy, it never occurs to old Meandering Moldbug to set out an argument as to why democracy is bad. His central thesis is simply asserted rather than argued.

So, my open letter to an open-minded tech bro: "Base your life on a book that insults your intelligence less than this one does"


*E.g. page 85: "From a semiotic perspective (I didn’t go to Brown for nothing, kids), the fascinating thing about world peace is that, while these two little words are remarkably precise and their compound is hardly less exact, the phrase is not without its Empsonian edge." - It's extremely important to Monarchical Moldbug that you're aware that (1) he went to Brown, (2) he knows what "semiotic" and "Empsonian" mean. One suspects that his point about world peace is less important than this.

* E.g. page 88, where "wow this guys a massive cunt" moldbug takes some time to talk about turning Gazans into biofuel, or 6 pages earlier when we're treated with his theory of historiography "The neat thing about primary sources is that often, it takes only one to prove your point."

*E.g. page 128: "The victory of Obama, a Movement man to the core, represents the final defeat of the Stalinist wing of the American left by its Maoist wing."
Or page 161 where Mendacious Moldbug dabbles in some mild climate scepticism before having a bit of fun joking around about shipping Obama and his family off to Kenya

[Tommy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Red pill? More like cringe pill. Notting particularly far outside the bounds of conventional wisdom taken from any online comment section here, just more topologically autistic. You get the typical right wing screeching about the bad men at the New York Times, CFR, the foundations, state department, etc, etc... also everything in America really went wrong with FDR of course. A typical defence of McCarthyism but his problem with McCarthy is he didn't destroy the organs of power just annoy the men there. This was all written long before Cheeto Hitler successfully brought back Roy Cohn's methodology full scale of course. Most of this propaganda could be coming from the Mises institute, besides mildly attacking Rothbard and Hoppe for their limited notions of sovereignty. Corporations are effective therefore organizationally governments should just model themselves on them and drop the pretence of popular democracy. The big genius idea is to replace bad institutions with good ones. Also look at all this hidden knowledge from old books the Illuminati has placed on google books and hrmmm black on white crime figures of course.

[Jason Harper · Rating 2 out of 5]

This wasn't written very well. The anomalies in the progressive worldview were laid out in a coherent manner, but the author meandered for hundreds of words before spending time to make his points. The reader would be better off reading the beginning of each chapter before skipping immediately to the ending. And while he introduces his prescription for solving this problem of progressivism, he does it very lazily with cherry picked examples and no real analysis. I've seen a couple of videos with Curtis recently, so I wanted to read up on his views. I wouldn't recommend reading this to figure them out as it lacks any substance.

[Parasuram Venkatesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

“UNQUALIFIED RESERVATIONS is a strange blog: its goal is to cure your brain. We’ve all seen The Matrix. We know about red pills. Many claim to sell them. You can go, for example, to any bookstore, and ask the guy behind the counter for some Noam Chomsky. What you’ll get is blue pills soaked in Red #3.”

That’s about all you need to dive into this book. Well, that and the title. As long as you can keep a reasonably open mind for what amounts to 14 lengthy, annotated blog posts with interspersed poems, you will exit the Matrix. The world outside is brutal, but it is brutally REAL.

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a little tough to get into at first - Moldbug's writing style is dense, there are a lot of links, there are a lot of jokes I didn't get. But once I invested the time to click all the links and google the references that I didn't understand, I eventually found the writing enjoyable. Which is good because the ideas are very interesting and unique, definitely a lot of perspective that I had never heard before. Glad I gave it read. I will be thinking about it for a while.

[blaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Laid out the blueprint for the contemporary reactionary/dissident right critique of liberal democratic government. Moldbug takes aim at liberalism and its Whig historiography - the idea that history progresses, that the trajectory of progress is fundamentally good, that progress is to be found in liberal and left leaning tendencies, and that the opposition to this progress is bad. He identifies this as the dominant idea of our time, arising from the Anglo-American world and an intellectual/cultural development of Protestant Christianity. The religious element is not just an influence: liberalism amounts to the dominant contemporary religion, which can be seen both by the blind faith in progress, and how heretics and nonbelievers are treated (for a current example see the Western image of Putin: if you were an alien trying to learn about Earth’s different cultures, you’d think people in the West viewed Putin as a deep primordial evil).

It’s here that Moldbug develops his idea of the Cathedral:

“In the long run, power in a democracy belongs to its information organs: the press, the schools, and most of all the universities, who mint the thoughts the others disburse. For simplicity, we have dubbed this complex the Cathedral.

The Cathedral is a feedback loop. It has no center, no master planners. Everyone, even the Sulzbergers, is replaceable. In a democracy, mass opinion creates power. Power diverts funds to the manufacturers of opinion, who manufacture more, etc. Not a terribly complicated cycle.

This feedback loop generates a playing field on which the most competitive ideas are not those which best correspond to reality, but those which produce the strongest feedback. The Cathedral is constantly electing a new people who (a) support the Cathedral more and more, and (b) support a political system which makes the Cathedral stronger and stronger.”

Left-leaning people may balk at the idea that power is really held by this Cathedral, and not governments or the 1% or Capital or some confluence of these, but I think he does a good job arguing that the institutions that frame reality have the most power in mass-political societies. Althusser somewhat indicates toward this as well, and I’m told Gramsci does too.

All well and good, but why is progress bad exactly? Moldbug conceptualises a dichotomy around the Greek term nomos, meaning law or custom. On one side there are pro-nomian societies, where law, rules and strictures - in the broadest sense of these terms - prevail. People can expect promises to be fulfilled. As a consequence, these societies are high trust, stable, and internally safe. On the other side are anti-nomian societies, where the drive to relax social rules and strictures has melted away social cohesion and results in low trust and instability. The anti-nomian instinct might start out innocently enough, and some individual instances may be justified (stopping the Spanish Inquisition, for instance), but the result of this steady unravelling over time creates a cycle that propels itself and stops for no rule, no matter how valuable or justifiable. A society at the end of the anti-nomian path is due for collapse, due to the inability of the cultural and political consensus to view the reality of the situation and act on it. Liberalism and progressivism are anti-nomian. Old rules and customs are shrugged off as a matter of faith, and the societies that most zealously pursue this are decomposing and are liable to see increasing acts of internal violence (USA for the biggest example). Per Moldbug, progress and liberalism ought to be completely dealt with before a collapse occurs that would impact the lives of countless people.

So, what to do? Political conservatism doesn’t work at all, simply because it’s always the inferior and reactive (not reactionary) position in the framework of progress. Today’s conservatives are the progressives of a few decades ago. Conservatism is just progressivism driving under the speed limit. Also, the institutions are in too deep to reform. The only option, as far as Moldbug is concerned, is a wholesale restructuring of political and social institutions. How, then, to achieve that? He gets pretty shaky here. He advocates a sort of modified Caesarist position whereby a highly capable person is given absolute authority over a government, but can be recalled at any time by some vaguely defined set of people. This person, who he terms the Receiver, has the job of resetting the old social arrangement and building a new, responsible, affluent society. He doesn’t really explain how the Receiver and their backers get into power, but advocates a sort of bloodless coup and a wholesale clear out of the old bureaucracy, a la the collapse of East Germany.

In all a meandering, though entertaining and provocative framing of autodidact political theory. Has some holes, especially the prescriptive aspect, but I enjoyed it for the most part. I left out a lot of the detail of his argument - especially the mimetic nature of ideas, and why it is that progressive ones outcompete right wing ones - but I read this on and off over a few months via my phone, so a lot of it escapes me. Worth checking out.

[Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a bad read, he’s good at diagnosing issues and hes charming in a weird, can be long winded but i think it funny.

[Alec Piergiorgi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I’m not a progressive of course, I found a ton of this to be a new perspective on almost everything political and economic. Very fun as well with a lot of character coming through the writing.

[Stone · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is difficult to read (very much so, that's why it's a 2 and that's the only reason), it has a lot of weird examples between the main structure as a support. If you don't know the person in the example, skip it because otherwise it would be a pain. And it would start to flow very well if you do because as messed up as his writing style is, this guy had the decency to wrap up everything at the end of each chapter. And at the end of the day I would recommend it to people, because it's so powerful, bold, and revolutionary and I like books like that. If it is written by another writer this book could probably be so huge now. But Mencius fucked it. He did. This book has so much potential.

General Idea:
Government nowadays is no longer the way it used to be. It is basically the Cathedral (mainstream academia, journalism and education). The universities formulate public policy. The press guides public opinion. In other words, the universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent. Not someone, information organs are now the power centres.

The Cathedral is a feedback loop. It has no centre, no master planners. Everyone is replaceable. In a democracy, mass opinion creates power. Power diverts funds to the manufacturers of opinion, who manufacture more, etc. However, this feedback loop generates a playing field on which the most competitive ideas are not those which best correspond to reality, but those which produce the strongest feedback.

Today’s administrative states are irresponsible because their actions tend to be the consequence of vast chains of procedure which separate individual decisions from results. The result is hopelessly dysfunctional and ineffective, often becomes seriously detached from reality, and demands an immense quantity of pointless busywork.

Democracy, on the other hand, is a dangerous, malignant form of government which tends to degenerate, sometimes slowly and sometimes with shocking, gut-wrenching speed, into tyranny and chaos. Each vote, representing an inconsiderable fragment of power, by itself signifies nothing; an aggregation of votes only has a relative value.

Parties are a trial of strength—each party acquires confidence from the very circumstance of equality—both become assured they are right—confidence inspires boldness and expectation of success—pride comes in aid of argument—the passions are inflamed—the merits of the cause become a subordinate consideration—victory is the object and not public good.

And politics always emerges when management breaks down.

That's why, Mencius is calling for the wipe out of parties, government, democracy even politics. Separation of education and state. Liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power to "Public policy". Nothing but pure centralised unanimous ideas being implemented.

[Aaron Kleinheksel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most seminal and important political manifestos written so far this century, and I am embarrassed it took me this long to finally get to it, having been aware of Moldbug and his influence on the intellectual right for many years. If you have any interest in politics (political philosophy, culture, psychology, power dynamics, etc.) you really need to read Curtis Yarvin's work (AKA Mencius Moldbug). You will not agree with everything you read in AOLOMP, but you will NOT be bored. In place of what I've long tended to call the media-educational-industrial complex, Moldbug here coins the far more succinct term "the Cathedral," which encompasses our universities, media, permanent federal administrative state and now I would say also "woke" capital. If you happen to be on the right in America, you've almost certainly come across the term Cathedral in relatively common usage among the media, literary and intellectual class.

AOLOMP was written years ago, and its author has little common notoriety, but his ideas continue to gain in influence. In this treatise, MM advocates monarchism or "restorationism," (described in the text) as he believes our Constitutional and "democratic" Republic to be largely captured by leftist "progressivism" and rotten to the point of collapse. He lays out his case mostly very well, and while I don't agree (yet) with his prescription, I also wouldn't argue with most of his diagnosis.

A couple examples to whet the appetite and provide an example of MM's writing style:
From Ch. 12:
"The leading cause of violent death and misery galore in the modern era is bad government. Most of us grew up thinking we live in a time and place in which Science and Democracy, which put a man on the moon and brought him back with Tang, have either cured this ill or reduced it to a manageable and improving condition. That is, most of us grew up believing—and most Americans, whatever their party registration, still believe—in progress."
From Ch. 14:
"In order to make an impact on the political process, you need quantity. You need moronic, chanting hordes. There is no way around this. Communism was not overthrown by Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky and Václav Havel. It was overthrown by moronic, chanting hordes. I suppose I shouldn’t be rude about it, but it’s a fact that there is no such thing as a crowd of philosophers."

If you have a progressive or leftist friend who is still capable of reading ideas that may conflict with his or her closely-held dogmas, pass this to them.

I think one reason I so enjoyed this is because the tenor and style of writing, as well as MM's sense of humor, so closely mirror my own sensibilities. I could write my own essay about this book, but I'll just end with a favorite quote found along the way while reading this: As Edith Hamilton said to Freda Utley: “Don’t expect the material rewards of unrighteousness while engaged in the pursuit of truth.”

[Honk Honkerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The original redpill. If you've ever wondered about what how and why progressivism is, where it comes from, where it's going and why it's so creepy, this is the place to start. Moldbug is an erudite in history and gives you the slow progression of how this mad cult of power came to be. It's a letter but it should be called a book. The breath of insights is significant and you'll have to take pause and think about the mind bending you just experienced. 2/3 of the books are super super solid, until it comes to the last 1/3 where he becomes much more playful in his writing. I assume this is because his positive politics come in to play and I think it's always more difficult to build something new than to dissect what already exists. Combine this with his interview on Based Deleuze and you'll get a good feeling about him.

Personally, this solves the Hitler problem of the right, and I'm very happy for that, because I've been banging my head against the wall to either Hitler or not Hitler. I mean Hitler is pretty cool, but that moustache? Cringe.

Establishing a government that fits 2 /3 from {secure, responsible, effective} would yield the third, and having an absolute monarchy is something new for me to think about, since it's such an intuitive solution to the dem*cracy problem. I final solution so to speak. Drawing on historical examples from ancient Rome about Augustus uniting the republic and solving the constant civil wars is bretty bretty gud.

Definitely give this a shot if you're looking to escape the frame of conservative vs liberal. Of course, if you've never had an extremist though in your life this will be like giving your 80 year old grandpa DMT.

Legal Disclaimer: taking redpills is not a substitute for individual evalution and should only be used to improve an existing diet. Thinking about the state of the world should be taken with a glass of water and not on an empty stomach.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

The following is an assortment of notes from the reading which get progressively less edited. This will be a book that I'll need to read again sometime. Possibly one day I'll have a political view that considers this antiquated. So far I like 80% of MB.

Before introducing "democracy" the world's locations were much nicer. Demo brings "freedom" but the cost is enormous destruction. Who profits? Not the US people, not the local people, just the transnational bureaucrats.

England didn't want peace. They wanted to destroy germany. Even after germany offered peace with status quo.

Reaction = order but prog != chaos
Prog see themselves as torch bearers of change. And survivor bias and the (history leans left = good bias) makes them thing change is always good.

Moldbug asks for the source of the W force. I postulate it's just entropy. This may have been written before he said something similar, or rather I saw the comment in a youtube vid explaining Moldbug.

Progressives do not believe in chaos, just "change"

2008 dems were all alynskites

alynskism lets you use your primal desire to gang up on someone and let you rationalize it as doing something noble. If you started a progressive movement without destruction it would have little motivation and support. The progressive activist above all else wants destruction.

they do this by biting off small chunks of the construction, increasing the complexity and complexity = entropy.

"Anyone can believe in the truth. It takes a loyal person to believe in nonsense. Hence the entire progressive worldview"

[Duncan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this will help you come to terms with the US election results. It's mandatory reading, I feel. Now, it might not be the most well written text, nor the most well laid out. Moldbug has a tendency to go off on tangents that are entertaining but they can get in the way. But the ideas expressed are almost certainly things you've never considered.

Essentially we find that democracy is a useless contraption, a convoluted lie that we all hate but continue to perpetuate. That might seem like blasphemy, which is why it's probably necessary to read these essays. Life is better when alternative points of view are explored. Moldbug shows how and why democracy is decrepit, and then lays out a restorative alternative. You can decide if you agree or not at the end of the book.

There's a lot going for the book, and I would urge people not to dismiss it out of hand.

[Moon Captain]

Nothing of value here. Lonely dude's blog, barely coherent. Interesting for its role as a foundation of alt-right ideology which has destroyed my best friend's mind completely . He's an isolated raving lunatic now, he can't even have a conversation without ranting about how medieval times were better, so I decided to read all the shit he read that made him this way. He hid it from me, and avoided giving any answers, because I think he knows deep inside that it is shameful. Unfortunately he probably thinks this urge for privacy is because the information is clandestine, not because it's embarrassing and illogical. I hope he recovers but I don't think he will.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

The diagnoses of the book, is mind-blowing, it literally changed my perspective on most issues and made me think critically, in many different levels that I had not even conceived of before. Although I do not fully agree with the proposed solutions to the problem that is the "Cathedral" rule, I am intrigued by the approach and certainly would consider Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin) to be one of the most brilliant political minds of our age. Established authors and thinkers are toddlers, compared to the intellectual fury unleashed by this author.

[N Perrin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the greatest work of political thought since Les Mis, and you can read it all for free online at the Unqualified Reservations blog.

But my God, as much as he's an entertaining genius, Mencius sure writes like a pompous ass.

[Christopher Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as good as “A Gentle Introduction...” but still great.

[putperest · Rating 5 out of 5]

some of the best political and cultural diagnosis i've read. very important.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, the things I didn't like. This is a set of blog posts, and could use a good editor, both for style and clarity. The links to various Wikipedia articles, etc. did not work on my Kindle. So I got the worst of the both: not a great book (no real editing) and not a great blog post (links don't work). And, like most books, it could be shorter. Half as long would have been twice as good.

Substantively, this is an important book if you are interested in developments in right wing (if that is even the correct term) political thought in the United States. Between the jokes and irony and evident joy in provocation, it can be difficult to pin down his real views. (I've not read the rest of his blog.)

The book is so far out of the mainstream of liberal and even conservative thought that it is the closest thing I have experienced to seeing what the world might look like stripped of all my priors...my upbringing, my reverence (yes, this is the right word) for the Constitution, my belief in the Enlightenment and progress, and the basic decency (for all its faults) of the US government. His idea of the Cathedral is provocative and maybe even correct. In any case, we need some explanation for the lack of diversity of thought among educational, cultural, NGO, press, and governmental groups. And it is true that most people should have no say in political questions, as they lack the intelligence, disposition, and experience to think deeply about policy questions. But the idea of a dictator or CEO running things and that being better than our current arrangement? Even if you could get there from where the country is now without bloodshed, it would most likely be a disaster in practice.

Anyway, read the book or blog, and try to keep an open mind.

[Keir R · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moldbug is an incredibly fascinating thinker when it comes to evaluating the difference between what is and what ought to be when it comes to government. The irony of the title is that you would be hard pressed to find a progressive open minded enough to read this front to back let alone take the argument seriously. Moldbug is well versed in history but I cannot help but wonder how many of the examples he uses over and over are selective and in some cases overused. Many of the books are repeatedly referenced throughout his interviews and other works.

Having a firm understanding of history is essential to making sense of the current political climate and this is where Moldbug is able to shine. Many of the examples brought to light paint a different picture than what we would see coming from the consensus historians of the 20th century. The American revolution being a right wing coup, being openly sympathetic with the loyalists, frequently citing primary sources of loyalist opinion are some of the tactics that he repeatedly uses throughout his works. This is much appreciated as the reflexively dogmatic consensus today insists on perpetuating many of the myths Moldbug calls out.

The reading does require a great deal of attention as Moldbug puts the reader through a series of thought exercises to illustrate his point. Many of the metaphors proffered by Moldbug in these exercises are useful in explaining the current crisis(inner team vs. outer team) and have even more relevance looking back at the past decade than they might have had before.