Curtis Yarvin is one of the architects of the philosophy called Neoreaction, which I previously wrote about. He has been described as one who uses ten thousand words where a hundred would serve. Marx is similarly wordy, but he once wrote a manifesto that described his views in a reasonably compact form, which I read many years ago for a class. It just found out that Yarvin
As always, the gap between what is and what ought to be is immense.
I think your analysis mischaracterizes ancient forms of government. Despotic societies with human sacrifice still had a great reliance on culture. The Aztecs only went as far as they did with their sacrificing because of a cultural reaction to a famine, not because it was the most efficient way of ruling. Traditional monarchy is not the same throughout history: early feudal monarchy was vastly different from the post Black Death Absolutism that took hold in Europe.
The goal of Formalism seems to be providing a capitalist / corporatist framework for producing a highly decentralized state network within a state. The Holy Roman Empire with CEOs instead of princes. I think it is heavily flawed because market based corporations are much more volatile than princely families with landed titles.
Of course all early states had a great reliance of culture. My analysis is necessarily simplified. What I call despotisms are early states, or what Peter Turchin calls Archaic monarchy. This is separated from a later form of absolute rule that had some external validation from religious or philosophical structures, which I call traditional monarchy, or just monarchy. The classic example would be the Assyrian Kings as despotism versus the Emperor Ashoka after he became Buddhist as the monarch.
Part of what makes the Aztecs a depotism is the fact that human sacrifice was part of their cultural playbook. Another part is is it instability. And I note their civilization was less than 200 years old when it fell. The only reason why Cortez and his handful of men were successful is that the Aztec empire was unstable. Had they been a traditional monarchy they probably would be defeated Cortez. I would point our that Europeans arrived in West African before the Americans, yet were unable to conquer those lands while the American states easily fell. It's true that the Africans had resistance to European diseases as well as diseases of their own that affected Europeans, but there were more advanced having traditional monarchy, advanced religion (Islam) and iron weapons just like the Europeans, while the Americans did not.
In fact, the Europeans did not conquer Africa until they had developed capitalism and the scientific method social scale-up techs and so pulled ahead of the Africans, and pretty much everyone else.
The Incans seem much closer to a traditional monarchy, but fell with less initial resistance than the Aztecs. Lacking iron was a big deal, but perhaps even more so was lacking horses or knowledge of them.
I don’t know much about the Inca. I read a bit on wiki. They had been around for only about a century when the Spanish came and were embroiled in a civil war. The government seemed to collapse after Atahualpa’s capture. It’s short duration and the apparent weakness of its legitimacy-granted norms suggest it had not become a traditional monarchy.
Also this sequence is typically followed when states are initially formed (so it would apply to the Peruvian civilization since this is one of the at six? “pristine” civilizations (ones that arose independent of the others). Western Civilization is an “induced” civilization, forming state societies in response to the threat posed (and example shown) by the Roman empire. The Germanic tribes whose coalescence into states and subsequent evolution produced the modern Western European states was an induced development. Some of them may have skipped the despot stage altogether.
He, Thiel, and the other neo-reactionaries stand to benefit from wrecking US democracy and establishing their vision of authoritarianism. That lies behind all the verbiage.
Thank you for sharing this Mike. So far I am unimpressed with the Dark Enlightenment, despite its cool name.
Oddly, many of the ideas I have championed at Risk & Progress could be seen as Dark Enlightenment-adjacent.
The key difference, so far from what I have gathered, is the need for checks/balances, and power sharing in government.
I don't believe that any political system can survive long when it is extractive in how it derives its power and wealth. Only inclusive systems are sustainable long term.
Yes. It is the inclusive nature that supports the increased legitimacy to forestall instability in the much more complex societies made possible by capitalism. With many more players, you need to bring them into the tent, or they will plot against you.
Your biggest self contradiction is (a) social systems cannot be engineered to stop violence yet (b) scalable institutions such as the state reduce violence.
In the Libertarian viewpoint, states are recognized as security providers. However, they face several design flaws that reduce their ability to effectively provide security. Firstly, they are monopolies, so there's limited competitive pressure as they have a captured customer based. Secondly, they face an owner/agent problem, where the agents do not have a strong incentive to operate the state efficiently as there is limited feedback (such as voting) to maintain accountability. Third, the state takes on too many different functions; according to the theory of the firm, larger firms are need some kind of efficiency gain from size to offset increasing overhead from bureaucracy.
I disagree with Yarvin in many areas but the core thrust of his ideas are good ones. By focusing on the state as just another provider of goods and services, we can broaden the toolkit available to improve the function of the state. Its time to wake up and stop thinking about states in a religious way. States are not deities.
It's not a self contradiction. When you engineer something you are manipulating a system to get a desired result. This works when you well understand the mechanisms that explain the behavior of the system. We do not understand how systems like human societies work. It is risky to try engineering such systems. The best approach is what one does with complex industrial processes that are not well understood: evolutionary operations.
Attempting to engineer societies is what revolutionaries do; it almost always leads to worse outcomes.
The American Revolution succeeded by *not* being a revolution. The same American ruling class that existed before the war remained afterward, simply with those who sided with England removed. Little was changed. When problems arose, a constitution was drawn up that was minimal in design and which kept the same people in charge.
Over time, bits and pieces were added and some things subtracted. It's messy, but it has muddled on for 236 years and hasn't gone belly up so far. At the first crisis resolution it sought to exclude a large portion of the elite from rule which triggered civil war, which was resolved by US victory.
We are now in our third crisis resolution period and maybe we do not survive it to begin a "fourth republic." But the examples Yarvin gives haven't even gone through one of these.
Engineering is different from science. You don't actually have to fully understand the underlying structure of a system to apply engineering techniques. In software, usually the underlying code base is far too complex for any person to understand. So techniques such as test driven development, fast iteration loops, and separation of concerns allow engineers to handle such codebases.
In the case of social systems, we do actually understand how they work on a deeper, scientific level. The criticisms of the state Yarvin provides are mostly grounded in economic theory, which is the most mathematical of the social sciences. We also have an entire field, Sociology, which is dedicated to understanding human sociology!
Engineers are used to working under conditions of uncertainty and risk. Construction engineering, mechanical engineering, bio engineering, all rely on concepts of risk tolerance. Working with social systems is not any different!
But not only that, the existing institutions we have today apply economic and other social sciences to decision making. Today's technocratic democracy is primarily based around experts using social science to manage public opinion, economic growth, and reward key groups. Libertarians argue that these techniques should be expanded, not stopped - and we should take the findings from social science seriously and apply them using the same techniques already used.
Note that in Yarvin as an example, he does not advocate for revolution. He consistently puts forwards techniques to use the existing systems for reform. I don't agree with him in many respects but in this area I am in agreement with him and disagreement with you. We can in fact use science and engineering to improve society.
I am a chemical engineer and working in process R&D for 33 years mostly on fermentation and chemical processes. I understand engineering and the limitations of engineering in poorly understood systems like the microbial systems the other engineers and scientists and I worked with. We had the advantage of laboratories and pilot plants where were could run scale models of the processes we were working on and manipulate variables to assess their effects. We also had the advantage of many lots, while there is only one shot at history.
When working in a well-defined system like physics or mechanics, it is possible to design a spacecraft that flies to a location a million miles away and then undergoes a complex set of operations with no chance of intervention and have it perform flawlessly, as with the James Webb telescope. You cannot remotely do anything so precise in biological systems, including medicine. This is why new drugs have to go through trials and sometimes despite lots of very promising data from laboratory work and earlier trials the candidate simply does not pan out.
Our understanding of human societies is no where near the level of our understanding of biology or human physiology and yet we are routinely humbled by Mother Nature.
Plenty of time policymakers have made choices like the tax cuts in 1964, 1981, and 1986 that economic theory says should have positive effects on economic performance for most people which did not. Policy makers decided we would just run deficits in the 1960 so we could start a war of choice that we lost, at the expense of the Bretton Woods system and a decade of stagflation. If people understood economics then why the surprise at the results of MFN status for China and the inability to see the 2008 financial crisis coming when all could see the capital gains tax cuts that likely helped stoke the fire.
These failures have to do with known issues with the structure of government - specifically, the lack of a rapid feedback mechanisms such as prices that exist in the private economy. It's challglenging to know if any government activity has a net positive economic benefit because of the calculation problem caused by the involuntary nature of state action.
Again you keep claiming that it's impossible to design social systems yet that's exactly what our technocratic democracy does! Every US President since at least FDR, and including Trump, has relied on experts in the social sciences to manage, build and reform institutions. You should know as an engineer that just because there's a system failure does not mean the entire system has to be trashed - failures should be analyzed, data collected, and new strategies to mitigate future failures implemented. That all said, because of the known sociological issues with government structures, states tend to underperform private enterprises.
I sense that you lack an understanding and respect for the social sciences. Believe it or not, these fields are critical to the functioning of every institution. Our institutions today did not evolve; they were intelligently designed by experts from the social sciences.
Of course, governments have to make policy. And they frequently get it wrong, as I pointed out. But then the voters throw them out and give the other party a chance. It is inefficient, but it is self-correcting. In the same way, markets are inefficient, but are self-correcting.
What Yavin is proposing is a one-time solution to the problem of government. In the economic sphere this is the equivalent of a planned economy. It doesn’t work for economies and it won’t for polities either. The reason is a lack of a self-correcting mechanism. This was what Churchill was referring to when he called democracy the worst form of government except for all the others.
To be clear I'm not a Yarvinite, but his ideas do involve several feedback mechanisms that should work faster and more efficiently than voting - and note that voting outcomes are mostly manufactured by institutions.
First, he proposes privatizing ownership of goverment. That means taking all the different bits of power spread around the system and rationalizing them. Federal unions, ngos, universities, etc should all receive shares in a newly incorporated government based on their relative power as measured today. These owners then receive dividends, vote for a board of directors, and appoint a ceo the same way the best corporations are run. This privatizion fixes the turnover problem where each administration is incentived to loot the physical, human, and other capital before the other party takes office. It also provides an accountability process based on self interest, instead of hoping politicians will do what's best.
Second he proposes social welfare programs for this reformed state to preserve and grow human capital instead of destroy it. This has a long term positive feedback effect where the new system reinforces itself, as greater human capital becomes more capable of improving the new system, unlike our current system where politicians give handouts for votes while destroying incentives to advance careers.
Third he argues that the new owners of the state should use the proven efficient techniques from public corporate governance to maximize the improvement of the nation. This includes publicly tradable shares in the state, a strong executive, accountability through a board of directors, and shareholder proposals. Going into why these techniques work in our current era and why they would work is beyond what I can write in a blog post comment, but I'd suggest Hoppes work "Democracy the god that failed" as being based in solid science and refers out to other work and terms you can search on sites like NBER to read the actual math, empirical experimental data, and theory.
As always, the gap between what is and what ought to be is immense.
I think your analysis mischaracterizes ancient forms of government. Despotic societies with human sacrifice still had a great reliance on culture. The Aztecs only went as far as they did with their sacrificing because of a cultural reaction to a famine, not because it was the most efficient way of ruling. Traditional monarchy is not the same throughout history: early feudal monarchy was vastly different from the post Black Death Absolutism that took hold in Europe.
The goal of Formalism seems to be providing a capitalist / corporatist framework for producing a highly decentralized state network within a state. The Holy Roman Empire with CEOs instead of princes. I think it is heavily flawed because market based corporations are much more volatile than princely families with landed titles.
Of course all early states had a great reliance of culture. My analysis is necessarily simplified. What I call despotisms are early states, or what Peter Turchin calls Archaic monarchy. This is separated from a later form of absolute rule that had some external validation from religious or philosophical structures, which I call traditional monarchy, or just monarchy. The classic example would be the Assyrian Kings as despotism versus the Emperor Ashoka after he became Buddhist as the monarch.
Part of what makes the Aztecs a depotism is the fact that human sacrifice was part of their cultural playbook. Another part is is it instability. And I note their civilization was less than 200 years old when it fell. The only reason why Cortez and his handful of men were successful is that the Aztec empire was unstable. Had they been a traditional monarchy they probably would be defeated Cortez. I would point our that Europeans arrived in West African before the Americans, yet were unable to conquer those lands while the American states easily fell. It's true that the Africans had resistance to European diseases as well as diseases of their own that affected Europeans, but there were more advanced having traditional monarchy, advanced religion (Islam) and iron weapons just like the Europeans, while the Americans did not.
In fact, the Europeans did not conquer Africa until they had developed capitalism and the scientific method social scale-up techs and so pulled ahead of the Africans, and pretty much everyone else.
The Incans seem much closer to a traditional monarchy, but fell with less initial resistance than the Aztecs. Lacking iron was a big deal, but perhaps even more so was lacking horses or knowledge of them.
I don’t know much about the Inca. I read a bit on wiki. They had been around for only about a century when the Spanish came and were embroiled in a civil war. The government seemed to collapse after Atahualpa’s capture. It’s short duration and the apparent weakness of its legitimacy-granted norms suggest it had not become a traditional monarchy.
Also this sequence is typically followed when states are initially formed (so it would apply to the Peruvian civilization since this is one of the at six? “pristine” civilizations (ones that arose independent of the others). Western Civilization is an “induced” civilization, forming state societies in response to the threat posed (and example shown) by the Roman empire. The Germanic tribes whose coalescence into states and subsequent evolution produced the modern Western European states was an induced development. Some of them may have skipped the despot stage altogether.
This is a solid take on Yarvin's ideas.
He, Thiel, and the other neo-reactionaries stand to benefit from wrecking US democracy and establishing their vision of authoritarianism. That lies behind all the verbiage.
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-plot-against-america
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/from-madisons-vision-to-musks-dystopia
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-libertarian-suicide-pact
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/clear-thinking-v-curtis-yarvin
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/not-even-wrong
https://thucydidesii.substack.com/p/network-cities-enter-the-chat
https://thucydidesii.substack.com/p/influence-of-curtis-yarvin-peter
https://michaeldsellers.substack.com/p/mike-brocks-chilling-explanation
https://michaeldsellers.substack.com/p/the-democracy-is-obsoletegang-and
https://www.persuasion.community/p/americas-pro-authoritarian-theorists
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-red-pill-pusher
https://www.mind-war.com/p/american-national-socialism
https://www.mind-war.com/p/eugenics-cabinet-the-hyper-racist
https://www.bugeyedandshameless.com/p/jd-vance-peter-thiel-bilderberg
https://deconstructingkremlinpropaganda.substack.com/p/why-a-vote-for-donald-trump-is-a
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/how-silicon-valleys-corrupted-libertarianism
https://hartmannreport.com/p/american-caesar-trumps-path-to-power-82a
https://speterdavis.substack.com/p/frauds-in-the-wings-the-plagiarized
https://www.altrightdelete.news/p/vance-thiel-yarvin-2024-the-neoreactionary
Thank you for sharing this Mike. So far I am unimpressed with the Dark Enlightenment, despite its cool name.
Oddly, many of the ideas I have championed at Risk & Progress could be seen as Dark Enlightenment-adjacent.
The key difference, so far from what I have gathered, is the need for checks/balances, and power sharing in government.
I don't believe that any political system can survive long when it is extractive in how it derives its power and wealth. Only inclusive systems are sustainable long term.
Yes. It is the inclusive nature that supports the increased legitimacy to forestall instability in the much more complex societies made possible by capitalism. With many more players, you need to bring them into the tent, or they will plot against you.
Your biggest self contradiction is (a) social systems cannot be engineered to stop violence yet (b) scalable institutions such as the state reduce violence.
In the Libertarian viewpoint, states are recognized as security providers. However, they face several design flaws that reduce their ability to effectively provide security. Firstly, they are monopolies, so there's limited competitive pressure as they have a captured customer based. Secondly, they face an owner/agent problem, where the agents do not have a strong incentive to operate the state efficiently as there is limited feedback (such as voting) to maintain accountability. Third, the state takes on too many different functions; according to the theory of the firm, larger firms are need some kind of efficiency gain from size to offset increasing overhead from bureaucracy.
I disagree with Yarvin in many areas but the core thrust of his ideas are good ones. By focusing on the state as just another provider of goods and services, we can broaden the toolkit available to improve the function of the state. Its time to wake up and stop thinking about states in a religious way. States are not deities.
It's not a self contradiction. When you engineer something you are manipulating a system to get a desired result. This works when you well understand the mechanisms that explain the behavior of the system. We do not understand how systems like human societies work. It is risky to try engineering such systems. The best approach is what one does with complex industrial processes that are not well understood: evolutionary operations.
Attempting to engineer societies is what revolutionaries do; it almost always leads to worse outcomes.
The American Revolution succeeded by *not* being a revolution. The same American ruling class that existed before the war remained afterward, simply with those who sided with England removed. Little was changed. When problems arose, a constitution was drawn up that was minimal in design and which kept the same people in charge.
Over time, bits and pieces were added and some things subtracted. It's messy, but it has muddled on for 236 years and hasn't gone belly up so far. At the first crisis resolution it sought to exclude a large portion of the elite from rule which triggered civil war, which was resolved by US victory.
We are now in our third crisis resolution period and maybe we do not survive it to begin a "fourth republic." But the examples Yarvin gives haven't even gone through one of these.
Engineering is different from science. You don't actually have to fully understand the underlying structure of a system to apply engineering techniques. In software, usually the underlying code base is far too complex for any person to understand. So techniques such as test driven development, fast iteration loops, and separation of concerns allow engineers to handle such codebases.
In the case of social systems, we do actually understand how they work on a deeper, scientific level. The criticisms of the state Yarvin provides are mostly grounded in economic theory, which is the most mathematical of the social sciences. We also have an entire field, Sociology, which is dedicated to understanding human sociology!
Engineers are used to working under conditions of uncertainty and risk. Construction engineering, mechanical engineering, bio engineering, all rely on concepts of risk tolerance. Working with social systems is not any different!
But not only that, the existing institutions we have today apply economic and other social sciences to decision making. Today's technocratic democracy is primarily based around experts using social science to manage public opinion, economic growth, and reward key groups. Libertarians argue that these techniques should be expanded, not stopped - and we should take the findings from social science seriously and apply them using the same techniques already used.
Note that in Yarvin as an example, he does not advocate for revolution. He consistently puts forwards techniques to use the existing systems for reform. I don't agree with him in many respects but in this area I am in agreement with him and disagreement with you. We can in fact use science and engineering to improve society.
I am a chemical engineer and working in process R&D for 33 years mostly on fermentation and chemical processes. I understand engineering and the limitations of engineering in poorly understood systems like the microbial systems the other engineers and scientists and I worked with. We had the advantage of laboratories and pilot plants where were could run scale models of the processes we were working on and manipulate variables to assess their effects. We also had the advantage of many lots, while there is only one shot at history.
When working in a well-defined system like physics or mechanics, it is possible to design a spacecraft that flies to a location a million miles away and then undergoes a complex set of operations with no chance of intervention and have it perform flawlessly, as with the James Webb telescope. You cannot remotely do anything so precise in biological systems, including medicine. This is why new drugs have to go through trials and sometimes despite lots of very promising data from laboratory work and earlier trials the candidate simply does not pan out.
Our understanding of human societies is no where near the level of our understanding of biology or human physiology and yet we are routinely humbled by Mother Nature.
Plenty of time policymakers have made choices like the tax cuts in 1964, 1981, and 1986 that economic theory says should have positive effects on economic performance for most people which did not. Policy makers decided we would just run deficits in the 1960 so we could start a war of choice that we lost, at the expense of the Bretton Woods system and a decade of stagflation. If people understood economics then why the surprise at the results of MFN status for China and the inability to see the 2008 financial crisis coming when all could see the capital gains tax cuts that likely helped stoke the fire.
These failures have to do with known issues with the structure of government - specifically, the lack of a rapid feedback mechanisms such as prices that exist in the private economy. It's challglenging to know if any government activity has a net positive economic benefit because of the calculation problem caused by the involuntary nature of state action.
Again you keep claiming that it's impossible to design social systems yet that's exactly what our technocratic democracy does! Every US President since at least FDR, and including Trump, has relied on experts in the social sciences to manage, build and reform institutions. You should know as an engineer that just because there's a system failure does not mean the entire system has to be trashed - failures should be analyzed, data collected, and new strategies to mitigate future failures implemented. That all said, because of the known sociological issues with government structures, states tend to underperform private enterprises.
I sense that you lack an understanding and respect for the social sciences. Believe it or not, these fields are critical to the functioning of every institution. Our institutions today did not evolve; they were intelligently designed by experts from the social sciences.
Of course, governments have to make policy. And they frequently get it wrong, as I pointed out. But then the voters throw them out and give the other party a chance. It is inefficient, but it is self-correcting. In the same way, markets are inefficient, but are self-correcting.
What Yavin is proposing is a one-time solution to the problem of government. In the economic sphere this is the equivalent of a planned economy. It doesn’t work for economies and it won’t for polities either. The reason is a lack of a self-correcting mechanism. This was what Churchill was referring to when he called democracy the worst form of government except for all the others.
To be clear I'm not a Yarvinite, but his ideas do involve several feedback mechanisms that should work faster and more efficiently than voting - and note that voting outcomes are mostly manufactured by institutions.
First, he proposes privatizing ownership of goverment. That means taking all the different bits of power spread around the system and rationalizing them. Federal unions, ngos, universities, etc should all receive shares in a newly incorporated government based on their relative power as measured today. These owners then receive dividends, vote for a board of directors, and appoint a ceo the same way the best corporations are run. This privatizion fixes the turnover problem where each administration is incentived to loot the physical, human, and other capital before the other party takes office. It also provides an accountability process based on self interest, instead of hoping politicians will do what's best.
Second he proposes social welfare programs for this reformed state to preserve and grow human capital instead of destroy it. This has a long term positive feedback effect where the new system reinforces itself, as greater human capital becomes more capable of improving the new system, unlike our current system where politicians give handouts for votes while destroying incentives to advance careers.
Third he argues that the new owners of the state should use the proven efficient techniques from public corporate governance to maximize the improvement of the nation. This includes publicly tradable shares in the state, a strong executive, accountability through a board of directors, and shareholder proposals. Going into why these techniques work in our current era and why they would work is beyond what I can write in a blog post comment, but I'd suggest Hoppes work "Democracy the god that failed" as being based in solid science and refers out to other work and terms you can search on sites like NBER to read the actual math, empirical experimental data, and theory.