Curtis Yarvin
Curtis Guy Yarvin (born 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American blogger and software developer. Yarvin has been described as a neoreactionary and "neo-monarchist". In his blog "Unqualified Reservations", which he wrote from 2007 to 2014, and on his more recent Substack page called Gray Mirror, which he started in 2020, he argues that American democracy is a failed experiment which should be replaced by monarchy or corporate governance. He is known, along with fellow theorist Nick Land, for influencing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic movement known as the Dark Enlightenment . In 2002, Yarvin founded the Urbit computer platform. In 2013, he co-founded Tlon to manage and develop Urbit, and helped lead it until 2019. Biography. Early life and education. Curtis Yarvin was born in 1973 to a highly educated, liberal, secular family. His father's parents were Jewish–American Communists. Yarvin spent part of his childhood abroad, mainly on the island of Cyprus. In 1985, he returned to the US and entered Johns Hopkins' longitudinal Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. He graduated from Brown University in 1992, then was a graduate student of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, where  he conducted research on operating system network primitives and compiler optimization. Yarvin left graduate school without graduating. In the 1980–1990s, Yarvin was influenced by the libertarian tech culture of the Silicon Valley. Yarvin read right-wing and American conservative works. The libertarian University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds introduced him to libertarianism, especially Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. The rejection of empiricism by Mises and the Austrian School, who favored instead deduction from first principles, influenced Yarvin's mind-set. Urbit. In 2013 he co-founded Tlon to build out Urbit further and released the code under an  open source license. In 2016, Yarvin was invited to present on the functional programming aspects of Urbit at LambdaConf 2016, which resulted in the withdrawal of five speakers, two sub-conferences, and several sponsors. Yarvin worked with and helped lead Urbit development at Tlon before stepping down in January 2019. Neo-reactionary blogging. Yarvin's reading of Thomas Carlyle convinced him that libertarianism was a doomed project without the inclusion of authoritarianism, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe's 2001 book "" marked Yarvin's first break with democracy. Another influence was James Burnham, who asserted that real politics occurred through the actions  of elites, beneath what he called apparent democratic or socialist rhetoric. In the 2000s, the failures of US-led nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan strengthened Yarvin's anti-democratic views, the federal response to the 2008 financial crisis strengthened his libertarian convictions, and Barack Obama's election as US president reinforced his belief that history inevitably progresses toward left-leaning societies. In 2007, Yarvin began the blog "Unqualified Reservations" to promote his political vision. He largely stopped updating his blog in 2013, when he began to focus on Urbit, and in April 2016 he announced that "Unqualified Reservations" had  completed its mission. Yarvin currently blogs about his political views on Substack under the page name "Gray Mirror". Views. Dark Enlightenment. Yarvin says that real political power in the United States is held by something he calls "the Cathedral", an amalgam of universities and the mainstream press. According to him, a so-called "Brahmin" social class dominates American society, preaching progressive values to the masses. Yarvin and the Dark Enlightenment movement assert that the cathedral's commitment to equality and justice erodes social order. Yarvin's ideas have been influential among right-libertarians and paleolibertarians, and the public discourses of  prominent investors like Peter Thiel have echoed Yarvin's project of seceding from the US to establish tech-CEO dictatorships. Political strategist Steve Bannon has read and admired his work. Yarvin argues for a "neo-cameralist" philosophy based on Frederick the Great of Prussia's cameralism. In Yarvin's view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful and should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose "shareholders" (large owners) elect an executive with total power, but who must serve at their pleasure. The executive, unencumbered by liberal-democratic procedures, could rule efficiently much like a CEO-monarch. Yarvin admires Chinese  leader Deng Xiaoping for his pragmatic and market-oriented authoritarianism, and the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime. He sees the US as soft on crime, dominated by economic and democratic delusions. Yarvin supports authoritarianism on right-libertarian grounds, claiming that the division of political sovereignty expands the scope of the state, whereas strong governments with clear hierarchies remain minimal and narrowly focused. According to scholar Joshua Tait, "Moldbug imagines a radical libertarian utopia with maximum freedom in all things "except politics"." He has favored same-sex marriage, freedom of religion, private use of  drugs, and written against race- or gender-based discriminatory laws, although, according to Tait, "he self-consciously proposed private welfare and prison reforms that resembled slavery". Tait describes Yarvin's writing as contradictory, saying "He advocates hierarchy, yet deeply resents cultural elites. His political vision is futuristic and libertarian, yet expressed in the language of monarchy and reaction. He is irreligious and socially liberal on many issues but angrily anti-progressive. He presents himself as a thinker in search of truth but admits to lying to his readers, saturating his arguments with jokes and irony. These tensions indicate broader fissures  among the online Right." Drawing on computer metaphors, Yarvin contends that society needs a "hard reset" or a "rebooting", not a series of gradual political reforms. Instead of activism, he advocates passivism, claiming that progressivism would fail without right-wing opposition. Yarvin originally called his concept of aligning property rights with political power "formalism", the formal recognition of realities of power. The label "neo-reactionary" was applied to Yarvin's ideas by Arnold Kling in 2010 and adopted by Yarvin's followers;. His ideas have also been described by Dylan Matthews of "Vox" as "neo-monarchist". Under his Moldbug pseudonym , Yarvin gave a talk about "rebooting" the American government at the 2012 BIL Conference. He used it to advocate the acronym "RAGE", which he defined as "Retire All Government Employees". Acting as a provocateur, he described what he felt were flaws in the accepted "World War II mythology" alluding to the idea that Hitler's invasions were acts of self-defense. He argued these discrepancies were pushed by America's "ruling communists", who invented political correctness as an "extremely elaborate mechanism for persecuting racists and fascists". "If Americans want to change their government," he said, "they're going to have  to get over their dictator phobia." Alt-right. Yarvin has been described as part of the alt-right by journalists and commentators. Journalist Mike Wendling has called Yarvin "the alt-right's favorite philosophy instructor". Tait describes "Unqualified Reservations" as a "'highbrow' predecessor and later companion to the transgressive anti-'politically correct' metapolitics of nebulous online communities like 4chan and /pol/." Yarvin has publicly distanced himself from the alt-right. In a private message, Yarvin counseled Milo Yiannopoulos, then a reporter at "Breitbart News", to deal with neo-Nazis "the way some perfectly tailored high-communist NYT reporter handles a herd  of greasy anarchist hippies. Patronizing contempt. Your heart is in the right place, young lady, now get a shower and shave those pits." Yarvin came to public attention in February 2017 when "Politico" magazine reported that Steve Bannon, who served as White House Chief Strategist under U.S. President Donald Trump, read Yarvin's blog and that Yarvin "has reportedly opened up a line to the White House, communicating with Bannon and his aides through an intermediary." The story was picked up by other magazines and newspapers, including "The Atlantic", "The Independent," and "Mother Jones." Yarvin denied to "Vox" that he  was in contact with Bannon in any way, though he jokingly told "The Atlantic" that his White House contact was the Twitter user Bronze Age Pervert. Yarvin later gave a copy of Bronze Age Pervert's book "Bronze Age Mindset" to Michael Anton, a former senior national security official in the Trump administration. Views on race. Yarvin has endorsed the belief that whites have higher IQs than blacks for genetic reasons, and has been described as a modern-day supporter of slavery. He has claimed that some races are more suited to slavery than others. In a post that linked  approvingly to Steve Sailer and Jared Taylor, he wrote "[i]t should be obvious that, although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff." In 2009, he wrote that since US civil rights programs were "applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber", the result was "absolute human garbage." Yarvin disputes that he is racist. He has described the use of IQ tests to determine superiority as "creepy". He also disputes being an "advocate for slavery". Per Tait, "Moldbug's racial comments suggest a broader trend: the  anonymity of the internet allows him and others who have followed in his wake to revel in taboo language, ideas, and activities. Violating social norms is a kind of liberation for Moldbug: entertaining these ideas is to break from the Cathedral." In his essays, “Why I am not a White Nationalist” and “Why I am not an Anti-Semite,” Yarvin offered a somewhat sympathetic analysis of those ideologies before ultimately rejecting them. Right libertarianism. According to Tait, "Moldbug's relationship with the investor-entrepreneur Thiel is his most important connection." Peter Thiel was an investor in Yarvin's startup Tlon  and gave $100,000 to Tlon's co-founder John Burnham in 2011. In 2016, Yarvin privately asserted that he had been "coaching Thiel." Thiel and investor Balaji Srinivasan have echoed Yarvin's ideas of techno-corporate cameralism. Thiel wrote in a 2009 essay that he "no longer believe[d] that freedom and democracy are compatible... Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron," and Srinivasan advocated in a 2013 speech a "society run by  Silicon Valley (...) an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology." Personal life. He has two children with his late wife, Jennifer Kollmer (1971–2021), who died in San Francisco in April 2021 as a result of complications caused by hereditary cardiomyopathy. On April 7, 2022, Yarvin announced that he was engaged again.