Clowns Criticizing the Clown Show
They wanted chaos but not this chaos.
I was rather amused by the WaPo report, “Curtis Yarvin helped inspire DOGE. Now he scorns it.”
Before gutting the federal workforce became Elon Musk’s job, it was Curtis Yarvin’s dream.
Yarvin — a Silicon Valley blogger and software developer who argues for replacing American democracy with a dictatorship — spent years outlining an assault on what he calls “the cathedral” of elite power and consensus. Long before the U.S. DOGE Service launched in January, Yarvin coined his own four-letter acronym for bureaucracy-slashing: RAGE, or “Retire All Government Employees.”
Although he says he has never met Musk, Yarvin is a powerful influence among those carrying out DOGE’s radical cost-cutting agenda, two advisers to the effort said. One, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to describe the group’s work, said Yarvin had offered “the most crisp articulation” of what DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, is trying to achieve.
“There’s this alliance of the media, of universities, of government,” the DOGE adviser said. “These people are capturing the government and using it for their own ends and for their own power. And that’s very scary to us. You want to lessen the power of the cathedral.”
It’s not every day a neo-monarchist’s Substack helps shape disruptive federal policies. But Yarvin, 51, isn’t celebrating. In fact, in several recent interviews with The Washington Post, he offered a surprisingly harsh assessment of DOGE, comparing it to an orchestra of chimpanzees trying to perform Wagner. He also said the group’s attitude toward federal workers resembles that of a brash but insecure man who repels potential sexual partners.
“In the worst aspects of DOGE, there’s this aspect of the incel who gets mad at the girl who won’t sleep with him,” Yarvin said, using the term for so-called involuntary celibates. “That’s not a powerful attitude.”
[…]
That such a provocative figure should deem the early activity of the second Trump administration too, well, provocative is among the many unpredictable developments since the president assumed office less than four months ago. Despite his informal role as secular prophet to DOGE and some Trump administration policymakers, Yarvin now asserts that Musk and President Donald Trump are needlessly harming and antagonizing government experts whose support they should be seeking.
“It’s very shortsighted behavior from the standpoint of building capital, or building power,” Yarvin said. “They’re really acting on a seat-of-the-pants basis.”
Yarvin’s DOGE disillusionment is somewhat surreal, almost as if Marx had lived long enough to troll the Bolsheviks for misreading “Das Kapital.” It is also, perhaps, an object lesson in the dangers of translating the often outlandish digital discourse that has shaped the American far right into real-world policies that have scaled back scientific research, jeopardized some lifesaving foreign aid programs and risked hobbling government services with mass firings.
I’m only marginally familiar with Yarvin’s work but this doesn’t shock me at all. Enthusiasts for authoritarian rule almost always envision that the authoritarian will be someone very much like them if not, well, them. It’s not nearly as much fun when someone wields unchecked power with a different vision.
Beyond that, many people who broadly support President Trump’s ostensible policy goals nonetheless oppose the manner in which his administration is going about achieving them.
Aside from the obvious cruelty, DOGE is simply reckless. It’s not only not actually achieving any real government efficiency, it’s destroying capacity in areas where all but the nuttiest anti-government ideologues think government is necessary.
Similarly, whatever your views on what American trade policy should look like, it’s hard to find any serious economic analyst who thinks wildly erratic tariffs are a good idea. Predictability is a sine qua non of a sound economy.
Lastly, the Bolsheviks clearly misapplied Marx’s work, which was a description of how sociopolitical systems evolve, not a prescription for governance. It certainly didn’t call for pogroms and totalitarian rule.
Sounds like someone thought he was going to get the job himself. Sour grapes.
This.
Self-delusion from intense mirror gazing.
Fun to listen to the freak show, but the tone is eerily similar to that of progressives whining about Biden or Obama. The purity police can never be pleased.
I have been reading Yarvin off and on since someone pointed out he was a major influence in the new right. Also, Scott Alexander at Astral Codex has a pretty in depth, and very funny look at Yarvin’s beliefs which started out as some combination of ideas for sci-fi writing and BS between the guy who think they are the smartest ones in the room, a lot of them IT folks. Based upon his writings its clear what is happening is not what he wanted but contra this article, in his writings he has tried to underplay how bad things are and how they arent anywhere close to what he wanted. In fact, he claimed that if events played out as they are now we would have created Hitler and have fascism.
Also, just to be clear how much his stuff based upon fantasy, his idea was that we should have a powerful ruler, not leader, who would not be elected but would assume power because he was worthy. The definition of worthy is complicated but it mostly means they showed absolutely no interest in politics or ruling. Once someone actually became worthy, they would assume power and then rule. Not with an election but they just assume power because they are worthy. The only check on the power of the ruler is that there would be an unelected board that could fire the ruler if he started acting like Trump is now. Note that we dont have that board and there would be nothing to stop the board from abusing power, especially as in Yarvin’s world the board would be untouchable.
Anyway, no bad I am making it sound with my lack of writing skills it is actually worse than I can describe. I guess to be minimally fair some of his ideas arent that far out. Many people have pointed out that an enlightened, benevolent despot would be the most efficient form of govt. It actually makes sense, but one man’s benevolent is another man’s monster and as Lord Acton noted long ago power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Steve
“In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed “not productive”: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”
Yarvin, a self-described reactionary and extremist who was 35 years old at the time, clarified that he was “just kidding.” But then he continued, “The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass. However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide.”
Left without comment.
I forgot the link to the above:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/where-jd-vance-gets-his-weird-terrifying-techno-authoritarian-ideas/ar-BB1qpkq4
@becca: I read a few posts by Yarvin in that era. I decided that nobody would take him serious (using the handle of “Mencius Moldbug” didn’t help with that).
Apparently I was wrong.
Scott Alexander (of Star Slate Codex) just recapitulated some of Yarvin’s maunderings that can be summed up as “anybody who seeks power can’t be trusted with it”. Which is not actually a new sentiment, but Yarvin goes into great, great detail about this principle. Because he hates democracy and wants to be ruled by a dictator – but not just any dictator, because they all suck. No, the proper ruler is a philosopher-dictator, who has never sought at any moment, in any way, to be dictator.
Which of course, is horrifyingly misaligned with the general alt-right and Vance, etc. Yarvin is now mumbling about how much they suck, too.
Curtis Yarvin was an old man yelling at the clouds well before he was actually old.
@Jay L Gischer:
So, he plagiarized Plato.
He might do better to get himself a Domme and leave the rest of us alone.
My wife once had a discussion about Sylvia Plath with a professor:
Wife: These sentiments are terrible!
Prof: Yes, but they are a beautifully written horrible, aren’t they?
I think that’s Yarvin’s appeal. He writes colorfully and engagingly about the problems of democracy. In some sense, he’s not wrong. Democracy is the worst system – except for every other system that’s been tried.
It’s not good, because people are not good. It does ok, though, but the country needs to be invested in it. Now it seems that between a quarter and a third of the country are invested in destroying it under some pretext of “one doesn’t vote on right or wrong”. Of course, they don’t mean one’s personal ethos, but what all you other monsters are doing is WRONG!.
So here we are. Democracy is an eternal struggle.
This is why we need DEI in college admissions. We have an entire, incredibly-important field filled with the biggest fucking assholes who have no empathy for anyone outside of their little bubble. Their bubbles need to be forcibly expanded.
They have an unfortunate tendency to find their way into pseudo cults — Objectivism, Effective Altruism*, Evolutionary Psychology… — trying to find explanations for large parts of a world that they don’t understand (poor people, minority experiences, women…) that they just don’t encounter, and think that with their big brains they know the answers. If they had people they regularly encountered who could say “well, actually**, SNAP benefits are not enough to encourage poor people to have litters of children” or whatever,
Curtis Yarvin might have a genetic predisposition to being a complete douchenozzle, but if enough people in tech knew that his common-sense solutions have been tried many times and failed each and every time, he wouldn’t have the level of influence he has. He would just be the equivalent of the crank at the end of the bar, day drinking and going on about how both sides are the same and what we really need is some mind numbingly simplistic solution that would be thought of by an edgy 13 year old.
A lot of the people who got caught up into this weren’t awful people — they were naive, undereducated semi-smart people who want to change the world, and have the money to do so.
As I would tell junior engineers who were parroting these ideas “Do you know who else changed the world? Hitler.” I was generally thought of as a crank.
*: Effective Altruism is the least awful of these pseudo cults. It’s a pity that it fell apart with crypto scams. I knew a girl who got into it, after she had a brief Objectivist phase, and it was a big improvement. She enjoyed the sex cult aspects, and bought so much mosquito netting for Africa, and donated so much to build small schools in Thailand or whatever. So much better than Objectivism even if it was mostly wildly ineffective.
**: starting sentences with “well, actually,” ensures that tech shitheads pay attention. These are people who believe that technically right really is the best kind of right, and failed to understand the humor in that line from Futurama.
@Gustopher:
The problem isn’t so much lack of empathy, but rather an abundance of antipathy to anyone outside their tiny bubble.
@Gustopher:
Umm, you’re hittin’ close to home, Fred.
It frustrates me to no end that figures like Yarvin are taken to characterize the engineers whom I have spent decades working with. Almost all of them carried some sense that they wanted to make the world better. I worked at firms that were leaders in diversity. One firm I worked for offered benefits for domestic partners, including same-sex partners, long before the political push to legalize SSM.
What happened is that the internet enabled social media and money took over. The worst actors are only peripherally engineers, while all kinds of bad actors are attracted to money, like yellowjackets to a picnic.
And yes, there are people with goofy ideas. I have found people with goofy ideas everywhere I have been in life. Nobody would have heard of Curtis Yarvin if Vance/Musk/Thiel didn’t want to elevate his rhetoric while ignoring the full meaning of his writings.
@Jay L Gischer: I was in software for 20+ years. I will probably go into it again, if I need a paycheck.
Nearly everywhere I worked was very good on queer rights, because there are a lot of queer software engineers. One company went so far as to cover the difference in taxes for employees who couldn’t not file jointly with their partner before same sex marriage was legally recognized.
And the majority that I encountered were the same. But their empathy ended at their direct experiences, and everything past that was “analyzed” with “cold, hard logic” often pulled from TedTalks. Often just a gently white-washed version of “men are hunters and women are gatherers and certain people just have bad genes.”
Their lack of experience outside a young, white male dominated bubble means they’re really easy marks. The fact that they are often very successful financially means that they can spread their … marksmanship? … far and wide.
They’re self-made men ™ and don’t understand how others can’t just make themselves.
I think you’re missing how much the dog chases its own tail here. And the idolization of the Musks.
@Sleeping Dog: “Fun to listen to the freak show, but the tone is eerily similar to that of progressives whining about Biden or Obama. The purity police can never be pleased.”
Please, ‘both sides do it’ is garbage here.
@steve: “The only check on the power of the ruler is that there would be an unelected board that could fire the ruler if he started acting like Trump is now. ”
And that that board should be outside of the USA with cyber control over military assets.
Yarvin thinks that this is a desirable situation.
Dear old Mencius Moldbug aka Curtis Yarvin.
I think I’ve mentioned before I first encountered his blog back in the early ‘oughts, and left some disobliging comments.
He’s “smart”, but in a rather limited and superficial way.
iirc I advised him to try reading Aristotle, Locke, Santayana, Oakeshott, and Popper.
Anyone who thinks absolute monarchy secures property from predation knows little of history.
I sometimes have an inclination to demand all engineers (and lawyers for that matter) should be required to take courses in history and the history of political philosphy.
And likewise arts/humanities folks in economics, logic, and the history of science.
Also, the whole thing of yearning for a philospher-king lawgiver and ending up with Donald Trump (and Elon Musk playing Robin) is just utterly hilarious.
If only we didn’t have to actually live in this rather annoying timeline.
As someone who was naturally good with math, logic, and computers at a young age, and got repeatedly praised for how “smart” I was, but eventually realizing how I was actually only smart in one small area, I can understand why Yarvin and Musk think they’re smarter than they actually are. But so, so very limited in real-life experiences with people who aren’t like them.
That’s a large part of why democracy is better than a dictatorship. Because no one really has the breadth of knowledge needed to run everything.
I get that the analogy is for emphasis, but even a suggestion that the current GOP and this administration are in the same universe, through any lens, as the Russian revolutionaries is literally painful.
Intellectually, the goodness of the faith in which they operate, the ends which they seek, all of it is different. Lenin, Trotsky and the people in their faction wanted to help humanity by pulling power from the bourgeoise to the masses. There’s a reason that, in addition to Marx, they will continue to be read around the world for many, many years to come.
Turdis the disillusioned? What a naive and stupid little baby brain, and Moldbug has always been.