I’ve been reading some of Curtis Yarvin’s work lately.
For the most part, he seems like a blowhard, and an incorrect blowhard at that. His general rhetorical approach seems to be to make bold assertions, dressed up in flowery and bombastic language, and then to flatter his reader for being in on the secret. When he’s on podcast interviews, mostly the hosts will agree with his premises, but occasionally he’ll make a claim that they reject and push back against. Then Yarvin is forced to defend his bold claims instead of just insinuating them, and often his actual argumentation comes off as pretty weak.
I get the feeling sometimes when reading his work of reading a high school essay, of the author reaching for arguments to defend a bottom line, decided for other reasons, rather than reporting the arguments and evidence that lead the author to believe the conclusion.1
He admits directly that he’s writing for fun, and occasionally talks about writing to troll people. I get the impression that his views were arrived at in part by a sincere intellectual investigation of history and political philosophy, and in part because they were fun (ie shocking) to advocate for in 2008. But now they’re a key part of Yarvin’s brand and he’s kind of stuck with them. As in academic philosophy, his incentives are towards doubling down on his distinctive ideas, regardless of their truth.)
His rhetorical style reminds me of that of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nassim Taleb. All three of them have a deep knowledge of their subject matter and each writes with an arrogance / confidence in the correctness of his view and an insinuation that the reader, like him, understands some important truths not grasped by the masses of humanity. This style makes these authors fun to read, for some people, and insufferably annoying for other people.
My read, so far, is that if you don’t already buy into his basically aesthetic premises, his disgust for modernity and for progressivism in particular, he doesn’t have much in the way of good arguments for persuading you of his views. Perhaps the main thing that he does is open people’s eyes, allowing them to see through a hitherto completely unknown perspective that pierces through the civic propaganda of our time. Having seen through that perspective, perhaps some parts of the the world makes more sense. But that’s not because Moldbug made a strong case for his claims, so much as his rhetoric ensnared you in his wake, and pulled you along for a bit. (I’m very interested in Moldbug fans who disagree—especially those who’s mind was changed by some of his posts.)
That said, he does have a few important and novel-to-me analytical points.
Today, I think I grasped an important core of Yarvin’s political philosophy which I hadn’t previously understood, and which, not having understood, made many of his claims seem bizarre in their not-even-wrongness.
All of the following is a compression of my understanding of his view, and is not to be taken as an endorsement of that view.
Claim 1: Sovereignty is Conserved
This is almost a catchphrase for Yarvin. He uses it all over the place.
There is always some force or entity outside of and above the law. Every law is enforced by some process (otherwise it’s hardly a law). And the process that enforces the law must, necessarily, have the power to exempt itself from that law. If not, it wasn’t actually the system ultimately doing the enforcing. Sovereignty is “above-the-law-ness”, and it’s always conserved.2
As an intuition pump: there exists someone in the US government, who, if they decided to, could “disappear” you a (more or less) ordinary US citizen. Possibly the president could detain or assassinate a US citizen for no legible cause, and face no consequences. Possibly some specific people in the intelligences services, as well. If there’s no one person who could do it, there’s surely a consortium of people that, working in concert, could. (That sovereignty is conserved doesn’t mean that it’s always concentrated). In the limit, the whole of the US military must be above the law, because if it decided to, in a coordinated way, it could trivially overturn any law, or the whole governmental system for that matter. [More on that possibility later.]
Even if no specific individual is above the law, the government as a whole sure as hell is. “The government” can, fundamentally, do whatever it “wants”.
This is explicitly counter to an ideal enlightenment philosophy—that of equality before the law. That no person, no mater how powerful, is exempt from the same basic legal standards.
Moldbug asserts that any claim to equality above the law is horseshit. Sovereignty is conserved. Power is real, and it bottoms out somewhere, and wherever it bottoms out is always going to be above the law.
This isn’t a law of physics, but it is a law of nature—at least as inescapable as the logic of supply and demand, or natural selection. 3
Because of his rhetoric and politics, it’s easy to read Moldbug as not caring at all about the inequities of power. This is somewhat of a misunderstanding. It’s a non-question for Yarvin whether it’s good or desirable that sovereignty is conserved. It’s just a fact of life that power is going to ground out somewhere. Whether we consider that inhumane or prefer that it was otherwise is of no more relevance that if we wished perpetual motion was possible. It’s not possible, and it’s not possible for a pretty fundamental reason.4
But as a society, we’re are intent on deluding ourselves about the nature of power. That might cause problems, in roughly the way it might if we insisted on deluding ourselves about the efficacy of perpetual motion machines.
Claim 2: The profit motive + competition is a stronger guarantee than ideology
So there’s always some entity outside the law. But, one might think, given that sad reality, that its better to divide up that power as much as possible so that as few people as possible, and ideally no one, can unilaterally disappear people. Checks and balances, and limited powers, and so on, to prevent any individual or group in government, and the government as a whole from being too powerful. Perhaps we can’t abolish sovereignty, but dividing it up as much as possible and spreading it around seems like the the most humane way to deal with the unfortunate situation, right?
Yarvin is in favor of monarchy, so he says “no”. Why not?
Because, in practice, the less concentrated power is, the more it is effectively controlled by ideology rather than rational optimization for anyone’s interests.
This is the basic problem of voter incentives: The odds of any individual person’s vote shifting policy, and impacting that person’s life directly are so minuscule as to be irrelevant. The main impact that your voting behavior has on your life is through signaling: signaling to your peers and to yourself what kind of person you are. If your vote materially impacted your life through policy, you would be incentivized to carefully weigh the tradeoffs in every decision (or defer to trusted expert advisors). But if your vote is mostly about showing how compassionate you are, how committed you are to our shared values, carefully weighing tradeoffs doesn’t help you. Saying the most applause lights the fastest is what’s good for signaling.
As Bryan Caplan says “Markets do the good things that sound bad, and governments do bad things that sound good.”
The more power is divided up into tiny pieces the more it is steered by ideology instead of by self-interest. And rational self interest is much less dangerous than ideology.
As discussed, the US military could overthrow the US government and the US legal system, if it wanted to. Why doesn’t it do that? Because there’s a distributed common knowledge belief in “democracy“. Lots of people in the military sincerely believe in the democratic ideal, and even if they don’t, they believe that they believe they do, and everyone knows that everyone else would immediately oppose any attempts at an “undemocratic” military coup.
Which is to say that the thing standing between the US as it currently exists and a military dictatorship is an ideological commitment to “democracy”. This seems to have worked pretty well so far, but those scare quotes are pretty scary. If a sufficiently large faction of the military came to buy into an ideology that claimed to carry the torch of the true spirit of democracy (or Christianity, or Social Justice, or Communism, or enviornmentalism, or whatever moral ideal compels), that ideology would take over the US.
And similarly, to the extent that the US government is possessed by the spirit of Wokism, your country might suddenly become violently woke.
This isn’t a hypothetical. We’ve seen countries get possessed by Communist ideology and become violently Communist.
In contrast, consider if instead there was a single king/CEO, who has complete and total power over his domain, who controlled the military power. As long as he’s sane and competent (which has been a problem with historical monarchs but which Yarvin thinks is more-or-less solved as well as we can reasonably expect by the structure of a joint-stock corporation), this monarch would be acting from incentives that are much closer to rational self-interest, because he (and the shareholders of the joint-stock country) benefit(s) directly from the upside of actual actual policy outcomes, not just the social signaling benefits of his policies. He wants his realm to be safe and well-governed because that will increase the value of the real estate he owns, and he will make more money that way.
Especially so if he governs only one of hundreds of sovereign realms in a patchwork. In that case there’s competitive pressure to get policy right, and maintain rule of law. If he does a bad job of ruling, residents will leave to live somewhere else, taking their tax revenue with them.
This is not perfect. Any given king might be bad, just as any given CEO can be bad. There’s no guarantee that a king won’t be possessed by and ideology (it’s certainly happened before! Ferdinand II of the Holy Roman Empire and Alexander I of Russia, come to mind). But it’s better than the alternatives. Especially if the shareholders can remove a bad king from power and if there’s competition between sovereign realms, both of which introduce selection pressure for sane, self-interested kings.
It’s true that the sovereign could, by right, have any person in his realm who ticked him off quietly assassinated. But, realizing that sovereignty is conserved, that becomes less of a problem of monarchy in particular, and more of an inescapable problem of power in general, one which we obscure but don’t eliminate with limited governments of ostensive checks and balances.
Plus, assassinating people, even if you have the legal right to do it, is generally going to be bad for business—an erratic CEO doesn’t inspire the confidence that causes people to want to live in his realm. Enough shenanigans like that, and his sovereign corporation will start losing customers, and his shareholders will sell it’s stock and/or have him removed at CEO. And if the CEO is actually sovereign, that removes the strongest incentive on historical monarchs for having people assassinated: as a means of securing his power.5
But most importantly, a monarch-CEO is much much less likely than a democracy to get riled up and implement Communism. Communism is transparently bad for business, but sounds good (meaning it is a good way to signal your compassion or tribal loyalty). The incentives of CEOs leave them less vulnerable to takeover by parasitic ideologies compared to masses of people in democracies. And ideological revolutions and generic bad-but-sounds-good policy is the serious threat-model. The all-powerful CEO who has the legal and pragmatic power of life and death over you is just much less dangerous than a state controlled by competing ideologies, which might decide that doing massive harm (from burning down your cities in the name of black lives, to rounding up all the jews, sending your scientists to work camps) is morally obligatory, in a fit of runaway virtue-signaling.
And indeed, when there’s some political power in the hands of the people, a good strategy for an ambitious person seizing power is to craft or adapt an ideology that enflames the people’s passions, and empowers you personally. That’s what Hitler and Lenin did. When sovereignty is in the hands of shareholders and their CEO-delegate., ideologies are less adaptive for gaining power, and so less pervasive in the first place. But this is a separate thread of Modbugian philosophy: that democracy causes ideology, that’s less central to the point that CEO-kings operating under the constraints of the profit motive and market competition are less vulnerable to ideologies than democracies.
Given that we can’t escape power, the profit motive of a king is a much stronger guarantee of good outcomes than ideological commitment, because ideologies are crazy, or at least can turn crazy fast.
Once you have that attitude, the fact that sovereignty in our present era seems to bottom out in basically ideological institutions seems…rather concerning. Every time you read “democratically controlled” you might mentally replace it with “more or less controlled by at least one more-or-less insane egregor.”
When I think in these terms, Yarvin’s political philosophy clicks into place for me as a coherent take on the world.
I’m not sure if I buy it, overall.
I agree that we don’t have literal and complete equality before the law: there are elites who get special treatment, and there may be individuals in the system that can literally get away with murder (though my guess is that’s only true in pretty limited circumstances?). But the US social and legal system really is demonstrably more egalitarian, closer to the ideal of equality before the law, than the European aristocratic systems that proceeded it. And that seems like something to be justly proud.
I think he’s underselling separation of powers. It’s true that the government can do whatever it wants, but we’ve set it up so that the government has difficulty mustering up unified and coherent wants to act on. Government is, in practice, limited by earth’s low coordination capacity. Which gives us a kind of safety from tyranny.
If someone in the intelligence community wanted to “disappear” me, they would have to keep it secret, because they would have political opponents, and just principled detractors, who would, if they could, expose the criminal and have them arrested. Nixon was removed from office for violating the law. It might not be perfect equality before the law, but it’s a pretty impressive example of something approaching that.
Further, I’m less pessimistic than my read of Yarvin about constructing systems in which NO individual is above the law in the sense of being able to unilaterally violate it. eg systems where everyone enforces the law on everyone else. (Systems like these are vulnerable to 51% attacks, and the number of actual people required to implement a 51% attack falls as political and/or social power is consolidated. But that’s true of literally every system of law, and the question is how we can do best.)
It does seem possible that a CEO-monarch who can be removed by a vote of the stockholders is more likely to act from straightforward material rational self-interest than voters do, currently. (Actual historical monarchies have a number of critical-level problems, from crazy kings to violent succession disputes as the norm). It seems like it is likely to have other problems—namely a principle agent problem between the shareholders and their delegate.6 I’m curious to see a government that runs on that system, and see how it behaves. Maybe it would result in good policy.
However, I think there are other schemes, mostly untried, that do a better job of incentivizing good judgement from voters, while also getting the historically-validated stability benefits of democratic governance. I’m thinking of systems like futarchy (or just prominent, public, prediction markets) and quadratic voting.
The main feature that’s doing the work in Yarvin’s conception, is the multitude of micronations competing for residents. As long as you have sufficiently low transaction costs involved in moving from one country to another, and at least some countries have politically unified enough governance that they can and do adopt the explicit policy goal of optimizing tax revenue (or, for that matter, any of a number of possible social welfare functions, or baskets of indicators), you get all the benefits of the Moldbugian system. The bit about CEO-kings isn’t actually critical. Maybe that’s the best way to optimize policy for tax revenue, or maybe not. Possibly that the king has authority to kill any citizen for any reason is net-beneficial for security and stability, such that many people prefer living in a nation where the chief executive has that level of legal authority, and overall tax revenue is higher. But then again, maybe not. (The optics are pretty unnerving, at least.)
It sounds to me that the problem is not that we don’t have kings, in particular, but just that there’s so little room for governance experimentation, in general, and so new radical ideas don’t get tried.
- For instance, I’m unimpressed with Yarvin’s claim that his political schema would lead to world peace. He spends a few sentences asserting that his realm-CEOs, being rational, would have no issues solving collective action problems, and would have no need for a higher governmental structure above them to enforce collective action, and then moves on. 🙄 ↩︎
- See, for instance, here.
> The key is that word should. When you say your government “should do X,” or “should not do Y,” you are speaking in the hieratic language of democracy. You are postulating some ethereal and benign higher sovereign, which can enforce promises made by the mere government to whose whims you would otherwise be subject. In reality, while your government can certainly promise to do X or not to do Y, there is no power that can hold it to this promise. Or if there is, it is that power which is your real government.
↩︎ - We might try to conceive of clever schemes under which this is not so: legal systems based on blockchain smart contracts where there’s no enforcement mechanism outside of the computerized legal corpus, itself. Maybe in some scenario like that, we would have effectively grounded out the root of power into the law itself, and escaped the basic dynamic that someone is always above the law (in much the same way that reconstructing life to use encrypted genomes would potentially allow us to escape the so far inexorable pull of natural selection). ↩︎
- > It is immediately clear that the neocameralist should, the tight rope, is far inferior to the ethereal should, the magic leash of God. (Typically these days arriving in the form of vox populi, vox Dei. Or, as a cynic might put it: vox populi, vox praeceptoris.)
> Given the choice between financial responsibility and moral responsibility, I will take the latter every time. If it were possible to write a set of rules on paper and require one’s children and one’s children’s children to comply with this bible, all sorts of eternal principles for good government and healthy living could be set out.
> But we cannot construct a political structure that will enforce moral responsibility. We can construct a political structure that will enforce financial responsibility. Thus neocameralism. We might say that financial responsibility is the raw material of moral responsibility. The two are not by any means identical, but they are surprisingly similar, and the gap seems bridgeable.
From Profit Strategies for Our New Corporate Overlords, here. ↩︎ - Crucially the board of directors of a realm, the people who do have the power to remove the CEO-king, should not live in that realm, for precisely the reason that this represents an incentive for the king to use his complete power over you, as your sovereign, his ability to have you and your family killed or tortured, to get you to vote as he demands in board meetings. ↩︎
- If the CEO-king has absolute power over his realm that seems like it gives him a lot of leeway to control the information flows about how the realm is doing back to the shareholders that might hold him accountable to profit. ↩︎
musings and rough drafts 
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