Curtis Yarvin Discusses the Ukraine Situation with Alex Jones

Curtis Yarvin, AKA Mencius Moldbug, appeared in studio with Alex Jones this week to talk about the situation in the Ukraine.

I enjoyed the interview.

Yarvin was the key figure in the late 2000s and early 2010s era “dark enlightenment,” when various thinkers on the internet were reevaluating the core assumptions of modernity. It has been labeled “neo-reactionary.”

Yarvin’s blog, started in 2007, was called “Unqualified Reservations.” I would almost like to say that I read it and it was influential on me in some way, but like Gravity’s Rainbow, I tried to read it dozens of times and really just couldn’t ever get into it. It was too autistic, and the use of terminology-laden prose struck me as pretentious. He has a new blog on Substack now called Gray Mirror. I hadn’t read it, because of bad past experience with his writing, but after watching the Jones interview, I am going to check it out, because he seems to have pivoted into more direct language.

Yarvin was also interviewed last year by Tucker Carlson.

nb4 “Curtis Yarvin is Jewish” – he’s half Jewish and very Jewish looking. And the autism of the prose on the old blog was definitely very Jewish. However, I don’t think that means he’s not worth listening to, as he’s saying things that other people don’t really say.

Some of the stuff on the old blog was also stupid. I remember reading that he thought Elon Musk could become king of America and run it like a corporation, and thinking “well, that’s just goofy talk.” But his point about how absolute monarchies have a proven track record of working and democracies have no such track record, and in fact are now seen to devolve into decadence and depravity, is quite true.

Anyway, it’s food for thought that I found worthwhile.

Alex obviously takes the position that we should return to Republicanism, which has generally been my thought as well, though I don’t necessarily take a hard position on it. Yarvin points to the track record of absolute monarchies, but the reality is that industrial and post-industrial societies are much more complicated than the societies historically run by monarchs. His response would be that modern corporations are complicated and run by CEOs, but corporations are driven by completely different incentives than governments.

One thing that I absolutely do agree on is that democracy has failed, utterly. I also agree that it won’t end until it collapses, as it has resulted in such a wide gap between the ruling elite and the normal people.

This also speaks to an exchange I had with a reader.

He wrote:

No revolution was ever made by “the people”, anyway.

I don’t know if the 3% figure of people in the American colonies who actively took part in the war of independence against the British Crown is correct or not, but certainly not unreasonable.

The French Revolution was largely the work of an elite inside the bourgeoisie.

The Napoleon epic was the work of, well, Napoleon himself and his group of close friends (field marshals and top administrators, maybe 30 people in total).

The Bolshevik revolution was the work of the minority (ironically called Majority/Bolsheviki) inside a fringe party (the SD) inside a minority political current (socialism).

There is a school of sociology that has been banned from university grounds since 1945, called Elitism. It was mostly developed in Italy, by Pareto and others. If memory serves me right, the theory goes like this :
– In every single human society, 80% of the people have nothing to do with managing public affairs, only 20% of the population, the smartest and most well-off do so.
– The elite is itself dispatched to address different tasks : the economy, the military, intellectual life, politics…
– A revolution is typically achieved when some part of the intellectual elite becomes dissatisfied with the current state of things for whatever reason, starts appealing (through books, newspaper columns…) to other members of the elite to join hands into changing things and slowly persuades the masses that change is desirable. Some parts of the elites and of the masses join them, and boom, you have a revolution. The formerly disgruntled intellectuals become the new political overlords and a new cycle starts.

To which I replied:

Great post, and I think you could also reduce this to the functionality of tribes mentioned above or in one of these other articles.

If a tribal leader was deemed incompetent, it was going to be the guy who was asking the most questions who is going to replace him, presumably one of his closest personal friends, if we’re talking about hunter-gatherer society.

The problem now is this pedophile satanism thing, which seems to be completely real and seems to have totally penetrated the entire elite.

But we should remember that the elite is not stagnate. That’s not the way genetics work.

Napoleon himself was the son of a goose farmer.

No, just joking. But I think he was definitely “lower nobility” if nobility at all.

Hitler wasn’t from the nobility at all, his father was some benign local bureaucrat.

But Stalin was literally the son of a shoemaker or a tailor or something.

He then responded:

Going on a tangent here, but his father line haplogroup (EM34) is almost non existent in Europe. Country where it is most present is Ethiopia. So, yes, Napoleon was a nigger.

In a more serious mode, he was born, exactly as you said, into a “lower nobility” Corsican family of Italian origins. His father was a local lawyer, on this poor Mediterranean island. The chances of someone like this ending up Emperor of most of Europe were very small.

It is usually a sign of the vitality of a system when “new blood” comes in. Then, things settle, the new elite turns into the old elite, and 150 years down the line, heirs to once vigorous conquerors are usually turned into effeminate sadists and need to be getting rid of.

Revolution, I think any serious person will conclude, is not possible under the current regime, at least in its current form. It is, nonetheless, inevitable in the longer term.

Yarvin mentions that Putin clearly views himself as a monarch, and I think that is basically true. The same would be true of Xi Jinping, who is effectively an emperor. However, these countries both have much more complex governmental structures than any of the “absolute monarchies” of the past which Yarvin praises as the ideal.

Democracy is clearly too oppressive, and too alienating to the individual to exist long term, even outside of the current challenges and bizarre moves being made by the elite. Most of us are going to live to see it fail, and I think the most important thing that thinkers can be thinking about is what comes next.