The King's Man
(Allow me to re-introduce my blog)
When the Queen died, all natural reactions arose: heads of state paid respects; the former colonies noted—well, colonization; and the youth of Britain expressed confusion that the monarchy continues to exist.
All natural reactions, that is, save one. Conspicuous indeed was the silence of America’s leading monarchist, Curtis Yarvin.
You may be saying: Who the fuck, Alex, is Curtis Yarvin?
The asker of this question earns my envy and admiration both. Your quality of life is so high that you rarely use Twitter. I implore you, asker: read no further.
For the brave remainder
Curtis Yarvin is the foremost living theoretician of the far right. That he is a monarchist is not a typo: it is the philosophy he has explicitly and zealously propounded over fifteen years of blogging—originally under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, more recently in his own name.
The left-liberal reaction to Yarvin has been to label him a fascist. His defense, generally, is a vaudevillian Who—me?, complete with glances over his shoulder.
Fascism, Yarvin explains, is a subtype of monarchism—specifically, one that requires the support of a mass movement. Gaining such a movement is infeasible; as Yarvin puts it, with typically satanic understatement: “Classical fascism is out of reach.” And not just—Yarvin’s most strenuous objection to the charge of fascism is that he doesn’t want a mass movement.
As Tablet’s sympathetic, if not generous, profile has it: “How could he be a fascist, Yarvin protested, when he so clearly detested ‘the masses’ and ‘the People’—two of fascism’s most celebrated subjects?”
Yarvin, then, prefers dictatorship unencumbered by popularity. His order at Wendy’s is “Reich, hold the rally.” In his own words:
That the king is above the law (or, as Nixon so memorably put it, “if the President does it, that means it’s not illegal”) is one of the most fundamental principles of premodern law. If the king is not above the law, some other power is above the king; and so he is no king. Absolute power is inherently the power of final decision.
While this was the power of Hitler and Stalin, it was also the power of Elizabeth I, Peter the Great, Frederick the Great, Augustus, Atatürk, and Alexander the Great. While it would probably not do well in the hands of Donald Trump or Joe Biden, the world has fifteen billion hands—quite a few of whom are effective, experienced CEOs.
By tirelessly articulating the trouble with democracy—with popularity itself—the man and his ideas steadily gain… popularity. Today Yarvin has the ear of two of the most controversial candidates seeking Republican nomination to the Senate; he is the “court philosopher” for tech billionaire and would-be kingmaker Peter Thiel—a literal kingmaker, if Yarvin has his way; and he is gaining cachet in the unlikeliest crowd of all—and far from the least consequential: Yarvin is a cult figure in the edgier, more Online circles of New York artists and writers, including the infamous Dimes Square demimonde.
Let me join you now in saying: what the fuck is going on?
I first stumbled on Yarvin five years ago. I mentioned this nutty “Moldbug” to my then-roommate in Bushwick, a very online man; I wanted reassurance of my sanity—surely this random “monarchist” blogger was the crazy one.
Instead, my roommate said: “Careful, dude.” He warned that Moldbug was a slippery slope—a deeper rabbit hole than I seemed to realize.
I said, “I think it’s too late, haha.” I was already thousands of words deep in Moldbuggian lore.
Yarvin is a compulsively engaging writer. He can be funny, that rarest of all qualities in political thinkers. There is a demonic (dare I say Mephistophelean?) bonhomie to the voice—like the unexpected warmth of the character in the movie who has secretly resolved to kill themselves.
Also, he’s not always wrong.
My favorite thing about Substack is the full-spectrum weirdness of its writers; like the early days of Twitter, the platform is a stylistic and ideological free-for-all. It retains the capacity to surprise.
Reading about the potential emergence of hyperpowerful artificial intelligence—fears of which are lately attracting the concern and donations of the multi-billion-dollar Effective Altruism movement—I came across a random Substacker making an excellent point. If you have eyes to see, you have noticed the limitations of intelligence. Past a certain point, raw smart-ness is diminishingly helpful for the actual accomplishment of goals. Surely, the blogger reasons, billionaires could find a worthier cause.
I found this persuasive. So what if an AI becomes exponentially brilliant—who’s to say it wouldn’t also be exponentially neurotic?
Then the blogger pivots:
It’s fair to say that no one researching AI risk is in any way a conscious charlatan. Or at least, if such a thing exists, I have never heard of it. Given the intelligence required, there are easier and more effective ways to be a charlatan.
No—these people are all trying to be effective altruists. Or something. The real trouble is not that their brains or hearts are too small—exactly the opposite. With amazing people like these, there is no stopping them from their mission. They need a mission. To have a mission is the meaning of their lives.
So the only way to help them is to help them pivot to a different mission—ideally, one which might actually prove relevant. Here is a rational theorem that I will now prove: the only effective altruism is monarchism.
This is when I discovered I was reading Mencius Moldbug, now out of the closest as Curtis.
This man, without question, has a genius for sticky concepts: it is Yarvin who invented and popularized the now-ubiquitous political denotation of “red pill.” Similarly, I find the thought experiment of American monarchism to be surprisingly generative.
But. To understate matters, I do not feel he has proven his theorem. To understate matters further, I am repulsed by the concept of an American dictatorship. Yarvin is my enemy in every sense of the word. Yet his ideas are more entangled with the political left than they first appear; his philosophy is symptomatic of far larger phenomena.
And as Yarvin himself says:
We should treat the idea of existential AI risk with complete seriousness—mocking it not at all, or at least not much. It is always good to think more about existential risks.
SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY TOMORROW, DEAR FRIENDS.