Moldbug-Chasers
Parsing out the right's court philosopher
Politicians, ugly buildings, and bloggers all become respectable with age. This might be the benign explanation for Curtis Yarvin’s current popularity. Writing a few million words lend credibility to any venture, including that of Mencius Moldbug, which was Yarvin’s alter-ego during his most pugnacious era of blogging activity. Concretely, Yarvin’s career has gone from supposedly subversive and innovative commentary against the Dubya-Obama uniparty, only to give way to the legitimacy of Coronadoom lockdowns and voting for Joe Biden. Such evolution seems to me below the dignity of any sentient creature let alone one called one of eminent voices on the political right wing. But the exact course of this progression is beyond my knowledge or interest.
You see, for many years I had the distinction of saying I had never read a complete blog post by Mencius Moldbug. It wasn’t personal. Moldbug was well known as a shining light of the intellectual right, and the popularizer of terms that were omnipresent during the leadup to Donald Trump’s election in 2016. I found my way over to Unqualified Reservations a couple different time to have a go at his more popular and influential posts. Attempts were futile. I couldn’t do it. The posts were too long, too much a cataract of information, too desultory. I would begin to read and my head would empty out, the whole thinking apparatus flushed out by the endless windstorm of words and facts and almost-facts and pop culture and memes, memes, memes.
The explanation for this verbosity is provided by Yarvin himself in the introduction to the present text, Unqualified Reservations, Volume I, published and somewhat edited by Passage Press: Yarvin does minimal editing of his blog posts, and in fact could not be bothered even to read the three essays which compose the book. Gibbon wrote the entire Decline and Fall as a first draft, and Kerouac allegedly wrote the entirety of On the Road in one scroll of typewriter paper. But for the vast majority of scribblers, serious writing and editing are synonymous. Yarvin did not have the time to write something brief, so he wrote something long instead. This is especially an evil in the age of digital writing. The knowledge that you are moving your work from manuscript to page is a firm incentive to make sure the latter finds something better than the former. But when everything remains pixels, the temptation to forego editing is often irresistible. But because prose writing is an expression of thought, the lack of editing is likewise a lack of self-criticism, and an emasculation of thought. Such is the danger of the digital age.1
In Yarvin’s defense, his work is much better on the printed page—it is at least readable, unlike the words on the screen. At the same time it is not really worth reading. If you have the meme terms under your belt, you have enough. The book is nearly 500 pages, and has three essays in it, the tiny “Formalist Manifesto,” and the gargantuan “Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” and “How Dawkins Got Pwned.” In total, they form a kind of weird mix of realism and idealism, a weighty tome’s worth of information (much of it great), but all towards advancing a political philosophy that is far inferior to the sum of its part. Yarvin comes off like an excited undergraduate, anxious to pull together in haphazard fashion the contents of his course syllabi, along with a couple anarchist writers he has stumbled across. Any reader will be better off turning to the syllabi.
The Formalist Manifesto sets the stage for the Moldbug schtick. He is essentially a realist and a pragmatist, one without ideological priors so much as a desire to just make the country work. To do so, we have to optimize. Let’s stop thinking of the United States or any nation in terms of blood, creed, or soil, for after all, in essence, a nation is just one big corporation. Wouldn’t it be smart if we started treating it that way when we go about trying to govern it?
It is clear that Yarvin means to be profound with this observation. But it is already the conventional wisdom of the average neoclassical economist. “Let’s run the country more like a corporation” was a tag from the Ross Perot campaigns. And as left-wing critics were anxious to note, America already is run like a corporation. Moldbug’s dispute is always that the actual shareholders of America do not have enough authority, hampered as they are with republican trappings. It would be a much more innovative and subversive thing to run the nation like a democracy, even a republic—or even to ask the question what a democratic government would look like in the age of mass media and technocratic buffoons. But that would require a whole other mass of unqualified reservations.
It is important to grasp that Yarvin’s kowtowing to the powerful is what makes him “right wing” and nothing else. He is otherwise a technocratic, mushroom-tripping atheist. His crusade in this great sovcorp of our existence is to make sure the idealists don’t bog down the energy of commerce. This idealism he calls, Universalism, which threatens to spoil the whole thing with “All men are created equal” and “to each his ability, to each his need” and the like. Universalism is one of the fruits of Christianity, Puritanism in particular (he has read some books on why this is so, but doesn’t quite grok the causal mechanism—for the actual progression of this heresy you’re better off with EMPIRE OF HATRED). The bastion of Universalist power he even terms the Cathedral, which is what the Marxists would have otherwise called the Superstructure. Yarvin is less rageful than Nietzsche and Barabas, yet his outlook is still fundamentally and necessarily anti-Christian, because the Christian belief, just like all sound philosophy, is catholic. There is no God on This Sovcorp Earth.
Moldbug’s project is to hamper or at least mock the Universalist foe. Richard Dawkins is his target in the last (very long) essay here. The mockery is meant to be ironical, for Dawkins is famously an atheist, though one adhering to the tenets of “nontheistic Christianity” in Moldbug’s coinage. How Moldbug arrives at this little contradictory gem is not worth recounting—just rest assured that if you want a better explanation you can read EMPIRE OF HATRED.
Moldbug’s project began in large part as a reaction against the lunacy of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy, which at least on its face was aimed at liberating Iraq. It was the Universalists who had the stupid belief that democracy was the natural state of man, and hence Arabs freed of the chains of tyranny would be a wellspring of republicanism and civic virtue. This is owing from the fact that the “employees of Washcorp are overwhelmingly universalist—except for the disgruntled military.” Granted, the supposedly most Universalist of Universalists on the left never bought this bogus story for a minute, including Richard Dawkins, to his credit. No, the left wing saw through this as an ideological ruse, as did many in the supposedly idealistic Bush Administration, when they occasionally lauded the new lower gas prices that would result from US dominance in the area. On that note, was the Iraq war really a failure? For whom? The shareholders of America? The actual shareholders of American have a pretty diverse portfolio, including much investment in another Middle Eastern country.
A brief digression: Moldbug is identified with resurrecting the unpopular paleoconservative cause vis-a-vis the Neoconservatism that got us into the Iraq war. This paleo- vs. neo- is still a fundamental divide on the American right. But does Neoconservative have any meaning at all? Irving Kristol coined the word in the 50s or 60; if there is more to it than “Let’s let Jews into American conservativism,” feel free to correct me. Nation-building and popular sovereignty for Third-Worlders was never a central tenet. It was mainly a salve of the Cold War in fact, meaning this nebulous construct had at best since 1991 to gain its bearings. And in those dozen years, it managed to convert crusty old Republican hacks like Cheney and Rumsfeld. Who was the Voltaire of the Neocons? What is its Du contrat social, that caused so many to flock to the streets of Baghdad? Why should I believe there is anything coherent in this thing Neoconservatism at all? Serious commentators try to draw an intellectual threat between Neoconservatism and Trotskyism, as if there were some deep ideological bond between the two. But Trotskyism itself was just a practical designation more than a creed. Isn’t it possible that this lineage was per accidens, that it was all a matter of the people who held the belief, and that those people all happened to be—-
[QUALIFYING RESERVATIONS. QUALIFYING RESERVATIONS]
Anyway. Do Moldbug’s constructs and analyses warrant respect?
Moldbug claims that Universalism is the dominant ideology of the era. True enough! He makes a more subversive claim that ruling ideologies, like the present day Universalism, do not need to make themselves known: Their conclusions are imposed in such a way that no one need question their basic tenets. This is how a bright guy Dawkins can get roped into nontheistic Christianity in the first place. This is apparently true of all eras, for he claims on p. 469 “No 13th Century Frenchman would have labeled himself as ‘a Catholic.’ He did not call himself anything… His beliefs were universal—that’s what catholic means.” From a historical standpoint, the claim is embarrassing, even within the realm of Yarvin’s limited knowledge, for he actually cites the Albigensian Crusade four pages later. What was the Albigensian Crusade? It was an event in which French Catholics were very explicitly pitted against French Cathars. How did these Frenchmen know who was fighting whom, when everyone’s beliefs were universal? OK, OK I shouldn’t harp on the guy. No intellectual since Francis Bacon has been required to speak honestly of any historical event where the Catholic Church is involved, and to Yarvin, as to most men, even rightwingers, the years before 1789 are another universe.
But Yarvin’s philosophical idiocy comes through clearly. His entire point about the “Cathedral” of the Middle Ages is that no one in the Middle Ages had to concern himself with what it meant to be Catholic because it was simply presumed that everyone was Catholic. What you actually find in the Middle Ages is constant scrutiny as to what it meant to be Catholic, what Catholic laws should effect, and what an overall Catholic society would look like, here as it is in heaven. In other words, the “Cathedral” of that time was constantly self-critical, and applied that criticism in open government of the state.
In fatal contrast, the “Cathedral” of our own time is quite murky about what it is, or what it wants, and operates under the exterior premises of the system. Why is this? Because the answer would explode all of Yarvin’s premises about power in the present day, which again, is held in the hands of the Cathedral Universalists, or something along those lines. Who actually controls Sovcorp USA? Is it those nasty Universalists who keep getting us involved in war after war after war? Or could we just possibly bring in the kind of basic political-economic analysis any campus Marxist can see as plain as day? Why is Moldbug so committed to such a facile understanding of how the political system actually works? As always, he is a realist when it suits him—this is why nations are just big corporations—while somehow mere ideas can invade Bagdad and overthrow the Evil Empire. “Yes Communism was overthrown by Sakharov, Brodsky, and Havel. The philosophers did matter. What was needed was a combination of philosopher and crowd—a rare and volatile mixture, highly potent and highly unnatural.” Ah, but who is controlling that crowd? Does it have something to do with capitalism? Does it have something to do with the unfettered march of technology? Inquiring minds might suspect this is so, but will find nothing substantive about these topics in Moldbug.
It would be inaccurate to say that Moldbug has a complex political philosophy or a unique heuristic for looking at power. His work is stuffed only because it is unedited. But a great deal of mass and footnotes does not make a work complex. When this busyness becomes absurd and incomprehensible, as it often does in the course of this work, one wonders if it is accidental. America’s Mideast policy since 1991 might be more complex than “Do whatever’s good for Greater Israel,” but darned if it isn’t a good first approximation. Moldbug adorns a kind of realism in his analysis of power; this is the great attribute of the libertarians and anarchists. Still, he will play the game of ideology when probing too much into the contours of power leads to unlovely results. He is right wing after all, meaning he has to make our shareholder-superiors look good.
As noted above, Moldbug/Yarvin’s claim to being rightwing primarily lies in his attitude about mechanical relations to power. But blind obedience to power is not actually a virtue to anyone but those who don’t want you to know the tenets on which legitimate power is based. The Christian will tell you power comes from God; the pagan will tell you it comes from strength. In the present day, only a technocrat can avoid such a fundamental question, largely because he does not want to know the bases of his own power and he certainly does not want others to start questioning the course of political change. Overall, he is dependent on using ideology as a strong causal factor because he is uninterested or unwilling to confront the bare realities of political power, or treat them in a way that any undergraduate Political Science textbooks can do.
Is there plenty of good stuff here? Of course. If one person read Dr. Johnson because of Moldbug, he has done a little good for the world. But what is Yarvin’s added value in all this? He quotes many great thinkers, but I’d be hard pressed to come up with any way he betters them. Moldbug can barely sustain a thought. We get instead endless scientific analogies, lame coinages, meme talk and pop culture babble.
Why all the feting now? Any figure profiled by the mainstream media is a figure welcomed by the mainstream. Not that Yarvin’s heterodoxy on matters of race and democracy are accepted by any reader of the New York Times, but the criticism of harmless critics is a boon to power. Not even the most tyrannical of systems can survive a total lack of self-criticism, not because anyone in power cares, but because their own power is strengthened by the guise that their own ideologies can survive Socratic scrutiny. Where our ruling policies are foundationally irrational, and their ultimate effects well nigh unavoidable, an ongoing dialogue gives the false appearance that human ration and will can have any weight whatsoever.
If you enjoyed this article, check out Empire of Hatred, available wherever Empire of Hatred is sold.
The editing of this paper book is pretty slipshod. The chapter numbers go from Arabic to Roman numerals when “Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” hits what should be double-digits. Couldn’t we have cleaned this up? Likewise, the footnotes are sometimes embarrassing. Moldbug’s sentence, “We’ll call it Dr. Johnson’s hypothesis—from this quip by the great doctor” does not a require a footnote identifying Samuel Johnson as that selfsame great doctor.