Motus Mentis

Curtis Yarvin, alias ‘Mencius Moldbug’, seems to be getting back in the game. He discontinued his enormously influential blog Unqualified Reservations years ago (it has now been archived and reorganized here, minus the comment-threads), and seemed for a while to have tried to keep his head down, concentrating on his (apparently quite successful) computer-science career. But his identity had been revealed, and his writings made him radioactive. (Among other things, he found himself barred from some tech conferences once word got out that Mr. Yarvin was indeed the notorious Moldbug.)

Something seems to have changed. I don’t know if it’s just that the battle lines are so clear these days, and his cover so thoroughly blown, that he feels he might as well just come out and fight; perhaps he has also made enough money that he no longer feels the need to worry about career suicide. Whatever it is, he appears to be finding a place for himself in the Claremont Institute orbit. Not long ago, for example, in a post about Michael Anton’s review of Bronze Age Mindset at the Claremont Review of Books, I mentioned that Mr. Anton had been given the book by Mr. Yarvin. It interested me very much to know that they were friends — they both understand that the problem of good government is, at bottom, an engineering problem, but my impression had been that Mr. Anton (and Claremont/Hillsdale generally) has far more confidence in the American Founding and Constitution as an acceptable solution than Mr. Yarvin, who has leaned more toward monarchy than republicanism, does. The tension between the Moldbuggian critique of the conspicuous failures of our democratic republic to continue to provide anything close to good government, and the view of the Founding as given by Mr. Anton and Thomas West (in which the disease now afflicting us is due not to some liability in the founding principles themselves, but in our abandonment of them) is something I’ve been stewing over for a while now.

Now Mr. Yarvin has written a series of essays for The American Mind, a Claremont publication. The first has been published, with four more forthcoming. In this one, Yarvin describes a form of scepticism he calls the “clear pill” (keep in mind that it was Yarvin as Moldbug who gave us the now-ubiquitous metaphor of the “red pill” in its political context). He also outlines and contrasts two kinds of despotism: a familiar kind in which repression and coercion are used to force a single official narrative down the peoples’ throats, and another, sneakier type that gives the people a choice between two narratives — a skillful bit of “stagecraft” that tends to make people choose which one they will believe, rather than asking the right question, namely whether either of them is true. (Parents of little children all know this trick: rather than just ordering a child to eat an apple, it’s much better to present, say, an apple and a peach, and offer the tyke a choice. The former arrangement is obviously, even to a three-year-old, naked coercion, whereas the latter neatly solves the problem by stagecraft — giving the child the illusion of freedom.)

It’s good to see Curtis Yarvin back in harness. (I guess we should stop calling him ‘Moldbug’.) I won’t say more about this essay for now — it’s just the first of five parts, and I’ll wait to see what he has to say. You can read it here.

And if you’ve never read any of his original writing (which was a bolt of lightning when it first appeared, and was the seed around which the “Dark Enlightenment” coalesced), you have waited too long. You can start with his “Gentle Introduction” — the “Red Pill” — here.