Curtis Yarvin joins us to discuss the Anglo-American “empire of love,” the bohemian libertines of the ancien regime, Putin’s relative weakness, Xi’s advantages over Mamdani, and populism’s last chance. *The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
Curtis Yarvin joins us to discuss the Anglo-American “empire of love,” the bohemian libertines of the ancien regime, Putin’s relative weakness, Xi’s advantages over Mamdani, and populism’s last chance.
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*The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Peter Slezkine: Hi, all. The following episode is part one of a two-part conversation with Curtis Yarvin. In this episode, we cover a bit of everything, from Ancient Rome to modern monarchy. In the next episode, which will come out in a couple of weeks, we will focus more narrowly on the fate of the liberal order, which Curtis calls The Empire of Love. I hope you enjoy the episode.
I'm Peter Slezkine, Director of the U.S.-Russia-China Trialogue project at the Stimson Center. Since the middle of the 20th century, relations among the United States, Russia, and China have had an enormous impact on each country separately and on the world as a whole. The purpose of the Trialogue is to better understand this extraordinarily complex and consequential relationship by directly engaging with experts from all three countries.
My guest today is Curtis Yarvin, a veteran of Silicon Valley and a leading light of the alt-right.
[00:00:57] Curtis Yarvin: Oh, my god.
[00:00:57] Peter Slezkine: Curtis, welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:59] Curtis Yarvin: You said “alt-right.” That's the worst.
[00:01:00] Peter Slezkine: Is it the worst?
[00:01:02] Curtis Yarvin: Yeah.
[00:01:02] Peter Slezkine: I can start over, or you can just tell me why it's no good.
[00:01:04] Curtis Yarvin: Actually, there was a, of all people, Washington Post writer who came up with a good... And it's fine. We're into it. She came up with a good term. It's, sort of, a weird source, but I don't like “new right” because I think that's the, sort of, standard default term. The problem is the phrase “new right” has been used, I think, at least seven or maybe 47 times in the last century. It's grim because it reminds you that every time it's been used, it just dies and goes away so completely that people forget about it so completely that they reuse the term, right?
[00:01:36] Peter Slezkine: Well, it also begs the parallel with the new left-
[00:01:38] Curtis Yarvin: Yes, it does.
[00:01:38] Peter Slezkine: ... which is an association you may not enjoy.
[00:01:42] Curtis Yarvin: Well, it's a fine association, but there's only one new left, right? And new left is unambiguous. Dissident right is often used. It's a little self-congratulatory. It's not as bad as rationalist, which makes me basically want to punch someone, but it's all right. But with this Washington Post writer, who I was looking at, I guess Kara Voght or something, came up with simply “modern right.” And I think “modern right” is good. It's, kind of, arrogant maybe in the right way. Dissident right is, kind of, whiny in beta almost a little bit.
But yeah, we're the modern right, so, you know, all these dinosaurs. Do you remember that, long ago, there was this... people repost this thing. I think it was a book. It was called Young Guns, about the new leaders, maybe, like, 20 years ago, the new leaders of the Republican Party. And so, you've got, like, Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan and all these other people standing and looking. And that is definitely not the modern right.
[00:02:36] Peter Slezkine: Let's call you then a leading man of the modern right. So, let's then start with how we got here. Perhaps, you could tell us a bit about your family, your upbringing, and how and when you arrived in Silicon Valley.
[00:02:47] Curtis Yarvin: Oh, yeah. Well, I'm the child of an American diplomat. So, I grew up within this wonderful thing that we call the international community or... you know. It's funny. When you hear the phrase “international community,” it's one of these things where your mind automatically puts scare quotes around it because you know it's a euphemism. Actually, anytime you use the word “community” in modern American political discords, it's a euphemism, right? You know, you'll hear urban politicians talk about the community, right? You know what they mean.
[00:03:16] Peter Slezkine: Well, the more you insist on community, the less likely it is to exist in [inaudible 00:03:19].
[00:03:19] Curtis Yarvin: Exactly. So, is the international community really a community, or what is it? And I don't know how I came up with this, but I came up with a term that most people seem to like as a, sort of, dysphemism for the same thing. Instead of the international community, what I call it is the Empire of Love. So, for example, it makes complete sense that, since the Empire of Love conquered Germany in 1945, there is now a Love Parade in Berlin.
I mean, obviously, you've seen the flag of the Empire of Love with the love flag, right? So, there is real love there, I want to say, but it's also really an empire. So, anyway. So, I grew up as a child of this proconsul of the Empire of Love and saw its operations, to some extent, from the inside and then went off and studied computer science at Johns Hopkins Brown in Berkeley.
Some people know me entirely as a computer scientist. I went to grad school, I dropped out of grad school, I got into the industry, as we call it here, I made a little bit of money in the dot-com boom, and I was like, “All right, I'm going to do my own, I guess, what you call a boil-the-ocean project.” I was like, "You know what? I have a little bit of money, so I'm just going to try to reinvent all of the operating systems," which I do, in fact, have some expertise in. That involved doing something that you might call an unsupervised Ph.D. thesis, which had a lot of cracks in the schedule because you can't really think about type systems all day for eight hours a day.
And so, at first, I was getting into Austrian economics. Austrian economics led me via Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and then finally Hans-Hermann Hoppe into a context where I suddenly realized that I could process pre-revolutionary and pre-democratic political and social thought without getting hives all over my face. I was not allergic to it, as you might say.
And that suddenly allowed me to take pre-revolutionary and counter-revolutionary thinkers and writers seriously. Whereas, previously, I just perceived them as, more or less, the way a Catholic in the year 1600 might have perceived Protestants as, you know, hostis humani generis, right? And I'm like, "Wait a second. These people are actually trying to save me."
And so, I started reading people like Thomas Carlyle and the great Joseph de Maistre and other pre-revolutionary and anti-revolutionary thinkers. That was what gave me the feeling of escaping from Plato's Cave. And Plato's Cave being a relatively old metaphor, I wound up being the one who stole the Wachowski siblings' metaphor from The Matrix of the red pill and made it into a metaphor for right-wing enlightenment, which I believe the Wachowskis do not get the joke at all. I don't think they're very appreciative.
I think, probably, in fact, if they were in the same room with me and they could, they would punch me. And I don't know that they're, sort of, wrong to do that because it was definitely a theft. So, I'm going to try to avoid them.
[00:06:26] Peter Slezkine: So, how do you get from Austrian economies to red pill in America?
[00:06:32] Curtis Yarvin: Let me be specific about where this leads. So, basically, the interesting thing about Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: The God That Failed, besides, sort of, daring to throw stones at this holy word, “democracy,” because it's really the word that's holy, actually democratic, we'll go into this later, but democratic, in the 20th century, basically just means legitimate. Like, as I always point out, the former land of North Korea is the DPRK. That's the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. That is three synonyms for democracy in one place name, and it's monarchy.
So, you know, like, that's how they fuck with your head, right? So, in any case, basically, sort of, the details of deconstructing that are less important than this, sort of, provocative but perhaps incompletely explored idea in Hoppe that, if we think about states as firms, then the world isn't, in a way, or at least, ideally, is, in a way, a, kind of, ungoverned Libertarian paradise because there's actually no government above these firms, which, in case you've noticed, is exactly what Libertarians want.
Of course, the idea of a world government, or, as some may call it, an Empire of Love, has been basically competing with this, but if we take the old Westphalian multipolar order of the classical international law of, like, Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel, we see that it corresponds very closely to this abstraction of the state as a firm. The property of the firm is the land and people of the state. There are no citizens. There are only subjects.
And this is the state model of The Law of Nations, which, I have to say, worked, I think, quite well for Europe under the Westphalian order. Certainly, there wasn’t any holocaust. So, like, what do we have to laugh at them about?
And once you discover that, there are a whole other... Like, one of the things, of course, in Plato is that when you leave the cave, you see the light, but then you go back and you're actually completely blinded because you can't see anything and you have to explain reality to these damn fools who think the fire is the sun, right? And so, you have an Anglo-American tradition of political thought, and you also have an Anglo-American unipolar world order, which really begins in 1815. So, it's over 200 years old. The Empire of Love is basically born at the Battle of Waterloo.
[00:09:18] Peter Slezkine: And by that, I mean, most people would just call that liberalism.
[00:09:22] Curtis Yarvin: Yeah, liberalism. But liberalism can be... That's a very complicated meretricious term that's used in a lot of different ways, in a lot of different directions. It's notable, however, that, if you will, this very protean word, has spread itself across the earth, is that it has gone along with the growth of the Anglo-American Empire of Love.
The idea that, by adopting Anglo-American political ideologies or political forms, people can live like the English or live like the Americans, I think, it's a delusion by which the idea of, like, the flat earth does not even compare. The first time this delusion is tried, which really should have been enough, is, of course, in the 1780s in the beautiful, beautiful country, I was just there, of France. And as you may know, the French, in the 1760s to 1780s, had a very well-developed, very sophisticated civilization. As Talleyrand says, you know, "No one who does not remember the time before the revolution can never know the true sweetness of life." We try to recover that sweetness here in San Francisco with Burning Man and other antics. We certainly have better drugs. We don't have better clothes. And I think our society is otherwise inferior, but we're trying hard out here to be a Bohemian libertines.
[00:10:48] Peter Slezkine: And you think pre-revolutionary France was home to Bohemian libertines?
[00:10:53] Curtis Yarvin: Oh, fuck, yeah. Absolutely. Are you kidding me?
[00:10:57] Peter Slezkine: Wigs, high heels, and lots of good alcohol.
[00:10:59] Curtis Yarvin: Have you not seen Dangerous Liaisons?
[00:11:02] Peter Slezkine: I've even read it in the original.
[00:11:04] Curtis Yarvin: That shit was real. Right. And so, these libertines, basically, were gourmands in every possible way. They were gourmands in a culinary sense, of course, in a sexual sense. And in ideas, they were also gourmands. And they saw these, kind of, English ideas. They saw that Inglet had established, really, this stable constitutional monarchy, as they call it.
And so, a bunch of French people of high rank in stature, up to and including the king himself, were basically like, "Wow, we have some problems. Things aren't perfect. We just lost the Seven Years' War. If we copy this system, we'll become as great as the English."
And so, that was, sort of, the equivalent of, let's say, you're, like, a junior in high school and you're, like, walking down by the lockers and you see that somebody has dropped a couple of pills on the floor so you take them. There's a sort of person who will do a thing like that. Often, they come to a bad end. In the case of France, they came to a bad end.
And the, sort of, important thing about that experience of basically importing the Anglo-American political system and having that lead to immediate political disaster, that's the whole story of decolonialization. If you're familiar with modernization theory, you get elections, you get steel mills in the jungle, chip fabs in the jungle, kids learning calculus, less crime, and it all comes as a package, right?
And, you know, never has theory been more completely disproven by the facts because there's another way to interpret the spread of this ideology, which is to compare it to one of my least favorite plant diseases, Dutch elm disease. So, as you may know, many towns in America had beautiful streets often called Elm Street, in the way of A Nightmare on Elm Street.
[00:12:49] Peter Slezkine: Yeah. Mark Twain thought New Haven was the most beautiful city in the United States, and there were elms everywhere, and none remaining.
[00:12:55] Curtis Yarvin: Yeah. And then we started trading with China. And from China came this disease that is misnamed Dutch elm disease but actually comes from China. And they've been trying to get Dutch-elm-disease-proof elms for quite some time. And the way to do that is to use DNA from Chinese elms because Chinese elms are actually resistant to the disease. Now, they're smaller, shittier elms which are just like shittier C-grade elms. So, you want to breed them with our, like, stately but vulnerable elm genes.
[00:13:24] Peter Slezkine: And that Anglos are resistant to liberalism the way that Elms are to Dutch elm disease.
[00:13:29] Curtis Yarvin: That's right. And so, essentially, rather than liberalism being this magical path to being Anglo-American, it's just the reverse. It's actually an endemic disease at home which is controlled by various kinds of natural enemies, but when you introduce it into a place like 18th-century France where it has no natural enemies, it's like giving smallpox to the Native Americans. And so, what liberalism has actually done is it's been an excellent tool for going around the world, conquering, like, smallpox.
And so, you see this pattern, especially in the revolutions of 1848, which are so reminiscent of both Arab Spring and the Ukraine War. They're just like, "Oh, my god. History normally rhymes, but in this case, I think it actually may be repeating," is that you have this, sort of, sympathy both popular and political for these kinds of rebellions that, sort of, endow them with this almost, kind of, magical strength. I used to have serious trouble in understanding how, for example, Garibaldi with, like, 300 guys. Okay? They're wearing improvised uniforms. And 300 guys are able to overthrow the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
Now, I'm like, all right, the Athenian expedition, like, definitely needed more than that. Like, how weak is this kingdom? Whatever. And then I realized that it wasn't actually Garibaldi. It was Garibaldi plus the Royal Navy, or rather the Royal Navy plus Garibaldi, or let's just say the Royal Navy. And so, the Royal Navy establishes after... You see all, sort of, these patterns of this.
So, you have this Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which Gladstone... You know what Gladstone said about the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Bourbons there? He called it the negation of God. I mean, what incredible imperialist rhetoric. Like, our enemies are the negation of God, right? And so, Ferdinand II, or whatever it was, why was he the negation of God? I think he probably locked up some, like, shitlib agitators and put them in jail.
And what you're seeing in the conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies is you have this liberal rhetoric, which is, sort of, the rhetoric of freedom but is also the rhetoric of conquest. And it creates this Italian state, which is not fundamentally a peer of England, which actually seems to be a, sort of, trading colony and is, kind of, being integrated into being an external province of the British Empire. And you have this especially interesting thing. I'm just laying the groundwork for stuff that we can go on about later. You have this interesting thing where Garibaldi is a nationalist. And yet, he's actually, sort of, handing over this territory to an international empire, that cynical way of looking at these revolutions of 1848 and that they're setting a pattern that we see even to this day, because we can ask the same question about Ukrainian nationalism. Is it very nationalist? Is it very Ukrainian? Do the people behind it speak the Ukrainian language? Well, sometimes, they do, you know.
[00:16:45] Peter Slezkine: I mean, I think there's a very good argument that the history of liberalism is, as you say, tightly bound with Anglo-American Empire, and it is a very effective tool in breaking down competitors, which were typically imperial or monarchical. So, by exporting liberalism via British Navy, or later the American aircraft carrier, you are dismantling your competitors by appealing to their populations, opening markets, and so on.
So, I was just wondering. So, you read continental philosophers in your spare time while working on operating systems. You come to doubt the inherent virtues of democracy. And at the time, you are in a Silicon Valley that is almost uniformly liberal or libertarian.
[00:17:40] Curtis Yarvin: It's still almost uniformly liberal. The Tech Right is widely exaggerated. You can even work at Palantir as a, like, full-throated trans progressive. As long as you don't bother people with your faith, everybody's fine with it.
[00:17:55] Peter Slezkine: The Tech Right may be, I guess, exaggerated, but some of its titans have very vocally supported Trump and are now reorganizing their businesses around the national interest competition with China's hard power. How much of this is just adapting to the political fashion, or is there a true ideological turn that you were ahead of the curve and now many of your peers have followed suit?
[00:18:23] Curtis Yarvin: Well, I think a lot of people have basically, in a lot of different ways, and this is not at all exclusive to the tech world, have, kind of, lost their faith because I think it, sort of, has become really much more difficult to see this trend as heading toward utopia. I mean, I guess, New York City can still... you know. Communism springs eternal into the human heart. I mean, my own grandparents were American communists, my father's parents. So, I'm not surprised to see New York City elect a communist or rather a progressive of mayor in this time.
You know, the history of the word “progressive” is really interesting because it's been the word meaning supporter of communism basically for almost 100 years. The word “progressive” is, in fact, used in the Venona dispatches, which are messages from American agents back to the KGB or GRU. They use the word “progressive” in this way.
So, needless to say, kids on a campus who are saying progressive don't realize that this is its history. It's, sort of, like there are old families in New Mexico who fold tablecloths and use candles in certain ways, and they think that's just a tradition, but they don't realize that their ancestors were actually Jews 400 years ago.
[00:19:43] Peter Slezkine: Well, your ancestors, not too long ago, were communists. You said your grandparents...
[00:19:47] Curtis Yarvin: Absolutely. And they always use the word “progressive.”
[00:19:47] Peter Slezkine: And you don't like modern progressives or communists of any flavor, but you are a member of the right who advocates revolution or a hard reboot of society. So, are you not just taking up the revolutionary mantle and delivering the dish under a different sauce?
[00:20:07] Curtis Yarvin: Well, you know, some have spoken of the Jewish revolutionary temperament. I think that I actually have the mischling revolutionary temperament. I was actually at a dinner of my publishers the other day. And we looked around the table. And we realized that, in fact, everyone at the table was a mischling, which is, sort of, like, wow, I'm carrying bags of a gold ore up from the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and I look around at everyone in my caravan, and I notice that one of them is either a horse or a donkey.
[00:20:35] Peter Slezkine: Wait, explain what a... Interpret that Yiddish term.
[00:20:39] Curtis Yarvin: Half Jewish. It's a Nazi term that we use ironically.
[00:20:42] Peter Slezkine: So, that explains your attachment to conservative revolution. It's the two halves of your-
[00:20:48] Curtis Yarvin: Yeah.
[00:20:48] Peter Slezkine: ... biological entity doing battle.
[00:20:51] Curtis Yarvin: Exactly right. That's perfect deconstruction. And so, yeah, essentially. And so, when you say revolution, no, I think “reset” is a better term because revolution is inherently chaotic. And what I imagine is much more like the fall of East Germany. You're liquidating the old regime much in the way that you liquidate a corporation, not in the way that you liquidate an ethnic group.
[00:21:17] Peter Slezkine: But East Germany had a West Germany to be incorporated into an American Empire of Love within which the entire new country was subsumed.
[00:21:26] Curtis Yarvin: That's right.
[00:21:26] Peter Slezkine: And with the United States, there is obviously no superstructure along those lines.
[00:21:30] Curtis Yarvin: There is no superstructure along those lines. And so, one needs to be created. And the way of creating or defining that superstructure, since there is no other way, unless we want to become exceed to the Chinese Communist Party, which seems a little alien to me, but, frankly, I don't know, you know. Come on. Who would take comrade Xi or comrade Zoran? I'm going to go with comrade Xi every time, you know. And every time, I'm going to go with comrade Xi and that one choice between Western and Eastern communism. In any case, yeah, we don't have a West. The West says no West. And so, that takes a very nerdy, spurge kind of imagination to imagine what comes next. Some obviously have called it the nerd Reich. I'm not going to, you know, endorse that term. Has a certain ring to it, however. And obviously, those who coined that did not mean it well, but the term “Reich” is hardly unique to the Nazis. I mean, if you go to Denmark, there's, like, Reichs this and Reichs that, whatever. It just means kingdom.
[00:22:34] Peter Slezkine: Well, and you go to Berlin, you still visit the Reichstag or...
[00:22:36] Curtis Yarvin: Exactly. So, it will just be the nerd Reichstag.
[00:22:36] Peter Slezkine: But yeah, that still doesn't help me understand how this label helps with the reboot of the United States, which then has nothing superior to fit into.
[00:22:49] Curtis Yarvin: Well, it does because here's the, sort of, the basis. You're really cutting to the chase of things. Basically, there's a number of ways of defining the word “democracy.” If you go and read the New York Times or The Economist, they will define it as what some call civil society, or some call meritocracy. Some would call it due process, you know, all of these structural things, very much an element of any real democracy.
And every time you use these words, you're just saying oligarchy. Putin has elections. We call it managed democracy because the outcome is not in any doubt and the process does not actually put any serious sovereignty in Russia up for grabs. So, they have managed democracy in what, in fact, is a monarchy. And we have managed democracy in what, in fact, is an oligarchy.
You can see this system really perfectly described very seriously and very brilliantly in Walter Lippmann's book, Public Opinion, which was written over 100 years ago. But when we look at democracy in the Aristotelian sense, in the literal sense, meaning, the rule of the many rather than the rule of the selected few. You know, a better term is populism. And if we're supporters of populism as opposed to... I mean, there are many flaws with this meritocracy because this meritocracy was designed under the unfortunate illusion that it had solved the problem of who watches the watchdogs and created, in fact, a self-watching watchdog. And for a while, this was very plausible. And then this self-watching watchdog started to do some really fucking weird shit like invent COVID. You're like, "How is that even possible?" And yet, it was.
And so, I would say that, in the contest between literal democracy and literal oligarchy, unfortunately, that contest is a little like you probably know, like, couples who are in bad marriages, and this couple is over at your house, and they can't not fight with each other in public, and it's, like, sad or whatever, but you look at this couple and you're like, "Goddammit, you know, the real problem is that he's right about her, but she's also right about him."
And I think a lot of historical conflicts are like that, sort of, he's right about her, but she's also right about him. So, when you look at populism, there's a couple of different problems. Not only our great leader of the Tech Right, Elon Musk, keeps tweeting out things like Vox Populi, Vox Dei, which is obviously a very right-wing thing to tweet in today's world. I personally have seen the Vox Populi. I don't really have any particular illusions about it. I don't think that it's a Vox Dei. I think it's Vox, like, Facebook moms trading rumors.
And so, we can question the ability of the populace to govern effectively. We can question whether they have an effective theory of governance. We can question their intelligence. We can question their knowledge. All of these things are routinely questioned. You may have heard what the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh said about the subject, great guru of the '90s who attracted all these Hollywood people and then tried to take over a small town in Oregon.
[00:25:58] Curtis Yarvin: Yeah. I watched the Netflix documentary.
[00:25:58] Peter Slezkine: You watched the thing. And there's this great tape of Osho that you can find on YouTube. And he's very guru-like. I may know this literally. He says, "Democracy is the government of the people, for the people, by the people. But if the people are retarded, then the government is retarded." And, you know, you can't really argue with that. I mean, it's like a fucking syllogism. It's fucking Aristotle right there, right, you know.
And so, guy's got it down. But the thing is that's really the problem that people think of when they think of the problem of true literal democracy A.K.A. populism. But the thing is that's not actually the worst problem. The worst problem is not just that the people are incompetent, but that they have another problem that often goes along with being incompetent. They are also weak.
And their competence and their strength has been diminishing very continuously over the past 200 years, maybe even over the past 500 years, because let's not forget that populism, like all sorts of political forums, is essentially a rationalization of power. And a mob of 200 years ago, or, dear God, 500 years ago, really understood its power. And, like, 100,000 people, if they have any courage or inclination to violence or strength and if there's no regular army ready to oppose them, they can do whatever fuck they want. I mean, the storming of the Bastille, like, literally, it was just like a normal thing for human beings who spoke languages that you and I could recognize to take a human being and literally pull them apart by the arms and legs.
[00:27:45] Peter Slezkine: Well, the powers that be were so frightened by the mob that they allowed carnivals at regular intervals that would let some of the steam out.
[00:27:56] Curtis Yarvin: Let some of the steam off.
[00:27:56] Peter Slezkine: So, instead of the King being pulled... getting his arms pulled out of his sockets, they were doing it to some sort of effigies.
[00:28:01] Curtis Yarvin: That was the origin. Exactly. And so, in this day, when you can get hundreds of thousands of people together and they do no more than litter, and the last people who will riot at all are the underclass, and all they want to do is steal TVs, basically, the force that motivated the institution of elections is gone because the reason that you're having elections is to say, "Hey, wait a second, let's not have a giant chimp fight between mobs. Let's actually just count heads to see who would win."
[00:28:35] Peter Slezkine: But isn't it fair to say that, in modern circumstances, the classical Greek typology of governance doesn't work anymore across the board? That democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy have all been weakened by invisible modern forces? Putin is an autocrat. And he is weak. He is terribly limited in his power, relative to the head of some clan, a warlord, or a monarch. You can call the United States an oligarchy, but any given member of the elite is terribly reined in by structures of which he or she are a part and cannot compare to the Lord of a manor some centuries back.
[00:29:17] Curtis Yarvin: So, that, of course, brings us to the third political force, which is the force of monarchy, which is a relatively interesting one. Let me just sum up, sort of, the relation of populism to oligarchy, because oligarchy has basically learned that it can treat populism and thereby treat the whole body of the populace with great disrespect. It can basically, to use an old Texas phrase, piss down your neck and tell you it's raining and basically pursue policies which are inherently and intrinsically unpopular, such as mass third-world immigration for decades, and just keep winning against popular opposition.
This is a world in which, basically, because of its, sort of, incapacity for leadership, the people are inherently weak. And because they're weak, they're actually following the same road that kings followed on their way to becoming ceremonial. There's a wonderful political science book from, like, maybe 40 years ago. I think it's called 1588, A Year of No Significance by Ray Huang. And it has this wonderful description of the state of, basically, I think, like, a nine-year-old emperor of China, who, of course, delegates all of his powers, especially to, like, a state eunuch, right, and is basically taught to sign the papers that are put in front of him.
And the comparison to a modern president, especially to... we had the wonderful experience of having a president with dementia, and the country went on as normal. Nobody was told. Nobody had to notice the fact that you had a president with the mind of a nine-year-old. But yeah.
So, you see the, kind of, dwindling of the strength of populism, which used to be this just, like, massive force. Plato compares that, I think, to an elephant or something that, sort of, needs to be handled. And now, like, the 20th century is, sort of, elites learning to control mass opinion and to neutralize the power of the mob more and more and more.
[00:31:29] Peter Slezkine: But you haven't explained why it is weak, how it became weak, because in the first half of the 20th century, there was nothing more frightening than the mob.
[00:31:38] Curtis Yarvin: Yeah. I think technology plays a huge role. I think civilization plays a huge role. I think atomization plays a huge role. You'll note that, like, technology didn't really advance in the Roman Empire. And yet, exactly the same thing happens in the Roman Empire. The populace becomes completely depoliticized. It loses all of its, you know, asabiyyah, its strength.
The last emperor to hold public elections in Rome was actually Caligula. And it was widely considered a joke. And it was, in fact, a joke. Elections in California are rapidly coming close to a joke level. You can almost imagine Gavin Newsom appointing his Tesla to the California Senate. And I guess it wouldn't be a Tesla. What's the politically correct electric car? And so, it's, sort of, at the ending of this system.
And as for the power of monarchy, now, we get into an interesting question because there is no form of government that produces so much variability as monarchy. And so, when we look, for example, of course, you, as a Russian expert, are very aware that Putin is actually a very weak tsar by Russian standards. He's not as weak as Yeltsin. He has a precarious dominance over the various kleptocratic clans in his world, but he ain't no tsar. That's for sure. But when you look at the strength of monarchy, first of all, when the people are weak, because democracy in the form of populism is, of course, the natural enemy of monarchy, that is exactly when the world is ready for monarchy. This is exactly why the Roman Empire, which, of course, was the Roman Republic, was not brought down by the Caesars. It was saved by the Caesars. The Gauls would have eaten them alive. The whole thing was falling apart.
And for the Roman populace to realize that it was becoming weak and frivolous and starting to vote in elections the way less like an upright citizen and more like a sports fan, which is, basically, sort of, the path, one of the deepest paths, to Democratic decline, was also for them to realize that the only way they had to push back against the rapacious aristocrats, the Zoran Mamdanis of their time, is by basically being a laser and not a flashlight and focusing all of their energy on a single point, which means delegating all of their power to a single leadership, which means the alignment of democracy and monarchy.
[00:34:17] Peter Slezkine: But so, the New York Times, the New Yorker, just say that you're a fascist. You are now saying that the mob loses all hope in its effete rulers and fat-cat oligarchs. So, they laser focus their legitimacy onto a leader who will make them strong and carry them to new heights. How is that not a description of what you're proposing?
[00:34:39] Curtis Yarvin: So, that is not a description of what I'm proposing in a very important way. Again, we've got these three forces. They're forms of government, but they're also forces of government. They exist in any structure — monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, the one, the few, the many.
And if you translate those into modern language, you get “authoritarianism” for monarchy, you get “populism” for democracy, and then you get “meritocracy” for oligarchy, but if you translate them into, kind of, principles of power, they're authority, popularity, and prestige. And the real, kind of, crisis of governance in the Western world over the last 200 years is that you have this, kind of, sundering between authority and prestige. When popularity is on the side of prestige, against authority, you get a Russian Revolution or a French Revolution that's very, very bad. When popularity is on the side of authority, that is the classic fascist structure.
And so, you have this very fucked up situation where you have authority and popularity on one side and prestige on the other. And that is exactly what, in this, sort of, history-rhymes-but-does-not-repeat sense, you are seeing with the world of Trump world. Trump has popularity. He's gained a very thin piece of authority from that because he's trying to exercise influence over the U.S. federal government, which is something the President is really not supposed to do any more than the King of England is supposed to do it, but the President has not been powerless for as long as the King of England. And all the cool people just laugh at him.
He's a short-fingered Bulgarian. He has a gold-plated toilet. If it was actually gold, that would be one thing. The gold plating is just Trump is all gold plating. His interior decoration instincts are all wrong. His breeding is terrible, et cetera.
[00:36:44] Peter Slezkine: Gold toilets and golden showers, I guess, is the summation of Trump among those who have prestige.
[00:36:51] Curtis Yarvin: Exactly. And so, basically, it's just utter contempt. And it's very, very similar to the way the tsar was seen by the Russian intelligentsia in 1900, except that the tsar actually had power.
And so, you have this problem of, like, really, where you'd like to get back to, is a previous kind of world of monarchy because, certainly, when you look at, say, the court of Elizabeth I, or Frederick the Great, or Louis XIV, you see that all three forces are united. So, the monarch in these regimes has absolute authority, has massive popularity, and is also the focus of prestige within the state.
And so, really, the challenge in today's world of really creating a monarchy that is not fascist is a really intensely hard problem. And yet, we see flashes of it, in a way, in, the tech right, or the nerd right, or whatever you call it, because, actually, this is not a bonehead right. This is a right made up of the Elon Musks of the world who has a very big brain, right?
And so, the idea of basically having uniting and, certainly, the online right just is very confident in our, you know, superior intelligence and knowledge. I mean, you know, arguably, really, our most significant figure is Bronze Age pervert. And if rumors about the identity of a Bronze Age pervert are true, which I can't really speak to, but if they are true, a Bronze Age pervert has his undergraduate degree in math from MIT and his graduate degree in political philosophy from Yale and can speak ancient Greek with the correct accents.
So, you know, it's just like we have all of the ingredients here. We actually have the ingredient of prestige. We can imagine constructing prestige. Our people are actually in all of these institutions. They're, like, very in the closet. There are people in any elite institution that you can name that are basically our closeted, I wouldn't say sleeper cells, but, you know, sleeper cells, right? They're not sleeper cells. They're not anything like that, of course. But the thing is, like, basically, just because a certain set of really smart, talented, contrary people who think for themselves can see the need for these new doctrines.
And so, actually, we do have the ingredients for a regime which is not like Hitler or Mussolini or Putin, which is more like Louis XIV or even Napoleon. Like, that capacity is out there. And the seeds of basically a new prestigious elite exist. They have been sown. They're in my inbox. I know these people. Like, this potential is real.
[00:39:57] Peter Slezkine: But wait, why do you pick these two French figures as models? They are very different from one another.
[00:40:02] Curtis Yarvin: They're very different from one another.
[00:40:02] Peter Slezkine: And had all sorts of pathologies, Napoleon could only sustain his political energy as long as he was conquering and subduing and at the head of his army. And Louis XIV required an entire elaborate court where all of the futile lords had been domesticated.
[00:40:22] Curtis Yarvin: I know. You know, all of these things, like, you can never step in the same river twice. None of these things was perfect in any way, you know.
[00:40:30] Peter Slezkine: Not to mention just American tradition. So, I mean, it's a country founded on an idea. And I understand that is a cliche that is incorporated into every one of Biden's speeches, but nonetheless, the United States is not...
[00:40:43] Curtis Yarvin: It's all complete bullshit. And anyone who remembers who actually falls in the 18th century...
[00:40:46] Peter Slezkine: No. So, you think you can write any software on this hardware, that there's no need to appeal to the founders or to some sort of lingering legitimacy in order to create a regime that will hinder...
[00:40:58] Curtis Yarvin: Nobody takes that shit seriously anymore? And that's, kind of, the secret, in a way, like, communism has done its work. Like, nobody takes that shit seriously anymore. The Civil War and World War II are still sacralized in our narrative. And if you want to argue about those wars with people, you should be prepared to roll your sleeves up. But debunking the Revolutionary War, except for some maybe very backward conservatives, does not get anybody hot under the collar. It certainly does not get left just hot under the collar when you're just, like, "George the III did nothing wrong."
And so, actually, what you're looking at is this incredibly frivolous... It is simply the fact that populism is so weak. That presents an enormous challenge in using its force effectively because that weakness has to be used very efficiently as a generator of power. And yet, two things. One is that, because it is so frivolous, it is much more comfortable doing crazy shit. Citizens would not do this shit. Citizens would not say, "Let's have a regime change." They'd be like, "Well, actually, I don't know about that. I've been voting in my town meeting for, like..." But actually, Zoomers are just like, "Yeah. Why the fuck not?"
There's a line from Ernst von Salomon's novel about his time in the Freikorps, where he's saying, "What we wanted, we did not know. What we knew, we did not want," which is a very Zoomer kind of political attitude.
And so, actually, getting this kind of regime change done does not involve getting these good citizens to set aside their school boards and all the other symbols of their Massachusetts citizenship. It only requires to getting them to say, "Fuck it. I need something different." And then the thing that is different that is offered to them, that is put in front of them, has to be something that actually works. And they're not going to be the ones that are going to be able to distinguish between something that's, like, crazy in a good way and something that's crazy in a bad way.
[00:43:08] Peter Slezkine: You mean, in theory, they will understand once it either proves itself in practice or fails to do so.
[00:43:14] Curtis Yarvin: Well, if it fails to do so, then we're in a world of shit because they won't have power to, sort of, take it back from there. And so, actually, they get one chance, and they'd better get it right. And if they don't take this one chance, the future is basically whatever city you live closest to, your children or your children's children will experience that city looking like Johannesburg.
[00:43:38] Peter Slezkine: Why do you think there's one chance? I understand this was the rhetoric going into the election.
[00:43:43] Curtis Yarvin: Because we're coming very, very close to the end of having any populous power at all. That is coming through a number of channels, but mostly it is coming through, you know, a simple demographic warfare, such as this happening in California. If California was the United States, you'd have to think about methods other than winning elections in order to change its government.
You know, as I joked on Twitter the other day, sort of, our definition of citizenship has gone from jus sanguinis, the right of blood descent, to jus soli, the right of the power of the soil, to jus airbus, which means that anyone who can get a $2,000 ticket from anywhere is part of your polity.
And so, the last gasps of populism are in our own age and our own generation. Its ability to interrupt the tremendous decay of meritocratic civilization is, like, a very, very transient thing and is currently being completely fucked up.
[00:44:52] Peter Slezkine: Thanks for listening to the Trialogue Podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the show so you don’t miss out on any episodes. The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.