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A Primer on Curtis Yarvin

Date: 2025 Oct 05

Words: 2446

Draft: 1 (Most recent)

To my readers: I am putting this out a bit prematurely because I am making Sunday my regular posting day. Because of this, there is a bit more material of this author I would like to read before I make claims about him (I have not finished one of his more well-known “books”, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives). When I do finish this, I am going to post an other version of this article. You can see both this version and the updated version when it is published by clicking the arrows in the “drafts” section above.

I am doing a short series about different authors influential in certain political circles. Next I am going to be writing about “BAP”, who is connected to Curtis Yarvin and is influential in the same circles.

I have been getting into Curtis Yarvin lately. An author who I previously described as “junk food compared to, like, a book” and “having no grounding in reality whatsoever”. And this may be correct, but, for what it is worth, he is one of the only people out there proposing anything even remotely pragmatic of what there is to be done. He previously wrote as “Mencius Moldbug” on the blog Unqualified Reservations from 2007 to 2014, and currently writes on Gray Mirror on Substack, that’s “gray” with an a. If you take the time to read him periodically you will stumble across something and go like, “oh, so that’s where that comes from!”.

Curtis Yarvin is extremely prolific. Unqualified Reservations is >500k words, and Gray Mirror is even more. He has written a few books, which are really more collections of blog posts strung together. He has done many interviews. Apart from his political writings, he also created a popular operating-system-within-an-operating-system, Urbit, which challenged a lot of fundamental assumptions about computing, was an OS built with his political considerations in mind, and is used by many people today. I have not read even half of all his material (that would be a very big undertaking), but I estimate right now I have read >250k, including his short books/blog post strings “A Gentle Introduction to Unqualfied Reservations” (2009) and “How Dawkins got Pwned” (2007).

A very common critique is that Curtis Yarvin is not grounded in reality, and this is a pretty good one. He went to Berkeley for a computer science PhD, before dropping out and doing a startup. He exited the startup with a ton of money that he used to buy a house in San Francisco, start a family, and fund his self-study about history, politics, economics, and start the Urbit project, and build a library of many rare books. Now, someone who doesn’t have to really worry about typical financial constraints for a very long time is going to get pretty caught up in abstractions, and someone who reads that many books is going to get pretty far away from a more in-touch person’s thoughts. This critique is right, if a person with a job went around saying some of these things Yarvin does, he would be out of his mind, but, for all his out-there words, Curtis Yarvin has made a few too many correct predictions decades out to be ignored. He may not be right about everything, but he is right where it counts.

Okay, enough disqualifiers - I am actually a huge fan of Curtis Yarvin, and (despite his volume) I have consumed a ton of his stuff. He is unpalatable to bring up around many educated people, which is expected, but I go to community college right now, and the idea stimulation there doesn’t go beyond the 200 level and no one there probably knows who he is. My economics professor, well, he is a good professor, but he doesn’t know who Thomas Schelling is, and everyone should know who Thomas Schelling is. Curtis Yarvin knows who Thomas Schelling is.

Hundreds of thousands of words of authorship could warrant a hundred thousand words in response to his authorship. One of his shorter books (it’s 30k words, but can you call it a book when it was written as a series of blog posts and published as a book retroactively?), “How Dawkins got Pwned” is a response to another book The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Summarizing his ideas would actually be a pain in the ass (the book “A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations” is 109k words, the title is ironic) so I am going to do one pass at it, and then link a few publications about Curtis Yarvin that already do it for me. You should read them all. In fact, a couple of other bloggers last decade wrote responses to Unqualified Reservations that were at least 30k words long, so there’s no point for me doing that here, it may be a worthy endeavor but it is outside of scope here. Here is enough of what you need to know about Curtis Yarvin if his name ever comes up at a casual setting:

In the media currently right now he is most famous for advocating for monarchism, and the reasons he believes in this is that the current oligarchy in America right now is sailing it straight into an iceberg, and the only way to stop is this to put absolute power into one man. He repeatedly cites FDR as an example of when this was the case in America. He describes himself as a “reactionary”, which to explain simply is a right-winger who wants to react to the continous progression left, as opposed to a conservative right-winger. He is a denouncer of democracy, he has read de Tocqueville, and makes the case that America was never a democracy and never for a moment solidly rested on Democratic principles. In his interviews, he keeps repeating that there are the three Aristotelian forms of government, monarchy rule by one, oligarchy rule by few, and democracy rule by many, and that each type of government can be good or bad - he thinks that is the absolutely essential information you must have to be able to understand anything else he says. He predicates that the American Revolution was not something sacred that should be mythologized. In fact he goes so far in this as to say here this week that we should “cut down [George Washington’s] cherry tree”. I am not sure if he is saying this for shock value or not, but for at least 15 years he has been demythologizing the American Revolution. He decries figures such as Sam Adams as anarchists in Chapter 2 of A Gentle Introduction. He has a very strong tendency to make frameworks of thinking an taxonomic classifications (such as in this one Universalism: Postwar Progressivism as a Christian Sect; this featured post and the inaugural post on his website A Formalist Manifesto; this one Castes of the United States; and this one A Reservationist Epistemology) and I think some of them are supremely useful for discussion about religion and should be brought to the light and be made as commonly known as the “political compass” (you know what that is, right? left, right, authoritarian, libertarian). He made very good use of the word cladogram in How Dawkins Got Pwned, which has since become one of my favorite words. He is famous for the idea of “The Cathedral”, the term he coined (or perhaps borrowed from Eric S. Raymond who he acknowledged by name) for the ruling oligarchy in America that is the academia and the press. They form the cultural and policy source for everything that is happening in America, and it is near-difficult to dismantle (but, he argues, not completely impossible) because it is a decentralized thing and is not accountable to anyone. He argues that a monarch can come in and smash it and that is why we need one. He argues here and in A Gentle Introduction that “progressive” is a euphemism for “communism” (the same way conservatives are quick to cry “socialism” is a euphemism for “communism”). He cites (here, here ) Hunter S. Thomspon as a key influence, which resonates very strongly with me personally because HST is one of my favorite authors OAT, and Hunter S. Thompson cracked the formula for putting fleeting thoughts in first-person POV in material meant for an actual readership, and Yarvin does it extremely well. The popular internet terminology “red pilled”, which has a fairly diluted meaning but for now I am going to tack as “someone who knows what’s going on”, was taken from The Matrix and popularized by him, which goes to show (and has mutated into a bunch of other “-pilled” suffix internet terms) which goes to show how pervase his ideas have become.

Notably, something I’ve observed that I think is really important to point out, Curtis Yarvin has become “required reading” for certain circles in Europe before in the United States. Which is funny because he writes mostly about America, not Europe. The way I look at it, the Europeans are aware that whatever happens in internal American politics determines their fate, so they are more sensitive to a non-mainstream thinker influencing mainstream thought there.

Like I said, there is too much work by Curtis Yarvin to write about in one blog post. So I am going to cap this with three lists: (1) links from Curtis Yarvin detailing what Curtis Yarvin to read (2) good interviews with Curtis Yarvin and (3) future blog post ideas I have for writing about Curtis Yarvin.

Times when Curtis Yarvin Correctly Predicted the Future

This might be scope creep but I am including this here for now.

The involuntary, concealed, guilt-inducing activation of the European amygdala somehow seems to do just as good a job, if not better, as any Klan mob of keeping the black man down. We must get rid of the amygdala! Coincidentally—or not—this racist organ is also the part of the brain activated when you or I feel fear. I can’t imagine why that would be. Step back a moment and picture your fellow Americans, who are so confi- dent that by electing a mulatto President (more money, more power) they have brought this astounding circus to an end. Quite the contrary. They have just fed it another lollipop.
A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations, Ch. 3

Here, Yarvin in 2008 correclty predicts that electing a black president will not succeed in smoothing over race tensions in the United States, the next decade or so during the whole racism craze of the 2010s.

For instance, suppose a Sam Altman were given plenary power over the US economy, reorganized into One Giant Business. His mission: cut costs, while maintaining production. His methods: eliminate white-collar busywork (real estate agents, lawyers, medical billing clerks, etc.); replace human industrial robots with actual industrial robots; and when all else fails, replace high-cost American labor with low-cost Indians housed in barracks and fed only on lentils, Dubai-style.

Does anyone doubt that aggressive and autocratic application of these methods could reduce US employment by 5 to 10 percent a year for at least a decade? Indeed, as the Singularity nears, the future of work becomes clear—there is an IQ threshold below which any human, no matter how cheap to feed, is a liability. Classic unskilled manual labor remains productive in some domains—gardening, housecleaning, and so on. Perhaps this will be true for another decade or two. It will not be true indefinitely. As the machines get smarter—assuming they get smarter—the threshold will rise. Eventually, the only human beings worth employing will be Sam Altman and his friends. Then, at last, even they will be laid off. Universal unemployment is the definition of the Singularity.

Sam Altman is not a Blithering Idiot

Moldbug wrote this in 2013 in response to a blog post on Sam Altman’s own blog. It is not a stretch to say that Sam Altman was thinking about these types of things, about automating labor and mass unemployment when he was writing his essay in 2013, but the timeline doesn’t line up completely. On The Joe Rogan Experience in 2024 Sam Altman says he spent a year reading textbooks in 2014, which was after this was written, and that was when he came up with the idea for trying to build AGI. It is extremely prescient that Yarvin wrote about automating labor with AI about Sam Altman, which is exactly what Sam Altman would go on to do when he cofounded OpenAI in 2015.

Times Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Can Directly be Traced to Influencing U.S. Policy

Curtis Yarvin’s policy has been an influence to many White House aids and even cited by J.D. Vance.

As an aside, I think it is very cringe when J.D. Vance’s mention of Yarvin is used to legitimize Yarvin. He was somebody before J.D. Vance was on the scene.

  1. One of Yarvin’s pet theories is that the President should in effect not be accountable to the other two branches, for a best system of government, and Congress should be there to just “rubber stamp” the President’s decrees. He cites FDR as the prime example of this, and says that the presidents since then have not been more than figureheads. His ideas that the President should supercede the other two branches was directly demonstrated in March 2025, when Trump went against a court order from Judge Paula Xinis ordering the un-deportation of Abrego Garcia, which was a huge break from precedent.
  2. Yarvin has long maintained that the educated classes have been the root of all the problems America is facing, and that a complete dismantling of the current elite university system is necessary. “‘Tanks in Harvard Yard’, I said 15 years ago” he says in a tweet from July 2025. So far in Trump’s administration, he has struck against higher education, when he repealed lots of government funding to elite universities.
  3. Yarvin has maintained that the President should use military force to control crime. In August 2025 he deployed the National Guard to D.C.
  4. In An Open Letter (2008), Yarvin floats that there are certain U.S. government agencies that are strongly aligned with the left, and certain ones that are aligned with the right, and if one side wanted to crush the other then they would have to shut down the opposing side’s agencies (here). In 2025 Donald Trump shut down USAID, cut down the Department of Education, and cut down the State Department.
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