The Gen X Files: Curtis Yarvin and When Nerds Go Dark...
The Gen X Files: Curtis Yarvin and When Nerds Go Dark...
Is it mental masturbation or something weirder? The whiny lament of a passed over generation.
A number of people have asked me over the years about what I think of Curtis Yarvin, or of his pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. I tried to answer the question in parts if I can’t get out of having to answer it altogether.
I’ve traditionally demurred simply because I don’t think it wise to get involved in these sorts of things. But Curtis is everywhere all at once — in Vanity Fair, on Tim Dillon’s show, and producing movies like Alex’s War.
I had wrongly dismissed Curtis as a kind of academic Super Bowl nerd which indeed he was and I was sympathetic to him, especially after he lost his wife, who seems to have financially supported him over the years while he was essentially blogging all day.
I now think he’s trying to make fascism cool to the nerds. He says the best part of fascism is its art. Perhaps that’s the only part of it that’s justifiable.
Curtis Yarvin once described me to Peter Thiel as a kind of Pinkerton, or private detective. At the time I took it as a compliment but, in hindsight, I think he was calling me a Fed.
The Pinkertons were Lincoln’s guys and deeply involved in the formation of the post-Civil War America. They were
Curtis, though, thinks the wrong side won the civil war. For him, Lincoln was a dictator. Eh, not quite. He understood that a defense of America required preserving the Union. You can’t have a more perfect union with fewer members in it.
I would have mentioned all that had I gotten a word in. We’d first met at one of those interminable dinners hosted by Thiel, some of which I arranged. I’d say we spoke but, as is often the case, Curtis did all the talking. My participation, like those of the other guests, was merely to hear him talk. He loves hearing himself talk, like all cult leaders do. And boy can he talk — almost without taking a breath, almost like it’s all rehearsed—a sort of spiel or perhaps a wind up toy that when released just goes and goes.
When Curtis went home I told Thiel and Blake Masters that I knew Thiel was funding the Gawker legal fight. Rather than out him as he feared, I said I wanted in and together we dismantled what we called the Manhattan Based Terrorist Organization. I’d later learn that the Deep State knew we were taking on Gawker and that that litigation effort would become the model for taking out Infowars, the Daily Beast, and Fox News.
Which is why it is altogether puzzling to me that Curtis is now repping a new Alex Jones film which is suitably amoral about the real harms that Jones’s bullshitting causes.
The Pinkertons were private detectives. We are detectives, you and I, engaged in the forensics of the here and now, plumbing the depths of both the Internet and the human soul, which have some sort of interplay in the real world.
We believe that, with enough attention to detail and requisite research skills, we can learn how things really work. By repetition, we ultimately build software.
In some cases we can enshrine those insights into technology and that technology — doing more with less — can and indeed does, change the world.
Say what you will about Clearview or Traitwell, but they really work. So too do the dozens or so other companies I’ve invested in and supported over the years.
So why then do none of Yarvin’s tech companies work?
Curtis is often described as favoring a kind of “techno-monarchist” but he is neither technical nor much of an elitist. In essence he makes the argument that the oligarchs who run Silicon Valley should rule but Silicon Valley can’t even rule itself. It can’t even address the junkie shooting up in front of their kids schools.
Are these investments — or payoffs?
Or is it welfare designed to give him a sinecure in his intrinsically divisive projects of recruiting American tech workers, who, having written software, imagine themselves ruling?
Is Yarvin running a cult? And if so, where does this cult lead? Who does it benefit in the end? Every cult is run for some nation’s benefit.
Curtis’s brother was accused of being involved with a terrorist bombing and Thiel, Yarvin’s principal founder, once joked about building bombs in his book, Zero to One. Thiel co-author — and someone Yarvin has donated $5800 — has said positive things about the Unabomber. All of this is very weird and what it has to do with electoral politics I couldn’t say.
Part of the way Curtis bamboozles you is by owning a part of the library. He makes endless allusions to books. He seemed disappointed that I had read those books, too, and found that Curtis’s version of those book didn’t exactly correspond to my understanding of them. He is a bibliophile without being a deep reader—a fan of showing off his library. They master the trivia because their lives are trivial.
I’ve always found the names of the generations to be revealing. Gen X like fragile X, a fatal disorder. The name supposedly means Generation Next but they never quite arrived, did they? And now seem sure to be replaced by the millennials who outnumber them. They’ll whine all the way, which they are wont to do, but we will replace you.
There are all kinds of theories I think for why they never quite made it.
But let me venture a few, starting with their Gen X pop culture which Karate Kid and Star Wars are perhaps the best examples. Star Wars is very, very important for the Gen Xers.
“I’m a capitalist. ‘Star Wars’ is the capitalist show. ‘Star Trek’ is the communist one,” Peter Thiel told Maureen Dowd.
“There is no money in ‘Star Trek’ because you just have the transporter machine that can make anything you need,” he added. “The whole plot of ‘Star’Wars” starts with Han Solo having this debt that he owes and so the plot in ‘Star Wars’ is driven by money.”
Is Peter Thiel really arguing that Jabba the Hutt is the hero? How then does he think about Leia strangling him with the chains?
It may be the only thing that they have approximating art and it was, of course, done for them by George Lucas — a Boomer who imagined that the Vietcong were the good guys. What is it that the pseudo-romantics of America are always empathizing with our enemies anyway?
If you haven’t read David Brin’s Stars War on Trial, you must. Barring that, read this great interview. I won’t spoil it for you but this paragraph is revelatory enough.
Interviewer: You mention that George Lucas “has spent the last 20 years relentlessly pissing in modernity’s face, preaching Romantic claptrap about how demigods and mystic warriors are better than democracy.”
David Brin: JRR Tolkien had a grievance against modernity, but he came by it honestly, at the Battle of the Somme, watching the flower of his generation mowed down by modern implements of death. He saw what coal dust did to the buildings and lungs of London Town. The Lord of the Rings rails against modernity — painting it as a tool of Mordor — while extolling the elfish demigods and mystic chosen-one warriors of Numenor. And it’s great stuff! We are on opposite sides of this argument. But Tolkien is very good and makes his case in a gorgeous story.
In contrast, George Lucas was given everything by modernity… health and fun and riches and all the tools he needed for his dream – to direct movies — to come true. Modernity provides the brilliant artists whom he hires by the bushel-load. When he rails against modernity – along with democracy and science and the hopeful possibilities of the common woman or man – he is simply being an ingrate.
Brin continues:
Interviewer: Would George Lucas, or anyone for that matter, be a good benign dictator – (by good I mean successfully benign)? If so, how do you pick a correct one?
DB: We all daydream about what laws we would command, if we got to be king. I am no exception. Moreover I admit there have sometimes been good kings. Only look at what happened when their sons took charge. It took a special kind of maturity for George Washington and his band of geniuses to say: “Let us limit our own power. Instead, we’ll ask the people to argue and negotiate with each other.”
The result is noisy, messy, frustrating… and so vastly better and more just and more productive than the preceding 6000 boring years of brutal, nasty feudalism. We are in a revolution. It is ongoing. And science fiction is the one form of literature that says: “look, we can spot mistakes! We can criticize and maybe cooperate. Look at how far we’ve come. Maybe – just maybe – we can go farther.”
Yarvin wants to restore that old feudalism. He won’t come out and say so he hides it. That’s the spirit with which Yarvin writes his piece about hobbits and dark elves.
But Curtis, you’re not an elf. You’re a pet of an oligarch. Like many of your generation, that is best you can do. You are the middle children of history. You whine.
We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war
Your spiritual war… maybe your jihad?
No, your role is to watch as our parents — Boomers — hand over the country to us.
Because in your assessment of the world you have often been wrong. You complain about how the elites, the boomers, Dad didn’t do you right. As if you were owed something.
But what? What? Because if you want to be an elf, you have to be right and you were not. Not on a whole host of issues. That’s why we passed you over. If you want to be an elite you have to be elite. Elites look out for their people—not profit off of them. You don’t demand a divine right to rule over the hobbits. You earn it through deliberation, negotiation, and well, through, listening.
In Tim Dillon’s podcast, circa 28 minutes in, Curtis says he was pushing lockdown and had bet against the stock market and was talking his book. How revealing. “That really biased my coverage,” he said. “I’ll admit that.”
He also mentioned the Steven Soderbergh film Contagion which features a Jude Law figure who is criminally pushing a number of things online. Is that from whence Curtis got his inspiration? Really?
During that time he predicted millions of deaths and even wrote at one point that someone you love will die on a ventilator. He was, of course, wrong though how wrong remains to be seen. How many of those deaths attributed to covid are, in fact, covid deaths nobody knows.
The truth is that the Chinese wanted lockdown ahead of the 2020 elections to weaken America and Curtis, whose pseudonym is itself Chisraeli — Mencius Moldbug anyone? — was prepared to deliver it. But you can’t lock down the American body or spirit.
Thiel once told me that everything is its opposite but Curtis, in his praising of a gay Austrian or German dictator, is making everything a tad too obvious. The experts — so often wrong — all go to the schools that Peter Thiel recruits from. They can fuck off to Portugal, or New Zealand, or from wherever else they came.
The rest of us — in America — will be enjoying our freedom. We are Men here — not dark elves or hobbits. We argue amongst ourselves. We duke it out but ours is a revolutionary people.
When danger strikes at our fragile young Republic, there’s still space for a pleb Lincoln, a patrician FDR, or even perhaps a Joe Biden (University of Delaware, Syracuse Law).
Even Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) — that slacker not quite Gen X president — gets it.
Why are you stealing my photos to do hit pieces?