Yarvin on Democracy, Leftism, and Julius Evola
The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.
Blue Pill, Red Pill
In his second blog post, Curtis Yarvin makes what he calls a case against democracy. He begins by pointing out that we are all steeped in democracy and its values from birth, and it’s hard to change. To help see things differently (of course using The Matrix image of the red and blue pills) he offers ten statements about democracy and an alternative view. He doesn’t discuss any, so all discussion is mine. I’ll look at three, the first, and two chosen by the highly Enlightenment method: the 15th decimal digits of pi and e.
First PIll
blue pill:
Democracy is responsible for the present state of peace, prosperity, and freedom in the US, Europe and Japan.
red pill:
The rule of law is responsible for the present state of peace, prosperity and freedom in the US, Europe and Japan.
So close. Yarvin doesn’t ask himself where the rule of law comes from, nor why it’s working. I’d say that in a democratic polity most people think they have a voice in deciding laws, so they are generally willing to obey the laws. That leads to the good stuff, which encourages further acceptance of laws. Of course, there are other reasons depending on the nature of the individual and their sense of participation in humanity. Some people obey out of fear, or because that was engrained in them from birth. Others think about the alternatives, and agree to be bound. And there are many other possibilities.
Yarvin doesn’t ask himself who are the people who refuse to obey, like the current administration and its leaders. Are they acting like they live in a democracy? No. They act like they’re rulers. And it’s easy to see that a majority of people don’t like it. Of course the current administration goes much farther than others, but Yarvin might have noticed the abuses and corruption of the Bush administration, or that it pushed us into pointless wars and then failed at them. Maybe he suddenly has.
Third pill
blue pill:
The disasters of fascism and communism demonstrate the importance of representative democracy.
red pill:
Fascism and communism are best understood as forms of democracy. The difference between single-party and multiparty democracy is like the difference between a malignant tumor and a benign one.
Yarvin calls fascism and communism single-party democracies. But they were not democratic at all. They were all managed by a single person whose decisions were his own and were final. How exactly are they different from the monarchy he wants to install?
Fifth pill
blue pill:
Power in the West is held by the people, who have to guard it closely against corrupt politicians and corporations.
red pill:
Power in the West is held by the civil service, that is, the permanent employees of the state. In any struggle between the civil service and politicians or corporations, the civil service wins.
The premise here is that some person or group in each “Western” nation has ultimate power. It’s just as false that “the people” have ultimate power as it is that the civil service has ultimate power. Anyone who watched the Bush Administration run things would know this. The civil service is and always has been reasonably accountable to the political leadership, more in Republican administrations than in Democratic.
Yarvin doesn’t mention the role of the courts in all this. It’s a telling omission.
Leftism
In this post, Yarvin tells us that the essential idea of leftism is that intellectuals (he prefers the term “scholars”) should run the world. Scholars are indistinguishable from priests.He asks:
Can anyone find an exception to this rule—i.e., a mass movement that is generally described as “leftist,” but which does not in practice imply the rule of scholars, or at least people who think of themselves as scholars?
I’d guess he means that the ideas that justify and organize a leftist mass movement come from intellectuals. For example, Karl Marx justified and motivated the leaders of the Russian Revolution. John Locke justified the American Revolution and the form of its new government.
But that’s true of any revolution. There may be grievances, but grievances can be solved by negotiation or tweaks to the order of things. Regime change requires a replacement for the ideology that supports the existing regime. Does Yarvin understand that this applies to himself, to Ayn Rand, to all those right-wing jerks he cites?
1. In comments on my last post, people noted that Yarvin was going to debate Danielle Allen, a Harvard professor with a specialty in democracy. Afterwards, someone posted what looked like a transcript of the debate on Blue Sky. It was taken down and the account closed, but I read it before it disappeared. Yarvin’s arguments felt like a ball falling down a Pachinko board, bounding from pin to pin with no clear connection. Or, as the WaPo described his blog posts, he was “wildly discursive”.
At one point he said that Harvard doesn’t teach conservative thought. For example, no one teaches the thought of Julius Evola. This is from the Wikipedia page on Evola:
He viewed himself as part of an aristocratic caste that had been dominant in an ancient Golden Age, as opposed to the contemporary Dark Age ,,,.. In his writing, Evola addressed others in that caste whom he called l’uomo differenziato—”the man who has become different”—who through heredity and initiation were able to transcend the ages. Evola considered human history to be, in general, decadent; he viewed modernity as the temporary success of the forces of disorder over tradition. Tradition, in Evola’s definition, was an eternal supernatural knowledge, with absolute values of authority, hierarchy, order, discipline and obedience. Links and fn. omitted.
Evola was a major factor in Italian fascism, with ties to German fascism. After WWII he was closely involved with far right-wing Italian politics. It gets worse: “Evola wrote prodigiously on mysticism, Tantra, Hermeticism, the myth of the Holy Grail and Western esotericism.”
So, Harvard doesn’t teach a marginal weirdo fascist. That’s what Yarvin thinks is a gotcha.
2. I’m on the road, and my main book for this trip is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It’s set in Russia between 1805 and 1812, and give a history of the Napoleonic Wars from the perspetive of Russia and five aristocratic families
Here’s how Tolstoy describes the attitude of one of his characters, Nicholas Rostov, towards Tsar Alexander I:
Rostov, standing in the front lines of Kutuzov’s army which the Tsar approached first, experienced the same feeling as every other man in that army: a feeling of self-forgetfulness, a proud consciousness of might, and a passionate attraction to him who was the cause of this triumph.
He felt that at a single word from that man all this vast mass (and he himself an insignificant atom in it) would go through fire and water, commit crime, die, or perform deeds of highest heroism, and so he could not but tremble and his heart stand still at the imminence of that word. P. 467, Kindle edition.
Does Yarvin feel that looking at Trump or Musk?
As a trans woman, I will never stop laughing at conservatives using the blue pill/red pill analog without realizing that it’s about choosing to be transgender.
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Re: #2. I’m not sure Yarvin is all that happy with Trump, et al. He seems more like a person who loves to articulate how much he hates everything and everyone. He’s close to being a nihilist. His theory of what a good government might look like is wildly hypothetical. But that saves him from taking any position that might be empirically tested.
Yarvin is like Humpty Dumpty – he uses a word like democracy to mean what he wants it to mean, even if that meaning is not remotely the accepted definition.
That would be ok if he defends his definition by resort to historic meaning or linguistics. I’m betting that he doesn’t..
The rule of law and democracy are not mutually exclusive.
His blather about civil servants would make sense only if civil servants could pass on their position to some they choose. Yarvin seems to parrot the right wing line that the federal government is infested with leftists and the leftists are able to stay in power. However, it might just be that government service attracts a certain kind of person. Maybe government service creates “leftists”.
Or maybe government jobs attract people who are driven to serve the public through work, and Curtis Yarvin has absolutely no fucking clue what that means because he’s never had to work to make anybody else happy let alone had any interest in doing that.
“Fascism and communism are best understood as forms of democracy. The difference between single-party and multiparty democracy is like the difference between a malignant tumor and a benign one.”
Well, that is certainly an opinion. If democracy encompasses forms that are rule of just a few people, isn’t monarchism or dictatorship just an extreme form or single-party democracy? Seems very Humpty-Dumpty.
“Can anyone find an exception to this rule—i.e., a mass movement that is generally described as “leftist,” but which does not in practice imply the rule of scholars, or at least people who think of themselves as scholars?”
US socialism of the 19th to early 20th centuries? It was union and labor-led, not scholar-led. Actually, besides technocracy, I can’t think of any movement that implies the rule of scholars
I can’t think of any form of government that puts scholars in charge. Real scholars don’t want to be in charge. They like studying and talking about stuff with their colleagues and occasionally outsiders. Your guess of the reforms of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries is better than anything I came up with.
That’s why I proffered my understanding that scholars provide a framework for a different ideology. But who knows?
“Real scholars don’t want to be in charge.”
And they also may fear being in charge. Despite their gaining mastery, many scholars only see “how much they still have to learn” or they come to realize how much simply is unknowable—and so they become increasingly less confident in their belief in their personal suitability to act or lead. In terms of the Dunning-Kruger effect this is represented on the (mostly neglected) far right-hand side of the diagram (in Wikipedia). In cases such as these, they might need to be reminded: “You only know plenty.”
A good friend graduated from Annapolis several decades ago. He used to say that the service academies were less interested in top scholars, which private schools tended to drool over, than all-rounders, who had a bias toward action. In simplest terms, doing what can be done is much preferred to thinking too much about what should be done, and only then getting around to doing it.
That seems right to me. Effective politicians tend to do the same.
What I was taught was that you go for solutions you can work with and improve, rather than going for unattainable perfection.
I despair, honestly. Why, with the tribulations and disgust Agent Krasnov causes, is this Yarvin person (who resembles a Simpsons character and sounds like the Unabomber) taken so seriously as to be in the position to recommend a complete change of our government? Yikes! We’ve been hijacked!
Besides petulantly whining about Democracy, does Yarvin address how to replace his idealized CEO leader should they (is it always “he” in Yarvin’s musings?) turn out to be capriciously corrupt? In theory, and in practice, Democracy provides a means to replace elected officials.
I haven’t seen anything to suggest he has a theory of change. The WaPo article I linked suggests he hadn’t thought through much of anything.
Excellent series so far. I read W&P many decades ago with a Dr. Fiene as my (excellent) guide through this and other Russian literature. Tolstoy’s critique of the ‘Great Man’ theory is thorough, though the work offers more than that. I look forward to your further critiquing of Yarvin’s sloppy and chaotic thinking. We’re either of his parents devotees of Larouche?
Yarvin’s claim that Communism and Fascism are different versions of democracy is dishonest and anti-intellectual. It seems to be a garden variety attempt to say that moving from a representative democracy to, say, Trump’s Fascism isn’t that much of a change, and most people should be happy with it. After only three and a half months of Trump, we have already seen how false that claim is.
Yarvin’s claim that power in the West is held by govt civil servants, who are antagonists of elected politicians, is grossly over-simplified. He supports Trump’s view that only the whims of elected politicians, or at least the chief elected politician, count.
Civil servants, who represent precedent, due process, and the rule of law, restrain the chief executive. That makes civil servants inherently illegitimate, and justifies their immediate firing by the chief executive, without due process or a planned transition. Doing so is not only justified, but obligatory. It’s a foundation for chaos and dictatorship, not legitimate govt.
He must have played hooky the day they explained why the Civil Service system exists.
Yarvin is a petulant adolescent incel who probably couldn’t find a date to the prom. But he has a ton of money and the ear of the bitter Queen who owns Palantir. I won’t say his name. I have a high school education and can easily tell he is an idiot. The old saw that he is what a stupid man thinks what a smart man sounds like applies here. None of this changes the fact that he has a large disaffected following which includes the President of our country. Like Steven Miller, he needs to be put in front of a camera as much as possible. The more people see and hear these folks, the more repulsive they become. They are not camera shy. They crave attention.