This week’s issue of the New Yorker features a long, fascinating profile of the rightwing blogger and software developer Curtis Yarvin, by the writer Ava Kofman. Yarvin has, for about a decade and a half now, been a highly influential figure on Silicon Valley’s anti-democratic right – a once fringe cohort that has lately become its political centre of gravity. Initially published under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin’s ideas are extreme even by the standards of the American right. His central claim is that democracy is inherently unworkable, because the vast majority of people are simply not smart enough to collectively direct the course of their nations. He himself has labelled his political philosophy – and I can barely type these words without cringing – “the Dark Enlightenment”.
The ideal form of government, for Yarvin, is a kind of neo-feudalism, in which a CEO-monarch, advised and assisted by a “cognitive elite”, rules over a populace who are granted precisely one right: if they don’t like their lives under the rule of that particular CEO-monarch, they can move to another that better suits their idea of the good life. Naturally, Yarvin is also a firm believer in so-called “race science” – the entirely unscientific belief that humans can be divided into races, and that there is a correlation between intelligence and genetic traits such as skin colour.
I first encountered Yarvin eight or nine years ago, when I was writing about the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, whose anti-democratic beliefs were becoming increasingly influential in Silicon Valley. Yarvin’s software company Urbit was funded by Thiel, and he was at that time viewed, as Kofman puts it, as the “court philosopher of the Thiel-verse”, exerting a strong rightward pull on Thiel’s own political views.
Yarvin has become an increasingly mainstream figure in recent years. His centrality to the American new right was the focus of an article in Vanity Fair in 2022, and last year he was the subject of a lengthy interview in the New York Times Magazine, for which he was photographed in a leather motorcycle jacket, affecting an air of strenuous moodiness. JD Vance has cited him as a political influence, and his ideas about dismantling the federal government – mass firing of civil servants, cessation of formal international relations, ending all foreign aid – are generally recognised as an inspiration for Elon Musk’s Doge. Mountainhead, the new film from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong about four tech billionaires plotting to overthrow the US government, is scattered with recognisably Yarvinian ideas that have been barely tweaked on the satire dial.
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And yet for all that, I was sceptical of the idea of a magazine profile of Yarvin – especially when that magazine was the New Yorker. This is a publication whose cultural prestige, and reputation for intellectual seriousness, can’t help but rub off on even the most critically handled of subjects. I suspected that the form itself was somehow ill-suited to the subject matter, and that such a profile might only serve to further legitimise Yarvin, and to popularise his profoundly contemptible ideas. (Readers who are familiar with my own work outside of this weekly column – and, now that I think of it, even within it – might find themselves concluding that this concern about directing attention toward dubious subjects is a bit rich coming from me. Fair point, I suppose.)
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But as soon as I read the profile, those concerns mostly disintegrated. Part of what has long made Yarvin a seductive prospect for the right was the sense, until fairly recently, that he was an aloof and elusive figure, issuing transgressive political ideas from the shadows like a reactionary pamphleteer. Kofman’s article is valuable, and compelling, because it dismantles this myth without even particularly seeming to go out of its way to do so.
She paints a closely observed portrait of a deeply unappealing man, whose self-aggrandisement and apparent insecurity emerge as two sides of the same narcissistic coin. The article illustrates, among other things, an important truth: that an over-investment in the idea of intelligence per se, and in particular the obsession with IQ as a measure of personal worth, is almost always a symptom of a stunted intellect. As a kid, Yarvin attended a summer camp for “talented youth”, and his general affect – his former trivia champ’s insistent display of general knowledge, his mistaking blunt-force debating skill for a lively and subtle mind – remains very much that of the superannuated precocious child. Though it’s hardly the point of the article, it functions as a dire warning to any parent who might be tempted to skip their child ahead in school. (Yarvin was initially homeschooled, and later skipped three grades ahead of his peers, a formative experience which seems to have proven all but fatal to his personality.)
As a PhD student in Berkeley, we learn, he was sometimes referred to as “helmet-head”, because he often wore a bicycle helmet in class; the joke among his peers was that it prevented new ideas from penetrating his mind. One of the most perceptive insights in the profile comes from Yarvin’s ex-fiancee. She suggests that his embrace of a provocative ideology might be a “repetition compulsion”, a psychic defence allowing him to reframe the ostracisation he felt as an unpopular, nerdy kid. “As America’s most famous living monarchist, he could tell himself that people were rejecting him for his outre ideas, not for his personality.”
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Kofman takes Yarvin’s ideas seriously, not in order to inflate their value, but to put them in their proper place, and to lay bare their flimsiness. She never does anything so obvious as outright ridiculing Yarvin’s undercooked reactionary philosophy; she merely describes it. In the neo-feudalist system he delineates, for instance, problems such as legitimacy, accountability and orderly succession would be handled by a secret board of directors. “How the board itself would be selected is unclear,” writes Kofman, “but Yarvin has suggested that airline pilots – ‘a fraternity of intelligent, practical and careful people who are already trained on a regular basis with the lives of others. What’s not to like?’ – could manage the transition between the regimes.” Reading Yarvin’s plan for his ideal polity, as the English writer James Vincent put it in a social media post, “is like listening to an imaginative child explain how their Lego fort is governed”.
One interesting subtext of the profile is Yarvin’s apparent distressed realisation – and here again, the reader must read between the lines – that he is being outmanoeuvred by a writer who happens to be not just smarter than him, but also a young woman. Kofman quotes a series of texts he sends her about her reporting, telling her that her “process is slack”, and that she may be “too dumb to understand the ideas”. The problem, of course, for Yarvin is not that she doesn’t understand the ideas, but that she understands them perfectly well – and that she understands him, too.
As risible as his ideas might be, they are increasingly influential, and increasingly dangerous. And there is real value in exposing those ideas to proper scrutiny, in pulling back the curtain to confirm that the great and powerful wizard of the Dark Enlightenment is in fact just an insecure and needy dork wearing a bicycle helmet in class.
