Curtis Yarvin: Beliefs
I’ll start by re-iterating my summary of Yarvin’s points from his post in response to the recent controversy, titled “Why you should attend LambdaConf”. I’ve clarified some points from conversations he had in response to that post. It’s important that these are current views. These can’t be pawned off as a 7 year old blog post being mis-interpreted. These are summaries of his own words, from a couple weeks ago, that he responded to at length without substantially disagreeing with.
- Curtis Yarvin is not Moldbug, and he doesn’t perform that work anymore. One only needs to look at his replies in the comments to his Medium post to see that he’s still explaining his neo-reactionary beliefs — this whole post which is supposed to be “why attend LambdaConf” is actually “why my beliefs are reasonable”.
- Racism is believing that white people are better than black people. If you don’t believe that, you’re not racist. This is simply not a useful definition of racism in 2016. It was an acceptable short-hand in 1960, but we’ve moved past it now. He also seems to display some cognitive dissonance on this point, as he implies in a later comment that “true” racists of this sort are extremely rare. So this definition seems designed just to eliminate “racism” as a possible explanation for anything.
- We can learn interesting social principles from “old books”, but any ideas engendered by reading old books cannot actually affect anyone. People are energized on both sides by the things he’s written. Controversial ideas wrapped in an appeal to authority are inherently powerful. This statement is just false. More on this in “Abdication of Responsibility”.
- There are statistically significant differences between human races in intelligence, those differences are not studied thoroughly enough, and will only become more clear as DNA sequencing improves. This is where Yarvin and his supporters get to claim they’re on the intellectual high ground and that their detractors are impossible to reason with, because they won’t admit the facts or scientific worthiness of these studies. Unfortunately for the people who agree with this “science”, if you want to be a good scientist, you have to throw it out because it’s heavily tainted and influenced by other factors.
- Being smarter than someone else doesn’t make you “better” than them. Just more suited to intellectual pursuits (see point 2). In the “Logical Fallacies” section, we’ll go through exactly what he means by “better” and how he’s conflating the moral superiority of his definition of racism with the physical difference of higher cognitive function.
- The smartest of the smart people are not inherently more qualified to “run things” on the basis of intelligence alone, but most elite institutions propel the smartest individuals to leadership anyway. I don’t see the same dissonance or fallacies in this statement that I see in the others, but I have no personal experience with elite institutions, and no way to determine if this is based on fact, opinion, or some personal vendetta.
Yarvin’s post in response to the controversy notably doesn’t address any larger political ideas and how they tie into this base platform, but I’ll admit, he got me at first. Those points almost seem like reasonable claims. Incredibly wrong-headed, but as a white man raised in suburban America, I can see how he arrived where he did. I was unfamiliar with his prior work, and although I’ve met many varieties of ignorant racist (I have more than one of “those uncles”), I’ve never actually engaged with someone who got literally all the facts and then bent them to their will like Yarvin does.
I figured he was misguided, so I talked to him in the comments after he responded to my summary of his post. He didn’t directly address the studies I offered as a contrast to the studies he referenced, and I realized that of course he had already seen and disregarded them. I went and actually read some of his older posts. They bothered me. Yes, he seems to have softened his edge a bit over the last 8 years. He doesn’t seem to present quite the same bite of sardonic disdain and anger. But how different is he, really?
Past Beliefs
Yarvin has stated his belief that leftism is “a cancer”, and that it will be unable to be defeated through the democratic process as long as conservatism remains unpopular, but might require some thinking “outside the democratic box”. He leaves it unsaid what this outside the box thinking might be. He does say that making conservative ideas more popular could allow the defeat of leftism within the democratic process, but again does not specify how one might accomplish this goal.
These sort of statements are the political ones that other conservatives, libertarians, and free speech advocates argue should not preclude Yarvin from a professional assembly. I totally respect his right to express these opinions. In fact, I haven’t seen anyone speak against those ideas specifically, although I’m sure some have. I don’t intend to either, although I feel I need to point out that when I hear someone advocating for actions “outside the democratic box”, I think of political tools such as gerrymandering & voter suppression. When he mentions making conservative ideas more popular, I can only assume it means something like spreading memes through the American consciousness, as his blog has been doing for 8 years, and as is happening now with the incredible amount of publicity from this on-going controversy. I’m not forcing that reading onto his words, it’s just what I see in them. As Yarvin is fond of saying, “your mileage may vary”.
Yarvin is fairly careful to keep the disparate portions of his political “platform” separate — his political stance against liberalism as detailed above, the clear descriptions of ethnic, religious, and political communities as monoliths in his writings, his scientific ideas that certain races are less intelligent than others wholesale, and his social suggestions that those monolithic groups should be segregated, in spirit and maybe in fact, à la feudalism/slavery.
The following quotes might seem cherry-picked, but mostly they’re just the relevant portions of texts related to the current accusations that Yarvin favors the enslavement of black people. I’ve linked to the full posts. In the pages not from his blog, just search “Mencius” to find his material. In the spirit of fairness, it’s important to note that these come from an extremely small portion of his writing, but there’s not really any way to avoid that.
We have not agreed that a man can be born a slave, but we agree that he can sell himself into slavery. … It is only a short step from seeing the State as an enforcer of voluntary and binding obligations, to an enforcer of involuntary and arbitrary obligations. … Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery.
- from “Why Carlyle Matters”
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We might say to a ward: instead of [the US government] feeding you, and [the US government] having the right to compel you to work, the Salvation Army will take this charge. You are still a charitable dependent — still a slave. But your new master is an organization that specializes in charity in general, and the rebuilding of human souls in specific — and will probably do a much better job of it.
Of course, this is only a baby step toward the real reprivatization of slavery, ie, allowing private citizens or for-profit corporations to accept the paternal role. As a liberal, you’d probably balk at this.
- from the comments of Liberal Biorealism “Biology & Justice: First Cut”
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In the history of American slavery, it can safely be said that most slaveowners were decent people who treated their slaves reasonably, while a nontrivial percentage were not.
- from “A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations part 7”
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Every year, thousands of people of class B are attacked, raped and killed by people of class A. The converse is extremely rare — at least, rare enough to be a cause celebre. (BTW, I love the argument that class-A people attack, rape and kill other class-A people as well. As though this were some great saving grace.)
Large areas of X, including entire major cities, have been ethnically cleansed by the departure of class-B people fleeing class-A violence.
Versus class-As, class-Bs are systematically disfavored in competition for educational and professional positions.
- from “Why I am Not a White Nationalist”
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… essentially every black-on-white murder or rape is a hate crime. … the people who commit these crimes have all been bathed up to the pores, typically since kindergarten, in a black nationalist ideology in which these crimes are justified acts of resistance to oppression.
- from the comments of 2blowhards “They Say “Racist!!” Your Reply Is…”
If you’re pre-disposed to criticize Yarvin, those quotes probably seem pretty damning, and most of Yarvin’s critics react in basically the same way. They latch onto the most egregious parts of Yarvin’s essays and use them as justification for labelling him as a Racist (with a capital ‘R’) and discarding the entirety of his essays as infected and him as a Bad Person. This practice immediately raises the hackles of Yarvin’s supporters, who see this as anti-intellectualism, and fault the critics for being reductionist and misrepresenting Yarvin’s views.
Before I’m accused of being unfair, I’ll say again — that’s a very small sample of his writing. But the portion shown is representative of those ideas. The great portion of his writing isn’t offensive, but isn’t especially interesting either. It alternates between boring, snarky, misled and even intentionally misleading, but those things offend me on an intellectual level, not a gut-check one. The only things I’ve found in his writings that I viscerally shrink from are when he suggests that some people are born with a slave mentality, that black people are inherently more violent, and it’s important science that black people are less intelligent as a group. But almost none of the ideas he has are new, especially not these most offensive ones. And since his ideas all existed separately before, the ideas he expounds upon that have intrinsic value might be able to be separated from the ones that don’t.
I want to be clear that I don’t approve of the quotes above, but I’ve heard all the same tired things said by white people my whole life, and a lot of them were just uneducated on the issues. It’s easy for me to imagine a scenario where Yarvin hasn’t actually wrestled with his internalized racist beliefs yet; hasn’t examined his own thought processes and biases sufficiently, and has perhaps unwittingly created a philosophy to justify it.
But is that really fair here? Critics have been accusing him of this for years. Am I really supposed to assume that no one has actually tried to talk through it with him before? That none of those “reductionist” critics have engaged Yarvin at length, tried to offer him opposing views, and through their hard work acquired the moral insights on Yarvin’s character necessary to capitalize the “R”? I don’t know, I’m new to trying to understand the massive body of Yarvin’s work, and there’s a ridiculous amount of content and interactions to comb through. I haven’t personally seen that discussion, but it doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. Of course, it’s also not his critics’ responsibility to educate him.
What I have seen is Yarvin abusing “facts” and debating tactics to mislead open-minded and biased people unfamiliar with how to break down arguments.
