Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's pretty thoughtful about how power is actually leveraged and has interesting insights around these ideas, particularly areas of democratic failure that I think are worth thinking about. I think his solutions are more questionable, but his writing is at least worth engaging with. I think people just dismiss him out of hand because he's a political enemy.
I'm worried I'm sealioning, but could you possibly point me to one of these thoughtful pieces? It's a lot to wade through for me to try to figure out what you're talking about without any pointers... I did read a decent amount of his "mencius moldbug" stuff back in the day, and I just wouldn't describe it the way you do in this comment, so I'm wondering what I'm missing.
Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
291–300 of 453 posts
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been difficult since ~2020 to truly read pieces that are heterodox. Everyone who was painting outside the lines was effectively erased from the polite society of the online squares. Yarvis doesn't even touch many of the existing third rails today.
Yes. It's quite bad, but even if you're a die-hard left liberal, or libertarian or whatever, Yarvin's ideas are a great exercise. He points out all sorts of failure modes in Democratic society that don't seem to get talked about by other political theorists. For example, the way in which power is so widely distributed means that anyone who manages to come to a powerful position is strongly incentivized to spend all t…
>For example, the way in which power is so widely distributed means that anyone who manages to come to a powerful position is strongly incentivized to spend all their efforts simply maintaining their power lest they quickly get removed and replaced by someone more power hungry.
I don't see what's wrong with that in a democracy. "Maintaining their power" means passing bills for their constituents and campaigning for the next election. If they keep getting elected, the people clearly want it
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might be interesting from a philosophical point of view, but when it comes to "do we want this person to have influence over how our government is structured?" it really doesn't matter if the conclusion is wrong because the premise is impossible or because it doesn't follow from the premise. In any case, this one fails both ways. A benevolent dictatorship might be the best form of government in the short term , bu…
Sorry, but again, you're just rejecting the premise of the thought experiment, which is "what if it were possible to always have a benevolent dictator, would that be the best government?". This is a silly way to engage with a thought experiment. It's like if you responded to the popular "what if the allies lost WW2?" thought experiment with, "well, they didn't". Yes ... but you've missed the point. I agree that this…
It didn’t say “always.”
The problem is that there’s no single definition of what makes a government “best.” Even putting aside the massive problems of what sort of outcomes we’re looking for (I have a feeling that Yarvin and I don’t agree on what criteria we’d use to judge this), the timeframe is not specified. It’s perfectly reasonable to interpret that as “over five years,” “while the benevolent dictator is alive,” or “forever, and also the dictator is immortal.” I’m not rejecting the premise, I’m merely interpreting it as the second one. The third one isn’t a counterfactual like “what if the Nazis won,” it’s more like “what if Hitler was 50ft tall and had super strength?” It’s ignoring basic, universally accepted truth about human biology. It might be fun to imagine, but when talking about the real world it makes no sense. I choose to assume that the people who accept this premise want to make sense, so I assume they mean a real, human dictator who will eventually die.
Incidentally, I not only accept that premise, I believe it. A benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government, while it lasts. The only advantage of democracy over benevolent dictatorship is long term stability beyond the lifespan of the rulers. But this is such a big advantage that it puts democracy solidly on top.
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is his opinion really weird when a strong centralized leader (kings, emperors, etc.) was the norm until very very recently? Seems like it's more a return of the political theory of of "enlightened absolutism" that was popular amongst philosophers in the 18th century, or maybe something like Confucius' ideas on government.
Yeah. You should read what Schopenhauer had to say about government, and this was barely 150 years ago, in the mid 19th. > "In general, the monarchical form of government is that which is natural to man; just as it is natural to bees and ants, to a flight of cranes, a herd of wandering elephants, a pack of wolves seeking prey in common, and many other animals, all of which place one of their number at the head of the…
The counter-argument is that even if you say democracy is sub-optimal, it’s certainly more stable than monarchy. Monarchy sounds good when you have a benevolent philosopher-king that does all the right things, but what if you get a bad king? That could mean decades of poor leadership.
With a monarchy, lighting has to strike over and over again.
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
When the American Left split into progressive and liberal camps in the mid 2010s, the rationalist and adjacent communities underwent a huge internal conflict. Scott and a lot of his orbit tend to stay on the liberal side which these days is called and often calls itself "centrist". The aftermath of the split has had pretty huge effects in most Western spaces. A lot of the progressive left is really angry at the centr…
He seems to get more hate than more mainstream people on the more centrist side of that split... Granted, they do all get hate, and your description does resonate. But he still seems to be an outlier.
He was considered a core, visible member of the rationalist community from well before the split. For better or for worse he is considered a figurehead of the movement. With the acrimony of the split there was no way he was going to escape unscathed no matter which side he ended up on just by sheer visibility of his writing.
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Precisely, I'm not sure why Curtis is kept being discussed when if you listened to him now, it's all nonsense.
Because he says rich people should rule the world, ergo rich people like him and attempt to encode his very stupid ideas into our politics, ergo we all have to care what he says It’s really a testament to how astonishingly stupid some of those rich folks are that they find any of Yarvin’s work compelling.
That's what I've been wondering. How is this much different from Nixon's trickle down economics? An idea the wealthy are happy to promote because it protects their influence.
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#297Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#298Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He's foppish and playful more than he is scary. This is a very unwise stance to take. Peter Thiel has teamed up with the Heritage Foundation to implement this plan. This is why A16Z and Musk put Trump in power, it is precisely to implement this plan.
Musk is on the outs. And what if there is no grand conspiracy? We're extremely far from any of Yarvin's "plans" at any rate. Yarvin's most cherished plan was to create a shadow university called the "Antiversity" -- a sort of repository of all truths unbeholden to politics and fads. Is this a bad idea? Which other Yarvin ideas scare you so?
Musk is on the outs because if he didn't leave his post within another week or so as he was a temporary government employee. In other words, had he stayed, he would have had to publicly disclose a ton of personal financial information.
Him "leaving" was part of the plan, and this fallout was most likely part of the charade.
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#300Didn't have time to make it through the entire (long winded) article, but is it wrong to boil down his thinking to the simple idea that a benevolent, competent dictator is the best form of government? I ask as this seems like a very simplistic and obvious idea. The problem isn't that this is necessarily incorrect, it is how do you find this mythical figurehead? History has shown that we have never discovered a system…
Yeah, he is also committed to race science, the belief that diversity is fundamentally bad, and that states "own" their citizens, and can do anything they want to them. None of that is just the basic idea of a benevolent dictator. Yarvin's views are repugnant and evil as well as reductive, childish, and unoriginal.
> he is also committed to race science, the belief that diversity is fundamentally bad
Ironically, he's jewish. He's a modern day tech-bro Clayton Bigsby.