Curtis Yarvin
162 quotes
Biography
Curtis Guy Yarvin, also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American far-right political blogger and software developer. He is known, along with accelerationist philosopher Nick Land, for founding the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement (NRx), which originated in the late 2000s.
"Every society in human history that has ever given itself over to government by intellectuals has lived to regret it. Ours will be no different."
"The history of ideas since 1789 is an endless record of mass murder in the name of the people."
"The relative peace of the last sixty years has been achieved only at the price of creating a university system which is an established church in all but name, and which suppresses any thought it finds even remotely disturbing."
"The most powerful people in the West today, measured strictly by their ability to influence the real world, are journalists and professors."
"When you create a category called "religion" which lumps together all the delusional traditions that people who are not like you have inherited unquestioned from their intellectual ancestors, you are making it harder, not easier, to question your own assumptions."
"Simplicity is the cure for violence. For example, if we postulate an imaginary oracle that could predict the outcome of any battle, we could eliminate war. The predicted loser would have no incentive but to concede to the demands of the predicted winner."
"Hominids crave power, and they rationalize it as responsibility. No one ever achieved power by promising to enslave his followers. It is always about improving the world, at least from the perspective of prospective supporters. And it is almost always sincere. Insincere leaders are very rare, because hominids are very good at detecting insincerity. It is much easier to delude others if at the same time you delude yourself."
"Democracy is to power as a lottery is to money. It is a social mechanism that allows a large number of hominids to feel as if their individual views affect the world, even when the chance of such an effect is negligible."
"[T]he ruling caste are the people who say "we" when they mean "the government". The ruled castes always say "they"."
"In fact, natural selection tends to favor the ascent of ideologies which not only are ineffective, but actually iatrogenic. In other words, the solution is actually causing the problem it purports to be trying to solve."
"In a society where scholars are the ruling caste, actual scholarship tends to disappear."
"Universities are no longer institutions of scholarship. They are revolutionary seminaries. Their product is cadre."
"The New York Times could print nothing but lies for a year, and it would still be the most powerful institution in the world."
"You think you're charging the matador, but you're charging the cape."
"Technical advances have masked, and continue to mask, the signs of decay that would otherwise be obvious."
"The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology."
"Moderation is not an ideology. It is not an opinion. It is not a thought. It is an absence of thought. If you believe the status quo of 2007 is basically righteous, then you should believe the same thing if a time machine transported you to Vienna in 1907. But if you went around Vienna in 1907 saying that there should be a European Union, that Africans and Arabs should rule their own countries and even colonize Europe, that any form of government except parliamentary democracy is evil, that paper money is good for business, that all doctors should work for the state, etc., etc.—well, you could probably find people who agreed with you. They wouldn't call themselves "moderates", and nor would anyone else."
"Replacing your own ideology is a lot like do-it-yourself brain surgery."
"In fact, it's basically impossible to combine a system in which agreements stay agreed with one in which equality stays equal."
"Democratic politics is best understood as a sort of symbolic violence, like deciding who wins the battle by how many troops they brought."
"The essential idea of leftism is that the world should be governed by scholars."
"That's always the trouble with history. It always looks like it's over. But it never is."
"[E]very kind of human action has become shrouded in a vast cloud of something called "ethics", which no one can define, but no one is allowed to question. An actual holy book would be a serious improvement."
"[T]he hardest part of thinking clearly is recognizing false assumptions that are universally shared."
"There is no institution to which one can go in order to receive a sound paleoconservative education. Most of the people in the idea trade would simply deny that such a thing exists. Safeway will sell you a whole, salted rhinoceros head before Harvard will teach you that Lincoln was a tyrant."