Am I Supposed To Take Curtis Yarvin Seriously?

Yarvin and the New York Times unwittingly make the best case ever for a liberal arts degree.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Over the past few months I have seen social media mentions of Curtis Yarvin as the latest in a long line of contrarian thinkers worshipped by the techbros. And I assiduously avoided all the links.

Why? after all, I study the ideas industry, and I’ve certainly engaged with some of these contrarians in the past. But I usually find these debates to be tedious and costly. As I noted last year:

Each of these approaches start with some not-entirely-unreasonable assumptions (“Prediction markets have some utility!” “Technological innovation is worth incentivizing!” “We should think about future generations in taking actions in the present!”) and then going to such logical extremes that you wind up writing insane sentences like, “Any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.” And it’s tricky to reject these philosophies while taking care not to reject the plausible initial assumptions that some of these worldviews posit.

I assumed that Yarvin fell into this same category of DIY thinker and, with everything going on, was uninterested in expending the necessary energy to deconstruct these views.

However, fortunately or unfortunately, the New York Times Magazine decided that it would be a good idea to have David Marchese interview Yarvin and then print all 4,000 words with some very flattering black-and-white profile photos.

At which point my social media feeds started blowing up about it.

At which point, people that I respect asked me what I thought.

At which point I read the entire interview.

My immediate reaction to Yarvin is the same reaction that the cops have to Bill Pullman’s character in Ruthless People:

My considered reaction: at least with the likes of, say, Marc Andreessen, some effort is required to parse out his true-but-not-new points from his new-but-not-true points.¹ With Yarvin, it’s much simpler: pretty much everything he says in this interview is wrong. There is no kernel of an interesting idea gone bad; there is just a bunch of half-baked analogies that fall apart if you have a decent liberal-arts education. It’s like listening to a stoned, first-year MBA student who read his father’s outdated history books when he was a teenager and half-remembers them.²

Yarvin’s interview is too ridiculous to merit a comprehensive critique, so the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World will just highlight three absurdities in his interview.

First, to challenge Yarvin’s contention that dictatorships are preferrable to democracies, Marchese asks him about Hitler and Stalin, asking “Given that historical precedent, do we really want to try a dictatorship?”

Yarvin’s response:

Your question is the most important question of all. Understanding why Hitler was so bad, why Stalin was so bad, is essential to the riddle of the 20th century. But I think it’s important to note that we don’t see for the rest of European and world history a Holocaust. You can pull the camera way back and basically say, Wow, since the establishment of European civilization, we didn’t have this kind of chaos and violence. And you can’t separate Hitler and Stalin from the global democratic revolution that they’re a part of.

This is so galactically stupid that I have to assume Yarvin was stoned during this interview. The degree of historical ignorance required to make these claims is breathtaking. It requires a dedicated effort to not learn anything about European or world history to sound that confident and that wrong at the same time.

Second, there is Yarvin’s claims about the current structure of the federal government:

What’s happening now in D.C. is there’s definitely an attempt to revive the White House as an executive organization which governs the executive branch. And the difficulty with that is if you say to anyone who’s professionally involved in the business of Washington that Washington would work just fine or even better if there was no White House, they’ll basically be like, Yeah, of course. The executive branch works for Congress. So you have these poor voters out there who elected, as they think, a revolution. They elected Donald Trump, and maybe the world’s most capable C.E.O. is in there.

Nope! No, no, no, no, no. All the noes.

The last half-century of American politics has been one long series of delegations by the other branches of government to the executive branch, followed by the president exercising increasing control over the executive branch as unitary executive theory has taken root. But even those of use concerned about excessive executive power would disagree with the notion that government would run better without a president or White House. Indeed, the reason Congress has delegated is that it is the more dysfunctional institution. Yarvin is simply, totally wrong.

Finally, there’s Yarvin’s half-baked analogy that the government should be run just like a private business should be. Here’s one example of that:

I think that having an effective government and an efficient government is better for people’s lives. When I ask people to answer that question, I ask them to look around the room and point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy, because these things that we call companies are actually little monarchies. You’re looking around, and you see, for example, a laptop, and that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy.

Yarvin is at the mercy of his myriad selection biases in the above statement. First, he only looks at business successes. This ignores the fact the majority of business start-ups are not in business after ten years. Or, to spin it slightly differently: do you want the folks responsible for the Chevy Nova, DDT, or Bhopal to be running the government?!

Yarvin also ignores the myriad ways that CEOs can nearly destroy their businesses. This holds with particular force for CEOs who have zero expertise in their business’ sector. And finally, to repeat a theme, running the government is not equivalent running a business. Providing public goods is harder than providing private goods.

Look, maybe Yarvin makes more sense in his writings than in his oral interviews, though I doubt it. But his stupidity raises the question of why he merits the New York Times Magazine treatment. Marchese’s justification is as follows:

I’ve been aware of Yarvin, who mostly makes his living on Substack, for years and was mostly interested in his work as a prime example of growing antidemocratic sentiment in particular corners of the internet. Until recently, those ideas felt fringe. But given that they are now finding an audience with some of the most powerful people in the country, Yarvin can’t be so easily dismissed anymore.

Honestly, if that’s the case then what I would like to know is exactly what the Andreessens and JD Vances of the world agree with about Yarvin and why they agree. Or, as Elizabeth Spiers puts it:

It’s going to be a long four years already. If this is the best that the MAGA intellectual class can bring to the party, it’s going to get so much dumber.

1. Though Andreessen did himself no favors in his interview with Ross Douthat (though it appears the New York Times did him a solid).

2. *Inhales* “Hey, did you ever think that, like, the president is like a CEO, man?!”