La version française de cet entretien sera disponible dans le prochain numéro imprimé de la revue HUIS CLOS.  

Curtis Yarvin is an American blogger, political philosopher, software engineer, and poet. To a generation that spent too much time online in the 2010s, he is best known as Mencius Moldbug, the pseudonymous author of a series of blog posts that became Unqualified Reservations. Written over seven years beginning in 2007, Unqualified Reservations (UR) is the political diary of a dissatisfied American liberal, a man whose diplomat parents were established parts of the US influence-machine, the Brown- and Berkeley-educated grandchild of Jewish pro-Soviet activists in 1940s New York. His signature political position is to dissolve the modern democratic state and replace it with monarchical government.

UR is freely available online or in one of several print volumes; the Open letter to open-minded progressives, with its 300-odd pages, is the most succinct introduction possible. Aimed squarely at the coastal liberal class Yarvin belongs to, the essay, gently and with care not to ruffle the prejudices of his audience, opens the reader to the idea that the liberal project, in America, Rhodesia, or anywhere else, is not the summit of humanity’s political evolution. In Yarvin’s telling, Western-style democracies cannot survive competition from rising illiberal states in the East, nor preserve themselves from collapsing through the internal strife their own policies promote.

UR circulated quietly in tech circles and among anonymous political theorists, but saw limited mainstream attention until years later. Instead, it moved in a murky world of niche blogs, some disappeared, with little to unify them but common readership. Far away, it was this collection of posts that woke then-dormant Shanghai-based British philosopher Nick Land from his dogmatic slumber, leading to the publication of a long essay series The Dark Enlightenment. Dark Enlightenment: faintly over-the-top, sci-fi flavoured, comically ambitious in its scope. Quite naturally, this became the label that has come closest to ‘sticking’ in subsequent years.

Part of a broader turn but unique in its own right, Yarvin’s work argues that democratic societies are inherently unstable, inevitably destructive of personal liberties, and should be replaced by monarchical rule of a single executive figure in what Yarvin calls neocameralism. The only ‘right’ retained in this system is the right to exit, or to move from one monarchical state to another. Older libertarian ideas that appear in his work include the patchwork, or group of small competing states, each with different social and economic models, a model that characterised Renaissance Italy and allowed for meaningful cultural development through inter-state competition.

The Dark Enlightenment would have remained the idle amusement of tech professionals but for the sudden upending of 2015-16, and the gradual rotation of Silicon Valley donors – once synonymous with Obama-era progressivism – to the American right. In recent years, media reports have claimed Yarvin exerts a sinister influence on PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, and that US Vice President J.D. Vance, who has cited Yarvin approvingly in public, counts among his acolytes. Direct influence is easy to assume and hard to prove; mentions in interviews, associates in common, exaggerations by a press searching for behind-the-scenes villains. Like everyone, he is best understood in his own words, and to that end, we sat down with Curtis in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, at the end of his brief stay in Paris.

Tom Dupré: We’ll start with recent events. In your most recent Substack piece you expressed some pleasant surprise that there has been so much real activity from the new administration. How deliberate is this from senior people? Because it seems unbelievable from the outside that something like DOGE is dismantling the machine of US foreign influence to save money. Is this understood as an excuse to destroy it?

Curtis Yarvin: That’s an excellent question. It’s hard to know because all of these policies are the combined result of senior people and junior people. And the junior people are going to be more likely familiar with my work. Is saving money a sort of way to communicate: ok, we’re really enacting the destruction of the Deep State in a way that is understandable to boomers? Possibly. Certainly, I couldn’t have picked a better target in terms of a small but passable target than USAID, because actually it’s like you’re destroying an institution that most people have never heard of, that, when you talk about its activities, is very hard to defend to boomer voters, and yet it’s absolutely crucial to the network of formal influence. I don’t know why that was chosen, I’m not privy to these processes, but I certainly approve of the target.

TD: You’ve written of the previous failings of the right-wing movement in America and so on. How do you view, and what is the significance of the crypto scams? Is this a return to the old Tea Party phone bank boomer tax, or what is it?

CY: [Laughing]. I think it sort of represents the chaotic element of change in a way. It is worrying a little bit, because Milei had his own version of TRUMPCOIN, which also did very badly… There’s an element of just world fallacy in the crypto scams, where people basically look at it and are just like “here’s the thing, we’re creating a new world and forgetting about the old, it must be good, it must work!” And I’m like: actually, not all such things are good, not all such things work. This is my main critique in a way: if you cross the Rubicon, you need a map of the other side of the Rubicon. And if there’s stupid shit on your map, you’re going to pay for it. Milei got some stupid shit on the map… The Americans who ran that [the $LIBRA coin endorsed by Milei] were openly talking about how they used him. And this was a failure in Milei-world. I was talking to some Argentinians about Milei, with his cloned dogs, and he’s a swinger too – he’s actually a tantric sex coach. And so here comes this guy, with his sex magic, his sideburns; imagine him naked in an orgy! Naked and priapic at an orgy! He comes to your woman… “Oh, but he’s the president…” In a way, the Milei administration is this mad man, this wild man, this satyr, this creature of deep, essential humanity surrounded by Argentinians, who are classic Argentinian conservatives, they went to Harvard, they worked at the IMF or whatever, and they’re sober. They’re not sex addicts, they don’t have cloned dogs. The alliance between this kind of sober, elite Argentinian intellectual and the wild man is very useful, because they can basically send the wild man into the room with the bureaucrats. It’s the Nixon madman theory. The Democrats are like: “oh my God, he can do anything.” You see the downside of that when you get chaotic stuff that’s just a complete self-own, and you see that Milei needs to be managed a bit more. Can he still fuck? Of course he can still fuck, but he probably shouldn’t do crypto.

TD: We’ll move on shortly from Trump — one final question on that side. There are rumours that people in the administration are familiar with your work. Many people have discovered you through Unqualified Reservations or Substack, but more people, probably even some of the younger, more politically active ones, are first exposed to you through the denunciation of your work in the mainstream press. Do you think there’s a symbiosis between the reformist new right and the centre-left press?

CY: Excellent question. Actually, what I’m looking for, and what I’m getting with the New York Times piece, is not really denunciation. As people in the new right gain power, as you gain power, people who love power become more friendly to you. Strange how that works! – and actually, I love that, I want to be friendly to them, and my friendliness is not fake. For me the right relationship between the new right and the centre-left is not one of animosity, but seduction. And the relationship of seduction with a beautiful woman: first of all, do not abase yourself before her; she’s used to that, it turns her off; if you drop your knees in front of her, you’re dead as a sexual being to this woman; the way to actually get her attention is to ignore and not care what she thinks; and then she’s like: “who’s this guy who doesn’t care what I think?” And if you come with an objective aura of power and success, and then you don’t suck up to those people, that establishes the right basis for the relationship. And then you can answer their interview requests, you can be clear and frank with them, you never cringe before them, you tell them exactly what you think. You choose your words a little carefully but you’re never confrontational, you’re never resistant. It’s true what you say: even among the enemies of the centre-left and of the mainstream, it is the mainstream that defines who is heard. For example, among libertarians — and I used to be one — there are a hundred libertarians who’ve read Hayek to every libertarian who’s read Von Mises, because Hayek got more press from the mainstream. Von Mises is ten times as great as his student Hayek. It’s important to recognize that this situation is real, and the worst thing for the cause is when the centre-left latches on to some mediocrity and promotes them as a strawman. It’s actually really important to build those relationships and make them positive, friendly, frank, honest and productive relationships. I myself am amazed at how well that strategy works — but it’s not a strategy, it’s real, it’s real love: inside this beautiful woman, I really see the person who is begging to be loved in the way that she deserves. I can give her more love than these other rockstars can, not only the beautiful body but the person inside it [laughs]. That’s how you seduce, that’s how you win.

TD: Moving back briefly to governance. Back in Unqualified Reservations you made a very memorable caste-division of the different parts of American society. In your later work you focused on the need to win over a subset of the professional-managerial class, what you call the Dark Elves. First, your family was involved with the state bureaucracy, diplomacy, and the State Department — they are Elves — so presumably they worked all their lives in or around the sort of programs now losing funding via USAID. How do you imagine they would have reacted to the last two months?

CY: My parents are different. My father reacts quite positively, although I don’t think he is as radical as I am. Whenever you overcome an old regime, or you have a regime change, the way for it to work is that the new regime must succeed on the old regime’s terms. The terms and ideals of the old regime are that it’s fundamentally the governance of the intellect. And so, you want to conquer these intellectuals, and say: “I know where you’re coming from, I understand where you’re coming from, and because I come at you from the outside, I know more about your traditions than you know yourself.” In the same way you can be a student of Islam, from the inside or from the outside. In some ways, coming from outside of Islam, certain realisations are going to be more obvious to you than to any Muslim. And it’s the same with the Left. A few weeks ago, I filmed an interview with Chris Lehmann, who used to be the editor of the New Republic, is currently an editor of The Nation, and founded The Baffler and is also a student of Christopher Lasch, which I didn’t know before I did the interview. He’d written negative things about me. We talked about the history of the American Left for a while. It’s the same thing. He’s a Leftist, he knows this history from the inside. That makes you miss certain things which are obvious from the outside. It was a very good, positive conversation. Whenever I talk to these people, I want to establish myself as legitimate by their standards, and that’s the way to win. Not to be bitter, resentful, unpleasant, gloating at them. You have to respect that they have power, and that all power comes from God.

TD: Do you think that this class, this managerial professional class is in danger now that a lot of the old careers and routes in are going to become, if not obsolete, have far fewer positions?

CY: Well, a career in this class is already very, very hard. You’re really climbing a greasy pole. And you can succeed at one level, get all the right degrees from Harvard and if you want to go to Washington there are very few jobs for you, it’s very hard to get these jobs, it’s very hard to climb within the system. You can step outside the system, you’ll go to law school, do mergers and acquisitions or whatever. You’re still part of that class. But climbing in terms of the hierarchy of power, that’s very hard. It’s always been very hard. Maybe it’s getting a bit harder. One of the external signs that the Trump administration is having a real effect on Washington DC — and one of the funniest ones — is house prices.

Max Goldminc: Everyone is leaving, in one day.

CY: It’s insane.

MG: Which would never have happened in the first term.

CY: The first term was nothing. That’s a sign, a small sign, but that’s something.

TD: Do you see there being a massive asset price bubble?

CY: We live in a financial system that is more deeply fucked than I could possibly describe. Even to describe it as a bubble is like calling a kraken an octopus. It’s an octopus, okay, it’s a squid of some kind. To unravel the world of 20thcentury finance and all the insane distortions it creates, that itself is beyond the comprehension of most people, how crazy that system is. When Elon Musk talks about the contribution of the budget deficit to inflation — yeah, that’s one thing. But you know what else is a cause of inflation? The stock market keeps going up. And when the stock market goes up the financial system is expanding its liabilities. It is expanding them with equity rather than debt, which is a significant difference, but fundamentally the stock market is a way of spending free money to boomers. The boomers spend that money, and that is inflation. The idea that you can have a financial system that does not depend on the permanent continuous inflation of liabilities… There are prospects for that, but it [would] take a scale of change there, as again, a hundred times what we see out of the Trump administration, and what see out of the Trump administration is a hundred times what I expected.

TD: Following what happened with DeepSeek, do you see a structural advantage to the US versus China in the AI competition?

CY: The structural advantages that remain for the American system are very evanescent, they’re very short, they disappear very rapidly… The Chinese are very good at cloning. The remaining structural advantages that need to be used very quickly are essentially ASML and SpaceX. The Chinese cannot generate extreme ultraviolet light and they can’t put a recoverable rocket in space. These advantages are going to last for a single digit number of years. If the US hopes to exploit these and stave off Chinese world domination, it has to act very vigorously and very fast.

Abderrahmane El Kadiri: In this particular case, do you think that the rule of law would be an asset or a liability in the tech battle against China?

CY: It’s a liability (laughs).

MG: In Europe it definitely is, because there are so many regulations and laws regarding AI…

CY: What we call the rule of law is really the rule of process — and there are two ways of running a larger organization. You can run up by process or by command. When you compare a startup with Washington, it’s not that one is libertarian and the other is not, it’s that Washington works by process and Silicon Valley works by command. Elon Musk’s world works by command. The Chinese have not yet figured out how to clone SpaceX, hopefully they never do. Elon Musk doesn’t file patents because he knows the Chinese would steal them; it’s actually better to have secrets. My children speak Chinese, but I don’t want to have to learn Chinese as an adult, it’s a very difficult language to learn. Out of patriotism: let’s win this one, but I respect what they’re doing over there.

TD: El Salvador?

CY: Brilliant. Unqualifiedly brilliant. They clearly get it. I have been to El Salvador twice — I’ve not met Nayib Bukele, but I want to. I walked in the historic centre of San Salvador with my MacBook Pro under my arm in no case, I felt completely safe. I would do that here (Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris). In New York, I wouldn’t do it; when I went to Sao Paolo I wouldn’t even take my phone out. What happened in El Salvador is not a pretend thing for the Internet, it’s absolutely real, and it’s a tremendous inspiration. The fact that they told the Washington Consensus to go pound sand and got away with it… If they tried the same thing fifty years ago, there would have been three communist guerilla movements, one funded by Russia, one by China and the other by the US [laughs] and they would be fighting each other, total war, total chaos, bombs everywhere. Now The Economist merely says: “we don’t do that,” the IMF says “this Bitcoin thing is silly;” they can deal with that. His approval is at 90%, of the remaining 10%, 7% are the families of gang members and the last 3% went to Harvard [laughs]. I think it’s impressive, I take my hat off.

TD: Now moving to France. In earlier writings, you referred to the de Gaulle regime as a “muppet” state as opposed to a “puppet” state. Could you go into more detail on this — I assume it’s about Algeria — and do you find it worrying that even more radical electoral elements in the French right insist on self-identifying as Gaullists?

CY: What was de Gaulle’s line? “I have understood you.” De Gaulle knows his place in the order, he causes immense heartburn among Roosevelt and Churchill but never stepped outside that line. So, ultimately, with the second coup, which is really designed to save l’Algérie Française, he just used it to establish the Fifth Republic and do the bidding of the State Department. Was that all he could do? Was it the best he could do? It’s so hard to know. You have to be in his position to know what was possible. What’s important now is to realize what was possible and impossible in 1960 is different from what’s possible now. And what Bukele did, he essentially saw in America an old tiger that had no teeth, he went into its cage, looked into its mouth, and saw that he could turn his back on it. De Gaulle couldn’t do that. Could he have done better? Very hard to know.

MG: In your latest publication, Disturbance, you comment on the fact that we cannot even comprehend the American Constitution as it was written back in the days. What I found singular is the fact that, while American conservatives traditionally refer to the Constitution and want to uphold its original version — this being the reason they are called the Originalists — you proposed something new: since no one can understand the original constitution, we don’t have to emulate it, much like how no one really understands history in general because we don’t read Greek and Latin anymore. Do you think that a new conservatism should not be based on the traditional, originalist view of the constitution, but rather on what you refer to as first principles? A sort of tabula rasa?

CY: There are two ways to do it, and I am a little bit agnostic about the best way to do it. There is the way of Caesar and Augustus, where you say we are rehabilitating the old forms, with a new way of doing it, much like FDR did, we’re living within the structure, we believe in the structure, we believe in the old gods – we just believe in them in a new way. This is why Caesar, Augustus, and the emperors following him never used the word rex, that is a sacred word. I think Fustel de Coulanges points out that rex is a spiritual title. So, by rejecting the term, they are simultaneously saying that they are not bad like Tarquin, who was driven out, and that they are also too humble to claim that title. There is a kind of spergy renunciation of all traditional words: it’s exciting to say “we don’t care about the 18th century,” it’s a great way to excite young people because they’ve never heard it before, it’s completely fresh. There’s another way that is more acceptable to boomers where you’re basically saying: “what we’re doing is consistent with the letter of the constitution.” Either of those approaches can work in different kinds of ways: there is an iconoclastic version and there is a kind of Machiavellian version: either of those I can imagine being successful; it just depends on the vibe, on the specific circumstances.

MG: In your book, you write that “no one seems to be in charge when it comes to culture and trends.” On the very next page, you add “in my mind, someone always needs to be in charge when it comes to politics.” In the same chapter you mention that there are two possible ways to understand and experience your own history, the local view and the historical view. Would you say that many of our problems regarding political philosophy come from the fact that people are too embedded in their own history? Do you feel that writers like yourself have to identify and say who is in charge? For example, now that he’s in his second term, Trump has this very overt claim that he’s in charge.

CY: That inchargeness is shocking to liberals, but, in a way, they haven’t been shocked enough. For Trump to say that he is in charge of the executive branch is one thing. But to step beyond that, for example: Trump could very easily establish his own institutions of truth. He could compete with the Cathedral [in Yarvin’s writing, the entire ideological apparatus of modern liberal America, the institutions that develop and promulgate it], which would be the first stage toward actually attacking the Cathedral. Instead, the closest thing Trump/Musk has to competing with the Cathedral is community notes on Twitter [laughs]. Baby steps… It’s a cool hack. Something is very likely to be true if two people who usually disagree with each other agree on it. But, imagine: I’m trying to compete with the New York Times, with this beautiful tautology: All the news that’s fit to print. The tautology is the essence of sovereignty: I am because I am, I am that I am, etc. So, going up against All the news that’s fit to print is All the news that two people who usually disagree with each other agree is fit to print. It lacks what you would call a je ne sais quoi [laughs]. There’s a smallness to it. Even with the tremendous arrogance of Musk and Trump – which is a beautiful arrogance – for them to step into this role and to realize that the White House needs to compete on a level playing field with the New York Times, Harvard, the Courts — that’s a huge one for them, they’re still daunted by that. They’re like the barbarians entering Rome; “that’s a very big building. It seems to be ours. What do we do with it?” That shock is still there.

MG: One of the main thesis of Spengler in the Decline of the West, is that Caesarism would first come back through businessmen —

CY: Every businessman is a Caesar.

MG: Cecil Rhodes [British colonist and founder of Rhodesia] was the first example that came to his mind. Now we have Musk who is obviously a Cecil Rhodes figure for the present day.

CY: I wonder if Musk has even heard of Cecil Rhodes [laughs]. Probably!

MG: You talked earlier about the process way and the command way. Musk comes from this command mindset and brings it to the executive branch, which used to be founded on the idea of command…

CY: …but has now turned into the administrative branch, which is built from process from the legislative and judicial branches. Trying to run the administrative branch on the principles of command is insane, it’s basically putting TNT in a car that normally runs on gasoline and seeing what happens. “I better be standing a long distance from this, when you turn the engine on…”

TD: Huis Clos is primarily a literary magazine, so we want to ask you about your poetry and other literary aspects of your work. Do you think that in the current state of the Internet, it would be possible for a blogger working in a similar obscurity to how you were fifteen or twenty years ago to have the same audience and impact; if not, how can we fix it? Also, why do you publish all your verses directly onto Substack? There isn’t a print collection yet. When can we expect one?

CY: I would love to do a print collection; it is certainly worth doing. I have many priorities and it is a smaller priority. Poetry is timeless, it is not written for the present; sometimes I think “I haven’t written a poem in too long,” “I wonder if I am too old to write poems”, and so on. It is very important to me, it is an important form, I think it has great relevance and timelessness at the same time. With all the things happening in the world, it takes a backseat in certain ways. But I absolutely regard it as important. In a way, all my work is a literary project. Literature is beyond the rational. My style is not just a rational appeal, it’s a seduction, it’s an invitation. Poetry is the extreme of this as it doesn’t work on the basis of the rational, but rather on the basis of the subconscious, the ambiguous, the irrational. It should last longer than a topical essay of any kind, so I still consider it very important. There’s a world where people forget my political action and my philosophy but remember me just as a computer scientist and a poet.

TD: Would you prefer to be remembered for your political writings or your poetry?

CY: People will remember me or not remember me for whatever reason. Do I take it seriously? Absolutely. Just as my political philosophy is intended to compete with, or if not compete with, to exist in the same frame and the same world as the Spenglers, the Machiavellis and so forth. Unless you intend your poetry to succeed in the highest level, you should not write poetry at all.

TD: You deal with personal themes but you also deal very directly with politics and the same themes you deal with in your prose…

CY: …as did Pound!

TD: As did Pound. You say “the highest art is propaganda”. Now, typically right-leaning poets, which you would have read some of, when you judged that [Passage] prize, they’ll normally avoid contemporary politics, or deal with it obscurely, and they won’t use the kind of late twentieth century American forms that you prefer.

CY: I love mid-century poetry and one of the most influential essays for my writing was written by Joseph Brodsky about Cavafy [Greek poet, 1863-1933]. Cavafy was trying to remove all the poetry from his poetry, he was trying to strip it down and make this extremely barebones… As Empson says, the fundamental element of poetry is ambiguity — I really believe in the Empson interpretation. Cavafy is like: how can I write a poem which is so stripped down, that it just says what it thinks, and yet is still a poem that works. John Ashbery, for example, is a very talented poet, his prosody is amazing, yet you often feel that he is playing with you and that underneath his ambiguity he doesn’t mean anything at all — you never have that issue with Cavafy. You can always tell that Cavafy was always meaning what he meant to say. That removal of complexity and that removal of poetry from the poetry is very modernist, it’s very essential. In terms of the form of my work, I developed a lot from Basil Bunting. Bunting has this amazing essay on Shakespeare, where he points out that the Shakespearian line is both a Latin line made of iambic feet and a Germanic line, because when you read Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter [sudden barking, dogs fighting] …wow [barking continues, dogs pulled apart] That’s intense… And when you read the Shakespearian line, it can read just as well as a stressed tetrameter, as an iambic pentameter. My line is a very much simplified Germanic line, I basically will write what looks like free verse, but it’s actually a stressed tetrameter or trimeter without any of the Germanic alliteration or whatever. It’s a reduced, simplified Germanic line. I really like that line and structure. I will occasionally use rhymes or other decorative elements. It looks like free verse but it’s actually not — there’s no such thing as free verse, as I’m sure you know. Alright – I’m calling an Uber.