We have gone further in our convictions. We reject more!
—Lebezyatnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
It is safe to say that on May 5, 2025, Danielle Allen sat in the proximity of Curtis Yarvin at the Harvard Faculty Club. Fact-checkers will back me up. But the ensuing event defies further description. It was billed and conducted as a debate—a controversy that could have figured as the Lincoln vs. Douglas or Baldwin vs. Buckley of our time. Yet it was a strangely one-sided non-affair. Allen, the distinguished political philosopher, tried to strike a balance between responding to some of the neo-reactionary provocateur’s general propositions while also letting him have his spicier takes on Cotton Mather, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the missing link. He, in turn, seemed unable to realize just how far out of his depth he was. Watching him brandish his chatroom Darwinism was like watching a grizzly bear attempt to eat a plate of grapes with chopsticks. Any educated observer watching the footage cannot but wince as Yarvin repeatedly accuses Allen of speaking in “abstractions” (i.e., ideas), mispronounces words (e.g., “ochlocracy”), and uses terms like equality and democracy as if oblivious to their various possible senses. I count Allen as a mentor and friend; I am partial to her. But do not take my word for it. Watch the video. Regarded as a debate, this was the intellectual equivalent to sending an AH-64 Apache helicopter into combat against a garden gnome. It wasn’t close.
And yet this is precisely the age of the gnome, the troll, the hobbit, the golem—and all manner of wee folk who blog against The System in which they now prosper. Regarded not as a debate but as a meme, the event was therefore highly satisfactory. In this corner: one of the more distinguished and celebrated academics in the United States, a scholar of democracy, a classicist and political theorist with two PhDs, one of Harvard’s twenty-five University Professors. In the other corner: a cult figure with the nom de blog “Mencius Moldbug,” who has achieved international notoriety for some Pretty Online notions. Their very pairing was another little tear in an already tattered brain-reality continuum: a sight not unlike that of buffalo guy rampaging through the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But, unlike QAnon Shaman, who had to batter his way in, Yarvin is now the toast of DC. He is a prominent sibyl of the right, someone whose writings have found sympathetic resonance in Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Stephen Miller, Michael Anton, and J.D. Vance. And according to a Reddit galaxy a click or two away, Yarvin emerged as the hands-down winner of his appearance with Allen. It was weird.
From one angle, the weirdness was due to familiar questions about whether these two were well matched. Allen agreed to debate on the grounds that Yarvin’s influence needs to be disputed outright. Both parties agreed, during the event, that there should be more such debating and viewpoint diversity in higher education. Yet one would have to add that debates presuppose shared agreements of rational practice and justification, such that some kinds of positions have to be excluded from the outset. Academic freedom and free speech can be fruitfully exercised only to the active exclusion of ideas so heinous, outré, or cranky as to not be worth taking up. Free speech would not be well served if the wrongness of slavery or the roundness of Earth had to be revisited from scratch anytime someone expressed skepticism about them.
These tacit agreements about where to draw the lines of admissibility are nonetheless fast fraying, such that some meaningful number of Harvard undergraduates want to hear what Yarvin has to say. From another angle, some might say that Yarvin is the most influential spokesman for a suite of ideas that have been unfairly ruled out-of-bounds by the dominant gatekeepers of culture over the past decades, that this very influence is proof that the progressive control of intellectual culture has stifled thought and created a demand for reactionary alternatives, and that higher ed can no more afford to avert its eyes from this backlash now than Harvard can afford to ignore the White House or, indeed, the new digital right itself. To pair the literate Harvard scholar with the digital autodidact and edgelord was, in this sense, completely appropriate. As Allen noted in her opening remarks, this was Enlightenment versus “Dark Enlightenment”: two readings of the American trajectory.
These are fearful asymmetries. The inescapable sense of their false equivalence, however, was due neither to the content of their views nor to their relative influence but to the fact that these two Enlightenments are not even up to the same things. While Yarvin is undoubtedly doing something very well, that is, one would be wrong to mistake that something for rationality. His notions don’t bear close scrutiny, and he doesn’t seem to mean them to; they are not well suited to being dialectically examined in debate. (“I’m a poster, not a writer.”) A notable difference between the two speakers’ responses was precisely that Allen advanced arguments, claims, and principles, whereas Yarvin offered intricate set pieces, analogies, touchpoints, and anecdotes, suggesting a learning as eclectic as it is superficial: an open-ended series of links. And this is, paradoxically, the source of his strength—not only because his writing balks at the seriousness that would make it subject to test and refutation but also because he has made it just about impossible to evaluate, describe, or even to write about his work with something like dispassionate clarity.
Yarvin is a consequential figure, but not on account of his body of thought. Approaching Yarvin as a “political philosopher” (as the moderator of the debate with Allen introduced him) is approximately as helpful as approaching Jerry Springer as a moral theorist: One comes away with the sense that the joke is only ever on oneself for trying to get to the bottom of him in such terms. Nor is his practical influence what most matters. Evidence of anyone in the Trump administration trying to carry out some program in accordance with Yarvin’s posts is scant and exaggerated. Rather, Yarvin’s significance consists in his having discovered and explored some of the key gestures, triggers, devices, and attitudes that now govern the reality of digital politics itself. He realized that digital speech means a new kind of psychic and aesthetic war—new conformations of “us” and “them”—and he understood that it could only be fought For The Win.
Yarvin’s blog fashioned a new online aesthetic of intellectual delinquency and disdain, a new way of winning attention by provoking a strong sense of meaning without making sense. Irony—and the ways it permanently repels rational reckoning—is part of it. So far from being a mere means to plausible deniability it is essential to the new form. As Nick Land, the English philosopher credited with cofounding the Dark Enlightenment, once wrote: “Without a taste for irony, Mencius Moldbug is all but unendurable, and certainly unintelligible.” Yarvin’s middlebrow, accessible sloppiness is another feature. It makes it possible to take him seriously, if one is already inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, and makes him seriously obnoxious, if one doesn’t: a sure method for polemic and division. His writing has also become fascinating by virtue of its willingness to transgress against a sense of heightened sensitivity to words themselves. He has won a public during the past two decades as a result of the increasing translation of our shared speech into the logic of social media, which has made it possible to surveil, control, and standardize the acceptable terms of speech, even as it has also made it possible to create countercultural “dark” fora, the shared confession of which is the ecstasy of saying the unsayable and writing the unprintable. In this sense, Yarvin’s online words have performed offenses of the sort that others have come to see as extensions of their own wishes.
It is this new aesthetics pervaded by rancor and iniquity-signaling that—combined with Yarvin’s world-weary swagger—has proved exceptionally resonant both as a style of the New Right and as a key for thinking through what is so potent and destructive about digital politics itself. More than his ideas, it is this cultivated carelessness about coherence or consequences that has undoubtedly found imitators, some of whom are making policy in the second Trump administration. In his own flippant words, “It’s basically like the European division of society in which there are kings, priests, warriors, artisans, laborers, and merchants. Right? And I’m a priest. That’s just my role.” And, while he’s an avowed atheist, this strikes me as peculiarly right—he is a priest of the Dark Enlightenment, a prescient reader of its tea leaves: a medium for their heretical ironies.
The Techno-Futurism Is Now
The “Dark Enlightenment” (or neo-reactionary movement: NRx) is one area of the wilderness of online writing that has sprung up over the past twenty years to contradict, unmask, and rage against a broad liberal consensus about society, religion, and politics. Its two main figures are Yarvin and Land, the latter of whose techno-futurist views are more philosophically interesting and way further out there than Yarvin’s. (Land asks us to imagine human racial progress as “think face tentacles.”) One might mention the work of Balaji Srinivasan and Michael Anissimov as constituting its broader canon. Yarvin and this company have at various times proposed or predicted some combination of the following claims: that the Whiggish view of history as continuous moral progress is bunk, that liberal democracy is headed for permanent collapse, that democracy is an inefficient, entropic, and intellectually oppressive form of government, that the idea of equality is a mystification invented to serve the ruling caste’s interests, that purported differences in IQ between races and people do or should or will translate into their social superiority, that some form of monarchy or CEO supremacy is to be preferred to liberal democracy, that nation-states are dated entities, and that political regimes should be reimagined in terms of digital technologies. It is little wonder that some of Silicon Valley’s techno-libertarians have given Yarvin the come-hither.
While the backbone of these thoughts consists in the contradiction of liberal democratic norms—Land: “democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself”—it does not otherwise add up to an especially coherent, stable, or practical body of thought. All the same, it is distinct from the intellectual dark web, alt-right, alt-lite, New Right, woke right, dissident right, vitalism, integralism, radical traditionalism, Groyperism, or any number of other post-liberal affiliations that have sprung up beyond the pale during the past decades. These, of course, run the full gamut from the Barnes & Noble respectability enjoyed by Jordan Peterson to outright neo-Nazi and militia-friendly websites. Some such groups are openly theocratic, ethnonationalist, antisemitic, or historically nostalgic. Yarvin is (as far as I can see) none of these.
What all these affiliations do have in common is a context of interests: a sense of alienation from the established Republican Party, a desire to challenge views about race, sex, immigration, and gender sanctioned by bien-pensant thinking throughout the 2010s, a sense of being unfairly excluded from and stigmatized by mainstream institutional respectability—all of which have created the metaphorical sense of operating in darkness, leading up to the discovery of the aggregate common cause that has come to light as “Donald Trump.”
Many of these affiliations have also come to adopt as their lingua franca two figures of speech coined by Yarvin himself to describe their epistemic position as outsiders. The first is “the cathedral,” Yarvin’s tag for the university-media complex from which the terms of liberal acceptability originate: the institutions that create and enforce secular, egalitarian, progressive cultural norms. “[C]hurch is an organization or movement which specializes in telling people what to think”; the cathedral is our version of an established church. The other image is the “red pill,” adapted from the film The Matrix to indicate the possibility of suddenly being jolted awake from the cathedral’s illusions and brought back into the real world.
As dominant themes of Yarvinthink—and, more broadly, of ours—the cathedral and red pill deserve close reading. Labeling an opposing ideology a religion is not itself an original move. Marx and Engels wore the joke out in their 1845 The Holy Family. But Yarvin’s use of the cathedral image has stuck as a clever piece of trolling because it calls the cathedral the one thing that it would be most galled to call itself. That is, it’s the contrary of how correct mainstream thinking—the New York Times–reading, college-educated, HBO-watching professional class—would like to regard itself: secular, democratic, fact-based, egalitarian, diverse, scientific, and in all ways above merely parochial opinion. Whereas one of Yarvin’s refrains is that this is nothing other than a new form of Puritanism: a sanctimonious class ideology venerating numinous, indemonstrable principles like humanity, equality, progress, and democracy.
The images of the cathedral and the red-pill whereby one exits it also have the cunning effect—shared by conspiracy thinking and Gnostic soteriology—of creating a total and incommunicable separation between inside and outside. While the they inside the cathedral are regarded as having a monolithic ideology in common, the we outside need have nothing in common other than that we are outside (that is, other than our opposition to living the lie inside). This is the founding of a newly imagined community. And because the difference between insiders and outsiders is a quasi-religious one, outsiders are thereby absolved from the need to argue with or reason about what insiders think—as well as from having to rationally justify their own position to them.
One of Yarvin’s stock rhetorical gimmicks, along these lines, is to flip a switch that is supposed to alienate you from the world you inhabit. “Suppose you are a Catholic in sixteenth-century Spain.” “Suppose you are an alien….” Or, in the debate itself: Reading Allen’s book made “me feel like I was reading…a work of Islamic history that was written by a Muslim.” Enlightenment off; Dark Enlightenment on. In a curious way, this gaslighting move itself partakes of the logic of religious conversion: a metanoia of the soul that takes place in a moment, at the twinkling of an eye. Still blinded by the light outside the cave, a new vision snaps into focus. In a curious way, the move likewise trades on the Enlightenment prejudice that religion is crazy and irrational. Part of the bargain of Yarvinthink is therefore that moderation and persuasion are for chumps. Are you with me? Are you in?
A New Form of Political Doomsaying
This mode of arguing in total disjunctions has become only more powerful and ubiquitous since Yarvin pioneered it in the late aughties. I remember my first scalding encounter with it in the form of Michael Anton’s 2016 “The Flight 93 Election” essay for Claremont Review of Books—the essay that first made the pitch for Trump to an educated conservative public who was still on the fence about him. The essay was enthusiastically shared with me by a close friend. Whether through direct or indirect influence, I now see that it is closely patterned after Yarvin’s blog. The essay makes (among other matter) a series of pungent points about the limits of 2010’s mainstream cultural conservatism, about the fact that it had grown too content with its well-funded position on the margins, that the job of people like Ross Douthat was to be meek and mild mascots who “show up and lose”—that is, to articulate a view that allowed liberals to congratulate themselves for checking the free-speech box but would never be taken seriously. The essay then moved in for the kill by means of a provocation. The choice between Trump and Clinton was like the choice faced by the passengers of the United Airlines Flight 93 hijacked by Al-Qaeda on 9/11: “charge the cockpit or you die.”
I didn’t buy this at all, but I admit that I nonetheless felt seized at the time by a sort of sickening second-guessing. This was totally insane, right? My friend was crazy, yes? Or was I the crazy one for not getting it? As in much of Yarvin’s writing, Anton’s conclusion takes the form of an analogy—it’s not meant to be rationally inexorable but rather to test your underlying orientation: It is a gauntlet that presorts possible responses into two. Pick a side: duck or rabbit. Take a stand and prepare to fight virtually to the death. The framework operates by resolving underlying anxieties, qualifications, and modulations of conviction into the friend/enemy distinction that characterizes identity politics and fundamentalist thinking. In this sense, the essay actively helped usher in a version of the disambiguated world that it purports to describe—a world that both draws and thrusts us toward extremes, and so a world to which the political theory of Carl Schmitt seems increasingly apposite. (My friend and I still talk—but politics is off the table.)
I am not saying here that it was irrational to vote for Trump but that a new form of political doomsaying began to emerge with and around him that discovered explicit appeals to the insanity of the opponent to be a winning proposition—and that this factitious insanity has now become a core property of the political world itself. Since 2015, the logic of events has defied impartial description and undermined the legitimacy of any one source purporting to offer it; it has rather consisted in a steady series of gambits for just such disjunctive identity tests. Was Ashli Babbitt a domestic terrorist or a patriot? Were COVID lockdowns Nazi-like diktats or reasonable public health measures? Is Donald Trump a wrecker of the republic or does he belong on Mount Rushmore? Is the dress in the picture blue and black or white and gold? Does the voice say “Yanny” or “Laurel”? I bet you feel pretty strongly about it. And whatever else you want to say about it, the truth is definitely not somewhere in between. It’s like looking up your symptoms on WebMD: Do you experience dizziness? Headaches? Nausea? It might be nothing. Or it might be a brain tumor. One way or the other, the pill is swallowed suddenly and whole.
The ability to cast miscellaneous information into suggestive and portable form is part of what is effective about Yarvin. As priests in antiquity discerned the future from the entrails of sheep, Yarvin has a knack for reading order into our Pynchonian entropy. He classifies social castes in the United States by borrowing terms from India and ancient Rome—or from Tolkien. He tirelessly generates thought experiments (“imagine the dictator isn’t even human”), parables (“On the continent of Mu, there are two nations…”), pictures (“I feel it is essential to begin by engaging the visual imagination…”), taxonomies (“heroin liberals and cocaine conservatives”), and a growing idiosyncratic nomenclature all interspersed with a savant-like torrent of factoids from economics, history, and politics (“when I look at the Tea Party Republican of 2010, I think of the late Merovingians…”). It’s a distinct voice and counternarrative; he tells signal from noise. He is a published poet. And if one reads him in the right satiric mood—as if from an alien point of view unconcerned with truth or goodness—he can be fun.
The digital economy has made it impossible not to be aware that one doesn’t just get God’s-eye news anywhere at all, as well as made it impossible not to know that one’s own preferred diet is the thing that ends up swallowing one’s mind whole. Political commentary and news are themselves a sort of aggregator, a controlled hallucination of multiverses that one can put on or off with a click. Yarvin intuited this earlier than most and made it impossible for many to think of it or him in other terms.
What’s weird is the sense that most of us now automatically afford ourselves this status of enlightened outsiders. Whether in the form of being red-pilled, socially conscious, in the know, politically aware, up on it, or “woke” (a term popularized in the late aughties, around the same time as Yarvin’s cathedral), the goal of enlightenment refers to a condition of being exceptional and thereby exempt from the basic problem by virtue of having reached disenchantment. In a way, this is just our natural ignorance. It does not occur to most readers of the Republic to imagine ourselves where we probably are: never leaving the cave. But what is different now is that this insistence on outsiderness is itself a dominant way of thinking about the world and that we have a medium of thinking and speaking that allows us to click from mindset to mindset on demand, to float our reasons rather than ground them, and to view the world as spectators, through a window, as if onto an alien land. If there really is a cathedral, that is, it is unclear whether anyone is really left inside it. In other words, the cathedral is just another image for how the views of other people look to us through the lens of the Internet itself.
Reflecting on Some Hard Truths
If the point of the Dark Enlightenment were simply to illustrate how (everybody else’s) thinking is embedded within a larger ideological orientation—that is, that all rational thinking is underwritten and legitimized by institutions, traditions, and forms of power, and therefore, never simply “objective” or “unbiased”—then this would be a dreary truth and barren. But the most important heresies can be diagnostic transgressions serving to highlight blind spots of a given doctrine. If NRx is a sort of nemesis of American liberal democracy, then those who still think the latter is a good idea should try to account for and respond to the best conceivable version of this heresy. I see at least three hard such truths in the dark mirror.
A first hard truth is that consensus American liberalism—the individualist, democratic, meliorist, progressive, secular universalism that has supplied the mainstream theory of American politics since World War II—has grown stale for many. Part of the youthful energy of Yarvin’s writing is simply that he raises questions about first principles. “Are nation-states, such as the US, even useful?” “Have you ever considered the possibility that democracy is bunk?” “Is this operating system [of global governance] working?” Such rhetorical questions gain purchase to the extent that it is almost impossible to defend the manifestly flawed condition of what exists in the absence of other viable alternatives. What seemed to be the awesome strength of liberal democracy—its practical vindication over communism—has turned out to be its greatest weakness: the absence of any existing, theoretically coherent alternative against which to defend it. As Ava Kofman writes in her well-researched profile of Yarvin in The New Yorker, “His approach seizes on the reality that most Americans have never learned how to defend democracy; they were simply brought up to believe in it.” We no longer hold these truths to be self-evident.
Yarvin uses his rhetorical questions to drive home the argument that democracies are not optimal means of ensuring order. He compares American democracy unfavorably to states like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai: authoritarian technocracies that are fairly peaceful, safe, and prosperous. He adds that such states “appear to provide a very high quality of service to their citizens, with no meaningful democracy at all…They are weak only in political freedom, and political freedom is unimportant by definition when government is stable and effective.” The underlying vision is that of a government that provides the most seamless customer service.
It is no longer enough to rejoin that autocrats are likely to become greedy and will not be accountable to their citizens—our perception of our own regime only very incompletely falsifies the point. The answer can only be that the processes of democratic participation are themselves intrinsically meaningful and good—that democratic practice and speech are the moral achievements based on an ideal picture of what a human being can become—rather than mere instruments of an efficient process. But to the degree that our practical experience of these truths consists in mere biannual voting, they are evidently withering. Yarvin’s view can be refuted only in and by practice.
A second hard truth is that mainstream liberalism has become identified with the aspiration to neutrality to a degree that has made it harder to defend. The problem with liberalism as an ideology is not that it is false but that it has ceased to present itself as a political and moral vision of the good among others. If Yarvin and others have made hay of referring to wokeness or COVID politics as puritanical, it is not just because the secular is being trolled for being “religious” but because wokeness and COVID politics have, by their own lights, tried to stake their authority on political and epistemic neutrality: the former as a project to neutralize the linguistic and sociocultural manifestations of identity, the latter to base political decisions on straightforward deference to expert, scientific authority.
These projects have been complex and paradoxical—I realize that this does not match the description that most may have formed about them. Nor that they are coextensive with liberalism as such. Rather, I mean to say that the most conspicuous and controversial strands of recent liberal and progressive politics have been weak at defending the principles underlying them precisely as principles—and as moral (rather than empirical) ones at that. What we are to mean by equality (understood as the objective of wokeness) has not been well specified or justified except by the exercise of pointing out its absences, which has led to the sense that it has no particular objective other than the endless reform of all that could ever oppose it. So too, the long-term dithering opacity about how to weigh public health measures in relation to competing moral costs (like keeping children at home or people isolated) could not but feed suspicions that such measures were partly motivated by the desire to increase social surveillance and state control.
Liberalism has long had an ambivalent relation to the moral good. Classical liberalism was conceived as a political position that would mediate and stand above particular creeds, even as its practice has of course required its own ethic and sensibility. As the two meanings of the word liberal suggest—hands-off and hands-on—the idea of negative liberty has an unstable, if not adversarial relationship to any moral project that offers itself as the one and only truth. And critics of liberalism have long made the argument that, in presuming to neutrality and universality, liberalism refuses to see itself for what it is: a historically specific and culturally situated political program that relies on the presence of Judeo-Christian mores and Western institutions. But if liberal democracy is to continue to exist, it must be prepared to say what the good is for human beings and what grounds it. That is, it must step down from its presumption to be an aloof umpire and jump into the fray of defending the notion that equality, autonomy, and dignity are not just the mumbo jumbo derided by Yarvin but are morally right and true.
A third hard truth is that this country was founded within a technological context so alien from the present that a dangerous gap has opened up between our material and ideal experiences of the world. Nation-states came to be within a new sense of vernacular identity—our solidarity with other citizens relies centrally on our common care for the Constitution, the letter of the law, and the bookish practices of democratic deliberation. The political imaginary of the Internet is, by contrast, one that, by keeping us all globally in touch, does not conform to our current territorial borders and loyalties.
The greatest theoretical strength of NRx writers is their willingness to conjugate new political forms with the first principles of digital practice. Like Thomas Hobbes, they purport to look at politics from an engineering perspective. Politics needs “rebooting”; violence is something to be programmed out. Both Yarvin and Srinivasan—inspired by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson’s The Sovereign Individual (1997)—envision a world in which people are governed in smaller statelets, each of which could be joined or exited at will, and each of which would be governed by its own legitimate dictatorships and laws. Just how this “Patchwork” of statelets might come about or why they should not be swallowed up by larger Leviathans is not clear. Nor is it always clear that such statelets need to be fleshed out into analog reality. In Srinivasan’s account, we should be thinking of a new form of sovereignty—based on blockchain technology—that would not necessarily require territorial control at all. And even if this does not look viable enough to become political reality, Yarvin and Srinivasan have put their finger on a problem that autocracies the world over are sedulously working to rectify through their national management of social media and cryptocurrencies. The United States needs a response in kind, if it hopes to avoid a permanent war of dysfunction between our two digital states, our two pills to wonderlands blue and red.
This speculative freedom is also connected to the most conspicuous weakness of NRx writers, which is likewise what sets them apart from other forms of reactionary writing: their lack of interest in religion, in anthropology, or in some governing picture of human ends, virtues, or aspirations—their desire to hold meaning as such at arm’s length in the service of a specious techno-objectivity. Their willingness to transgress against liberal first principles is also their inability or unwillingness to understand the actual motives and convictions that animate us from the inside out. Srinivasan sees that states are based on ultimate commandments, but places religion alongside “keto kosher” (“the sugar-free society”) and “your body, your choice” (“the FDA-free society”) as examples of what kinds of commandments might bind the new form of sovereignty he has in mind. In Yarvin’s case, what he calls the mystifications of the cathedral are just the stuff of politics itself—human attempts to live right in common—regarded from an alienated perspective. His language of states as startups and software as statecraft suggests that he thinks of freedom as mere freedom of preference. It may well be that this is just where our digital uses are leading us, to a condition in which citizens become so depoliticized as to be indistinguishable from users. But the long-term viability of political units still rests on their capacity to summon ultimate allegiance; they must, at times, still be bodies to which people will give the last measure of sacrifice. And no one has laid down their life for the love of Meta.
At the end of the debate with Allen, Yarvin returned to the fact that what needs protection in universities is the Veritas of Harvard’s motto—by which he means the scientific truth, plain and simple. This is the bedrock that one finds again and again at the foundation of all his thinking: the notion that the practice of political and moral convictions only serves to warp the pursuit of the empirical, objective Truth about the world. In other words, his unmasking of Enlightenment is only undergirded by a proposal for a form of even more enlightened Enlightenment or an even more neutral neutrality—a fantasy in which empirical truth could govern the world unaided. This curious conclusion is what accounts for how completely conventional his thinking finally is. Having contradicted all existing political conventions, he pulls up short of the Karamazovian “everything is permitted.” And that is just the point at which things start getting interesting, the point at which nihilism is willing to transgress even this taboo. In his New Yorker profile, Yarvin gushes over Russian, Chinese, and Salvadorian autocracies and voices his interest in discovering some method of eliminating human beings “without any of the moral stigma,” only to then wipe away a tear of sadness at the sight of a homeless encampment. His perspective is, in all, an unholy mishmash of Vlad the Impaler and Dora the Explorer.
One of Yarvin’s more widely quoted aphorisms is that “Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left.” The image, borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft’s supernatural horror fiction, is one in which a deeply buried, tentacled monster of mandarin opinion only ever trends toward further progressivism. Yet this reference rests on a careless, if telling, misapplication of the image. In Lovecraft’s work, Cthulhu in fact stands for the chthonic and terrifying irrationality that permanently defies human beings’ enlightened attempts to master and order the world. So that, while Cthulhu serves as an avatar for Lovecraft’s reactionary politics itself, it has become its very opposite in Yarvin’s use. More fitting still: In Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, this awful monster is only ever directly visible to us as a small and cheap-looking bas-relief, a knockoff “superficial imposture.” Such is Yarvin’s writing and such are the avatars of our cultural revolution in their ironic recalcitrance to sense: shadows standing for an urgent darkness, the very power of which consists in the fact that it will not be otherwise confronted.