UnHerd's Flo Read speaks to Curtis Yarvin at the Unherd Club. Curtis Yarvin is the philosophical godfather of the so-called ‘New Right’, a movement that defies simple categories and political expectations. His writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug explores everything from anti-democracy to accelerationism. He joined UnHerd for an evening of conversation and audience Q&A.<hr />
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This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
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Calm.
...and dare I say provocateur. He is the author of Unqualified Reservations, a kind of extraordinary oblique blog that he wrote...
...the pseudonym Mentius Moldbug. He is now author of the Gray Mirror sub-stack, which has a similarly obl-
...style I would say. He's the godfather of the red pill movement, a kind of leading light in the new right in the US and infamously advocates...
Monarchy he's not a royalist rather he's a kind of equal opportunities supporter of absolute power which is something I'm sure
We'll get into this evening. His name is, of course, Curtis Yavin. Join me in welcoming him to the Unheard Club. Curtis, I'm going to start by reading back to you something that you've written about, which is very--
thing to do but I'm gonna do it anyway. You mentioned on a recent blog post some instructions that Louis XIV gave to his son and they go a bit like this
Can so securely establish the happiness and tranquility of a country as the perfect combination of authority in the single person of the sovereign. The greatest subdivision in this respect often produces the greatest calamities. So I suppose that's an obvious...
Place to start, is the civic calamity or whatever you might call it that America is facing right now a fault of democracy? When you use the word democracy of course you're using a very very
In complex word, and the meaning of that word in our modern world, it's like one of the simplest examples of kind of what's going on here that I ever came up with was simply to examine the words democracy and politics and note that we use, they mean the same thing, but they have opposite emotional valences. And so anything democratic is good, anything political is bad. If we were to democratize foreign policy, that would be good, but if we were to politicize it, that would be bad.
We believe in democracy without politics, which is a rather strange thing to believe in if you think about it. That sort of reminds you, or reminds me anyway, of an interesting fact, which is that some people would say that the least democratic nation on earth is North Korea. But in fact, if you look at the name of North Korea, I mean, and North Korea is very much an absolute monarchy and I'm happy to
Talk about why that doesn't exactly apply in the North Korean case. But if you look at the official name of North Korea, it's the DPRK, and that is three euphemisms for democracy and one place...
Name. And so, you know, Democratic Republic, Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Is this why we have a kind of when people say don't talk about politics over dinner, but no one would ever say don't talk about democracy. Sure. And so you
Democracy has become, you know, which was actually, to the, you know, most people don't even know that to the American founders, or at least many of the American founders, you know, the word democracy is a curse word. It's considered, like, you know, extremely harmful.
Well, actually, one of the funniest ironies there available in the world today is if you go to the-- I mean, these pages change all the time. If you go to the Wikipedia page for Athenian democracy,
-- observation by a modern historian that it's very strange that people have been larping the system as we say, people have been trying to imitate the glories of Athenian democracy. The funny thing about this, as the historian accurately notes, is that everyone who experienced Athenian democracy--
sort of the age of Pericles and beyond, who wrote about it, whose writings we have, thought it was the most terrible system ever. I mean, Athenian democracy literally executes Socrates, the founder of modern philosophy. And so...
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