Witty explication of how the world really works that appeals to people who like to know how the world really works while also knowing no one else does. Cherish and enjoy but do not for a second think this is advice on how to live. Pure entertainment. For politics, stick with self interested pragmatism with a dash of idealism. Join the Lions Club or the PTA or both. Recycle. Don't tell anyone at the PTA you even know of the existence of this book.

Written as a blog, An Open Letter could stand the use of a good editor; but as far as the author's meaning and intention, it is truly well written as it stands. No matter how you categorize or affiliate yourself--or don't--this will be an eye-opening thesis for you, so long as you read it thoughtfully. Too many people today don't think for themselves. Do you just let yourself drift along with the non-thinkers? Read this and find the answer to that question.

A fantastic intellectual trip, taking the reader through the underworld of ideas that have shaped our current crisis of identity in the US and the West. The author offers a coherent way to escape this labyrinthine world and provides hope of emerging to a brighter future.

Moldbug has some interesting ideas that he is able to back up pretty well. Not for those who thrive on luke-warm rhetoric.

My project here is to analyze, in the detail required for all necessary understanding, the thought of Curtis Yarvin, who wrote under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin is the most prominent figure of what has been called the Dark Enlightenment, one thread of modern reactionary thought. My short summary is that he offers mediocre analysis with some flashes of insight. Even so, his thought is ultimately mostly worthless, because his program for political change is silly, since it fails to understand both history and human nature, and is ultimately indistinguishable from the program of the Left. Overall I was very disappointed, and this write-up is shorter than I expected when beginning my project, since there is not all that much interesting to talk about.

As I read and write on Reaction, I continue to divide its modern thought into three basic groups, at least as far as its American incarnation. The first is those who endorse the Enlightenment and merely think that the American experiment has gone wrong from its ideal position, either in 1787 or 1866. Generally, this is associated with scholars who follow the late Leo Strauss. The second group, what I call Augustans, take a dim view of democracy and focus on power and its uses; they are ambivalent about or hostile to the Enlightenment. This group has a major sub-group, what I call “civil institutionalists,” who reject the Enlightenment but focus on the revival of society, not the uses of power. The third, who like to call themselves the “Dark Enlightenment,” a name that encapsulates both their objection to the actual Enlightenment and their atheist perspective, is a loose confederation whose most prominent philosopher is probably Yarvin. It is the Dark Enlightenment (also self-called “Neoreaction” or “NRx”) we are examining today, through the prism of Yarvin.

My own purpose in bothering to do this is to, ultimately, offer my own program for Reaction that is achievable, rational, and comports with reality and human nature. My premise is that our current Western structure is in terminal decline—though the decline I see is very different than the decline seen by Yarvin and his allies. Thus, I don’t care about the Dark Enlightenment as such, and am most definitely not going to join the team. I am merely using it as a mirror, to construct my own thoughts. If I were a betting man, I would say my own final program will be Augustan in nature, rejecting much of the Enlightenment and pushing a combination of Christianity and human achievement as a unifying force. Its avatars will be men like Ferdinand Magellan, Robert Gould Shaw, Hernán Cortes and Ignatius Loyola. Still, seeing what the Dark Enlightenment has to offer is actually clarifying for my program, since it shows the blind alleys one can go down.

This may seem like a lot of effort to put into something, the Dark Enlightenment, that is not an important movement, if measured by actual numbers of people who are paying any attention. Certainly, in the ten years that it’s been extant, it has accomplished nothing of its goals and has no political traction. In fact, it seems to mostly be dead or dying, having been overtaken by real events on the right wing of the political spectrum. So, I think of the Dark Enlightenment thinkers as mostly creators of thought experiments. Some of the thinkers are simply useless or bizarre, such as the very significant transhumanist/“accelerationist” contingent. None of them are leaders or have any charisma at all; they aspire to be Rousseau, perhaps, but without the magnetism, social acceptance or lionization. Still, given that our present situation is bad in many ways (though good in others), and it is both unsustainable and increasingly harming, rather than helping, human flourishing, thought experiments may be useful.

This present analysis is the entirety of the time I intend to spend on the Dark Enlightenment, since I have already reached the point of sharply diminishing returns. But to create the present analysis, I have spent quite a bit of effort. It has not been easy or particularly pleasant—not only have I read much of what Yarvin has written on his blog, I have also read various other prominent writers in the Dark Enlightenment, none of whom can actually write (notably Michael Anissimov and Nick Land), as well as writers outside to whom Yarvin points his readers, both modern and older. I have also read criticisms of Yarvin, and of the Dark Enlightenment more generally, ranging from Scott Alexander’s (of Slate Star Codex) semi-famous (in these circles) Anti-Reactionary FAQ to science fiction author David Brin’s rants. As dim a view as I have of the Dark Enlightenment’s program, and much of their analysis, those few on the Left who actually engage with it generally suffer from a complete lack of reasoning or interesting things to say. What they offer is basically a compilation of false and unexamined statements combined with personal insults, usually using what Scott Adams aptly calls “linguistic kill shots.” The sole exception seems to be Scott Alexander’s extended attempted factual takedown of Anissimov, which is not very good, just the best of a bad lot, and of limited value to any overall analysis, since Anissimov is a transhumanist believer in the Singularity, which makes him invincibly stupid and thus an easy target.

Even after this effort, it has not proved easy to engage with the Dark Enlightenment. Yarvin’s writing, which is the best among its thinkers, has numerous debilitating deficiencies. First, the organization is atrocious; while any given paragraph is usually written reasonably well, and the flow of discussion is more or less in one direction, there is no clear organization on argument. It is mostly musings, bordering on conversation, something the blog format tends to encourage. Musings have their place, but they have no point in political manifestos, and the reader suspects obfuscation. I haven’t read any Lenin, yet, but I’m very sure Lenin didn’t muse in his writings. Second, the snarky tone of ironic superiority grates on the reader, both just because it’s a bad tone, and because there is no reason for the reader to believe that Yarvin has earned it. Third, he beats metaphors to death; if I have to hear about the "Matrix"’s “red pill” one more time I’m going to scream. Fourth, and the single worst structural element of Yarvin’s writing, is that he will frequently create a link to refer to a third-party source, but the link will not specify what he is trying to show, and so any point simply hangs there unless the reader goes hunting. Or he will quote something with a link to it, not specifying the author and expecting the reader to go figure it out and then return. This would be bad enough, except that maybe 70% of Yarvin’s links are to Wikipedia, and of the remaining 30%, maybe 80% are dead. So, the reader reading a printout or a Kindle version offline is left mystified at critical points, trying to parse out what Yarvin is trying to say. If he is reading online, any flow of thought is continuously disrupted by the need to click, only to find that, in the case of Wikipedia, Yarvin could have summarized his point and omitted the link, and in the case of dead links, that he is baffled. This is, again, no way to write a political manifesto. Fifth, Yarvin pretty frequently shows that he is not as educated as he likes to think. For example, he repeatedly ascribes to Machiavelli the phrase “if you strike at a king, you must kill him,” though it really comes from Emerson (admittedly, a vastly inferior mind to Machiavelli). And it was not Edmund Burke, but Adam Smith, who said “there is a lot of ruin in a nation.” Such errors, rarely fatal but always irritating and undermining Yarvin’s claim to have a macroscopic view, crop up with metronomic regularity.

All Yarvin’s writings were written as posts on his blog, Unqualified Reservations, which is now dormant. It was active from 2007 until 2016, though the majority of writings took place between 2007 and 2009. The blog itself is wide-ranging, but Yarvin offered four multi-part writings, written as serials, totaling approximately a thousand pages in standard text, that seem to encapsulate most or all of his philosophy. The most talked-about is titled "An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives." The second, which has significant overlaps with the first, is "A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations." Both of these I have read, twice, along with at least some reading of most of the (obscure) books he links to within those writings, and those two will be the focus of my analysis. Two other writings are more focused: "How Dawkins Got Pwned," a shorter screed attacking Richard Dawkins for being insufficiently dedicated to actual atheism and true unbiased inquiry, and Moldbug on Carlyle, a set of admiring essays about the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle. The first is unreadable; the second not terribly interesting. For all the attention Yarvin has gotten of late, it is not at all clear to me that any significant number of people have actually read anything Yarvin has written. All his four serial writings are available for the Kindle and have been for years; they have an average of two brief reviews on Amazon, from fans of his. The number of comments on his posts isn’t high—maybe an average of a hundred, with most of those coming from repeated comments from a handful of people. And his personal Blogger profile, prominent on his site, apparently over all time, has 60,509 views—of which ten are from me, since every time you go or hit “Refresh,” another is added. My conclusion is that if the more mainstream press had not occasionally mentioned Yarvin, nobody would ever have heard of him. Which does not show he is wrong, but does suggest delusions of grandeur, which is buttressed by his habit of stating that what he says is, once revealed, self-evident and irrefutable. Yarvin, like all Dark Enlightenment types, regards himself as a genius. It gets tiresome.

But Yarvin does offer a competent and half-original political typology. First, he defines progressives and reactionaries. To him, a reactionary is nothing more than “a believer in order.” Progressives have a more complex definition, because they are self-delusional liars. They “see themselves as the modern heirs of a tradition of change, stretching back to the Enlightenment. They see change as inherently good because they see this history as a history of progress, i.e., improvement. In other words, they believe in Whig history.” Progressivism’s real raison d’etre is being “a way for people who want power, to organize,” while at the same time being able to “rationalize this ruthless, carnivorous activity as a philanthropic cause. The real attraction is the thrill of power and victory—sometimes with a little money thrown in.” And so the core distinction between right and left is that “Right represents peace, order, and security; left represents war, anarchy, and crime. . . . The left is chaos and anarchy, and the more anarchy you have, the more power there is to go around.”

Yarvin calls the “Synopsis” the received wisdom of Progressivism at any point on any particular matter, which wisdom always changes in the direction of being more left-wing. More left-wing means movement towards entropy, toward the opposite of order. Presumably the pursuit of egalitarianism and emancipation, the core values of the Enlightenment Left, aligns with entropy, although Yarvin does not make this argument explicitly (suggesting a failure to understand actual Enlightenment thought). According to Yarvin, this slide toward entropy began with the radical Protestants, Dissenters, which led to the Enlightenment, which has led to nothing good. Finally, Yarvin’s most famous definition, and neologism, which has achieved mainstream use among conservatives, is the “Cathedral”, which is “the set of institutions that produce and propagate the Synopsis—mainstream academia, journalism, and education.” This is a form of spontaneous coordination, “Gleichschaltung without Goebbels.” Effectively, “the press and universities control the State,” through the vehicle of the Cathedral. It is not a coincidence that the term has religious overtones, as we will see below, though Yarvin is a hardcore atheist.

I think this is mostly exactly right about Progressives, and certainly the Cathedral is a compelling and accurate image, although as I have delineated elsewhere, there are multiple types of power that attract, and they should be distinguished. Yarvin notes “The progressive never sees it this way. . . . Usually there is some end which is unequivocally desirable—often even from the reactionary perspective. But if you could somehow design a progressive movement that could achieve its goal without seizing power or smashing its enemies, it would have little energy and find few supporters. What makes these movements so popular is the opportunity for action and the prospect of victory.” “The continued existence of reactionary [i.e., Right] phenomena provides evidence that progressives are struggling against dark forces of titanic and unbounded strength. . . . So it is reality itself that progressivism attacks. Reality is the perfect enemy; it always fights back, it can never be defeated, and infinite energy can be expended in unsuccessfully resisting it.” This explains the unhinged nature of late-stage Progressivism—having successfully overcome the Right on any issue that could plausibly be tied to reality, they have moved on to wholly fantasy political programs waged with increasing shrillness, such as the demand that mentally ill people believing they are really the opposite sex be praised and accommodated, including by surgery for children against the parents’ wishes, or that we pretend a child can have two fathers, one of which bore him. I can hardly wait for their next few crusades, because my guess (not Yarvin’s) is that their reach has exceeded their grasp.

Whether that is true is really the key question for our future. Yarvin correctly identifies that history has moved in a Progressive way for two hundred years (he would say longer, but his grasp of history is poor). To Progressives, of course, this is because they are correct and on the right side of history. More likely, it is because they have a unifying, simple theme attractive to a wide range of people: you can be granted power over others, and, with respect to the natural world, ye shall be as gods. Whatever the reason, this process has accelerated in recent decades, creating a centrifugal force that will, I think, force a fragmentation that will be an opportunity. Needless to say, for Yarvin, democracy is not desirable in the abstract; it was a failure when tried, and now we do not even have democracy; rather, now, “the government implements [the Cathedral’s] scientific public policy in the public interest.”

Back to the analysis. Most progressives are part of the ruling class, what Yarvin calls Brahmins. Opposed to them are Townies. Brahmins are, on average, richer, more fashionable, tied to elite jobs, and viewed as superior. This is basically the red state/blue state distinction; or Joan Williams’s “professional-managerial” elite, or any of the many other variations on classification of Americans that have lately become fashionable. Over time, Progressivism always wins in America, and the Right always retreats. Progressivism, since it is merely the desire for power manifested as the demand for change, is a predatory phenomenon, both inside the country, where Brahmins prey on the Townies, and outside, such as in World War II, where the worldwide Progressive alliance started the war and crushed non-Progressive movements, a process that has continued globally since. Yarvin is continually spitting epithets at Nazis and fascists, the latter poorly defined as “neomilitarism” in the Wilhelmine mold, while admitting that they are reactionary movements opposed to Progressives, which creates what may charitably be called a feeling of dissonance.

So that’s the modern world of Curtis Yarvin. On to normative claims. The core premise of Dark Enlightenment types is that Western society has gotten worse on every relevant objective measure, most especially in personal security against violence, but also on other measures. But this is false. What Steven Pinker gets wrong is not that the world has gotten better on certain measures; it is why it has gotten better. As I have demonstrated at length, the Enlightenment has nothing to do with it, and in fact the Enlightenment project has reached its inevitable end. But that says little or nothing about the future potential for human progress and human flourishing, although to be sure the West will need to be released from the idiot dead end into which the Enlightenment has led it, which is now actively generating the opposite of human progress and human flourishing.

Anyway, Yarvin’s core claim is that the only reason for a government to exist is to ensure peace, order, and security. According to him, all modern governments fail, and fail increasingly, at this. Around the world, from the United States to Naples to Guatemala, peace, order and security a hundred years ago was much greater. It really cannot be overemphasized that all Yarvin cares about is personal security. He does not mean national security (he wants to return to what he incorrectly labels “classic international law,” basically might makes right, in international relations), he means lack of violent crime. He claims that crime in America and England (he never says anything relevant about the history of any other country, other than occasional cherry-picked narrow pieces of data) has exploded over the past century. I am not sure of the truth of this, other than that crime in America has decreased significantly in the past twenty years, and crime in England increased.

Regardless of the statistical truth about crime, this is a pauperized vision of government, ignoring thousands of years of political philosophy on the question of the purpose of government as it relates to human flourishing. It is, however, a vision of government that fits well (though by no means perfectly) with the only pre-nineteenth-century political philosopher Yarvin cares about: Machiavelli. The Dark Enlightenment is all in with Machiavelli—not with the details of his thought, with which they cannot be bothered to engage, but with Machiavelli’s rejection of virtue as having any relevance to governance. Yarvin has no different view of human nature or human teleology than Progressives. For the Dark Enlightenment, it is instrumentalism all the way down, and the sole desired fruit for the populace of that instrumentalism is personal security against non-state violence. As far as I can tell, few of the major Dark Enlightenment figures have any moral vision at all. They don’t even have utilitarian morality, although they generally view the world through a utilitarian lens. This leads some of them into openly endorsing eugenics (which was, of course, a Progressive invention widely implemented once already in the United States), and I suspect all of them would endorse it in practice. I further suspect they’d endorse all sorts of things in practice that would be very unpleasant. There is some truth in the claim that Yarvin makes, which I discuss below, that Progressivism is desiccated Christianity, though what remains of that underpinning is disappearing quickly. The Dark Enlightenment’s ideal world would not even have that as a moral underpinning; it would be the pagan world of Augustus, which, as I have noted elsewhere in detail, was in many ways a moral horror, if efficiently governed. In the immortal words of Ross Douthat, if you don’t like the Christian Right, you really won’t like the post-Christian Right. Or Left.

Having these definitions in mind, Yarvin’s main mode of discourse is to pick some books relating to a seminal event somewhere between 1770 and 1935, most of which are available for free online, and tell us that this book (a) contradicts everything we have been taught about history and (b) is undoubtedly correct in its views, and everything we have been told to the contrary is wrong. Why it is correct, though, we are never told, other than that contemporaneous primary sources that agree with Yarvin’s conclusions are unimpeachable for some unspecified reason. Yarvin’s approach is typical of the ideologically driven autodidact. His focus is extremely narrow and his analysis and conclusions are Gnostic. The Kingdom of Darkness wars with the Kingdom of Light, but with the keys provided by Curtis Yarvin, we can see the truth. Anything that does not fit the story does not appear. This means that at no point does Yarvin engage with any actual arguments of those he has designated as his opponents, i.e., Progressives, since he regards them all as cover for lies. I suppose that’s satisfying for his acolytes, and internally coherent, but not overly attractive to the world at large—thus justifying Yarvin in his conclusion that discussion is worthless.

In its shortest form, what Yarvin advocates to solve the problem of Left dominance is the destruction of our current political system and the creation of a system based on what he variously calls by names such as “neocameralism” and “joint-stock republic.” This is a monarchy where the monarchy is viewed as a chief executive; but, like a chief executive, his power can be removed at will by a group of stockholders. At the same time, Yarvin claims he is a Jacobite, a supporter of the restoration of the Stuart monarchs as absolute monarchs (apparently there is a current pretender to the throne, namely the crown prince of Lichtenstein), and that the English monarchy giving up any power was a mistake. I think he says that to grab attention, since the Stuart monarchy bore very little actual resemblance to “neocameralism.” Yarvin gives as the only major example of an actual implementation of a program like his the Prussia of Frederick the Great. “Although the full neocameralist approach has never been tried, its closest historical equivalents to this approach are the 18th-century tradition of enlightened absolutism as represented by Frederick the Great, and the 21st-century nondemocratic tradition as seen in lost fragments of the British Empire such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai. These states appear to provide a very high quality of service to their citizens, with no meaningful democracy at all. They have minimal crime and high levels of personal and economic freedom. They tend to be quite prosperous. They are weak only in political freedom, and political freedom is unimportant by definition when government is stable and effective.”

What of conservatives, as opposed to progressives or reactionaries? On a practical level, Yarvin is correct that for a very long time, conservatives have been losers. Yarvin has contempt for today’s American conservatives, of whatever stripe (though he wrote prior to current events). He regards them as ineffectual and irrelevant to all political matters, which I tend to agree with, especially after reading, for example, Jonah Goldberg’s latest, in which he admits openly that he has no intention or desire to win on any issue of concern to him, merely to delay somewhat the pace of never-ending and always-expanding Progressive demands. Which is Yarvin’s point. In Yarvin’s words, “A conservative is someone who helps to disguise the true nature of a democratic state. The conservative is ineffective by definition, because his goal is to make democracy work properly. The fact that it does not work properly, has never worked properly, and will never work properly, sails straight over his head. He therefore labors cheerfully as a tool for his enemies.” Or, quoting Robert Lewis Dabney, chief of staff to Stonewall Jackson: “American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader.”

Quoting a man from the era of the Confederacy also implicitly illustrates a second point, which is that the modal opinion shifts Left over time. I think Yarvin exaggerates this somewhat, since he defines any change as Left. But there’s always change of some sort, and in the manner of most ideologues, Yarvin tries to fit a line to the data that is not as straight as he thinks. Still, as he says correctly, “The [pre-1922 corpus] is far, far to the right of the consensus reality that we now know and love. Just the fact that people in 1922 believed X, while we today believe Y, has to shake your faith in democracy. Was the world of 1922 massively deluded? Or is ours? It could be both, but it can’t be neither. Indeed, even the progressives of the Belle Époque often turn out to be far to the right of our conservatives.”

So that’s his analysis. As I say, Yarvin’s didactic method is to instruct us that what we know about history is wrong, by picking some primary sources from different eras, and putting them on a pedestal. Yarvin’s main historical example of “altered history” is the American Revolution. He has two basic claims: it was illegitimate, built on lies; and that the Americans won only because traitorous Progressives in England, Whigs, allied themselves with the American rebels. His evidence consists of a few books: Thomas Hutchinson’s 1776 pamphlet, "Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphi"a; Peter Oliver’s 1781 "Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion"; and George Fisher’s "True History of the American Revolution," from 1902. I bought all of these, and read them in part. They’re interesting Loyalist history, and certainly there is a coherent argument against the American Revolution, perhaps one sometimes overlooked in summary history. But Yarvin treats these well-known facts and views as dynamite he’s placing against the foundations of the American system, and that’s just a delusion of grandeur. Naturally, he does not mention disagreeing contemporaneous sources, even from conservatives, such as Friedrich von Gentz’s comparison and contrast of the French and American Revolutions. Yarvin just can’t admit to himself that the American Revolution, like all historical events, was a complex event with many causes and competing interests, not some conspiracy by Progressives.

On more modern history, Yarvin is no better. He loves Albert Jay Nock, a lazy and cynical fake anarchist, because he agrees with Nock’s jaundiced view of both Nazis and Roosevelt. I can get behind such a double-jaundiced view, but it doesn’t mean the Nazis and Roosevelt were the same, which is basically Yarvin’s claim. He treats as a fresh discovery, which it is not, that every member of Roosevelt’s so-called Brain Trust was sympathetic to Communism, and that Roosevelt’s NRA (not the good one we have today) was a cult. Much of this has the feel of fitting a theory to a view of history, making it by definition unfalsifiable. You can always find a primary source that fits with your theory, if you look hard enough, and given the actual connections between twentieth-century Progressivism and very bad behavior, it’s easier the closer you get to the present. That doesn’t make it news. He also points to modern conspiracy-oriented books as the Gospel truth, such as “George Victor’s [2008] extremely convincing "Pearl Harbor Myth",” due to which “it has become clear that the long-bruited rumors of FDR’s prior awareness of Pearl Harbor are quite simply true.” I have no idea whether FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in advance, though I am aware some make the claim. But the claim that sixty years of dispute about a factual matter is settled by one new book is typical of this mindset.

Thus, Yarvin is crippled by his lack of history, even though he thinks he is knowledgeable. He’s the type of man who thinks Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods is history, but that only he and a select few can see its undeniable truth. In occasional flashes of honesty, he admits his lack of knowledge: “I know more or less nothing at all about the history and historiography of the twelfth century.” Any other century could be substituted for “twelfth,” except for a narrow grasp of certain aspects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He doesn’t even know anything about seventeenth-century England, his Jacobean paradise. Yarvin says little about history other than as quotes from old books, but when he does, it’s often laughable (and cribbed from Steven Pinker, whom he claims to dislike), such as his allegation that in the nineteenth century, children in England were hanged for blasphemy. Actually, the last execution for blasphemy was in 1697, of Thomas Aikenhead, an adult, and there is precious little evidence any child was ever executed in the entire history of England for any crime, much less for blasphemy. Such examples could easily be multiplied.

[Review finishes as first comment.]

What we have here is less a letter than a 120,000-word declaration. An indictment, if you will, of the slow leftward drift of politics since... well, earlier than you think. Read to find out. In fact it seems to be aimed at progressives perhaps only ironically, as few progressives have any interest in, never mind knowledge of, the periods of history to which the author repeatedly refers. Rather its audience will almost certainly be a jumble of disaffected conservatives, exhausted libertarians, and other misfits much closer to the author’s own views (whatever those may be in reality).

This is not to say that there’s nothing here for progressives; surely there is a great deal. What the progressive will find here is above all something unexpected, a crack in the edifice of their tightly constructed worldview, a piece of the puzzle that stubbornly refuses to fit anywhere, a glitch in the Matrix. I’m not referring merely to those progressive anomalies which the author examines in the first two chapters, but also to something perhaps yet more worrying: Moldbug himself. Here we have not just someone with a countervailing narrative, but someone whose knowledge of history, economics, politics, and technology dwarfs the progressive’s own, and who employs this knowledge in dismantling the progressive narrative and constructing one in its place which advances the cause of... are you ready? Hereditary monarchy.

This is also not to say that the Open Letter is not rhetorically effective. Distressingly to the progressive, the author makes reviving the house of Stuart seem downright attractive, if not the obvious course of action. Despite charges of prolixity against neoreactionaries like Moldbug, he is a gifted writer with a winning style at once clear and erudite, though given modern reading comprehension levels, what we have here is only arguably the former and almost off the charts as regards the latter. Like any good rhetorician he begins by flattering his audience and taking on board all their assumptions, and at first simply plants seeds of doubt. He recognizes the enormity of his task, and is content to merely clear the way. By the seventh chapter he is preaching to the choir—that aforementioned cadre of rightist mutineers—but by this time the damage is done; the progressive who has got this far is partially de-converted, or a glutton for punishment. Perhaps both.

I’m not sure how many progressives will make it that far, much less to the end. Progressives, generally lacking a fine Nietzschean epistemic grounding, will find the notion that modern ideas can be false and yet enjoy an adaptive advantage rather uncongenial, as they will the notion that perhaps what would best serve the needs of humanity is the conversion of the state into a joint-stock corporation. If this is an open letter to progressives, then the Declaration of Independence was an open letter to George III. What we have here is a CHALLENGE to progressives, and the challenge is first to pull their head out of their own lower intestine, next, to grasp an alternative narrative, and finally to repudiate it if they can.

I don’t think they can. While the author is far better at destroying than at building (his positive political ideas at times seem undercooked, and sometimes so outlandish as to suggest insincerity), the hammer he wields is a mighty one. The twilight of these idols may not be upon us quite yet, but for anyone with ears to hear, Moldbug’s sounding of them makes clear their utter hollowness.