Yarvin for Normies: Democracy, Oligarchy, and Monarchy

A sensible introduction to his work

The way you understand politics is probably wrong. It is wrong because most people think about politics from the frame of their 11th grade civics class, in other words, our conception of politics are full of myths and theory divorced from reality. Nowhere are these myths more present than in the minds of conservatives, often contributing to their never-ending political defeats.

Here comes the real value of Curtis Yarvin (Aka Mencius Moldbug). He does a great job at dispelling the civics and ethics vision of how the political process works and his writing attempts to describe the inner workings of modern politics.

The issue is that he is utterly unapproachable if you are not used to both his ranting and disorganized writing style as well as his stoner-like voice when he is umm… you know, basically, ahh… speaking.

I really do believe that this is a shame though, because he is genuinely a writer with some interesting political arguments together with an amazing knowledge of history. Which is far more than you can say for the vast majority of the online right wing.

This essay will be the first of a series of standalone works where I will take Yarvin's core arguments about politics and explain them in an orderly manner, starting with the state and the 3 forms of government. The other two will be his ideas on international affairs and on ideology.

If by the end of this essay you are interested on his ideas, I highly encourage you to actually read his stuff. Finally, I want to thank Parker Banks that helped me with the Yarvin quotes in the video version of this essay.

The Government

First, we must define what Yarvin means by “the Government”. Curtis, being a former Silicon Valley startup CEO, tends to look at the government as if it were nothing more than a corporation that controlled its own security. If the government is just a special form of a company, then what are its products? Simple:

“The assets of this business are the people and the land.”¹

A successful government is one that knows how to develop their land and ensure the health of their people. In a very rudimentary sense that is the difference between Denmark and Haiti, one of them has been able to manage its land and care for its population and these two result in a prosperous society. 

I’m sure that most people, on the right and left, can agree with this simple definition of what a state is and most especially what it is supposed to do; develop its land and care for its people. Wonderful.

So, we can say that when a government can provide both of its two services successfully it is giving us good customer service and we will be happy citizens. However, when the services are sub-par, or even not there at all, then we can only call it bad customer service. Therefore, in Yarvin’s view, any government that can provide good customer service is, by definition, good government no matter how they do it.

“The key is that we are evaluating a government based on what it does, not what it is. As Deng Xiaoping—probably the greatest statesman of the 20th century—put it: “Who cares if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice?”

The subjective approach asks whether the government catches mice. It does not ask who the government’s personnel are, or how they are selected, or how they are managed.”²

This means that the result is what counts and that one should not prefer a system of government for its own sake, but instead, only for the quality of the services it offers. If you are going to believe in democracy, it should only be because you believe that democracy is the best means to produce good government, not because democracy is an end in itself, even if it produces bad results. This analysis applies equally to all systems of government. Which other systems?

Plato’s 3 systems of government

Plato’s wisdom when it comes to the systems of government has remained uncontested 2500 years. There are three types of government:

1. Monarchy; the rule of one.

2. Oligarchy; the rule of the few.

3. Democracy; the rule of the many.

In every society in history one of these three systems of government held power over the other two and it is not hard to observe this from hindsight. The First French republic of the Jacobins was an unfettered democracy where the crowd held absolute power, while Napoleon’s Republic-turned-empire was clearly a monarchy where he held absolute power. Great Britain during the same time, was clearly an oligarchy in which the lords held sway over the matters of state without having power concentrated in one single person, but in a class.

Clearly, there were gradations in each one of these, but it is easy to look back and see where the power was actually concentrated. The trouble comes when we ask what our current system of government is because we do not have the benefit of hindsight.

Of course, the civics and ethics teacher taught you that our political system is clearly a democracy where the people have the power to elect their representatives and that democracy is secured by the separation of powers and the constitution.

Many others, like Chomsky and Alex Jones, will disagree and they will say that we do not live in a democracy because real political power is actually concentrated in the hands of the few and not the many. So, which one is it?

If we want to know in what system we live in, the biggest problem is that we have a lot of contradictory assertions that obfuscate this question, so the only thing to do is to look at how the state actually works. Not how it nominally works, because nominally Noth Korea is a “People’s Democratic Republic“ and Britain is under the iron fist of the royal family.

So, we need to look at what makes democracy strong and contrast it with what makes monarchy strong and see which of the 3 forms of government is the strongest today.

3 Sources of power

Each one of these forms of government has a specific source of power that will be present in all societies: The source of power of monarchy is the leadership qualities of one single person, the source of power of oligarchy is the power of institutions, and the source of power of a democracy is the political energy of the crowd.

Monarchy

Let’s begin with the power of monarchy, which comes from leadership. Any leader is always to a certain extent a monarch, because he leads. In other words, the decision-making power inside an organization becomes concentrated in one person.

Now, there are not many people claiming that we actually live in a monarchy and that is because inside of our societies there are not many people who have strong leadership roles with total executive power.

There are only two real places where executive leadership is present, that is the military where there is a definite chain of command (Befehl ist Befehl), and in the corporate world where the company’s fate lies in the hands of the CEO, who has power over budget, strategy and personnel.

However, these monarchical structures are rarely absolute. The general has a gang of lawyers and bureaucrats breathing down his neck and in the corporate world there are only a handful of CEOs that have enough force of character to impose their will, Elon Musk is the exception, not the rule.

So, we can say that monarchical power in western societies is fairly weak, while around the world it is far stronger, take Egypt for example, or Russia if you want another. The great strength of monarchy and the reason that it remains a constant source of power is that all great projects require competent leadership.

The IPhone? Steve Jobs. The A-bomb? Oppenheimer. A man on the moon? Werner von Braun. The conquest of Gaul? Julius fucking Caesar. The Russian revolution? A certain V. I. Lenin. I could go on, but the point is that one cannot underestimate the power of leadership to get stuff done, especially in hard times.

Oligarchy

The source of oligarchical power is the institution. An institution is an organization with a common identity that is staffed by a selected group of people who follow a set of rules and procedures. This could be a government ministry staffed by university-educated policy experts, or it could be the medieval Polish Sjem, a parliament staffed by the nobility which elected the king and passed laws.

The point is that an institution is always staffed by a specialized minority. If an institution has absolute power over a government, the class of people who staff this organization will hold power over the majority of the population. This model of organization has its benefits because it does not rely on any single person, instead it relies on the procedure. To quote Curtis:

In a bureaucracy, decisions at every level are not taken by individuals; they are taken by processes. All work is according to process. Managers in a bureaucracy are not bosses; they are exception handlers.

The reason that institutions have always existed is that they simplify things, for example, all tax collecting is done by an institution that works based on the set of rules. Imagine the trouble of collecting taxes on a case-by-case basis! Therefore, the power of oligarchy is never extinguished since there will always be institutions with power inside any government.

Democracy

So where does the power of democracy come from? Democracy is the rule of the many, therefore its power comes from its numbers, in other words, the power of democracy comes from the crowd of common citizens which is present in all societies.

The power of the crowd cannot express itself in any organization, since that would mean that some would lead and others would follow, which would be an oligarchy with more steps. This process is well described in the work of Robert Michels where he describes the process of how syndicates lose their egalitarian and democratic character, and the power becomes concentrated in the union bosses.

Democratic power can only come from a large group of disorganized people that are brought together by common interests. The problem is that a large, disorganized crowd cannot create a manifesto or draft coherent policy because that would require organization. Therefore, the only way that the crowd can express its power is by mob violence or the threat of said violence.

The important democratic revolutions were exemplified by mob violence; in the American revolution were the Sons of Liberty destroyed Governor Hutchinson’s house and tarred and feathered their enemies, in the French revolution the “enemies of the people” were lynched and executed in the storming of the bastille and the September Massacres. I could mention many other cases, but it would be better to quote Yarvin:

It was democratic power that executed Socrates; even lynching is a fundamentally democratic exercise of power. Lynching is mob violence; mob violence, unless the mob is an organized mob, is democratic violence.³

However, the threat of violence is often even more powerful than the violence itself; that is exactly what a protest is; it is the threat of mob violence. When you have 10,000 excited people on the streets, you have a small army that can turn violent in the flip of a switch and go full Weimar on your opponents. The same is fundamentally the case with elections; they show which side can muster the bigger army. Yarvin again:

As Clausewitz observed, war and politics are a continuum. Representative democracy is a limited civil war in which the armies show up, get counted, but don’t actually fight.⁴

The balance right now

So, which of these three powers is strongest today? This whole idea of protests being threats of mob violence and elections being civil war rehearsals seems very strange to us, since this sort of violence is unheard of in our modern societies. Yeah sure, people yell at each other in protests and get mad in elections, but the idea of protestors lynching someone and burning government buildings is quite foreign to us.

However, this idea was not foreign at all to the people of revolutionary Paris, the Weimar republic or Mogadishu. This tells us that our contemporary western societies have very low amounts of democratic power because we are remarkably docile. If the mob does not have teeth, it is powerless. Indeed, there have been many movements that have mobilized tens of thousands to come out into the streets in their support and have achieved nothing.

This is also due to the relatively transient nature of democratic energy, we have all seen this play out a thousand times; the government does something unpopular, immediately there is outrage, protests, speeches. Then a couple of days pass and the whole thing dies down, the people go back to their homes, and within a month everybody has forgotten the initial outrage.

Monarchy is also not very strong in our societies, it is most clearly seen in the business world where there is a CEO at the head of practically every company and a chef at the head of every restaurant. But outside of that, our society has a strong aversion against the rule of one and prefers to dissolve such positions, or at least restrain their power.

This is taken to its maximum extent with the head of state in western countries, nominally the president or prime minister is the person who is in charge, however, their power is far smaller than it seems. They do not have a say over either budget (this is the legislative’s job) or personnel (the president cannot fire any civil servants).

So, the result is that the monarchical power in our societies is still present in a few places, but especially in politics it is hard to find someone who still exercises real leadership combined with executive power. Instead, the average politician today is a bureaucrat with little leadership skills. Are we going to pretend that Scholtz is comparable to Schmitt, Macron to De Gaulle, and Biden to FDR?

This is because in the almost total absence of both monarchical and democratic power, the institutional power, which is by nature oligarchical, is overwhelming. I think that this could be best described in a thought experiment. Imagine that in the next election Trump wins by a landslide and decides to use his executive power, for real this time, and do something radical like impose a federal ban on abortion.

Three things would happen, the first is that his employees in the civil service would offer a lot of resistance to the carrying out of such an order. Since they cannot be fired it is hard to pressure them to carry out the presidents will, furthermore most civil servants are vote for the democrats. It would be like convincing a teenager not to go to a party without the power to ground them if they do not comply.

The second would be that the department of justice would challenge this decision and call it unconstitutional. The supreme court would totally strike down the executive order and now you have a conflict between two branches of government, the issue is that the supreme court holds far more power than a president who is hated by his own employees who would not feel obliged to carry out an unconstitutional order.

The third would be that the press, backed up by the most influential (University educated) people in the country, would vigorously protest such a tyrannic assault on women’s rights and the justice system. There would be protests in every major city and university faculty. All of which would cause a major backlash in popular opinion since it eventually follows the press and the universities. Exhibit A, exhibit B.

In short, every institution in the US would challenge the executive order and they would certainly win. This thought experiment helps see that the institutional power is far stronger than the executive power, since institutions run the government, educate the most influential people and steer public opinion (Yarvin also recommends reading Walter Lippman’s book by the same name).

The Cathedral

This supremacy of institutional power is Yarvin’s most important idea, which he gives the name of “The Cathedral“:

The great power center of 2008 is the Cathedral. The Cathedral has two parts: the accredited universities and the established press. The universities formulate public policy. The press guides public opinion. In other words, the universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent. It’s as simple as a punch in the mouth.⁵

The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure. (…) It always agrees with itself. Still more puzzlingly, its doctrine is not static; it evolves; this doctrine has a predictable direction of evolution, and the whole structure moves together.⁶

All major political institutions are on the same page, the New York Times agrees with Harvard which agrees with Yale which does not have any major disagreements with the civil service. The only institutions that disagree with the cathedral are small, irrelevant such as DeSantis’ “New College of Florida“ with 600-ish students and frankly low-brow publications such as the New York Post.

What keeps the institutions of the Cathedral united is that they are all staffed by the same class of people, which is the intelligentsia; the class of people where status is defined by scholarly achievement and whose members are university educated. Furthermore, the modern intelligentsia also has a common ideology, progressivism, which permeates almost all institutions in the west and keeps them gleichgeschaltet.

The idea of the cathedral also explains the remarkable success of progressivism in the past century. Progressivism moves forward and takes generation after generation because the most prestigious institutions and the most fashionable people support it:

In fact, we know exactly what Washington’s policies twenty years from now will be. They will certainly have nothing to do with “politics.” They will be implementations of the ideas now taught at Harvard, Yale and Berkeley. There is a little lag as the memes work their way through the system, as older and wiser civil servants retire and younger, more fanatical ones take their place. But this lag is getting shorter all the time. And by the standards of the average voter forty years ago, let alone eighty, Washington already is seriously insane. What is the probability that by your standards—as progressive as they may be—Washington forty years from now will not seem just as crazed? Fairly low, I’m afraid.⁷

One would surely expect to see a plurality of ideas inside the intelligentsia, since they are smartest and best-educated people in your society. Why then is there such ideological uniformity around progressivism? Simple. Progressivism has power on its side, and power is always cool. Yarvin explains:

Growing up in the modern Western world, you learned that in all pre-modern, non-Western societies, everyone (…) put their faith in theories of government now known to be nonsensical. The divine right of kings. The apostolic succession of the Pope. The Marxist evolution of history. Etc.

Why did such nonsense prosper? It outcompeted its non-nonsensical competitors. When can nonsense outcompete truth? When political power is on its side. Call it power distortion.

And why, dear open-minded progressive, do you think your theory of government, which you did not invent yourself but received in the usual way, is anything but yet another artifact of power distortion (…)?

The issue with power distortion is that it can promote bad ideas and bad ideas lead to bad results, which leads to more deranged explanations or outright lies, that certainly do not help whole system.

Bad government

However, it is important to mention that Curtis does not oppose the cathedral and its progressive beliefs because he is a fanatical conservative. Instead, his opposition comes from a more pragmatic angle; he simply thinks that the ruling institutions are incompetent and doing a bad job:

Fast food is a fine metaphor for government. You’d think managing a sovereign corporation (a government) is probably more complicated and difficult than operating a fast-food chain. (…)

But if I saw a McDonalds next to a Calmeat, Mickey would be my man. Of course, there is no Calmeat. We do not live in a world where the State of California sees fit to operate restaurants, fast or otherwise. There is no state burger. Even as an open-minded progressive, however, I’m afraid you will have to concede that if there was a Calmeat, it would either be either horrible or horribly overpriced, and probably both.

(…) we don’t live in a world of good government. California is better-governed than nine-tenths of the Earth’s surface. And there is no way its government could flip a decent burger.⁸

This is essentially Yarvin’s explanation for most things that are wrong in the west, from the gigantic government deficits to the rising crime; they are all symptoms of an irresponsible government which is getting high on their own ideological supply.

Perhaps this might not seem concerning now, but in the future government incompetence will lead to ruin, both economic and social. because a state that is not able to flip a burger cannot be tasked with keeping a civilization running.

21st century monarchy?

So, how can one make government effective again? Curtis has an unorthodox solution to this difficult question and his solution is… monarchism. He in infamous for being one of the few remaining monarchists out there and his reasoning goes like this:

How do we achieve effective management?

We know one simple way: find the right person, and put him or her in charge. (…) In the military world, this is called unity of command. In the (…) corporate world—and in the nonprofit world that opposes it—this individual is the CEO.

Why does individual administration work? When said individual is a douche, it doesn’t. There is no reliable formula for good management. But there are many reliable formulas for bad management. A better question is: why does management by committee not work?

Divided control of any human enterprise tends to fail because of a phenomenon generally known, around the office, as politics. Politics always emerges when management breaks down. (…) Replace one manager with two (…) either has a new way to succeed: making the other fail. The more cooks, the worse the broth.

In every human endeavor outside government itself, undivided administration is well-known to produce optimal results. If Peet’s could beat Starbucks, Southwest JetBlue, or In-N-Out Mickey D’s, by adopting a “separation of powers” or a “constitution” or some other architecture of leadership by consensus, one of them would certainly have tried it. (…)

How could we produce effective government in California? The answer: find the world’s best CEO, and give him undivided control over budget, policy and personnel. I don’t think there is any debate about it. The world’s best CEO is Steve Jobs. (Remember, this was written in 2008)

Which would you rather live in: California as it is today, or Applefornia? Which would you rather carry: the iPhone, or the Calphone? I rest my case.⁹

In Yarvin’s opinion the US is not a democracy and to try to turn it into a democracy is an absurd task since democracy has never led to good government, instead it has led to mob violence and anarchy.

According to him the real problem is that we live under an ineffective oligarchy and the solution to this is to appeal to the third system of government, monarchy. He often uses the examples of modern monarchical leaders such as Lee Kwan Yew, FDR, the already mentioned Deng Xiaoping.

However, Yarvin also emphasises that the monarch, or CEO, must be accountable. That there must be an authority over the monarch in the same way that in a joint-stock company there is a board of directors that has the power to remove the CEO if he performs badly or if he goes full Caligula.

However, such a system has never existed without the monarch overriding the board or the board controlling the monarch, but Curtis insists that creating a system that only produces good monarchs is only an engineering problem and that it is possible to construct a perfect system with the help of modern technology such as board anonymity and the use of cryptographic technology.

This is, in my opinion, the weakest part of Yarvin’s writings because the whole design is still theoretical and relies on the idea that one can use the model of the joint-stock corporation without having any accountability to a higher power i.e. the government.

This is the old “Quis custodiet“ problem, which has been popularly translated as ”who watches the watchmen?”. A corporate CEO is subordinate to the state, but a sovereign CEO, a monarch, can do whatever he wants. Curtis hopes to make the CEO subordinate to the board, but even his perfect system can become corrupted by the people inside it and deliver either a tyrant, or a weak monarch.

But I think that here Plato’s hierarchy of forms of government is relevant, he writes that the best form of government is that of a good king, an Attatürk, Augustus, or Fredrick the great. However, Plato also writes that the worst possible form of government is a bad king, one that goes mad with power such as Nero or one that is weak and incompetent such as Nicholas II.

Why to read Yarvin

I still think that reading Curtis Yarvin is important especially because it counters the 11th grade civics class understanding of politics. We can see what it has done to the conservative movement, they still think that the power comes from the people, from the silent majority! Indeed, it was by reading Yarvin that I gave up on being a conservative since I stopped believing that this movement will ever win.

Yeah sure, they might win an election or two while retreating in every single issue because they hold no institutional power. Yet they do not recognize their losing predicament and believe that if only they can win the next election, they will be able to turn their 100+ year losing streak around and beat the “woke“. No such thing will happen, and one can only hope for it if one’s strategy never left 11th grade civics class.

And even if I often disagree with him (I’m more of a Roman Repubican myself), I fully recommend delving into his essays and blogposts since they offer interesting historical anecdotes, good political commentary and, once you get used to his style, a very enjoyable read. The articles that I most recommend about internal politics are:

• Castes of the United States & the BDH-OV conflict - short and good place to start.

• The Formalist manifesto - medium-long and his first essay, intro to his ideas.

• A brief explanation of the cathedral - medium length, newer work.

• Heroin liberals and cocaine conservatives - medium and about current politics

• Romney! He sucks! - Short and amusing piece on the 2012 election.

• An open letter to open minded progressives - very long, Yarv’s main book.

• You can only lose the culture war - medium length, about the losing culture war.

• Socialism and capitalism are both fake - medium, historical and economic revision.

1. Gray mirror; Salvador as a startup state

2. Unqualified Reservations; An open letter to open-minded progressives. Chapter 6

3. Gray Mirror; Three shapes of journalism

4. Unqualified Reservations; The OV-BDH conflict

5. Unqualified Reservations; An open letter to open-minded progressives. Chapter 8

6. Gray Mirror; A brief explanation of the cathedral

7. Unqualified Reservations; An open letter to open-minded progressives. Chapter 7

8. Unqualified Reservations; An open letter to open-minded progressives. Chapter 6

9. Unqualified Reservations; An open letter to open-minded progressives. Chapter 6