Who is Curtis Yarvin?
BORN INTO A SECULAR JEWISH FAMILY in 1973, Curtis Guy Yarvin spent much of his childhood abroad as the son of a State Department official. He graduated from Brown in 1992 and did graduate work in computer science at UC Berkeley before dropping out. Instead of earning his degree, he entered the tech startup world of Silicon Valley, eventually founding Urbit in 2002 and the Tlon, Inc. in 2013, with seed money from Peter Thiel.
In 2007, Yarvin emerged, pseudonymously, as a DIY political theory blogger. He’d started out as a “prolific commenter” on the blog “Overcoming Bias” (later “LessWrong”), a home for self-described “rationalists” obsessed with AI. “Unqualified Reservations” is what he called his own blog, and there, he began to make a sustained case for monarchy.
What makes Yarvin a monarchist—a so-called neoreactionary—is his belief in the absolute importance of securing law and order before all else. Yarvin insists that a unitary executive is a practical necessity for achieving this goal—really, a king is what we need. The king’s role is to secure order as the basis of liberty.
What makes Yarvin a “neoreactionary” is that he reconstructs the argument for monarchism on new bases. Secular, he makes no metaphysical claims about the divine right of kings or the great chain of being. Instead it’s a combination of radical libertarianism and authoritarianism. Think Thomas Hobbes with contemporary technocratic jargon or sci-fi gobbledygook.
Yarvin’s intellectual emergence can be traced from the most extreme edge of right-wing libertarianism, and his old blog suggests his self-directed political development was guided by canonical libertarian texts on libertarian websites. He calls the Austrian economist and libertarian icon Ludwig von Mises a “titan” and the “paleolibertarian” economist and activist Murray Rothbard a “giant.” In the early 1990s, the anarcho-capitalist Rothbard assailed the mainstream conservative movement, but he saw potential hope in an alliance with a dissident hard right. “I am a Rothbardian,” Yarvin wrote earlier this year.
Yarvin fully embraces the paleolibertarian critique of the state as an overweening, imperial threat to traditional ways of life. He sees virtually no function for large parts of the modern welfare state and is willing to push the conclusions of his libertarian principles far beyond the American mainstream, and even beyond conventional libertarian discourse, into privatized fantasylands.
Running parallel to Yarvin’s radical libertarianism—which he believes will lead to human flourishing—is his conviction that there is no spontaneous order. Anarchism is anathema to him; he believes order must be imposed by a narrowly defined but unassailable state. He cites the Victorian thinker Thomas Carlyle, whom Yarvin describes as a “royalist libertarian,” as his inspiration for this position. And Yarvin’s turn against democracy and toward monarchy was in part midwifed by another radical libertarian, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who argued democrats naturally follow short-term incentives and in doing so create unceasing risks to the state. Kings, on the other hand, are free to plan for the longer term, and are therefore superior.