Yarvin Proves Billionaires a Societal Failing
The New Yorker has a profile of Curtis Yarvin, self-described monarchist and “philosopher” to the right wing, including people like Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance. The profile does not interest me that much — Yarvin is an idiot, a garden variety supremacist who mistakenly thinks that he is the smartest person in every room. What does interest me is what the profile says about the failings of our society.
When I say that Yarvin is an idiot, I am not being dismissive. Bluntly, he seems to just be a very stupid, uncritical person, latching onto whatever nonsense lets him think of himself as superior to, well, anyone he wants to be superior to. His entire schtick — that a version of monarchy protects freedom better than any version of democracy — is disproven by, well, pretty much every fucking monarchy that has ever fucking existed anywhere and at any time in history. His journey to being the worst person to be seated next to a dinner party started when the Swift Boat adds (for those of you too young to have lived through the Karl Rove era, the Swift Boat Veterans were and astroturf organization that aired ads that lied about John Kerry’s military service in order to weaken one of his strengths.) If you merely saw the ads, they could seem plausible. But they were entirely bullshit, as any amount of research would show. A “thinker” who grew to question democracy itself because he believed those ads is, to use the technical term, a fucking moron. And that doesn’t even begin to get into his stupid ideas about turning over the world to airline pilots or inventing a single button that could turn off all the weapons everywhere.
The man can’t even writer replacement level shitty science fiction.
What he can do, however, is tell techno-business people what they want to hear. And what they appear to want to hear is that some people are just superior to other people and therefore should be in charge. Yarvin came to the attention of people like Thiel, Andreessen, and Vance through their venture capital funds. Thiel had already read and become friends with Yarvin through his “let the superior tech people run the world, you mud peasants!” blog and, hey, by some miracle, he also thought Yarvin’s startup was worth an investment! What a coincidence! Yarvin would continue to benefit from Thiel’s patronage and connections until here we are: this idiot is taken seriously inside the White House.
Yarvin is only taken seriously because he tells uber wealthy people what they want to hear. In no serious setting would he be regarded as anything but a fool, as his ideas are paper thin, based on bullshit and, as far as I can tell, the voices in his head reading him terrible fantasy novels, and cannot be defended based on logic, history, science, or commonsense. He is, in every way, shape, and form, a fucking idiot. But because he has the patronage of the uber-rich, he gets profiles in the New Yorker and people, powerful people, are exposed to the seductive cry of “you are better than normal people and deserve to be in charge. Science says so!”
Now, such sycophants have always been around and have always wormed themselves into the hearts and minds of the worst leaders. We, as a democratic society, used to have a means of countering these twerps: we taxed the ultra-wealthy and built universities and a free press to provide rigorous refutation of the chronically stupid, like Yarvin. Anyone backing an obvious idiot like Yarvin would have been ridiculed and had his business judgement, as well as his general sanity, questioned.
Today, however, because even those limited constraints so vex our computer overlords, our universities are under attack and our press has been gutted by the monopolies those self-same tech-bros have orchestrated. Because we have allowed them to grow beyond reason, we now have the worst of all worlds: our independent sources of truth and knowledge gutted, and ideas promoted not because of merit but because of money.
Billionaires are a failure of society. Allowing people who can ignore the democratic will of the polity and create artificial respect for poor ideas warps society. Yarvin, a man who a normal society would relegate to screaming his ideas on the corner of less trafficked streets, is evidence of just how far the wealthy have been allowed to warp our culture. The way out, of course, requires taming that power. Otherwise, the future is a series of Yarvins, making the world dumber. Forever.