THE PERFORMANCE
Curtis Yarvin—who writes under the name Mencius Moldbug—performs the role of the disinterested intellectual, a man who has "solved" politics the way a programmer debugs code. He presents himself as a radical empiricist, stripping away the sentimental fictions of democracy to reveal the "true" machinery of power. His prose is dense, allusive, almost clinical in its detachment. "I am not a monarchist," he once wrote. "I am a scientist of government." The performance is one of cold rationality: I am not advocating for anything. I am merely describing how the world works.
But the gap between the stated identity and the documented reality is stark. Yarvin does not merely describe monarchy as a historical fact; he advocates for its return, not as a theoretical exercise but as a practical solution. In A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations, he writes: "The only way to fix America is to replace its entire political class with a single monarch, preferably a hereditary one, who can then appoint a new elite." This is not description. It is prescription. The performance of neutrality is itself the performance—because if you are merely describing the inevitable, then resistance is not just futile but irrational. The audience is not being educated. It is being recruited.
THE HISTORY OF THIS PERFORMANCE
The pose of the detached observer who has discovered an unassailable truth about power is not new. It is the same move made by Thomas Carlyle in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), where he argued that democracy was a failed experiment and that society required "great men" to rule. Carlyle, like Yarvin, framed his argument as a grim inevitability: This is how the world has always worked. You are merely too sentimental to admit it.
Earlier still, the French reactionary Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) performed the same trick, insisting that monarchy was not a political choice but a natural law, as self-evident as gravity. "The people need a master," he wrote, "because they are incapable of governing themselves." The language of science is a recent innovation, but the underlying claim—that power is not a social construct but a biological or mechanical necessity—is centuries old.
The originality of Yarvin’s performance is not in the idea but in the packaging. He is Carlyle for the Silicon Valley set, translating monarchism into the language of software engineering. The king is not a divine right sovereign but a "CEO of the state," and democracy is not a moral failure but a "bug in the system." The performance is updated for an audience that believes in disruption, not tradition. But the script is the same.
THE DOCUMENTED RECORD
Yarvin’s intellectual output is voluminous, but his personal behavior tells a different story. In 2007, he co-founded a startup called Urbit, a decentralized computing platform that promised to "replace the internet." The project was funded by Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund, which invested $1.1 million in 2013. Thiel, a self-described libertarian who has also flirted with monarchist ideas, has been one of Yarvin’s most influential patrons.
But here is the contradiction: If Yarvin truly believes that democracy is a failed system and that power should be concentrated in the hands of a single ruler, why does he participate in the very system he claims is doomed? Why take money from venture capitalists? Why build a company within the framework of a legal and economic order he describes as irredeemably corrupt?
The answer is in the documents. In 2019, Yarvin sold Urbit to a new entity controlled by a small group of investors, including himself. The structure was not a monarchy. It was a standard Silicon Valley power play: a founder retaining control while extracting capital. The performance of anti-democratic radicalism did not extend to his own business dealings. When the cameras were off, he played by the rules of the system he claims to despise.
This is not hypocrisy. It is strategy. The performance is for the audience. The money is for himself.
THE INTELLECTUAL CLAIM
Yarvin’s central claim is that democracy is a failed experiment, and that the only stable form of government is a monarchy—or, in his updated terminology, a "neocameralist" state, where power is vested in a single ruler who treats the nation as a corporation. He cites historical examples, particularly the British monarchy, as evidence that hereditary rule is the only system that has ever worked at scale.
But the gap between his usage and the original sources is vast. Yarvin ignores the fact that the British monarchy he admires was not a pure autocracy but a system of checks and balances, where power was constrained by Parliament, the judiciary, and the Church. He also ignores the fact that hereditary rule has, historically, been a disaster more often than not—producing weak, incompetent, or tyrannical rulers who bankrupted their nations.
His other key intellectual move is to appropriate the language of systems theory, arguing that democracy is a "complex adaptive system" that inevitably collapses into chaos. But systems theorists—actual ones, not tech bro dilettantes—do not make this claim. They study how systems adapt, not how they fail. Yarvin’s use of the term is not analytical. It is rhetorical. He is not describing a system. He is selling a conclusion.
THE AUDIENCE
The person listening to Yarvin at 11 p.m., scrolling through his essays on a phone, is not a monarchist. They are someone who has lost faith in the institutions around them—the government, the media, the universities—and is looking for an explanation. They are not stupid. They are searching for something real in a world that feels increasingly fake.
Yarvin offers them a story: You are not wrong to feel this way. The system is broken. The people in charge are lying to you. But there is a solution—one that the elites don’t want you to know about. The tragedy is not that the audience is gullible. The tragedy is that they are right to be angry. The system is broken. The elites are lying. But Yarvin’s solution is not a fix. It is a grift.
The audience is not looking for a king. They are looking for agency. Yarvin gives them a fantasy of power instead.
THE THING THEY GOT RIGHT
Yarvin is correct about one thing: The American political system is deeply dysfunctional. The two-party duopoly is a cartel, the media is captured by corporate interests, and the bureaucracy is unresponsive to the public. These are not fringe claims. They are documented facts.
The problem is not that Yarvin identifies the symptoms. The problem is that he prescribes a cure that is worse than the disease. Monarchy is not a solution to institutional decay. It is a surrender to it.
REMEMBER
Curtis Yarvin sells the fantasy of a king to people who just want their democracy to work.
This newsletter uses direct quotes, public records, court documents, and documented biographical fact. It does not make claims beyond what the record supports. Readers are encouraged to consult primary sources and reach their own conclusions.