Curtis Yarvin, a radical monarchist and former Moldbug, argues the U.S. should replace its dysfunctional bureaucracy with an accountable sovereign—like Elizabeth I or Henry VIII—not a ceremonial figure. He compares Apple’s mission-driven leadership to China’s centralized rule, critiquing the Constitution as a Federalist oligarchy where Washington and Hamilton created a hollowed-out executive branch. The Electoral College, he claims, was meant to function like a CEO search but now fails due to political interference, leaving presidents powerless against an administrative state. History’s monarchies, he asserts, were often competent, not tyrannical, suggesting the U.S. could benefit from a single decisive leader to escape oligarchic gridlock. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Curtis Yarvin.
Now, you may not know Yarvin.
He's a really, really interesting thinker.
He used to write under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug.
And I don't know exactly where to place him on the political axis.
He's usually referred to as a reactionary right-winger, but some far-left people like him as well.
And I've been listening to a lot of the young dissident right on podcasts, just trying to figure out what they're thinking.
And almost, we had Jay Burden on, I remember, and almost all of them cite Curtis as an inspiration.
He has a substack called Gray Mirror.
He has a book called Unqualified Reservations.
And just for those of you who, just to remind you, the way I do interviews, I bring people on for one reason, which is to find out what they have to say.
I'm not here to argue with them or struggle with them.
I hope I ask good exploratory questions, but I don't necessarily agree with them, but I'm not going to scream at them.
I actually want to hear them.
It is a kind of, it's different than what you've heard.
So, Curtis, thank you so much for coming on.
It's a real pleasure to meet you.
I've been reading a lot of your things and very, very interesting stuff.
Great pleasure to come on, Andrew.
I suppose I always struggle with this question of what to call myself like in a sort of branding sense.
Recently, I came up with the phrase radical monarchist, which, you know, the radical has this kind of nice Berkeley kind of sound to it.
And then you're like a monarchist, but maybe you're not the kind of monarchist who believes in like, you know, Queen Elizabeth II and, you know, King Charles III.
Maybe more you're the kind of monarchist who believes in Queen Elizabeth I and Henry VIII.
Well, this is what I want to get to because I listen to the people.
Yeah, and so I, well, you know, if you'll let me keep going, but I think I know, I think I know where you want me to go.
It's like, you know, when we look, when we read the past, we're always struck by, I think some historian once said, we understand the Roman Empire and maybe even to some extent the Roman Republic better than anyone who ever lived in the Roman Empire.
And that's because whenever you're inside a society, it's a sort of, it's in this kind of, you know, what we call in Silicon Valley a reality distortion field.
It's inside a little bubble of very deeply unquestioned assumptions.
And, you know, one of the reasons to really get into the past is to understand, is to have an external perspective on that bubble of unquestioned assumptions that we all live inside.
And one way to do that is to understand the past well enough that you can get advice from the past and specifically that you could actually know what, for example, here's just a random question.
Suppose you could put Elizabeth I in a time machine and she could go back and look at the England of Elizabeth II.
What's she going to think?
You know, and the thing is, if you can't really, from, as a person who, I guess we have King Charles III now, but as a person who lived for basically 50 years in the age of Queen Elizabeth II, to answer that question, I would have to have a very good understanding of both Elizabethan eras.
You know, that's a good test for how well you can look at your society from the outside.
Okay.
And so, you know, to answer that question really, really briefly, I would say that the answer, you know, the start of the answer is obvious, which is that Queen Elizabeth I, as we all know, is at least to a substantial extent, an actual governing monarch.
She's actually the queen of England.
She's actually the CEO of the English government, as we would say in the corporate world today.
She is to the government of England what Elon Musk is to SpaceX.
People might do stuff, you know, does she know where every sparrow falls or every memo flies?
No, but she's actually in charge.
And if you maybe you could quibble with that as an Elizabethan historian, and then you really have to go back to Henry VIII, who's really in charge, or maybe even Henry VI, you know, and who's so in charge that he's not even notorious.
And so the thing is that what someone who certainly conceived of it as her own responsibility to be in charge would think of someone who nominally had the same job as her, but in fact was basically a crowned Kardashian who only did photo ops and basically, you know, was there for the tourist trade, right?
You know, so I think that, you know, I think there are more things that Elizabeth I would think about Elizabeth II's England, but she would be coming from that initial perspective.
Right.
She would be coming from the initial perspective of this is crazy.
And this woman is extremely deluded.
And she actually thinks she's the queen, but she is not the queen.
And, you know, then she would look at this and that about England and she would be like, oh my God.
So that, but that's what you, that is what you're, when you call yourself a monarchist, you want a monarch.
Yeah.
And so, you know, the thing is, why would anyone call themselves a monarchist in the year 2024?
Well, if you look around you, you know, I'm looking into some very delicate computer hardware right now.
When I opened the box that contained that computer hardware, it said designed by Apple in California, made in China.
Now, those are three brand names there, Apple, California, and China.
Okay, two of these things are monarchies, and one of them is something else.
Apple is a monarchy.
Apple is literally run by a single CAO.
It's an accountable monarchy.
He's, you know, Tim Cook is accountable to the board.
Mark Zuckerberg actually is not accountable to the board because he has special magic shares that keep him not accountable.
And China is a monarchy, and it's run by Xi Jinping, who is, again, accountable to the Chinese Communist Party to some extent.
But, you know, is there such a thing as a sort of perfect, ideally absolute monarchy?
No.
But when we see, quote, constitutional monarchies throughout history, we notice that they very, very quickly degrade into ceremonial monarchies.
You could argue that basically, for example, in England after the Restoration, the period of Charles II was a period where there was a genuine balance between the monarchical power and the parliament.
Obviously, you know, they kicked out James and replaced him with basically a fake king, right?
Beam Dream: Sleep Better, Naturally00:02:12
England has had fake kings for 300 years.
Japan has had fake emperors for a thousand years.
I don't know how many people know this, but like the emperor of Japan was last in charge of Japan in like the 1100s, 1200s, something like that, right?
Since then, it's all been shoguns ruling in the emperor's name.
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Can I back you up just a second?
When you went about, when you were talking about the computer, it's made by Apple in California.
Government vs. Deep State00:15:46
Is your point there that only two of those state of California tried to make a computer?
Imagine if the state of California tried to make an electric car.
Now, they wouldn't actually pretend.
There was a time when these projects could be done in this is not a permanent quality of government, the way libertarians think.
The Manhattan Project was the most successful and effective engineering project of all time.
It was a government project.
And when we look at that project, we see that it was run almost exactly like a Silicon Valley startup, right down to having the two, the technical and the non-technical co-founder.
You know, so it's really more a diarchy than a monarchy is one thing that sort of Silicon Valley's kind of had this kind of minor variation on the design.
But mostly, if you want to get anything actually done in this world, you give it to one person and hold them accountable, him or her, accountable for their results.
But didn't, but doesn't Silicon Valley produce the ideas that these people then actualize?
I mean, in other words, you know, if you go to DC, you'll see a lot of ideas, you know, in and around the government.
There is no shortage of ideas in and around the government.
But the government, because of the way the administrative state operates, and this is one of the things that I think is most important for people to understand is the difference between a private corporation and the administrative state, the deep state, whatever you want to call it.
Yes, the fact that people can't be fired is an obvious difference in the deep state, but it's so much deeper than that, right?
I actually grew up in the deep state.
So my dad was a foreign service officer.
My mom was a DOE.
My stepfather was on the Hill.
So I kind of have a certain familial understanding of the way DC operates and also have a personal understanding of the way Silicon Valley operates because I've been a CEO here in a small way.
So like these things are night and day.
And so the thing is, when you look at the federal government, there are times in the past when it has worked as a monarchy.
FDR, I have a lot of bad things to say about FDR, but like him or not, he was the monarch of America.
And if you look at the way the New Deal operated, imagine a world in which Washington is as efficient as a startup and actually kind of runs like a startup and is kind of young and fresh and full of really talented people and works kind of like Uber.
And you'll understand why people develop this immense trust in like the deep state, this generational trust.
It's like the way people trust Apple or Google, but like even more so.
It did incredible things.
It conquered the world.
Like, you know, like you have to respect when you look at this monstrous cancerous blight that is Washington, D.C., you can't forget the fact that like 75 years ago, it conquered the freaking world.
Right.
Right.
And so, you know, on the other hand, if basically you gave everyone in Apple a permanent job for 80 years and like gave it, made it completely unaccountable to market results.
I mean, you know, Apple went down very, downhill very quickly without Steve Jobs.
And like it was, it was a death door.
But my question is, you know, my question, though, just to, just to go back for a second, the computer revolution, like many other technical fracking revolution, came out of the kind of mess of America that came out of these people.
Sure.
So, so, so, so the thing is, when we think of monarchy as a, as a kind of an organizing force, you know, what we see is actually like, you know, if you're looking for a system that is this kind of single unified monarchy where the king tells everyone to do, you're looking at the like the world of the ancient Incas, right?
The Inca civilization was like this.
It was just incredibly, unbelievably, absolutely totalitarian.
And so what you see in successful systems is that it's like laying tile or something.
You have these blocks of monarchy, and then the blocks are competing with each other and holding each other accountable through competitive tensions.
Do you remember, you know, the movie The Third Man, of course?
Yeah, sure.
One of my favorites.
You know, that great Orson Welles speech about Italy and the Coco Clock.
Did you know that Orson Welles actually ad-libbed that speech?
It wasn't in the script.
Yeah, I know.
God knows where he came up with it.
But, you know, here's this incredible insight.
And this insight is running absolutely counter to what everyone believed at the time, because this is the era of Wendell Willkie, like one world.
People really believed in the United Nations.
They thought it was going to be like the EU, but for the world at the time that this movie is made.
Right.
And so basically when Orson Welles comes out and like says, he just says it like he really knows it.
I mean, the history is all false.
Like all these Swiss cakes were fighting each other, right?
You know, but when he says this kind of deep truth that's so counter to what everyone believes in that moment, it's just creates this really powerful, you know, moment because everyone in this, you know, in their bones knows that it's true.
It's like, it's the fact, you know, what keeps Apple effective?
It's a little tough because Apple is kind of a monopoly in some ways.
But imagine Apple without Android, right?
It would be a lot fatter and happier and basically more on its way toward evolving into something like the Department of Energy.
Most people don't know that the Department of Energy is the lineal bureaucratic successor of the Manhattan Project.
And it actually evolves into DOE.
And so when you look at the federal government, this is the, you know, the point that I, that's really important to note is that the difference, the most important difference between Apple and say the Department of Energy or the state of California, which is only in a way a symbolic difference.
Even the fact that it's a monarchy is different.
What's important is that Apple operates on what the U.S. military calls mission orders.
The idea of mission orders, there's a German name for it, but that doesn't mean the Nazis invented it.
The Germans call it Alftrag's tactic.
And it's a military idea.
And the idea is that you don't micromanage.
It's as simple as that.
You have some people who work for you.
You've got a mission to accomplish.
You've got resources.
You're like, okay, you do this, you do that.
You don't tell them how to do it.
The captain doesn't tell the lieutenant how to take the hill, just what hill to take.
This principle is fundamental to any large organization.
It's the principle of basically you don't get to question the mission, but you get to implement the mission however you see fit.
Okay.
This principle is profoundly alien to the functioning of the U.S. federal government and the civil service in particular.
Anything that acts, this is why anything that actually needs to get done gets contracted out.
Because actually the way the civil service operates is on the basis of process.
So if you're in the civil service, basically there's a process.
There's literally a law that's, you know, in many cases that's describing what you're there to do.
Let's say you're a vice consul at a consulate in Santo Domingo, which was my dad's first job back in the 70s in the State Department.
Your job is to apply U.S. immigration law.
And there's a process for applying U.S. immigration law.
That law basically describes what you're doing.
You're not like nobody comes to you and is like, hey, Herb, why don't we pick out 10 guys today who we think would make really good Americans?
Can I interrupt you for a sec?
Because there's so much coming at me that I really have to parse some of it and just take some of it apart.
So I understand, because obviously the first thing that conservatives theoretically are supposed to be worried about is freedom, is people having the freedom to.
And the idea, remember that the ideas coming out of an Apple or any company are generated by the profit motive.
They want to make money so that they have the freedom to collect this money and keep some substantial amount of it.
So they are inspired to do that.
All of those things.
So do you know that?
Do you know, I think I can I anticipate, I think, your question.
So do you know the concept of the theory of the firm?
This is a basic economics concept.
And, you know, the idea is like, why is Apple one block?
Why don't instead you have a bunch of people basically signing contracts with each other?
So in order to implement the functioning that is Apple, why don't you have, why isn't Apple, you know, why doesn't Apple in a libertarian contract oriented world, why do we still even have concepts like employee?
Why don't we basically just make deals between individuals and all of those agreements between individuals add up to Apple?
Right.
I used to be a libertarian, you know, so I can, I can, I can, I can speak libertarian pretty good.
In fact, this laptop is resting on, you know, three copies of Murray Rothbard.
So the Like, and and you know, the answer again is that basically, and I think this is one thing, it's sort of, you know, the kind of it's very interesting that historically, you know, we live in an age when to be a conservative is to emphasize freedom over, for example, duty, order, family, responsibility.
Well, I think all these things are necessary for freedom, but yes, well, yes, exactly.
And so, in a way, basically, I think that the conception of freedom that kind of goes, you know, back before the American era in the European tradition is that the amount of freedom that is healthy for any person or any system is completely dependent on the nature of that person or system.
My 16-year-old daughter, for example, needs a very different level of freedom from my 17-month-old son.
So, you know, if you have a child who's a heroin addict and they're 25, they need about as much freedom as an 18-month-old.
And so, you know, just as, you know, those are examples just on the individual level.
And then what we see is that, again, you know, freedom is in a sense the opposite of contract.
So when you sign an employment contract for Apple, you give up all kinds of freedoms for like very, very large parts of your day.
You agree to basically be part of this ordered system for getting things done for making these, frankly, amazing laptops that, you know, could only be done, you know, in this structure that is remarkably reminiscent of an army or a plantation or a manorial, you know, castle or something very, very antiquated.
And then you look at the way the really important things in our world are done, because as libertarian as you can be, you're always going to admit that the jobs, whether you go full Hans Hermann Hoppe and you believe in like private national defense, you know, there is still a job that needs to be done there.
Only the dead have seen the end of war, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And we agree that the jobs that we assign to government are in general much more important jobs than like making a really sleek laptop that just doesn't crash.
Right.
Right.
And actually making a sleek laptop that doesn't crash is much more important than what most companies do.
So you want the government to be run like a corporation, essentially.
Sure.
That's a very, very, but that's a simple thing to say.
Yeah.
But when you imagine what it means, people will pay lip service to that.
But the thing is, when people pay lip service to that, they don't understand.
It's like saying, let's say I have a Soviet tractor factory and I say in 1991 and I say the Soviet tractor factory should be run like a corporation.
Well, for, you know, 80 years, this tractor factory has been running as a Soviet bureaucracy.
So my first question is, why should I keep any of these people?
Why should I keep any of these assets?
Why, like...
The only thing that's troubling me here, just in terms of clarity, is Apple, theoretically, doesn't have the right to have me arrested.
It doesn't have the right to come to my house and say you're worshiping the wrong God.
I'm going to set you on fire.
Where the king does kind of, you know, I mean, and that's that's a tremendous power.
And the thing that the founders are always fiddling with is how do we keep that power from getting out of control?
Sure, sure.
And the founders are actually fiddling with a couple.
The founders, you know, I don't think the founders would find our current system to much resemble.
Oh, I think they could not.
Yeah, I agree.
I think they would just be like, what does this have to do with us?
Right.
You know, and I think that they would have the same reaction as like, you know, Roman senators from 200 BC looking at the empire in 400 AD.
They would just be like, what does this have to do with us?
Right.
Why do you still call it the Roman Republic?
What's up with that?
You know, and but they were actually struggling.
You know, one of the things that, you know, there's a couple of things when people talk about the founders, and I kind of got into this in my infamous debate with Chris Ruffo the other day.
There's a couple of things to remind ourselves when we talk about the founders.
One is that we tend to do this weird thing where we telescope the revolution of the 1770s into the Constitution, which is a phenomenon of the 1780s.
And because as you may know, the Constitution is actually the second American Republic.
You know how the French give their republicist numbers.
The first republic is the Articles of Confederation, the Congress of the Confederation.
Yeah, and I was thinking of that as you were speaking before, but that's right.
And here's a test for how you think about early American history.
When you think about the First Republic, other than the history of its army, what do you know about the history of the Articles of Confederation period?
Bearing in mind that this, the Congress of the Confederation, is like, you know, lasts about 13 years.
They felt that the Constitution did not centralize enough power, basically.
Do you know any of the names of the leaders?
Do you know any of the events?
Do you know what happened during that period?
It's a complete white spot on your brain.
It's like it's been, you know, X-rayed out with a protein, with a proton knife.
You actually don't know anything about it.
Seeing the Constitution as Software00:05:47
And the thing is that one of the reasons we don't generally understand that period in terms of, for example, right-left politics in America.
But actually, if you go back and read the period, like this, it's sort of what snaps into your mind very, very clearly is that by the late 1780s, pretty much everyone in the, you know, everyone responsible in the country, because the mob was really a thing at this time, pretty much everyone in the, you know, responsible in the country thought that this experiment in basically LARPing Greek democracy, LARPing Athenian democracy was not working.
And what was needed was something more Roman.
And of course, they were very, very into the classics at that time.
Specifically, as you probably know, you probably know the background in which people are like, hey, George Washington, do you want to be the king?
And he's like, no.
Okay.
So what the Constitution is, is a right-wing coup that basically establishes the quasi-monarchy Monarchy of the Federalist Party.
And within the Federalist Party, you have basically the co-founders of the United States government who are Washington and Hamilton.
But what I want to know, wait, wait, the question that I'm asking, though, is how do you answer the question?
Or do you care about the question, which is also fair?
What are we going to do to limit the powers of the king?
How do you so first of all, there's one of the classic or one of the fundamental kind of errors in terms of pre-democratic political science is that you don't, when the problem that you're facing in creating an accountable monarchy is you're actually caught between Scylla and Kurubdis because you need the CEO to not be micromanaged in any way.
You need him to actually be the CEO, but you need him to be accountable.
If you've hung around in the private sector much, for example, the way they solve this problem at Apple is they have a board of directors.
And what's really important about this system, which by the way, the word president was actually originally a corporate title before it was a political title.
So the founders had some experience with basically the kind of rising sort of corporate form.
They kind of, they knew how to form organizations very, very effectively.
So for example, in the Constitution, which was actually really supposed to be an accountable monarchy of this type, and which did function kind of as a startup under Alexander Hamilton, you know, what was supposed to do this job was the Electoral College.
And they didn't realize that politics would basically like blast through the Electoral College as if they put an overly weak seal on a nuclear reactor.
They really thought that the Electoral College was going to be a bunch of like anonymous, not of just not anonymous, of like, you know, prominent statesmen who would choose basically the candidates for president as if they were like CEO search firm.
So that was basically kind of the start of their design.
Of course, you know, I mean, like any system that you don't get a chance to test before it shipped, like the Electoral College just never worked at all.
So when you're basically looking at the Constitution sort of in this way, like a software engineer, you're like, oh, I see what they were trying to do here.
And, you know, you can also see what they were trying to do because they wrote about it in the Federalist Papers.
Now, you know, so they really understood the concept of an executive.
They really understood that, you know, the nature of an executive branch.
As I often say, we don't have an executive branch today.
We have an administrative branch.
It's a completely different thing.
And it's run by process set down by the judicial and legislative branches.
Really, like, you don't need to steal an election in this country because the president doesn't have any power over the executive branch.
And the, and like what to do about changing that is one thing, but like, you know, you might, you think you're electing Queen Elizabeth I out there, but you're actually electing Queen Elizabeth II.
And if that's the only thing you learned from me today, I think that's another fair assertion.
I was like, you know, I was going to say that I would be willing to have a monarchy if we have Queen Elizabeth I, but I'm afraid I'm afraid of all the people.
Here's the thing.
Just so sort of one minute, Curtis.
To put it in perspective, basically, so I have various gimcrack designs for trying to make a monarchy completely safe.
There are a lot too much to go into here.
But the basic question is that human history has run for thousands of years on one of three operating platforms, monarchy, oligarchy, or democracy.
What we have here is not a democracy because the people aren't powerful enough to rule it.
Very simply.
Like there's no alternatives besides oligarchy and democracy.
What you got is an oligarchy.
Now, you can say, well, a lot of crazy things can happen in a monarchy.
King can go insane.
He can get a brain tumor or whatever.
Yeah, that's dangerous, you know?
But if you look at the record of like true monarchies before the age of revolution, you're not seeing Hitler.
Three Operating Platforms00:00:41
You're not seeing Stalin.
You're seeing some who are good and some are okay.
You know what?
Pick any one of the Fortune 500 CEOs.
They'll probably do fine.
You want to start the second holocaust.
I got to stop here, but it's really interesting talking to you, guys.
I'd like you to come back.
I hope we'll get to do it again.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Thanks so much.
Nice to meet you.
All right.
Well, I'm waiting for Queen Elizabeth to come back.
I've always been a fan.
I'm a fan.
I'll write her.
I'll write her and see if she shows up.
But an interesting conversation.
For more brilliance and laughs and all kinds of things, candy, maybe even some little alcohol, come to the Andrew Clavin show on Friday.