#119 - Curtis Yarvin - The Tyranny of Democracy - The Illusion of Choice

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Peter McCormack Show – Episode #119

"Curtis Yarvin: The Tyranny of Democracy – The Illusion of Choice"

Date: October 14, 2025
Host: Peter McCormack
Guest: Curtis Yarvin

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Episode Overview

In this provocative and intellectually dense episode, Peter McCormack sits down with Curtis Yarvin (aka “Mencius Moldbug”), a controversial internet intellectual and critic of democracy. Together, they challenge the central myths of modern Western governance, dissecting the assumptions underpinning democracy, meritocracy, and populism. Yarvin systematically unpacks the illusions of choice and power that define contemporary politics, advocating for radical re-examination—if not outright rejection—of democratic dogma. The conversation roams from philosophy and history to modern policy, internet culture, and even hypothetical regime change, offering a sweeping diagnosis of societal stagnation and dysfunction.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Duality and Ambiguity of "Democracy"

• Curtis' Opening Thesis [00:00, 76:44]:

  • Democracy, as popularly understood, conflates two distinct ideas: populism (rule by the many) and meritocracy (rule by the best or most educated).
  • This ambiguity allows political actors (e.g., Soros, elite institutions) to wield the term for legitimacy, even when their practices are anti-populist.
  • Quote [00:00 / 74:37]:
    “Everybody who believes democracy is great believes either that populism is great or that meritocracy is great. But they also, all of them, believe that either populism is awful or meritocracy is awful. [...] Splitting the word in half into its reality and not letting it retain this fatal ambiguity allows you to basically sort of defeat each of these things in detail.” — Curtis Yarvin

• Populism vs Meritocracy:

  • Populism equated with raw political competition (“passengers electing the pilot”).
  • Meritocracy equated with technocratic, credentialed rule (“Harvardism”).
  • Both are unworkable at scale; both produce corruption or stagnation.

2. Monarchy & Organizational Effectiveness

• Historical Context [03:02, 52:18, 76:44]:

  • For most of history—about 98%—monarchical/pyramidal structures dominated.
  • Even modern organizations (businesses, families, armies) function like monarchies.
  • Quote [77:33]:
    “Imagine the government of California, not through a contractor, but literally itself, designing an iPhone. Imagine it assembling an iPhone. It's like imagining chickens inventing algebra.” — Curtis Yarvin

• Monarchy as Unacknowledged Model:

  • New York Times, Meta, and Apple cited as real-world modern “monarchies.”
  • Curt advocates recognizing this “org chart reality” instead of clinging to failed democratic forms.

3. Why Democracy "Fails"

• Historical Critique [06:41, 21:23, 65:32]:

  • Democracy was long viewed as a slur or failed experiment—most notably in ancient Athens.
  • The association of the progress of science or technology with democracy is baseless; the Nazis and Soviets were scientifically advanced but anti-democratic.
  • U.S. political “progress” is more narrative and self-justification than genuine improvement.

  Quote [06:41]:
  “It was always a bad idea. The word democracy was considered a slur up until really the 19th century.” — Curtis Yarvin

• System Maintenance & Oligarchy:

  • Modern states have become atheistic theocracies, or oligarchies—e.g., the “rule of Harvard.”
  • Parliament and the PM are ceremonial; real power lies in permanent bureaucracies (as represented in the show “Yes, Minister”).

4. The Corruption of Knowledge and Expertise

• The "Valve" Analogy [21:23, 43:17]:

  • Ideal: A “pure” life of the mind (academia) feeds truth into governance.
  • Reality: Power corrupts the marketplace of ideas; relevance and funding trump truth.
  • Merger of academia and power leads to self-reinforcing, careerist, and sometimes dangerous behavior (e.g., gain-of-function virology research, COVID origins) (see [30:23] for virology tangent).

  Quote [21:23]:
  “Everything is a bureaucracy. The ideas that prevail are no longer the best ideas but the most powerful... Power just comes rushing back up the pipe because power wants to flow uphill.” — Curtis Yarvin

5. On Revolutions, Regime Change, and Modern Stagnation

• Comparison to USSR collapse [03:02, 66:26]:

  • Popular delusion: Regime change is impossible until it becomes inevitable.
  • Soviet Union needed to discard not just a government or leaders, but a whole theory of government.
  • The West has not reckoned with this task for its own paradigm (“all we have is huge piles of books written by dead people and some great technology”).

• Modernity as a Prolonged Dead End:

  • Societies feel “stuck”; change is proscribed by institutional inertia and language control ("the tongue of Mordor").
  • People sense things aren’t improving; there’s no agreement or consensus.

6. Narratives, Historiography, and "Whig History"

• History as Political Propaganda [63:23, 73:53]:

  • “Whig history” is the progressive myth that everything is getting better.
  • Most history is politicized, revised with each regime; everyone believes in a narrative constructed to legitimize the present order.
  • The American Revolution analogized to the Vietnam War as a fundamentally misunderstood and mythologized civil conflict.

  Quote [73:53]:
  "Everything is just narrative. And that narrative has evolved to be as powerful as possible." — Curtis Yarvin

7. Pathways for Change: Elections, Not Pitchforks

• On Civil War and Change [108:39, 111:25]:

  • Modern “mobs” are toothless compared to historical ones; the capacity for real violence or challenge isn’t present.
  • All meaningful change in the West must occur through elections and lawful transfers of power—not revolutions or mass violence.
  • Advocates for a “Bukele” or FDR-style move: win elections, then consolidate real power ("auto-coup").

  Quote [108:41]:
  “We are one of the most nonviolent and least self-violently organizing populations in history... The energy just isn’t there and hasn’t been there for a long time.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the word “Democracy” [09:11]:

  • “What I’m really convinced needs to be abolished is actually the word democracy, because the word is extremely meretricious... Make a practice of basically not using the language of the regime, or what you might call the tongue of Mordor.” — Curtis Yarvin

• Academic Power and COVID [30:23]:

  • “Virology has turned into this massive cobra farm that killed 20 million people... Do you suppose this affects other aspects of government as well?” — Curtis Yarvin

• Escape Valves and Disillusionment [65:54]:

  • “Where's the escape valve? Where's the therapy...? If the escape valve is discussing the idea that maybe this democracy is a bad idea, it's like, whoa, we can't have that discussion.” — Peter McCormack

• On Monarchy's Modern Echoes [92:38]:

  • “My favorite monarchy, the most important monarchy today, is a fifth generation absolute hereditary monarchy called the New York Times.” — Curtis Yarvin

• Why Violence Is Off the Table [119:26]:

  • “The anti-government mob actually has political potential in theory, but it has zero capacity for violence.” — Curtis Yarvin

• On Modern Elites and Potential for Change [115:34]:

  • “There is a fracturing of the elites right now… but it's at a very young stage... it's much more timid and much more unready to rule than most people suppose.” — Curtis Yarvin

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Important Segment Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment Topic | |----------------|---------------------------------------------| | 00:00–02:55 | What is democracy? Its contradictions | | 03:02–06:29 | Revolutionary change and systemic inertia | | 06:41–10:04 | Historical view on democracy, populism, and meritocracy | | 13:04–21:23 | From aristocratic progressives to today’s oligarchy | | 21:23–30:23 | How power corrupts academia, virology story | | 43:17–46:44 | The infinite money printer and self-correction loss | | 52:18–52:58 | Aristotle’s three systems: monarchy, oligarchy, democracy | | 62:20–66:26 | UK political crisis; the "illusion of hope" | | 73:53–74:26 | Everything as narrative, democracy as schizophrenia | | 76:44–78:12 | Monarchy as the hidden structure of effective organizations | | 108:39–111:02 | Why Westerners can't do civil wars anymore | | 111:25–112:10 | Bukele, FDR, and "auto-coups" as template | | 115:34–117:19 | Fracturing of elites and new potential | | 119:28–121:40 | Pro-government vs. anti-government riots, loss of mob power |

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Tone and Atmosphere

The conversation is lively, witty, and combative, peppered with Yarvin’s erudite asides, arch metaphors, and dry humor. McCormack plays both earnest skeptic and curious student, coaxing clearer statements from Yarvin as he interrogates and sometimes challenges (or laughs at) his guest’s arguments.

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Final Thoughts

Curtis Yarvin’s critique boils down to a rejection of the linguistic and institutional ambiguities that prop up modern democracy, insisting that only by naming and discarding its myths can genuine reform—or regime change—even be envisioned. He doubts that revolution-by-pitchfork is possible anymore, and proposes instead a frank discussion of monarchy (in its many forms) as the default, time-tested model for human organization—even if it offends modern democratic sensibilities.

Despite Yarvin’s controversial stances, the episode offers a rich, challenging, and occasionally darkly comedic guide to the contradictions and limits of Western political imagination.

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Transcript

[Curtis Yarvin]

Everybody who believes democracy is great believes either that populism is great or the meritocracy is great. But they also, all of them believe that either populism is awful or meritocracy is awful. And so actually just splitting the word in half into its reality and not letting it retain this fatal ambiguity allows you to basically sort of defeat each of these things in detail. You know, here is the problem. You have this couple who is right about each other. And as Aristotle said, there's only two forms. Oh, wait, there's a third form of government which has been used basically by 98% of regimes for all of history. Moreover, this third form of governance, which is monarchy, which is basically just a description of an org, of a pyramid shaped org chart, is not only used by 98% of governments in history, it is used by all effective organizations in the world today.

[Peter McCormack]

This episode is brought to you by our lead sponsor and massive legends iron, the largest Nasdaq listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. Now, they're not just powering the bitcoin network, they're also providing cutting edge computer resources for AI, all backed by renewable energy. Now, my boy Danny and I have been working with their founders, Dan and Will for quite some time now and we've always been super impressed with their values, especially their commitment to local communities and sustainable computing power. So if you're interested in mining bitcoin or harnessing AI compute power, Iron is setting the standard. And so you can find out [e-mail], which is Irene.com that is iron.com. right. Curtis, good evening.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Hello.

[Peter McCormack]

I was in, I was in Las Vegas about a week and a half ago and my good friend, I went for lunch with him and we were, I was pitching about the state of the UK and he said, you need to go watch these interviews courtesy Arvin and the New York Times. Go and watch it. So I went back to the hotel.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Watched it and had you heard of me before? Vaguely.

[Peter McCormack]

I heard the name and I think I'd seen you because of the Constantine show. But like, I hadn't engaged with it because I hadn't known anything about you. But when I was talking about what's going on in the uk, he was like, just go and watch this New York Times interview. It's brilliant. And I did. Then I watched the Tucker one and then I think I watched, which is much older. Which is, yeah, much older. But I think I watched. I basically spent about 24 hours watching everything. Jesus Christ. Reached out to my guy Joe and You were in the uk I was. So I missed you there. And then he said you were in New York. So I said to Connor, we got to fly. We got to do this. I wanted to talk to you, and I tell you why. The reason. Well, there's loads of questions I've got, but one of the main reasons I wanted to talk to you is because I kind of came to this realization that I think we've lived in this world. Tell me if I'm from here, that as long as I've lived, things have always been kind of the same. So we kind of expect it to.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Always be the same.

[Peter McCormack]

But there is a reality that revolutions happen, things change, and we should at least discuss that.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And the more stagnant they are, the more suddenly they seem to change. And one way, I was just up at Yale. I did a Yale Political Union event and a Federalist Society event about things which would have been utterly unthinkable a year ago. Not even. Especially two years ago, where I did come to Yale two years ago. But it was like I had to sneak in. And the way I was expressing this in my YPU speech was that, of course, the obvious comparison is to the Soviet Union. But the thing about discarding the Soviet Union was that not only did you have to discard these leaders, not only did you have to discard this government, not only did you have to discard the system of government, but you had to discard the whole theory of government and even to some extent, a theory of man, in order to be rid of the Soviet Union. And one of the things you notice about that problem is you notice this sort of curious effect where big things are easier than small things. So actually, Everybody in the mid-80s was thinking about, how do we reform the Soviet Union? How do we fix this? The grain harvest, comrade, it's too low. Our transistors are just fat. They're just fat transistors just no good. We get these calculators from West Germany, and they're incredible. How do they make these things? And you just have this feeling that you're losing and you can see lose all around you. And you want to push back against the lose, but you want to repair the fabric of the system. And you don't see. No, actually, at a certain point, that was probably a long time ago, it's become much easier to replace it than repair it. But the thing is, when we're thinking about the age of these political ideas in the Soviet Union, they only had to throw out about 80 years of political history in Other words, basically the entire. I mean, in the fall of the Soviet Union, there were still people that remembered tsarism, Right? And I think the equivalent period for our system of government is actually about 400 years. So it's a bigger lift. And moreover, it's also a much bigger lift because the Soviets could, or thought they could just revert to the Western system of government. It was very few people that said, like Solzhenitsyn said, hey, no, not so fast. You can't just flip over to the Western system because maybe the Western system isn't perfect either. And nobody really heard that. He made this famous speech at Harvard in 1978 where he says this, and people are like, what the hell? I thought you were supposed to be for freedom, man. And so actually, that flip over. That flip over involves basically, we don't even. They at least thought they had a model to go off of. We don't have a living model to go off of at all. We don't have anything, right? We don't have anything except huge piles of books written by dead people. That's basically what we have, huge piles of books written by dead people and some great technology. And those are sort of our ingredients. But I'm entirely convinced that that is the magnitude of change needed to change the way we think about the way we govern ourselves in a way that will basically. And the acid test for that is, how can the west leap ahead of China?

[Peter McCormack]

Is it for you? It's not that democracy has historically failed, it's just failing now because we've had such massive changes in technology, wealth, social ability.

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, no, no, no, no. It was always a bad idea. And, well, I mean, the word democracy was considered. It was a slur up until really the 19th century, right? You start to. John Adams will tell you that democracy is the worst system of government ever, right? His second cousin Samuel Adams might have praised it, but he might also have just dodged the word because it had such a bad name. If you go to the page on Athenian democracy, the Wikipedia page, the last time I looked, I'm sure these things change all the time. But there's a quote about Athenian democracy from a modern scholar. And modern scholars are not, I think, generally that good on the subject. But he's like, it's sort of stunning that actually people have spent the last almost 2,500 years trying to larp this form of government, when every writing, extant writing we have from the period says that it was absolutely horrible and led to the fall of Athens, right? And executed Socrates. Right. And so you're like, the question of why people keep being attracted to this starts to be a little like the question of why people. Why rats keep being attracted to cocaine. Maybe the cocaine isn't actually so good for the rats after all. Right. You know, and, like, can we think that? Can we suspect it? Because, you know, Xenophon certainly thought it, you know, and the Plato, I mean, certainly thought it. Socrates probably thought it as, you know, the hemlock did whatever horrible thing it does to you, you know. Yeah. So first of all, you have this word democracy. And when I was debating Professor Rubenfeld at the YPU the other day, I grew. There was not. It's like countervailing speeches and not enough. Really back and forth is kind of criticism of the format. So I got like, a minute as a general rebuttal. And one of the things, after hearing a lot of voices, including student voices on the subject, I was like, what I'm really convinced needs to be abolished is actually the word democracy, because the word is extremely meretricious. We can start by not using the word. Actually make a practice of basically not using the language of the jargon of the regime, or what you might call the tongue of Mordor. Like, if somebody uses a word that starts with iv and ends in ursity in my presence, I grow. I kind of give them a look. I'm like, you could have said variety. You're really entirely capable of saying variety in this situation. There will be a time when it is appropriate to say this word, but not here, not now. And that's because you're invoking power when you use these words. The word democracy means legitimate, blessed government. How democratic is a government is how blessed is it? And one of the sort of the easy kind of brain twisters, which you can sort of use to unwrap your brain from this a little bit, is notice that the words democracy and politics have opposite valence. So calling anything democratic is a compliment. Calling it political is an insult. And I was talking to a professor the other day. He even started talking very seriously about the idea that we need democracy without elections. You know, most people will say, well, I love democracy, but, you know, does it really have to mean putting politicians in charge of the government?

[Peter McCormack]

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[Curtis Yarvin]

No. And moreover, there's never an answer. And you are also distracted by the Cape rather than the Matador in a way. Because actually, as you probably know. Yes, Minister. Think of it that great of very accurate. Even when I was growing up as a child of the American deep state, I knew about. Yes, Minister. Because it was actually the only thing that told the truth about my parents world in a very comic sort of way. And the reality is that Sir Humphrey Appleby is really in charge of everything. And the importance of Parliament or the Prime Minister or Jim Hacker MP or even Jim Hacker PM to Sir Humphrey Appleby is. Is in a way comparable to the importance of Charles iii. Right. You have a fundamentally ceremonial form of government. And so what you're looking at is a system which is different from the ussr, but not as different as you might think. Moreover, the level of historical connections is extremely deep and intriguing. For example, did you know about your Prime Minister's summer vacation?

[Peter McCormack]

No.

[Curtis Yarvin]

In Czechoslovakia.

[Peter McCormack]

I didn't know about that.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh yes. Oh yes. You know, Keir Starmer as a teenager was basically, you know, spent a summer in a program behind the Iron Curtain. Now maybe he's a Fabian. Yes, we know. Fabians. We know. Did I mention that? We know. Do you know their original logo of the Fabian Society?

[Peter McCormack]

No.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It is literally, I don't imagine how they did this. You can look this up. You will not believe me. This sounds like a BS Internet myth. It is absolutely true. It is literally a wolf in sheep's clothing.

[Peter McCormack]

Connor, you gotta find that for me.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Bring it up.

[Peter McCormack]

You gotta find that. So he was probably crying during the Velvet Revolution.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, shit.

[Peter McCormack]

It is.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Bring that one up the top left. Oh, yeah. Holy. You know, so, right. You know, so actually we're dealing with a wolf here, you know, and like all of this sheep stuff and you know, when the wolf in sheep's clothing addresses you is will you not be kind and gentle fellow sheep? You know, that's not really. You want to be a dog and not a sheep, basically.

[Peter McCormack]

So is democracy really there to allow the slide into socialism?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Democracy again, if we stop using this word, we will immediately feel much better. So let me explain how to stop using this word.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay?

[Curtis Yarvin]

There are in fact two things, very discreet and understandable things that we know by common names for which we use the word democracy interchangeably. These two things are at war with each other. So it's as if we use the same word for elves and orcs or something. Right? As soon as you disambiguate this very slippery word, democracy, you can split it into two things in contemporary political language that will immediately be understood whenever you are tempted to say democracy, say either populism, which is a somewhat slippery word, but we'll sort of get back to that and roll it up. Or meritocracy. Okay, okay. So having one word for populism and meritocracy allows Soros world to basically go around the continent claiming that he's for democracy, when actually he believes that politicians should have no power at all. And this is not a new phenomenon, this is a century long phenomenon. And, and what happens even before communism in the sort of Fabian period, broadly, which is the late, of course, 19th century, the way I like to basically really get inside the head of a tradition is go back in time far enough where I actually like it. So basically my personal guru is an English writer named, a Scottish writer named Thomas Carlyle, okay. Who I recently learned, actually I think he's pronounced it Carlisle, which is very weird to me, but I'll just keep saying Carlisle.

[Peter McCormack]

There's a town in the north of England called Carlisle.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And absolutely fabulous writer. And even though I think his work that I like the most is actually some of his least read work, but the John Ruskin, whose name you might recognize is a student of Carlyle's, and the Ruskinites sparked this sort of Ruskin is basically an influencer, as is Carlyle in his own way. Ruskin is really an influencer. And so there's this late 19th century cult of Ruskin and the Ruskinites you might recognize. Kind of the Arts and Crafts movement is related, like Art Nouveau, but also the Fabians come out of the Ruskinites. So in America, there's a group called the Liberal Republicans, also known as the Mugwumps. Some of my favorite writers. Henry Adams might recognize the name. Charles Francis Adams Jr. Probably don't recognize the name his brother. Even better. Brooks Adams. Amazing. Brooks Adams, total critic of democracy. He writes this. So Henry Adams wrote a novel called Democracy, which is really about how awful politics is. Published it anonymously because that was the times. Brooks Adams wrote the law of civilization and decay, which is this kind of spinglarian rant. Bear in mind these people are all great grandsons of John Adams. They're grandsons of John Quincy Adams. These are great American hereditary aristocrats. It's like the fricking Kennedys. So imagine if the editor of the New Yorker is also a member of the Kennedy family. So this is intense aristocracy, concentrated superpower aristocracy. These people basically look at politics in what we now call the Gilded Age. They would have said the great barbecue. And I'm going to confine this to the sort of the American side. There's a parallel English side. These people look at American politics in this period. They see that it's disgusting and corrupt and basically creates things like sort of. So Lincoln is sort of this revolutionary figure, and Thaddeus Stevens, who follows him is still more revolution. Thaddeus Stevens is never president. He's leading the country from out of the Senate. This is the period of radical Reconstruction. Just insane piece of the 20th century that dropped into the 19th century, imposes basically third world government in the American South. People are like, oh, my God. They'd never seen the Third World before, but they saw it. And that basically retreats, as revolutions do, and comes into sort of the Gilded Age, where if you drive around New York, basically everything cool was sort of built in this between 1850 and 1950, basically. And. And they look at the way they're governed under literal democracy. Literal democracy, meaning populism, meaning politicians are in charge of the government. So literal democracy, Politicians are in charge of the government. And what do they do? They're idiots. They steal. They run political machines. They're Boss Tweed. You've probably heard the name Boss Tweed. So what you basically get here's this beautiful mechanism that John Locke is fantasizing about or whatever. And what you actually get is a bunch of Irishmen in electing Boss Tweed. They were a little bigoted, let's face it. They had a very. The level of racism you need to despise the Irish is a very high level of racism that isn't really available today. So these are bigoted people and they're profoundly aristocratic, prejudiced in every way. They consider themselves absolutely superior to everyone in the world, except maybe certain people in London. And they're probably right about all of these things. And they're like, this is a shit show. And so they're basically like, you know what we're going to do? We are going to relearn the lesson of Plato and we are going to become a new guardian class. And we feel ourselves to be entirely capable and righteous and ready to rule. We know how this is done. We know it's not Boss Tweed. There's a coming world of science. We're going to rule scientifically and it's gonna be amazing, right? And again, this is before. This is turn of the century stuff. And into that comes also. So there's a sort of statesmanlike energy and then there's this religious missionary, mainline Protestant missionary world that basically feels the same sense of aristocracy, but also believes it can literally turn everyone in the world into the same kind of aristocrat. And we have adopted that wholly unfounded, actually objective scientific belief is woven very, very deeply into the basis of our culture. And there's no evidence for it whatsoever. And so this is their kind of. That is one strain in it. And that strain sort of grows the strongest over time until it basically leads to where we are. But of course, there's this aristocratic strain and really the first generation of American progressives, these are progressives with like a capital P. Progressive has been a euphemism for communists since roughly the 1930. My grandparents were communists. They used that euphemism. That's normal, right? Communist actually means you're a member of the party. Progressive means you're a supporter of the party. While there was a party, there's no longer really a party. But that's just like cancer, going from a centralized mass to a decentralized mass. So in any case, that's the backstory basically, is that aristocrats were like, you know what? Literal democracy populism is not working. So we need to invent basically this Platonic oligarchy, which we're going to call democracy, because for the same reason that the United Kingdom is still called a kingdom, although frankly, it's not sad.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, we're sad.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, it is sad. And the. I was just reading Blackstone on the laws of the king. Maybe more about that later. But in any case, these Platonic aristocrats basically were like, all right, we are going to govern in a statesmanlike way, but we are going to be the first ever to bring science into statesmanship. Thus was born the world of social science. This idea that we can be governed by numbers and formulas, you know, and, you know, things, concepts like even, like GDP or even the way we measure inflation. These are wholly 20th century concepts. They were introduced in an absolutely thriving America and just obviously thriving America. You've seen pictures of the streets in the 20s, even the 30s, you know, and I'm just like, you know, if this was the end you came to, if this was where the rule you followed brought you of what you use was the rule, right? You know, they have all of this social science, all of this kind of scientific and basically pseudo scientific intellect that's put together in mimicry of the obvious triumphs of actual science. And of course, this is done on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It is not. I mean, the Soviets are only minor deviation from this. Basically. They're really part of the same phenomenon. And it was thought basically. And you find again, if you go farthest back, you find this thought most clearly that these Platonic guardians, these Fabians, these professors, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, they're living the pure life of the mind in their ivory towers. You've heard of the marketplace of ideas. They're buying, they're selling, they're in the marketplace of ideas. It's all good, right? And in the marketplace of ideas, the best ideas triumph, right? Like truth will always defeat fiction. Well, here is the problem. This is the fundamental flaw with this design because they seem to have solved the problem of who watches the watchdogs forever and ever perfectly. And what they were gonna do is they were gonna create the disgusting sewer of Gilded Age politics. And they had identified this pure, clean glacial lake. And they were just gonna open the drain in the lake and let the lake rush into the sewer and just clean it out with, you know, 50,000 PO pounds of pressure per square inch. All this disgusting stuff would be removed. And it was an absolutely wild idea, as wild as any of my ideas today, that professors would be running the country in 1900, right? And they had this wild, visionary, brilliant idea because they knew that they were capable of ruling and they knew that there were. They had 30 IQ points, 50 IQ points. I don't know. Boss Tweed, right? Guy probably doesn't even read. He's like his mark. He sounds like his mark. I don't know, you know, and like the. So it seemed like a real no brainer to them and they forgot only one thing. There was only one technical, one small technical error that doomed this utopia, which is that there wasn't a valve in the pipe and so water flows downhill. But ideas are not really like that. And especially what really loves to flow uphill is power. And so they thought that if they put the world of ideas in control of power and the world of ideas, which was pure, in which basically the best idea would win. Here's a wonderful demonstration of this. I got something that everybody, every intellectual should own, which is a Victorian encyclopedia. I honestly do not know how they did encyclopedias with Victorian technologies. Chambers encyclopedia from the 1870s. How do you do an encyclopedia with their computers? I don't know. That's like saying, how do you record music before electricity? I have no idea. And yet they kind of manage. And this is 12 volume encyclopedia, very, very full, interesting encyclopedia. Really this beautiful picture of the past, right? And then because it's actually hard to update an encyclopedia without computers, right, they would do. The 12th edition would be like the 11th edition, actually. I also have a 12th edition Britannica which also does this. The 1911 Britannica is really a great one, but the 12th edition is much cheaper and just has some supplemental volumes. The 1911 Britannica is like Wikipedia. If every entry was written and edited by leading scholars in the field whose names are actually visible there. It's an incredible document. In any case, I'm reading the supplement on chemistry and the supplement on chemistry is usually three or four years later is, you know, we've been thinking a lot about chemistry and we've decided that, you know, it's no longer right. You know, we were writing water as HO, but really it is correct to write it as H2O. And they're just like, oh yeah, we'll just fix that, right? You know, today, if there would be like this like lifelong generational struggle between the HO people and the H2O people, and the HO people would know that if they lost that struggle, they would lose their jobs, their careers, their livelihood, probably their wives, right? You know, and like, you know, they would not give up. You know, they would, they would fight tooth and nail for ho. Like ho would be absolutely stuck. That's the way that 21st century science works. Victorian science, which created this goddamn modern World without which we have no. They're like, oh, yeah, It's H, it's H2O. That's the way it's supposed to work, right? You know, but the way it actually works in this system, now that you've taken this beautiful life of the mind with the academics, like dancing around the fairy groves and the robes and intoning, having symposiums, which is clearly the way it's supposed to be, is that now everything. Because basically power matters. Everything is a bureaucracy. Everything has the structure and even worse, the ideas. There's a conflict of interest. The ideas that prevail are no longer the best ideas because actually there's another, you know, evolution. You know, the marketplace of ideas is based on evolution. And evolution is the survival of the fittest. It's not the survival of the best, it's not the survival of the smartest, it's the survival of the fittest. Evolution can make you dumber as well as smarter, stronger, weaker, as well as stronger, smaller as well as bigger. There is no, like, trend line in evolution, right? And what happens when you basically connect, you know, the beautiful blue lake of ideas without any valve whatsoever to the, you know, incredible sewer of power is power just comes rushing back up the pipe because power wants to flow uphill and just huge bubbles of sewage start appearing in your beautiful alpine lake. We call this sewage communism, basically. There's a number of words for it, but communism is a good one. But it's not a specific set of ideas. It's a way that ideas evolve in this context. And the way that ideas evolve is suddenly it's not survival of the truest anymore, it's survival of the most relevant. Because actually, suddenly the quest in academia becomes the quest for funding and the quest for power and the quest for relevance. Because actually, because your ideas can control government policy directly. Impact really matters when you're in this ivory tower. You want to be doing something that is relevant to power. And I think there's no better illustration of this. And this was the illustration I used much more quickly. Sadly, at ypu the other day at Yale, I was basically like, like, let's think about virology. Now the thing is, when we think about virology, I think we can all agree that virology is a public good. Because actually defending our species or the whole species really against viruses is not unlike defending the Earth against asteroids or aliens. You've heard of this alien spaceship that's going to come kill us in a couple months, probably Three Eye Atlas, probably not, but you never know. And, and it could render a lot of this stuff, frankly pretty irrelevant. But let's keep on, you know, like, you know, and, and the, the. Probably not. And it's probably just academic puffery. I suspect it's a big comment. But it's a really big. It's a really big comment. I suspect it's just a comment. And also the nickel, the tail is in the wrong direction.

[Peter McCormack]

It's probably just because this is long fin, though.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, but that's just because the exposure is stretched so it looks like a cylinder. Of course, it doesn't mean it's not a cylinder. The tail is also pointing in the wrong direction as though it was like a deceleration jet. I mean, it's probably nothing. I wouldn't worry. I wouldn't worry. Don't worry. And again, there's no way, there's no way it would help anyway. Anyway. Anyway. Off of aliens. Off of aliens. You know, what happens in virology is a nice case in point because the nominal goal of virology is to defend us from viruses. So if you have no conflicts of interest, if you're working in a system entirely without conflicts of interest, then you will be striving every day to defend humanity from viruses. You will not be striving every day to infect humanity with viruses. And the idea that you would infect humanity with viruses will be very atrocious to you. And yet somehow we did, conceivably. Actually, you know, the issue with COVID isn't so much, you know, I don't think anyone has a really serious case that it was intentional. I think we're looking at second degree murder here at most, which is a pretty minor crime. On the other hand, 20 million people is kind of. A lot of them were old. They were going to die anyway.

[Peter McCormack]

So negligence.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, negligence. But like kind of big time negligence. And also the behavior after the negligence really should have been, oh my God, we screwed up. Here's the Wuhan virus database. Where's the Wuhan virus database? Here's the. We totally screwed up. We own it. I am personally going to shave my head and retire to a monastery. I did not mean to kill 20 million people, but I did. That's how it went down. That is not how we saw them behave.

[Peter McCormack]

And there was money to be made.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes, but the money is the least important thing. I'm more worried about how this happened and why this happened. And I would first point out that it is entirely possible. Let's give the wet market people their due. It's Entirely possible that, as Jon Stewart put it, a bat met a pangolin and they fell in love. I'm not buying it. If you've seen the Jon Stewart episode, like two minutes of Jon Stewart, my God, the man is a genius. I don't know who wrote that for him. They wrote it perfectly. He delivers it perfectly. And I'm like, I will forget the rest of Jonathan Stewart's entire career for that one clip. Okay, I'll just forget it. I'll pretend it didn't happen. You know? And the. But maybe it was a coincidence. But even if it was coincidence, in their private Slack messages, some of these virologists basically looked at this grant and was like, wow, this looks like a recipe for Covid. So they made a recipe for Covid and they were cooking it. Maybe the recipe didn't turn out and Covid just happened independently because of bat met a pangolin in Wuhan where there are no bats. Okay, okay, okay, okay, Right. It's possible. It's possible. But the real issue is basically, in terms of government policy, is the cost benefit of this work from the perspective of the nominal interest of virology. Because the idea that actually there's no benefit whatsoever has been demonstrated for this gain of function work. Actually, people just kind of wave their hands and say, well, science is good. Knowledge is good. Wasn't that the motto in Animal House? Yeah, science is good. Trust us. Science is good. More money, please. Trust the science, more money, please. Right. And that's the way Echo Health alliance was essentially going about its work. And there's an interesting story, actually, behind EcoHealth Alliance. If I can diverge for a second, and just as a way of illustrating the absolutely diabolical effects of eliminating that valve between the life of the mind and power. Are you familiar with named Gerald Durrell?

[Peter McCormack]

No.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Lawrence Durrell?

[Peter McCormack]

No.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Lawrence Durrell was a famous author of the early 20th century. He wrote the Alexandria Quartet and other famous literary works. His brother, Gerald Durell, whose books I read a ton of as a kid. Cause I grew up in, like, Commonwealth countries where Gerald Durrell was everywhere, was a zoologist, and he was the most engaging essayist. And he went to basically various decaying corners of the soon to be defunct British Empire and collected cute, fuzzy animals and brought them home to a zoo that he established in Jersey. Not New Jersey, but Jersey. And lovely, lovely writer. Delicious experiences. Kids love animals, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And this business of collecting. There's a show that was huge in the US The Durrell family Something, something, something. Based on his life in Corfu as a child. Beautiful, romantic. So, Durrell, basically, of course, we live in the era of what you call, I believe, the quango, we call it the ngo. And he founds a quango. And the purpose of his quango is to go and collect little fuzzy animals and breed them and restore and save the species from the disastrous collapse of Africa or whatever, right? Which he never, of course, mentions. He's not political and this is all very good and true. And he finds this alliance called the Wildlife Trust, which goes, maybe you can see where I'm going with this, maybe not, which goes to, you know, and goes and collects wildlife. And of course, he grows old and passes away. And he is replaced as the leader of the Wildlife Trust by his successor, also an ecologist, a man named Peter Daszak. And Peter Daszak realizes that the purpose of an NGO is not to actually collect cute, funny monkey babies, to collect money, but to get grants. And he's like, actually, the thing about spider monkeys or whatever is they're not relevant. But you know what's relevant? Viruses. And so the Wildlife Trust becomes Echo Health alliance and they start to get Pentagon grants for hunting viruses. And this really kicks into high gear, of course, after Stars one, because Stars one is a real wet market escape. And so everyone, this is why where the wet market came from. It's just what everyone was looking for. It's ascertainment bias. And so this creates basically EcoHealth alliance, which basically goes to the bat caves in southern China and Yunnan and is like, how can we find more of these bat coronaviruses to establish that they could be a threat to humanity? Because actually, if they're a threat to humanity, we should study them because they're a threat to humanity. Now, the problem with these bat viruses is they're actually bat viruses. Actually, each bat is infected with like several coronaviruses. So, like there's a whole lot of coronaviruses. Most of them, you could like snort them in pure powder and they do absolutely nothing because they're bat viruses. But sometimes they mutate and the mutation is a random thing. You know, it's a cosmic ray, comes out of space, alters, changes a G to an A or something. How can we predict that that's going to happen? That was the name of one of these studies. Predict. Well, one way to predict that that could possibly happen is to mutate them ourselves. How could they possibly mutate? And it's like you find your 10 year old son, you come home and your 10 year old son is setting fire to the kitchen curtains. And you're like, kevin, what are you doing? And it's like science. And you're like, science is like, well, science says that over 40% of house fires start in the kitchen. What if the curtains caught fire? Could we get out? Could the dog get out? And that's when you realize that you have a problem. We have a problem like that. We have to talk about Kevin. Kevin has a name and his name is Peter Daszak. And Peter Daszak has actually shut down Echo Health alliance and founded a new organization under a different name, which is now going out and getting grants. Actually. The importance of coronavirus has only been proven by these events. There are more virus hunters than ever. Moreover, if you think, well, Trump will save us from this, well, all right, so I forget his name, unfortunately, but Fauci is out. Fauci had a somewhat checkered record with AIDS as well, as you might recall.

[Peter McCormack]

Kind of got away with it, though.

[Curtis Yarvin]

The amazing genius. There's a kind of Moriarty level criminal genius of not only inventing this thing, but actually successfully covering it up. I mean, oh my God, right? And what a genius, right? And you have to salute them in the same way that you're just like, wow, how does Ted Bundy do all those things? Or like Hitler. Amazing graphic design, right? Fauci, right? Amazing bureaucrat, master of bureaucracy, emperor of virology for 30 years, the Robert Moses of virology. There will never be anyone like him, but he's replaced by, all right, and they're working on actually shutting down gain of function research. They're working on this. They are trying. They're seriously trying. Unfortunately, the person that they replaced, and I don't think they're funding any more coronavirus research. And the fellow who replaced Fauci, actually, God Eichelberger, something like that, as the chief of virology, is also a great virologist who made us, who showed his greatness. A lot of scientists have this one great idea that makes their name. And his great idea was, what if, holy cow, he was in the bath, he was in the shower one day and it came to him, we could resurrect the 1918 flu. Absolutely. You think I'm fucking joking. I'm not fucking joking. And he's like, I know what we'll do in Alaska. We'll go to Alaska. I swear to God, I'm not making this up. We will go to Alaska. And in the permafrost in Alaska. Sounds like a thing. There must be Bodies of people who died from the 1918 flu. We can exhume the bodies, we can dig them up, we can restore them, restore the virus, and we can study it. And he literally did exactly this and it made his fricking career. And that is who is running virology today, right? So basically you're like, you know, the famous New Yorker cartoon of like, the audience is like, you know, what do these dumb pilots know about flying? You know, let's elect the captain. You know, that's literal democracy.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Okay, here we have meritocracy, right? And the thing is, you know, and if you generalize across what happened here, what you see is that basically by saying, defining the way virology is funded according to the impact of the science, you've inadvertently created. There's this famous effect that happened in the raj in India, the cobra problem, where the raj was like, well, people are being bitten by snakes. We need to stamp out cobras. How about a bounty for every cobra head you bring in? So what did the Indians do? You can guess. They started farming cobras. And so virology has turned into virology. This unimportant, this small part of virology is good, but honestly, we haven't really solved viruses. We could probably do without it. Virology has turned into this massive cobra farm that killed 20 million people. And then I'm like, do you suppose this affects other aspects of government as well? And I'm like, wow. We had this policy of expanding NATO to the east. Now we could figure out why we wanted to expand NATO to the east. We had to expand NATO to the east. Like any addict, we kept promising the Russians we would not expand NATO to the east. And then we expanded NATO to the east. And why many experts have. There were actually the people who should be running virology today, People like Richard Ebright. And just name names. Richard Ebright. People who warned against not only gain of function research, but these specific coronavirus experiments. Like, if there were a marketplace of ideas that worked, these guys would never, like, they would be entitled by law to three blowjobs a day. I don't know, something. It was just like the people who warned against Covid and were not listened to. Like the idea that these people have not been granted even by the Trump administration simply the right to fire anyone they like and basically recommend anyone they like for prosecution. That would be their appropriate way to handle this. Right. You know, in a system that was actually as self correcting as we think this system is. But it does not appear to be very self correcting does it, you know, and so that's meritocracy. Meritocracy has basically said we are going to evolve all of the ideas in this marketplace of ideas to be as powerful as possible.

[Peter McCormack]

But it's not a real marketplace.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, it is a real marketplace. It's just a marketplace that's rewarding things that you and I don't happen to really like. It is a real marketplace, but it's.

[Peter McCormack]

A marketplace financed by an infinite money printer.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, there's that, there's that certainly, but it is actually supported even more so. I mean, it's sort of part of the state in that sense. The infinite money printer is a problem. We should get to that. We should get to that. But even if the system was running on hard money, it would still have a very serious problem.

[Peter McCormack]

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[Curtis Yarvin]

So let me rephrase what you're saying in a way. When you're running a government on soft money, you have lost a source of self correction that is very powerful. You have lost the corrective effect of reality because you were actually able to borrow infinitely. And because you were able to borrow infinitely, especially if you have the global reserve currency because your great grandparents conquered the world, okay? You know, you basically have. You have a spectacularly unaccountable state, and your spectacularly unaccountable state is basically free of any real constraints on the bizarre pseudo evolution of this marketplace of ideas. So it can go almost infinitely crazy.

[Peter McCormack]

But its goal also is self preservation. So its goal is to direct the funding towards the things that helps preserve it and convince people.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, the thing is that you don't want to. It's a purely decentralized mechanism and that's what makes it so powerful. So when people, you know, when we, when we sort of think in the way of this sort of, kind of 400 year old way of thinking, we have this sort of anti autocratic way of thinking. We're always looking for conspiracies and powers. Actually, what makes progressivism so powerful and so dangerous is that it's genuinely a spontaneous order. It actually doesn't have a center, it doesn't need a center, it doesn't push, it pulls. Or either it doesn't push, it sucks. Right? And so actually what you see in this marketplace of ideas is the temptation of power. And if you remove, it's not the pressure of censorship, it's the temptation, it's the seduction by which the most sexy ideas are the most powerful ideas. Fast forward to the present. What is sexy? How can watching the new P.T. anderson movie, which I was reviewing just the other day for the Spectator, how can the new P.T. anderson movie make 60s violence in the 21st century seem sexy? It's almost impossible. I don't think it succeeds. But the fact that you can even try to make communism feel sexy today is incredible. And that basically speaks to a fundamental sexiness of the idea of the thing which keeps recurring despite the evidence. As I was saying earlier, about Athenian democracy that it really just doesn't work. And so everything at every level is sort of seduced by power and many of the tropes. And this is one of the reasons for sort of the huge failures of basically libertarianism, because I literally read, I think, everything that Mises and Rothbard wrote. I am definitely a recovering libertarian. You know, I've had every flavor of this whiskey, and, you know, libertarian sort of keeps failing. And this is, in a way related to its leftist origins, because libertarianism 200 years ago was classical liberalism, and it was on the left. And, you know, understanding that the fact that it was on the left sort of means that it's kind of. It has a kind of. Of flaw, in a sense, basically is what pushed me. This is a good example of why it's not just sufficient to wind the clock back to 1965 or 1940 or some other period. Even to wind the clock back to 1776 is a mistake, because the American Revolution is fundamentally leftist. And all of these leftist tropes seep in a mythical way into, for example, American conservatism and kind of fatally poison it because it's trying to fight leftism with leftism. Actually, the nature of this leftism is the sense in which sort of all ideas are kind of corrupted in a way that makes these kind of malignant ideas seem more powerful. So, for example, in France in the 1770s, big American craze, big Anglophilia, people are like, wow, the American Revolution. That's fricking cool. That's punk. Lafayette goes over to fight in the revolution. How punk is that? That's seriously punk, right? Everyone cool was into these new English ideas of democracy and elections and constitutional, at the very least, constitutional monarchy. And you know who got infected with this Covid of the mind is Louis XVI himself. The revolution, as they say, was first in the mind of the king. Louis XVI was like, wow, this constitutional democracy seems to work really well in England. And actually the kings have had their power removed basically, since for almost 100 years at this time. But he's like. He just wants to tinker with those little locks. He's just kind of a nerd, right? And he's like, oh, yeah, pretty cool. English constitutional democracy. Like, three years later, he's like, where did my body go? Right? Because make no mistake, there's no such thing as decapitation. They're actually removing the body, right? And. But it's over very quickly. So basically, these toxic ideas. Why do these obviously toxic ideas flourish in the French marketplace of Ideas in the world of dangerous liaisons. French aristocrats who have 13 mistresses and live in this very, very sweet and rich way. The French Revolution doesn't come from the peasants. It comes from the aristocracy. And it comes from the aristocracy trying to imitate the English system of government, which, again, is one of these. Basically, it's just like, what were the philosophes doing? What was Voltaire doing at that time? He was basically doing gain of function in political science. And this creates a virus whose effects are still sweeping the globe today. Left versus right originates in the French Revolution. The color red is a revolutionary color. Originates in the French Revolution. Like, it's still. Actually, we're still in the age of that revolution. In fact, it's very easy to identify political tropes today that are directly related to tropes in England literally 400 years ago.

[Peter McCormack]

But when the pitchforks come out, we have a bad king. It's very easy to replace it with a whole new system. But when we have one bad government, we just replace it with another bad.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Government we actually can't replace. So. So going back to Aristotle's three systems, Monarchy. The government of one. Literally, let's just use the literal word, monarchy. The government of one Queen Elizabeth I, Monarchy. Hitler, Monarchy. Stalin, Monarchy. Kim Jong Un. Monarchy. Ivan the Terrible, Monarchy. Khufu, who built the pyramids. Monarchy. 98% of human history. Monarchy. That's the normal thing. That's what you get when you stop digging. Okay, so right now we're in a hole, and we're very, very deep in the hole. But we're. But first of all, it's essential to understand that when you value all time periods equally, you know, as the great German historian Leopold von Ranke said, all eras stand equal before God. He was not a Nazi. It was before then. So we can say him. You know, all eras stand equal before God is one of Ranke's great utterances. The other one is to tell history as it really was. And when we tell history as it really was, and all eras stand equal before God, suddenly we're not restricting ourselves to a sample of monarchs. That's like Hitler and Stalin. Hitler and Stalin certainly exist, but so does Louis X. And we are not weighting Hitler above Louis X for some weird reason. We are actually, when we look at Hitler and Stalin, we're looking at monarchy in the age of democracy, which is indeed a very problematic era for monarchy in a lot of different senses. But that's monarchy, oligarchy, the rule of the few. The definition of that oligarchy can take many forms. Our oligarchy is essentially what previous periods would have called a theocracy. Now it's an atheistic theocracy. But essentially you can basically follow the ideology of Harvard all the way from 1636 today and say there isn't really an aspect of American culture from 1636 to now that has deviated from Harvardism in any way. Where Harvardism is always a leading indicator, everything else becomes Harvardism. The south is different, the south becomes Harvardism. Everything is Harvardism. And so to basically chart an intellectual history of the United States, it is entirely sufficient to chart an intellectual history of Harvard. Harvard, by the way, is actually, I didn't know this until a few months ago when I found it accidentally seriously implicated in the Salem witch droughts. Not even the witch hunting is new, right? And so this is why I'm like 400 years, okay. That would bring us to 2036, which hasn't quite happened yet. But yeah, you can identify basically sort of cracks in the old regime that appear well before 1636. But you're in England, not a miracle America. So that's basically theocracy, oligarchy, meritocracy, the rule of Harvard, these are all basically the same things. And then you have true literal democracy, the rule of the demos of the many. And basically, when you're looking at the rule of the many, it's very attractive in a lot of ways. It's sort of emotionally good. We all want to believe that all men are created equal. Even though I guess I would say, I kind of compromise on that point and say I can't really say that all men are created equal, but I would say that all identical twins are created equal. But I'll go with that. I'll go with that. I mean, but even there you see differences. But that's a good baseline, right? And.

[Peter McCormack]

You'Re saying with democracy, everyone gets a vote, but everyone's got a brain.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, not even everyone. I mean, see, here's the problem with. Remember the New Yorker cartoon of the passengers electing the pilot? And New Yorker's like, wow, democracy is a really dumb idea. And I gotta agree with that, to be honest. Right? I'm basically like the conflict between oligarchy, literal oligarchy, the conflict between meritocracy and populism. There's a very simple way to understand this conflict. Surely, you know, a couple that is always fighting and, you know, you talk to, you're friends with both of them, right? And you understand where they're coming From. And you're like, you know, really the problem with this relationship is that he's right about her, but also she's right about him. And you're just like, do they deserve each other? I don't know. But he's right about her and she's right about him. And you see that basically when you understand most conflicts from a sort of global perspective, usually your answer is, in some ways, some ways there are sort of huge errors. So In World War II, for example, the main charge of the Nazis is they're fighting against the international Jewish conspiracy, which doesn't exist. The main idea of the Allies is they're fighting against the Nazi plot to take over the world, which also doesn't exist. Right. And it doesn't exist. Go to a Wikipedia page.

[Peter McCormack]

I know, I know.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Bring up the Wikipedia page for Nazi foreign policy debate. Say so. Nazi foreign policy debate. So basically, imagine if you're talking so. So when Americans were fighting like my grandfather were fighting in World War II, they were basically like, we're fighting against Hitler's plan to take over the world. Though my favorite part of this page is the part where. Yeah, Jochen thys jokenthes, basically, here's the evidence for. Here's the evidence from a serious historian for Hitler's plan to dominate the world. The evidence is he liked really big buildings and people who want to dominate the world also like really big buildings.

[Peter McCormack]

Hold on, let's read it. The other arguments for the case of the globalist. Joachimthes has been noted to say that plans for world domination can be seen in Hitler's ideology of displaying power. The creation of magnificent buildings, the use of propaganda to demonstrate German strength, along with the message to create the right to a thousand years clearly shows Hitler's aspirations for the future. I mean, that's obviously a terrible argument.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Imagine if that was the best argument for, like, the reality of the Holocaust. You and I. The Holocaust is one of the best documented events in human history. Right. You and I would have to be. If that was the best evidence for the Holocaust, I would go out on the street and scream, the Holocaust didn't happen.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, but there was certain expansionism in the war.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Sure. There was expansionism in Eastern Europe. You know who else expanded in Eastern Europe? Frederick the Great. You know how much George Washington worried about Frederick the Great? Not at all. Right. So essentially you're like, basically in that war was so screwed up that even then, even in that situation, the number one argument as expressed at the time of the Germans is we are fighting against the International Jewish conspiracy. The number one argument of the Anglo Americans is we are fighting against Hitler's plan to take over the world. Those arguments are both completely bogus. However, arguments like 2 through 10 on both sides are basically correct.

[Peter McCormack]

I don't know what that is.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So, for example, argument number two on the Allied side is. By the way, they're doing a lot of human rights abuses. Also true. I could go arguments through arguments 2 through 10 on the Nazi side, but we would probably get bogged down in that channel. Yeah, okay, no, I understand that, but argument number one on both sides is just complete crap, right? It's just absolute crap. There's no international Jewish conspiracy. I'm sorry, groipers, it doesn't exist. Right, but arguments two through ten, that's a little more interesting. In any case, basically, you see these. Just like the world in what we call the age of democracy is just thrust into these delusions because the set of delusions that spread in the demos, as opposed to the aristos, as opposed to the oligarchy, there's a completely different set of forces that dictate the success of a meme on Facebook, which is what we're actually looking at when we look at true literal democracy, not Astroturf democracy, but grassroots democracy. The truth is that Astroturf really astronomically sucks and basically gave us Covid. Right? And that's just an example, like all over the government, all over. The way we think about politics and power is these ideas that have been evolved for 100 years to be as powerful as possible and often bear no resemblance to reality are basically what is like. Look at our ideas about criminal justice, look at our ideas about teaching reading in schools. All of these ideas get just become sinister parodies of themselves. Until education becomes anti education. Bill Ayers become the Weather Underground guy, becomes like the leader of our educational system. Insane things are happening in every direction because we took the cold alpine lake and we connected it to the sewer and we didn't put in a valve.

[Peter McCormack]

But we are there now. So like, you know, there's one per. I won't name them. There's this one person I spoke to that I was interviewing you and they were like, but that. It's crazy. It's like crazy right wing ideas. But bear with me. But it's like crazy right wing ideas. What the hell are you doing? But at the same time, there's a growing number of people who want to listen to Courtesy Arvin discuss democracy.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And there's that word again.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, but they wanted. But they want It. Well, they want to hear you talk about why you don't believe in democracy, why it's failed. And, like, if we just look at the UK as a great example at the moment, it's so fucked. We're so fucked.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Imagine you had told any englishman from before 1900 the story of the UK, which is a word that nobody used, by the way. Nobody said uk, they said Britain, or they said England.

[Peter McCormack]

Let me just finish, though. We're so fucked at the moment that in the space of a few short years, a party that never existed, looks like he's gonna win the next election.

[Curtis Yarvin]

In 2029.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, in 2029. But they've come from, like, nowhere to dominating the political discourse. And look, there's a lot of people. There's a lot of people who will say, nothing's gonna change.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Nothing ever happens. Nothing ever happens.

[Peter McCormack]

But the reasons it's happened is because they've lost all faith in the Left Party. They've lost all faith in the Conservatives, Labour. It's like they need something new. But at the moment, sorry, bear with me, there's something new. It's a new color party. It's not a new idea. And what it is is that you're at least just saying, look, can we at least just have the conversation that this idea is a terrible idea. That's what you're basically thinking.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Have we lost before? Do you know the term Whig history?

[Peter McCormack]

No.

[Curtis Yarvin]

That's Whig with an H. Right. And Whig history, which is identified or described as such by the historian Herbert Butterfield in the 1930s, I believe, is basically this sort of belief in monotonic progress. And it was really a lot of Whig history comes from just watching the progress of technology, which is actually totally extrinsic to government. Every form of 20th century government in major nations seems to have done quite well with this. It's not like the Nazis were bad at science. It's not like the Soviets were bad at science. So using science as an endorsement of our system of government is pretty lame. When the US basically stole the Nazi rocket program and used it to go to the moon, right? And then you're like, oh, yeah, science. We do science. You know the Tom Lehrer line about Werner von Braun? Tom Lehrer, he was this great. He was a mathematician and comic songwriter. An amazing figure, huge figure among American nerds for the last 30 years. He recently passed away because he was a nerd. He put all his lyrics in the public domain. And there's a great one about Wernher von Braun, who is of Course, the director of the Nazi rocket program, who's promptly in 1945, moved to America and becomes the director of the Apollo Program, literally directs the program that puts Neil Armstrong on the moon. Like, he doesn't even lose his job. He just moves to Alabama. And the line is. Let me remember the Tom Lehrer line, you know, Verna von Braun, Wernher von Braun. The rockets go up. Who knows why they come down? It's not my department, says Werner von Braun. So the Nazis, actually pretty fine at science. Right? And they're still Nazis. Right. They still like the Holocaust. That's a real thing. Right. And so actually taking credit for the rise of science, people are like, oh, well, you don't want democracy, but democracy invented antibiotics. I'm like, that's true. But the Nazis invented rockets, you know.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah. But, like, I think what I'm trying to get into is that there is, like I say in the uk, we're fucked. There's no agreement, anything. I had the conversation with my son on the way over. Cause I'd had an argument with somebody, and he was like, everyone's replaying the same arguments to each other. There's no agreement on anything. And people are looking for an escape valve.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You've heard rock bottom. Well, yeah, you've hit rock bottom.

[Peter McCormack]

Where's the escape valve? Where's the therapy? Like, is therapy.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. Are we gonna build, you know, the labor anthem, you know, Till We Build Jerusalem and England's Green and Pleasant Land. You ever heard that one?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah. And we used to have to sing at school.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, that's because you live in a communist country.

[Peter McCormack]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, hello, Wake up.

[Peter McCormack]

But the point is, it's like people are looking for that escape valve. But if the escape valve is discussing the idea that maybe this democracy is a bad idea, it's like, whoa, whoa, we can't have that discussion.

[Curtis Yarvin]

That's exactly what it was like in the Soviet Union in 1987 to say maybe communism was actually a bad idea. Yeah, maybe. Actually the whole thing was a mistake. And maybe it's like I was talking to a Frenchman once, like, 10 years ago, and he's like, well, yeah, the French Revolution is very complicated. We had the first revolution, was a good revolution, and then we had a bad revolution. I'm like, my friend, my brother in Christ, have you ever heard of Occam's Razor? And I won't say he was enlightened, but hopefully it helped. And Occam's Razor is just like, what if. Actually, what if all of this sort of one thing that I find that's sort of super interesting. When I go and debunk the past, there's a couple of things I find. Could you type into the browser window the phrase. Go up to the browser bar and type the phrase. True History of the American Revolution. True history of the American Revolution. Oh, wow. It's a book called the True History of the American Revolution. You might want to click on that. Click on the old page images. True History of the American Revolution.

[Peter McCormack]

Sidney George Fisher.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Sidney George Fisher. I'd never heard of this person. I don't know how I found this book. But when do you think, Just from looking at that page, when do you think that book was published?

[Peter McCormack]

Well, I mean, I can see Alexander.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Hamilton as sure, but anyone can quote Hamilton. When do you think it was published?

[Peter McCormack]

I don't know. You might tell me. Recently.

[Curtis Yarvin]

1903.

[Peter McCormack]

Oh, shit.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, shit. 1903. Very old. Right. And I look at this book and I start reading this book. You can flip the page images. There's a really nice. There's a really nice line in there. Wait, wait. Back. Go back. Read the first paragraph.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay. The purpose of the History of the Revolution is to use the original authorities rather more frankly than has been the practice with our historians. They appear to have thought it advisable to omit from the narratives a great deal, which seems essential to.

[Curtis Yarvin]

All right.

[Peter McCormack]

But this comes back to the point. It's like the winners of the war get to write the history.

[Curtis Yarvin]

That's right. And so if you scroll down a little bit. Whatever. Go to the next page. We're getting into too. Into the weeds here. Go to the next page. There's the. At the end of the introduction to this. Keep going. Okay, go up. Go up. Ah, yes. At the start, the sentence. The start of the. Go to the previous page.

[Peter McCormack]

All right, let's go to the bottom.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Before I discovered the admissions. Start reading there.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay. Before I discovered the emissions of our standard. Keep going. Con histories always felt as though I was reading about something that never happened and that was contrary to the original experience of human nature. I could not understand how a movement which was supposed to have led to such a deep uprooting of settled thought and custom. A movement which is supposed to have been one of the great epochs of history could have happened like an occurrence in a fairy tale. I could not understand the military operations, and it seems strange to me that they were not investigated, explained and criticized like those of Napoleon's campaigns of our own civil War. I was never satisfied.

[Curtis Yarvin]

English Civil War Obviously, yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

I was never satisfied until I spent a great deal of time in research, burned into the dust of the hundreds of brown pamphlets, newspapers, letters, personal memoirs, documents, the publications of historical societies, and the interminable debates of Parliament, which, now that the eyewitnesses are dead, constitute all the evidence that is left us of the story of the revolutions. Those musty documents painted a very vivid picture upon my mind, and I wish I had the power of painting the picture as the original story.

[Curtis Yarvin]

All right, stop, stop, stop. So you can go deeper. This rat hole is very deep. It is a beautiful rat hole. And, like, those sentences left a very deep impression on my mind because actually, he tries very hard to paint that picture. And you're just like, oh, wow, that never made sense to me before, right? And I'm just basically, the American Revolution is the Vietnam war in the 18th century. It is essentially a domestic political conflict which becomes a war overseas. And because it is fundamentally based on a domestic political conflict, that war does not make sense militarily like the Vietnam War. And there's actually a recent book by an English historian named Robert Harvey that I just found randomly in a used bookstore. And I'd been going around saying, the American Revolution is the Vietnam war in the 18th century. And I read this book, which was clearly published several years before I had sent anything of the like on the Internet. And he's like, you know, guys, here's the answer. The American Revolution is the Vietnam war in the 18th century. And so you're just like. Like, basically, you just break this whole thing. And it's like, if you go and you want to criticize. The funny thing is that if you want to talk to Americans and criticize their picture of the American Civil War or the World War II, both of which they ascribe deep emotional importance to, is a very tricky prospect. And you can do this. And there are very important revisions that need to be made. But you are constantly stepping on people's emotions, but they don't give a crap about the American Revolution, right? And so actually, like, basically just the fact. I mean, step back a second and think about. Imagine you grew up in Lower Slovia, right? All your life, you'd heard about the glorious Slobovian Revolution, George Slobovich, who wouldn't cut down the cherry tree, or whatever, and you're just like, wow, this really sounds like mythical cult of personality propaganda history, but the alternative is Communism. So I guess I'll believe in my mythical propaganda history. And then suddenly, Slobovian invents a Slurch engine. And you go to your slurch engine and you type in True History of the Slovian Revolution. And you get that, and you're just like, wait a second, you just broke my brain with a book from 1903. Right? And there's a lot more where that came from. And so essentially, when you reject 400 years of shitty politicized history, which has been politicized in almost exactly the same way as virology, actually.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, there's that word again. Politicized.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Politicalized. Because power has corrupted it. Because basically the fact that history matters leads to historians. And this was. If you kept reading, you would encounter Sidney George Fisher. I have no idea who this person was saying exactly. What I just said is that essentially, when you take a field of inquiry and you say, this field of inquiry, previously pure, is going to have an impact on the world, the fact that it has an impact on the world has an impact on that marketplace of ideas. And basically, our system of government was built by people who did not recognize or understand that reality, which is just a fundamental engineering fact of political science. They just left a term out of their equation.

[Peter McCormack]

So everything is just narrative.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Everything is just narrative. And that narrative has evolved to be as powerful as possible.

[Peter McCormack]

But it's almost like then that couple you talked about, the couple before that argue all the time, but they spend their whole life together, and all their friends are like, you guys, why haven't they broken up? And that's basically what this democracy is.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Then it's like, it's democracy. If you split the word democracy into meritocracy and populism, democracy is just meritocracy versus populism. And you're sort of, you know, and you're just like, you know, both of these things really suck.

[Peter McCormack]

But, like, the couple who doesn't want to split up, even having the conversation with the vast majority of people that, yeah, this democracy thing is a terrible idea. It's like, whoa, whoa, we're not going to do that.

[Curtis Yarvin]

No. And actually. But the thing is, everybody who believes democracy is great, great. Believes either that populism is great or the meritocracy is great. But they also, all of them believe that either populism is awful or meritocracy is awful. And so actually, just splitting the word in half into its reality and not letting it retain this fatal ambiguity allows you to basically sort of defeat each of these things in detail. And so you can say to the populace, okay, dude, you're so right about universities and newspapers, the lying press the mainstream media, they lie all the time. It's very, very true. They really suck. And I want to speak to you and understand that you just have this deeply felt intuitive sense that these people cannot go on governing us. That this is absolutely corrupt and absolutely impossible and absolutely sucks. And let me explain to you why you're right about this. Using big words in the marketplace of ideas and so forth. But you gotta be like, on the other hand, let's look at what memes win on Facebook, right? And you're just like, actually, are you really gonna run the government based on what memes win on Facebook? Because Elon Musk, for example, is a big believer in literal democracy. He once posted vox populi, vox dei, like, what the people believe must be true. I'm like, I don't see it. I just don't see it. I just don't see it. And so actually, here is the problem. You have this couple who is right about each other. And as Aristotle said, there's only two forms. Oh, wait, there's a third form of government which has been used basically by 98% of regimes for all of history. Moreover, this third form of governance, which is monarchy, which is basically just a description of a pyramid shaped org chart, is not only used by 98% of governments in history, it is used by all effective organizations in the world today.

[Peter McCormack]

It's used in our home.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It is used, absolutely. Yeah. But that is, it is the family. If you buy this phone, it comes in a box saying, designed in California by Apple, assembled in China. All right, that is three organizations. California, Apple and China. And among those organizations are two monarchies and two one party states. China and California obviously are the one party states. China and Apple are obviously the monarchies. And if you imagine, and if you say, well, one party states are bad, well, California's a pretty nice place actually. And if you imagine the government of California, not through a contractor, but literally itself, imagine Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation, designing an iPhone. Imagine it assembling an iPhone.

[Peter McCormack]

It just wouldn't.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's like imagining chickens inventing algebra. And so you're basically like, actually go to see a movie. It has a director that's a monarch. Go to a restaurant, there's a chef that's a monarch. Go to a chain restaurant, it has a CEO who monarchically comes up with the recipes. Imagine if, like, you know, say what you want about Chipotle. Have you had Chipotle? It's all right, it's good, it's all right. But imagine if the Customers of Chipotle voted on the Chipotle recipes. Yes, yes, you can imagine that. Would a Chipotle last under those in that situation?

[Peter McCormack]

Well, that's why my home with my kids isn't a democracy.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Exactly. And so, you know, essentially, you know.

[Peter McCormack]

But by the way, my children have their pitchforks.

[Curtis Yarvin]

They do, they do, they do.

[Peter McCormack]

And, sorry, also, if you don't like Chipotle, you don't go to Chipotle.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You don't go to Chipotle. So monopolies are harder. This was something that was very accurately pointed out by Professor Jones in our debate earlier today. Actually, the constraints of the. This is why I think that not only are small states better than big states, the best periods in human history, the most generative, amazing periods, have been large numbers of competing small states. Moreover, these small states compete basically in two ways. They compete in trade, of course, because they're essentially businesses competing for export markets. But they also compete by making war. And unfortunately, war has devolved into this inhuman thing of press a button and kill people joystick drone hunting videos. I don't know why. Actually, Ukraine hasn't basically allowed anyone over the Internet to operate drones and kill Russians. That would have just been the insane. That's the modern. Yeah, exactly.

[Peter McCormack]

It's like Fortnite.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. People would pay. People would pay. They would pay to actually be virtually on the front lines and operate drones that kill people. And then the Russians would do it, too.

[Peter McCormack]

It's like a merger of Hostel and. Have you seen the film Hostel?

[Curtis Yarvin]

No. What is it?

[Peter McCormack]

Where they bid. They bid to torture people. It's like a merger between Hostel and Fortnite.

[Curtis Yarvin]

This could happen next week.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Actually, someone in the Ukraine could watch this video and be like, gosh darn, that's a good idea.

[Peter McCormack]

But like, Curtis, if I go home to England after this, I'm like, oh, yeah, Curtis, onto something. Yeah, I. Fuck this democracy thing. If I try and explain that to any of my friends or family leftists, they're going to be disgusted.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And so, in a way.

[Peter McCormack]

Let me finish the point. They're going to be disgusted. Like, you cannot take this idea or what? Like democracy, it's like, we all must have an opinion, but the conservative friends, something. I mean. Well, I think he's got a point.

[Curtis Yarvin]

But he's going too far. But, you know, not always. Not always, not always. And this is why, basically, you know, Confucius had this great line. You know, not enough people cite Confucius, but great man Confucius. Confucius had this great line about the rectification of names. He was basically like, to repair the stake. And Chinese governance in Confucius's day had many of the same problems that it has today. He's like, basically, he's sort of with Orwell on this. He's like, basically, Orwell is like, the main problem in politics is we are confused by the words that we use. We need to fix the words because we have all of this Orwellian goodspeak language. This is why I don't say the word that starts with div and ends in ursita, right? And if I want a lot of different kinds of flowers in a bouquet, I would be like, I want a lot of variety of flowers. And I advise everyone to do that is instantly helpful. Do not use that word. But the word democracy, just by having these two opposed meanings where people. Democracy really means legitimate. It means powerful. It means you have the right to rule. And so people fight over this word. The populists are like, no, we're the real democracy. George Soros is like, no, I, Emperor Palpatine. I'm the real democracy. Right? And civil society, that's the real democracy. And you can see where he's coming from. I respect where he's coming from. His views on populism are very unsympathetic. Tommy Robinson's views on George Soros are also very unsympathetic. And frankly, I believe they both kind of have a point. Right? And this is why I'm a monarchist. I'm basically like, actually, your first step is to basically split these things apart. Then when you're talking to your leftist friends, say, all right, when you say democracy, you're really arguing over who owns this word, which means we're in charge. North Korea, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. That is three synonyms for democracy and one place name. And it's a monarchy. So just don't do that, right? Stop with that stuff, right? And let's sort of look at this situation objectively. Let's say that we agree that when we say democracy, we mean these two things, meritocracy and populism. And then talk to your leftist friends and basically say, yeah, we agree about populism. Maybe you can even use slurs, talk about the gammons or something. The chavs get contemptuous with them. Wear a long sleeve shirt to hide your tattoo. The tattoos are fine, actually, but there's a little bit of.

[Peter McCormack]

It's the conservatives who hate the tattoos.

[Curtis Yarvin]

When I was at the festival in England, wonderful festival. Wonderfully organized where I debated Alistair Campbell, which is now available online. You could bring it up even. And you know, I haven't watched. I never watched myself. My wife liked it, but she likes everything. So who knows? Maybe I totally, you know, flamed out, but I think I did okay. I certainly didn't get butt.

[Peter McCormack]

I'm only gonna hope that you give him a hard time.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I did, but in a nice.

[Peter McCormack]

I love this look. They started with the philosopher.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Don't even. Let's not even go there. Let's shut up with that stuff.

[Peter McCormack]

They don't lead with Curtis Yavin anymore. They were like the philosopher behind J.D. vance.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's so bad. Everyone needs to stop with that right away.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, but they just.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I haven't talked with them in ages. But, you know, but using it as.

[Peter McCormack]

A pejorative against fans.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Sure, I know. And that's why I haven't talked with them in ages and I don't want to either, you know, and like the, the. The sound like it more and it's the. But in any case, the, the, you know, one of the things they did very nicely at the rather cringely named how the Light Gets In Festival was the security, I thought was very good. And the security consisted of me being followed around by a fellow who, you know, basically, if I had to guess, I would say that he was a Millwall supporter.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And like you, he had many tattoos, but unlike you, many of them were on his face. And I felt very comforted by the presence of this, I believe you would call him a yabo. And he seemed like a good sort, a very good chap, you know. And like, actually, like I realized that many, if you go to, you know, and this was in North London and actually in North London, they don't like the yabos so much. Or so I'm told.

[Peter McCormack]

Was it guy in Islington?

[Curtis Yarvin]

It was Hampstead.

[Peter McCormack]

Oh, yeah. I mean, look, this is our Champagne Socialist.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It was all. The crowd was all champagne Socialists.

[Peter McCormack]

They would be voting for Man Valmy.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It was hardcore champagne socialists. So imagine me debating Alistair Campbell in front of 200 champagne socialists.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, no chance.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Amazing. Amazing. No, I just care about. First of all, in a situation like that, your goal is not actually. I mean, you would love, of course, to have this happen, but he's not going to let it happen. Your goal is to not make Aleister Campbell look bad. Your goal is just to make yourself look good. And that is also the best way to try to make Alistair Campbell look bad. Because he is of course going to try to make you look bad. And you just have to be completely insouciant about it. And that's the secret. For if you ever find yourself in a room with Darth Vader and you're like, where's my lightsaber? That's how you do it.

[Peter McCormack]

I don't think I'm gonna get to spend any time.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I don't think so. I would be lovely if he would come on your show.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, I think I've called him a war criminal too many times.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, see, I had a very different approach to Alistair Campbell. I was like, you know, Alistair, you and I have something in common. We both supported the invasion of Iraq. And then I go on to explain why I feel this was a mistake and, like, I learned something from it. And then inviting him to do the same, which, of course, he does not do.

[Peter McCormack]

No, he has to rationalize it and then go swimming and talk about trees.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Exactly, exactly. And that's how you deal with Alice Campbell. Right. You know, okay, it was good. It was fine. I'd do it again, you know, probably with a few beers, but okay. So look, so, you know, so if I can summarize my response to that question, your friends are going to be horrified. And basically, the way to make friends and influence people, this is something, by the way, that the late Charlie Kirk was brilliant at. He would be like, you got to start with agreement. You got to find a point of agreement. And once you find a point of agreement, you are on the same side as the person. You can work from there. And basically, if you can say, look, I completely agree with you about populism. It is ridiculous that the passengers should elect some rando to fly the plane. That is basically absurd. And let's agree with that, because the main force of basically both sides is hitting the other. This is the truth that they feel that they have that the other side doesn't have. And in this case, what's fortunate is that it's kind of basically an accurate truth. Like, World War II is really fucked up, because both sides have this lie that they're basing everything on. And that's one of the things that makes that war really uniquely horrible, is that both sides are fighting for a lie. It's insane. Actually, the great book on World War II that everyone should read is a book by probably our greatest author, a man named Nicholson Baker, and he wrote a book called Human Smoke, which contains none of his own words. It is entirely plagiarized, and it consists entirely of tweet length excerpts arranged for chronologically from World War II. And the great conclusion that you get from this book, which is basically the introduction to the true study of the 20th century, is that World War II was not a Marvel movie. And once you're ready to accept that World War II was not a Marvel movie, you are ready to study history. And until then, you were just a child and you should be kept out of the library. And that is my strong feeling. And if you want to break past that, read Human Smoke. It is a great book by one of our greatest writers. I've written it down and published by. I mean, hugely published. Like, amazing. This is not a fringe alternative book. This is not a book where you freak out if somebody might see it on your bookshelf. This is completely conventional.

[Peter McCormack]

I want to talk to you about one of my sponsors, Incogni. And that means we're going to talk about the weird world of spam. And I don't just mean those spam emails that you get day after day from companies you never heard of and companies you've never signed up to. I'm also talking about those spam phone calls you get from those people who seem to know a little bit too much about you trying to get your bank details. It's all a bit creepy right now. This all comes from the world of data brokerage. There are companies out there collecting your data, building profiles and sending that data to anyone who wants it. Which is why when one of those scammers phones you up, they seem to know everything about you.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You.

[Peter McCormack]

Now, I've tried, I've tried myself to get off these lists, try to get off the phone lists, try to get off the email list. I unsubscribe from every one of these emails that comes in. But this game of whack a mole, it just never ends. And so this is where Incogni comes in. They do all the hard work for you. They reach out to these companies and they will get you legally removed from these lists. And I know because last time they sponsored my show, I signed up and I didn't take the free option that they offered me. I wanted to pay for it. I wanted to see if you get value for money. And they removed me from 79 data broker lists. And so I've stayed on, I've stayed a subscriber, and I have seen a massive decrease in the number of emails and phone calls I've been getting. So it's a great service. I recommend you check it out. If you're sick of this like I was, please head over to incogni.com Peter. And sign up. If you use the code Peter, you will get a lovely 60% discount. So that's incogni.com forward slash Peter. But like Curtis, if you're right. If you're right, like, we need to stop this shit now. But. But the. It's.

[Curtis Yarvin]

But you can't just stop this shit. I need to start something else.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, that's the point. It's not a palatable idea. Like, people aren't gonna. We're not gonna wake up as a nation. Have enough people go, yeah, this is a terrible idea. We need to. We need to bring back a monarch. Certainly not while we've got Charles as king, because that would be a terrible monarch. But.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, what if. What if what?

[Peter McCormack]

You know, But I feel like it'll only come through force. That's what I feel.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, two things. Let me just throw this out there. What if Charles III is not really the legitimate king because 1688 was illegitimate? If you agree that 1688 was illegitimate, then the legitimate throne of England runs through a complicated strain of princesses and whatever until it winds up in the kings of Bavaria. And from the kings of Bavaria, it flows actually to one of today's few working monarchs, who actually is an absolute working monarch and not just a crown Kardashian, which is Hans Adam II of Liechtenstein. And actually, what if the true monarch of England is, I believe his name is Prince Joseph Wenzel, who is the son of Hans Adam and was the first true prince of the Stuart lineage to ever be born in England. Okay, now setting that aside, setting that aside, you know, the reality is that monarchy means a lot of different things. It means, basically it simply means, you know, unitary authority over the state. You can have an elected monarch. You can have a monarch elected by a royal family. Of course, in the private sector we have these pseudo states called corporations and we see. So. So here's an example of the question of monarchy. I did this. I thought actually it was very well done. My New York Times interview, right? He asked me in that interview, I'm defending the idea of monarchy. And I'm like, actually, my favorite monarchy, the most important monarchy today is a fifth generation absolute hereditary monarchy called the New York Times.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, I love that, by the way.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And. But here's what actually happened behind the scenes of that moment. So I'm basically like. And look at the New York Times, which is a fifth generation absolute hereditary monarchy. Actually, the way that works is super interesting. The New York Times has a dual class share structure. Class A And Class B shares. Anyone can buy Class B shares on the exchange and they get dividends or if the New York Times deigns to pay dividends, but they have no power over the corporation. Power of the corporation is held entirely by the holders of Class A shares, who are all the descendants of Adolf Ox. And he has quite a few descendants. And interestingly, the system is very similar to a system that exists at the sovereign level, which is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in which very similar power, although it's much more informal, is held by the descendants of Even South. Even Saud believed in polygamy. So there's really quite a few descendants of even Saud, but they managed to come together and elect mbs. MBS elect. Not elect, but choose. Not elect in a formal process, but they choose mbs. Tell me, how are. We know how presidents are chosen, but how are presidential candidates chosen?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, that's fair.

[Curtis Yarvin]

We want the formal process, but we actually don't care about the formal process. We just want good results. We just want a good government. Right? And say what you want. I mean, honestly, there's a couple of different perspectives. I can see why people have varying opinions about mbs. Because, for example, they call him Mohammed Bonsa for a reason. There was this case of Khashoggi, you know who I mean? It's really rather. I'm so torn on this. It's really rather a sad story because, you know, this guy was, you know, he's in exile, right? He leaves Saudi Arabia, he's left this life behind him, but he wants to get married to his girlfriend. To do that, he needs a divorce. To do that, he's in Turkey. He needs to go to the Saudi embassy to get some paperwork. He goes to the Saudi embassy, just shows up unannounced. He's like, I need this paperwork. They're like, oh, well, thinking very quickly, we don't have this ready. You need to come back in a week. He comes back in a week. There's this assassin. His girlfriend is outside the embassy watching, and there's a Saudi assassination team inside. And they seize him. As soon as he gets upstairs, they seize him. They literally. They rip his clothes off. They saw him apart with a bone saw, you know, the body, whatever, has never been found. And then someone to fool the security cameras comes out of the embassy wearing his clothes. Okay? And the dark. Okay, dark, Dark. But on the other hand. On the other hand, he was a journalist. Sorry, dark. I know, I know, I know. But in any case, actually, he wasn't really a journalist. He was a Saudi power player. And this is really what makes it like he hadn't actually left that life behind. He was still a player. And so it was a gang hit on a gangster. He didn't even write his own stories. They were basically ghost written for him by Qatar. He was a former number three guy, the Saudi intelligence. Right. This is a gang hit on a gangster. And this is the real reason I'm actually not sad. I know many journalists, I love many journalists. Many of them are beautiful people. They can usually write English, which this guy basically could not do. So there's that. But on the other hand, it's a good bit.

[Peter McCormack]

I don't know why people say you're controversial.

[Curtis Yarvin]

There you go. I've just made an enemy of all journalists for all time. Actually, let me say positive things, and this is one of the things I said to Marchese. I was just like, actually, in all of these institutions, institutions everywhere, in these very deeply darkly corrupted institutions that have been evolved by this sort of power craving into the opposite of their purpose, whether they're doing virology or education or diplomacy. Everywhere in these institutions you will find these little points of light who are individual people who actually believe in their real mission. These are the virologists who question basically, gain of function research. These are the diplomats who said, well, maybe we don't need to expand NATO to the east. These are the educational people who are like, well, maybe we actually need to teach children to read. Right. Everywhere you find these little crazy people. Yeah, they're crazy to try to exist within these professions, but they exist. And they basically are very careful and some of them are very good. And actually some of the top journalists in the world are like totally based and absolutely wonderful. Yeah, that's the reality. But the majority, not so much.

[Peter McCormack]

The Khashoggi thing reminds me of what Dave Smith said recently. He was talking about the Jimmy Kimmel incident, and he said, what you have to understand is Jimmy Kimmel is the regime. He's not an independent.

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, no, no, you're not pushing back. People are starting to understand that. They're starting to basically see this kind of shape of power. In a way. It's like one of the things that Yeltsin did in the fall of the Soviet Union, which as a 15 year old, I'm watching this. I've been reading the Economist and the Herald Tribune for seven or eight years or something, and I'm like, he bans the Communist Party. I'm like, who bans parties? Bad people ban parties. It's bad to ban parties. He bans the Communist Party. And actually, this is what needed to be done, because actually, this institution is not. The New York Times is not a free market institution, okay? The New York Times is a government agency. If it was actually the Department of Information, if actually, if it was literally identified as a government agency, you would instantly realize, number one, it is the most powerful agency in the government. Number two, the idea that the New York Times can basically take information from any other part of the government and steal it and sell it. That makes no sense if it's a private company, but makes complete sense if it is the most powerful agency in the government. Actually, in the kind of founding document of 20th century journalism, which is a book by the great Walter Lippmann called Public Opinion 1922, which everyone should read, one of the things that's remarkable is that he compares journalism to an intelligence agency, and he's like, these are the same thing. And you're just like. Like, all right, you're off your. Wait, you're not off your rocker. And so actually, like, yeah, you know, treating. When you see, here's the thing about regime change, is that you're basically in this world where you're just like, you've lost all hope. And it's like, really good that you've lost all hope because you've sort of reached rock bottom. And you're just like. Your last idea is like, you know, there's just nothing I can do. And then you have this idea, well, maybe I could quit. And it seems so impossible and so difficult, and you've tried so hard before. Like, maybe you can just quit, right? And just quitting involves giving up a lot of these glittering ideas and a lot of this feeling of, like, wow, you know, I play guitar so much better when I'm on cocaine. And, you know, all of these things, and you just actually have to say no. You know, you have no other alternative but to just a pin in these sort of sweet, glittery concepts that are so meretricious when you dig into them, that seem to mean so much to you and basically say, you know, yeah, what if we've actually just been making a huge mistake for the last 400 years?

[Peter McCormack]

Okay, so. All right, fine. Yes, fine.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Have I bludgeoned you into submission yet?

[Peter McCormack]

No, no, because I came with an open mind. Because, like, let's discuss everything.

[Curtis Yarvin]

There you go.

[Peter McCormack]

Let's just discuss everything.

[Curtis Yarvin]

There you go.

[Peter McCormack]

Like, the person who said to me today, who was.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Was.

[Peter McCormack]

I'll talk about it afterwards, but didn't, like, the fact that I was going to talk to you, it's like, well, why can't we discuss it? It might be a terrible idea. But if you talk about monarchs, but you also talk about, like a CEO.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes.

[Peter McCormack]

And to most people, they're entirely different things. Monarchy is a little bit hereditary. You can get the bad king, whereas a CEO, you get a bad CEO, it's easy to get rid of them.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Not always. So here's an example. Not always. So here's an example. Remember I talked about the governance structure of the New York Times? Well, actually, the only people that can get rid of King Salzburger are the descendants of Adolf Ochs. But it actually goes even further than that. So the governance of Meta Facebook is actually far more absolutist than that. No one can get rid of Mark Zuckerberg. He has all the Class A shares.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, but people can just stop buying the New York Times, stop reading it, or stop using Facebook.

[Curtis Yarvin]

There are always essentially. And so when you see that effect.

[Peter McCormack]

That's the Pezith.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. When you see that effect of. Basically, what you're saying in a way is, ultimately, if a thing sucks, I'm a CEO myself. Right. I know what it is to be a CEO. I've never succeeded. Huge. Yeah. I'm a CEO. And we can get into that. It's related to your other interest. And if you're in the world of the CEO, basically of like the startup CEO, which is a very intense way to be a CEO, because there's a line in Ben Horowitz's startup book, which is an acronym, which is wfio, which means we're forked, it's over. And everyone who has run a startup has multiple WFIO moments. Exactly. Right. And so. So to be a king in these dire kind of straits, it's like being King Alfred of England. King Alfred must have had. If you remember anything about King Alfred back in the 800s or whatever, he had a lot of WFIO moments. Right. Churchill had his WFIO moments. Right. And so that energy, that sort of temper of competition needs to be supplied. It doesn't need to be supplied to any organization because monopolies can kind of. Of monopolies kind of suck in a way, but they still have incentives, they're still responsive. The CEO of PG and E still cares what. Which is our electric company, which is private for some reason, still cares about how much money, how many dividends he sends out to his shareholders. Occasionally. There's still tension. That need for tension is essentially really important in Any kind of governance system and any structural system, because without tension, things just collapse in a way. And so the best level of tension you get from sort of various kinds of competitive governance, and there's a lot of ways, for example, countries compete to have a balance of trade. We're currently getting reamed by China in that way. And when Donald Trump says, we're losing a trillion dollars a year to China, he's absolutely right. That is the correct terms in which to describe it. Right. I would, truthfully, I could spend an hour explaining why just by the way he talks in that way. Donald Trump understands economics better than 99.99% of professional economists, even though that makes me sound like it's word of Kim Jong Un.

[Peter McCormack]

Professional economists or Keynesian economists?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Economics professors. Okay, economics professors.

[Peter McCormack]

Keynesian propagandist economists.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just had. It's not out yet, but I just recorded a very wonderful conversation with Lord Skidelsky, the biographer of Keynes. And we discuss Keynes and Mises and many other fun things, but we can go in the Austrian economics and crypto direction anytime you like.

[Peter McCormack]

We will get there. But on this point, it's like, okay, okay, so selling the idea of a hereditary monarch is going to feel like a backward step to some people. Selling the idea of a CEO of a country is a little bit easier, but how does it happen? What are the guardrails? Who is the board that can remove them if they suck? What's the reality of it?

[Curtis Yarvin]

The reality of that? So, first of all, the reality is that normally we larp the past under unthinkingly a lot when we think about politics. And so the first reality is like, how do we get the public to endorse something that seems crazy to them? And my answer to that is, have you met the public? We live with the craziest, most frivolous public ever. There's a great black mirror episode where they elect a cartoon character. Have you seen that one?

[Peter McCormack]

God, I've seen nearly every episode. I don't think I've seen that.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's not very memorable. It's not like the one where the prime minister fucks the pig.

[Peter McCormack]

That's episode one.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's bad. That's the worst bak mirror of all.

[Peter McCormack]

But I mean, this is kind of real because we all sat there going, well, if I was Prime Minister, would I fuck that pig to save the princess?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, it's true. It's true. Keerstar. I mean, but, you know, Kierstar will.

[Peter McCormack]

Probably fuck the Pig. Anyway, I'll probably go. I'm probably going to go to jail now for that.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, just don't go back, you know, but, yeah, I have to. Yeah, I'll visit you. I'll visit you.

[Peter McCormack]

Back to my point. Back to my point.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, back to my question.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So the first answer to your question is actually, we live in the most nihilist. We have the most nihilistic and frivolous public ever. And if you look at. Basically, forget the boomers, the silent generation, even my own beloved Gen X, you were probably born in the late 70s, maybe 78. 78, 73. I love Gen X, Gen X power. Right? You know, forget Gen X. Forget the millennials. Let's just focus on the zoomers. And the thing is, basically, the zoomers, if they're in this boring world, right? And there's a red button on the wall, and the red button says, if you press this button, everything will change. You know, I don't think anybody but a zoomer will press the button, but a zoomer will be like, why the fuck not? Anybody but a zoomer will be like, well, it could get much worse.

[Peter McCormack]

What year's Zoomer?

[Curtis Yarvin]

I think even the younger zoomers, the Zoomers who are like teenagers in, you know, Zoomer is.

[Peter McCormack]

A Connor issue.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, but the later. The later zoomers. The later Zoomers are the most radical, right?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah. Like, come on, let's put Connor on the spot. Connor, you're a zoomer. You can press a red button and everything.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You can press the red button and be like, all right, you know, in an instant. In an instant, why would you press the button? Why not?

[Peter McCormack]

Why not?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Why not? Right. Why not? Why not?

[Peter McCormack]

Why not?

[Curtis Yarvin]

And so when we think of democracy, we think of, like, this New England town hall with people like, how do we establish a more perfect union for ourselves and our posterity? And, like, the Zoomer, like, vibe is like, why not? Right. You know, and so. So actually, the key to basically sort of. And in a real regime change. Here's the thing about a real regime change. In a real regime change, everyone's life changes. You know, if you were in, you know, East Germany in 1985 and 1995, you had a different life. Your life was different, right? And, you know, the idea of having an election, having some event, because all this has to happen through elections. Does it? Yes, well, pretty much. Yes, it does. And I'll explain why in a second.

[Peter McCormack]

Why can't it happen through civil war?

[Curtis Yarvin]

No. No, it can't. And that's really the Most disturbing fact, it can't happen through civil war. It can happen through civil war. Because when you look at societies that were actually capable of civil war, they had something that we don't have, which is boss. They had men who had all been in fights. How many fist fights have you been in? How many fist fights of?

[Peter McCormack]

Not recent, but I had a lot.

[Curtis Yarvin]

When I was younger. Yeah, maybe when you were younger, but.

[Peter McCormack]

Like, you know, there were no camera phones recording you.

[Curtis Yarvin]

There were no camera phones recording zoomers. Not so much. You know, like if you look at what? Meh, meh.

[Peter McCormack]

What do you mean?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Depends on your perspective, you know. But the thing is, fundamentally we are one of the most non violent and most, least self violently organizing populations in history. If you look for example at the. In France they had a thing right before COVID Remember the Gilets Jaunes, the yellow jackets in France? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. They were basically like. They had studied democracy. It's okay if you use quote Mark. They studied democracy in school and they knew that the way you change the government of France is to get a lot of people together in Paris and have them make a lot of noise. And they got together, it was like waving the orange paddles for the carcass. They got together in Paris, they had this brilliant idea that every French driver, as I discovered when I fell asleep on the wheel in France, every French driver has to have a yellow vest in their car. And they're like uniforms. I'm like, who's had this idea before? Right?

[Peter McCormack]

It's more than that. You have to have a warning sign in the back.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, but they only used the yellow vest, Right. Because it was an improvised uniform. And suddenly a mob became an army, which is what happens when you wear a uniform. A mob became an army and they're like, we have this army of people and we're going to get together in Paris and things are going to change. And they got together in Paris and nothing happened. And they're like, all right, that was act one. We're going to come back for act two next weekend. And I think they got up to like Act 50 or something and then Covid happened and everybody called the whole thing off. Right. And that's why basically you can't have political change through mass movements. Is that the energy just isn't there and hasn't been there for a long time. If you look at England 500 years ago.

[Peter McCormack]

Hold on. But that's a non violent civil war. If a civil war happens here in the U.S. republicans are getting their guns Out.

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, no, no, no, no, no. None of these people has ever shot at a human being. None of them knows how to shoot at a human being. The Tea Party in America, exactly the same thing. You got a lot of people together, you know what? But they didn't even litter. Okay, so the leftists at least litter. They didn't even litter.

[Peter McCormack]

So is a better example of where this has happened and could happen is Bukele a good example?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Bukele is a better example because Bukele was elected through the normal electoral process, and then he carried out what in Spanish is called an autogolpe, which means an auto coup.

[Peter McCormack]

Change the rules a bit.

[Curtis Yarvin]

He was elect, as did our, you know, the much revered American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

[Peter McCormack]

And I took a quote from that, by the way. Where is the one? I mean, I took a few. But in the event that Congress shall fail to take one of these two causes, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask Congress for one of the remaining instruments to meet the crisis. His broad executive power.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Executive power to wage war.

[Peter McCormack]

Again, to wage a war against the emergency, as the power would be given to me if it were in fact invaded by a foreign force. He said, like, give me the power. Fuck you, I'll do it anyway.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, yeah, Basically, right? He's like, give me the power. And he's like the most revered president in American history by Democrats and Republicans alike today. Right. And so, you know, the idea that this is like. And he basically rules as a dictator for life. More or less. Yeah. With little issues. He's not 100% Hitler. He's like 70% Hitler. And of course, he doesn't kill the Jews. He has that for that. Although he does reject every opportunity to save the Jews. For example, there's something, I don't know. Great, but very successful novelist Michael Chabon has a book that was written in the 80s called the Yiddish Policeman's Union that is set in an alternative world where something called the Slattery Plan was successful. The Slattery Plan was a plan by a guy named Slattery who worked at the Department of the Interior, who in like, 1938 or so, proposed. What if we just. You know, I understand that most Americans don't like Jews and we don't want to let in the Jews, but what if we actually, you know, it was a brilliant idea, like that permafrost idea I mentioned earlier also involved Alaska. He's like, what if we let all the Jews go to Alaska, then they won't bother Americans who are basically anti Semitic at this time. This. This is true. And we'll just let them into Alaska and Alaska will be filled with Jews instead of polar bears or whatever. Where's the downside? FDR turns us down flat. FDR is like, no, we can't do that because FDR is like, basically. Well, FDR did not really like Jews himself. And FDR is like, well, Hitler says he has a Jewish problem. Am I in the business of solving Hitler's problems for him? I don't think so. And so actually, to say that FDR was not involved in genocide is like. I really know, actually. Like, there's something very dark there.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And so, you know, and that's that. But yeah, you know, FDR's first inaugural is just like, all right, you elected me president. Guess what? I'm going to be a real president. If you look at FDR's platform that he runs on, he's basically governs as the opposite of his platform because the Democrats are America's like traditional conservative party, let's not forget. So if you look at the 1932 Democratic platform, it's like small government, lower taxes, et cetera, et cetera. It's a traditional Democratic platform. That's how that inversion happens. And so he's just like, all right, there's a crisis. I'm going to take absolute power. But the thing is, he also had this whole revolution of the elites behind him. Remember how I was talking about the Fabians, the progressive Republicans? He's like, I'm going to have a revolution and I'm going to hand power to this aristocracy which is ready, willing and able to assume power and to govern and knows exactly what it would do with it. And who is not quite ready and willing and able to assume that same level of power, despite popular belief is Silicon Valley. They've gotten a little closer, but they're not there yet.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, it's interesting you should say that because there is a fracturing of the elites right now. There is a, like a new wave of elites where someone like Mark Henderson says, do you know what? I'm not going to be with the. I don't want to go to those dinner parties. I don't want to be.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's at a very young. It's at a very, very young stage. It's much earlier than most people suppose, and it's much more timid and much more unready to rule than most people suppose. But it Is vaguely. It is the only thing. And it's different, of course, in time, but it is the only thing that is sort of comparable in any way to those progressive elites that I was talking about earlier.

[Peter McCormack]

But it is a new sort of like, it's like there's a Peter Thiel, there's Marc Andreessen, there's your good mate J.D. vance. No, but I'm joking. But what I'm saying is there's a break now.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You can. But you can glimpse something distant, but it sort of still doesn't know. Like, think about the dog that caught the car. If someone says to these people, all right, we all surrender. The New York Times surrenders. Whatever. You're in charge of everything. You're the publisher of the New York Times, the President of the United States, the President of Harvard, you're in charge of everything. What do you do? I'm not sure we really know yet. And that's actually one of the most significant problems.

[Peter McCormack]

But is there, like a first mover advantage where some of these people are fracturing away from the. Because they're still elites, whatever they are, they're still the rich people. They still did what the fuck they want. But there's like this fracture in the like of people who realize that this democratic system is failing. And if the Democrat. If the pitchforks come out, they're in line to be taken. Are they? The brighter people are realizing we need to.

[Curtis Yarvin]

The pitchforks are a myth. The pitchforks don't exist. And that is one of the most disturbing facts about the world that we live in.

[Peter McCormack]

But, like, well, historically, there are myths.

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, in the present day, they're a myth.

[Peter McCormack]

The current pitchfork is a vote or a tweet.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes, yes. But literal pitchforks do not exist.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, we replace pitchforks with votes.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, but actually in the past, they had both pitchforks and votes. And the threat was if you ignored the vote, then the pitchfork would come out. And now that threat has become toothless. And that is a big reason, and that cannot be changed. And it is a big reason why votes also have become toothless. Because votes used to be a threat of the pitchforks. You know, in a way, England 500 years ago was more democratic than England today. Because in England 500 years ago, London 500 years ago, you know, the mob was, you know, there's no standing army. The mob is almost irresistible. It's very problematic. And so if the London mob, like the Apprentices, rumor runs around the Apprentices that, you know, the Germans in the steel yard are undercutting true born Englishmen in the wool trade. Well, there's of lot a only one solution. Let's get together and kill all the Germans. And they would basically do this, you know, they would have pogroms. Right. You know, well, the mob now wants.

[Peter McCormack]

To maintain the system rather than the.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Mob now doesn't have any force like the last London riots you had. First of all, to the extent that anybody riots at all. Remember the London riots in 2011?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, they brought them down South London.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Were you in them? Were you?

[Peter McCormack]

No, they were. They were fucking idiots.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, sure. And they did not have any political capacity. They were not going to storm Whitehall and establish an alternative government. And that's an underclass riot. Also January 6, which was not an underclass riot, which was a riot of the lower middle classes, was also not going to storm the Capitol and establish an alternative government and immediately order an armored corps to arrest Barack Obama or something like that.

[Peter McCormack]

But the mobs we have now, we went to London for the Tommy Robinson Free Speech March. We went to observe, we went to see it and there was every attempt to keep it as peaceful as possible. Tommy himself came forward and said, be peaceful, don't drink, don't put on face masks. There was one clash where they'd shepherded people to a wrong place and a bunch of idiots threw some bottles. It lasted 20 minutes. It wasn't good. It was a front page of the daily mail of 100,000 people.

[Curtis Yarvin]

But the one event is like, you know, meanwhile.

[Peter McCormack]

But when the Black Lives Matters riot happened or the Gaza protests happened, those.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Are pro government riots. Those are pro government.

[Peter McCormack]

But that's what I'm saying. The mob now, there is a mob now and it's a pro government.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Okay? So the pro government mob is obviously completely irrelevant and just there to basically torment the people. The anti government mob actually has political potential in theory, but it has zero capacity for violence. So in 1934 in France, for example, example, not to get all Putin on you, but in 1934 in France there is an event where basically the French right and there is a number of sort of quasi Nazi like armed forces on the French right, including the Croix de Feu, the Cross of Iron. These are World War I veterans, huge numbers of them. These are blood hardened people. They will do anything. And it's like the Giles jaunt, the Mass in Paris and then the leader of the Croix de Feu, Colonel de la Roch, incredibly hard name. Everything about the naming goes very hard here. Colonel de la Roque is like, do we storm the Presidential palace and form a new government. And Colonel de la Roch is like, no, we're peaceful and democratic. And so they all go home. Right. You know, we should look at the people of Nepal, you know, and that determines the direction that France goes. And so the idea that Tommy Robinson, you know, God bless his heart, is gonna storm Whitehall if even somebody throws a bottle, if even there's, like, some yabos with facial tattoos, Tommy doesn't like it, and nor should he. Right. And so actually, the idea that. That violence can save you in any way, shape, or form, or that violence can defeat these governments has always been a myth in a way. Actually, an intact state can always resist any level of violence. And intact. If the state at the time of the storming of the Bastille or the Russian Revolution had been healthy, the storming of the Winter palace, these things never would have happened. And so this is why.

[Peter McCormack]

Because of Western. Because we're western nations. There's a Western nation. We've just seen it in Nepal.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And we've been domesticated. We've been castrated. We've been like, you know, de. In a way, the removal of violence from the daily life of, like, ordinary people is just, like. Is actually a dehumanization. If you were an Elizabethan aristocrat, you were expected to be able to kill people with a sword. It was like a totally normal thing. Right. You know, and if you were, like a commoner, it was just like. I mean, the murder rates are, like, very high at this time. Right. You know, you are rough, rough people. And the reason that democracy, literal democracy comes into existence is that it is a formalization of this mob power, just as monarchy is a kind of formalization of the influence of, like, a great military leader. And when that. That force vanishes, the power becomes symbolic. And this is why we have all of the symbolism of democracy today. But actually, because there is no potential for mob violence, fundamentally, the government does not have to listen to the people. And this is why you see this kind of turbulent opposition to mass migration in England today. And so Shabana Mahmood feels free to just totally ignore it because, like, what can they do to her? They can't do anything to her. What can Tommy Robinson do to Shabana Mahmood? Nothing. Right. He might as well be a gnat in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil as far as Shabana Mahmoud is concerned. Now, Nigel Farage, that's a different story. Right? And that's why, basically, that is why, actually, in this sort of moment, the question of, do you start Winning elections and then actually doing the FDR thing of saying, we won the election, so we're actually in charge of the government. Like, whoa, you won the election, but that doesn't mean you're in charge of the government. Like, whoa, right.

[Peter McCormack]

You know, we have the Civil Service for that.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, we have the civil. Yes, Sir Humphrey Appleby is like, yes, Minister, Very good. You know, like, yes, you're in charge of the government. Right. You know, and, you know, and, you know. But an accent more plummy than any I could ever emulate. Right. You know, and. And the accents, I love British accents. My gosh. You know, and especially the high tone, you know, RP ones. Does anyone still speak rp? Can you emulate rp?

[Peter McCormack]

I don't know what you mean by rp.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Receive pronunciation. The Queen's English talking like Queen Elizabeth ii in, like, 1960.

[Peter McCormack]

I don't think I could.

[Curtis Yarvin]

But you know what it would sound like if you tried.

[Peter McCormack]

I don't want to make an attempt the Queen. But what I will say is that I think my podcast career was quite successful because I had a large American.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Audience and they respect a British accent and I definitely. But actually, if you got a little bit more plummy, they might respect it more. You're a little bit like, you know, is that an estuary accent that we got going on here?

[Peter McCormack]

Well, so, so, so my bitcoin podcast did very well in the US And I definitely accentuated my British accent a bit more when I learned it was a cheat code.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Girls love it.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, dude, when I used to travel. Sorry, Simon. When I used to travel my podcast, in my single days, I would get to America. My Tinder description, British.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

Suddenly six foot four.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Many such cases. Right?

[Peter McCormack]

No, but the British accent does work. But not in Britain, because people go, oh, no, he's just a dumbass.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But if, but if, but if, but if you sounded like an eaten old boy, you know, I think that still has a certain effect.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, I think so. I don't think the Geordie, the Brahmi, some of the other party. If you can speak slowly and, you.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Know, politely and like Sir Humphrey Appleby.

[Peter McCormack]

Oh, you're so beautiful.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. It does work. But where were we with that?

[Peter McCormack]

Okay, so look, but I'm going back to the point, really.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So it went. What is really important is to basically say, we don't have this backup of overthrowing the government through violence. We actually need to change the government by winning elections. And the ability to win elections is slipping away as Basically very servile and devoted populations are imported. That is the reality of the political shape of the moment. You only have a certain amount of time to win that.

[Peter McCormack]

So we got a three year window of opportunity for one, a new party which looks like it could be reformed, but they. Then they really have to be Trump 2 rather than Trump 1.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, no, they have to be like Trump 4 or from 5.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay, so straight in there.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, they have to rewrite a lot of the laws all the way. I would say that, you know, if you want to. You know, people often look at sort of a problem with restricted range. So if you're looking at there's a range, there's a Boolean question, a range between 0 and 1. One of the easiest ways to sort of trap people is to get them of thinking of 0.1 as 1 or 0.01 as 1.

[Peter McCormack]

Straight to 1.

[Curtis Yarvin]

When they get to 0.01, they're like, I won. No, actually, you're just zoomed in a little too much. Straight to one and straight to one. There's an excellent. There's a very easy way to define straight to one that is very satisfactory, that cannot be argued easily against by our friend the Lib. And that is to say that actually the level of sovereignty that you need to hand to Prime Minister Farage is essentially the level of power that was held by allied military government in Germany in June 19, 1945.