The Cathedral and the Clown Car

When the United States' present administration got into office, the media latched onto Curtis Yarvin as a hidden mastermind behind its clear incompetence, and spent a couple weeks churning out articles about him – including that embarrassing New York Times interview. This revealed a clear understanding of the NYT’s thoughts, and indeed of the thoughts of the mainstream media at large when it comes to these figures, whose critiques, no matter how weak, always threaten to bring down the house of cards that is the liberal defense of managed democracy as an apt alternative to totalitarianism, or even the notion that it is an alternative at all.

In the early 1990s, Curtis Yarvin was working towards his PhD in computer science, and in-between his research, he frequented Usenet newsgroup discussions, interacting mostly with fellow academics and players within the tech industry, as in, those which had the money and knowledge to join the conversation in the first place. Usenet at the time was perfect, blooming with just enough discussion and topical diversity, without its users being treated as a “mass”, but as people whose names and affiliations had real meaning and thus subjected them to social controls. This mutual arrangement between intellectuals was only threatened every month of September, when students started arriving at universities, and started joining the network without knowing any of its social conventions; eventually, they always either left or integrated with the rest.

What happened when 1993 came around, however, is what provoked the creation of endless quotes, of the sort normally posted by the kind of person who needs an ideological justification for banning anyone they find annoying off a chat: Internet providers which dealt mostly with residential and basic education customers started to provide Usenet access, irrevocably lowering the bar for entry, forever. Since a large slice of participants now lacked the same backgrounds and repertoires, the network became a mass, and the use of moderation tooling without individual scrutiny became more and more common, birthing the current status-quo of public conversation networks.

Beyond Hoppe and Carlyle, this defining moment for Silicon Valley’s culture of “freedom-loving elitism” is what influences Yarvin. While he is quite well-read, his language oftentimes betrays the frustration embodied in the politics of self-proclaimed “neo-reactionary” thought, in a way only someone familiar with his actual classics — God vs. Atheists posts on alt.philosophy.debate — can tell. This shallow elitism, nominally based on merit, is the hero of the Dark Enlightenment, whose forces fight the Cathedral and its press arm in the Polygon, all promoters of democracy against the truly efficient neo-cameral system.

The neo-reactionaries make the average academic marxist look like a 5th grader when it comes to the subject of making up shallow terms justified by even shallower analogies. This is, in part, an example of how it pioneered the modern right-wing tactic of “code-word overload”, where obscurantism is used both in order to create a barrier of entry, and in order to provide the illusion of complexity. While this primordial version of the tactic is not really the start of modern “dogwhistling” practices meant to hide the overall topic of the conversation, it is important to note that the semi-modern usage of the “red pill” originates here.

To uncover the real meaning behind the “Dark Enlightenment” is a difficult task, not born from complexity, but rather from the fact that introducing the term also introduces quite a bit of history, which is not really important when we’re looking at the principles of neo-reaction in isolation, but becomes significant when taking into account the fact that the modern right-wing aesthetic interfaces with libertarianism, post-modernism, technical terminology, futurism, and mysticism, all of which make up very small parts of a larger collection of symbols and memes.

If we entertain a more rigid view, we can point to “neo-reaction” as a set of policy proposals that are more-or-less grounded in immediate reality, but are conceptually shallow, and to the “Dark Enlightenment” as a term applied by philosopher Nick Land, who is sympathetic to the neo-reactionary reading of how the world works today, but defends an unabashedly accelerationist project. Land’s perspective is more tightly bound to a bourgeois left intellectual tradition, seeking to further the reproduction of capital to the most extreme levels, and thus contradicting some of the backwards measures defended by neo-reaction, most markedly the recent defense of re-shoring United States industrial production [1]. You see, in conversation, this distinction is meaningless, until it suddenly isn’t: the reader is left to decode these constant semantic shifts, something which they can only do via observation and engagement. For our purposes, “neo-reaction”, “NRx”, and the “Dark Enlightenment” are the same thing.

So, what do the silly people on social media actually believe? The pillar of NRx thought is that there exists a circle called “the Cathedral”, responsible for producing a unified “scientific” doctrine that is used as a pretext to rule the world. This basic tenet provides Yarvin’s ideas with the core of their agreeableness, considering that it is a clear starting point for an analysis of the current conjecture, allowing readers to fit their idea of what the Cathedral actually is to their preconceived notions, using neo-reactionarism as a means to expand the content of their own personal worldview.

What tends to diverge “schools of thought” from a set of programmatic guidelines is the kind of vagueness which allows for syncretic creativity on the part of the reader, letting them mix-and-match their fundamental beliefs and aesthetics with the new cool thing they’re reading. The hatred of journalism and academia, of America’s panoply of NGOs, is not a high bar at all, even for those who are facilitators for these organizations. Via introducing such an agreeable concept as its pillar, neo-reaction ensures that its circle of support, even if it is small, will remain broad, and will include even those within the “administrative state” it seeks to re-shape. This has been seen a thousand times before with all the tired right-wing cliches like “Teachers for Trump”.

First, let us establish that “the Cathedral”, in the sense of “whichever institutions of cultural prominence that the reader may dislike”, constitutes a real, interlinked policymaking and propaganda apparatus for the bourgeoisie. Where neo-reactionarism contradicts with this reality is in its insistence that the Cathedral is the true power in the modern state, not merely a “fourth republican power”, but the Republic; the actually-existing “deep state.” According to Yarvin, policies flow from the brains of professors, the highest echelon of this power, and hold their will over government – first, by holding the credentials required for public officials to enter government, second, by influencing public opinion through the media, turning the democratic system into a flexible instrument of the Cathedral’s power. They are the “extended civil service.”

In fact, we know exactly what Washington’s policies twenty years from now will be. They will certainly have nothing to do with ‘politics.’ They will be implementations of the ideas now taught at Harvard, Yale and Berkeley. There is a little lag as the memes work their way through the system, as older and wiser civil servants retire and younger, more fanatical ones take their place. But this lag is getting shorter all the time. [2]

Two things should strike the reader right off the bat – the discrepancy between prevailing academic memes and actual government policy (no matter the ruling party), and the exclusive focus on the role of the “Cathedral” in state affairs. Academia doesn’t limit itself to degrees for bureaucrats, nor do journalists report exclusively on senators’ morning meals: That it is a policymaking and credentialing apparatus for the bourgeoisie in the public and private sphere is at the core of its irreparable failure as an institute for knowledge production, with the rigidness of the “proper” scientific method coming into conflict with all the relevant incentives at play: students need degrees, specialized industries needs workers, the state needs specialized industries, everyone else involved needs to fill their quota. The creation of any sort of edifying research takes a backseat to the boxes that need checking. NRx entrepreneurs know this well, which is why they are constantly looking for ways to optimize away the needs for academic certification, with Silicon Valley shifting hard to maintain its own intricate system of accreditation, used, along with personal portfolios, to more efficiently hire (and depreciate the salaries of) job candidates.

Here, we find an obvious contradiction: the completely inept system the new breed of tech capitalists must circumvent just happens to be perfect at manufacturing the future of state policy. In an attempt to address this problem, neo-reaction must must affirm that professors operate with impunity – after all, “who tells journalists and professors what to say?” [3] In Yarvin’s example of an ideal liberal technocratic state, “Mutopia” (one cannot go five seconds reading Gray Mirror or Unqualified Reservations without an extended fictional analogy) “no one need supervise the professors and journalists—they are self-watching watchmen.” [4] But we have seen time and time again that the watchers of the watchmen are the private initiative, which curtail the horizon of acceptable stances for the academic institutions they are large donors to, and investors in. If a university threatens the portfolio of a benefactor by, say, voicing opposition to the State of Israel during a BDS protest, their contract is not renewed [5]. Tenure is a privilege of a minority, who themselves often delegate instruction elsewhere; they have had to smooth out their opinions for several years beforehand.

Academia, however, is the smallest pebble inside Yarvin’s made-in-Guangzhou leather boots. His spite is most consistently directed at “the Polygon” or the “Official Press”, the liberal mainstream media which is even more deeply beholden to their owners, which tend to be old-money capitalists. In this rehashing of your conservative uncle’s dinner time sermons, the newspapers maintained by capitalist oligarchs rule the world, being the entity which presses the loose internal proceedings of the academic cliques into a perfectly round soy pill for public consumption and indoctrination.

But neo-reaction is also soy, in the same way 2010s conservatism was soy, seeking to constantly catch the attention of the mainstream press. The New York Times interview would not have happened if the editorial staff was not completely sure that it played into their big opera of party politics. When Yarvin goes to a relatively mid-tier program and rants about how black people had it better in southern slave states, the NYT has already won, no matter how much the NRxistes delude themselves into believing that spamming YouTube comments is synonymous with media discipline. This is, of course, because at the end of the day, the whole show is promoting papers to the “NPR class”, which has already made up their mind, scoffing at comments about the greatness of Apartheid as a way to feed their moral fiber so they won’t feel bad for supporting Israel.

Indeed, liberals are the audience, an audience which early NRx pretends to be at dialogue with, but which only the “Polygon” earnestly reaches: and that audience is an independent force! When readers are discontent by a shift in reporting, like in the case of the Washington Post, they go away, forcing large owners to subsidize and intervene in manufacturing a pivot towards a different readership [6]. This is the power of the “Cathedral”, the one advantage sizeable bourgeois ideological institutions have had ever since they properly became a thing. Given a large enough subsidy, you can always find someone who will pay you eventually – this is, after all, one of the most consistent principles Silicon Valley is founded upon.

But, for Yarvin, there are YCombinators and there are federal technology partnerships; he is perfectly willing to acknowledge the sway of donors when they sit in government (he attributes scientific agreement on anthropogenic global warming – “AGW” – to Department of Energy funding [7]) but somehow misses it everywhere else. He cannot acknowledge this Cathedral’s role in policies he likes – Reagan, Nixon and Thatcher are half-outsiders who “appeared to succeed, for a while, but little trace of their efforts (at least in domestic politics) is visible today. Their era ends in the 1980s, and it is impossible to imagine similar figures today.” [8] No, the Chicago School never existed, and Clinton was a communist. You’re hallucinating.

Neo-reaction is completely inept at explaining where the Cathedral’s memes come from, viewing it as nonsense opposed to business interests. This reflects conditions in Silicon Valley, where DEI, for instance, really was a burdensome imposition taken to avoid regulation in the 2010s, but neither accounts for the interests of the bourgeoisie as a class nor the internal workings of academia. For Yarvin, the “dominant ideas” in the Cathedral are merely those which “validate the use of power,” which “tends to benefit you and your friends. A dominant idea will be especially popular with your friends and former students in the civil service, because it gives them more work and more power.” [9] Thus, the Cathedral always lands on left-wing, interventionist policy. This is a real set of incentives at work in academia, and it would be fine and well if more than an insignificant percentage of academics could get government jobs – or if jobs in the civil service were so desirable in the first place, which the current administration has done a fine job disproving. Otherwise, it offers no explanation for why something becomes the day's academic fad (and certainly not why “tolerating criminals” would be a dominant idea.)

The academic in academia, the one working to produce this ideology, has a career to advance; they must constantly get their work published to stay afloat. This is not denied by academics themselves – only its consequences are. The ideal academic subject is very important, but subject to constant, never-ending debate; it is an endless fountain of abstracts. The ideal academic paper is flashy and conclusive, selling journals, making headlines – giving other authors room to argue. Academics and journalists alike have a vested interest in giving a controversial spin on a controversial topic while remaining within its current bounds – there is a market for “Marxist” social democrats and “anarchist” partisans of tribal state-capitalism. [10]

Academia’s discussions are important, which means it has clear policy implications for companies or governments – but, if they can help it, no conclusion would lead to anything so disruptive as needing to “redirect 10^14 dollars worth of economic activity” to make war on climate change. Whenever a new topic can be spun into a new field of study, it will be, no matter how much it pushes scientific notions of falsifiability to the brink. There is no better example than intersectionality – a near-infinite list of intersecting “forms of oppression,” each with myriad policy implications justifying the employment of a whole industry of specialized consultants and Human Resources professionals. Each “intersection” is easily reduced – for the academic, HR exec, and leftist pseudo-radical alike – to a mere shadow-play of ideas, devoid of that uncomfortable material background their employer is quite happy with. [11]

Academia can easily acknowledge bias – white bias, male bias – and it can acknowledge its methodological flaws – the replication crisis, the lack of interdisciplinary research. These can (theoretically) be fixed [12]. What it cannot acknowledge is its actual role as bourgeois ideologist; that all the demographic biases in the world pale in comparison with the bias of being a career academic or journalist, and that its persistent belief that a more diverse academia will be better equipped to understand racial issues is an exercise in self-delusion. It is a bloated corpse, brilliantly shining as it flakes into dust; the final form of that archaic, rotting division between mental and manual labor. It is irreparably segregated from society. How many times has the brightest researcher failed to understand the basic realities of a Californian warehouse picker or a Chinese factory worker? How many times has the work of a dozen ecologists been outclassed by the observations of a hunter?

This division makes the academic blind to the everyday reality of billions of non-academic, scientifically illiterate people, and this blindness creates a fundamental separation which neither side is capable of overcoming individually – yes, the best academic works are written by those with a lifetime of non-academic experience, and the self-taught researcher is often the most insightful – but the system of knowledge production goes a long way to systematically reproduce ignorance, be it via classical financial gatekeeping of articles and data, or via the creation of cliques which find themselves collaborating more and more with the publishers and authors which seek to section off human knowledge via extensive copyright enforcement.

No amount of leftist-liberal education will fix this, for the educator cannot be educated in turn, and, when they need to appeal to their erstwhile student, they must filter any genuine knowledge they have into marketable pop science. All the while, the crippling division of fields makes every academic an idiot savant, an expert in one field who believes they are an expert in all – the doctor of philosophy will not learn otherwise, even from the mouth of Socrates. So long as the need for a career is not abolished, it will remain this way – and that demands a social revolution not even the “Marxist” or “anarchist” academic can bear to consider.

Academia is as divorced from the technology sector as it is from the general population, and academic credentials are similarly spread out in both. The research which pushes it forward today is either private R&D or anonymously published on arXiv; academic programming is, generally, as useless as Urbit [13]. Silicon Valley is uniquely positioned to give rise to a Yarvin; here we have a group of unusually successful employees with the money and connections to ascend into the bourgeoisie, in an industry mystified beyond belief, in an isolating job done alone as often as not; a group which, from the start, was a homogeneous group of middle-class social outcasts.

Their userbase knows nothing about their job, and, until recently, their regulators didn’t either; both make uninformed, nonsensical demands. If they knew what they were talking about, however, they wouldn’t trust one bit of the industry’s advertising, and the stock bubble, daily growing, would burst. It must always be magic, its practitioners magicians atop a mass of idiots. The Silicon Valley programmer must always be able to think of himself as a superior being. This is the actual content of neo-reaction’s intelligence-based caste system – preservation of trade secrets.

The culture this produced suddenly became a PR liability when it leaked onto social media – around the time it first faced the threat of regulation – and the workforce faced a sudden, new job threat. This was the environment Yarvin’s political writing began in, and he has dutifully served to make a new band of frustrated little people walk to the polls, where they will try, as the leftists tried and failed, to “radicalize” one of the monolithic parties. Yarvin, for one, is already disappointed with their performance [14].

Flattering the Silicon Valley programmer is, of course, Yarvin’s day job; nobody else would purchase ten-chapter paperback blog posts, and his other work opportunities have dried up as VCs realized their uselessness. His work is valued for its cultural appeal; it is the Che Guevara t-shirt of west coast venture capitalists and labor aristocrats. The liberal critic of Yarvin cannot stand the thought that there is a truth – a one-sided truth, an incomplete truth, but a truth nonetheless – to his “anti-intellectualism.” Nor can the Silicon Valley programmer – cherishing the same delusional confidence in their narrow expertise and fed up with their own unenlightened rabble, stumbling blind through the hallowed halls of “technology” while babbling storms of political gibberish – see the truth behind the ramblings of his favorite blogger and tat-salesman – De te fabula narratur!

Footnotes

1. “The problem with Trumpian mercantilism”, Gray Mirror


2. An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives, Chapter 7


3. A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations, Chapter 5


4. “A brief explanation of the cathedral,” Gray Mirror


5. “University professor fired over pro-Palestine and antisemitic views,” The Jerusalem Post (known Hamas rag.) https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-822052


6. “The Washington Post is Limping into Trump’s Second Term,” The Wall Street Journal. https://web.archive.org/web/20250428175741/https://www.wsj.com/business/media/washington-post-challenges-trump-second-term-61ea6ed9


7. This article, “AGW, KFM and HNU.” is really worth reading for a laugh. He plays the reasonable center who believes in anthropogenic global warming before declaring its severity a hoax because the DoE is nine-tenths publicity stunts by volume, climate models are rough and inaccurate guesses, because they do not fit Popperian falsifiability, and because pop science is an oversimplified, untrustworthy appeal to voters. Instead of trying to argue against “human neurological uniformity,” he tells the reader to look outside!


8. An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives, Chapter 7


9. “A brief explanation of the cathedral,” Grey Mirror


10. Yarvin need look no further than New York’s Oneida Indian Nation for an example of his dream government in action.


11. Or, in Yarvin’s case, reduced to genetic differences in IQ – the modern, scientistic manner of attributing the division of labor to the immortal soul.


12. In practice, of course, these won’t be fixed either. Academia will not stop recruiting most of its people from the middle classes, nor will it abolish the need to get published, the preferences of publishers, or the squabbling over credit which hinders interdisciplinary research.


13. It’s just a virtual machine that runs a terrible APL clone, except its network layer requires you to pay crypto if you want to get an address. “Neo-feudalism” in practice!


14. “Barbarians and Mandarins,” Gray Mirror