One of the most disturbing things about Donald Trump’s January 20th inauguration was who was standing behind him on the dais as he became the country’s 47th president. Aside from some cabinet picks, it wasn’t MAGA loyalists or Republican party bigwigs as might have been expected, but some of the world’s richest men, titans of Silicon Valley, who had often been at odds with him in the past.
The wealthiest among them, Elon Musk, began an ongoing assault on many cherished U.S. government agencies and entitlements soon after. He’s done so with little real pushback through the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), which is not an actual department but was created by an early executive order that renamed the United States Digital Service (part of the executive branch) and bestowed it with unprecedented powers.
Unelected and exempt from the Senate confirmation process normally required for individuals to lead government agencies, Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO, was technically given 130 days to bring what amounts to a startup philosophy to the federal bureaucracy without regard for the country’s laws or its legislative branch.
For context, remember how Steve Bannon wanted to “deconstruct” what he called the administrative state? Musk’s young DOGE acolytes are now recklessly doing so with little care for current or future consequences. Whether they will be able to continue their work, as Musk seems likely to step back from such a visible role in the administration, is an open question.
Musk is in some ways a manifestation of one of the core philosophies that’s produced an alliance between reactionary Christian nationalists on one hand and tech bro CEOs—like those behind Trump at the inauguration—on the other. Add a complete misunderstanding on the part of many in the administration, including the president, about how trade works in a globalized world and you have a recipe for the uniquely 21st century disaster that’s unfolding daily before our eyes.
From libertarianism to monarchy
Arguably the Silicon Valley oligarch most interested in intellectual pursuits is not Musk but Peter Thiel, another remarkably inarticulate speaker who published an essay more than a decade ago declaring that freedom and democracy are incompatible, and who has worked to undermine the latter ever since.
In recent years, the venture capitalist, who was an early Trump supporter, has cultivated conservative politicians through business connections including failed Senate candidate Blake Masters and the current vice president of the United States, JD Vance.
Another of Thiel’s long term human investments is the software engineer and self-proclaimed Neo-reactionary (‘NRx’) philosopher, Curtis Yarvin, who is often name-dropped by Masters and Vance in interviews and public statements.
Yarvin, previously a must-read blogger for much of Silicon Valley under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, unironically calls himself a monarchist. Although he says absolute monarchy is the best form of government and occasionally references the likes of Queen Elizabeth I, he usually means that political leaders today should act as top down rulers like the tech CEOs who speak so favorably of him.
One of his most talked about catchphrases in these circles is “RAGE,” or “retire all government employees,” an idea that’s coming to life through that other acronym, DOGE. It’s a somewhat backhanded compliment, but Yarvin has the remarkable ability to repurpose pop culture staples like “The Lord of the Rings” in a way that appeals to reactionary minds.
Under his Moldbug pseudonym, he is credited with two concepts that have become ubiquitous online over the last 15 years: ‘the red pill’ and ‘the Cathedral.’
The fictional problem of ‘the Cathedral’
As Yarvin wrote in a piece called “A brief explanation of the Cathedral,” after dropping his pen name and creating his Gray Matter Substack, “the cathedral” is just a short way to say “journalism plus academia”—in other words, the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the center of medieval society.
But the label is making a point. The Catholic Church is one institution—the cathedral is many institutions. Yet the label is singular. This transformation from many to one—literally, e pluribus unum—is the heart of the mystery at the heart of the modern world.
Reading on, one quickly realizes that this “mystery” is anything but that, to anyone familiar with the concept of the manufacture of consent, an idea originally tied to pioneers in public relations a century ago, but now most associated with Noam Chomsky.
Yarvin approaches the concept from a different angle than Chomsky, in some ways returning it to its PR roots by cynically ignoring the influence of monied interests on politics and culture altogether.
As Jacobin contributor Ben Burgis explained in a public debate, Yarvin’s framing around what he calls the “dominant” ideas spread by the cathedral downplays the power of the wealthy owners of most of the press (and to a lesser extent, wealthy donors to academic institutions). Focusing on the molding of culture and politics by middle management in media and, even more absurdly, professors in the humanities at universities, is ridiculous to all but the most blinkered culture warriors on the right.
As if to prove the point Burgis was making, another of the billionaires who stood behind Trump at his inauguration, Jeff Bezos, removed the editor of the Washington Post’s opinion section in late February to ensure that only pieces discussing his views about “personal liberties and free markets” are presented to readers. It’s ironic that Yarvin claimed that the all powerful cathedral would somehow be able to prevent such an institutional takeover with Bezos and the Post as his example.
Reading his work, it often seems that Yarvin cares more about being edgy than about being truthful in terms of where power actually lies in our hyper-capitalistic world.
Red pills and freedom cities
Writing as Mencius Moldbug in 2007, Yarvin repurposed a metaphor from the Matrix movies, the Red Pill, which was brought into the world by a pair of transgender sisters who probably meant something else by it. In doing so, Yarvin had the widest impact in his career as a cultural provocateur.
As Jacob Siegal wrote in Tablet Magazine in 2022, “In one of his earliest blog posts, Yarvin birthed the now-ubiquitous meme of ‘the red pill,’ …the revelation of a suppressed truth that shatters progressive illusions and exposes a harsh underlying reality.”
Although most often associated with online misogynists and incels today, Yarvin saw the red pill as the realization that the Enlightenment ideals he came to associate with the cathedral and democracy are actually a poison leading to societal decadence and decline. His solution at the time? Thousands of sovereign “Patchwork cities” run by corporate entities that could eventually replace the United States and other countries.
Interestingly, some time before his work, Peter Thiel, showing his belief in libertarianism as a political philosophy, burned barrels of money in support of the failed “seasteading” movement, in many ways an earlier version of the corporate cities Yarvin had in mind. This unworkable concept has moved onshore to places like Honduras in recent years, where existing security forces are increasingly used to protect the wealthy from the consequences of their actions.
In a recent twist, the current occupant of the White House is now talking about creating so-called “freedom cities” within the U.S. to bring home the idea of a sovereign corporate state, unencumbered by regulations or the constitution, and run by a CEO rather than elected officials. Thiel is involved in another project, Praxis, which hopes to do the same thing in Greenland.
This idea is clearly still a goal for many techno-feudalists, and Donald Trump has given Yarvin hope that the kind of monarchy he never imagined could overthrow a country like the United States is now possible.
Libertarianism and monarchy might at first glance seem opposed. But Yarvin’s wealthy fans take the former to its natural conclusion, while their views of the latter—through an almost religious belief in meritocracy—ignore the role that social status and luck played in their success.
At the end of the day, we are all just non-player characters in this simulation they call life.
