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The difference between Yarvin and vinegar-drinking scolds is that Yarvin merely repeats yesterday's vinegar-drinking scolds. If you like his writing, there's literally centuries' worth of it (in fact, it only stopped being the norm rather recently), and if you go study history at a university you'll read quite a lot of it. It does seem less fresh, though, once you read it in proper chronological order, and with appropriate context, rather than somebody posting a stuffy, safe, and dull 1897 text as a surprising, reactionary 2012 blog post. He served cold leftovers and seemed like a chef to people who'd never had a good meal.

maehwasu 2397 days ago

I actually agree strongly: one of the best things in his writing is his references to primary sources, many of which I found extremely enjoyable to read. The past is a foreign country more interesting than any tourist trip you can take.

If the only thing the Moldbug posts did was link to that material, that would be a service in itself.

To give Yarvin his due though, he does a good job synthesizing it all into a general theory of power being a necessary and sufficient explanation of motivations in most cases.

Except for two problems: his understanding of the material is well below that of a first-year history student (he's a layman more than an amateur), and any decent college book or course contains far better references. Second, there is nothing new about his positions. They're a rehashing of the old mainstream, that was rejected over time because of societal and technological changes he doesn't know and certainly doesn't understand. As someone who studied both physics and history in grad school, his writing about history seems to make as much sense to someone who has actually learned that history as the multitude of texts about Reiki and channeling aliens that mention "quantum energy" make sense to someone who has actually studied physics. It only looks interesting (in a serious way) when you know virtually nothing. I read it in the same way I read about Reiki: a sort of curious anthropological entertainment from an epistemology that diverges sharply from science and scholarship. Sort of like a modern person would enjoy reading medieval texts about body humours or the four elements. So it's interesting to me to see the alternative constructions people who have no real scholarship make in order to understand the world around them.

> his understanding of the material is well below that of a first-year history student

Met plenty of history grad students in grad school. Well-read but intellectually very limited, and very herd-minded. But, then, I did not go to an Ivy with a tradition of excellence in the humanities.

> Second, there is nothing new about his positions

Of course there is, it's just the nutty cypherpunk stuff like crypto-locked nukes.

> As someone who studied both physics and history in grad school

You're a member of an extremely small class. He does not write for people like you. It makes no sense to write for people like you if power is the goal.

Marx's writing was childish beyond belief. He did not even know calculus. Yet, look at how much has been unleashed on his behalf.

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Mountain

Oh, I have no doubt Yarvin's writings could unleash something, if only because they already did. They're a rehashing of what became mainstream opinions following Romanticism [1]. Eugenics [2] was taught in numerous universities at the beginning of the 20th century. Clearly, some people can find Romanticism appealing today for the same reason they found it appealing in the 19th c., and they will find it appealing, yet again in the 23rd. The only defense is knowing how and why it arose the first time around, and why it was ultimately rejected.

If you want to read a book about the struggle of Romanticism and Humanism, read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.[3]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

P.S.

For those interested in a direct response by a scholar to another, perhaps less extreme and more sophisticated, charlatan of Yarvin's general milieu, see: https://thebaffler.com/latest/peterson-ganz-klein

zozbot234 2397 days ago

Eugenics emerged in modern times as a Progressive-era policy. It seems kind of vague and perhaps misleading to link it to Romanticism, when actually it follows along the exact same lines as the secular, "scientific" Humanism that you evidently find so appealing.

It's well-known that the Nazis imported eugenics from Yale and Oxbridge. And eugenics was publicly defended by people all over the political spectrum until 1939. After 1945, it went underground. It never went away.

Moldbug can preach his Carlyleism all he wants. In the end, the unleashing of energy will be due to people researching the genetic basis of intelligence and IVF. The pathological bloviators preach, the unsung soldiers and scientists make things happen.

The cold leftovers can still be highly nutritious to those raised on processed, mythologized, state-endorsed pseudo-history.

I don't know what to say except that as someone who has studied history professionally for some years, Yarvin's history is far more mythologized than the "state-endorsed pseudo-history." Hell, Yarvin's writings were the state-endorsed pseudo-history from about 1820 to 1920.

They read like a text by a Reiki guru about quantum physics. It, too, can be surprising by pointing out that the Newtonian mechanics you learned in high-school is far from the whole story, except that the story they give is just... wrong. I'm not saying one couldn't come to the same position as him while actually knowing history, but he specifically certainly doesn't.

Mythmaking and mythbusting do not have to be mutually exclusive. If one can recognize the former, the whole can be edifying.