Curtis Yarvin Quotes

184 Sourced Quotes

In other words, our so-called democracy is dependent not on the wisdom of the people, but on the internal power politics of the official church. If these politics produce a political platform which translates to responsible and effective actions, the government will be good. If they don't, it will suck. Either way, we have consigned the state to an unaccountable conclave of bishops. Why this is an improvement on monarchy, or any other form of autocracy, is unclear.
This political architecture, an abortion by any standard, is commonly known as a theocracy. Oddly enough, the classic historical case of a theocracy is… wait, hang on, I'm forgetting… oh, yes! Right here, in North America. Under those strange people we call the "Puritans".

Curtis Yarvin
[…] the most absolute and amoral of powers can have good reasons to restrict its own actions and obey its own restrictions.

Curtis Yarvin
Democracy means that popular opinion controls the state; intellectuals guide popular opinion; ergo, intellectuals guide the state.

Curtis Yarvin
Thus applying libertarian principles of natural rights […] moves a state not toward the libertarian goal of spontaneous order, but away from it—i. e. toward chaos, defeat, and destruction. Because its enemies use artillery, and it doesn't. Its enemies do not bother with trials, and it does. Etc. Therefore it is weak, and cannot produce any order at all, spontaneous or otherwise.

Curtis Yarvin
The relative peace of the last sixty years has been achieved only at the price of creating a university system which is an established church in all but name, and which suppresses any thought it finds even remotely disturbing.

Curtis Yarvin
The strong government executes firmly and decisively. The weak one is fickle and inconsistent, and as a result has to be much more vicious to achieve any given level of security.

Curtis Yarvin
Once you go to college, you are no longer in the real America. You are in a fortified outpost of future America, which has been planted in the real America to enlighten and assimilate it.

Curtis Yarvin
The irony of the postwar age is that this reign of global peace, this universalist millennium, was achieved by the Allied victory in the most ruthless war in modern history, in which neither side displayed the slightest respect for enemy civilians.

Curtis Yarvin
[…] far from advancing toward tolerance for all, Western civilization is being overrun by an aggressive and intolerant monoculture.

Curtis Yarvin
All the great crimes of the recent past have been committed by states which portrayed themselves as profoundly ethical actors. Removing this mask, eliminating the ability of the beast to portray itself as good, uninstalls an essential module in this perverse system.

Curtis Yarvin
The Western world certainly has all the physical and human tools it needs to restore civilization in the Third World and resume the work of Lord Cromer. But it lacks the legal and political tools, and until it has those it shouldn't even try. As in Vietnam, it ends up just handing victories to its adversaries, who use the result as simply one more piece of evidence that demonstrates their invincibility.

Curtis Yarvin
From the perspective of its subjects, what counts is not who runs the government, but what the government does. Good government is effective, lawful government. Bad government is ineffective, lawless government. How anyone reasonable could disagree with these statements is quite beyond me. And yet clearly almost everyone does.

Curtis Yarvin
In a democracy with a free press, the press is the government. Public opinion on any subject will naturally shift toward the opinions of those who explain that subject to the public.

Curtis Yarvin
A good test for getting rid of anything is: if we didn't have this, would we need it?

Curtis Yarvin
A sovereign should never make any concessions in response to violence or the threat of violence, unless there is no alternative but surrender.

Curtis Yarvin
The reason it's so difficult to oppose lawful democracy is that we have so few alternatives to compare it to.

Curtis Yarvin
In the English language as we use it now, words like progressive and conservative are actually relative designations. Progressive means "left of the mainstream" and conservative means "right of the mainstream." When the mainstream shifts, these words have to shift as well, and the result is that many of the radical left-wing ideas of 1907 would be radical right-wing ideas in 2007.

Curtis Yarvin
Yes, the US military should leave Iraq and Afghanistan. But it should leave not because it is impossible for a modern military to defeat a bunch of tribal warriors. It should leave because it is fighting an American civil war by proxy. One, this is just sick. And two, the right place to fight a civil war is always at home.

Curtis Yarvin
Leftism is Protestantism and Protestantism is leftism...

Curtis Yarvin
[…] humans clearly have an inherent sense of right and wrong. They also clearly have a mechanism which makes this moral sense almost always correspond to their interests.

Curtis Yarvin
The temptation to reform, rather than abandon, the adaptive fiction is omnipresent.

Curtis Yarvin
Most people in the West don't think their entire system of government is fundamentally, irreparably corrupt. Nor did most people in the Soviet Union.

Curtis Yarvin
Every society in human history that has ever given itself over to government by intellectuals has lived to regret it. Ours will be no different.

Curtis Yarvin
To a Carlylean, Satan is the Lord of Chaos and the Father of Lies. When you lie—intentionally or unintentionally—you sacrifice a kitten to Satan. Satan loves you for this! And, since he is not uninfluential on this earth, he does what he can for you. Which is sometimes quite a bit.
The Carlylean technique accepts only absolute veracity as the basis for any political strategy. The fact is: by sacrificing the occasional kitten or two, by twisting the truth a bit for the sake of this quarter's sales, libertarians and other rightists get nowhere.

Curtis Yarvin
The only problem with colonialism was that it got nationalized. Which was enough. Colonialism chartered company–style is profitable. Colonialism as a government department is a disaster.

Curtis Yarvin
But yes—disbelieving in democracy in 2008 is a lot like disbelieving in God in 1758.

Curtis Yarvin
When you create a category called "religion" which lumps together all the delusional traditions that people who are not like you have inherited unquestioned from their intellectual ancestors, you are making it harder, not easier, to question your own assumptions.

Curtis Yarvin
[…] the problem with genius is not promoting it, but suppressing it. It takes a very large and intricate system to perform the latter task, but it works pretty well as you can see.

Curtis Yarvin
In reality, intellectuals have always worshiped power and they can be expected to always do so. Historical periods in which intellectuals are estranged from power are the exceptions. We just remember them better, because they have resulted in most of the progress of civilization. But if we are in one now, you definitely could have fooled me.

Curtis Yarvin
Cosmic righteousness and consistent, objective law are not just different things. They are actively opposed. Arbitrary rules whose derivation is entirely historical, but whose result is absolutely clear—such as property titles—are often the only way to define a consensus that everyone can agree on peacefully.

Curtis Yarvin