Curtis Yarvin - Government Quotes

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I can't imagine counting the number of times I've heard someone say "we should…" when what they really mean is "the government should…".

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
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
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
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 Western governments of 2008 are red-giant states: they are as large as they have ever been, but also as weak as they have ever been.

Curtis Yarvin
Limited government simply has no motivation to stay limited. And so it doesn't.

Curtis Yarvin
The system will be defeated when most intelligent people realize that The New York Times is a government gazette and Harvard is a government seminary, and when they form alternate institutions that fulfill the same role in a way that is genuinely independent.

Curtis Yarvin
But in 1938, three systems of government were contending for global supremacy. One of them is still around: yours. Anglo-American liberal democracy. Had military luck favored either of the others—National Socialism or Marxism–Leninism—we can also be sure that it would have discovered and reveled in its foes' every misdeed, and that it would have approached its own, if at all, tentatively and ambiguously.

Curtis Yarvin
The entire intellectual system of the West was corrupted by its twentieth-century connection to government. Public opinion reflects press opinion, press opinion reflects academic politics, and academic politics are driven by power-struggles in which the attraction of the state is clear.
The victory of Keynesian over Misesian economics, for example, is a classic case of this. Theories of economics which led to jobs advising the state were adaptive. Theories which didn't weren't.

Curtis Yarvin
The basic premise of UR is that all the competing twentieth-century systems of government, including the Western democracies which came out on top and which rule us to this day, are best classified as Orwellian. They maintain their legitimacy by shaping public opinion. They shape public opinion by sculpting the information presented to the public. As part of that public, you peruse the world through a lens poured by your government.

Curtis Yarvin
[…] revenue-maximizing government is not a medieval atrocity from the past, but a permanent feature of human history whose rare exceptions are unstable and undesirable.

Curtis Yarvin
Of course, since the government is sovereign, it can break its own laws any time it likes. But it will not do this unless it has a good reason, because the value of a lawless state is much lower than that of a lawful one.

Curtis Yarvin
[…] you don't want to be governed by a persistently unprofitable government any more than you want to eat in a persistently unprofitable restaurant.

Curtis Yarvin
The fact that governments are useful to the inhabitants of their territory is a purely secondary and emergent property. They need to be useful, because a government that does not provide at least basic security will not find itself with any rents to collect.

Curtis Yarvin
If the US was a unified, effective actor which intended to conquer and civilize Iraq and Afghanistan, it would abolish the native puppet governments of Maliki and Karzai, place all lawless areas under martial law, create military formations with US officers and native troops, create civilian governments with US executives and native employees, and in general do what the British did in India, Egypt, Burma, etc., etc.

Curtis Yarvin
Since the ideal of limited government—that is, the idea that sovereignty cannot be the rightful property of anyone, individual, family, or corporation—has become general, we have seen an extraordinary level of violence, which appears to be connected to the question of who should control and receive the revenues of sovereignty.

Curtis Yarvin
The question all conservatives, libertarians and reactionaries need to be asking themselves: how do we organize to seize power? For me, the winning combination is the combination of absolute government with absolute truth.

Curtis Yarvin
You get rid of the system by making it fashionable, among the most fashionable people, to believe the system needs to be gotten rid of. It is certainly possible to build a system of government that can withstand, in a purely military sense, the disapproval of its own elites, but such is not the case with ours.

Curtis Yarvin
Surely, after the legal realists plunged us into a century-long nightmare of litigation and government by judiciary, precisely as its critics warned, we can see the value of legal formalism.
Law is inherently objective and consistent because it is defined as such. If it isn't inherently objective and consistent, it is not the rule of law but the rule of men. Which we have far too much of these days.

Curtis Yarvin
You are probably used to worrying about the crimes of your government overseas, but not in this way. You have an eagle eye for the crimes of the Defense Department. When it comes to the crimes of the State Department, you have the approximate visual acuity of the average snail.

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
It is a commonly held misconception that elected politicians hold any significant power in the current Western system of government. At best they represent figureheads around which power coalesces, and you can follow the power by following the name, as if it were a small and dusty bobber attached to a large and energetic fish.

Curtis Yarvin
Colonialism ended because political changes in the colonizing countries made it impossible for the colonial governments to govern.

Curtis Yarvin
No one observing the Western governments today can fail to be struck by a massive sense of sleepwalking. There is no unified consciousness or purpose behind their actions. Each of their decisions is an atom unto itself, made through an almost ritualized process by a large number of very intelligent, talented, and ambitious people, whose abilities tend to cancel each other almost perfectly, leaving nothing but a chilling bureaucratic continuity.

Curtis Yarvin