Curtis Yarvin - Power Quotes

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A good way to find the most powerful people in the US is to find the most responsible people. No one in the US is scheming for power. A lot of them seem to be working for change. No one in the US is brainwashing the masses. A lot of them seem to be educating the public. No one in the US is ruling the world. A lot of them seem to be making global policies.

Curtis Yarvin
Hominids crave power, and they rationalize it as responsibility. No one ever achieved power by promising to enslave his followers. It is always about improving the world, at least from the perspective of prospective supporters. And it is almost always sincere. Insincere leaders are very rare, because hominids are very good at detecting insincerity. It is much easier to delude others if at the same time you delude yourself.

Curtis Yarvin
The war in Iraq is an American civil war by proxy. The real prize of this war is political power in the United States. If the US military wins, the Republicans win. If the US military loses, the Democrats win. We saw the exact same thing in Vietnam, and given that, in general, the Republicans are the Democrats' punching bag, the result is pretty inevitable.

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
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
Power drives thought. Seize power and thought will change itself. When the Allies conquered Germany in 1945, all Germans were Nazis. It took the occupation authorities no time at all to replace Nazi jargon with liberal jargon. It took about twenty years before the change was sincere. Now Germany is the most liberal nation in the world. In 1933, of course, the Nazis pulled the same trick in the same way. And this is just the twentieth century. Cuius regio, eius religio is a much older rule.

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

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
Therefore, to establish any stability, the democratic State must manage public opinion. This is also known as manufacturing consent, and it typically involves a substantial system of official or quasiofficial education and/or journalism.
So a good way to see which faction holds real power in a democratic state is to look at which can get its people into influential roles in education and/or journalism.

Curtis Yarvin
The artists of today produce kitsch because they're rebelling against a fictitious power structure by supporting a real one.

Curtis Yarvin
[…] tyranny is best seen as a sort of static civil war. The tyrant's office differs from the monarch's in that the latter's legitimacy is assured by law, whereas the former's is a matter of personal power and prestige.

Curtis Yarvin
And the Left, in power, must pretend to contend against some great, imagined enemy, which it naturally models on itself.

Curtis Yarvin
The secret of power is that power and responsibility are the same thing.

Curtis Yarvin
Democracy is to power as a lottery is to money. It is a social mechanism that allows a large number of hominids to feel as if their individual views affect the world, even when the chance of such an effect is negligible.

Curtis Yarvin
The difference between a monarch and a dictator is that the monarchical succession is defined by law and the dictatorial succession is defined by power.

Curtis Yarvin
[…] power in a democracy is held by those who manage public opinion.

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
Power corrupts not by repression, but by seduction.

Curtis Yarvin
By handing a tiny slice of power to each of its residents, democracy performs the most essential task of a political structure: rewarding its supporters. […] Until voters learn to renounce this little wafer of fictitious authority that it regularly drops on their tongue, they will never free themselves from democracy.

Curtis Yarvin
The permanent contest for political power that democracy creates is an extreme case of limited war, in which no weapons at all are allowed, and battle is resolved by counting heads.

Curtis Yarvin
Reaction is the reconstruction or restoration of the civilized mind, through political power, from any form of progressive or revolutionary degradation. In order to be a great reactionary leader, you have to have made your subjects more sane through the exercise of force—probably through the drastic, but effective, method of curing them entirely of politics.

Curtis Yarvin