Curtis Yarvin - System Quotes

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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 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
For obvious reasons of human psychology, journalists […] are likely to favor political systems in which they themselves are more important and powerful.

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
[…] 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
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
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 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
Corruption in Third World countries is a case of the formalist pattern trying to reemerge. A Third World government, far more than ours, is a system for distributing dividends, which even in the worst countries on earth are nontrivial. It is just a hellaciously intricate and absurdly informal system.

Curtis Yarvin
Economically, a fiat monetary system works exactly the same as a metallic monetary system in which the sovereign owns an infinite gold mine.

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 moderate ideas of one generation are the extremist ideas of its parents, and the whole system shifts gradually over time.

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
In fact, it's basically impossible to combine a system in which agreements stay agreed with one in which equality stays equal.

Curtis Yarvin
The system may be Orwellian, but it has no Goebbels. It produces Gleichschaltung without a Gestapo. It has a Party line without a Party. A neat trick.

Curtis Yarvin
On a number of subjects—not just segregation—I note that the public opinion of California in 2008 is quite similar to the public opinion of Stanford in 1963.
This is easy to explain: in post-1945 America, the source of all new ideas is the university. Ideas check out of the university, but they hardly ever check in. Thence, they flow outward to the other arms of the educational system as a whole: the mainstream media and the public schools. Eventually they become our old friend, "public opinion". This process is slow, happening on a generational scale, and thus the forty-five-year lag.

Curtis Yarvin