Curtis Yarvin Quotes

In a society where scholars are the ruling caste, actual scholarship tends to disappear.

In fact, natural selection tends to favor the ascent of ideologies which not only are ineffective, but actually iatrogenic. In other words, the solution is actually causing the problem it purports to be trying to solve.

[T]he ruling caste are the people who say "we" when they mean "the government". The ruled castes always say "they".

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.

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.

Simplicity is the cure for violence. For example, if we postulate an imaginary oracle that could predict the outcome of any battle, we could eliminate war. The predicted loser would have no incentive but to concede to the demands of the predicted winner.

"Formalists attribute the success of Europe, Japan and the US after World War II not to democracy, but its absence. While retaining the symbolic structures of democracy . . . the postwar Western system has assigned almost all actual decision-making power to its civil servants and judges, who are 'apolitical' and 'nonpartisan,' ie, nondemocratic . . . In other words, 'democracy' appears to work because it is not in fact democracy, but a mediocre implementation of formalism." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)

"The main problem in human affairs is violence. The goal [of formalism] is to design a way for humans to interact, on a planet of remarkably limited size, without violence." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)

"Moderation is not an ideology." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)

"Not all Muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims. Similarly, not all conservatives are cretins, but most cretins are conservatives." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)

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.

The most powerful people in the West today, measured strictly by their ability to influence the real world, are journalists and professors.

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.

The history of ideas since 1789 is an endless record of mass murder in the name of the people.

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.