Curtis Yarvin Quotes

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.

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.

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

One of the classical symptoms of decadence is that young aristocrats spend all their time on political scheming, and it'd be hard to say we don't see this now.

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

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.

The royal family is a perpetual corporation, the kingdom is the property of this corporation, and the whole thing is a sort of real-estate venture on a grand scale. Why does the family own the corporation and the corporation own the kingdom? Because it does. Property is historically arbitrary.

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.

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

[T]he undemocratic, tyrannous societies are not those which failed to take the democratic arsenic, but those which took it and found it fatal.

[A] free, prosperous democratic society is like a person who's so strong and healthy he can take a dose of arsenic every day—or at least, every four years—and still survive, sort of. The free, prosperous democratic society might be remarkably unfree and unprosperous compared to an undemocratic society that never took the arsenic, but so few of the latter survived the last two centuries that we have no basis for comparison.

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.

[P]ublic opinion in a democracy is a sort of funhouse mirror that reflects—albeit inaccurately, imperfectly, and often quite reluctantly—the views of the governing elite. To be fair, it also has a certain filtering effect which discourages some of the nuttiest intellectual fads, if only because they can be positively incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't been to Harvard.

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

A political formula is a belief that makes the ruled accept their rulers. Since the former tend to outnumber the latter, a political formula is, if not absolutely essential, an excellent way to cut down on your security costs.