Two Sides of the Same Coin: RAGE and DOGE
Initially I had intended to describe the writings and philosophy of Curtis Yarvin in order as they occurred historically, from the inception of his original blog, Unqualified Reservations, in 2007 up to his contemporary writing at Gray Mirror. However, given that, at the time of this writing, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been in the news, I would rather start with a speech given by Yarvin, still going by his pen name of Mencius Moldbug, at the BIL conference in 2012. The title of Yarvin’s speech was “How to Reboot the US Government.” Yarvin boils down his approach to a simple acronym — RAGE — Retire All Government Employees, as follows:
Step 0 - A government is just a sovereign corporation that owns a nation. All it needs is a good staff and CEO.
Quoting Yarvin, “It just so happens that our sovereign corporation is very poorly managed, and there’s a very simple way to replace that which is what we do with all corporations that have failed. We simply delete them.”
Step 1: Retire all government employees with generous thanks and benefits (including NGOs and universities, but excepting police and military)
Quoting Yarvin, “Obviously you can’t send the police and the military home. Fortunately the people that are actually law enforcement officials are some of the least powerful in the government because power flows top down in the security area. Most of the government power actually flows bottom up because the people who really control policy are the permanent bureaucrats.”
“…it’s a very large system and it all needs to be destroyed.”
Step 2: You need a national CEO.
Quoting Yarvin, “A national CEO is what’s called a dictator. It’s the same thing. There’s no difference between a CEO and a dictator. If Americans ever want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”
At the time, this speech went virtually unnoticed. Even at the time of this writing, the YouTube video containing this speech, which was posted on October 20, 2012, has only 85,000 views. However, at present one cannot help but see the parallels between Yarvin’s concept of “RAGE” and Elon Musk’s implementation of DOGE. Even right down to word choice, (Elon Musk has claimed to “delete” elements within government agencies) DOGE mirrors RAGE.
To encourage all government employees to retire, Elon Musk has implemented a deferred resignation program (titled a “Fork in the Road” just as a similar program was named when Musk took over Twitter) that allegedly offers federal employees 8 months of paid administrative leave if they agree to resign from their positions. Military and federal employees involved in national security and border security are exempt from the offer. Musk’s DOGE has effectively shut down USAID, an agency that has provided funding to many NGOs and universities, by placing nearly all of the agency’s employees on administrative leave.
Yarvin, for his part, has praised DOGE’s efforts to encourage Government employees to resign. In fact, Yarvin feels that the deferred resignation offer was, if anything, too stingy. Quoting Yarvin, “Why just nine months’ severance? After a lifetime of service? Why not all four years? Just go. Your silver will still be delivered, without fail, to your mailbox. With four years to make yourself useful in some other way, to some other human being or beings—plus of course your existing retirement package—who can feel mistreated?”
DOGE has already passed Step 0 of the RAGE playbook, and is in the process of implementing Step 1. Whether or not Step 2 will occur remains to be seen.
So who is Curtis Yarvin, and how did a little-noticed speech he gave in 2012 come to have such a profound influence on the politics of today?
Background
Curtis Yarvin was born into a Jewish American family in the early 1970’s. Incidentally, his father was a federal employee, and he has described himself as growing up as a “foreign service brat.” Yarvin went to Brown University to study computer science before later transferring to a PhD program at UC Berkley in the early 1990s. Yarvin later dropped out of the program in order to join a tech company in Silicon Valley. After the dot com bubble burst, Yarvin took several years off and studied right-wing philosophy, specifically the writings of Thomas Carlyle, James Burnham, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. These writings shifted Yarvin’s primarily libertarian perspective toward authoritarianism, and has informed much of his own political writing, beginning with his first blog in 2007, Unqualified Reservations. Yarvin actively wrote on a number of topics from 2007 through 2013, but for the purposes of explaining the New Right, I will only highlight a three concepts from his philosophy: the Cathedral, the Red Pill, and Corporate Monarchy.
The Cathedral
The Cathedral, as Yarvin defines it, is "just a short way to say ‘journalism plus academia’”. Essentially, the Cathedral is a network of elite institutions, primarily “mainstream media” and universities, that exert narrative control and shape public opinion in American society. The “Cathedral” exerts real power while lacking formal authority, similar to the Catholic Church’s influence in European medieval society. While European kings held formal power, their actions were often constrained within the limits dictated by the Pope, who held the real power.
According to Yarvin, the key characteristic of the Cathedral is its apparent unity of thought and action despite the lack of formal centralized control. He argues that these institutions, while ostensibly independent, behave as if they were a single organizational structure, effectively functioning as a sort of “hive mind". This ideological uniformity manifests itself in several ways:
Ideological Consistency: the Cathedral tends to promote a consistent set of ideas and values, always toward a progressive or left-wing perspective. In Yarvin’s words, Cthulu always swims left.
Swarming Behavior: When new ideas or social issues emerge, the Cathedral's components often respond in unison, quickly establishing a dominant narrative. The “hive mind” swarms.
Rewards Friends, Punishes Enemies: The system rewards those who conform to its prevailing ideology while marginalizing dissenting voices.
Mobile: The Cathedral's doctrine is not static but evolves over time, with all parts of the structure moving together in a predictable direction. This was seen, perhaps most explicitly, in the media response to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially dismissing panic over COVID-19 as xenophobic in nature, the media quickly shifted to supporting lockdowns and “stay-at-home” orders within a matter of days/weeks.
Yarvin argues that the Cathedral creates a "monoculture" in the marketplace of ideas, effectively propping up what he sees as an oligarchic power structure. While centralized within the media and universities, the Cathedral’s influence permeates through all aspects of society, such as classrooms, corporate HR departments, and government bureaucracies. All of these elements within the Cathedral work in tandem to create and maintain the illusion of democratic governance. So complete yet so subtle is the Cathedral’s influence that most are unaware of its existence, hence the need to “red-pill” those within society.
The Red Pill
The concept of the Red Pill is derived from The Matrix movies. In the The Matrix, Neo, the main character, is given a choice between two pills, one red and one blue. The blue pill represents a pleasant fantasy. The red pill represents a harsh reality. Yarvin borrows this concept to assert that "democracy is bunk.” In other words, taking the Red Pill is waking up to the truth that democracy in America is an illusion, a simulation intended to give people the impression that they have political agency, while in reality all real power is exerted by the Cathedral. The Cathedral, then, creates an illusion of choice and freedom while actually serving the interests of a narrow ruling class. Yarvin’s Red Pill, represents the harsh and painful realization that democracy is a facade, and accepting this reality is necessary for understanding the true nature of power in modern society.
Moreover, according to Yarvin, “democracy” and “politics” are essentially the same thing. And just as many Americans consider “politics” to be flawed, Yarvin considers democracy to be flawed for a number of reasons:
Inefficiency: Yarvin sees democratic processes as slow, cumbersome, and hindered by bureaucracy and partisan conflict.
Susceptibility to populism: He believes democracies are vulnerable to manipulation by charismatic leaders and emotional appeals, undermining rational policymaking.
Short-term thinking: Yarvin argues that elected officials prioritize policies with immediate results to secure re-election, neglecting long-term planning and sustainability.
Fragmentation of power: He views the division of power among branches of government as creating inefficiencies and hindering decisive action.
This is Yarvin’s original concept of the Red Pill. The Red Pill has since expanded beyond Yarvin’s original usage, generally being applied a range of other controversial, right-wing views and beliefs that challenge so-called “mainstream” narratives.
Corporate Monarchy
Yarvin’s solution to solving democracy and defeating the Cathedral is a form of absolute hereditary monarchy that he calls “neocameralism”. He argues for a single, powerful leader — an “American Caesar” — effective in dismantling the Cathedral and implementing a libertarian, capitalist society.
Yarvin contends that an absolute hereditary monarch would have no interest in maintaining a dysfunctional bureaucracy and would be more likely to adopt economic and social systems that make nations thrive.
The key aspects of Yarvin's proposed solution include:
Centralization of power in a single individual to prevent fragmentation of power and decision-making.
Structuring government with a corporate-like hierarchy and clear, defined lines of authority.
Elimination of the bureaucracy (RAGE).
Implementing a system that doesn't "leak" power to lower classes or other institutions.
In short, Yarvin wants to unite formal power and real power. This would require the complete and total dissolution of power structures of the current Cathedral — media, universities, the bureaucracy, and NGOs, and centralization of power into a corporate monarchy.
Yarvin’s influence permeates throughout the New Right, influencing prominent philosophical adherents such as Bronze Age Pervert (Costin Alamariu), Academic Agent (Neema Parvini), Auron MacIntyre (real name unknown), Steve Bannon (Trump’s former Chief Strategist) and Michael Anton (a Trump 45 national security adviser and Trump 47 Director of Policy Planning at the Department of State). Perhaps more importantly, however, are Curtis Yarvin’s influence on powerful individuals in Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel in particular.
The Peter Thiel Connection
Curtis Yarvin’s ideas captured the attention of Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal with Elon Musk, a founder of Palantir, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and a prominent political activist known for his conservative/libertarian political views. They have been ideologically aligned since at least 2009, when Peter Thiel contended that he “no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible.” In 2011, Thiel provided financial backing to Tlon, a company started by Yarvin. Yarvin is said to have watched the 2016 US Presidential Election at Thiel’s house.
Around 2014, Yarvin’s writings in his Unqualified Reservation blog ceased, and he largely stayed out of the public eye while he ran Tlon until 2019. In 2020, Yarvin returned to the public limelight through an appearance at Justin Murphy’s Based Deleuze Release Party in Los Angeles on February 28, 2020. Peter Thiel was said to be in attendance at this appearance. Around the same time, Yarvin launched his new blog, Gray Mirror. He has since made numerous appearances on podcasts and interviews, including the New York Times, Tucker Carlson, and the Young Turks. It is believed that Thiel has been funding Yarvin’s writings for years, and is considered to be his “billionaire patron”.
The J.D. Vance Connection
Peter Thiel also happens to be a billionaire patron of J.D. Vance, the current Vice President of the United States. Vance himself has at least some familiarity with Curtis Yarvin’s writings and has referenced Curtis Yarvin in numerous interviews. The earliest interview I could find where Vance specifically mentions Curtis Yarvin is in an appearance on Jack Murphy’s (AKA John Goldman, an individual who has an interesting history of his own) podcast released on September 17, 2021, wherein Vance claims Yarvin as an influence.
Quoting Vance, “So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things…”
Vance continued: “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
Later on in the podcast, Vance implicitly refers to Yarvin’s American Caesar, quoting Vance: “We are in a late republican period.” (presumably referring to the late Roman Republic, just before the ascent of Julius Caesar) “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
Yarvin, for his part, claims that the relationship between he and JD Vance is “overstated". However, regardless of those claims, it is clear that Yarvin’s philosophy is highly-influential not just within Silicon Valley, but directly into the White House.
Making the Connections
I hope by now it is clear to the reader the connection between Curtis Yarvin’s anti-democratic philosophy and the policy implementation of Trump 47. The key cog is Peter Thiel, who is the common link between Curtis Yarvin’s RAGE, JD Vance, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk’s DOGE. I believe that Elon Musk’s DOGE is just the first step toward the ultimate realization of Yarvin’s vision; the end of democratic rule in the United States, and the beginning of an absolute hereditary monarchy led by a corporate CEO and board of technocrats from Silicon Valley.
If you found this post to be helpful, please consider subscribing (it is free) and sharing it with others — it will help boost this post’s reach in the algorithm. I think more people need to be aware of where I think this country is likely headed. Stay tuned for the next part, which will be a description of Bronze Age Pervert.
I have also released another article describing Curtis Yarvin’s “butterfly revolution” which is essentially his playbook for turning the United States into a corporate monarchy. You can read that post here.
The dark nutjobs have done a great job bamboozling the gop, they eat up all the dictator b s. Great article 👏 👍