To summarize my conclusions: If you’re feeling generous, Yarvin might not be “a Racist”, but he at least has internalized racist beliefs. He seems to have no interest in addressing these biases, and has instead built a philosophical framework to justify them. He is an intelligent and relatively skilled writer, who hides his arguments behind a smoke-screen of obscurity, “science”, fuzzy logic, and “civility”. He claims to have no influence and be no sort of leader, but this is demonstrably false (whether he actually wishes it or not). His disavowal of “leadership” in the movement he helped create makes the ideas associated with it more dangerous, not less.

Yarvin employs many debate tactics designed to make his arguments more difficult to critique, appeal to a general audience (without actually allowing them to understand), artificially create respectability, and move accountability for his ideas away from himself.

Asking the Wrong Question

In his post aimed at convincing people to attend LambdaConf, Yarvin laid out what he claimed the real question was —

That might be worth asking, but I think it’s sort of missing the point. I’ll try to answer that question at face value, then propose an alternate question.

We can look at Yarvin’s beliefs, and most specifically to his essay on Carlyle. Those quotes aren’t cherry-picked, other than as necessary to break down a 9,000 word post into its thesis. Yarvin gets a lot of flack for this post, where he endorses the possibility of slavery as a valid system of governance, based on the premise that a democratic state is already full of social and economic contracts enforced by the state. It’s a fact that Yarvin sees this as a logical progression. It’s not even a particularly novel idea, it’s just one that’s not often endorsed publicly in the US because of the unresolved spectre of the North American slave trade and our masturbatory fetishization of capitalism.

But there’s something missing from all the criticism of Yarvin “endorsing slavery” and the insistence from the neoreactionary camp that it’s “not chattel-slavery”. The missing part of that conversation is that the problem most of Yarvin’s critics have with him is exactly the same reason his more ignorant proponents support him. It isn’t his interest in rehashing 200 year old political theory, or equating capitalism with feudalism. It’s how it dovetails so nicely with his theories regarding race.

As a white man, I have the option of exercising a few privileges in this situation.

I could exercise the privilege to not personally care that Curtis Yarvin has racist beliefs (lowercase). He does. That’s not really up for debate, it’s just proven by his own words. I think that’s basically ok, although I’m sure I’ll take some flak for saying so. It’s unfortunate, but a lot of “decent” white people have the same beliefs. Probably a lot of people we work with, who bite their tongue every day, because they know that it will be taken as badly as this has been. These lowercase racists should educate themselves, but it’s our unfortunate responsibility to try to handle their ignorance with as much grace as we can when they let it show, and point them to the education they’ve clearly lacked until that point. I know repeating the same 101 stuff gets tiresome, but every time lowercase racists see some controversy like this blow up, it seems like a personal attack on their morality and what they perceive as their own rational understanding of the issues. You’re totally welcome to your outrage, but it’s not helpful to them to conflate their failings of ignorance as deep moral failings as well before they have the tools to understand.

I also have the privilege to not care if Yarvin is a Racist with a capital “R”. I would classify these as people who have been presented with evidence that they ignore, and who actively seek to enforce injustice for racist reasons. I’m certainly suspicious of Yarvin on this point, based on which pieces of evidence he accepts and which he ignores, and the political beliefs he chooses to endorse. I’m reminded of an acquaintance with a PHD, who I’ve heard say truly stupid things about black people against all evidence to the contrary, far worse than we’ve publicly seen from Yarvin, without irony, and using less polite terms. Intelligence is no panacea.

But if, like me, you have the privilege to ignore Yarvin’s racism, and if, like the organizers of LambdaConf, you have exercised that privilege at the cost of other people’s willingness to participate in your community, I ask you to consider just one more thing. Consider that Curtis Yarvin has created and grown an ideology whose foundation stones are racist sociology, very debatable science, and power structures that have in the past supported institutional racism far worse than that visible in current American society. Yarvin built this ideology for years while hiding behind a pseudonym, and still eschews ownership of that ideology in the greater world. Even if he disowns his past conclusions, it will live on without his support. Ideas are tricky that way. My racist relatives can be unpleasant, but none of them have written any manifestos.

I don’t think the big question is “Is Yarvin a Racist?”, but is something more like, “Is Yarvin a leader in a movement aimed at enshrining bigotry on a large scale through use of manifestos, bad science, uncivil rhetoric, and internet intimidation tactics?”. Three weeks ago, when I was unfamiliar with Curtis Yarvin’s work and the NRx movement, that question probably would have seemed ridiculous to me. But now, after reading Yarvin’s writings and watching how this debacle has unfolded, it no longer does.