Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug): An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives

Neoreaction (NRx) found its breeding ground in the American techno-libertarian subculture, strongly attached to the historical legacy of the pre-democratic thought. Curtis Yarvin, better known on the Internet as Mencius Moldbug, launched the movement with his blog Unqualified Reservations. NRx’s central thesis is the complete revaluation of the notions of practices of democracy, regarded as a fabrication, the will of the people being too arbitrary and varying to form any coherent foundation. In An Open Letter to Open-Mind Progressives, Yarvin argues that progressive beliefs are out of touch with reality and based on a common sense that has been historically distorted by elitarian thought. Progressivism’s set of norms and beliefs are determined and imposed by The Cathedral, i.e., a fictional meta-institution consisting of mainstream universities and media. People systematically let their thoughts be steered into a certain direction because of “selective anesthesia”. The Cathedral propagates what Yarvin calls The Synopsis, which is specified as the set of all reasonable ideas, widely propagated thanks to the corpus of mainstream academia, journalism and education. NRx’s power is gained by recruiting “a combination of philosopher and crowd” to create a counter-Cathedral. The environment in which such recruitment takes place is the Internet.