Splitsville KING ME!

The Fresher-Than-Fresh Newsletter for Fans of THE SPLIT

Last week we tentatively—if trenchantly, and with our customary joie de vivre—explored a variation on our usual notion of Splitsville—that term of art referring to how the US consists of two (or more) “nations” residing in one geo-political entity. Instead of talking about different, rival populations (each numbering in the tens of millions), we proposed the idea that the US now harbored different states defined by money: There is the “nation” of billionaires, and there’s the rest of us.

Accordingly, we gave serious thought to the idea of the “network state,” as propounded by network-state-propounder Balaji Srinivasan. We did this, not because we found his ideas intriguing and we wished to subscribe to his newsletter, but because his followers numbered, among others, billionaires Peter Thiel (mentor and $upporter of billionaire-lapdog and soulless opportunist JD Vance) and Marc Andreesson. These are smart guys. It made us wonder: Given how semi-baked and iffy the network state idea seemed (like a cross between an online hobby club and a gated community on the moon), why would billionaires be interested in it—especially since it promised/threatened to remove such network-staters from the very political and economic institutions that enabled their fortunes in the first place?

Turns out we didn’t know the half of it. Not only do these richer-than-God types seem to think seriously about living in “states” which offer no roads, utilities, public services, or, for that matter, laws, they also seem to find it plausible to live in a quasi-monarchy in which the head of the “government,” (such as it is) is not a president or a prime minister but, rather, a C.E.O. selected by a committee or round table or parliament or delegation or synod or huddle of—wait for it—airline pilots.

Think we’re kidding? Think again! Although, no, don’t think again. Instead, read this much-cited piece in the June 2 issue of The New Yorker, by Ava Kofman, about Curtis Yarvin. Here’s how it starts:

In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.”

Moldbug, as you have guessed, is Yarvin. It was he who borrowed the iconic scene from The Matrix and advised his readers to “take the red pill,” i.e., embrace the difficult truth of the world as it really is—a formulation that has entered the lexicon of the far-right. Please be amused to realize that “becoming red-pilled” is now standard practice for every Q-anon conspiracy kook and crackpot, for whom “do your own research” means poke around on the internet until you find something that seems to prove what you already believe. Don’t worry. Whatever it is, you’ll find it.”

Yarvin’s bio, as Kofman sketches it, shows a brilliant son of a domineering father, a kid who skipped three grades and entered high school at age twelve and graduated from Brown at eighteen, defining him as a pipsqueak who had to strive and perform to get noticed and respected. (“He wanted to be viewed as the smart guy—that was really, really important to him,” his first girlfriend, Meredith Tanner, said.) “Friends from Yarvin’s twenties described him as a reflexive contrarian who reveled in provocation,” Kofman writes. (Reminds us of the knee-jerkily nasty, proudly repulsive Stephen Miller.) Young Curtis was, per Tanner, “a big old hippie” until 2004, when he believed the obviously mendacious Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and decided that if John Kerry had been lying about his Viet Nam service (he hadn’t), then everything else Yarvin harbored in his (naïve, sucker’s) world view must also be wrong.

From there it was a Slip ‘N Slide skid to the right: He first embraced libertarianism, and then fell under the influence of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s treatise Democracy: The God That Failed (2001). This son of a domineering father decided that the best form of government was rule by a domineering yet benevolent strongman, who would of course take good care of his people, and his state, because both “belonged to” him. “You don’t ransack your own house,” Yarvin told Kofman, as though that little homily put paid to the ideas of corruption, vanity, ambition, greed, and aberrant psychology. Then again, maybe Yarvin simply hasn’t heard of Donald Trump.

As with Srinivasan, Yarvin thinks that small is better. But then…well, it gets weird:

Following Hoppe, Yarvin proposes that nations should eventually be broken up into a “patchwork” of statelets, like Singapore or Dubai, each with its own sovereign ruler. The eternal political problems of legitimacy, accountability, and succession would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O. of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp. (How the board itself would be selected is unclear, but Yarvin has suggested that airline pilots—“a fraternity of intelligent, practical, and careful people who are already trusted on a regular basis with the lives of others. What’s not to like?”—could manage the transition between regimes.

Every age has its visionaries, some of whom could use a good eye exam and some corrective lenses. One thing that kills us—in a bad way—is how many reactionaries (e.g., Yarvin, Peter Thiel) cite autocratic rule as a way to maximize “freedom.” They never seem to specify whose freedom is being maximized at the expense of who else’s. (They also like to damn and disdain government while, at the same time, reaping much of their fortunes from it. Cf. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, et al.)

It’s tempting to say that only in a timeline in which Donald J. Trump is President of the United States would such an individual—a silly-clever nudnik who seems to know nothing about human nature, or even that it exists—be considered the “court philosopher” of anything other than a vacant squash court. But it’s not the world-corrupting existence of Trump, or the rampant stupidity of MAGA populist nationalism, that bestows upon the Curtis Yarvins of the world influence and legitimacy. It’s the existence of so many billionaires.

A millionaire lives as well as it is possible to live, in our world; billionaires literally live in a different world. Splitsville, baby. A millionaire buys one or more houses; a billionaire buys one or more islands. A millionaire collects cars; a billionaire collects politicians. A millionaire has his own Beechcraft Bonanza or even a cute little Cessna jet; a billionaire has his own space program. Thus our monetary Splitsville.

The problem, unique to our time, is that now there are so many billionaires; they’ve gone from being an oddity to just another socio-economic type. (For much more on this, read Timothy Noah’s long piece in The New Republic, which came out the very day we’re posting this Splitsville!) The more normal they feel, the more they have come to believe that their world is THE world. And so they fantasize about ways to improve it, regardless of how those improvements might affect the non-billionaires among us.

They sponsor intellectuals to come up with plans. The intellectuals—brainy, repressed nerds who are still mad about their experience in high school, and/or with girls, and/or with sex, and/or who feel liberated by attacking the imagined tyranny of wokeness—fantasize a world in which being smart isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. (In Yarvin’s circles, people are always talking or tweeting or texting about “high IQ.”) Kofman draws a vivid portrait of the social aspect of the neo-reactionary right—the parties, the dinners, the debates.

For these people democracy doesn’t “work.” Indeed, government, “the administrative state,” doesn’t work, and shouldn’t even try. After all, the masses aren’t smart. Kofman:

Yarvin has little to say on the question of human flourishing, or about humans in general, who appear in his work as sheep to be herded, idiots to be corrected, or marionettes controlled by leftist puppeteers.

Why, then, should the plebeians be given anything—starting with the right to vote? Government, to the extent that there should be any, isn’t meant to serve “the people.” It’s meant to serve the ones who deserve it—which is to say, the ones who own it, as defined by Yarvin & co.

During Trump’s first term, we saw a tweet (by somebody who wasn’t even Trump) referring to “Lady Melania,” and we thought: Jesus Christ, this idiot thinks we’re living in Westeros, that the liberal democracy of the US is pretty much like the clashing kingdoms of Game of Thrones. It’s hard not to think the same about Curtis Yarvin’s “neo-monarchism.” Which is to say, it’s not a political program or a philosophical system, but a fantasy, an elitist conceit that has no more to do with reality than Atlas Shrugged or the latest rantings at CPAC. If Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen want to throw money at it, well, why not—that’s what billionaires do. But sooner or later Yarvin is going to have to confront the classic question: Quis gubernatores aeroplanorum eligit?

Who chooses the airline pilots?