Tag Archives: dark enlightenment

the dark enlightenment part deux

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Continuing my thread on the so-called dark enlightenment, the term was actually coined by a British philosopher named Nick Land, following up on Curtis Yarvin’s ideas. From Wikipedia:

Land’s work with CCRU, as well as his pre-Dark Enlightenment writings, have all been influential to the political philosophy of accelerationism, an idea resembling that of the “fatal strategy” of “ecstasy” in the earlier work of Jean Baudrillard, where “a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization.”[citation needed] Along with the other members of CCRU, Land wove together ideas from the occult, cybernetics, science fiction, and poststructuralist philosophy to try to describe the phenomena of techno-capitalist acceleration.

Okay, up to this point it all sounds at least Singularity-adjacent. Now, I thought the Singularity was just good clean science fiction fun. But somehow the ideas have seeped into right-wing thinking. Anyway, Nick Land is the guy who came up with the term The Dark Enlightenment and wrote a long online manifesto called…The Dark Enlightenment. Now, before I link to I have to say this contains some racist ideas, so I link to it in the same spirit I might link to something like Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Mein Kampf – you can read it for historical/academic interest and to try to understand what might have been going through the diseased mind of the person who wrote it. Again, the reason this matters is that it seems to have influenced individuals with some power over all our lives, possibly including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and J.D. Vance. So without further ado, here is the link.

[tick tock tick tock time passing]

I skimmed through the thing. And mostly it is just…dumb. It’s an endless word salad of very loosely related ideas and free association. Amid the racist drivel about IQ and eugenics there are some ideas about city-states run by corporate boards of directors, in which citizens are free to shop around for a jurisdiction that suits them.

There is some cheerleading for Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore. I lived in Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore at the very tail end of his life, and I read his very long book From Third World to First while I was there. I also read William Gibson’s essay Disneyland with the Death Penalty in the Singapore national public library and nobody beat me up. That would have been around 2012 or so, and from what I have heard that book would not have been available and might even have gotten me in trouble even 15 years earlier. Anyway, about Lee Kuan Yew – he imprisoned some political opponents without trial and controlled the way his people were allowed to dress and act up to a point. But overall, in my view, he was a selfless person who had the welfare of his people in mind in all his decisions and actions. He believed strongly in what you might call “meritocracy” in a dictionary sense, where policies were designed by economists and lawyers and politics was not allowed to get in the way of these policies. He provided housing and education for all his people. He cracked down vigorously on any form of organized crime. And he cracked down on any form of racist speech and put strong policies in place to protect ethnic and religious minorities, which in Singapore means people of Indian and Malay descent, who are largely but not all Muslim. To this day, as far as I know, there are no statues of Lee Kuan Yew because he did not want there to be.

But there are not going to be many leaders as selfless as Lee Kuan Yew. For every Lee Kuan Yew there are going to be a million mediocre leaders and maybe a Hitler or Stalin if we are unlucky. Ordinary people given the kind of power he wielded are going to be corrupted, and genocidal psychopaths are going to do mass murder. His sometimes brutal embrace of economic theory and evidence-driven policy is completely opposite the made-up, corrupt, fantasy-based shooting from the hip we are seeing from the Trump administration in 2025. If Singapore is the Dark Enlightenment, Donald Trump is a dark lump of shit spiralling around a clogged drain.

So a quasi-libertarian city-state run by a board of directors on a floating island or, exercising my imagination here, a space station someday? Maybe. Turning existing large countries with democratic or at least (small R) republican governments into these city-states. No, this is pure fantasy and not even the “common sense” variety. It makes no sense. If we want citizens to be “shareholders”, focus on policies that promote economic growth, institute a value added tax with minimal loopholes, and then return that value to the shareholders in the form of either cash or services. There is no practical alternative to majority rule with the human rights of minorities protected. If we are worried about the majority making bad decisions, educate the people. In the U.S. at the moment we are going 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

What is the “dark enlightenment”?

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I could probably spend a few posts on this one, but basically I don’t think there is a coherent ideology here. But of course, when it comes to politics, that doesn’t really matter. What matters much more is who is motivated by a set of loosely related, sometimes contradictory semi-ideas, how powerful the motivated people are, and what actions they choose to take. And as you may see if I really get into it, some of the people potentially motivated by this mess of ideas include Elon Musk and J.D. Vance.

Let’s start with Curtis Yarvin, aka “Mencius Moldbug”. Here is how a July 2024 Politico article describes him:

Yarvin doesn’t hold any official title or office — he is an ex-computer programmer turned blogger, having first risen to prominence on the online right in the 2010s while blogging under the pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug.” But he’s often cited as the “house philosopher” of the New Right, chiefly for his promotion of the “neo-reactionary” (or “NRx”) movement…

Like Deneen, Yarvin and his NRx followers reject the quest for “progress” as the core of political life. As Yarvin told Vanity Fair in 2022, “The fundamental premise of liberalism is that there is this inexorable march toward progress. I disagree with that premise.” Instead, Yarvin believes that American democracy has denigrated into a corrupt oligarchy, run by elites who strive to consolidate their power rather than serve the public interest. The solution, Yarvin argues, is for the American oligarchy to give way to a monarchical leader styled after a start-up CEO — a “national CEO,” [or] what’s called a dictator,” as Yarvin has put it — who can de-bug the American political order like a computer programmer de-bugging some bad code…

Vance has said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration.

But get into the Wikipedia entry on Yarvin and there is some darker stuff.

Yarvin has been described as a “neo-reactionary”, “neo-monarchist” and “neo-feudalist” who “sees liberalism as creating a Matrix-like totalitarian system, and who wants to replace American democracy with a sort of techno-monarchy”.[11][12][13][14] He has defended the institution of slavery, and has suggested that certain races may be more naturally inclined toward servitude than others.[3][15] He has claimed that whites have higher IQs than black people, and opposes US civil rights programs.

Yarvin has influenced some prominent Silicon Valley investors and Republican politicians, with venture capitalist Peter Thiel described as his “most important connection”.[16] Political strategist Steve Bannon has read and admired his work.[17] U.S. Vice President JD Vance “has cited Yarvin as an influence himself”.[18][19][20] Michael Anton, the State Department Director of Policy Planning during Trump’s second presidency, has also discussed Yarvin’s ideas.[2] In January 2025, Yarvin attended a Trump inaugural gala in Washington; Politico reported he was “an informal guest of honor” due to his “outsize[d] influence over the Trumpian right”.,,[21]

Yarvin argues for a “neo-cameralist” philosophy based on Frederick the Great of Prussia’s cameralism.[43] In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful and should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose “shareholders” (large owners) elect an executive with total power, but who must serve at their pleasure.[40] The executive, unencumbered by liberal-democratic procedures, could rule efficiently much like a CEO-monarch.[40] Yarvin admires Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping for his pragmatic and market-oriented authoritarianism, and the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime. He sees the US as soft on crime, dominated by economic and democratic delusions.[39]

The guy doesn’t seem like a nice guy to me, but I will at least say on his behalf that he has publicly renounced racism and anti-Semitism.

It’s not too hard to imagine the so-called “tech bros” thinking that an artificial intelligence could serve as a benevolent dictator. But even if we had a robot dictator, some human or group of humans would have to initially decide the ground rules for “benevolence”.