Should the US Become a Technocratic Monarchy?

A few weeks ago, I attended Hereticon in Miami, an annual conference dedicated to “thoughtcrime,” hosted by Founders Fund, the legendary investment vehicle steered by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who helped Donald Trump win in 2016 and funded JD Vance’s Senate campaign. I am not sure why I was invited. Probably because the event has a Doomsday / Apocalypse theme and I wrote books on that topic. I will write more about Hereticon later. Topics discussed included biotechnology, geo-engineering, “start-up cities,” trad wives, rape orgies, UAPs, and why the N’avi were actually the bad guys in Avatar. For those who don’t much about Thiel, this is a great introduction: While at Hereticon, I met Curtis Yarvin, a 48-year-old Berkeley-based intellectual who is almost my diametrical opposite in terms of political beliefs and ideology. Interestingly, Yarvin and I come from somewhat similar backgrounds, products of East Coast liberal culture and the Left. His grandparents were members of the Communist Party and his parents were civil servants. His mother worked in the Department of Energy, which apparently fueled his enormous disdain for government bureaucracy. My mother was an unaffiliated Leftist who published “movement” books such as Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It and Julius Lester’s Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama. Both of us, also, cut our teeth in the early days of largely text-based Internet culture. While Yarvin was a frequent contributor to Usenet, I spent a lot of time debating in online forums, BBS’s, like Echo and The Thing. Yarvin is a hard-core atheist, while I have had many direct mystical and paranormal experiences that led me, over time, to abandon my initial skepticism and arrive at a monistic idealist, Gnostic/animist worldview. Founder of Urbit, a software company that attempted to realize his political ideas, Yarvin is known for writing the Unqualified Reservations blog under his pseudonym, Mencious Moldbug. He currently publishes Gray Mirror on Substack. Yarvin has been given a great deal of credit by journals such as The New Republic, Vox, Verge, and The Baffler for shaping the ideology of the dark enlightenment, neoreactionary or NRx movement. According to The Verge: “Yarvin is most commonly associated with the neoreactionary movement, whose adherents believe — as Thiel wrote in 2009 — that freedom and democracy are incompatible and that democratic governments and bloated federal bureaucracies should be replaced by enlightened autocratic regimes…. Perhaps no one online has shaped [JD] Vance’s thinking more than the neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, a former programmer with ties to Vance’s friend and benefactor Peter Thiel.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danielpinchbeck.substack.com/subscribe