Curtis Yarvin

“[T]he hardest part of thinking clearly is recognizing false assumptions that are universally shared.”

“[E]very kind of human action has become shrouded in a vast cloud of something called "ethics", which no one can define, but no one is allowed to question. An actual holy book would be a serious improvement.”

“All decent, reasonable men are horrified by the idea that the government might control the press.None of them seem concerned at all that the press might control the government.”

“That's always the trouble with history. It always looks like it's over. But it never is.”

“The essential idea of leftism is that the world should be governed by scholars.”

“Democratic politics is best understood as a sort of symbolic violence, like deciding who wins the battle by how many troops they brought.”

“In fact, it's basically impossible to combine a system in which agreements stay agreed with one in which equality stays equal.”

“Replacing your own ideology is a lot like do-it-yourself brain surgery.”

“The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.”

“Technical advances have masked, and continue to mask, the signs of decay that would otherwise be obvious.”

“You think you're charging the matador, but you're charging the cape.”

“The New York Times could print nothing but lies for a year, and it would still be the most powerful institution in the world.”

“Universities are no longer institutions of scholarship. They are revolutionary seminaries. Their product is cadre.”

“In a society where scholars are the ruling caste, actual scholarship tends to disappear.”

“In fact, natural selection tends to favor the ascent of ideologies which not only are ineffective, but actually iatrogenic. In other words, the solution is actually causing the problem it purports to be trying to solve.”

“[T]he ruling caste are the people who say "we" when they mean "the government". The ruled castes always say "they".”

“Democracy is to power as a lottery is to money. It is a social mechanism that allows a large number of hominids to feel as if their individual views affect the world, even when the chance of such an effect is negligible.”

“Hominids crave power, and they rationalize it as responsibility. No one ever achieved power by promising to enslave his followers. It is always about improving the world, at least from the perspective of prospective supporters. And it is almost always sincere. Insincere leaders are very rare, because hominids are very good at detecting insincerity. It is much easier to delude others if at the same time you delude yourself.”

“Simplicity is the cure for violence. For example, if we postulate an imaginary oracle that could predict the outcome of any battle, we could eliminate war. The predicted loser would have no incentive but to concede to the demands of the predicted winner.”

“When you create a category called "religion" which lumps together all the delusional traditions that people who are not like you have inherited unquestioned from their intellectual ancestors, you are making it harder, not easier, to question your own assumptions.”