The monster (and its gurus)

BarcelonaThe monster has monstrous ideas. The Big Boss is not a madman. Who feeds his boastful ego? Who breathes airs of greatness and superiority into him? Where does he get the ideological fuel that guides his immense power? Who are, in short, his intellectual gurus? In the essay The Dark Enlightenment(Edicions 62, translated by Mireia Alegre), the French political scientist Arnaud Miranda has dived into the bowels of the neo-reactionary thought that feeds the insatiable beast. Donald Trump's ultra-presidentialist policy is a frenetic combination of techno-futurism, national-populism and ultra-reaction. Those who write his script have first and last names, and are supported by billionaires of the tech. Let's get to know this barbaric galaxy.

If his first victory of 2016 was inspired by the alt-right (alternative right) of Steve Bannon, which also drove the 2021 Capitol assault, the current mandate has other extreme characters behind it. The most notable is Curtis Yarvin, a 51-year-old blogger, a computer engineer who has been theorizing for more than ten years about the need for a coup d'état. He is the star of neoreaction, an illiberal movement, a right-wing revolution that goes far beyond conservatism and neoliberalism. It is born from a staunch libertarian individualism that ends up asserting that true freedom is incompatible with democracy and advocates a kind of anarcho-capitalism. It sounds like a mental jumble, but it is for real. Yarvin emerges from here and goes even further. The barbarity of these (dark) enlightened ones has no limits.

Yarvin's vision is elitist (there are superior beings), violent (based on an anthropological pessimism), and technofuturistic. He is the creator of the Urbit software and, with John Burnham, of the company Tlon Corporation, financed by billionaires Peter Thiel (founder of PayPal and Palantir, one of the first super-rich to support Trump, and backer of J.D. Vance) and Marc Andreessen (founder of Netscape and who had supported the Democrats but switched to Trump in 2024). This pair also has pretensions of being thinkers.

Yarvin conceives of the state as a company at the head of which a CEO must be placed. He has set out to destroy what he calls The Cathedral, a sum of universities, major media outlets, high-ranking officials, and NGOs, behind which he believes cultural progressivism has been gestated since 1945 as a shadow religion that dominates everything and which he sees as a secularized Christian sect based on stupid beliefs: democracy, the environment, peace, human rights, equality, cultural diversity, community... Incredible, right? Well, he speaks seriously. And Trump, Thiel, Andreessen and company have bought into his discourse. Trump's attacks on universities, the mass dismissal of officials, the cuts to NGOs, or the disdain for the media come from here. Also the idea of giving carte blanche to Russia so that it puts an end to liberal democracies in Europe (Yarvin had already written this in January 2022, shortly before the invasion of Ukraine).

Accelerating capitalism

The neoreaction, gestated in the anonymity of the internet at the beginning of the 21st century, presents itself as an intellectual, anti-establishment, and subversive counterculture, which is expressed through pamphleteering texts and viral memes, trolling on social media to ridicule its enemies. As far as they can, they remain anonymous. Another key figure of this thick ideological magma is Nick Land, an English philosopher trained in the avant-garde left who has ended up advocating accelerationism: intensifying the deployment of capitalism as an entropic, chaotic form. He vindicates the "thirst for destruction" and believes in transhuman cyborgs as a path towards a eugenic posthuman future. He considers Keynesianism and democracy to be decelerators and, exiled as a blogger journalist in Shanghai, he praises Chinese state capitalism.

With similar delusions, there are other names, such as Spandrell, Bronze Age Pervert, and Zero HP Lovecraft. Delusions that are becoming reality in two senses: both from within power and by penetrating the mentality of the people with unusual force. No joke. Where do you think the concept of do-goodism or nihilistic anti-politics comes from? That is where we are. In the hands of this crowd, barbarians who are supposed to want to save Western civilization. Are we at the gates of the end of the democratic era?