Debugging Reality: Curtis Yarvin and the Engineer’s Fallacy

If you’re feeling bewildered by Trump & Co.’s actions and it’s causing you sleepless nights, reading Curtis Yarvin’s Unqualified Reservations—written under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug—may help ease your anxiety because you’d at least see their motivations. Many describe Yarvin as “the brain” behind Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, and other “tech bros,” but I wouldn’t go that far.

Yarvin’s role has been to articulate the worldview they already held. In contrast, Neocons like George W. Bush had Leo Strauss as their intellectual source. Fortunately, Yarvin’s writing is far more straightforward and conversational. Interestingly, Strauss and Yarvin share skepticism about democracy and advocate hierarchical rule by elites.

For most Americans, questioning democracy’s legitimacy feels sacrilegious, akin to criticizing freedom. Yet Yarvin appeals to “open-minded progressives” to reconsider democracy’s foundational assumptions. In this sense, he engages in a necessary deconstruction, and I fully support such philosophical inquiries.

To me, democracy isn’t sacred—it’s merely the best compromise we have. It has flaws and can evolve and improve. If a better system emerges, I wouldn’t object to replacing democracy entirely.

Yarvin’s analysis of contemporary political issues is persuasive. Clearly an avid student of history, he describes how “the Cathedral” came to power, composed of mainstream academia, journalism, and education. Focusing on these institutions explains why Trump & Co. are currently attacking Columbia University, the New York Times, and the Department of Education.

Yarvin employs Karl Popper’s typology for social orders:

Type 1: Tribal societies without central governance.

Type 2: Hierarchical societies with explicit, centralized authority (monarchies, theocracies, feudal systems).

Type 3: Open societies featuring fluid, decentralized authority, ideological competition, and ostensibly “free” institutions (modern liberal democracies).

Yarvin argues that Type 3 societies aren’t inherently better—and in many ways are worse—because authority becomes hidden and unaccountable. This assessment resonates strongly with rural Americans and many Republicans who feel overlooked by “elites.” There’s truth to this complaint.

Consider the dominance of Ivy League alumni in positions of power. Politicians and elite management consultants practically require Ivy League credentials. Attending an Ivy League university virtually guarantees career success, even without tangible skills. These institutions groom students for roles within the Cathedral, hence their emphasis on “leadership.” Graduates become professors, journalists, and politicians who shape public opinion.

Furthermore, these institutions maintain exclusivity, having little incentive to expand enrollment or adequately fund public universities. Through recommendation letters, well-connected elite high school counselors, Early Decision programs, donations, and legacy admissions, advantages flow to the children of the existing powerholders. This vertically integrated power structure makes it nearly impossible for rural Americans like J.D. Vance to be part of it.

Criticism of this system is easily dismissed as conspiratorial because no single individual can be pinpointed. During the 2020 Democratic primaries, multiple candidates simultaneously suspended campaigns and endorsed Joe Biden, ensuring Sanders’ defeat. It was obviously coordinated—but by whom? Similarly troubling was the opaque process that chose Kamala Harris as Biden’s successor amid concerns about his mental acuity. Republicans often attribute this to “the donor class,” for lack of a better term.

While I sympathize with Yarvin and Republican voters on this unfairness, I disagree with his historical explanation. Yarvin often attributes governmental inefficiencies to historical contingencies, contrasting them unfavorably with startups and corporate governance. He often argues that the California Department of Computing couldn’t produce iPhones; true, but the reason isn’t historical—it’s structural and logical.

Consider FIFA, soccer’s governing body. Members surely know how to play soccer, but their role isn’t playing the game. Their task—setting and enforcing rules—is inevitably fraught with inefficiency, corruption, and contradictions. The game’s efficiency relies precisely on the governing body’s inefficiencies, as it absorbs irrationality and complexity, allowing players to function as if the world is black and white, like their balls.

“The Cathedral,” therefore, is a rule-maker, while startups and corporations are rule-players. These roles differ fundamentally—logically, not historically. A rule-maker can’t compete within its own system. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem underscores this idea: any sufficiently complex logical system contains truths unprovable within the system itself. Consider: “There is no absolute truth.” If true, the statement contradicts itself.

Thus, the perceived efficiency of private businesses is a direct consequence of the Cathedral’s inefficiency. The former allows individual dictatorships to function optimally. Rule-makers must be inefficient because humanity itself is inherently irrational, contradictory, and imperfect. When we engage in structured activities—chess, soccer, startups—we accept artificial simplicity, equivalent to taking the “blue pill.” Mistaking these simplified games for reality and attempting to “debug” reality is the engineer’s fallacy. Reality can never be fully captured by rules, logic, or language. To understand why these contradictions can never be resolved, I’d recommend reading Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.

Human inefficiency and irrationality aren’t bugs but features we consciously reject yet unconsciously embrace. When we love someone, we often believe we’re drawn to their positive traits, but in reality, their imperfections captivate us. If perfection existed, everyone would love the same idealized person. Imagine a future humanoid without flaws—few would genuinely love it because it would feel too one-dimensional. If they do, it would be narcissistic love, where they imagine themselves to be perfect by owning it.

Societies are similar. We cherish societies for their imperfections, inefficiencies, contradictions, and human flaws. Yet we do need baseline conditions, akin to the bottom two levels of Maslow’s hierarchy: safety and physiological needs. Beyond these, perfection is impossible. “Improvements” for some inevitably represent “deteriorations” for others. Like wine, there’s a baseline quality we objectively prefer, but beyond that, taste becomes subjective.

In discussing world peace, Yarvin wisely states, “peace is learning to live with the world as it is, not as you want it to be.” Although I don’t entirely agree—since war and peace form an inevitable dialectic—Yarvin himself should perhaps accept the world as it is. After all, he and his startup friends, like Peter Thiel, are comfortably (or rather excessively) beyond the basic survival needs. Why do they need to reshape our society according to their worldviews? It appears that the current system has served them quite well. (Both are, in fact, Ivy graduates.) Surely, they cannot claim their motivation to be social justice.

I’m not against change—just skeptical of change driven by people detached from basic survival needs. Much of rural America’s anxiety today stems from disruptions caused by the very technologists they now ironically embrace as saviors. Complex digital technologies have created uncertainty no one fully understands. The technologists operate under an entirely different agenda: making this world endlessly more efficient and productive, driven solely by their unquestioned assumption that efficiency and productivity are sacred, self-evident virtues.