This was a crucial point in an excellent New Yorker profile on Curtis Yarvin:
On his travels, he often hosted “office hours”—informal, freewheeling discussions with readers, many of them thoughtful young men, alienated by liberal guilt and groupthink. What wins Yarvin converts is less the soundness of his arguments than the transgressive energy they exude: he makes his listeners feel that he is granting them access to forbidden knowledge—about racial hierarchy, historical conspiracies, and the perfidy of democratic rule—that progressive culture is at pains to suppress. His approach seizes on the reality that most Americans have never learned how to defend democracy; they were simply brought up to believe in it.
This ‘transgressive energy’ which comes from ‘forbidden knowledge’: the sense of having penetrated to a deeper layer of reality, through the intervention of the master. It’s a classically esoteric experience but characterised by worldliness, rather than worldlessness. It venerates knowledge and gives the aspirants towards it a path forward without leaving them caught and immobilised in the painful distance between the world that is and the world that could be:
Yarvin advises his followers to avoid culture-war battles over issues like D.E.I. and abortion. It is wiser, he argues, to let the democratic system collapse on its own. In the meantime, dissidents should focus on becoming “fashionable” by building a reactionary subculture—a counter-Cathedral. Sam Kriss, a left-wing writer who has debated Yarvin, said of his work, “It flatters people who believe they can change the world simply by having weird ideas on the Internet and decadent parties in Manhattan.”
Recently, Yarvin has taken to describing himself as a “dark elf” whose role is to seduce “high elves”—blue-state élites—by planting “acorns of dark doubt in their high golden minds.” (In this Tolkien-inspired metaphor, red-state conservatives are “hobbits” who should submit to the “absolute power” of a new ruling class made up, unsurprisingly, of dark elves.)
He offers the libidinal satisfaction of ‘burning it all down’ filtered through the safe pleasures of remaining behind a screen:
Yarvin is calling for something simpler and more libidinally satisfying: to burn it all down and start again from scratch
Mark Carrigan 