Scott Alexander was right: doubling down

In which I double down on my argument from "The edgelords were right: a response to Scott Alexander"

Edit: added some extra comments on aesthetics to the original version, thanks to a discussion with

TracingWoodgrains

.

Edit 2: In the original version of the article, I actually described the article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus as much more normative than it actually was. I edited that part to reflect he was merely describing both the pro and anti side re Scott Alexander.

The average reader of The New York Times must have been a bit puzzled as to why the magazine chose to interview a 51 year old guy called Curtis Yarvin for its 18 January 2025 issue: to most, he must have looked as coming out of nowhere, an obscure intellectual. To those “online” enough, he is anything but. Curtis, also known as Mencius Moldbug, has long been at the heart of the so-called “Dark Enlightenment”, an ideology that I have witnessed growing in influence in the last years of being “online”, only for this to culminate in what one could consider real political influence. Don’t take it from me, a very online person, who might be biased to assign too much importance to internet writers; take it from an article in another mainstream outlet, Time Magazine. The following excerpt not only highlights Yarvin’s growing influence, but also sketches, in broad terms, what the “Dark Enlightenment” is all about:

Largely ignored by academic philosophers, the “Dark Enlightenment” movement and Yarvin have curried favor and influence with tech executives in recent years. (…) Not unlike the Futurists, Yarvin advocates for replacing democracy with a kind of techno-feudal state—for the government to be run like a corporation, with the president as its “CEO.” This new system is elitist—“humans fit into dominance-submission structures” Yarvin wrote in 2008; and it’s authoritarian—“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia,” he said in 2012 (…) What’s even more alarming is that Yarvin’s outsize influence on tech executives has now made its way to Washington. The signs are everywhere: Yarvin was a feted guest at Trump’s so-called “Coronation Ball” in January 2025. Vice President J.D. Vance, a protegee of Thiel’s, spoke admiringly of the blogger’s influence on his thinking when interviewed on a podcast in July 2024. And while Andreessen’s role in the Trump White House is unofficial, The Washington Post reported in January 2025 that the executive “has been quietly and successfully recruiting candidates for positions across Trump’s Washington.”

Even the journalist running the NYT interview, David Marchese, seems a bit perplexed by this growing influence. He preambles the interview with:

I’ve been aware of Yarvin, who mostly makes his living on Substack, for years and mostly interested in his work as a prime example of antidemocratic sentiment in particular corners of the internet. Until recently, those ideas felt fringe.

In another post from last year, I argued against Ross Douthat, whose argument was that the Internet was enabling a “Monoculture”. On the contrary, I said: it’s an amazingly efficient and fast incubator of new ideologies, and ideas born on the internet shall come to dominate the 21st century much more than those born in traditional institutions (note the term “ideology” — I am not including here STEM stuff). In that post, I was mostly citing examples of how rationalism had become embedded into tech culture and influenced the development of arguably the most powerful technology we have now, AI, itself. Curtis’ neoreactionary movement is just another very important example that proves my point.

If the mainstream media has been ignoring Curtis for a long time, other, at the time obscure internet writers, were not. Most notably, Scott Alexander wrote one of the first comprehensive take-downs of neoreactionary thought back in 2013: the Anti-Reactionary FAQ. In fact, back then he spent quite a lot of time arguing against proponents of this ideology.

It was for this reason that I strongly disagreed with another, more recent article in The New York Times, this time by Michelle Goldberg, titled “The vibe-shifts against the right”. This piece brings the names of 3 purportedly ex right-wingers who have changed their tune recently, in response to the Trump election. Their names?

Alex Kaschuta

,

Richard Hanania

and Scott Alexander. The article uses Scott’s recent post, “The Twilight of the edgelords”, a meditation on whether centrists like him led to the rise of populism to clump him together with Alex and Richard, who were bona fide right-wingers¹, and more recently disavowed some of their past beliefs.

A few days ago, I wrote a response to the aforementioned Scott Alexander post, arguing that no, intellectuals² like him are not responsible for the rise of populism and his doubts are a result of excessive humbleness and self-awareness. If individuals promoting ideologies, as opposed to the pure force of social media, played any role in the shifting winds of culture, it is the mainstream that is to be blamed for becoming out-of-touch, not people like Scott. And precisely because of this recent NYT article, I am doubling down and defending Scott Alexander from his own self-accusations, voiced in the original post through the character Adraste.

That’s because I think Michelle Goldberg’s opinion piece makes a fundamental mistake by bundling Scott with Alex Kaschuta, a mistake that is representative of what I mean by “out of touch” when I refer to many mainstream intellectuals. I appreciate Alex for changing her stance so vehemently — I am sure she has faced a lot of backlash from her former coalition members for openly going against them. So this is not some sort of indictment of her.

But Scott and Kaschuta could not be more different in their intellectual evolution: while Scott was writing anti-reactionary FAQs back in 2013, Alex was inviting their figureheads on her podcast in an affirmatory manner: she was part of the neoreactionary movement, not arguing against them. The differences between her past ideology and Scott’s relatively constant one are miles apart. To put them together, just because they are both vaguely “anti-mainstream” shows a lack of curiosity regarding ideas. And here I am going contradict Ross Douthat yet again: it is not The Internet that enforces a Monoculture, it is the mainstream. And it’s precisely because of this Monoculture that the arguments against Trump coming from the mainstream felt somewhat lacklustre, whereas Scott, as much as one might disagree with him, has always been at the very least interesting.

So yes, I am doubling down on defending Scott (and by extension people like him³). Because it is exactly this blindness and lack of curiosity that has been the problem for a while in terms of intellectual elite thinking, not the “centrist edgelords”, as Scott refers to himself and related individuals.

It’s not like I agree with Scott on everything — there are a lot of points where I think he’s wrong. I could write an entire article about them. To begin with, I think he has started a movement, whether he likes to accept it or not, which has shot itself in the foot through bad aesthetics (broadly construed), despite espousing a lot of good ideas. I suspect it is these bad aesthetics that have led to so many vicious and often unwarranted attacks on rationalists. And because rationalism somewhat overlaps with an area I am interested in, progress studies, I am worried some ideas have been tainted through these bad aesthetics. I also disagree with his stance on autism: in my opinion, high functioning individuals with what one might call Asperger’s can still be considered to be severely impaired and depriving them of any name to rally around is not a good idea. I am much more on the side of

Tyler Cowen

in this regard. He has written about the topic in his book “The Age of the Infovore”, has a paper addressing autism from an economics perspective, interviewed important figures related to “the movement”, like Michelle Dawson — I recommend people check out this part of his work, that I think has gone unfairly less noticed. I also publicly disagreed with Scott on Lumina, a year ago. Anyway, the list of disagreements with SA could go on.

But the man is simply NOT responsible, in any way, of causing populism. On the contrary, he has created antibodies against illiberal thought in other intellectuals, as I explain in the following section.

Curtis Yarvin and Scott Alexander, two formerly “obscure writers”, who have both become extremely influential. They are both examples of what I meant when I said The Internet is anti-Monoculture. Yet their ideologies could not be more different.

The Great Man Theory of platforming

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“The Great Man Theory” of history remains unpopular among the academic and journalistic elite. That is not surprising: it carries with it an implicit admission of inequality: some individuals are truly, monumentally more influential than others and it’s not just chance or faceless “systems” that leads to this: it’s something about that person’s character, whether innate or acquired. You see this a lot when people like Elon Musk are discussed: it’s not him who created the hard tech empire he has, it’s his employees, or luck or his father’s emerald mines. But while intellectuals certainly know things business/start-up people don’t, the reverse is also true. And almost everyone competent in the start-up world that I have talked to, sees Elon for what he is: a one in several billion talent at being a hard tech company builder. He has done it over and over and over and it cannot be down to luck alone. That does not mean one has to agree with his moral, politics or fatherhood skills, and indeed many of the people who think that he is a sort of Kwisatz Haderach of tech, do not regard him as a personal model.

In terms of where I stand on “The Great Man Theory of History”, I am somewhere in between: I think both impersonal forces, historical currents that are beyond anyone’s control *and* extraordinary individuals shape the future. After all, had Elon been born in the Middle Ages, even in a privileged family, his technical skills would not have mattered at all and indeed, he might have gotten his head chopped off for speaking against the King, given the personality he has. So luck did play a role: the luck to be born in the right era, to be able to immigrate to the US and so on. The luck to be in an environment where a disagreeable personality did not run the risk of literally getting you killed (as it used to happen in many authoritarian regimes). To achieve the success he has, Elon probably committed many acts of “treason”. Overall, it is the institutions built post Enlightenment, the liberal norms of the US and indeed the pool of talent that this society has created, that he could draw upon, which allowed him to create what he has. And I also believe that Great Men (and Women) should always strive to recognize this luck and strengthen, as opposed to weaken, the societies that allowed them to achieve such success — one might even call this a form of noblesse oblige.

And while when considering the “Great Man Theory of History”, many elite journalists/academics tend to assign “power” only to broad historical trends, systems or groups of individuals ("society”), they to do the exact opposite when it comes to something else, namely so-called “platforming”. They seem to almost believe in a “Great Man Theory of Platforming”, where hosting an event where you invite someone with “bad ideas”, or even choosing to politely engage in debate with them can alter the course of history, at least that of ideas, which are broadly regarded as upstream of all else, in very, very dangerous ways. That such “bad ideas” would spread anyway due to impersonal cultural forces and the decentralized nature of the internet seems, in this case, to be downplayed.

One of the main accusations against Scott comes from those who blame him for “platforming” neoreactionaries like Yarvin. How did Scott do that? Did he run events with Curtis as the headline speaker, heaping praise on him? No. To many, Scott seems to be guilty of not completely refusing to engage with neoreactionaries, something that stains Scott by association, despite him arguing against them.

To better understand this debate, I recommend an article from 2020 in the New Yorker, written by the author Gideon Lewis-Kraus. The piece discusses Scott’s “doxxing” by the NYT⁴, but also does a pretty good job at summarizing the interests of the rationalist community for a broad audience and brings up both the arguments pro and against Scott and the rationalists’ involvement in the spreading of neo-reactionary thinking. The paragraph below is particularly relevant, with the sentences written in bold and italic illustrating the main points of criticism against Scott that are often brought up by those who consider him guilty of “platforming” Yarvin:

Many rationalist exchanges involve lively if donnish arguments about abstruse thought experiments; the most famous, and funniest, example, from LessWrong, led inexorably to the conclusion that anyone who read the post and did not immediately set to work to create a superintelligent A.I. would one day be subject to its torture. Others reflect a near-pathological commitment to the reinvention of the wheel, using the language of game theory to explain, with mathematical rigor, some fact of social life that anyone trained in the humanities would likely accept as a given. A minority address issues that are contentious and at times offensive. These conversations, about race and genetic or biological differences between the sexes, have rightfully drawn criticism from outsiders. Rationalists usually point out that these debates represent a tiny fraction of the community’s total activity, and that they are overrepresented in the comments section of S.S.C. by a small but loud and persistent cohort—one that includes, for example, Steve Sailer, a peddler of “scientific racism.” (…) Alexander has long fretted over the likelihood that the presence of these fringe figures could tarnish the reputation of the blog and its community. In late 2013, he published “The Anti-Reactionary FAQ,” a thirty-thousand-word post now regarded as one of his first major contributions to the rationalist canon. The post describes the world view of a group, centered around a figure called Curtis Yarvin, also known as Mencius Moldbug, whose “neoreactionary” views—including an open desire for the restoration of feudalism and racial hierarchy—contributed to the intellectual normalization of what became known as the alt-right. Alexander could have banned neoreactionaries from his comments section, but, on the basis of the view that vile ideas should be countenanced and refuted rather than left to accrue the status of forbidden knowledge, he took their arguments seriously and at almost comical length—even at the risk that he might lend them legitimacy. Ultimately, he circumscribed or curtailed certain “culture war” threads. Still, the rationalists’ general willingness to pursue orderly exchanges on objectionable topics, often with monstrous people, remains not only a point of pride but a constitutive part of the subculture’s self-understanding.

Who knows? maybe without this “platforming” that Scott facilitated, we would have never had Curtis Yarvin. Of course, this is completely backwards. Elon Musk is much more of a Great Man of History than Scott Alexander is a Great Platformer of neoreactionaries, in the sense that the latter role probably had much less causal impact on Yarvin’s rise⁵. Musk’s tech empire would not have happened without Musk. However, Yarvin’s ideas would have penetrated anyway, sooner or later. After all, he was completely deplatformed, ignored, cancelled etc by most mainstream publications and academia, yet his ideas did penetrate to the highest level of US political thought in the end. This shows there was appetite for such ideas, an appetite driven by deeper forces, as well as technology (the internet). Yet, despite this nearly universal deplatforming, somehow, we are led to believe that, another at the time unknown, anonymous blogger (Scott) engaging in a dialogue that was mostly critical of Yarvin’s ideas, might have dramatically changed culture in very, very bad ways. When I say “we are led to believe”, I do not just mean through the Gideon-Kraus article — so many critiques of Scott that I have read ultimately mention his engagement with neoreactionaries as some sort of mortal sin.

My interpretation is that Scott had his pulse on where the culture was heading and which were the important battles way before most of the mainstream did. And if he changed the history of culture with respect to neoreactionaries in any way, it’s against, not pro them. Scott’s points 2013 defense of liberalism and The Enlightenment reverberates now across many younger intellectual’s writings defending these principles. I, myself, was influenced by his piece and ended up reading on the history of ideas related to this topic much more. Around one year and a half ago I got acquainted to the writings of Joel Mokyr, Deirdre McCloskey and others who defend the moral framework of liberalism as the basis of the current relative prosperity and good life that we are all enjoying — an awakening I wrote about in one of my first piece that really took off: “Ideas matter: how I stopped being a Culture Incel”.

And such engagement with the history of liberalism from younger writers is good. For the battle lines now are not between Grey Tribe and Blue Tribe or Red Tribe or whatever (which are often mentioned in the Gideon Lewis- Kraus article several times as the important factors and are stand-ins for rationalists, Democrats and Republicans, respectively). The battle lines of culture, at their very core, are between illiberalism and liberalism. Liberalism has grown stale, almost impotent, like an old car that still does its job but has sort of lost its shine. It has become associated to what Deirdre McCloskey would call “prudence and prudence only“, when she refers to the excesses of bourgeois morality (which she sees as necessary/ a precursor to liberal thought). Or, using another term of hers, “idiotically strategic”⁶. By contrast, neoreactionary thought offers the appeal of the grandiosity of the old, the prudence-stripped courage of the ancient hero — an aesthetic that for good reason appeals to young men, when the alternative is a sort of neutered form of “idiotically strategic” prudence. And when I say for good reason, I mean that in an explanatory fashion, not in order to suggest they are correct.

This has happened for many reasons, that go beyond the scope of this essay. But liberalism⁷ is, I am convinced, the best way forward and the question is not how to get rid of it, but how to re-inject it with vitalism. I do not believe that Scott, rationalism and associated movements like Effective Altruism (EA) were good at injecting this vitalism. If anything, EA makes liberalism feel more on the side of “prudence and prudence only”. But one man cannot do everything. If one does not see that Scott was clearly on the side of liberalism, identified its opponents from very early on and chose to do something about it, with the means that he had at his disposal (writing), then one does not understand culture at all.

1. Alex was I think fair to say quite neoreactionary, Richard more of a combination between that and libertarian, though he is much hard to pin down and has changed a lot.

2. He calls himself an similar figures “centrist edgelords”. I do not really agree with the idea that he is an edgelord.

3. I am focusing on him because the NYT article mentions Scott specifically.

4. Lewis-Kraus might be right about some points he makes about NYT’s editorial practices, some of the corrections he brings to assertions of members of the tech elite and how it’s impossible that Cade Metz (the author of the famous NYT article) could have promised Scott "mostly positive coverage” — I really do not understand the subtleties of these things well enough to comment.

5. I do think Scott is A Great Intellectual of History — his body of work as a whole has been very influential. The same can be said of Curtis Yarvin. And if you believe Ideas are important, and upstream of much else, they are also, by extension, Great Men of History.

6. For more details, I recommend reading Deirdre’s book “Bourgeois Equality”, in which she argues how ideas played a key part in spurring the Age of Enlightenment and consequently the Industrial Revolution, which she calls, more empathically “The Great Betterment”. I recommend especially Part III, Part IV and Part VI of her book. If one desires an even more streamlined version, check out Part III specifically.

7. Here I mean liberalism broadly construed, not in the sense of the “Democratic party”.