On Curtis Yarvin. Critical theory for CEOs?
A few days ago, I said (half-joking, half-serious) that JD Vance is getting way too much credit. I guess it has to do with that fascination for a certain kind of conservative outsider — someone who can speak to power as if they were still on the margins.
I feel something similar about Curtis Yarvin, ideologue of the “neoreactionary” movement and the man behind that much-quoted term in techno-reactionary circles: the Cathedral.
At first glance, the idea sounds striking. Yarvin argues that universities, the media, and the cultural sphere form an informal system of hegemonic power that enforces progressive morality under the guise of neutrality. He calls this system “the Cathedral,” describing it as a kind of secular church — decentralized yet deeply effective — that determines what can be thought, said, and done in contemporary societies.1
It’s an interesting claim — but scratch the surface, and the Cathedral turns out to be little more than a reactionary, elitist, and authoritarian remix of ideas that critical theory has been working on for decades. Louis Althusser spoke of ideological state apparatuses like schools and media that reproduce dominant systems by teaching individuals to accept their place in them. Antonio Gramsci coined the concept of cultural hegemony to explain how a ruling class imposes its worldview as common sense. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman analyzed how the media shapes public opinion to benefit elites. Ivan Illich criticized modern education as a form of social domestication. Herbert Marcuse developed the idea of repressive tolerance to describe how democracies neutralize dissent by accepting only that which doesn’t challenge them. Pierre Bourdieu showed how prestige and symbolic authority operate as mechanisms of power legitimation. Michel Foucault argued that knowledge works as a form of power that regulates behavior and defines what counts as truth. Jacques Ellul pointed out that modern propaganda doesn’t “lie” — it emotionally structures reality. And Walter Lippmann had already warned that public opinion is a mediated construction based on simplified images that the media installs as reality.
Nothing new under the sun. But instead of questioning how power shapes subjectivities, Yarvin rewrites this entire conceptual apparatus as an indictment of the “progressive dictatorship,” turning it into a sort of critical theory for CEOs with an imperial nostalgia. Maybe that’s where the real interest lies — in what it reveals about the present, and the current state of critical theory itself, now capable of turning against its own foundations.
Yarvin offers a handbook of resentment. He turns the diagnosis of cultural domination into an argument against the very idea of equality. Instead of dismantling the machinery of ideological legitimation, he aesthetizes it — and captures it to build a new orthodoxy from above.
The fact that this operation is seen as clever or disruptive says less about Yarvin, and more about the exhaustion of a critical tradition that, in some cases, no longer distinguishes between emancipating and managing disillusionment.
— E.