The foundation of the so-called Neoreactionary movement, also known as “Dark Enlightenment" is attributed to Curtis Yarvin, whose philosophy is a rejection of the modern liberal democratic order. In a nutshell, the core tenets of his philosophy consist of not criticism but a complete rejection of democracy and its institutions. “The Cathedral”, his most famous concept is a description of modern Western society, which in his view, besides not being a democracy, is run by an unaccountable managerial class that controls all major institutions from universities to media to government bureaucracies.
As such, The Cathedral is a closed system that defines what is considered true, moral or respectable. It operates through a shared worldview with a system of incentives and punishments. It promotes “progress”, (a leftward concept in his view) and is intolerant of dissent towards its orthodoxy, viewing it as immoral, insane or evil that has to be excluded from respectable discourse. In his view, democracy as such, becomes a sham where voters choose between two managers (at least in the US) who ultimately serve The Cathedral’s agenda.
It is nearly impermissible to criticize some parts of his philosophy since any form of criticism is considered as a part of the natural defence of The Cathedral which, in his view, labels criticism as “sexist”, “racist” or “conspiratory” as a response to dissent. Yarvin is a formalist in that he believes that legitimate government power must follow from clear, unambiguous and, most importantly, owned sovereignty. Ownership is viewed as the alternative to the current democratic system as it diffuses responsibilities, leading to incompetence, corruption and system failure. In contrast, a ruler's personal proprietary stake in the nation’s well-being, aligns incentives and ensures competent long-term governance. CEO’s, monarchs and corporations are viewed as models of efficient governance.
In order to prove his thesis, he argues The Cathedral legitimizes itself through a standard historical narrative (propaganda) of contrasting and defining a “natural movement” from the Dark Ages to Enlightenment, or American Revolution as a fight for freedom. He uses the Pre-Modern regimes such as monarchies which he considers more stable, tolerant and effective than portrayed, as examples of formal sovereign systems that worked for centuries, vs democracies that do not work.
But what is his ultimate political solution? Yarvin does not offer a single global reactionary state. Instead he offers “Patchwork”, a world broken up (with the help of modern technology) into countless small sovereign communities where each micro-state is equipped with its own legal system, form of government and social contract. In such a world, hierarchy is established through a kind of Darwinian competition and free movement from patchlet to patchlet, which is claimed to weed out failed systems.
Yarvin has inspired a movement that is dubbed “Dark Enlightenment”, a term that signifies a radical shift from the ideals of enlightenment towards a cynical and Darwinian view of society and human nature. On a more practical level, and in the most recent year, Yarvin’s criticism of the democratic process has turned into a critique of the US administrative state, also known as “the swamp”. It is no coincidence that the current US president promised to “drain the swamp” and created, among other things, DOGE to do exactly that. DOGE’s sweeping actions (massive contract terminations, staff layoffs by half) can plausibly be viewed as directed attempts to dismantle the US department of education. While some of the criticism of democratic systems may be justified, it is not clear why Yarvin’s philosophy proposes ownership (a system of owned competitive sovereignty) as the ultimate solution. Similarly, it is not obvious how patchwork, criticized as a techno-liberatarian fantasy can be realized, be an improvement or a solution to the “modern civilizational decay”.
The troopers
One could argue that this is just another academic product that lives and dies on dusty university shelves. However, the upswing of new and powerful digital technologies, the domination of AI powered social media and the amalgam of elected/unelected power, capital and new technology seem to point in Yarvin’s envisioned direction. As a whole, the list of supporters, sympathisers, present or former government officials, politicians, intellectual influencers, patrons, the online ecosystems that feed on or promote Yarvin’s neoreactionary (NRx) and “Dark Enlightenment” ideas, and the populist attackers of “The Cathedral" can be made long. Support can range from direct financial patronage and vocal endorsement to intellectual affinity.
Some noteworthy individuals include:
- P. Thiel, his most significant and powerful connection, has provided financial grants to Yarvin. He is in fact the pinnacle of Yarvin’s neoreactionary appeal: A billionaire who considers democratic governance obsolete and seeks technological alternatives.
- B. Srinivasan’s own ideas on “Network State” as decentralized cloud-based communities, is a direct evolution of Yarvin’s Patchwork idea. His goal is to build formal systems of governance outside traditional nation-states.
- E. Musk has repeatedly engaged in Yarvin’s ideas calling his writing “the most accurate description” of the West. His rhetoric against the media elite, the “woke mind virus” align perfectly with Yarvin’s critique of “The Cathedral”.
- Balaji’s work on the Network State was funded by Marc Andreessen’s VC firm (a16z). The latter also invests in crypto and web3 projects that aim to disrupt traditional governance and finance.
- Nick Land, a former academic philosopher is an accelerationist and nihilist, who argues that technology should be unleashed to accelerate the breakdown of the current order, leading to a post-human future.
- Jordan Peterson, the clinical psychologist who operates on a parallel track with his fierce critique of “post-modern neo-Marxism” and the ideological capture of universities.
- Donald Trump is a populist manifestation of Yarvin’s critique of “The Cathedral”. The rhetoric of his two presidential campaigns ("Drain the Swamp," "fake news,"), his attacks on "deep state" bureaucrats, may be characterized as populist-nationalist rather than techno-reactionary. But they share the same enemy: the entrenched managerial class.
- J.D. Vance emerged from the tech world through Peter Thiel’s Paypal fellowship program. His rhetoric is often focused on corruption and incompetence of the elite and the need for a strong leader to break their power is well-aligned with Yarvinism.
- Tucker Carlson is arguably one of the most powerful influencers in the U.S. whose entire editorial stance is a relentless attack on “The Cathedral”, corporate media, university ideologies, federal bureaucracy.
- A former Trump Strategist, Steve Bannon’s project is a direct implementation of Yarvin’s philosophy. An important part of his project is the idea of dismantling the managerial bureaucracy (The Swamp) through firing officials, undermining institutional norms and withdrawing regulation.
One of the points we are making here is that Yarvin's influence on government figures is not about creating a party of neoreactionaries but about structuring the intellectual framework for pre-existing populist and “strong-man-centered” revolt against the so-called modern bureaucratic state. Indeed, many who may not be neoreactionary per se, find the critique of The Cathedral as a framework for understanding institutional bias in media and academia. Yarvin’s ideas have an appeal to mainstream conservative audiences who claim some kind of frustration with government bureaucracy. Because of his philosophy’s anti-democratic nature, it is not used as a direct political platform so at least for now, the political influence is indirect, tonal and strategic. Indeed, Trump’s famous appeal to people during his second presidential campaign is a snapshot of the process of regression/evolution that is aiming towards Dark Enlightentment: “vote for me this time and you won’t have to vote again!”
Our second and most important point is that this network that represents a significant intellectual current challenging the foundations of liberal democracy, has found a particularly receptive audience in the tech world where the power to build alternative systems is a tangible reality. If the projections are true and if the development of AI continues as predicted, the actual realization of a new world inspired by Dark enlightenment is not far-fetched. The fact is that the current rush to build superintelligent machines that will inevitably dominate the world in much more profound ways than nuclear weapons, is a perfect realization of a world envisioned by Yarvin.
The financial relationships in the Ecosystem of Dark Enlightenment is that the financial relationships are not directly about buying politicians (although Peter Thiel has provided massive amounts of financial support to both D. Trump and J.D. Vance), but about building capital and infrastructure for an alternative system. This is done either by A) funding intellectuals that create the blueprint, or by B) funding the tools that make executing the blueprint possible.
While wealthy tech libertarians and Silicon Valley figures have provided smaller donations to Yarvin and related writers who are disillusioned with the democratic system, the most significant and well-documented patron of Dark Enlightenment is Thiel Foundation Grants that provided grants to Yarvin’s “Center for the Study of New Society”. Thiel has made at least one personal donation of $50K to support Yarvin’s work, to allow Yarvin to write and develop his ideas full-time, effectively developing Thiel’s own political philosophy.
We should note that there is also a significant amount of money that flows to institutions that promote ideas adjacent to or compatible with the critique of "The Cathedral." For instance, the conservative newspaper “The Stanford Review”, founded by Thiel during his time at Stanford, was an early incubator for his ideas. Also “The Charles Koch Foundation” has funded university programs and think tanks that critique regulation and promote free-market alternatives. Indeed, the search for “alternatives to democracy” overlaps with anti-bureaucratic, anti-Cathedral sentiments.
Although more indirect, the far more significant financial flow involves investment by companies and technologies that facilitate an “exit from traditional systems”. This is, as we mentioned above, a core tenet of Yarvin’s Patchwork idea and B. Srinivasan's "Network State" concept. Thiel’s Founders Fund has been a major investor in Bitcoin and crypto companies as he considers Bitcoin a “financial weapon” and a tool that challenges state control over money. Similarly, Marc Andreessen’s VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has made billion dollar investments in crypto and web3 startups to enable new decentralized forms of organization and governance i.e. to create the infrastructure of a potential Patchwork world. And B. Srinivasan (a16z former partner and CTO of Coinbase), has personally invested in and promoted countless crypto projects that aim to create alternative economic systems.
Thiel was an early/major donor to the “Seatsteading Institute” as a literal attempt to build new jurisdictions free from existing nation-states. Also, the core product of his company Palantir, which is supposedly a defense contractor, is about centralizing information analysis to “empower decision-makers” i.e. those in power. Elon Musk’s SpaceX idea to create a multi-planetary society should be considered as the ultimate form of "exit" and a hedge against the collapse of a single planetary society.
In conclusion, technologies that influence or are influenced by the Dark Enlightenment worldview are already attempting to re-engineer society in tangible ways, often bypassing or pushing to bypass traditional democratic or institutional processes. In recent years, their focus has been on building and deploying transformative technologies (AI, blockchain, and related decentralized systems) as mechanisms of power and control. For instance, AI is framed not just as a tool for automating intelligence but also as a vehicle for redesigning governance, decision-making, and more recently, even human relations. Parallel to this, blockchain and crypto are imagined as ways of undermining or replacing centralized financial and political structures. Persuading majorities or engaging in slow policy reforms is certainly not desirable for these actors. Rather, they see technological architectures themselves as political acts: algorithms become arbiters of truth, and networks become new sovereignties a la Yarvin’s philosophy. In this sense, their projects are materializations of Yarvin’s theoretical ideas, direct attempts to hardwire their ideological commitments of Dark Enlightenment into the infrastructures that will govern everyday life.