Meet the Man Whose Philosophy Has Influenced Peter Thiel and the Technocrats

Big Brother Surveillance, JD Vance, Trump /
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From “The Last American Vagabond”

By gaining a deeper understanding of the philosophy behind Peter Thiel, we can learn where the second Trump administration is headed.

As it becomes clear the acolytes of Technocrat and faux-libertarian Peter Thiel will wield power in the second Trump administration, it is increasingly important to understand some of the influences behind Thiel and his fellow Technocrats.

One of the largest influences on Thiel’s thinking is a man named Curtis Yarvin, sometimes known by his pen name Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin and fellow philosopher Nick Land founded the school of thought known as the Dark Enlightenment, or the Neo-Reactionary movement.

While Yarvin’s writing and influence has mostly been on the edges of the mainstream, in the last decade his appeal has grown to the point that he is now being interviewed by the NY Times and cited as the philosopher influencing the MAGA movement.

A Brief History of Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas

From 2007 to 2014, Yarvin outlined his views of Dark Enlightenment on his blog Unqualified Reservations. Specifically, Yarvin has argued that American Democracy has failed and should be replaced by a monarchy with similarities to corporate governance structures. He has called for a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.”

In 2017, BuzzFeed News published an email exchange between Yarvin and Milo Yiannopoulis. In these emails, Yarvin describes watching the results of the 2016 Presidential election with Peter Thiel. “He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin told Yiannopoulis. “Just plays it very carefully.”

Thiel’s venture capital fund, the Founders Fund, also invested in Yarvin’s company Tlön Corp in 2013.

I first became aware of Yarvin and his ideas in 2016 when I noticed what was then known as the “Alt-Right” infiltrating American libertarian circles. In my 2017 essay, Removing the Alt-Right Infection on the American Libertarian Movement, I detailed what I saw as a pipeline from the the libertarian movement to the alt-right as self-professed libertarians, voluntaryists, and anarchists joined the burgeoning Trump movement.

I noted that prominent conservative libertarian theorist Hans Herman Hoppe described the genealogy of the Alt-Right through it’s connection to him and the Property and Freedom Society (which he founded to express his conservative views):

“Many of the leading lights associated with the Alt-Right have appeared here at our meetings in the course of the years. Paul Gottfried, who first coined the term, Peter Brimelow, Richard Lynn, Jared Taylor, John Derbyshire, Steve Sailer and Richard Spencer. As well, Sean Gabb’s name and mine are regularly mentioned in connection with the Alt-Right, and my work has been linked also with the closely related neo-reactionary movement inspired by Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) and his now defunct blog Unqualified Reservations.”

I tried (unsuccessfully) to point out these connections to different libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who support Hoppe. They refused to see that the Paleolibertarian movement founded by Murray Rothbard, the founder of American Libertarianism, and Hoppe’s “rational” justifications for this type of thinking influenced thinkers like Curtis Yarvin, who is seen as the pre-Alt-Right neo-reactionary movement.

At the time, I noted that Yarvin had been linked to the Trump campaign through Steve Bannon, former chief strategist of Trump’s first administration. Bannon was once influenced by Yarvin but has since soured on him, as well as that of Thiel and Musk.

Bannon recently appeared on The New York Times podcast calling out the tech barons for promoting “technofeudalism” and transhumanism.

“This thing is all tied together,” he said. “They have a very well thought through philosophy and a very well thought through set of ideas, and they’re trying to implement that. And to me, everybody’s afraid, everybody’s scared because of their power.”

While Bannon may be skeptical of Yarvin and the Technocrats, he is no longer part of Trump’s inner circle or the 2nd administration.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Vice President J.D. Vance is said to have been influenced by Yarvin.

While appearing on the conservative podcast Jack Murphy Live in September 2021, Vance, then a candidate for the Senate in Ohio, called for Trump to return to the White House and “seize the institutions of the left,” fire “every single midlevel bureaucrat” in the US government, “replace them with our people,” and ignore the courts if they try to stop him. Essentially, a counter-revolution by “counter-elites”.

“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” Vance said to Jack Murphy. “And when the courts stop you stand before the country, and say ‘the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it’.”

Who did Vance credit for these ideas? “So there’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” he said.

Vance elaborated further on his newfound ideals. “I saw and realized something about the American elite, and about my role in the American elite, that took me just a while to figure out. I was redpilled,” the future Vice President stated.

In a recent interview with Politico, Yarvin detailed his relationship with Vance and Trump official Michael Anton.

“When I called him up recently to talk about the second Trump administration, Yarvin told me that during his trip to Washington, he had exchanged friendly greetings with Vice President JD Vance — who has publicly cited his work — had lunch with Michael Anton, a senior member of Trump’s State Department, and caught up with the “revolutionary vanguard” of young conservatives who grew up reading his blogs and are now entering the new administration.

Yarvin’s Influences

Like all philosophers, Curtis Yarvin has taken inspiration from thinkers before him and expanded on their vision for the world.

After reading the work of 19th century philosopher Thomas Carlyle, Yarvin came to reject libertarianism as doomed to fail without inclusion of some level of authoritarianism. In 2010 Yarvin wrote:

“When I went from Misesian to Carlylean, my vision of the ideal state did not change. I, and others like me, want to live and should be able to live in a liberal regime of spontaneous order, which is not planned from above but emerges through the natural, uncontrolled interaction of free human atoms. Hayek in particular, though no Mises, is eloquent here.

What my conversion to the cult of Carlyle has changed—completely—is my understanding of the means by which this free society must be achieved. If it exists, it must be preserved: by any means necessary (as Malcolm X used to put it). If it does not exist? Bueller? Bueller?

It is easy to see that libertarians have trouble with the means part, because they have never come anywhere close to succeeding.”

Essentially, Yarvin argues that the libertarian appeal to self-ownership and individual liberty will always fail without some sort of overarching mechanism to enforce order, be that a monarch or a technocrat.

His arguments have increasingly held sway as more libertarians (and the population in general) find themselves powerless to fight back against Progressive elites. Many Americans are now hoping to be saved by a “counter-elite” in the form of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Donald Trump.

However, when one studies the words of Thomas Carlyle we clearly see what his ideas are capable of creating.

Jeffrey Tucker, a long time Libertarian author, theorist, and founder of the Brownstone Institute, wrote about the influence of Carlyle in his 2017 book, Right-Wing Collectivism: The Other Threat to Liberty.

In a 2016 essay for the Foundation for Economic Education, Tucker outlines the ideas of Carlyle and the danger they pose. He notes that Carlyle’s “great man” theory fits neatly into a call for a strongman to come save the nation from its ills.

“Have you heard of the “great man” theory of history?,” Tucker writes. “The meaning is obvious from the words. The idea is that history moves in epochal shifts under the leadership of visionary, bold, often ruthless men who marshal the energy of masses of people to push events in radical new directions. Nothing is the same after them.”

Tucker also quotes directly from Carlyle to show how he supported the idea that the population should bow to these “Great Men” as they take control of the machinery of the state in the name of some greater good:

“The Commander over Men; he to whose will our wills are to be subordinated, and loyally surrender themselves, and find their welfare in doing so, may be reckoned the most important of Great Men. He is practically the summary for us of all the various figures of Heroism; Priest, Teacher, whatsoever of earthly or of spiritual dignity we can fancy to reside in a man, embodies itself here, to command over us, to furnish us with constant practical teaching, to tell us for the day and hour what we are to do.”

The Last American Vagabond reached out to Jeffrey Tucker regarding whether or not he has the same concerns for the rise of right-wing collectivism in Trump’s new cabinet. He believes Trump’s current use of executive power has only been to reverse previous executive actions.

“What I had not encountered when I wrote that book was the real and present danger of the existing corporatist state and the incredible presence of administrative agencies that are the real government,” Tucker told TLAV. “The question to ask now is: how precisely is this going to be curbed? It does not just go away given that it has winnowed its way into every aspect of life in all commanding heights. No one has offered a solution beyond platitudes. What I see happening here is the use of power to curb power.”

Tucker’s statement regarding the use of “power to curb power” is perfectly in line with the thinking of another writer who influenced the technocrats.

The Machiavellians and the Counter-Elite

Curtis Yarvin’s thinking was also inspired by James Burnham, author of the 1943 book The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom.

The book takes its title from Niccolò Machiavelli, the Italian diplomat, philosopher, and author of 16th century book, The Prince. Michaevelli argued that leaders were justified in committing immoral acts so long as they achieved positive political ends. The book continues to be highly influential and inspired a generation of thinkers known as the Machiavellians.

James Burnham believed that the real political battle and progress took place because of the actions of elites in society. Burnham presciently warned that the United States could potentially slip into “democratic totalitarianism” where liberals, progressive, and defenders of Democracy give unlimited power to a centralized government and “advocate the suppression of the specific institutions and the specific rights and freedoms that still protect the individual from the advance of the unbridled state.”

Defenders of Freedom greatly influenced Curtis Yarvin, as well as Marc Andreesen, a businessman, former software engineer, and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz where he invests in a number of web3 projects.

While Andreesen does not hold an official position within the Trump administration, he has described himself as an “unpaid intern” who is helping advise on which personnel should join the 2nd cabinet. In December 2024, Andreessen told the Honestly with Bari Weiss podcast that he had been spending lots of his time at Mar-a-Lago with Trump.

“[I’m there] a fair amount—maybe half my time down there since the election,” he stated. “Look I’m not claiming to be like in the middle of all the decision making but I’ve been trying to help in as many ways as I can. Trump brings out a lot of feelings in a lot of people—people have very strong views—and then there are many political topics that we’re very deliberately not weighing in on.”

In January, the Washington Post confirmed this as well, reporting that Andreesen had “been quietly and successfully recruiting and interviewing candidates for positions across the incoming administration”.

This makes Andreesen’s recent statements on the Lex Fridman podcast regarding his views on the Machiavellians and their relation to Trump’s 2nd term all the more telling. Fridman asked Andreesen to explain his view that humanity always ends up being ruled by “the elite”.

Andreesen said the idea comes from the Italian philosopher Robert Michels, which he learned about in Defenders of Freedom.

“In the Machiavellians, he resurrects what he calls the sort of Italian realist school of political philosophy from the, from the 10s and 20s. These were people who were trying to understand the actual mechanics of how politics actually works,” Andreesen told Fridman. Andreesen explains that Michels believed in something called “the iron law of oligarchy”.

“So the iron law of oligarchy basically says democracy is fake. There’s always a ruling class. There’s always a ruling elite structurally. And he said, the reason for that is because the masses can’t organize, right? What’s the fundamental problem? Whether the mass is 25, 000 people in a union or 250 million people in a country, the masses can’t organize.”

Instead, Michels and Andreesen argue, since the majority are apparently incapable of organizing there must be a “small, organized elite ruling a large and dispersed majority”

“So as a consequence, democracy is always and everywhere fake. There is always a ruling elite. The lesson of the Machiavellians is you can deny that if you want, but you’re fooling yourself,” Andreesen concludes.

The Right-Wing Elite vs The Left-Wing Elite

The parallels between Thomas Carlyle’s vision, Curtis Yarvin’s calls for monarchy, The Machiavellian’s support of a counter-elite, Peter Thiel’s support of Yarvin’s ideas, and what we are witnessing with the Technocratic takeover of the U.S. government are obvious to anyone willing to take an honest look.

It is this idea of the inevitability of the masses being ruled by the elites which has inspired Andreesen, Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and other technocrats surrounding Donald Trump. In essence, it is likely they view themselves as the “counter-elite” whose job is to wrestle society away from the grips of the failed, tyrannical Progressive elite.

Unfortunately, for the rest of us in “the masses” we are facing a situation where the “Progressive elite” and the “Tech-Bro Populists” BOTH want to create a world run by artificial intelligence, where humans merge with machines, and are under the watch of an all pervasive surveillance state monitored by facial recognition cameras connected to a Smart Grid. Whether it’s the UN and the World Economic Forum, or Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel — both sides are promising they will build a utopian world which will benefit the future of humanity.

History is rife with examples of psychotic utopians promising the “Golden Age” while delivering despotic tyranny. Hopefully, the American people have learned the lessons of history and will not be swept up in the hysteria of the moment.

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