Curtis Yarvin vs. Carroll Quigley: Two Theories of Elites That Shape Power Today

Sunday, October 12, 2025.

Two thinkers, born half a century apart, stare at the same riddle: why do civilizations lose their nerve?

Carroll Quigley, the Georgetown historian who mentored Bill Clinton, believed societies endure only as long as they can replace their elites without revolt. When institutions stop admitting new blood, decay begins quietly—less a revolution than a slow replication of sameness.

Curtis Yarvin, the Silicon Valley blogger and programmer known online as Mencius Moldbug, looks at the same paralysis and calls democracy the disease.

His cure? A sovereign CEO running the nation like a start-up—decisive, absolute, “optimized.”

Quigley gave presidents a syllabus.
Yarvin gives billionaires a bedtime story.

Quigley’s Circulating Elites

In Tragedy and Hope (1966), Quigley diagnosed civilizations with a kind of institutional arteriosclerosis. Healthy systems circulate power; failing ones hoard it.

When universities, banks, and governments start existing to preserve themselves rather than their purpose, the arteries clog. Innovation fades; cynicism sets in. Collapse, for Quigley, isn’t divine punishment—it’s bad maintenance.

He borrowed Spengler’s sense of decline and Toynbee’s faith in creative response but translated both into the language of management. Show him an org chart and he’d show you the empire’s pulse.

Yarvin’s Sovereign CEO

Curtis Yarvin (b. 1973) sees the same stagnation and prescribes monarchy in JavaScript.
Democracy, he argues, is theater—endless committees pretending to steer a ship already owned by The Cathedral (media, academia, bureaucracy).

His solution, neo-cameralism, would convert the state into a corporation. Citizens become customers; the ruler a CEO accountable only to shareholders.

Where Quigley values permeability, Yarvin worships precision.
Where Quigley trusts feedback, Yarvin trusts hierarchy.
He dreams of a civilization so perfectly ordered it never needs to listen again.

The Two Blueprints for Power

Picture them meeting across time: Quigley in a book-lined office, Yarvin in a room humming with servers.

Quigley, sleeves rolled, sketches loops of renewal. “Institutions must breathe,” he says. “When leaders stop yielding, systems suffocate.” His world runs on oxygen—argument, curiosity, self-correction. Renewal, for him, isn’t revolution; it’s respiration.

Yarvin types quietly, then smiles. “That’s chaos,” he says. “Every time you open the system, mediocrity rushes in.”

To him democracy is sentimental clutter; the real rulers already write the code and the headlines. His remedy is architectural: replace negotiation with design. One mind, one dashboard, one executive clarity.

Quigley trusts circulation. Yarvin craves consolidation.
Quigley sees disagreement as civilization’s immune system; Yarvin sees it as chronic inflammation.

Psychologically, they seem to embody opposite postures of power:
Quigley, the secure leader, confident enough to be changed by dialogue.
Yarvin, the anxious controller, terrified of drift, mistaking silence for peace.

In therapy, Quigley would be the partner who says, “Tell me more.”
Yarvin would be the one who says, “We’ve discussed this enough.”
That difference—between curiosity and control—is the hinge on which both marriages and empires turn.

Lessons from History

History tends to punish rigidity eventually.
Autocracies promise speed but reliably deliver brittleness.
Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet—each sold efficiency, each died of fear (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012; Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018).

Power that cannot be questioned becomes blind. Every monopoly looks elegant until innovation dies inside it.
Even in nature, log-term survival belongs to systems that listen.

Families as Micro-Civilizations

Every marriage is also a government in miniature.
Healthy couples let authority circulate: one steers finances, the other emotions. Leadership shifts with circumstance.

In brittle marriages, one partner becomes the sovereign CEO—making every decision “for efficiency’s sake.”
The household runs on time; love runs out of air.

Therapists call it rigid equilibrium: everything stable, nothing alive.
When curiosity leaves a relationship, collapse begins politely—with two people insisting, “We’re fine.”

The Psychology of Elites

Why do elites—political, corporate, or domestic—cling so hard to control?
Because letting go feels like erasure.

At the summit of any hierarchy, anxiety wears the mask of certainty.
Leaders confuse omniscience with safety and fill the room with mirrors that nod back.

Neuroscientists call it confirmation bias.
Therapists call it defensiveness with an expense account.

As leadership scholar Manfred Kets de Vries (2018) notes, the narcissistic executive charms, inspires, and then slowly deafens the room. “His genius,” de Vries writes, “lies in mistaking dominance for vision.”

In Yarvin’s design, that deafness becomes a feature.
In Quigley’s, it only marks the beginning of decline.
Elites don’t perish for lack of intelligence; they perish for lack of teachability and gravitas.

Renewal or Rigidity in the Age of the Algorithm

Both men still describe American culture perfectly.
We inhabit Quigley’s nightmare and Yarvin’s fantasy concurrently—a pseudo-democracy managed by algorithmic monarchs.

Our public language worships inclusion; but our private desires craves the sneer of cool command.
We romanticize the decisive founder, the “visionary” who spares us the burden of consensus.
Politics has adopted the UX of tech: fewer steps, faster results, less conversation. Political disintermediation.

Even therapy borrows corporate grammar: scale your boundaries, optimize your coping mechanisms.
We no longer grow; we pivot.

Quigley might call it emotional fatigue—institutions that are too proud to yield, and populated by a polity too anxious to imagine alternatives.
Yarvin, on the other hand, would call imagination a waste of effort.
Both can mistake efficiency for evolution.

But control is not the cure for chaos.
Sometimes control is chaos rehearsing order. You are what you pretend to be.

Civilizations, like couples, endure only while they can bear the discomfort of the internal political feedback.
Once a system stops listening, collapse isn’t coming; it’s already begun.

Cultural Echoes: The Cathedral Goes to Hollywood

You don’t need to read Quigley or Yarvin to see them duel. Just stream Succession.
Logan Roy is Yarvin’s sovereign CEO—efficient, tyrannical, and surrounded by heirs who can imitate his power but not regenerate it.

In The Social Network, the boy-genius builds The Cathedral itself: code as creed, control as community.
And Silicon Valley turns Quigley’s “circulating elites” into farce—each startup preaches disruption, then dies protecting its monopoly. And so it goes.

Pop culture doesn’t just reflect these theories; it performs them for us like Caligula dancing nightly.
Our pseudo-democracy seems to have become the world’s longest group chat, and autocracy its most seductive “mute” button.

Closing Reflection

Every age breeds its Quigleys and its Yarvins—the reformer who believes systems can heal, and the engineer who believes they must be replaced.
The wise society learns from both: Quigley’s humility to change, Yarvin’s precision about decay.

But when faith in adaptation fades, the tyrant often rushes in to tidy up.
History’s cleanest rooms are often the emptiest.

Renewal is noisy, real human work.
It needs the friction Yarvin fears and the patience Quigley preached.
It requires what every good therapist demands: abundant curiosity under what seems to be relentless pressure.

Because civilizations, like marriages, don’t end when counterparts bicker and fight.
They end when one side stops listening..

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A. (2012). Why nations fail: The origins of power, prosperity, and poverty. Crown Business.

Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. Crown.

Nisbett, R. E. (2009). Intelligence and how to get it: Why schools and cultures count. W. W. Norton & Company.

Quigley, C. (1966). Tragedy and hope: A history of the world in our time. Macmillan.

Spengler, O. (1918/1926). The decline of the West (Vols. 1–2). Alfred A. Knopf.

Toynbee, A. J. (1934–1961). A study of history (12 vols.). Oxford University Press.

Turkheimer, E., Harden, K. P., & Nisbett, R. E. (2014). Gene–environment interplay in intelligence. In R. J. Sternberg & S. B. Kaufman (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of intelligence (pp. 377–402). Cambridge University Press.