DEBATE! Curtis Yarvin (“Mencius Moldbug”) vs. Ben Burgis on Democracy 

"The most Americanized people in the world are the most anti-American" 🤔🤔

2:02:40 Questioner: says "85% of the population is obese, overweight or obese" Yarvin: suddenly looks at Burgis

Did homeboy just say his biggest heroes are slaves because of "quiet quitting?" Gross.

A country has to be economically productive before you can turn Haiti into a country like Finland. It's hard to redistribute value which isn't there.

Burgiss won't shut up about this not being a "dialogue," but then he constantly interrupts Yarvin and then goes on rants for minutes at a time without having a single point he's driving at.

Yarvin: either more isolationism or colonialism would be better for Haiti . Based.

I was denied entry into a government building during a medical emergency because my phone died and I couldn’t show them the scan of my ‘vaccine passport’. I think the audience member that asks that makes a great point - and it’s almost certain that any UBI under our government would come with a slew of ever changing, corrupt conditions

Burgis tells an audience member to broaden his horizons (the thing he lost his mind about when Yarvin suggested he do the same) and then proceeds to tell the audience member to "literally shut the *uck up" when he's not behaving according to what Burgis has decided is acceptable (i.e. the audience member points out that Burgis is deflecting). I'm blown away by this level of Democratic discourse.

Curtis Yarvin was concern-trolling Ben and it really got under his skin. LOL

Ben is dogmatic to the bone

Ben "the genocide numbers were quite small" Burgis

burgis: "JAPAN IS VERY DEMOCRATIC!" yarvin: "uhh...it's a one party state" burgis: "JAPAN IS [vastly more] DEMOCRATIC [than haiti]!" yarvin: "what part of one party state do you not understand?" burgis: "homnahomamnaoahoammahammaoaoam!!!!!!"

What were the texts that Yarvin was imploring Burgis to read? The main difference was the conception of the Cold War. Yarvin contends that the US and Soviets both opposed European colonial legacies and jockeyed for the spoils but were at base in accordance. This is in distinction to what Yarvin described as Burgis' Howard Zinn conception of the Cold War and its labour history.

Yarvin's point is about how differences in populations can impact the effectiveness of social structures more heavily than the structures themselves. He’s trying to get Ben to acknowledge the impracticality of democracy as a solution to extreme disorder. He gets at the point with a few questions that Ben doesn't have compelling answers to: "What else is the difference between Chicago and Norway?" "How would you apply your Norwegian model to Haiti?" "What's your best example of third world socialism?" "What would be your expectation if, leaving the governments the same, we transport all the Haitians to Japan, and all the Japanese people to Haiti?" “What if we put the government of Finland in charge of Haiti?” He’s suggesting that it's easier to explain weak social structures as extensions of the underlying populations than in terms of policies that were supposedly prevented (in every single historical case apparently?) by imperialist intervention.

Oh yes, the pro-monarchy guy who thinks he invented the concept of ideology

Bizarrely narcissistic of Burgis to post a video of him thumping his chest and getting offended bc his two "debate" opponents wouldn't do what he told them for over two hours. Exceptionally democratic.

The reason why this comment section so convinced Ben won is because you’re all bought in on the same historical narratives that he is. If it occurred to any of you that there are many possible readings of a set of historical events you’d realize that there was almost no actual debating happening here because the whole time was just Ben saying conventional things and Yarvin trying to introduce alternative evidence to which Ben responds by saying “just make the argument don’t reference data points that I’m not familiar with like you’re some all seeing god who knows the truth!” If it occurred to any of you that there are multiple interpretations of history you’d realize Ben was the one being obstinate and that this is analogous to a lawyer in a courtroom saying “make your case with the evidence _I’m_ providing don’t bring in alternative points of view that would disrupt _my_ case.” The fact that most of y’all don’t understand that makes you guys the midwits in this scenario.

Ben comes off as tempermental, passive aggressive, and he throws bouts of fit which are disproportionate to the object of ire that triggered him. It really affects his ability to win people over to his side.

It was simply not possible to have a legitimate conversation between these two because Yarvin knows about IQ differences between groups and Burgis doesn't.

I think it's unbelievably based that these two gentlemen actually agreed to meet up and do a tête-a-tête like this. Normalize discussion. Normalize intellectualism in America. Also, that little moment at 1:40:52 where Ben and Curtis both laugh about the Chomsky teeth-grinding story made me smile. It was so human and you get to see that ridiculous, adversarial Left-Right dynamic dropped for a minute.

ESG is irrelevant, Ben? Lol Best proof of the huge blindspot. Wow

Peter Thiel needs to quit funding these goofballs

Ben got owned by Burgis.

Curtis looks like he owns and operates a tabletop board game and trading card game shop and is asking Ben “have you ever worked a day in your life?”☠️how much can I get for this holographic charizard bro?

i didnt say Japan was very democratic I said it was vastly more democratic. 😂😂😂

“I don’t believe in having bad encounters with the police”

Curtis Yarvin is actually correct in a critique of Ben's overarching viewpoint. There is an old saying that the most significant arguments happen over the most minor details, even if the two parties or organizations agree in spirit. Think about the relationship between Bakunin and Marx/Engels. Yes, you would classify them in spirit as both being on the left, but they wouldn't want to be organized together. Likewise, the same principle happens when Curtis tries to tell Ben that Ben's beliefs in spirit follow these left-leaning groups even if they dispute the smaller details.

Last time I checked, asking questions was part of a debate.

Yarvin rockin the Harry Styles in Don’t Worry Darling look

I wish we could get Ben and Tom Woods to debate.

Yarvin’s patience is unmatched.

Kevin Smith did a great job in this.

Norway has traditionally had less crime due to cultural homogeneity and small transparent societies - until immigration reached a tipping point... Now most prisoners in Norway are immigrants and crime is escalating. The lean sentencing and "humane" justice system is a magnet for foreign criminals and organised crime because crime is a low risk / high gain venture with minimal punishment for highly profitable crime.

Ben Obviously doesn't understand economics very well. He thinks that a society can become like Norway by adopting Norwegian "social democracy." In reality, Norway is a small country about the same population as Minnesota with a white Protestant mostly non-diverse population and hundreds of years of Lutheran education and capitalistic innovation and private ownership. Shocking that such a "system" doesn't work in a country like Haiti where production is much less, corruption and trust is much lower, and also there is no offshore oil.

Well, the comment section makes it clear that not only are people are living in vastly different parallel universes, but people can watch the exact same video and apparently see/hear different things. Which I think is sort of point for team Yarvin. One of the things I love about his blog the most is...he compares it to an acid trip. Even if he were completely or mostly wrong about everything (cards on the table: I don't think he is), I would still think there's a lot of value in considering radically different interpretations. I never heard of this guy until I heard from Yarvin that he claimed that Haiti could be made to be like Sweden if only it adopted a minimum wage. I'm curious as to what other people heard, because I don't think that's an uncharitable interpretation...having listened to this, it seems like that's literally what he said. Which seems like a wildly outlandish claim that, maybe I'm out of touch, but I wouldn't think even most committed blank-slatists would make a claim like that. Certainly not most economists, even the ones who support a minimum wage. Why not just tell them to print more money? And people think Yarvin is out there? Good god. That alone might disqualify him as someone who has any relevant insight into human affairs in my view. But I try to keep an open mind... I don't have to agree with someone 100% to consider them worth listening to...even if they say something I think is astonishingly boneheaded on a particular topic, it doesn't necessarily mean they have nothing worthwhile to say about anything else. But everything just sounded like the boilerplate leftism that I abandoned years ago. Yes, I've read my Chomsky and Zinn. No, I longer find it very compelling anymore, and nothing I heard here gave me a reason to change that. And I recall shortly before or after he said something like, "I'm talking actual evidence...you can come up with just-so stories about race" or something. Oh boy. Well, it's an empirical fact that people of different ancestral groups differ on metrics like income, crime rate, etc. You could come up just-so stories about why in the US, it's the legacy of slavery, and in other countries where the same observations hold, there's some other cause that also amounts to something something oppression... "Just so story" BTW is a pejorative way of saying "hypothesis", although that’s' a case where pejorativeness is appropriate, seeing as how it is an ad-hoc hypothesis created exclusively to shore up a predetermined ideological commitment. There is absolutely no scientifically plausible justification for the assumption all ancestral groups must be genetically identical on all traits relevant to socially important outcomes. The questions are: what are the differences, what is their magnitude, and much of a role do they play in various issues, etc. And it seems to me that you actually wanted to understand these issues and maybe find workable solutions, you should be interested in these questions and want to know the truth. Here's my appeal to authority: I have an MA in psych, a field which I think in unusual among academic disciplines in its emphasis on its own history and was fascinated with and read extensively about all aspects the nature/nurture debate for at least a decade. And I can confirm that Yarvin is absolutely right about this: the idea that all humans are interchangeable swept to dominance roughly after WW2, for reasons that may be understandable, but that have absolutely nothing to do with any empirical discoveries. And it has since become an orthodoxy that is enforced with conformism and intimidation. "Are you saying that different groups are inherently different? Then should we do XYZ policy that almost everyone would be horrified by?" Facepalm. This is exactly, EXACTLY the non-sequitur rhetorical ploy religious apologists use: "You don't believe in God? Then I guess you think it's ok to murder babies. If we didn't believe in God, life would have no meaning and everyone would just rape and murder all day every day." Well (A) I don't think those consequences would follow and you haven't even attempted to justify why they would, and (B) even if they did...so what? How is that relevant to the question of whether it’s true? It could be the case that there is no God, and also that it is beneficial for societies to be organized around the false belief that there is. I'm open to that possibility. I would rather it not be the case, but again, I don't see what relevance my wishes or anyone else’s have on what is or isn't objectively true. So I guess I'd have to concede that there could be merit to the Noble Lie perspective, which is what more knowledgeable and self-aware lefties seem to be implicitly supporting. Because it seems like if you were genuinely confident that the causes of all group differences were 100% environmental and 0% genetic, you would eagerly encourage research and support research in this area so that your enemies can be decisively proven wrong once and for all. That seems to be the exact opposite of what is happening. So…that’s my thoughts. On their personalities…I like Yarvin; met him in person once, and think he’s a great guy. Yeah he’s definitely arrogant, as is this Ben guy… I don’t know if it’s possible to be that smart and not be arrogant. But in this discussion… Yeah, Yarvin took some cheap shots sometimes, as did Ben… But Ben really came across to me as obnoxiously hostile and having a chip on his shoulder. Maybe it was just a bad day for him…I probably sound obnoxiously hostile in a lot of my rants at least to anyone on the other side, so I guess I shouldn’t judge harshly. But…here’s one final random thought. If you’re on RU-vid, if you’re public intellectual or a pundit of any sort… You’re in the entertainment business. If we wanted just the facts, we’d be spending the time pouring over spreadsheets or something instead. So…it is what it is. So quibbling over “he used rhetoric”, “no the other one did more”… Come on. Rhetoric is the art of persuasive communication. Yarvin IMO really good at it, which is why I find him so entertaining. And he uses it to make points that IMO are often important and true, in an eloquent and highly quotable (on the rare occasions where the point can be made clear in less than 5 paragraphs, but again, who am I to talk) way.

Yarvin's understanding of history is so confused and unsupported by evidence that it's hard to know where to start with debunking him. His claim that labor unions are "wildly anachronistic" in the 21st century is also rich coming from someone who wants to impose monarchy. So unions are outdated but kings and queens aren't? GTFOH, horrible arguments and deranged worldview.

Prime example of how hard it is to actually talk to anyone in the bubble, about the bubble. Lost cause.

Yarvin: Pre-modern humanity sees resistance to violent authority as abhorrent. Evidence: Chappelle and Chris Rock videos.

Dear ben supporters, it is not a virtue to be stupid.

Labour unions protecting labours speech? Where?

I had an openly Marxist professor in a tech college who loved Castro lol

Has the guy on the left actual met any real human beings rather than this idealised species he constantly invokes?

Ben doesn't understand "people."

Curtis's unchanging demeanor is great.

Ben has never given an argument, ever, lol

Moldbug's description of this soylent bugman's personality as "totally insufferable" is definitely dead on accurate.

In a monarchy the people know who to rebel against atleast.

"This is really news from an alternate dimension." 🤣

Ben struggling to come up with a lie when asked if he's ever worked in his life.

when Ben Burgis said that taking away the people’s ability to control the federal government was Democracy my jaw dropped

I think Yarvin takes a slightly more Aristotelian view of democracy that it's not the greatest and at the same time thinks a powerful executive like a monarch would increase the citizens political power in a democratic fashion? But Aristotle's story about the danger of democracy as mob rule centers around one such state .

"The family that owns the NYT bosses the news desk around all the time! You could never do that if you bought their shares: it's a completely autonomous organization!!! 🤪"

I can’t decide if Burgis needs more or maybe less of that “Magic Mind” supplement.

Never debate religious people Curtis, it's a waste of time and energy.

Yarvin responding to every argument by recommending a list of books in the most condescending way possible is hilarious. Dude's awful.

Curtis schizoposts irl

Yarvin: "Let me ask you a question..." "Just say what you want to say!" Thank you, Ben. Theres nothing worse than a wannabe Sócrates.

Yarvin’s method is to drop historical anecdotes so rapidly that you won’t notice they’ve detoured into nonsense. Glad Ben is well read enough to call him on the BS.

Amazing to hear Burgis dismiss the perspective of a more well-read interlocutor on grounds that his version of history doesn’t map to Big Narratives he’s been spoonfed.

Yarvin keeps saying read this book and you'll get it as if it's the only move you can do in a debate. Cite history, give me testable experiments that reveal the truth.

Ben came off as such an unreasonable asshole here it was pretty sad. he was never able to even engage at any level with what Curtis was putting down and resorted to chicanery and evasive debating.

did that guy said his ideal thing for society is a metaphor of slavery?

I'm about an hour in. While I do think it is true that Haiti can't simply implement a welfare state and be like Norway, Yarvin seems to imply this is due to cultural reasons as opposed to economic reasons. It is important to conceptualize capitalism as a global system which requires the uneven development of nations to realize surplus value. It's very simple to explain why the capitalist class in the US would have favored a higher welfare state in Europe and not in Latin America: Europe was supposed to be the consumers of finished goods produced by US industry whereas Latin America was supposed to be the producers of raw materials for us industry (ie higher regulation/wages/etc) would increase costs.

Mencius really vaporized Ben’s parents into a dot pattern in this debate

Brand loyalty is a combination of usefulness, aesthetic choice, and possible prestige/clout through ownership. Depending which door you enter the others are used to justify the entry way choice.

LMAO he got sooo mad

curtis remains joyful, affable and calm throughout the debate, while Ben gets misereable and agitated constantly. Curtis wins just on these optics alone.

The left arguing for democracy is actually the left arguing for a left-wing oligarchy to try real left-wing policies this time.

WTF, who told Thaddeus he was an anarchist? He *definitely* isn’t.

"everyone agrees with you, therefore you're arguing from authority"

Ben, could I recommend you read a primary source?

"I don't believe in having bad encounters with the police." he does not believe in reality.

Ben, you seem to be obsessed with Curtis. Are you okay man? Why so resentful?

"Why do you think that is?" - Ben in response to Yarvin bringing up the fact that we went into a cold war against the USSR after the most devastating global war in history lead namely by Nazi Germany, who Yarvin posits that we never even considered the possibility of a cold war with... I could think of a few dozen million reasons, but Yarvin's non sequitur ramblings were certainly more entertaining I suppose.

It is crazy how he can claim that using facts supported by most historians is just a appeal to authority while he wants us to live under a singlar authority

18:55 i think this is the moment Big Ben goes below a 45 degree incline in his chair

I don’t know how Ben put up with this bs, a master class in PATIENCE

@14:11 Funniest part of the whole debate. He's heating up. Mencius Boomshakalaka!

ben 0 curtis 1

Elite irrationality has an identifiable nucleus.

My heartbeat is fucked up because of too much coffee and this conversation

It is very frustrating and boring (a "waste of time," as Ben put it) the amount of times Yarvin accuses Ben of being "trapped" in his narrative (especially when this refrain essentially serves as an ad hominem in substitution for engaging with ideas and arguments). Obviously two people with very different political ideologies will inevitably perceive each other as "blinded" to some degree by ideology, closed minded, etc. But that's why a specific focus on ideas is important.That's why we need to make arguments and refute people. Ben is very skilled at this, but Yarvin spends a lot of time shifting the goal posts, cherry picking obscure historical examples, and returning to ad hominems about Ben's "narrative." The moderator did a horrible job, I thought. This discussion needed to be more grounded in specific topics, with clear points and counter-points.

I mean, for someone who is so dedicated to the idea of having a strong master Curtis doesn't seem to have an understanding of how mastery works. The master doesn't care about any of this stuff he's talking about (left or right, democracy or autocracy, etc.) what the master of the American empire cares about is successfully appropriating whatever possibilities may pop up back into capitalism by whatever means is expedient. So he runs around yelling about all these 'left' projects being carried out by the united states in a neurotic obsessive way, while ignoring all the right projects and not recognizing that there is a distinction between the left of capitalism and the left of socialism and not realizing that of course these people are going to be threading a very narrow needle to make all of this work.

Mencius moldbug fantástico 👏👏👏

just had a some constructive criticism as a fan of your work and fellow phl nerd. Although you were right on most of the merits, I do not believe you came off too well in your debate with Yarvin. Tonally and rhetorically, you were off your usual calm, collected, yet passionate and entertaining game. Your best work in this regard is your debate with Charlie Kirk. With Yarvin, I believe you came off, with all due respect, a little petulant and defensive. Rest assured though 99% of us just watching and not actually debating would do much much much much worse, and it’s not lost on me how difficult it is to do public debates and juggle all these plates successfully.

yarvin is really simple minded... how is this person even in debate circles?

Yarvin is a skilled rhetorician, but it's primarily deployed here in service of a kind of antipolitics that says nothing and depends on insinuation. Ben did a good job of evading that (engaging means ceding a lot of conceptual territory) and also provided a good humanistic counterpoint to Yarvin's performance of not caring. He's good at that performance, and many will find it charismatic (and confuse that for it being convincing) but when analysed it collapses into high school-style contrarianism.

one of the first things the curtis fella said was something about police brutality and then appealed to the authority of dave chapelle and chris rock as some kind of potential point for his argument. he also casually mentioned, without citing any specific fact or passage, a handful of books that ben aught to read, as if to appeal to the authority of the authors to bolster his argument. then he said something to ben about appeals to/argument from authority. am i missing something here? do i not fully understand the argument from authority concept, or is curtis just being hypocritical?

I remember watching this around the time it went up because of Thaddeus. How are these people so tolerant towards someone like Ben Burgers is beyond me

Holy hell, Yarvin's meandering and incoherent talking.. jesus, it has close to zero informational content.

Curtis is in another league.

One guy seems well read.

What Ben doesn't realize (I lived for a while in Europe, I doubt he did) was that Norwegians in the US are considerably richer than in Norway. In Norway and those "social democrat" countries you make less in real income, you pay more in taxes (42% for a normal wage earner is typical rather than 22% here in the US) and you get less housing for your money. In fact, if you compare per capita income, Sweden would be poorer than all but one US state - Mississippi.

did... did he just say the United States loved Fidel Castro?

His dad was involved in State Dept interventions south of the US. That says it all.

Ben the arm chair socialist as usual 😴

Sirens in the background...

Wilson 14 Points #6: "VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy." Looks like Curtis was right

I really appreciate your depth of knowledge to follow his self congratulatory trip through his own version of history. Well done. He never really made an argument for monarchy, just was trying to poke holes in democracy historically which we would all agree has plenty of issues. But I guess it's all hard so ... King anyone?

Ben is such a stooge