The Dark Enlightenment: A Primer
By Thomas Neuburger
What rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? —W.B. Yeats
We [the technocrats] could never win an election because we were in such a small minority. But maybe you could unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people who are never going to agree with you, through technological means. And this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics. —Peter Thiel, Libertopia 2010
We recently opened a discussion about challenges to liberal democracy and the modern state (see Alan Grayson’s The Idea of Idealism – What’s Going On?). His term for what’s coming is the “Endarkenment” — a play on the term “Dark Enlightenment,” which is making the rounds.
I want to introduce the Dark Enlightenment here, and in future pieces discuss some of its implications. They stretch, for example, from Plato’s Republic to the Chinese political system, and from sensible men like Thucydides among the Greeks to hubris-soaked crazies like many among our elites.
Intrigued? If so, please read on.
Pre-State Life & Democracy
One of our themes in this Substack is the advent and role of the State in human life. Let’s start at the start, with what human life was like for millions of years before the creation of states as an engine of force. Pre-state human life looked largely like this:
For about four million years, 99.85% of our species’ time on earth, we and our ancestors lived in tribal communities. It’s what we did and what we’re adapted to.
Tribes, like all human groups, had structure, but nothing dramatic, nothing like masters and slaves, workers and kings. Nothing systematically coercive.
Social decisions depended more on agreement than force. Yes, decisions were still made by groups, but the process wasn’t designed to create winners and losers in the modern political sense, but to secure consensus so the group could still cohere after a decision was reached.
This hierarchy was also benign because people could walk away, take family and cousins and leave. Almost all coercion was social — no prisons or guards; no cops enforcing the rules; no state monopoly on violence, no tortured agreements. Just human persuasion, which either succeeded or didn’t.
Tribal democracy is something quite different from the pitched partisan battles we engage in today — and if you think today is unique, pitched partisan battles more than 4000 years ago ultimately destroyed ancient Athens as a regional force.
So when we talk about “democracy,” we need to identify the kind of democracy we mean — the Western partisan coercive democracy that forces and keeps people apart, or tribal consensual democracy that brings them together. That distinction will play into the discussion we’re about to engage in; not immediately, but later in this series.
Distrusting ‘Democracy’
That said, as you’ll see, Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel and Plato are on the same page — none of them trusts the “masses.” But they’re reading from different books — Plato’s king seeks the good; Yarvin’s king seeks control.
The rest of this essay will describe the Thiel-Yarvin world. Why now? It’s now being born.
The Dark Enlightenment
The so-called “Dark Enlightenment” is a modern attempt to overturn Western political ideas about freedom and self-rule that took hold in the 17th and 18th centuries through the writings of men (yes, all men) like Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Kant and Paine (yes, our Thomas Paine). It can rightly be said that Enlightenment ideas gave birth first to revolution, then to democracy as practiced today in the West.
The Dark Enlightenment seeks to reverse all that, to remove partisan democracy as a political structure and replace it with rule by the technocratic few — the Thiels, the Andreessens, the Musks — to eliminate self-governance entirely and replace all political structures with corporate rule.
Their goal? First, bring down “the Cathedral” — the so-called “state religion” and all its supportive structures, both inside and outside government, and then create a world ruled by corporate kings who govern corporate states, a world where IBM itself is a political structure, ruled by its CEOs.
From the video below:
The core idea is to break up countries into a bunch of competing for-profit corporations called GovCorps. So instead of a country, picture a city run like a startup with a CEO.
This radical plan is why Musk’s Team DOGE went on such a destructive tear. To create a structure like this, you have to burn everything down. If you don’t, the remains of the old will pollute the new.
Support for this plan is more widespread than most people think. Even figures like Russell Vought, who is not a Dark Enlightenment figure per se, has the same philosophy of destruction. And non–Dark Enlightenment people like Larry and David Ellison, buyers of media en masse, would eagerly join Thiel’s anti-populist parade the minute it forms. After all, what’s media control for if not to contain the masses?
This is quite an old discussion. Which is best: Rule by the masses (freedom); rule by the best (freedom from rule by the masses); or rule by the powerful (because why not if you can)?
Let’s start today with the rise of the Dark Enlightenment, what it is, what it wants, and later we’ll tease out other related thoughts.
Elements of the Dark Enlightenment
To define more specifically the Dark Enlightenment, to expose its details, consider the video below. A transcript follows below. The source is this discussion.
Video Transcript
Let’s get right into it. We’re going to talk about a political idea that started way out on the fringes of the internet. But now, well, now it has connections that reach into the highest echelons of tech and government. It’s called the Dark Enlightenment, and it’s a movement that’s asking us to question, well, pretty much everything about modern society.
I know, it sounds like the setup for a spy movie, right? But this is a very real question, and it’s based on a very real and very influential ideology. To really get what’s going on, we need to follow the money and the influence, and see how some of the most powerful people shaping our world are all connected.
A Web of Influence — Tech, Politics & Power
See, the story of the Dark Enlightenment isn’t just about some abstract philosophy. No, it’s about the powerful network of people who are drawn to these ideas. And as you’re about to see, this is a network you need to know about.
Just take a look at this list. The concentration of power here is pretty staggering. You’ve got venture capitalists who literally funded the internet as we know it. People like Peter Thiel and Mark Andreeseen. Their entire careers are about breaking old systems. Then you have a sitting U.S. vice president and top-tier political operators. And what’s wild is that, according to our sources, they all share an interest in this one, single, pretty radical philosophy.
So what’s the common thread here? It’s not a political party. It’s not a secret club. It’s the writings of one guy, a software engineer named Curtis Yarvin. Writing under a pen name, Mencius Moldbug, he basically laid out the entire intellectual foundation for this movement from his blog.
The Dark Enlightenment — Core Beliefs
So what is this ideology that’s got the attention of all these heavy hitters? Let’s actually break down what it’s all about. In a nutshell, Neo Reaction, or NRx for short, is basically a rejection of the last few hundred years of Western political thought.
The argument is that things like democracy, equality, freedom, they just haven’t worked. So the solution they propose is a return to older, more hierarchical systems. Think monarchy, but with a modern kind of corporate upgrade.
And this quote [“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”], this really just says it all, doesn’t it? This is from Peter Thiel, one of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley. It gets right to the heart of this worldview. It’s this belief that our democratic processes are just too slow, too inefficient, and that they get in the way of real progress. The idea is that to get real freedom, at least their version of it, you might just have to ditch democracy.
And you know, this whole thing didn’t just pop up overnight. These ideas started bubbling up in the late 2000s on Yarvin’s blog. Then a philosopher named Nick Land gave it a catchy name [“Dark Enlightenment”], and slowly but surely, a community grew online before it finally broke into more mainstream conservative media just a few years ago.
The Enemy — “The Cathedral”
So to really get what these neo-reactionaries want, you first have to understand what they think they’re fighting against. And for that, they have a name. The cathedral.
The cathedral is their term for what they see as a kind of unofficial state religion. It’s not a real place, of course. It’s their name for a network of elite institutions. You know, the Ivy League schools, major media outlets, government agencies that they believe all work together to push a progressive ideology and crush any ideas that challenge it.
The Goal — Authoritarian Rule
So if the big problem is this all powerful “cathedral” that’s pushing a failed democratic system, what’s the solution? Well, it’s a total redesign of how government works. They want to replace democracy with something called neo-cameralism. The core idea is to break up countries into a bunch of competing for-profit corporations called GovCorps. So instead of a country, picture a city run like a startup with a CEO.
It’s all about clean, efficient, top-down decisions instead of messy public debate. A mindset that’s probably very familiar if you work in tech. And this is the key to the whole system. In this world, citizens are basically customers. You don’t get a vote or a voice in how the city is run. Your only real power is your freedom to leave, to exit, and take your money and skills to a competitor city-state.
This idea of exit-over-voice is pure Silicon Valley logic, just applied to an entire country. And they’ll tell you this isn’t just a fantasy. Proponents point to real world places they admire. They look at places like Singapore or Dubai and see them as models of efficiency, safe, prosperous societies that give people a high quality of life, all without the baggage of democratic elections.
Theory to Reality — Policy Influence
So this is where it gets really important. Are these just wild ideas on a blog somewhere? Or are they actually starting to influence real world policy? The evidence suggests it’s the second one.
So let’s look at one of Yarvin’s most concrete proposals. It’s a plan he calls RAGE [“Retire All Government Employees”]. It’s an acronym for a complete and total purge of the existing government, getting rid of all the career civil servants.
And then boom, you see that exact idea jump from an obscure blog right into the political mainstream. Back in 2021, JD Vance, who’s now the vice president, basically repeated the core of the RAGE plan saying a president should fire the entire civil service and replace them with political loyalists.
And this isn’t just talk. The creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is seen by some insiders as a real world application of this philosophy. In fact, some advisers to the department have reportedly called Yarvin an intellectual beacon.
Why This Matters — Beyond Government
But the influence doesn’t stop with direct government policy. The core concepts of the dark enlightenment are also fueling other related movements, especially in the tech and venture capital worlds.
And one of the biggest offshoots is this idea of the “Network State.” Think of it as a blueprint for the tech elite to just opt out of the current system altogether. The plan is to build a new country from scratch. It starts online as a digital community, and then they use crypto to crowdfund buying up land to create a brand new physical nation. It’s the ultimate exit.
And you might be thinking, who actually takes this seriously? Well, a lot of very powerful, very wealthy people. You have major VCs like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, the founders of huge crypto projects and CEOs of major startups. This isn’t just a fantasy. It’s a concept with serious money and brainpower behind it.
So let’s just pull this all together for a second. What we have here is a deeply anti-democratic philosophy that started on the Internet.
It’s now backed or at least studied by some of the most powerful people in venture capital and in government. And the ultimate goal? To completely replace our current system with something that acts more like a tech company than a country.
As Tech Leaders Lose Faith in Democracy, What Will They Build?
What we’ve laid out here is a pretty clear line, tracing an idea from a niche corner of the web straight to the people who have the power to enact radical change. And it leaves us with a really big and frankly vital question to think about.
If the very people building our technological future are losing faith in democracy, what kind of world are they trying to build instead? And who is that world actually for?
Comments