The Rapture and Curtis Yarvin capture

notes from a grim cafe in London

If you’re reading this, you’re a sinner and a non-believer.

You are, I regret to inform you, one of the unfortunate Left Behinds who have not been saved from the Endtimes and lifted up to heaven in the past 24 hours.

According to Pew Research, a staggering 40 per cent of Americans, including many senior leaders in the Trump administration (and Australia’s former Prime Minster Scott Morrison) believe in the Evangelical Christian concept of The Rapture, which according to a prophecy handed down by some South African pastor recently, was to happen on September 23 and into September 24 (yesterday; did you catch it?). The Rapture, as I’ve written about before, is a time of tribulation (or collapse, often interpreted as the end of the world) that sees believers in Christ suddenly taken up (“raptured”) from Earth into heaven to meet Jesus (without, conveniently, dying as such), while everyone else is left behind on Earth to suffer. It also sees a lot of Evangelicals actually getting excited about the prospect of collapse, championing its acceleration. Naomi Klein calls the phenemenon “end-times fascism”.

Of relevance: Charlie Kirk was an Evangelist and appears to have supported the idea of The Rapture.

In the past few months, Evangelicals have been posting on TikTok about how they’re readying their affairs for the big late-September moment and what they’re leaving behind for their non-believing friends (bibles with messages from Jesus written on them, for example). The Cut over at New York Magazine has saved you going down this particular algorithmic hell-hole and has done a rundown of the “RaptureTok” highlights if you’re interested.

Anyway, for those of you still here on Earth with me, I guess we’ll just have to get back to the job of muddling our way through the locust plagues and depraved madness on our own.

Speaking of which, I got to witness President Trump’s “court philosopher” Curtis Yarvin in action on the weekend. I was invited to speak on three panels at the “world’s largest philosophy festival, How The Light Gets In, in London. So was Yarvin.

The festival experience was overwhelming for me; my brain was in overdrive processing all kinds of intellectual shifts and collective responses from the crowd. I didn’t sleep; I had to abstain from coffee. The festival had a distinct heterodox and post-woke vibe to it. I was on a panel with two leading transhumanists discussing the Cartesian split. There were a good half a dozen panels and presentations on tech accelerationism and several that discussed “the future of The Right” (as an assumed phenomenon) and others still that wrestled with the relevance of progressive thought (as an assumed declining entity). I was also on a panel about the over-medicalisation of anxiety (and the need to stop the snow-flaking) and moderated a debate on whether sites like OnlyFans sent the feminist cause backwards (I think the “it doesn’t” camp won). And, of course, Curtis Yarvin was there sharing his ideas about dismantling democracy and bringing in CEO-led monarchies to run the world.

A Wild Live with Kory from "Breaking Down Collapse"... on Curtis Yarvin

I have many thoughts. But I’ll flesh out one that builds on a conversation we’ve been having here about handling the crazy-making diatribe that abounds. This is the crazy-making diatribe that gets traction with the algorithms and that is dividing families, communities and - dangerously - our entire civilisation.

Chaos is a tactic

I caught the tail end of two panels that Yarvin was speaking on. His speech is hard to follow. It is laden with heady but largely distracting historical references and nonsensical terminology. Yarvin also talks in emphatic absolutes. He allows no room for equivocation. My impression is that many in Brits are unaware of Yarvin and his influence on US (and beyond) politics. His sessions weren’t packed out. However, the crowd on both occasions was glugging his Kool-Aid - laughing at his contentious gags, clapping when he slam-dunked a divisive point.

Some people I knew in the audience reported feeling dumb-founded. Why are these clearly intellectually inquisitive people being seduced by this dangerous and cruel shit? I’d been thinking and feeling all kinds of things and writing notes throughout the sessions. My sense was that most people in the room were scared, feeling morally adrift and uncertain. As most people in the world, I would argue, are today. And scared, adrift, uncertain humans tend to cling to anyone who drives a certainty stake into the (wobbly) ground. It almost doesn’t matter what they say, if it’s said with unwavering certitude even the most dangerous, illogical ideas can feel safe. Like much of what US President Trump says to millions of Americans.

Yarvin, however, is a supremely, almost comically, bad faith arguer. He floods the zone with all kinds of verbose, irrelevant shit. He “brain scrambles” his fellow panellists in a way that really suggests he sees it as a sport. I watched as the other earnest academics tried to follow his spray-gun attacks and entangle themselves from a back-foot, defensive position. Yarvin looked delighted. It was horrible.

Brain scrambling as fluent bullshit tactic and the new muscularity

I suspect most of you here (the Left Behinds) would also have been left dumb-founded and perhaps confused that you, too, were being seduced by the spectacle. I witnessed the conflict in myself.

So cut to the third panel I saw Yarvin speak on. This time former press secretary to Tony Blair and The Rest is Politics podcast host Alastair Campbell was leading a direct in-conversation with him. For the first ten minutes, the crowd was once again enthralled by Yarvin’s dynamic, didactic, disorientating spiel, laughing and even cheering. But Campbell soon got the shits. And said to Yarvin, plainly, “I was warned of what you do when you don’t want to answer a question…you answer with another question. I’m going to insist you answer the question at hand…”¹. The atmosphere immediately shifted. We were all presented with an explanation for the itchy cringe we were feeling just one emotional row back from our intoxication; Campbell had named the “there there”. The relief was palpable. From that point on, Yarvin’s ideas were mostly met with gasps and groans. Campbell became the bored adult suffering a rogue child. “That’s what we call a sixth form debating point in England,” he said in response to one of Yarvin’s strawman deflections.

Back in the green room afterwards I went up to Campbell and thanked him for “not getting sucked in by the fluent bullshit” that Yarvin peddles so smoothly. I find very few progressive or humanity-anchored thinkers are good at going up against bad faith arguers. It’s an inherent feature-not-a-bug of progressive thinking. By virtue of being progressive it is necessarily speculative - it paints a picture of a yet-to-be-realised alternative that progresses beyond the status quo. Conservative thinking (and thinking that champions returning to feudal monarchies) draws on the nostalgic past with - yep - concrete examples that we are familiar with - 1950s family values,1980s abundance and the like. The unknown versus the cherry-picked parts of comfy bygone eras…you can see why the latter has the advantage.

Campbell, however, knows spin. And refused to be dizzied by it.

I’ve written before about how we all now have a responsibility to not contribute to the fragmentation and polarisation that often tips or stokes collapsing systems. We need to calm the farm. But at the same time we can’t capitulate to bamboozlement. We must learn how to meet the bad faith, scared, “extinction burst” tactics with steadfast reasonableness. This is not the same as arrogant certitude.

How to handle unhinged comments like a helpful grown-up (and why we must!)

I applaud (old, white) men like Campbell who manage to use their privilege and experience to role model steadfast reasonableness. And I said as such to Campbell; we talked for quite some time about the matter afterwards (and about our shared belief private schools should be abolished). I had similar discussions with a number of women thinkers at the festival, too, who were feeling nervous about going on stage “up against” other aggressively confident heterodox thinkers. By way of unsolicited advice (which I was really issuing to myself before heading off to do the same), I advised not getting sucked into the brain scrambling. Instead of falling over ourselves to counter the red herrings (in good faith), we choose one such and interrogate it firmly.

I also suggested that as women in the public eye (or at least up on a stage) we also have a responsibility to younger women to embody steadfast and comfortable reasonableness. We have to let go of our ingrained imposter syndrome. It’s now a duty. We can speak in nuances, we can allow for grey and intersectionality and all the stuff the post-woke crew deride, (indeed, we must if that is our intellectual contribution) and we can, or must, do so sturdily.

This is also, I believe, how the progressive Left needs to go up against the Right. I dunno…perhaps someone could hold a boot camp for wobbly progressives? It might be titled: “How to not cede ground, without being a c*nt.”²

I imagine many of you here (who haven’t been raptured this week) are leaders, or are aware that you are going to have to become leaders in one form or another, and are struggling to know how to go up against the bad faith behaviour around you. I issue the same (unsolicited) advice: Meet a Yarvin-like emphaticness with an embodied knowingness. Embody solidity, even in - especially in - the unknowingness. Be the ground in the ungroundedness. Just go there. Just be it. And watch a room shift gratefully.

Thoughts?

Sarah xx

1. Not a direct quote; my memory of it.

2. Apologies for the crude profanity…I’ve been in London…