Unqualified Reservations: Volume 1

The landmark essays of Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, that redefined political philosophy for the digital age.

Between 2007 and 2013, a mysterious software engineer writing under the name Mencius Moldbug published a sprawling blog called Unqualified Reservations, a strange fusion of political philosophy, cultural critique, historiography, and right-wing polemics never-before seen in the contemporary American landscape. In what became the most intellectually explosive body of writing of the early internet age, these essays helped define what would later be called the “Neoreactionary” critique of modernity: a systematic dismantling of progressive orthodoxy and an audacious attempt to imagine the architecture of post-democratic order.

Volume 1 gathers the foundational texts of this project. “Formalist Manifesto” is the blog’s first ever post and lays out Moldbug’s central propositions: that government should be understood as a formal, accountable corporation; that progressivism functions as a religion; and that the modern state’s dysfunction is the result of its refusal to recognize these truths. “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives”—the series that introduced the world to the concepts of “the Cathedral” and the “Red Pill”—offers a sweeping genealogy of liberal thought, exposing the moral logic and incentive architecture that binds our sense-making institutions. “How Dawkins Got Pwned” expands that analysis, tracing the secular humanitarian creed of the modern West to its Puritan and Anglican roots, and identifying in its universalism the seed of today’s political religions.