I always knew this day would come, sooner or later.

This idea has been percolating in my mind for nigh on fifteen years, and I’ve finally felt compelled to write it down, if only to make the voices stop. This is gonna be weird, and obscure, and rambling, even by my standards. No one will blame you if you want to skip it. Not to give you a whole red pill/blue pill moment, but…

Actually, the whole red pill metaphor is maybe a good place to start. How many of you know who Curtis Yarvin is? Maybe you read that interview with him in the NYT, or this profile of him in The New Yorker. At any rate, I’m guessing most people just recently found out about this character.

I first read Curtis Yarvin in 2011. I was a bored undergrad, obsessed with politics, and somehow I stumbled across Unqualified Reservations. I remember the part that got me: Yarvin’s pro-British take on the American Revolution. Yarvin is a contrarian, like me, and his deep dive into forgotten Tory writings immediately got my attention. So naturally I read the rest of his blog.

For those who haven’t read it, Yarvin (or Mencius Moldbug, to use the nom de blog under which he wrote Unqualified Reservations) is wordy, rambling, and obsessed with long-forgotten historical documents. And yes, I realize that probably sounds like it could describe me as well. But I am just a piker compared to him. I am at most Hildred Castaigne to his Mr. Wilde.

Anyway, you probably know the Reader’s Digest version of Yarvinism by now: democracy has failed, replace it with a techno-aristocracy. Yarvin, very much a fan of Victorian England, proposed a specific form for this techno-aristocracy: a joint-stock corporation managing the country as a financial asset.

Now, most people who read this think it sounds insane, though obviously Yarvin has his cadre of followers who think it’s a crackerjack idea. But I might actually be the only person on Earth who reads this and thinks, “that sounds like the plot of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Utopia, Limited.”

(Somehow, despite his love of words and Victoriana, I’ve never gotten the sense Yarvin is a G&S fan. Guess he’s not a musical theater guy.)

So, what is the plot of Utopia, Limited? The idyllic South Pacific island of Utopia is a bountiful paradise, ruled by King Paramount, who is kept in check by two wise men, who have the authority to order him blown up with dynamite if he gets out of line. The King’s daughter, Princess Zara, has gone away to be educated in England, and the first act ends with her returning with a bunch of leading English soldiers, doctors, lawyers etc. dubbed “Flowers of Progress” whose guidance will be used to remodel Utopian society along English lines.

The central tenet of this plan is expounded by Mr. Goldbury, the banker, who explains the logic of the limited liability corporation in song. King Paramount then cheerfully decrees that:

“We’ll go down to posterity renowned as the first Sovereign in Christendom who registered his Crown and Country under the Joint-Stock Companies Act of Sixty-Two!”

In the second act, this happens, and most of the plot is taken up with romantic comedy pairings-off and the angry wise men fuming at losing their positions of power.

The country is simply, too perfect. There are no hospitals, for no one is ill. No military, for there is a peace. As a result, doctors and soldiers are out of work. What is to be done?

Princess Zara realizes she has omitted something, namely, “government by party”. As she explains, under a party system:

No political measures will endure, because one Party will assuredly undo all that the other Party has done; and while grouse is to be shot, and foxes worried to death, the legislative action of the country will be at a standstill. Then there will be sickness in plenty, endless lawsuits, crowded jails, interminable confusion in the Army and Navy, and, in short, general and unexampled prosperity!

And so the opera ends happily, albeit sardonically. This is Gilbert and Sullivan after all.

Utopia is my least-favorite G&S show. The pacing is clunky, the songs are mostly unmemorable, Gilbert’s clearly lost a step when it comes to his lyrics. It’s actually a bit like a modern-day “franchise reboot” in the way it tries to do ham-fisted callbacks to more popular Gilbert and Sullivan operas, mainly H.M.S. Pinafore. And the song “English Girl” is just horrible, although when staged well, it can be kind of amusing.

Still, Utopia, Limited has its fans. George Bernard Shaw said it was his favorite Gilbert & Sullivan, but that was because it’s the one that most fiercely attacks English society, and GBS hated English society.

But now let’s put away our opera critic lens and look at this thing through our Moldbug Goggles. What do we see? The plot of the thing is literally implementing his plan, at least in the way a Victorian would imagine it. By turning the obscure island into a “modern” English stock company, they create a paradise on Earth… which is then ruined by the introduction of democratic elements, i.e. a party system of government.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t feel like I’m grasping for similarities here. This isn’t something vaguely like Yarvin’s thesis, it basically is Yarvin’s thesis, in dramatic form.

Is this interesting? I submit that it is, if only because Utopia, Limited is one of those fascinating artifacts of fin-de-siècle culture which gives us a glimpse into the world that eventually led to World War I. And World War I led to World War II, which produced the modern international order we know today. Which basically unironically agrees with Princess Zara’s speech above that democratic, party-based government is the way to go. It may be messy, but it leads to “general and unexampled prosperity!”

This is exactly the international order that Yarvin so zealously opposes, and which he created his entire philosophy of government with a view to replacing.

I think Yarvin is generally best understood as a Victorian intellectual who inexplicably came unstuck in time and appeared in the early 21st-century. To us, he seems crazy and possibly evil. This is also modernity’s relationship to the Victorian world generally. (Of course, if you’ve read That Inevitable Victorian Thing… but, that’s another story.)

And so we come back to where we began: with the increasing popularity of Yarvin’s ideas. But now we see that Yarvin’s ideas are not new; they were in the air in 1893! After a century and a half, has the science of political theory made any progress at all? Perhaps history really is cyclical.