The Cynic Wasps in the Beehive
We call her the Queen Bee, evoking images of large hats, courts, and command. In reality the Queen Bee is a slave to the hive, laying thousands of eggs a day. She does not command anything. Bees function through a complex system of chemical communication in a deeply decentralized fashion. Worker bees make many collective decisions autonomously using mechanisms like the "wiggle dance". Just as the misleading term 'Queen Bee' obscures the decentralized reality of beehive governance, an obscure "thinker" called Curtis Yarvin, similarly uses clever linguistic framing to make hierarchical power structures appear natural and inevitable, when they are anything but.
Words are important. The recent emergence of the science of "concept cells" suggests our brains have one-to-one mappings of abstract ideas to neurons or group of neurons. Presumably, words, after being processed by our brains, would correspond to these concept cells. When we say "Queen Bee", it invokes the idea of a central commander in the beehive. The phrase "Queen Bee" obscures the reality of how the beehive operates. Words are powerful and understanding this basic concept is why propaganda works.
The New York Times recently had an interview with an obscure "thinker" called Curtis Yarvin who is behind the dark enlightenment movement. While he may not be a household name, those in power in the current Trump administration and his Silicon Valley backers know him. JD Vance, being a product of Silicon Valley, also knows his ideas. In that interview, Yarvin proposes the idea of an American monarchy. In other writings, he talks about running the country like a business with the president as CEO. He uses a very clever language technique to make you susceptible to this idea. In the interview he says what unites the new right is not a positive belief, but an absence of belief. He continues by saying we need a greater openness of the mind. In other words, if you don't entertain these ideas, you must be closed-minded.
To further support the idea of monarchies, he goes on to talk about how everything you own is made by monarchies. Companies like Apple are run like monarchies. That the successful companies that make everything we use are run as absolute monarchies. This is actually a critique the left has had since the french revolution about capitalism. In fact, the word "capitalism" was coined by the newly developing socialist movement as a pejorative. That instead of getting, "Liberté, égalité, fraternité," we ended up with a new kind of feudalism, where we have new kind of monarch. Instead of criticizing this reality, Yarvin praises it. His fundamental argument is democratic, decentralized, institutions are ineffective, claiming we would be better governed by a monarchy-style system where power is concentrated in a single authority—similar to how corporations operate.
A crucial subject Curtis Yarvin never talks about is inequality. For most of human history, and especially under monarchies, there is huge amounts of inequality. The vast majority of people are poor while those running the monarchies are rich and live well. He wants to take us back to that world, though he wouldn't say it. That's because he doesn't believe inequality is a problem. He believes there are 'natural' hierarchies.
In David Graeber and David Wengrow's "Dawn of Everything", extensive archeological and anthropological evidence showing that many sophisticated early societies operated with remarkable egalitarianism and flexible governance systems is presented. One example in the book is the non-hierarchical urban centers of Ukraine's Cucuteni-Trypillia culture (spanning 700 years without evidence of rulers or class stratification). Curtis Yarvin's framing that hierarchies are "natural" or inevitable are a recent Western narrative rather than historical fact. The most powerful challenge to Yarvin in Graeber's scientific work is against the idea that inequality emerges naturally with civilization's complexity. Many ancient complex societies actively created institutional safeguards against accumulation of power by individuals. Graeber and Wengrow describe the ancient city of Teotihuacan in Mexico (flourishing from approximately 100 BCE to 550 CE) which provides strong evidence against the "natural inequality" narrative. This was a major urban center with an estimated population of 100,000-150,000 residents - one of the largest cities in the world at its peak. It had uniform housing, where most of the residents lived in high quality apartment compounds of similar size and quality. There was no royal iconography, unlike other Mesoamerican civilizations. The city appears to have been administered by a council or collective leadership rather than autocratic rule.
The danger with Curtis Yarvin's ideas are that they are supported by the current ruling party in Washington and provide the intellectual foundation to further accelerate inequality, regressing the USA into a world straight out of a Charles Dickens novel—where most of us are poor, while a few monarchs, living incredibly well, own and run everything. We live in a beehive and let the cynic wasps in.