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I'm pretty far from a Moldbug apologist, but this particular criticism uniquely does not land for him. We're talking about a man who built a full-fledged alternative to the internet from the ground up, hand-crafting every stage of its unique and bizarre infrastructure. Now that he's stepped away to let it grow on its own, from what I understand of his current projects, he's become rather enamored with New York's Dimes Square art scene. It seems like a bit of a dead end at best to me, but it's certainly an attempt to build something.
There are many people at whom you can credibly level the "no interest in building" accusation. Whatever else Yarvin's flaws are, this is emphatically not one of them.
Then I've expressed myself poorly. I was referring specifically to his maxim of "become worthy of power, then be handed power". That maxim has always struck me as rather parasitic.
He is indeed capable of building, in the sense that he can be at the top of the hierarchy, do the work, and give orders to those below him. Is he capable of building, in the sense of being at the bottom of someone else's hierarchy, and being a loyal follower? He's happy to be handed power, but is he willing or capable of building power from scratch? From what I've read of him, the impression I'm left with is that he is not. His fear and disdain of revolution is at least partially due to a keen awareness of the devastation that tends to result, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that it's also partially because he knows that if the present system goes away, he has no plan B. It's as though he sees power as a natural resource, like oil or uranium, and the whole question is simply who controls it, rather than it being an emergent property of human choice, and the question is how we generate it step-by-step.
Contrast @HlynkaCG's point about easy questions and hard questions: is the hard part designing a political system, or is the hard part getting people to actually follow it? Yarvin, like most modernists, strikes me as believing the former, and I think he's dead wrong and getting wronger every day.
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