In this repository, the Cathedral is Yarvin's term for a diffuse regime of ideological authority spanning media, academia, bureaucracy, and elite opinion rather than a single formal institution.
The concept describes a decentralized but mutually reinforcing system of elite legitimacy production. In Yarvin's usage, it explains why democracy keeps reproducing liberal-progressive outcomes even without one explicit sovereign center.
This concept is not the same thing as the state itself. It is a theory of how ideological authority and consensus formation work around the formal state.
It is also not a general synonym for elite. The current repo treats it as a specific Yarvinite explanatory category inside Neoreaction and Dark Enlightenment discourse.
The current corpus treats the Cathedral as one of the key internal vocabulary terms that helps connect anti-democratic critique to a broader theory of liberal institutional power.
wiki/summaries/mencius-moldbug-unqualified-reservations-core-texts-2007-2009.md: core primary-text cluster in which Yarvin's anti-democratic critique takes shapewiki/summaries/curtis-yarvin-peter-thiel-and-bukele-in-the-contemporary-anti-democratic-tech-right-discourse.md: later relevance and uptake context