The Rise of Bio-Mercantilism

Today, a shipment of illegal immigrants foisted on the general American population by its irresponsible elites was flown, by a stubborn state governor, directly to Martha’s Vineyard, an exclusive island set aside for the resort mansions of the wealthy and powerful. Those who assumed these wanderers would always be someone else’s problem, namely of their enemies, are now in one fell swoop disabused of that notion. Begun, the Bio-Mercantile wars, have.

I first christened the idea of Bio-Mercantilism in 2018. I thought we all needed a term to describe the role of population transfer and disparities in fertility in the 21st century. The term was a bit of a spinoff of Bio-Leninism, another great concept that helps describe our present age. I couldn’t help but notice that moving around people plays a bit of a different role than at other times in history.

There have always been population migrations of humans but what we see now is made unique by:

1 – The lack of military conquest in conjunction with demographic incursion.

2- The undertaking of non-violent demographic conquest and displacement as a conscious policy decision.

3- Players in the game try to improve the quality of their human capital while degrading the quality available to other players. This is where the mercantilism part comes in. Powers now compete over people rather than bullion.

Since the world wars and the atom bomb, the price tag on conventional warfare has become increasingly costly and the rewards of loot and pillage by itself increasingly paltry next to having functional international trade. Moreover, access to mass media seen by the whole world makes large-scale organized violence even more politically unpalatable.
Never before has it been a viable strategy to send pregnant women to take over territory, nor has a population simply breeding more ever guaranteed political power by itself, but now, in the 21st century, it suddenly has become one of the most successful and efficient methods of achieving geo-political goals.

A war of attrition grinds on between Russia and Ukraine, the offense and defense almost perfectly matched in a near-stalemate for six months now with no end in sight and many thousands dead. Meanwhile, the elite class of the Globalist Empire has typically achieved many of its goals without a single shot fired through the gradual process of demographic displacement, subsidizing the fertility of desired groups, and punishing the fertility of undesirable groups.

These processes have been going on of course at least since 1965 in the US, but the main change I notice worldwide is every major player has become aware of this method of attack.
Within the increasingly fractured US, state governors have been sending busloads of illegals to cities dominated by the ruling class for some time now, but this new gesture of sending uprooted peasants right to the doorsteps of aristocrats represents a degree of deliberateness and strategy we have not yet seen.
Bio-Mercantilism is no longer a one-sided decades-long directive from the Imperial City; increasingly, errant feudatories strive to fight back by playing the same game. No one is allowed to shoot each other yet, so until then pregnant women from far-off lands are the choicest munition of the 21st century.

The Techno Dark Age

At the close of the 20th century the very air was pervaded with total self-assurance and optimism at the end of history. The last great rival, the Soviet Union had fallen and with no serious alternatives out there, it seemed clear that an enlightened golden age was nigh that would culminate in a final singularity and carry humanity past its primitive roots forever into an immortal utopia.

Scarcely 20 years later those golden dreams of grandeur lie wet and muddy in the gutter like discarded scraps of gilt confetti and every day reveals a new crack in the shiny facade of the great globalist empire. The advances in technology that followed one after another with precipitous speed since the beginning of the 19th century have finally slowed down to a relative crawl of incremental advances and the whole system creaks trying to sustain its existing infrastructure. As sclerosis sets in, even basic travel and shipping on the roads and skyways of the Empire becomes ever more difficult.

The managerial elites that sit at the top of this crumbling pyramid flap and agitate furiously lashing out at their own subjects as they try to reconcile the grim daily dysfunction with their high minded dreams of equalism and the eternal blank slate. As crises deepen and multiply, the gnawing suspicion that the eternal revolution is in fact over only spurs their prideful spite and existential rage. They’ll tell the whole world it’s a “reset” or a “transition” and all part of the plan but this is of course delusional. It’s just another of hundreds of hubristic Empires that mark the ages like the rings in a tree trunk. The age of growth must come to an end to be followed by the winter season. Not only is singularity well out of reach now, we are entering a new Dark Age instead. It won’t be a Dark Age as we typically think of it, though. In fact I characterize the order I see emerging as a Techno Dark Age where the persistence of present forces are the cause of the descent.

The simplest way to describe this is that when we look at history it seems there is the potential for ages of cultural and scientific invention when enough high quality people have the luxury of resources and space to experiment. This state of affairs managed to emerge in the West from incentives that led elites and the Church to identify and cultivate top talent.
Stable stagnation happens when pretty much everyone has to optimize existing behaviors to break even against Malthusian pressures and the total saturation of every social niche. This pretty much describes Eastern Civilizations and the Middle East for most of its history.
We might define a Dark Age, then as a state when even with most people struggling, the society operates at a net loss and continues to deteriorate until some sustainable new equilibrium is reached.

The present Globalist civilization has by all indications begun to deteriorate against the best efforts to sustain it. We are entering a Dark Age, but counter-intuitively, it is caused not by a loss of technologies but because of technologies. Furthermore, I imagine that the presence of these technologies in some capacity may well characterize the duration of the Dark period. The pressures introduced by the extreme efficiency of modern life have finally reached a point where they have become corrosive to any kind of dynamic, inventive, or even sustainable society. In short, technology has so completely outpaced the social technology and evolved traits of humankind that modern civilization has become a hostile, acidic environment incapable of sustaining human life. Wherever the modern “1st world” way of life fully holds sway, full demographic and societal deterioration is well underway. Where the machine of society uses people most efficiently, they have nothing left to produce anything on their own and certainly not to reproduce. The genes of the most conscientious and capable get shredded and ground into dust each generation as standards of living and competence seem to keep deteriorating for reasons no one can quite seem to understand…

When I was a child, I would constantly hear about how the personal computer and then the internet would open new worlds of progress and creativity and for the first decade or two it was a colorful Wild West that seemed it would deliver on these promises. Indeed, even amidst the first creeping autumn decay, there was a final efflorescence of creativity and culture at the start of a new Millennium. By 2010, though, centralized search and social media platforms were already causing a mass homogenization of online culture that could be easily curated and controlled. Music was dominated by electronic shrieking of autotune and in less than a decade film, with some amazing exceptions, had devolved from Lord of the Rings to endless reboots of reboots of necroposted nostalgic intellectual properties and bland cookie-cutter superhero movies.
The prediction that modern civilization would become massively more creative failed to come true. Actually, the opposite seems to have happened despite having more people, talent, and money than ever. The indicators of civilizational dynamism and creativity have only grown dimmer over the last decade until most of what’s left is corporate Marvel movies tailored to managerial commissars and the Chinese. This brings us to ask the inevitable question: Why does the information age with infinitely better communication and access to creative tools fail to massively increase creative output and invention?

The answer of course, leads us back to our Techno Dark Age. The United States, for example, is a nation that has long held up competition between individuals as a high ideal, a cultural characteristic that has only been amplified technologies since the industrial revolution. Electric lighting, for example, makes it easier to work around the clock. This makes it possible for a workaholic who sleeps as little as possible to get ahead, which also puts pressure on everyone else to not fall too far behind. Any invention that makes labor easier, counter-intuitively makes output more competitive. When you have enough inventions like this, eventually there exists a state of absolute and perfect competition.
Now take an American society that is Absolutely Competitive and add Absolute Information as well….The intersection of these two forces makes a stable, lasting society impossible even as productivity and profit skyrocket in the short term.
Under these diabolical conditions everyone is in relentless existential competition with everyone else while getting real-time updates about every detail. The inevitable result is mass defection and total social breakdown in a Hobbesian nightmare landscape where fewer every year can afford housing or gain the stability to have a family even as the basic networks for transporting food and fuel teeter on the brink.

This nuclear meltdown of the 1st world mass society is what I mean when I say that technology causes and is an attribute of the new Dark Age. Runaway social competition has always been one of the main threats, if not the main threat to social cohesion in all times and places. The societies that stand the test of time, however, all develop social technologies to moderate in-group tensions so that most people can cooperate most of the time with each other and against outside threats. Any group has to be at least as good at mediating cooperation as its neighbors or else it is either slowly displaced or conquered.

Humanity has yet to develop social technologies that have proven able to deal with Post-Industrial society and the information age. It may simply be the case that humans cannot deal with too much information. We now see a new mass hysteria mind virus sweep through the collective consciousness every few months. We see people brainwashed and ghost-hacked into forgetting their former selves and mutilating their own bodies. We see many more turn on their friends and families as if they were bitten by zombies. It’s hard yet to even begin to internalize the true horror of our age as it destroys tens of millions of lives on an assembly line as surely as the great wars of the 20th century.

The Techno Dark Age will be an age of fracture as smaller and more localized groups figure out ways of not being destroyed by the larger mass culture that drives its adherents by the millions into near-extinction. This is already manifesting as a new age of tribalism where the 19th-20th century nation-state has already ceased to exist. Already there are neighborhoods, cities, and whole states that are difficult to travel to in the US if you do not think and look a certain way, a trend that will only accelerate and solidify. Over time, people will assort by region, make local laws and institutions intolerable to enemy groups and become entrenched tribalistic fiefdoms. The groups that come up with the best answers to the pressures of the information age will crush and displace their neighbors as if without effort. The Techno Dark Age is a necessary testing ground to see which models are suited and which are obsolete and doomed to pass away into a few historical footnotes. As we would expect from a Dark Age, most innovation and culture comes to a halt, but it’s necessary to clean out all the dead wood before a new phase of growth can begin. It’s all part of the process, if we are lucky. Without any new continents to colonize and a dysfunctional culture worldwide we can only hope the present crisis does not lead to permanent decay and primitive, sleepy stagnation until some cataclysm finally leads to extinction of the species.

The Establishment’s Fragility

Soon after the retreat from Afghanistan, the establishment was touting the idea of another lockdown to keep a lid on things. As I mentioned in my last post, I understood that they were going all in on a strategy of hard power meant to keep the populace overawed in the wake of their embarrassing weakness. Any remaining perception of their right to rule depended on the total success of this initiative.

Since then, their success has been partial at best as they busily try to run through the entire Greek alphabet with a new comic book virus villain seemingly every few weeks. With every new attempt to impose new restrictions on this decentralizing empire, emerging divisions within it are only made more clear. At this point, I’d casually estimate there’s at most 20% diehard true believers who really care about the whole mask religion and they are mainly concentrated in the bluest strongholds.

With every failed attempt to impose the disease on the rest of the country, the grip of the flailing central bureaucrats grows a bit weaker. No one seems to have much stomach to actively oppose the present system and there doesn’t seem to be any real alternatives in sight but at the same time there is no enthusiasm to sustain this state of affairs. It is no longer even clear who or if anyone is really in charge or in control and history tells us this kind of gap is always filled, usually pretty quickly.

Even within itself, the establishment’s base of support grows weaker by the day as they continue to engage in cutthroat competition among themselves and alienate their closest supporters.
I see the recent victory of Glenn Youngkin in the Virginia governor election as an important litmus test. While Youngkin is not really any kind of populist, the incumbent Terry McAuliffe is an arch-hatchetman of the establishment probably among the top dozen people invited to Obama’s birthday parties.

McAuliffe as governor of Virginia may as well have been mayor of Northern Virginia, an area that encompasses the pure establishment energy of the Imperial Capital perhaps even better than DC itself. McAuliffe was the steward of Establishment Mordor, had Obama personally campaigning for him, and still couldn’t find a way to win. What happened here?

The tides turned against McAuliffe once the backlash to critical race theory took hold and in response, police physically cracked down on school boards in Loudoun County and the suburbs around NoVa. Overnight what should have been colonies of the faithful were beginning to revolt. To understand what happened we must understand that the government worker, contractor, and bureaucrat class living around DC see themselves as a class of lesser aristocracy, considerably removed from the rest of the country.
The moment police were sent to rough them up at school board meetings, there was an open breach of aristocratic privilege. The American Szlachta class reacted with outrage to being publicly treated like Red-State insurrectionists and McAuliffe publicly stating parents shouldn’t have a voice in school curriculum sealed the deal. In the end, even some of the most powerful people in the world couldn’t tip the scales as necessary to save McAuliffe. Even they couldn’t completely fail to appease the Szlachta petty nobility of NoVa.

It is important to explore this particular case because it is a sign of serious trouble for an elite class when its support is weakening even among their closest retainers. Moreover, the talent bench for the government elites grows ever thinner as they backstab and metoo each other to monopolize positions of power. No new blood ever seems to emerge and at this point we are left with an assortment of the same old Soviet-style dinosaur party hacks trading places in all the highest positions with the President himself an American version of the sick and senile Chernenko.

All across the internet I see everyone still panicking about viruses and New World Order plots to force everyone to live in pods and eat bugs. It’s curious lately how instead of being hip and ahead like it used to be, most online discourse is now at least 6-8 months behind trends in the real world.

Few of any opinion right now seem to understand how desperately fragile the position of the present establishment really is. Globohomo, at least as we’ve known it, is swiftly crumbling and there is already a huge power vacuum. The first jackals and vultures are already circling around and it behooves us to consider what power coalitions of oligarchs are likely to emerge next.

We should also be aware that we are on the verge of a time of great opportunities as public opinion continues to shift steadily towards populist and dissident views. I for one find it hard to be discouraged when the most popular newsman in the country has pretty much quoted from dissident sources for a few years now and has had a famous neo-reactionary on his show. At the same time, an up and coming candidate for the French presidency sounds like a deep internet message board from around 2014.

The establishment grows ever-weaker outside of its core blue-zones of control, leaving huge areas wide-open. I have followed this so-called dissident section of the internet for over a decade and while the exercise of hard power and censorship is at an all-time high, the position of the globalist oligarchy has never been more precarious. This is a time to prepare for opportunities as they open up, because if you are not ready as they appear, you will miss out.

The Empire Decentralizes

The fall of Afghanistan is a major show of weakness from the Globalist American Empire that will have as strong of an effect domestically as internationally.
Indeed, the intelligentsia class seems to be aware of this as they have begun to refer to Red-State Americans as “American Taliban.” As silly as this comparison may be, it shows they understand on some level the implications of institutional failure at this particular moment in history… It is not the act of withdrawal that is dangerous, but the collapse of order and authority much sooner than anticipated.

Since Trump began his presidential campaign in 2015, the ruling establishment has gradually removed the velvet glove and resorted ever more to the iron fist of overt coercion and hard power. The trouble is our present rulers are scions of what is sometimes called “the new left,” the 20th century movement away from hard power in favor of dominating culture, institutions, and information. This strategy has been so successful for so long, it beggars belief that the establishment wants to reduce the fox strategy it has mastered in favor of a lion approach at which they are unpracticed.

Faced with Trump, all they had to do was play within the letter of their own rules to neutralize him and patiently wait four short years to get him out of office. As it was, the permanent bureaucracy, the courts, the pentagon successfully contained and encysted Trump by sabotaging, disobeying, and getting their own appointed as the president’s personal staff. The GOP leadership successfully co-opted and diverted Trump into squandering his limited political capital on harmless initiatives like tax reforms.

The ruling class had already won easily but they could not help themselves. They had to keep attacking, even if it meant damaging the rules and institutions they relied on to legitimate their power. In retrospect it is clear that they did not understand themselves correctly as a priestly caste built on ceremony and consistency. The rules and processes they began to abandon to increase pressure on Trump were their own best protection. Foolishly, they flung open the gates of their impregnable fortress to give battle on open ground.
Even worse for them, Trump, who was by a nature a New York City centrist in the mold of Giuliani or Bloomberg, was forced to become more like the man they thought he was. Trump was a real-life Jay Gatsby who desperately craved approval and respect from the old money and the power elite. Instead of disarming him with false friendship, they forced him to really rely on his own supporters and by the time of the 2020 election he was drifting towards becoming authentically opposed to the establishment.

In early 2020, the establishment ceased to selectively break their own rules and started to openly wield hard power in the most ostentatious way. They used this direct coercion not to achieve any decisive objective but simply to cow and intimidate the populace with the flimsy pretext of preventing disease. Then came a long summer of astroturfed riots in which entire neighborhoods were burnt to the ground unopposed with the implicit blessing of the state.
The ability of Washington bureaucrats and the corporations joined together to micromanage every aspect of daily life with masks, lockdowns, and controlled chaos was a truly awe-inspiring display of raw strength and even many long-time dissidents were intimidated and demoralized.

The rulers, though, never seemed to understand their power was drawn from a deep well of legitimacy established by 250 years of relative political stability and prosperity, by the Allied victory in WW2, by the defeat of the Soviet Union, by a civic society that followed due process regardless of politics… In reality, they were burning up vast reservoirs of this legitimacy on a great funereal pyre with only vague goals of getting rid of Trump and launching a “Great Reset.” By using all this built-up trust and good will to close down small businesses and force people to wear masks, they were like America in Vietnam clumsily napalming and defoliating endless miles of jungle with great destruction, but no decisive strategic aim.

The trouble with squandering accumulated legitimacy is it takes much more time and effort to earn it than it does to spend it, so competent rulers are slow to burn it up more than they must. When the ruling class holds a gleeful bonfire instead, they have surrendered whatever appearance they had left of holding the Mandate of Heaven.

The disorderly withdrawal from Afghanistan comes at a moment when the old legitimacy is nearly exhausted. Worse, the last 5 years of the elites publicly breaking their own rules have now established multiple disastrous precedents.
From the moment sanctuary cities simply ignored the directives of the US President and from the moment the president’s executive orders were struck down by random federal judges, the power of the federal government itself was severely weakened and a path towards greater local autonomy was opened wide. Somehow, the rulers, never imagined these new precedents could end up benefiting political enemies as they traded temporary benefits for the permanent reduction of their power. At every turn they were willing to damage Trump when it meant damaging the very concept of the presidency and the whole central government along with him.

At the same time, the central bureaucracy has been threatening renewed lockdowns and strict vaccine passports for months now without being able to deliver much more than talk outside of a few of the biggest cities where their control is strongest. If by the normal fall flu season, masks and vaccine passports are not in effect in most places, they will begin to seem weak and full of hot air. In the aftermath of total collapse of order in Afghanistan, it is incumbent on the establishment now to demonstrate they are still firmly in control in the USA. Unfortunately for them, there is now blood in the water and if they cannot fend off the sharks, the sharks will rapidly multiply.

Within days of the Afghan puppet president fleeing the country after his whole army deserted within hours, the governments and courts of conservative states are testing the boundaries as never before using the precedents created by the establishment as their own weapon. For days, the elites have screamed in a fury about the state of Texas deputizing citizens to circumvent the letter of the law. This would not have been such a problem had they not deputized antifas and NGOs to attack citizens without any process or accountability for years now.
This is why even in war, people can agree to some rules…because if you do it, the other guy can do it too. But the present rulers are just that stupid and now they face the price.

The trouble with being a regime that relies on hard power, is you have to be ready and willing to apply hard punishment the moment anyone gets out of line or your authority swiftly ceases to be credible. This is why anyone competent prefers to rule with at least some measure of legitimacy behind them. The Globalist American establishment now finds itself in a tough situation where it must very soon impose tight order by force or else face accelerating decentralization of its empire until it resembles a patchwork Holy Roman Empire with regional elector princes able to do as they wish. It may be in everyone’s interest to retain a polite fiction of a United States even as individual regions mandate face-coverings by secular sharia and have their own borders, citizenship, and passports, but everyone will understand a new reality that can no longer be disguised.

At this moment, the ball is in the court of the rulers as even their anointed puppet struggles to keep up appearances for another day. It’s up to them to explain quickly what makes their puppet here different from the one they had in Afghanistan. It’s up to them to figure out what to do as mass virus welfare programs expire, millions who’ve as of yet been bribed into docility suddenly sent back out into the world. Their move.

The Maskites

The air we are born into is full of eternal sin.

The virus of a thousand years.

That waited outside the walls of Eden.

Without the mask we breathe it in and

Contaminate our precious souls.

We must ever wear the mask.

From the first breath to the last,

The priest finishes his incantation and holds out his forearms to intercept a small head poking forth from a convulsing uterus.  His hands shake as he poises ready with a tiny elastic black mask stretched between his thumbs.

He is poised there almost motionless for the next hour of relentless contractions.  At the very moment the baby’s head emerges, he forces the mask over the newborn’s face as it opens its mouth to take its first breath.

The priest breathes a sigh of relief.  Once, when he was new, he missed his timing, and the baby had to be discarded as Unclean.  He knew he would be demoted if that ever happened again.

The newborn’s screams are muffled now beneath the fabric it must wear for the rest of its life.  The umbilical cord is snipped and soon the mother is squeezing dabs of colostrum onto the black fabric to be sucked up bit by bit by hungry infant lips.

He congratulates the mother but the priest cannot pause long for there is battle not far away.  He hasn’t slept in two days, he rushes from the hospital now to the battle front not two miles away.  Adult soldiers with steel masks fused to their faces long ago greet him in the trenches as the perpetual rain of shells arcs over head, with the waspish buzz of bullets zipping about just inches above ground level.

“Father,” cries one of them. “Lead us now in our charge.”

“Gladly,” says the priest, “I just gave life with these hands. Now we will take their lives.”

The men murmur with appreciation.

“Boy or girl? One of them asks.”

“I…I don’t know.”

“Now!  Let’s go!”  An officer screams through a mask with a megaphone built into it.

Within seconds, the Maskite forces have gone over the top and begin to charge across a muddy hellscape churned about by explosive plows drawn by devils for the last year.

Hundreds fall as bullets streak back and forth but the swarms of the Masked are unperturbed as they always have been. The sacrifice of one is a small thing next to the perfect safety of the rest. Despite horrendous losses, they reach the enemy position and fling themselves screaming as best they can through their identical facemasks.

As they overwhelm lines of trenches one by one, enemy soldiers wave their arms in surrender, always the youngest ones.  Anyone with experience knows better.  Convulsing with glee, the soldiers call upon the priest who carries with him a supply of complementary masks.  Masks of metal in the shape of an emotionless human face.

Everyone looks in disgust at the prisoners with their faces uncovered, their lips, mouths, and tongues waving about like exposed sexual organs.

The priest strides forth, metal mask in one hand, drill in the other.  He begins to chant.

Those who dwell apart from Righteousness

Must also wear the mask

Against the never-ending virus that tries every soul.

Where in life they deny the true teachings.

May their end set them aright in the fiery eyes of Absolute Purity.

The priest sets to his sacred work as prisoners are held down screaming. He notes again the particular sound and feeling a bladed screw makes as it sinks into wet flesh and fastens into bone with a hollow thud.  

In the light of dawn, a mass of revenants is sent back to the enemy lines groaning in pain and despair.

A horde of teenage conscripts who did not know to either flee or kill themselves reaches out for the mercy of their comrades, their masked metal faces impassive as they groan in agony and despair.  Streaks of dried blood trail down the edges of their permanent masks from wherever a screw was driven into their faces.

Looking on, their comrades can only imagine one thing.  Their officer gives the order and they raise their rifles.  Though many are blinded by tears, there is only one more thing they can do.

***

“God damn!  God dammit all! I told them if they did it again that would be it!”  yells the General. “I have tried to reach a measured peace with these savages and still they insist on the most brutal torture.  I must relay to the Emperor that every so often there is a culture that must perish from the universe for the good of all….This…this is their last planet and they still cannot behave as humans.  Commence orbital bombardment.  I refuse to waste more young men trying to quell them through measured means.”

***

Hundreds of thousands of Maskites cheer together across miles of front as their enemies begin to withdraw, soon they emerge from their defenses and begin to traverse miles of unguarded ground, waving rifles over their heads and firing wildly into the sky.

“This is a day of deliverance!”  Yells the priest with arms outflung, his voice amplified by speakers in his mask.  As the last dropship disappears into the atmosphere, the sky lights up with a thousand glorious comets.  The armies of the Righteous cheer until incandescent flashes make everyone shrink away.

As the blinding light resolves, tremendous mushroom clouds are visible in the direction of every town and city.  Shockwaves are on the way and the priest wishes that is the last thing he ever knew.  As ashes settle, he crawls about for another day or two vomiting inside his mask, he barely opens the emergency drainage slat on time to avoid drowning, then left trapped next to the ammonia stench of his own crusted puke.  Thirsty beyond thirst, no amount of canteens pilfered from the dead amend his ferociously peeling skin.  The priest screams at the grey sky one last time as he thinks of the newborn he just inducted into life already dead by now, his whole civilization and culture extinct with his passing, all his own life a waste.

Trolley Problems on the Island of Sodor

“Thomas! Thomas, wake up!”

Thomas the train engine lurches into the drowsy beginnings of consciousness.

A familiar voice comes from the darkness and a few moments later a dim pendant lamp snaps on as someone pulls on its chain. Standing there, casting shadows across the room is Sir Topham Hatt, controller of all the railroads of Sodor.

“Thomas, it’s urgent! An emergency! Oh my, you’re our only hope!”

Topham Hatt flicks a stiff switch and the garage door begins to open with a metallic groan, letting in at first a blinding slit of daylight and then a flood.  Thomas squints as he struggles to come fully awake.

“Thomas, I mean it.  We must go! Now!” Thomas is confused.  He can’t remember the last time the jovial railroad controller was actually screaming. To his astonishment, Topham Hatt himself climbs inside his cab.

Within minutes, Thomas roars at full speed from the Tidwell Sheds onto the main line across the island. Right away, he notices a smaller set of rails now alongside his own.

“The Duke and I thought it was a good idea!” blurts out the controller. “It’s a disaster.  Look, there he is!”

“It’s Trillions the Trolley, Thomas!”

A small red trolley car off in the distance closes the gap in just a few minutes.  As the interloper draws near, Thomas catches a glimpse of a twisted face with bloodshot, fixed, veiny eyes and a tongue that lolls out of its constantly-contorting gap-toothed mouth.

“Oh, no, he’s gone insane!  Whatever shall we do?!”

At that moment, Thomas notices assorted human limbs and a couple twisted bodies caught in the slats of the trolley’s front buffer. The staring faces of the dead with their filmed-over eyes nod gently to the rhythm of the rails.  Within a few more seconds, the trolley catches up with him and as it passes, he sees it is packed with as many passengers as its compartment can carry with limbs sticking out of each window. Everyone on board is screaming in terror and despair as Trillions the Trolley races past.  Thomas tries to keep up but the lightning-fast trolley soon vanishes over the next hill.

“He’ll be back for another lap soon enough.” says the controller with a sigh. “You see…you may not realize it but you and your friends have been asleep for the last forty years…Well, I tried to revive Percy and Henry and the rest, but no one in Sodor makes the parts for them anymore. I’m afraid we’ve lost them, Thomas.”

Thomas throws on the brakes with all his might sending sparks flying as grief and shock overwhelms him. He nearly derails as his eyes stare in horror and his mouth hangs agape.  In that moment he discovers a torture even the devil couldn’t have come up with, the feeling of trying to scream only to remember he has no lungs or larynx. Then, a keening wail and tremendous tower of steam bursts from his whistle that can be heard across the island. Thomas screeches to a halt with the tracks behind him still smoking.

Topham Hatt gets out of the cab, climbs onto the soft grass of the Sodor countryside and stands right in front of Thomas’ twitching face turned a much paler shade of grey than usual, his unfocused pupils reduced to pinpricks.  The controller removes his top hat from his bald pate for the first time and somberly addresses the last of the Sudrian engines.

“Oh, Thomas. We have made a bloody mess of things.  When we realized you and your friends only go forty miles per hour we imported a trolley that could go eighty miles per hour and put all of you away in your sheds.  At first everyone was overjoyed but over time, they had more children and we had a couple more million people move to Sodor. Soon even Trillions the Trolley couldn’t keep up.  We kept upgrading him and pushing him until now he travels at 160 miles per hour.”

“But now that’s too fast and we can’t slow him down.  The commuters on board are making just enough pay to get by. They can’t afford to stop or even slow down a little bit.  Now Trillions is running over anyone who gets in his way, especially the old and disabled who can’t move quickly. Now everyone is faced with sacrificing their parents and grandparents to keep working…Thomas, I need you to come out of it, I need you to listen to me.”

The little train engine’s gaze gradually refocuses and his face is now crumpled with sorrow around his big, expressive eyes.

“Thomas, we only really have two things we can do.”

“If we stop the trolley, we’ll stop people from dying right now, but even with your help not enough people will be able to get to work and the factories and the quarry will all shut down.  Then people will be penniless and desperate and I am afraid, Thomas, that will be even worse in the long run.”

“If we leave the trolley alone, it all goes on as you see now and Trillions will keep going even faster.  I can’t do this anymore, Thomas. There is a fork up ahead. One way leads to a switch that will divert the trolley to a dead end.  The other way will take us back to Tidwell. You’ll have to make the choice. I’m…I’m so sorry.”

Topham Hatt solemnly puts his hat back on and with stooped shoulders climbs back into the cab.  In moments, Thomas is moving, slowly and hesitantly at first, then starts to pick up speed. In the cab, Topham Hatt pulls out his gold pocketwatch from his coat on its delicate chain and flips it open looking for some small comfort.

Somehow Thomas can suddenly hear the relentless ticking of the watch over his engine and it grows steadily louder as time seems to slow down and the fork grows nearer.  Thomas’ brow is stern and eyes fierce but his mouth writhes with agony. Tears of jet black oil begin to well up around his eyes and streak down his face. The sound of the ticking is now almost deafening.  The fork is just ahead.

The camera zooms on Thomas’ face as the moment of decision approaches.  “Tohhh…misss!” Topham Hatt’s voice sounds slowed and distorted.

As the train engine furrows his brow even tighter, a line of static flickers across the screen. Then again.  And again. More lines of dancing snow appear, shimmer, and disappear. Suddenly there is a descending discordant orchestral glissando and atonal pizzicato strings.  As the glissando bottoms out, the screen goes black…

The animator jolts awake in a cold sweat, his heart pounding.  It’s an ordinary morning before another work day. He breathes deep and climbs and sits on the edge of his bed.  By his bedside is a large poster of a smiling, happy Thomas, the character he helps to create for a living. Those big dinner-plate eyes have been blandly watching over him while he was sleeping.  It was nothing. Just a nightmare. The animator shakes his head, gets dressed and heads out to the kitchen for a cup of coffee and to check the news on his phone. Looks like it’s going to be gray day at the beginning of Spring.  It’s early March in the year 2020.

Stark Truth Podcast: Neuro-Tribalism

My latest podcast with Rob Stark radio:

This time, we focus on how the internet is a new printing press that abolishes many of the constraints of geography and makes possible the formation of groups with relatively rare traits that would never find each other in a purely face-to-face society.
The internet makes possible a process of distillation.  If you have a trait that is 1/1000, you can find 350,000 people like you in a sprawling empire of 350 million.  That small but substantial minority, if truly cohesive, has the potential to steamroll countless millions who are isolated and weak in an atomized consumer economy.

I anticipate that while some of these new neuro-tribes may be dysfunctional crabs-in-a-bucket echo chambers, others will concentrate excellence and capability.  These latter will be the new ruling tribes over a de-facto caste system as the emergent peoples establish a pecking order.

We analyze how even within the roughly related populations we call “races” there are clusters of personality types.  Those who are roughly related and share key personality traits are those who form post-internet, post-nation neuro-tribes.  The black sheep of every family with mass communications are soon able to have a whole herd of black sheep where their particular aberrance is the norm.

To hear more listen to me and Rob at:
https://www.starktruthradio.com/?p=8877

 

Time For America To Grow Up

Since the founding of America, it’s always been a dumping ground for the rest of the world’s problems and a laboratory where those who come out on top can work their wills without any traditions or custom to hold them back.  Instead of a City on a Hill, it’s been more like that Randian city on the bottom of the sea from Bioshock.

From the beginning, it was a money mill where Whites and Indians were used as slaves until they were replaced by imported Africans.  Since the 1600s, it’s been about importing ever more unskilled labor to undermine the power of normal people who get just comfortable enough to decide they don’t want to be exploited to death.

Over 150 years later Benjamin Franklin was scratching his head wondering why average people defected to the Indians whenever they got the chance and only came back kicking and screaming.  What we call America has always been a game of hucksters and exploiters.
Most of the Founding Fathers were rich smugglers, slave-traders, and slave-owners who were de-facto New World aristocrats.  The American Revolution did not lead to chaos because it was the revolt of one elite against another elite.  There is a lot to be said for that; I favor an enlightened elite.  But their narrow view led to them getting deposed within a couple generations in a pointless and bloody civil war.

The American scheme proved to be sustainable for nearly 400 years because there was an entire continent to expand into.  Now there’s not.  Every easy corner has been settled and then populated to saturation.  If you want to found a colony now, you’ll be homesteader in Montana or Alaska.

Now, the American people have to grow up.  They have nowhere else to shove their problems.  In fact, we are so weak and divided that surrounding states that could never challenge us militarily easily shove their surplus populations through our porous “borders.”  They may be less wealthy and powerful, but they win in the game of genetic mercantilism.

All the rest of the world lives adjacent to groups of comparable power and few have two gigantic oceans to protect them.  Nor did they have whole continents to colonize.  Every other society on earth has had to reach a state of equilibrium within Malthusian limits and develop culture and traditions to limit disaster to manageable levels.  Those that could not were subsumed by more competent groups.

Now America is in the same situation as everyone else and we have to establish a sustainable civilization for the first time and in a very short time.

It is not cause for despair though.  Let us look at Africans in America who always vote 90% for the same party and move in lockstep whenever it matters most.  They are pound-for-pound the most powerful electorate in American politics simply because they can actually work together sometimes in a land where everyone else is out slit the other guy’s throat as soon as he falls asleep.

It has often been pointed out that Americans are not like other Europeans.  We are mutts of a 100,000 different admixtures, descendants of the misfits who couldn’t make it in Europe.  So it has been argued relentlessly we are a cursed people with no name, no nation, no inheritance, no future.

But what about Blacks?  They came from hundreds of different tribes taken from a couple thousand miles of coastline and from the interior of their native continent.  They have a decent level of admixture with European colonists.  None of that has been a barrier to their greater commonality when subjected to outside pressures.

We have already seen that a roughly-related race undergoes a process of ethnogenesis in a new homeland, especially when it becomes a minority beset from every side.
Many dissidents suppose the descendants of Europeans in America becoming a minority would be an apocalyptic end.  No, it would be the beginning of a new ethny who emphatically and viscerally know who they are.  An America that’s 60% European-descended remains in free-market slumber, working their lives away to out-compete the other guy by a few thousand bucks.
An America that’s 30% European is a fanatical tribe that engages in aggressive conquest against its blood enemies.

As pressure makes loose river sediment into hard rock, it can make a population of mutts into a new pure breed that back each other up and screw over outlanders whenever they can.  Americans will become their own European ethnic group alongside Germans or British.  There will be no “nation of immigrants” pablum.  Everyone will know who Americans are.  But first, it is time for America to grow up.

An Alt-Centrist Look At UBI

Now that Andrew Yang has popularized universal basic income into a meme, it’s important to remember how it would actually work in real life.

The most obvious problem with giving everyone $1000 is prices just go up. Prices adjust to what people can pay.

Yang recognizes this is a problem and argues like most free-market types that it would barely make a dent in basic food supplies and mass consumer electronics.

Like pretty much every other Market Worshiper, Yang focuses on bulk goods and commodities while neglecting positional goods.

Positional goods are those with prices mostly determined by one human’s situation relative to everyone else.  Positional goods have no intrinsic absolute value.  They can be worth nothing or infinity.  There is no bottom above zero for the shell of a house in the worst parts of Detroit; there is no top for a degree from Harvard.

If you think the most important cities are unaffordable now, guaranteed income would hit the most desirable places hardest, forcing even more people into the economically dead hinterlands where they have nothing left but opiates and suicide.

We need only look at the disaster that is college loans.  If anyone can get a college loan, prices adjust until you need a loan to go to college.

Or health care.  When the system assumes everyone has health insurance, you can’t afford healthcare without health insurance.

Maybe a bag of rice only goes up so high in price absent runaway hyperinflation but imagine what happens to local rents as soon as everyone has $1000 extra dollars per month!  The bidding war for apartments, credentials, medicine, and used cars are the silverback gorillas in an ever-shrinking room for most people, not buying ramen and plastic junk at wal-mart for a few pennies cheaper.  Those who focus on consumer goods while ignoring positional goods are either stupid or actively malicious.

A UBI that goes to everyone is not a solution.  If you have a basic income or any other systemic advantage, it can’t go to everyone(smart socialism) if you want it to be an effective policy tool.  If you want to have a handout, you have to choose winners and losers in a way that benefits society overall.  Who does the society want to subsidize?  Who does it want to disadvantage?

Our present elites love having a “level playing field.”  If you need a loan to go to college, insurance to get a surgery, and your UBI check to pay the rent, they own you more completely than the owner of an Ancient Roman latifundia mega-farm owned his slaves.  They own every breath you breathe and if you say something they think is mean, they pull out your heart-plug like the Harkonnens did in David Lynch’s Dune and laugh a hearty, villainous laugh as you flail about as your arteries drain dry in less than a minute.

It’s a dark time at the bottom of the second act, like The Empire Strikes Back, and lots of people are tempted to say “Fuck it, I can get 1000 dollars while I watch it all burn.”
Don’t think like that.  Nothing good ever comes from that kind of negativity.

It seems like Trump has totally caved and even started attacking his most ardent supporters.  Andrew Yang wants to lure in the whole population of Guatemala with promises of $1000, no land, no mule.

In a way, Trump has accomplished what we really wanted him to in our darkest hearts.  The present system with his final surrender stands totally and utterly discredited, the last shreds of the Mandate of Heaven sent to the winds.  It’s now just a race to see what replaces it all.

No US president has had any real power to influence policy for almost 20 years now.  It is now clearly a position about as ceremonial as the Japanese emperor.  People who were die hard WN 1.0 guys now promote Andrew Yang because they know it’s all a joke.  Nobody cares anymore.

Instead of the Search for Spock, it’s the search for who actually has real power and to formally recognize them and endow them with the responsibilities that come with rulership, whether they like it or not.

Stopping the Race to the Bottom

A strong authority is necessary to stop a society-wide race to the bottom and tragedy of the commons, especially when the internet gives every individual actor highly accurate information.

Some problems are pretty obvious.  A lot of the dysfunctions with European-American flight and the hand-wringing over “good schools” can be solved by simply allowing freedom of association.  If neighborhoods can decide what kind of people belong in their territory, millions of people are suddenly free to become more stable and rooted, giving trust and social capital a desperately needed boost.  Sometimes, an inept or malicious state can break what naturally fixes itself.  This has been a main theme of Western politics since the 1960s cultural revolution.  Fixing this problem no doubt would also help with low Western fertility but that problem is more complex.

Even countries like Japan that experience minimal pressure from the expansion of hostile outgroups have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world.  There is a measure of altruism involved in having children but if it’s all headaches and sacrifice, no one wants to bother if they can avoid it.
If the state wants more kids from its core polity, it must take measures to make the prospect of fecundity more tolerable.

Western countries are extremely punitive towards men in every aspect of life while women have very little responsibility.  Women work, but they generally get first dibs on part-time middle-paid jobs in safe air-conditioned offices.  If they don’t want to work there is always state assistance, sex work, or a man who supports them.
In the inherently unstable modern mating market, men cannot continue to be held to 19th century expectations.
Draconian child support laws make it so even the horniest men above 90 IQ are going to be very thorough about using condoms or making sure she really is on the pill.  This is a recipe for underclass dysfunction and eventual idiocracy.

There’s millions of men and women holding out until they start to turn grey for the “right one” by the standards of a society that no longer exists.  The fields of the first world will remain barren and cracked so long as cooperating men are expected to make lifelong commitments to partners who can leave them at any time while plundering their assets.  The problem with going back to traditional marriage is in an urban, wired society, people have too much information to be easily content with one partner their whole lives.  Men crave variety.  Women always want to move up or at least diversify the genes in their child portfolio to hedge their bets against nature.

The way forces and incentives are aligned, it may make more sense to ease up on male penalties rather than mandate Sharia law.  Perhaps cooperating men get a slap on the wrist or no penalty for knocking up women, so that the anti-natal equilibrium becomes defect-cooperate rather than cooperate-cooperate.  If one side has little incentive to care about contraception, there will be more babies.  Perhaps there would still be state assistance for single mothers, but the amount would depend on who the father is.  If her drug dealer gets her pregnant, not a single penny of taxpayer money is forthcoming and perhaps she gets paid to get the abortion.
And of course, we must understand that marriage is a 5 year dating arrangement below the upper middle class in modern society.  There is no need to take half of a man’s stuff when it goes sour as it typically does.  If she wants to leave, she leaves with her stuff.  Period.  And the man gets some kind of guaranteed access to the kids if he wants it.  Maybe she even has to leave them behind with him.  Furthermore, in a promiscuous modern society with little means of enforcement, DNA tests need to be a default made mandatory under law before a man invests one penny in a child that may not be his.

Without some form of guaranteed paternity and freedom from state punishment for men, first world fertility is certain to continue its downward spiral.  And it’s our fault, not that of any other group.

I mentioned schools earlier but that is another area where the competition of individuals has gotten out of control.  First of all, the corrupt state gets a huge population addicted to public daycare for 12 years so both men and women can work full time.  This gives the economy a short term boost at the cost of cannibalizing future generations.  By age 18 a young person should be ready for adulthood.  There should be no such thing as a “teenage” state of limbo, a bizarre pathology that only emerged in the 20th century.  Since the dawn of time, the mission of young people has been to learn from adults, not to spend all day in an insane asylum full of other kids taking pointless classes about things that serve no use and which they will never remember.

Worse, schooling has only continued to become more bloated as many now spend 16 or even more than 20 years in school.  For those older workers making good salaries, it is always tempting to keep the young warehoused for as long as possible in an already over-saturated economy bombarded with illegal immigrants and H1-B visas.  College tuitions have been spiralling now for decades.  It is a dysfunctional race to the bottom that only the virtuous state can bring to a stop and which the corrupt and evil state aids and abets.
Contrary to the rhetoric of libertarian shills, corporations are happy to have a taxpayer-funded system that churns out certified conformists with a ball and chain of debt around their ankles to doubly ensure their meek compliance.
This undeserved support needs to be torn away and the monasteries dissolved.

The solution here is to limit compulsory education to reading, writing, and arithmetic for most people.  In the 19th century, most kids could be taught these skills in a few months here and there at minimal public cost when they were not needed for the planting and the harvest.  How far we have fallen.

Then, further education must be limited to people who are genuinely curious and able to learn.  In my own time in the public education system, nearly every class was packed to capacity and any attempt at teaching was sabotaged by kids who did not want to be there, all in the sacred name of Equalism.

College must be limited to the best of the best and the aristocracy only.  This way the righteous ruler can arrest a race to the bottom while nurturing geniuses who will shape history.  For hobbyists, there is always the internet and perhaps some of them will rise to the highest level on their own.

Health care is another area that has suffered from “cost disease.”  It’s the same problem as college tuition, really.  If everyone can get college loans, prices adjust to assume everyone has a loan.  If everyone gets health insurance, prices adjust so you can’t afford healthcare without health insurance.
The solution here is more obvious.
Populations at the first world level do pretty well with a single-payer system.  Mixed populations do well with both systems in effect.  If you are a cooperator who pulls your own weight, you can tap into the single-payer free system.  If you are underclass, you have cash for your treatment or you die.  That’s how it works in many countries with high levels of stratification.  The US has just had enough wealth so far that it has managed to avoid facing reality with stupid schemes like trying to have mass subsidies for health insurance.(Affordable Care Act.) The inevitable result of this disastrous policy is even higher prices.

As you can ascertain from this essay, most of the solutions to these seemingly intractable problems are not that complicated if the ruler has an accurate understanding of reality and human nature.
The root cause is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be a ruler and what duties that exalted social position entails.  The people must be protected from self-destructive game theory equilibria as zealously as they must be defended from outside invaders.

Podcast: Pragmatic Dissidence With Robert Stark

Robert Stark and I focused on the specifics of an Alt-Center that recognizes the essential role of effective redistribution in a successful society and rejects worship of the “free market,” critiquing its role in the creation of culture. After all, we can look at all the great art, encyclopedias, and fan made mods people make for free. How do we manage this massive leisure economy? Furthermore, much great work of the past resulted when single, or a few patrons, rather than the mass market was the source of funding for creative work.

Also, I make mention of my dissident fantasy fiction story, Apostasy, and mention some of the inspirations for its setting.

Sexual Harassment Hysteria Seriously Undermines the Establishment

Podcast With Rob Stark About Alt-Centrism, Current Events

http://www.starktruthradio.com/?p=6168

This time, we discussed among many things

-the direction of American politics, especially the development of a true “alt-left” from disillusioned Bernie progressives

-the shifting of alliances in the Middle East and how ethnic struggles there presage the future of US internal politics.

-the importance of social capital in determining human desires and the general direction of societies.

-the impropriety of suffering the presence of the underclasses in cities that rightfully belong to society’s best cooperators

And more… Please join us.

Dissident Success Requires Cities

I too get a certain sense of delight seeing a map of the “Hillary archipelago” a few blue counties drowning in an immense sea of red.  Yet I still remember that LA, NYC, or Chicago areas, each easily outnumber all the population of the mountains, northern Great Plains, and the Great Basin combined.  The vast stretch in between Reno, Salt Lake City and Omaha up to the Canadian border has possibly less than 10 million in it out of a country of 330 million.  If not for provisions protecting small states built into the constitution, these outlying provinces would be politically irrelevant.

Even aside from overwhelming quantity, cities have been the natural generators of culture, art, and ideas since the beginning of civilization.  It is a common sentiment in the dissident right to be disdainful of the city, and having lived in cities, I vehemently agree with most of their points.  I only disagree with the conclusion that the city ought to be written off and surrendered.  On the contrary, the goal should be to take the city back.

When you have millions of people who can hop on a subway for a few bucks and see each other within the hour at any time, you can have groups of even highly unusual types of people that can meet up regularly.  Nobody reaches their full potential alone.  Throughout history look at any group of contemperaneous authors, artists, or thinkers and usually they all knew each other or at least corresponded.  These social circles generally had to form in cities.
The internet made the fluid real-time formation and exchange of ideas possible outside of urban areas for the first time, but this interaction remains abstract and ghostly until it is consolidated by regular interaction in person between people.  In the countryside a nascent high IQ counterculture is usually too diffusely distributed.  The city allows for the concentration of a critical mass of neo-tribalists in close proximity where they can interact and their energies can be amplified.

We will know the internet dissidents have fully transitioned into the real world not just when they have rallies, but when there are urban neighborhoods people associate with their identity that have their own public events and meeting places.  There are, however, the circumstances we have now that make cities ridiculously overpriced, unsafe, and dirty.  The dissidents might begin as a rough urban enclave bringing improvement to a small area but with long term goals in mind of how cities ought to be managed to maximize civilizational creativity.

Firstly, we should reflect on the problem of unproductive underclasses flooding into urban areas.  A properly run system wouldn’t allow this.  The poorest will always be crushingly poor no matter where you put them.  Productive people produce far more wealth if they have easy access to urban areas.  It does not make sense to even allow underclasses near the cities.  By simply occupying space, they drive up prices for scarce real estate.  This is compounded by the fact that any place they congregate becomes uninhabitable for law-abiding cooperators.  Even worse, crime spreads outward from these dead zones and further contributes to making cities into violent undesirable sinkholes people work a job in and then flee from at 4 PM.

In a righteous empire, the city should be seen as a desirable privileged place that non-rich cooperators are rewarded with access to, not a third world hellhole.  Obviously every city has many lower IQ jobs that need to be done, but that just requires an orderly, properly vetted working class preferably with higher IQ and conscientiousness than their work strictly requires.  Every person who lives in an urban area incurs a significant opportunity cost for society if they do not need to be there or are not the best choice to fill their scarce spot with.

When skilled professionals making six figures start living in their employer’s parking lot, we already know society has seriously mismanaged its resources and infrastructure.  Just think of all the wealth that gets wasted in a huge bonfire as people compete for scarce access to the economy’s machinery!  When poor planning and a dysfunctional undercaste prevent wealth producers from reaching the means of production, it’s kind of like cells getting blocked from processing oxygen by exposure to cyanide.

Of course, the main structural problem of cities in all times and places is they are “gene shredders” as Spandrell calls it.  Civilizations rise as the brightest and most capable congregate in cities and declines as they fail to breed or are massively outbred by the peasantry and underclass.  The automobile and with it the modern suburb allow people to participate in the urban economy while still reproducing at near-replacement levels.  Real light rail systems would be a lot better still.  Thus admission into the suburbs also must also be carefully controlled to have a sustainable high agency urban society.

In the longer run, I hope new technologies might even make cities less important and allow people to live outside of nodes on a narrow grid that are natural chokepoints for rent-seekers.  The obvious strategic problem with modern mega-cities is their huge vulnerability to attack.  Having all the best and brightest in one spot of course means it’s not that hard to decapitate an entire civilization with a single strike.
So long as the city remains the center of modern human power and organization, any dissidents require at least a foothold there.

The Augustus Principle

A dry history text book lulls us into the complacent idea that one time always splits neatly into the next on a precise date.  This way of thinking leads us to misinterpret our own time.
There is nothing quite like the look on someone’s face when I explain that Julius Caesar wasn’t an emperor and didn’t intend to end the Roman Republic forever.  It moves into an even stranger dimension when I explain that Augustus, who came after Caesar, had to pretend for a long time that he was not the real, autocratic power and the senate was still there for hundreds of years after it became a ceremonial institution within an empire.  There never was a precise moment Augustus(played by Brian Blessed) came out on stage and said “Ho, ho I’m the emperor of the Roman Empire!”

But surely, people back then had some idea when Julius Caesar took over that some new and drastic change was taking place even if they didn’t know what it was?  Then I mention Caesar wasn’t even the first guy to march on Rome.  A guy called Sulla had already been the first to do that.  He used it as a way to destroy his political opponents and reshuffle the deck of the senate in his favor.  People expected more of the same from Caesar and for the republican system to go on as it had for hundreds of years.

If I want to keep shaking up the prim and tidy version of history I can mention that the military reforms of a guy called Marius re-aligned incentives so that troops first owed their pay and pensions to their general, not to the government, making the emergence of miltary strongmen like Sulla and Caesar possible and inevitable.  At the time he did it, Marius was just trying to increase his own power and prestige in Rome and the senate went along with it so he could deal with the immediate crises presented by armies of Germanic barbarians.

As the republican system proved too inflexible to deal with crises, precedents and rules were worn down one at a time until the old system gradually became something else we now call an empire.

This fluid version of history makes people uncomfortable because it makes them start to think about their own time in a new way.  When history is a mesh of gradualisms rather than clean breaks on memorized dates a smug sense of security evaporates.  Anyone might reflect “The ancient Romans thought the Roman empire would never end in its heyday.”  This feels comfortable enough because it fits well with the tidy history of discrete periods.  The Romans had their time in the sun.  So did the dinosaurs.
It feels far less safe to think: “The ancient Romans did not even realize their government had ended as it was happening!  Nobody even really intended for it to end up that way!”

In reality, once Marius smashed term limits for consulship and made his military reforms, the Roman Republic was effectively over in a practical sense.  The control of the government over the military had been compromised and all government requires monopoly over the legitimate use of force.  Once one learns to think in terms of the fluid version of history, it becomes possible to see where crucial pivot points lay that went without recognition or fanfare when they happened.  Furthermore, there is an interplay of multiple pivot points.

The rogue generals unleashed by Marius’ personal ambition might not have been able to overturn the republic had the popular opinion been overwhelmingly in favor of the system.

The Roman Republic had a long tradition going back to its origins as a small city state of cooperation and compromise between the classes.  Periodically, the proles had revolted and gotten concessions giving them limited representation in government and some safety nets.  Perhaps the greatest concession the plebs ever got was a special political office created just for them, the tribune of the plebs.  To compensate for their votes being counted less, they got two tribunes who had veto powers.

As Rome grew richer and more powerful, this last obstacle to the elites became intolerable.  As Roman territory became concentrated in the hands of just a few wealthy families, pleb revolt in favor of land reform was taken up by a tribune named Gracchus.  Gracchus came from a wealthy family and was viewed as a class traitor(kind of how Trump is now.)  This threat to the mega-estates of the ultra-rich resulted in Gracchus actually getting beaten to death by the senate.  

As if this wasn’t enough, Gracchus’ brother tried to step in and carry on the cause.  He ended up committing to suicide to avoid also being beaten to death by the senators.  For some reason reform attempts were never quite the same after that and the social tensions rather than being resolved just simmered as the elite tried to sit on the pot lid.  With this tension and disenchantment already well established, it’s unsurprising in retrospect that rogue generals could count on considerable popular support. 

It seems a rule across time and place that any elite class tries to eliminate all obstacles to the exercise of power and cut any bothersome obligations or responsibilities to a larger society.  In a smaller-scale society like a city state, there is a limit to how far the elite can separate from the obligations of societal leadership.  However, when there is a huge increase in wealth and territory, the elites try to use this rocket fuel to break free of the gravitational pull of the lower classes so they can rule the world below as they will from their untouchable elysium in outer space.

If we apply the more fluid way of history to our own time, we realize the neo-liberal cultural revolution that took hold in the 1960s effectively ended forever in 2016 and we have entered a new historical period.  Even those who desperately want to restore the old social order do so with a tribal sort of viciousness in stark contrast to the harmonious star trek utopia they had envisioned for mankind barely one year ago.  Even as they yearn to go back, they are unable to appreciate the irony of how their fanaticism only fuels the formation of faultlines that will define a new age. 

Once we learn to ignore the dull farting tuba noise that is textbook history, we can see how Trump is a transitional figure and a pivot point.  Those who believe in the system of periodic shoeboxes might say “He is trying to be a Caesar!” of course without understanding what that really means. 

Trump is more like a Gracchus, a Marius, or even a Clodius Pulcher that aligns forces in a new direction.  Like transitional figures in the Roman republic, he will know not what he does as he helps begin the 21st century in earnest.

Scarcity of Social Capital Sustains Institutions

For almost twenty years it has been pointed out countless times how all the knowledge we get from universities is online for free.  Time after time people have predicted the collapse of universities or that for-profit colleges will take over.  Not only has the institution of the University not collapsed, tuitions are higher than ever and the for-profit colleges are the ones that have seen their business model collapse. At first, this seems counter-intuitive as the corrosion of the establishment’s credibility accelerates.

Though colleges are no longer sacrosanct as they once were they can keep hiking tuition to the pace of loans because there are no viable alternatives.  Red-pill dissidents have spent years bashing the college degree as a “piece of paper” while missing the point.

College offers access to reliable high-status social capital in a modern society where any sort of non-adversarial, high-trust social interaction is extremely scarce.  For most people entering adult life with even slightly above average IQ, campus is the funnel they must squeeze through to avoid the wasteland of service jobs where they’ll live without prospects surrounded for the rest of their lives by people they cannot really connect with. 

Also, there are far more people scrambling to take respectable white collar “real jobs” that require degrees than there are slots available.  This pressure means those who make it have to know someone on the inside.  To establish rapport with someone on the inside they need to have experienced the unique culture of life on campus.  People reach out and help those they feel are like them and with whom they have shared culture and experiences.  To get that gen X manager to reminisce about college days over lunch while you’re there as an unpaid intern can easily be the difference between having a career and being a barista. 

For those who do not go to university the military is one of the last sure reservoirs of reliable social capital.  The most cynical blue collar people you’ll ever meet will curse about the polticians, the government, the country but still glow with almost religious reverence if you mention the military and thank you profusely “for your service” if you were ever in it.  For average people who did not grow up with deep, high quality roots to see them through life, that’s pretty much the last social ladder available to them.

Then there is of course the public education system.   The crowning genius of the 19th century-style nation-state may well be the ability of compulsory mass education to standardize culture.  People instinctively understand that even if someone learns better through home-schooling, they are at a disadvantage by not having the standard life experiences in the standard environment installed in their meatware.  Someone who strays away from the insitutional status ladder finds themselves standing just outside the tribal circle as they interview for jobs, vie for promotions, try to make friends, and go out on dates.

The backbone of a society is not jobs, an economy, or even armed men.  The central structures of society are ladders and funnels leading to high quality social capital like lifelong friends, stable social roles, family, marriage, or even just the bare minimum status to be seen as eligible in one’s dating pool.  In a hunter gatherer band or a traditional agrarian village there are rites of initiation to test for eligibility and connect cooperators with the social capital they need to flourish.
The nation-state institutionalized these networks on a mass scale of millions.  The industrial revolution did not just lead to the mass production of goods, but also of culture and social status.

This assembly line of souls is still very crude compared to the simple organization of a village.  With such a large system, a glitch can send 10 million souls tumbling into the abyss where they have no role and no one cares if they live or die.  Overwhelming numbers made these casualties sustainable.

When everyone has been to the same sort of schools since they could walk, then go to the same boot camps, you can crank out 100 divisions of soldiers who can all understand each other and work together.  The 21st century however has heralded the shift away from mass culture and the return to inequality, caste, tribe, and natural aristocracy.

Neo-tribal groups are sprouting through the drab concrete slabs of the establishment but they will only be able to displace institutions when they can bust the monopoly of social capital and offer better prospects of meaningful belonging.

The Class Divide in the Alt Right

As the alt-right matures it can now be divided into working class and middle class wings.  Most of the arguments about strategy, methods, and optics since Charlottesville have at their root been different parts of society talking past each other.  The alt-right likes to talk about race, but too many of them seem to neglect class, which in some circumstances is even more important than race in a highly stratified America.  

The pre-existing White Nationalism 1.0 was a working class movement by its nature.  They were notorious for being abrasive purity-spirallers who don’t work well with others but those who made the transition to 2.0 have brought with them established organizational structures and are willing to show up in the real world.
At this point, when people are taking huge risks just stepping out into public, just showing up is the decisive factor, not wardrobe choice.  As a mercantile culture, we are still grappling with the new reality that action, revealed preference, and loyalty means more than words, presentation, or “brands.” 

From what I have seen, the most aggressively anti-social purity spirallers are already getting pushed out.  Over time I am seeing progressively fewer Nazi costumes.  As far as I can tell from pictures of Shelbyville, a few last people wearing nazi helmets are all that remains to be dealt with.  Counter-intuitively, complaints from the middle class wing of the alt-right actually grew louder after this event.  They were just as upset by a procession of people who looked like bikers and hunters dressed in black.  The reality is that working class groups won’t look nice and fuzzy, especially since the people who will actually show up tend to be the most angry and disaffected.  People who look determined and intimidating are not necessarily a bad thing.

The white polo shirt strategy has proven to be a stroke of genius that has created an image of the alt-right in the public consciousness.  More specifically, this has become the uniform of the middle class and SWPL alt-rightists.  They are trying to reach an audience where it pays best to be approachable, clean-cut, and well spoken.  While the black-clad bikers are gathering in rural white America, the polo preppy alt-right are targeting universities and urban areas.  

Rather than one conquering the other, these factions will end up pursuing their strategies in parallel.

I have seen a lot of criticism over the people showing up being “defective” but I think a lot of the armchair generals forget these are bands of dissidents.  The people who are comfortable and happy with their lives stay home, have other stuff to do, and have way too much to lose.  

The critics expect that the leaders of these groups can micromanage everyone like they are playing a real time strategy game and freak out about every negative thing the press seizes on.  In real life, these leaders are pirate captains elected into their roles by a motley crew of mutineers.

It takes a lot of guts and a disagreeable nature for anyone to actively go against what the rest of society is telling them to do, to reject false received wisdom, and seek out truth.  When you get a bunch of people like this in a room, you can’t expect any organization they form to run like a corporate department.  It’s only natural that it’s a bumpy ride and knees will get scraped. 

There has been a lot of public arguments between the leaders of these groups as they jockey for position and influence.  These are not crises but part of the natural process through which every organization is formed.  The clash of personalities has been a positive thing as the most able rise to the top and the worst narcissists, anti-social types, and the outright insane get weeded out.  

Every time there is a setback, loyalty gets tested and those who counter-signal too hard in the wrong way or against the wrong people fall by the wayside.  In these struggles, the class divide has been especially obvious. 

One leader screams at another about being a nazi larper only to be derided as an effete metrosexual in return.  One thing I have noticed though is over time certain rules of engagement have solidified and there are lines the leaders left standing no longer cross.  Now, even when disagreeing on tactics, there is almost always a disclaimer, of “I am glad this guy’s on our side but…”  

With pirate brawls now staying within this etiquette, the hierarchy steadily figures itself out.  Since the alt-right is the executive wing of the dissident sphere, those who come out on top will be those who can most effectively lead people to accomplish strategic goals in the field.

One of the biggest misunderstandings I see about the alt-right is from those who want it to become a mainstream political movement.  For some time yet, the niche of the alt-right is to be a minority of radicals who push the envelope and goad their enemies into over-extending.  By challenging the boundaries a few hundred alt-rightists can clear cultural space for millions more to drift slightly further towards them.

The alt-right is succeeding not by persuading everyone at once to their views but by changing the collective mood enough that alt-lite marketers are being forced to adapt or perish. 

Barely a year ago, a group with mostly gay men and women rose to become the alt-lite because their diversity points helped them get away with pushing ideas that no white straight guy could have presented to a large audience.  Someone like Milo was necessary and even his presence was enough to trigger a riot at Berkeley that was a huge turning point in exposing the establishment’s willingness to shut down free speech with violent thugs.

This excess lead directly to Antifa defeats at the battles of Huntington Beach and Berkeley forcing them to change their tactics ever since.  Few seem to reflect on the strategic significance of the fact that antifa has never again been able to attack independently, relying completely on sympathetic authorities to take their side. 

Now, it’s no longer necessary to be flamingly gay to popularize edgy political ideas.  Alt-lite figures like Milo are failing to make the transition and ex campus conservative types like James Allsup and Nick Fuentes are taking their place with far more discussion of ideas and less mindless sensationalism.  As the alt-right continues to keep on the pressure, it will change the culture—and the conventional politics lies downstream of culture.  

“Average Is Over” Is A Destructive Mindset

Every year the sort of inspirational speakers who appeal to drab office schlubs come up with flashy new slogans to say the same things.  For some time the theme they’ve had to address is how the marketplace has grown more competitive as the pond of opportunity shrinks for most people.  They can’t say it like that of course because that would be “negative thinking.”  You can’t make a living giving seminars at business hotels unless you make your clients feel good about themselves.  So this year the fad phrase to say while wagging your finger in admonishment with a smug, fake smile is “Average is overrr!”

All this means is the job market and society itself continues to become more scalable.  Instead of having musicians in every town, you have 1 musician who plays for 300 million.  So it goes for increasingly more fields.  You get your very best talent recorded to internet video or on a website and the guys 99.99% as good are out of business. 

 “Average is over” is an attitude of acceptance that only extreme excellence is of any worth from now on, the rest of us consigned to the dumpster.  And so we must go out and strive to beat the lottery.  If we make it then we are quadruply entitled to adopt sanctimonious airs and wag the finger at those below on “the ladder to success.”
This may well be the final form of that American strain of Puritanism before it finally implodes under the dire pressures it glorifies.

Hyper-individualist Americans love to hear stories about the very best meeting with stratospheric success.  Striving to do one’s best is admirable, but this attitude is not compatible with successfully running a massive empire of 330 million souls who all get hungry and sick whether or not they are particularly useful to anyone.

Furthermore, as only a few can be successful in the scalable world, we ironically see a regression to mass mediocrity in everything from culture to services.  This is because the best possible performers do not come from a vacuum but are incubated by thriving local subcultures filled with other competent enthusiasts.  If only a few can succeed at something, the subculture that cultivated geniuses withers and ironically, the baseline for the elite performers declines.

The subculture of a field that contains relatively average people also supports the sort of refinement that can beget works of genius that stand the test of time.  The very best talent has colleagues as a preliminary audience through whom the works of genius filter down to the populace.  When we have a culture that worships “average is over” the elite .001% answer directly to the perfect democracy of the masses.  The natural output is endless remakes and prequels calculated to reap x millions of dollars with y minimal % of risk.  We are left with precisely calculated drivel churned out as if by a data-mining algorithm.  This is the apotheosis of a market culture that tries to maximize popularity while eliminating all concept of selectiveness and loyalty.

One of the challenges a new society must overcome in the post-industrial age is to figure out how to cultivate subcultures, and eventually actual castes that concentrate human potential in self-reinforcing ways.  The pathological individualism of “average is over” is ultimately the delusional idea that you can have a rose without the bush.  A post-Western caste system asks: “what kind of bush might produce the best rose.”

This is achieved by thinking of culture or any other kind of excellence as we might think of politics and government.  We can’t get the best performance or the best talent without having the right filters.  Even the decadent United States governs through representatives rather than direct mob rule and retains certain filters of the unadulterated popular will such as two senators for every state, the electoral college, or the absence of voting rights for children.

The important concept is no human endeavor can be successful without selecting and filtering specialized groups within society.  This is like the difference between a multicellular creature with organs and an undifferentiated primordial soup.  Every one of the organs within the social body has its own bell curve of performance and in any healthy living thing, the average is not over, it is the backbone.

Worshiping White Women Is A Losing Strategy For the Dissident Right

One of the most frequent topics I see in the manosphere and alt-right is paeans to the superior desirability White women.  Alongside the writing are those same pictures of Baltic women in ethnic costumes no one wears for real anymore.  Then in the same breath I see rants about how these same women have terrible princess attitudes and are totally unsuitable for long term relationships or motherhood.  Then the next article on x site is always outrage that Blacks or Muslims are abusing White women.  What are they trying to accomplish by this?  Do they think their precious White women are going to come rushing back into their patriarchal arms in response to this rhetoric?  Do they think this will inspire other men?

These guys are prostrating themselves for the privilege of defending women who are not theirs.  They are trying to raise the status of women who are already looking down their noses from a mile-high pedestal.  This kind of foolishness played a significant role in making White Nationalism 1.0 a laughingstock.  There are millions of White men out there who have been frivorced, pounded down by the HR ladies at work, or just want a nice girlfriend.  Trying to talk to them about protecting the poor beautiful White wimminz is astonishingly tone deaf.  What the dissidents should be talking about is how they will help raise the artificially low status of ordinary White men.

On a primal level, any movement is successful because enough people are convinced they will get higher status.
The alt-right has been successful so far because it is the first group in decades to dare promote a positive self-image for Euro-Americans.  A people who have lived all their lives in a prison of collective guilt are amazed when sunlight they forgot even existed starts pouring in through a crack in the cold, damp rock walls.  It is a mistake though, to think heaping yet more praise on the women is part of the process of revival.

Women by their very natures are not truly members of any people.  They are heavily selected by nature to smoothly transition from one tribe to another whether by marriage or warfare.  White knighting is such a destructive force for nations because women have no nation.  They do not care where the high status men come from and they happily absorb the language and customs of wherever they happen to end up.   That blond-haired, blue eyed goddess who can do no wrong orgasms just as hard with the swarthy Mongol who burnt her village and slew all her Darwininan loser brothers.

The cuckish impulse to perpetually build up and defend feral White women

-Raises their value even higher, ensuring their fertility plummets even lower.
-Pushes away millions of White men who would otherwise be receptive.  Any idea that proposes sexual limitations on men who already have collective blue-balls and no hope of marriage or family is stone cold dead on arrival.
-Fosters a “one drop rule” that helps push even 3/4 white people into the coalition of the fringes, where they become a natural leadership class—making minority organizations far more dangerous than they otherwise would be.

Worship and protectiveness towards White women not only fails to win them back, this beta orbiter behavior only earns their contempt.  If the dissidents offer status to the men and engage in the conquest of hostile tribes, the woman problem solves itself.  In turn, men who sense they will get more sex and power are willing to pursue victory to the ends of the earth.

In this process, the bizarre Anglo-Saxon imposition of feminine race chastity onto men has to be discarded.  As long as humans have existed, the conquerers mate with the defeated people’s women.  Successful tribes want to control their pool of women but also let their Y chromosomes drift far and wide like dandelion seeds, if for no other reason as a pressure valve for internal tensions.  Then the mixed people who result all but beg to be janissaries and spies for the ruling tribe rather than defacto retainers of sacred minorities.  Then, over time, every generation is less “ethnic” than the last as the highest status group biologically wins each round.

In any case, we will know the alt-right has won when White male cuck porn is a popular genre and everyone tries to identify as Euro-American if they are 1/4 Euro and the Euros have stopped boasting about being 1/32nd Indian.

Observations Leading Up To Bannon Resignation

I will break with my usual habit of waiting for things to settle down a bit and indulge in some speculation.  At this point, things may not settle down for quite awhile.

Over the last few weeks I have observed that Trump has been spending progressively more time away from DC operating out of Bedminster and Trump Tower instead.

My suspicion is this behavior is entirely intentional, especially since it seems to have increased the moment General Kelly was moved to the White House.  I also noticed the media is attacking Trump over the length of his absences.  Trump has pointed to convenient renovations going on in the White House as justification, assuring the public that affairs of state are proceeding as usual.

Now, this behavior pattern has continued for weeks and could become the new normal.  Once one 17 day “work vacation” ends we shouldn’t be too surprised as another excuse is contrived with Trump only commuting to DC for several hours at a time as needed.  Meanwhile, it seems as though the leaks have abruptly stopped.

With this development, it is far less surprising to me that Bannon is leaving a White House that is no longer Trump’s center of operations.  Both men have found the DC swamp to be intractable and are now trying to gain leverage from outside it.

As far as I can tell, Trump tried his utmost to work with the Republican party establishment, backing their legislative initiatives to the hilt so they could accumulate some political capital for midterms.  Over time the tone of Trump’s tweets shifted from praising Paul Ryan’s leadership to criticizing Congress for not keeping promises they had made for years.

The final break happened when McCain cast the vote to get Obamacare repeal to the debate stage in the senate.  McCain then cast the vote to kill the debate as if to say “Just kidding!”  This public humiliation on the senate floor was finally too much.  The GOPe had openly admitted they would drag their feet indefinitely in order to wreck the president.  With midterms just over a year away, there was no more time to waste.

Trump brought in an outside consultant to sack his ambassador to the GOP starting a crazy chain of events that continues to cascade.
Furious that Trump was going off script even with McMaster there to “guide” him the beltway generals made sure Kelly got moved to chief of staff for good measure so the “pentagon boarding party” could keep the White House under lock and key.

Trump reacted by starting to contrive excuses to be away most of the time where he is likely establishing his own control structures with people he trusts. 

This time, when the president broke free of the generals to make an independent statement on Charlottesville, they had no immediate way of shutting him down.  Kelly was there, but as his despondent reaction revealed, he was powerless to intervene when unmoored from his place of power. 

With the GOPe’s strong condemnation of Trump’s statements and apparent support for tearing down historical monuments, all pretense of civility has been dropped.  They have hugely overextended with their unpopular positions and have created an opening for Trump to start displacing them in the upcoming midterms.

I am seriously wondering if I now see what may effectively be the emergence of two rival executive branches.  One run by the Pentagon, political establishment, and corporations in DC and another run from New York.  Perhaps we will get to see which is Rome and which is Avignon.

Interview with Stark Truth Radio About Post Scarcity Economics

http://www.starktruthradio.com/?p=4972

We spoke about topics related to many of my more recent posts: post-scarcity economics, the leisure economy, urban land management, state capitalism, and mentioned an alt-center.

My Interview With Robert Stark

I was interviewed by Robert Stark of Stark Truth Radio earlier this month.

http://www.starktruthradio.com/?p=4088
We spoke about:
-Singapore as an inspiration for alt-right government in a multi-ethnic country.
-The aesthetics of a post-Western social order.
-Mercantile ethnic groups from Southeast Asia and the Levant and its HBD implications.
-Trump’s political situation where both parties hate him and would get rid of him if given the chance.
-How the alt-right is limited mainly to the white working class and how a larger populist movement could attract progressive voters who have been neglected by the democrat coalition.

Post-Western Aesthetics post:

What Might A Post-Western Aesthetic Look Like?

Military Juntas are Cool Again !

Look, the real story of those years is not told in the books.  The military never bothered anyone unless they were leftist agitators or were committing violence.  Even our president now [Dilma] was detained for participation in making bombs.  Why doesn’t the media talk about that?  They don’t, ever.  There were demonstrations all the time.  One day we woke up and there were tanks in the streets.  That’s how it was.

But I can tell you one thing:  the military in those days were actually less corrupt than the rats we have now.  They cared about power and order, not so much about getting rich.  And those stories about pregnant women in Argentina in detention centers?  Let me tell you that a lot of them deliberately got pregnant because they thought it would get them released.  So a lot of it is propaganda.

There was a real war there.  To win a war, you have to be ruthless.  It’s fashionable to hate the junta, to hate Pinochet, and our own dictators, but the economies we have now we owe to them.  And that is the reality.  The real mistake the junta in Argentina made is that they lost a war to Britain.  Nobody has anything good to say about those who lose wars.

Those rubber fascists with their helicopter taxis weren’t so bad after all, I mean they were fighting leftists, the very spawn of Satan!
Let us forget about all those clandestine torture centers, of the genital electrocutions and the Desaparecidos.

Fascists apologists…. Is the Alt-Right showing its true colors?

For the full article Why The Left Is Suppressing The Truth About Argentina’s Military Junta

Shelters From Planned Obsolescence

Here’s a blast from the past, an article I wrote in 2011, that illustrates how much things have changed in a very short time thanks to new communication technologies that have sped and grown the flow of information through non-elite channels by orders of magnitude. At the time planned obsolescence was somewhat of a fringe topic and now seems like it’s being talked about far more. I will be following this soon with some more musings on economies, this time written in the (present year).

6 Heretic's Way

Builds Upon:Living On A Keynesian Playground

Many an old aphorism tells us that human desire is limitless.
Yet not so many tell us that human imagination is quite limited.

Humans can desire only what they already know of or are capable of imagining.
Thus kings in ancient times never had any desire for personal computers or i-pads.

Markets are like a genie that grants the wishes of a collective—anything that people want tends to manifest—but like a typical Arabian Nights style narrative, the moral of the story is the banality and short-sightedness of the wish-maker.

Somehow, we never see the ‘experts’ factor in shortcomings in human knowledge and imagination when they discuss the workings of capitalism. The theoretical customer seems almost like a Laplace’s demon with perfect knowledge of the universe.

In real life, imperfect consumer knowledge and foresight plus the influence of emotion makes planned obsolescence a more…

View original post 830 more words

Relaxing Music Part 1

One of my favourite musical tracks by an overlooked author, if you have any of your favourites to share, please post the links in the comment section.

The Aesthetics of Dominance

I just wrote my last article on the measured political strategies appropriate at this moment. But this is also a season for fiery comeuppance after a resounding historic victory!
Much of society is run at a gut and emotional level, just as is the human brain itself.  The cerebral cortex we associate with rational thought is a pitiful addon tacked on as an afterthought.

Societies give behavioral cues through aesthetics.  It’s no mistake that most buildings of governance across time and place are designed to dwarf the individual gazing upon them, whether a pyramid, a castle, secret police HQ, or a government agency, they make an argument through their forms for overpowering legitimacy.

Since ancient times, much imagery is displays of dominance, the towering ruler over other groups of outsiders.  As with dogs, the alpha is large, confident and on top and the subordinate always hunched, crouched and beneath.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s clear Ancient Egyptians intuitively understood intuitively many truths of human nature that our “modern” society has chosen to forget.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ancient Maya seem like they were quite clear on the concept.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And so are Indians to this day.

One of the most important motifs in all civilization across thousands of years is to show triumph in battle over a despairing and demoralized enemy.  It’s all about conveying the feeling a modern day sports fan gets when his team soars to triumph.  Except for pre-modern people it was in real life, not a game.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 60s Cultural Revolution leadership subtly kept up the tradition.  Absolutely love those forced smiles.  May as well all be baring teeth and snarling!

After almost 60 years of stultifying oppression it’s now up to us to choose the story of humanity!

We must project overwhelming dominance in every aspect of culture.  For every sitcom and ad that portrayed the husband as a blithering idiot puppet of his commensense competent wife, we must change the story to masculine leadership.  The actors and folk(pop) musicians must be demoted to minstrel tramps.  That’s one thing both Cromwell and the Taliban got right.

We must begin the “march through institutions” and hunt down the high priesthood of intellectuals, journalists, professors who betrayed the supreme, sacred trust given them by society in the most base, duplicitous, and wicked manner imaginable.

Those who betrayed their culture and their ancestors must be rounded up, publicly humiliated in every possible way and then poetically driven into the sea.  After being made to understand the essence of their fall and forced to watch their former lives incinerated before their eyes, they must be driven by ranks of ornately armored cataphracts into the waves with loud speakers projecting the applause of hundreds of millions.  The last sound they ever hear as they are driven beneath the wine-dark waves by steel shod hooves is the joy of their enemies.  Such is divine justice.

Somewhere in the nation is designated a Tarpeiian rock from which traitors are thrown to join their dishonored predecessors in a heap of bones ceremonially defiled with the contemptuous excrement of the righteous.  After living my whole life in an age of total decadence I can’t summon in myself the slightest spark of magnanimity or pity.

See Also:  White Collar Criminals Are Worse Than Street Criminals,
Election 2016: The War In Heaven