“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.

Alt-Lite and the Weakening of the Merchant Caste

Since Charlottesville, most of the alt-lite has fallen into line and is back to to selling merchandise and maxing out their follower counts.  Nevertheless, a significant segment still seem to be flailing about in fury and confusion.  As I noted in my article about dissident factions, those making money from the spread of ideas tend to be unhappy when the fault lines shift.  The alt-lite’s business lies in being just edgy enough so whenever the edge moves they have to pick up and move their market stalls.  It’s especially annoying when they’ve written a book or a blog only to find it’s suddenly irrelevant.

I knew they would be indignant and that a great deal of this indignation comes from their self-image as the leaders.  But there has been more of a reaction than I was expecting, because like the establishment, they misunderstand their position in a changing ecosystem.  Furious that the core alt-right has asserted control over the rules of engagement there has actually been a foolhardy attempt at a takeover.  Needless to say, this attempt and its aftermath has been one of the most hilarious things I’ve seen on the internet in some time.

A faction best known for selling e-books, t-shirts, and supplement pills actually thought they had the social and political capital to co-opt a movement from those who have real organizations, go out in the streets, and take physical risks.  How is this?  This depth of childish miscalculation just doesn’t make sense until we examine on a cultural level.

Such delusional thinking is more understandable when we realize the mercantile caste of society has been ascendant since at least the French Revolution.  The obsession with equality that we take for granted is connected to the bourgeois attitude that the customer is always right and two men with the same amount of money in their outstretched palms are effectively the same, to be treated the same.  This attitude informs the obsession of the modern world with being popular and inoffensive above all else.  This attitude is so ingrained we run even our personal relationships like businesses.

Concepts like honor and loyalty seem like anachronistic ideas from old stories of knights and samurais, or even the creed of alien species like Klingons.  It has been so long since any other world view held sway, we have have forgotten any other way is possible.

We see a great example when alt-lite personalities discuss the alt-right as a “brand.”  They cannot yet understand anything other than the mass market.  Why would they?  The business of America is business.  The attitudes of the marketplace have dominated the culture of the USA and the entire West for centuries.
When we realize they are going by the rules that have worked for generations which we are all taught our whole lives, it is easier to understand why they are unable to adjust to a changing reality.

The enlightenment itself was a new value system for a rising merchant caste.  It is no coincidence that secularism’s original and eternal enemies are the aristocracy and the priesthood who stood in the way of advancement.  With widespread literacy and the dawn of an industrial revolution the old order of landed nobles backed by priests was obsolete.  Wherever the forces of modernity came into play, the merchants became the new ruling class.  Even Japan which was far away, culturally distant, and not exposed to modernity until much later went through the same developments as everywhere else.
A nobility and bureaucracy dominated by a hereditary warrior caste steadily fell from grace as wealth and influence went to the new captains of industry and commerce.

History has its longer cycles that are greater than the parochial span of a human life.  We reach a point where all the easy gains from colonies and industry have been taken.  In a mature, saturated world, the winnings go to the strongest.  In this kind of a world, warriors and barbarians bound by clans and honor re-emerge with a vengeance.

In our present transactional utopia we think money is the source of power.  The truth is money is a manifestation of power as light and heat comes from the sun.  The light is soon extinguished without its source.  The established merchant princes thought money alone could defeat an unusual challenger in the 2016 election and to their complete astonishment they failed miserably.  Likewise, a faction of the alt-lite thought wealth and popularity alone would be enough to take over an organically-formed group with ardent devotion to a clear mission.  These foolish modern magnates are not unusual in the course of history.
If you read Spandrell’s brilliant series of essays on the Song dynasty, you will learn how a mere 1,000 horse archers was enough to conquer the wealthiest nation on earth—a huge empire of millions.  We can also consider the Italian city states, which relied heavily on mercenary armies.  They were able to fight each other to a draw but when faced with real armies from real countries they never stood a chance.

The fundamental limitation of money is that all the money in the world is worthless to a dead man.  The currency of successful organizational violence is men who are willing to risk their lives.  This is a law of the universe so primal and obvious that the wealthy and the educated are bound to forget it.  As cultures of honor and prestige again take root, the cosmopolitan bourgeois will have to accept that they are no longer the natural ruling class of society just as the lords and the samurai once had to make way for them.  Like their predecessors, they can either accept their proper place in the hierarchy from where they can contribute, or they can go down fighting against the universe itself and maybe leave behind some tragic legends if they’re lucky.

Reviving Hammurabi’s Code: Different Laws For Different Castes

There was once a king of Ancient Babylon who made a law code and had it written down for perhaps the first time in history.  Fundamental to this code was the assumption that the ranks of humanity are not equal and therefore given different treatment under the law.
In Hammurabi’s time, this meant lighter punishments if the victim of a crime was lower in rank.

It sounds unjust to us now, but if we think about it, one of the great perversities of our present system is that there are still protected castes in our society, it just can’t be written or spoken.
The human experience shows us if we do not explicitly codify rank, parasites implicitly become the most-protected.  Equality is hypocrisy because to espouse it is to defy the timeless lessons of human nature.

Every human society organizes into hierarchies and in a healthy society, people are ranked as they contribute to the society’s survival.  Higher status people, being more valuable, are given greater powers and protections.
The ranks of humanity tend to stratify into breeds based on temperament and ability for abstract thinking.
Therefore, the incentives and deterrants that work for one caste do not work for another.

An underlying problem of our present system is that everyone from professionals to the underclass are subjected to the same laws.
In practice, this means the underclasses are threatened with punishments that deter people with families and careers reasonably well, but give hardened gangsters little pause.

Unable to admit that society can’t deal with its underclass, over 2 million people are locked up in America with millions more on probation or parole.  Rather than being truly punished, society prefers to neutralize them.  Then feeding, clothing, housing these captive consumers, like students or soldiers, becomes an industry of Keynesian broken windows.

Underclass troublemakers tend to have high testosterone, low IQ,  and short life histories. The strategy for their niche is to take big risks with drugs and violence that get them killed young, but also get a few women pregnant.  They don’t really think far ahead.
They’d very much like to stay out of a jail cell, but it doesn’t come with the same stigma it does in polite society.  It might even increase their status and get them more women when they get out again.

For thousands of years the solution for dealing with underclass aggression across the world has been pretty similar.  Either beat the crap out of them with nightsticks or, if they can’t be trusted to contribute to society again, just have them shot.
An egalitarian system is forced to try to harden the laws against its underclass, but as it does so it ends up dumping a steaming load of feces on normal people going about their business.

We end up with nice professionals bewildered by “militarized” police who treat them like dangerous animals at a routine traffic stop and it ends up making even ordinary workers suspicious and frightened of the police.  The quality of life falls dramatically for everyone and the morale of the tribe is damaged.

The irony of making a law for everyone is no one gets dealt with properly or proportionally.  
Unable to simply beat down underclass thugs and unable to admit they require more attention from the law, a phony “war on drugs” gets invented.

At the same time, the cooperative classes do not get the friendly benefit of the doubt their lower risk profile would merit, causing fear and resentment.
Inevitably some get caught and ruined by the indirect dragnets meant to catch the underclass.  To cap it off, those who have jobs and earn a wage by the rules have to feed and house a small country worth of prisoners.  What is a struggling worker to think when they cannot afford to see a doctor and the prisoner gets to see one for free?

A legal system that cannot properly punish low-level dysfunction ends up punishing cooperators instead.  In the long term, this dangerously undermines trust in the legitimacy of the rulers and makes people question the good and worthiness of the society itself.

A society correctly aligned with the Divine Justice punishes low-consciousness defectors with the negative reinforcement of raw force that even animals can understand.

Those who work jobs, and can behave so long as they are given structure can be threatened with humiliation and damage to their reputations.  Just a few hours of being pilloried in the public square being posted to social media would make most hesitate before breaking the law.  
Those who become repeat offenders and no longer care about their public image can be demoted to underclass and treated accordingly when they commit their next transgression.

Those of high agency have greater understanding of their actions in the context of society as a whole so they are mainly punished for crimes they know full well can puncture the lifeboat everyone relies on.
Demotion to the job classes, temporary or permanent, would be one of the simplest penalties.  For people of active awareness, a 9-5 job scraping for money is little different than a prison sentence.

Those who betray high responsibility over wealth and culture must bear the greatest punishments.  An underclass murderer might be quickly dispatched with a bullet.  Reckless speculators and embezzlers who crash the economy are destroyed in every respect with elaborate ceremony as befits fallen angels.

For all classes incarceration ought to be a last resort, where it would potentially do actual good, not indulged in as a net-negative industry.  Already, most other countries imprison a tiny fraction of their people compared to the USA.

Above all, societies are not charities.  Every tribe exists in tough competition with its neighbors.  If it does not run a tight ship, it is conquered and subsumed.  Life is already hard enough for people who faithfully spend their lives helping the group.  It must be relentlessly reinforced: the fruits of society are always for cooperators first. 

There must be severe limits on patience with takers.  A criminal, whatever their class, is put to death or exiled when society can no longer trust them to participate in the mission of the tribe.
Come to think of it, the United States could send thousands of its criminals to Cuba as they once did to the US.  If a tribe finds a neighbor weak and stupid enough to take in their unwanted exiles, why not use it against them?  Then, even the worst become useful as shock troops.
Or just have an actual island or an entire walled-off province where the exiles get a real second chance to build something.

The unprecedented abundance of the industrial revolution has led to such splendid rot that we house and feed people when they go on killing sprees and pat down our worker bees.  
The quick gains of the last two centuries are taken now and societies everywhere are reaching the point of saturation.  Where there is less insulation against reality provided by accumulated wealth, criminals and drug dealers are again being put to death rather than nicely hidden away from the common life.

No Going Back to the 1950s – And What Lies Ahead

Some who celebrate (or mourn) Trump’s victory seem to think we will return to the 1950s status quo.
That won’t happen as never in history has any other historical period been revived despite the best efforts of thousands of years of reformers.  Erasmus always loses and even a successful Diocletian or Constantine end up creating something new rather than bringing back the old.
What we are left with is to figure out where we’re at and where the forces in play will take us.

To begin with, a majority of marriage age adults are now single and I do not foresee the trend away from matrimony will change anytime soon.  In practice a society of “free love” leaves a majority of males making free love to their hands but everyone dreams of having multiple desirable partners, the fulfillment of which always seems to be just a few clicks away.  Though most people will mathematically end up losers, the lure of being a winner is just too good to pass up.  Besides, the old system just isn’t cool.
Customs of matrimony require centuries, if not millennia of traditional reinforcement to establish and once undone require the right forces to coalesce once more.  Matrimony is reinforced by a pre-industrial world where resources are much scarcer and the long term pooling of resources between males, females, and their families is necessary for survival.  Marriage isn’t fun and it never was for fun.  It’s all about preserving resources in hard times and providing support for offspring whose survival was uncertain even with the best possible care.  So long as most people feel confident they’ll at least be able to eat and that their illegitimate kids will survive, it won’t change.  The combination of a steady basic food supply with low hopes of property acquisition, and social atomization that discourages pooling of family resources is an especially potent combination of disincentives.
Marriage will become much like it used to be, an institution that mostly serves the needs of the propertied classes.

The religion of the 1950s is not coming back either.  Even back then, it had been going steadily downhill in influence for centuries.  Christian religion requires faith in abstractions that is difficult to maintain in a world where information on every subject is abundant.  From now on, Christianity will only be useful as a value system for the prole classes, never again as the ruling ideology of a society with mass modern communications.
From now on, spiritual feeling will revolve around symbols and symbolic people that make abstract social concepts tangible.  We are seeing already a return to idolatry.  As people once imagined earthly human hierarchies in heaven and hell, they will return to a more primitive mindset of regarding earthly human hierarchies as heavenly.  Many only somewhat ironically refer to President Trump as God-Emperor.  They all know he is just a man, but they associate the idea of God-Emperor with the social and political forces he represents, just as Zeus represents lightning storms and leadership of his pantheon, or Hades stands for the land of the dead and riches mined from the earth.  
It may seem absurd at first but for human minds that cannot rightly grasp the magnitude of a million people any more than the size of a galaxy, godhood is the best concept to describe those humans whose barest whims affect the lives of millions.
The primary purpose of spirituality will not be to legitimize a moral philosophy but as in the days of cavemen to usefully describe the ethereal social sphere through concrete metaphor.

The economy of the 1950s is not coming back either.  Trump will be doing the right thing by at least removing policies that make the problem even worse and buy us some time, but no one can change the underlying forces. Human labor will be ever less in demand as world economic growth becomes static.  The seemingly endless easy gains of the industrial revolution are coming to an end and we have been entering a sort of new dark age.
I have a saying “diversity is easy in times of plenty” because once you have a pie that’s either static or actually shrinking the need to survive combined with the extreme competitive pressures in a free sexual market reduces the whole world into two categories.
-People who increase your chances of securing scarce resources and social status.
-Everybody else.

The forces in play are pushing humanity back towards tight tribal associations.  We now see widening fault lines along ethnicity and class and that will continue—but ultimately determining allegiances will be complicated.  Especially as it becomes more permissible to analyze humans by intelligence and temperament just as if they were breeds of dogs, so will humans divide up by neurotype and form the basis of the tribe-state.

The basis of sovereignty will no longer be primarily by geographical territory, but by the existence of a group, the culture it shares, the wealth it controls, the political power it wields.  In any given state or city in the West there are representatives of every type of person we can imagine.  Secession as we once would have imagined it is impossible.  What we will end up with is nation-tribes doing business, making treaties, and when that fails making war, as often by buying up real estate and businesses or setting the doctrine in schools as by outright violence.

Right now, Trump is among the first generation of leaders of the Neo-Tribal dark ages.  He rose to power on class and ethnic loyalties with a persona of stripped of pleasantries appropriate to the norms of our more barbaric times.  He gives us a template of what leaders will look like from now on.  In a dark age, people believe leaders should have the biggest winning rather than the finest principles.  So from now on the people in charge will be aggressive, generous desert sheikhs flaunting the money and harems everyone else admires.  The most honorable man will be he who has many children, has slain many men in battle, and delivered bounties of plunder to his followers.  With the old social contract shredded to pieces the people will have no more patience for staid married family men who are frightened of saying anything mean.

The tears and screaming of Hillary supporters is not irrational.  They sense in their guts, correctly, that their social universe is going through the apocalypse.  The system they have devoted their entire lives to as virtuous cooperator acolytes with all its ritual jumping through credentialist hoops and saying the right things for status is beginning to crumble all around them.  They have massive investment and sunk costs all up in flames.  They do not even know of, cannot even begin to understand anything else.  Learning in one cataclysmic event that history does not always favor “progress” is like a sheltered true believer hearing someone say “God doesn’t exist” for the first time.  It is to face a horrifying void.  Against every doctrine they were ever taught once-invincible civilization is actually regressing.

We return to primitive norms because only the extreme pressures of civilization ever made us otherwise.  This is why civilizations always change overnight the moment people have enough wealth to have any alternative whatsoever.  Civilizations persist by keeping people secure enough but at bare subsistence enough that they cannot dream too far and therein lies its fatal weakness when confronted with the slightest taste of prosperity.  The real change this time, though, is the access individuals have to information—far more agile and orders of magnitude beyond what even the printing press could offer.  Societies both primitive and civilized require most people to be ignorant so they can be indoctrinated into irrational beliefs that hurt the individual while benefiting the whole.  The result of millions empowered to advocate in their own interests is a recipe for upheaval, and so we go forward into uncertain territory.

21st Century Nationalism Is Not The Nation-State

As we witness the rise of populist-nationalist reformers all around the world, there is much confusion about what this nationalism actually means.  I get the impression that many think they are going back to the nationalism of an earlier time, but there is no resurrecting the past.

What we have called nationalism is the philosophy of the nation-state that arose in the 1860s.  Whether in Italy, Japan, or America we saw a vast expansion of state power and centralization enabled by the industrial revolution era technologies like the railroad and the telegraph.  The basic idea was that the country was divided up into departments handled by groups of bureaucrats in the capital city.
Mass public education inculcated all the nation’s children in the same values and eradicated local dialects and languages in favor of the speech of the capital province.  Germany hadn’t been united in any meaningful way for about 1000 years, Italy not since the Roman Empire. Regions had distinct cultures and often spoke tongues that were not even mutually intelligible.

All those differences had to go so humanity itself could be reduced to standardized parts in the machine.  The 20th century with radio, television and its mass mindless herd wars marked the high tide of centralization.  What people like to call “globalism” is just a worldwide version of the 19th century style nation-state.  The present nationalism is actually a reaction to what they see themselves as continuing in some way!  No wonder they are confused about their identity!

The personal computer followed by internet has decentralized networks at a furious pace.  The 21st century is about unraveling the monoculture that has grown ever more uniform and dreary over the last 150 years.
Until modern communications, large clumsy bureaucracies always won.  Maybe 2 million men died because rubber stamps were put on the wrong forms, but the other 18 million would overwhelm the enemy.  In a world of telegraph and then radio there was no real counter to this zerg swarming strategy.

Now though, it is possible for even small, poorly equipped forces to outmaneuver clumsy centralized states indefinitely while inflicting a thousand paper cuts and letting the nation-state waste its energy throwing slow, painfully telegraphed punches at gnats until it gases out.  It’s like a claymation giant monster flailing around in vain to kill the heroes or Captain Kirk vs. the Gorn.  It’s a simple concept often called 4GW(4th generation warfare) to sound hip.
By the early 2000s poor Arabs with home-made road bombs could outmaneuver the richest empire in history.  In the 2010s smartphones lead to the Arab Spring and Occupy followed by the Islamic State.

What we are seeing is an increase in the size of 4G organizations until we are looking at something on the scale of nation state with the flexibility of a small organization.  As it matures, this kind of system obsoletes the 19th century bureaucracy-bound nation-state.
The nationalist vs. globalist struggle we see across the developed world is the clash of established nation-states with 21st century decentralized networks.  As soon as we understand this it’s clear why the establishment is on the wrong side of history and why in spite of their overhwelming power they can only flap about in furious teary rage as their world falls apart.  There is a Tao of the universe and those who try to fight it, no matter how mighty, only exhaust themselves.
The election of Trump is only the beginning of their woes as his momentum carries over and they find themselves under siege in Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, France, and even Germany.

There is a new age upon us but it will not be a peaceful age.  While steadily dwindling wealth remained above a certain line and there was a USSR to scare people, unity went without serious challenge.  Since the year 2000 or so we’ve sunk towards the next dark age with rapidly shrinking wealth, low trust, low innovation, and stringent orthodox persecution of heretical ideas. Furthermore, in a nation-state that treats everyone like replaceable parts from cradle to grave no one feels like they really belong or really matter.  They plug into an economy to crank out production points for most of their waking time alive with no purpose in sight.  This purpose vacuum was waiting for something to fill it and modern communication brought down a Berlin Wall built from bricks of mechanistic nihilism.

It comes as no surprise then that the new organizations arising are very much like tribes.  What others call nationalism I call neo-tribalism.  As always some will benefit from change while others perish.  An age of tribes promises to be a savage one defined by groups fighting over scarce resources in a world where most niches are already over-saturated.

The main discussion between allied emerging tribes right now is what uniting principles will define the new nation-tribe.  Some believe it is about a civic polity, those who can participate at a net benefit for the whole.  Others believe that ethnicity will be the core.
I think both are right about some things but neither grasps the whole truth.  Disembodied communication allows humans to associate by natural predisposition and neurotype.  Some tribes will form coalitions of mutually beneficial types and in those coalitions there will be hierarchies of tribes.  In time, the tribal coalition becomes a caste system.

Above all, this means the end is coming for enlightenment philosophy that reduces all questions of society to the individual.  In the future, society will not be treated as a machine made of atoms, but as an organism made of cells. Societies themselves will finally be seen correctly as competing organisms in the wild rather than lifeless structures that interchangeable atoms happen to occupy.

Sorting out the Castes: Testing for Delayed Gratification

Delayed gratification is one of the most important principles in dividing lower castes from higher.
The need for instant gratification is the eternal and unmistakable mark of low class, poverty, and despair.
If we want to know what kind of people live in a neighborhood, all we have to do is take one quick glance down and see if people are throwing their trash on the ground or in trash cans.  If we walk into a store is the liquor and baby formula out in the open or is it kept behind glass?  It shouldn’t be that difficult to evaluate individuals as we evaluate a neighborhood.

In general, as people get more intelligent the more they can understand the abstract concept that if everyone chooses to cooperate by passing up littering or shoplifting now everyone gets the greater reward of a pleasant community to live in and stores full of easily accessible goods later.
Even smart people with low character tend to pay for their groceries because they prefer to expend their energy on much more valuable prizes with lower risk over a much longer time. They don’t let small prizes distract them when they could be gutting people’s 401k accounts instead.
Stupid people with low character on the other hand distinguish themselves by taking huge risks for small, uncertain, temporary gains. Their inability to understand probability and calculate risk/reward always gives them away.
Some ability for delayed gratification and long term planning is an absolute prerequisite to move up into the middling to upper middling castes.

To move into the highest castes though, the ability to inhibit desires has to be extended to another degree of abstraction.
The highest people need to have the ability to care about a good beyond themselves, to consider the good of an entire people or even the species. They must care about events beyond their own lifetimes.
The ultimate act of delayed gratification and the mark of a high human is planting trees that will never give shade in our lifetimes.
Clever people of the middle castes, on the other hand, busily hoard away for college, a house, or retirement but have little thought beyond the narrow scope of their own parochial circumstances. Their inability to understand a bigger picture always gives them away.
I have met many clever upper middle class SWPLs who wallow in aimless hedonism but don’t have the moral intelligence to care what happens after they die nor the wisdom to understand why their poverty of purpose has left them cynical and jaded.  Perhaps even more upper middles indulge in saccharine feel-good idealism that helps break the ice and gives cheap social proof at cocktail parties.  They know well in the back of their minds they’ll never have to test their beliefs against the real world.  In fact, having to care about the real world is an indicator of boorishness in their insulated universe.  Being insulated in itself, of course, is the defining mark of petty nobility.
Our present system is heavily influenced by these characteristic upper middle attitudes. These are the people who thrive in the meritocracy of credentials, “networking”, “extracurriculars”, “fellowships”, and standardized tests. Ironically, those with greater vision and imagination are pretty effectively weeded out by their criteria.  This is why we need a formalized caste system, to cut through the bullshit of those people far enough above to dazzle the lower ranks, but not so high as to be completely unrelatable.
The rightful rulers, of course, should be unrelatable to the average person.

Sorting out the Castes: Testing How People Think

A quick data mining search could give us a rough idea where most people are at in the hierarchy, but the caste system, like a system of courts needs to judge people with a very high degree of accuracy to preserve the system’s legitimacy.
A lot of busywork could be eliminated with easy disqualifiers but this frees up greater effort for the rest.
For the next step, maybe a test or evaluation of some kind would be required. The goal might be to look for key indicators of someone’s psychology in a way that would be hard to fake. Or perhaps even start testing people when they are children and continue to test periodically. In this process we would look for accurate constants that could improve the data mining algorithm.

Tests would need to be focused more in determining how someone thinks as opposed to memorized knowledge in itself.
Perhaps some raven’s style matrices could be thrown in like on an IQ test or reading comprehension/analogies to get an idea of spatial and verbal reasoning but more important might be simply asking someone’s opinion.
The idea wouldn’t be to screen people based on what they believe, but to examine why they believe it. If someone explains they believe in invisible unicorns because of lack of falsifiability principle, however specious this may be we already know this isn’t someone from the lowest tiers.

-Simple people tend to hold beliefs for simple reasons. The USSR is bad because the Russians are the bad guys.

-Middle people have an idea of a conflict between communism and capitalism and will be able to explain the differences in basic detail, something along the lines of free enterprise against collective control. They can tell us why one is bad and why the other is good but their reasons will mostly be the official propaganda without too much thought behind it. If you ask them to explain what “free enterprise” actually means they begin to stumble.

-Upper Middle can delve into more nuance regarding why a communist ideology that sounds good in theory doesn’t work with human nature and begin to simultaneously examine the flaws inherent in capitalism as well. However, they are quite content that capitalism is at once the least of evils and the best of possible solutions. They are not too interested in exploring further.

-Above that level someone might dissect the weaknesses in both systems and ask what a better alternative might look like. They might be willing to entertain the idea that communism suffered from being too extreme and that perhaps certain forms of socialism have applied Marxist principles more successfully and might in fact be more effective in the long run than a free market system with minimal controls that allows corporations to run rampant. This person has a mind that can place themselves on both sides of the issue and toy with different solutions from a detached perspective.

In short:

-Simple people believe what they’re told because they were told it and everyone else believes it.

-Middle people believe what they’re told because it seems to make sense in their daily life and everyone else believes it.

-Upper middle believe what they’re told because it seems to make sense in a larger context, seems better than what anyone else has come up with, and because everyone important believes it.

-Above that level, people examine what they’re told in depth and come up with their own ideas if it doesn’t check out. Or if it’s generally valid but just sub-optimal, they still ponder better solutions. They don’t really care what others believe for its own sake. They know full well most people believe what they’re told or at least they rationalize belief in what gets them laid and employed.

I figure just getting an idea of how someone thinks would be hard to fake. Even if someone memorized what to say about one topic, they would be lost if the subject were to change. I figure like confucian East Asia, people would send their kids to cram academies to learn how to think, or at least how to talk like a higher person.
My experience tells me though that there’s only so much that can be learned. And if the highest ideal is what every ordinary person strove for, that would be the mark of a healthy and vigorous social order.

Results could be cross-checked against data mining information and if there’s an unusual or unlikely patterns, the bureau of caste standards might have auditors it could send out to take a closer look.
It occurs to me that once people knew there was a data mining algorithm and a testing system, people would constantly try to game the system. An auditor might try to figure out if someone just memorized what to say on several topics and changed their purchase history to reflect tastes they don’t actually have in a bid to “get ahead.” “Speeding tickets” for caste fraud would disincentivize trying to cheat because there’s nothing to lose by trying and drastically reduce auditors’ caseloads to manageable levels. The biggest deterrent of course is most people simply wouldn’t find life beyond their rightful caste attractive.
Ultimately, though, the people on top must really be smarter than those below or else they will fail at preserving the legitimacy and integrity of the system.

Sorting Out the Castes: Easy Disqualifiers

Within 30 seconds of looking at someone’s facebook, their room, a list of their favorite hobbies, what they’ve bought lately we get a rough sense of what type of person they are.  It’s possible we could be mistaken but generally quick judgments work.  In modern society we’re told we can’t accurately judge and categorize people but in reality it’s not only doable, it’s pretty easy.
In real life, it’s generally safe to assume that a passing frat bro is more into jack and coke and fireball whiskey than single malt scotch or that a black dude with baggy pants and expensive shoes isn’t a Babylon 5 fan.  That hipster sitting nearby at the coffee shop probably isn’t into nascar(unless he’s being “ironic”), the rugged looking man with the big pickup truck probably doesn’t listen to NPR.  There’s exceptions of course, but even very crude anecdotal stereotypes work most of the time in real life.  So it’s not that extraordinary to expect that we could sort people correctly at least 90% of the time with a very low amount of effort.  If it was broken down to more of a science, I figure people could be put in the right place almost all the time.
If all a system needs to do is sort people out better than the present system, that’s a pretty low bar.

Perhaps we start with easy disqualifiers:

-Regularly buys lottery tickets, gambles against the house.
-Regularly uses payday loans and maxes out credit cards without compelling emergency reasons.
-Buys products from infomercials, web ads, spam emails.
-Doesn’t understand basics of how government works.
-Doesn’t have a basic idea of or curiosity about nation or world outside of their area.
-Buys all junk food at the grocery store and over-indulges in it.
-Doesn’t read, watch, or listen to anything that isn’t light entertainment.
-Buys flashy cars and clothes they can’t afford.
-Hopelessly, non-functionally addicted to any drug they come into contact with.

People that meet these criteria demonstrate they lack critical thinking and judgment. They lack the brain power to understand how probability or compound interest works. They don’t have the impulse control to manage complex choices or delayed gratification. In our present system they are mercilessly parasitized and exploited and they’re fair game because we’re all “equal.” Sorted into their proper caste, kept away from all positions of responsibility, it would be understood they are inherently vulnerable to the clever and must be protected as an adult would protect children or animals.
A pretty simple computer algorithm could probably instantly remove at least the bottom 10-20% or so without having to give evaluations or examinations to millions of people. Just data mining people’s real life behavior could probably make the initial rough cuts.

Imagine just taking away the vote from the dumbest and most impulsive 10% or so of the US population. There would probably be massive systemic improvements and an upgrade in political discourse overnight as if by magic. Just ponder a moment the magnitude of this lowest-hanging fruit alone.
Just weeding out those obviously unfit for civic life and placing them in an undercaste alone opens up huge possibilities before we even get started.

A Fair Caste System

A caste system can only be just if most people perceive themselves as having a fair chance to find their rightful place in the social order.
In our current system, someone very bright and capable may simply come from a poor neighborhood and easily fall in between the cracks.  In many ways, “free” Western societies already have rigid arbitrary caste by birth but those in polite society and credulous schlubs who want to “get ahead” just make believe that it doesn’t exist and call the dividing rifts visible at once on any color-coded city map by any other name.
Westerners can play this game of make-believe simply because there are “soft” forms of enforcement rather than formalized prescriptions enshrined in law but the reality is the same.

I’ll begin with an example of one thing the present society gets right:  Public libraries in every neighborhood.  Anyone who’s curious has access to information.  Book stacks are a bit out of date, but I notice most libraries are reducing their collections and making room for computers. This is a move in the right direction. It should be obvious in the 21st century that free public access to the internet is essential to any society at all that wants to consider itself fair.
And of course lending of e-books helps untie public libraries even from physical location and the limitations of space.

There are some things that would have to change with public libraries/internet access. Disruptive people just looking for someplace warm, with no interest in knowledge do not belong there and would have to be thrown out, though someone clearly engaged might be allowed to spend the night. An upside of a lack of equalism is there would be a clear sense the venue exists in service of its proper patrons. Public computers perhaps ought to be in cozy booths so people could browse with a comfortable sense of privacy for long periods of time.
The book collections would need to be reworked. As they are now, public libraries are loaded mostly with popular fiction and light self-help books. A correct sort of public library would have a clearer mission: to provide everyone the same opportunities to access valuable information. These public libraries would not exist first to cater to the popular taste, but to give a route upward to those of potential in every neighborhood.
This would mean an emphasis on skills and disciplines, critical thinking, history, and philosophy. I remember distinctly how in my life the public library would never even have a single book on computer programming. Perhaps libraries gave up having books that were valuable and therefore got stolen!
Also these kinds of valuable books remain closely guarded by monopolies and tend to be strategically overpriced for students.

Reviving a common institution in the ancient world, public baths in every town could contribute to social fairness.
Once I was an adult taking care of myself, it was obvious rent was the expense that dwarfed all others. I immediately thought of reasons why an apartment was necessary. The first that came to mind was being able to take showers. It’s impossible to find and keep a job to get money without personal hygiene. That stood out as one of the top ways people can be forced into paying rent. It occurred to me that there are truck stops and swimming pool and healthclub memberships but this is a very limited infrastructure for something that should be available to everyone.
Public baths would make it so even people living out of their cars could stay clean and provide a place where people from all the castes to socialize in a relaxed atmosphere and establish a sense of social unity. It would be a blow to the power of rent-seekers.

Another institution would be to set aside abundant public land in key locations for tent occupancy or even makeshift houses rented at a pittance. Also important would be free/cheap long term parking spaces for cars and RVs. Only people of good character and social standing would be granted permits to use these resources. These would not be allowed to become free zones of underclass misery. The main purpose would be to create a safety valve for decent people and an indirect price control on rents. I suppose wages would adjust to rents but that would be fine if it meant more of society’s effort went into productive activity. Most important I think, would be to establish the principle that being without money isn’t effectively a crime like it is now, at least for people with a basic level of conscientousness. For it to work, those who would trash the commons have to be shown their place.

A caste system is going to be most stable if the state makes an honest effort to sustain its people. Possibly guaranteed minimum income for people who are a decent risk for society to invest in. For lower class people who probably are stable where they’re at, perhaps guaranteed minimum food at least.
This society already has EBT cards but does it all wrong. Those who come to the state for food don’t decide what they get to eat, they take what they are given. It sends all the wrong messages when people with foodstamps can load their grocery carts with freezer food and snack cakes. There would be no wasting public money on luxury junk foods. In a smarter system they might get 50 lb. bags of rice, potatoes, or flour with some rations of fresh food and meat as decided on by the system. Whatever most cheaply keeps people healthy who are only going to produce a minimal return on investment.

Then there is the problem of those who are very likely to always be a net drain on society. Our current caste system imprisons a few million, the bottom 1% or so of defectors at enormous expense.
A fair caste system would strive to invest as little as possible in disruptive people and direct that wealth into good investments. Imagine if the money to care for a prisoner for a year was instead used to pay for education for a bright and promising young cooperator. It undermines the social order when an inmate lives a lifestyle that costs 50,000 dollars a year while many hard-working people on the outside live far more meagerly. For the masses to be content with lower to mid-caste, they have to feel they are granted a certain status and level of social investment just by virtue of being cooperators. It must be clear to everyone that even the smallest contributor lives in a category far above criminal defectors who drain society’s precious wealth.

I could imagine “reservations” instead of expensive prisons. The prison population is already a small country. They could really be given their own country. This would require substantial land, perhaps islands, but it would be a zone totally free of public investment and thereby prevent destructive people from becoming a perpetual drain on everyone else. Those who would destroy the public wealth would be set free to create wealth for themselves if they can and if their regions were nasty hellholes, it would be the natual justice after a fashion. In our existing system, city areas allowed to become ghettoes already informally serve a function kind of like this.
Of course, we could keep this more simple and do what many other nations do, encourage unwanted people to simply move to someone else’s country. Hapless egalitarian Western democracies, for example, serve as a worldwide dumping ground for other countries’ criminals and underclass when they could have just sat back and benefited from brain drain while keeping poor investments out.
Finally, in a crowded world with scarce resources there’s the simple fact that there is a time for the very simple solution of executions to make a clear and unequivocal statement to the masses that some behaviors will not be tolerated.

The problem with enlightenment social philosophy is that human social life isn’t just a game of high ideas. Human lives aren’t of unlimited value, most of us have to produce more than we consume or else we die. In real life, societies are like competing organisms in nature or like businesses in the marketplace. Groups that can capture wealth and then use it wisely are those that come out on top. Those that can’t get conquered or wiped out. So an effective society must embrace these realities. A fair caste system means life is very harsh, and possibly very short for those who try to destroy but on the flip side cooperators get to enjoy many nice things they can never have in a low-trust system that treats everyone the same.

A Just Caste System

When we think of caste, we think of people predestined into social roles by birth.  There naturally will be a degree of rough correlation—children tend to be like their parents, but not enough to ensure justice in a social system.  One ends up with plenty of capable people who in a fair system would rise above the confines of an arbitrary caste and the entire society suffers a loss of potential from this inefficiency.  Worse, a degenerate ruling caste becomes less competent than nominally lower orders and the system loses its legitimacy altogether.
But a society that eschews delusional equalism naturally recognizes the true differences in talents and capabilities among humankind.  In time the emergent natural categories are institutionalized into a just caste system.
Though these castes would not be determined by birth, it would be clear to most people by young adulthood where they belong.  There would be no decade long extension of childhood like we have now.  A correct society would help each person get on the best path for them and refuse to waste time.

I reflect on my own life and realize that all the advice from social institutions, my parents and family, adults, teachers, popular entertainment, the media—every single thing I was ever taught was catastrophically wrong or even outright lies about every aspect of life from dating to employment. I had to spend years unlearning it all—years that could have been spent productively instead. I still feel betrayed. I understand that the world changed rapidly but I will always remember the smug complacency, the inability to tell the truth under the smothering pall of political correctness, the lack of effort to understand the new stressors and try to set up a young generation for success in life.
I have been successful at many of my goals, but in spite of the social order, not because of it.
That failed society has forever destroyed my trust and lost the mandate of heaven.

When I have met people who were taught values in childhood that help them succeed real life, I notice they carry on their parents’ traditions. They feel natural loyalty to a social system that has always benefited them.
I have especially watched the families of Mexicans and other cohesive ethnic groups. One of the first things that always struck me was the uniformity of custom and clothing in their groups compared to what I was used to in White society. I didn’t see rebellion and resentment, youthful or otherwise. Whether people were working high or low jobs didn’t matter. These people always seemed content where they were at.
As I unlearned the delusions I’d grown up with, it became clear to me, that these people were content because they were in the roles that suited their nature and were given the life wisdom relevant to their lot. Everywhere I went, those who were cultivated according to their nature were stable and content, those taught against natural justice were miserable and rebellious.

I was a first wave millennial born in the early 80s to boomer parents. I was meant from birth to go to college, all the adults patronizingly told me it didn’t matter what I got a degree in. At age 18, knowing nothing else, I went like a lamb to the slaughter and have paid the price ever since. There was some truth to their advice, for a certain personality type going to a certain type of school. But someone with even slightest judgment of character could have seen in about 2 minutes that I didn’t have the social skills or extroverted personality required to succeed on that path. The older generations would always say with a patronizing smile that you’ll understand as you get older. But the more I have learned of life, the more I understand how foolish, greedy, and unwise they were.

Once I graduated college, that was it. The track ended, suddenly no one in society had anything more to tell me after 21 years of sanctimonious blather. I was left to sink or swim as I might. I reinvented the wheel as I had to, learning everything the hard way. I was like a hunter gatherer trying to find food for the first time as an adult. My entire youth was a waste, irrelevant to everything in my life yet to come.
I only began to succeed in life when I threw all the wrong ways away and started to navigate according to my nature and played to my strengths on the battlefield never fighting up hills, always contriving to defend a hill against the enemy. It’s that unforgiving kind of life that taught me the real solutions to problems aren’t always the ones that sound nice. The only thing that matters is what works.

A caste system doesn’t sound nice to Western sensibilities but in my experience with people from all walks of life, something like it is what works. Our unstructured system of atomized individuals doesn’t work. Humans, like dogs require structure and leadership, especially when we are young and know nothing.
I was just one of millions of young men left with no tribal initiation and no role, left to exist unacknowledged like ghosts among the living. Thinking back on those content Mexicans I realize even a completely arbitrary caste system that assigned me and my descendants to clean toilets for life would have given a more stable existence than the “free” system that left me for dead.

See Also: The Masses Crave Discipline

Pre-Politically Correct History: Eugenics and Hindu Caste

“The caste system had the eugenic value of keeping the presumably finer strains from dilution and disappearance through indiscriminate mixture; it established certain habits of diet and cleanliness as a rule of honor which all might observe and emulate; it gaver order to the chaotic inequalities and differences of men, and spared the soul the modern fever of climbing and gain; it gave order to every life by prescribing for each man a dharma, or code of conduct for his caste; it gave order to every trade and profession, elevated every occupation into a vocation not lightly to be changed, and, by making every industry a caste, provided its member with a means of united action against exploitation and tyranny. It offered an escape from the plutocracy or the military dictatorship which are apparently the only alternatives to aristocracy; it gave to a country shorn of political stability by a hundred invasions and revolutions a social, moral and cultural order and continuity rivaled only by the Chinese.”

Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage, 1935

Despite all the flaws and cruelty we’ve seen come from the Hindu caste system there’s something to be said for making sure people spend more time getting things done rather than putting all their energy into competing for status.
Also, compared to the constant uncertainty of existence in our own society there is something to be said for being born into a trade union that has real leverage.

Though we must be mindful of the sort of strife that is typical in Indian society, surely there are important lessons to learn from them as well. Lessons that can put the barbarous excesses of our own system in perspective.

Finally, results matter. Hindu society has proven far more stable for far longer than our own.

Another Excerpt on Hindu Caste and Eugenics from 1927