--- #TODO - **Mongol empire (13th c.):** The apex of step-born conquest—contiguous rule from the Sea of Japan to Hungary, subjugating populations a hundred times their own size through mobility, discipline, and terror. - **Demographic and economic cataclysm:** Mongols (Genghis Khan: ~40 M killed; Tamerlane: ~15 M) and later Turkic-Mamluk raids devastated Persia, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Russia—crippling the old heartlands of global trade and opening the way for Europe’s Renaissance and “age of discovery.” - **Parasitic yet cosmopolitan nexus:** Nomads depended on farmer-states, acting as Silk Road merchants and religious brokers; their tolerance was strategic, not humanistic. - **Dynastic and civilizational cycles:** Drawing on Ibn Khaldūn–style and Turchin’s work, herding polygamous dynasties collapse in ~120 years, half the time of monogamous farmer empires—reflecting the “hard-men to decadence to disturbance” cycle. - **Gunpowder pacification:** By the 17th c., firearms let farmer-states (China, Russia) conquer and settle the step—ending its barbarian spawn-point role and subsuming it into colonial empires. - **Cultural aftershocks:** The “former Mongol Empire” region (Russia, China, Central Asia, Iran, Pakistan) still bears authoritarian, clan-based, shame-oriented norms—echoes of the step’s imperative for collective defense against “demons from the grasslands.” - **Mongol “universal empire” (13th c.):** Mongolia’s high-altitude steppes, the harshest frontier, produced the toughest warriors—able to subdue China, Persia, Russia, Hungary and beyond. Geography forged a template of shock-cavalry conquest unrivaled until modern firearms. - **Nomads as Silk Road brokers:** Despite ruinous sackings, pastoral tribes kept the arteries of world-trade open—moving goods, ideas, religions (Buddhism, Islam, Nestorian Christianity) across deserts and mountains. - **Parasitic symbiosis:** The steppe “ate” the vigor of farmer societies by extracting tribute and talents, even as it depended utterly on agrarian surpluses for food, textiles, metallurgy. - **Cyclical dynastic collapse:** Polygamous steppe states cycled every ~120 years—half the monogamous farmer norm—because geography imposed low density and high mobility, driving both rapid expansion under a warlord and equally swift fracturing under his heirs. - **Gunpowder’s reversing tide:** Once firearms spread, the same open plains that empowered cavalry became their grave—wide vistas offered no cover, so Tsarist Russia and Ming/Qing China were able to settle and pacify the step by the 17th c. - **Cultural afterlife:** Even today, former-Mongol realms share clan-based loyalties, shame-cultures, and strong-man authority—the lingering imprint of geography that still defines their political economy. - **Black Death’s reset** (McNeil, _Plagues and Peoples_) McNeil’s epidemiological narrative shows how the mid-14th-c. plague ravaged both farming populations and nomadic caravans—weakening steppe confederacies and precipitating the end of Pax Mongolica, just as it galvanized Europe toward labor reform and social upheaval. - **Rise of gunpowder states** (Gat; Keegan) Both Azar Gat and John Keegan chart how matchlocks and cannons neutralized steppe cavalry supremacy by the 16th century—reordering the Eurasian balance of power in favor of centralized agrarian empires (Ming, Ottoman, Tsarist). - **World-system transition** (Morris, _War! What Is It Good For?_) Ian Morris argues that the early modern shift from Eurasia’s inland network to Atlantic-centered trade was powered by Europe’s new naval gunpowder empires, themselves forged on centuries of frontier-honed military innovations. - **Cultural Darwinism and civilizational decline** (Turchin, _War and Peace and War_) Peter Turchin applies cliodynamics to show how steppe raids periodically “cull” agrarian elites—favoring more warlike communities, then leading to overcentralization and eventual collapse, a pattern seen in Islamic, Mughal, Qing, and Russian imperial histories. - **Legacy of Mongol meritocracy** (Weatherford; Iggulden) Both Jack Weatherford and Conn Iggulden’s novels highlight how Genghis Khan’s reward-by-merit system (yassa laws) undercut old aristocracies—an institutional innovation that would reappear in later firearms armies and even modern bureaucracies. Western civilization, which emerged ~1400's (transition from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Europe, characterized by renewed interest in classical antiquity and a surge in artistic, intellectual, and scientific endeavors), has three major influences Roman, Christian and Germanic. Arguably america also has african influences (from their slaves), and the rus have slavic influences. Renaissance laid the groundwork, the Early Modern period (roughly 1600-1800) is often seen as the period where Western civilization began to truly shape the world through the Scientific, Political, and Economic Revolutions. ## Colonialism and The New World The effects of colonialism are really big and complicated around the world, but from the West's perspective, the big conquests of areas like Asia and Africa didn't really have big effects on the West itself. The big effects on the West itself due to colonialism were mostly in the New World. There were two big effects, the first of which was the introduction of New World crops that allowed industrialization. The only way the massive German and British factory cities could survive was because of the introduction of potato from the Peruvian Andes. Similarly, the huddled masses of Leeds and Liege were fed from the fields of Argentina and Kansas. However, the bigger effect and the thing that ended up being decisive to Western civilization was the colonization of temperate North America, or the U.S. and southern Canada. This allowed the West to more than double its land size and expand its population at more than 50%. Oceania is the other area that was introduced to the West, but its combined population is less than 40 million, which means it remains demographically insignificant. The European settlement of North America was one of the weirdest events in history. The native population died at a 90 percent rate to disease, and then a totally different population showed up, bred like rabbits, and spread across the whole continent from the Appalachians to the Pacific in less than a century without really changing its social structure. The big shift that resulted from the peopling of America was to shift the internal balance in Western civilization away from the continent to the British civilization. For most of Western history, Britain was a developed country, but it was a shrimp. In 1600, it had a population of 4 million, while greater Germany and France each had 20 million. Now, English speakers are by far the largest Western group, with the population pushing up against 400 million, more than twice the next largest European group, the Russians, and far ahead of the next more strictly defined Western group, the Germans. Civilizations always get unified by a continental, highly militaristic, often pseudo-fascist, bureaucratic state. Groups like Macedon, the Assyrians, the Chin, Tsarist Russia, and the Inca, etc. By those standards, Prussian Germany or, secondarily, Russia should have unified the West during the World Wars, and that nearly happened, but America was there. Britain's value system of democracy, liberalism, capitalism, etc. makes sense for a small mercantile island nation, but for a continental nation, you need to have a strong military at all costs so you don't get conquered. What happened with America was that it faced so little military competition from the Native Americans that it was able to expand across North America while maintaining a British social structure with British freedoms. America was able to get all the benefits of a wealthy island nation at the scale of a continent. America became so huge and wealthy that it had no competition inside the West and became the dominant power. I guess a good comparison would be: what if Carthage colonized Brazil, used all the people that settled there to beat the Romans and conquer the Mediterranean, spreading their weird system of democracy and capitalism? The American empire is a weird one, with a weird confederacy over Europe that's really an empire, but no one involved wants to admit it, held together by not-really-functioning legal identities like the World Bank and EU, all of which honestly make sense given the West's history. The US is almost a reluctant superpower, which is honestly a decently common thing across history, and half-asses a lot of its empiring, alternating between blowing up opponents and forgetting they exist. In total, a strange empire. The future of the American imperial West is complicated and a topic we'll cover at some point in the future. ## The West's Weakness For a couple hundred years, it was very difficult to find any real weakness in the West. The West was so dominant in practically any field, whether military, agricultural, medical, government, science, etc. However, after World War One, the West started to show its own weaknesses, and like Aristotle said, one's greatest strength, when pushed to its extreme, becomes one's greatest weakness. Before the World Wars, the West believed in its own racial, moral, religious, and civilizational superiority. This allowed the massive amounts of wealth and power the West had to be tolerable, even exciting. However, after the Holocaust, trenches, Charles Darwin, and seeing the Japanese and Russians beat Westerners, these became impossible to believe in. Without a God to forgive them, the guilt became intolerable. The West's guilt-based individualist system that had taken them so far had finally become a liability. *Explanations:* - Charles Darwin: The world makes sense without Christianity, The soul doesn't exist. - WWl: A Thousand years of social progress was shoved down the drain. Man remained savage after so much attempted civilizing. - Holocaust: The supposedly most advanced and racially developed people in the world committed the worst barbarism possible. - Japanese victories: Being White did not confer superiority. Other peoples were just as intelligent and developed. *Note: In this context, merged with our own modern reality of the westernization of south east Asia, one can begin to see how holocaust denial slots in the last piece of the puzzle of this neo-narrative. If the asians were actually just our brothers in trade, than their civility makes sense, and the fact that we would lose is negligible. Further, if the holocaust never actually happened, or didn't happen to the extent it was reported, or whatever variation of this you find acceptable to believe, than the west all along was superior, and only lost due to an internal enemy, a lower class we decided to shelter. ~note how this mimics the [[Mimetic Desire → Rivalry → Crisis → Scapegoat → Sacrifice → Myth → Ritual#The Mechanism of Scapegoating|classic scapegoating]] [[1HE - Seed & Blood - (9,000–8,000 BCE)#Proto-Morality, Slavery and Scapegoating| dialect in 1HE.]]* The heart of the issue is that without the Christian bedrock that's existed for all of Western history, there isn't a moral structure that can justify doing anything, and so the act of doing anything is viewed negatively by the envious. Without the idea of the afterlife, communism becomes a way to redress inequalities in the real world, the irony being those inequalities have to exist or everyone will be a lot poorer. Romanticism is a way of dealing with the lack of meaning given to us by enjoying life, but romanticism easily collapses into emotionality and depression when you have to face that most of life for most people is depressing and boring. Similarly, modern neoliberalism is about making people richer as fast as possible, but pushing for more money as fast as possible without any other criteria is a great way to fuck up your society really fast. One of the strangest things about the British-American world order is it's one of the few empires that cares about morality. I can't imagine the Assyrians, Prussians, or Mughals really caring if their conquered peoples practiced slavery. And killing villagers was just a nasty thing you had to do to prevent rebellions and keep the empire running. The Americans, meanwhile, killed half a million of their own people in a civil war for the express purpose of ending slavery in their own country, while the British campaigned to end slavery across the world after abolishing it themselves. This doesn't even include stuff like trying to expand personal freedoms among the subjects of their empires and trying to respect war rights and not kill civilians—stuff only the Anglo-American order and countries neighboring it have tried to do. The West has done absolutely awful things in its history, but it's also the only society that's felt guilty about it and tried to change. Interestingly enough, however, its own worst critics are its own citizens. Many citizens of the West hate everything the West does. The modern West is basically the only society ever that institutionally flagellates itself. Western governments fund artists that want to tear down those governments. Young people imitate criminals to show off their masculinity. The system that trains people to be in the leadership, the universities, trains them to also be disloyal to their own societies. From the perspective of any other society or any other era in history, this is absolutely bizarre. Without the shared belief structure that came from Christianity, there's no shared positions that anyone can agree on. This means that anything big like waging wars, figuring out an economic policy, figuring out what should go in education, just doesn't work because no one can agree on a shared value system. The West has been wealthy enough for the last 80 years; it's basically just been able to ignore these deep questions and push them into the future, but that future is becoming now. These amount to an existential crisis for the West. Declining birth rates, which are heavily correlated with declining religiosity, fuck a population by aging and removing youthful energy and more people. If the West can't wage offensive war and a majority of the West has no desire to fund any military, it's effectively tying its own hands behind its back against more brutal opponents like Russia and China. If every vector of Western culture hates the West, after a couple generations, no sense of cultural unity will be left. Legendary German historian Oswald Spengler once described Western civilization as Faustian, in that it traded an easy understanding of the world for looking for the truth and thus got an incredible amount of power. Nietzsche once said that you can judge a man by how much truth he can handle. The West looked for truth and probably saw more than was healthy for our society. It saw a world where there's no real evidence for God, where you can still get the barbarity of the trenches after centuries of improvement, where the only law that exists is cruel Darwinism, and a single supernova could wipe out life in an instant. Western man, believing he was guided by God towards greater and greater glory, slunk back into depression in his lonely apartment and hated that he ever tried in the first place, hating only those who still had the courage to try even more. Everything is uncertain, but in my opinion at least, the one thing that can keep the West alive and keep it going is faith—not even faith in God, but faith in our own ability to exist and do good. --- ## The Specter of Apocalypse (1,900 - 2,000) ![[Franz von Stuck - Wilde Jagd (The Wild Hunt) (1889).webp]] *Painted decades before World War I - 1889* The painting which inspired Hitler depicts a mythic apocalypse, the breakdown of order under the assault of primal forces, a Dionysian eruption heralded by Wotan, the embodiment of pure power. Observe the figures swept along, drowned in currents of the hunt's mimetic contagion. Their individuality lost in the collective madness, envoys of pure animalistic horror and desire. The power depicted here is not one of reason, it's an elevated Rousseauian bastardization, a will forcing itself on the world. It is primal, an almost demonic authority wearing the face of man. Wotan *commands* the storm, the beasts, the souls. A product of the zeitgeist witnessing the death of god, and in it's place, the rise of mass movements, nationalism, and the cult of personality, forces that would soon engulf Europe. > Götterdämmerung "Twilight of Gods." It refers to the final destruction of the gods in Germanic mythology. Figuratively, it has come to describe any cataclysmic event marked by extreme violence and destruction. Richard Wagner famously used the term as the title of the last opera in his Ring cycle, further popularizing it. --- ### When Man Learned to Split the Skies ![[CastleBravo2.gif]] The culmination of the "Baconian project" – the relentless drive to master nature – was Los Alamos. Nuclear weapons represented a power so immense, so potentially self-destructive, that it fundamentally altered humanity's relationship with technological progress. The "dark dimension" of science became undeniable, and thus began the disillusionment with technological and scientific progress. This fear, internalized over decades in the collective psyche, bred a deep-seated risk aversion. Progress, once inherently good, became potentially catastrophic. The environment, bio-weapons, AI – all carry this apocalyptic fear, a change in the fundamental 'Language' used to understand progress. ![[Castle_Bravo_nuclear_test_(cropped).jpg]] Faced with the terrifying potential of the external world of atoms they had reshaped, society turned inward. Through explorations into yoga, meditation, psychedelics, identity politics, even video games, the manifestations appear from this shift of "outer space" to "inner space." It's a move away from manipulating the physical world towards exploring or escaping into subjective experience and abstraction. The digital world of bits offered a seemingly safer, more contained realm for innovation, an escape valve.  - **Unleashed Mimesis:** As traditional structures (religious, social) weakened (a process Thiel implies Christianity itself paradoxically initiated by revealing the scapegoat mechanism), human imitation became less channeled. This fuels dynamism but also rivalry and status competition ("looking around," envy). - **Loss of Transcendence:** Without a vertical reference point (God), focus shifts horizontally – to peers, rivals, what others have (the Tenth Commandment violation: coveting). This breeds the "unhealthy status competition" Thiel sees rampant in late modernity. The digital world, particularly social media, becomes an accelerator for this mimetic envy and status jockeying. - **Scapegoating Science/Christianity:** Thiel notes the irony: early modernity (allegedly) blamed Christianity for hindering science; late modernity blames it for starting the dangerous project ("dominion over the earth"). The constant is the need for a scapegoat, but the target's alleged crime flips, revealing more about the accuser's anxieties than the accused. Science itself shifts from hero to potential villain in the popular narrative. - **Ossification:** Thiel touches on regulation and bureaucracy but sees them more as symptoms or contributing factors enabled by the deeper shift, rather than the primary cause. Hyper-specialization makes systemic critique difficult – the "pin factory on steroids" hides the big picture. "[We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.](https://www.atomicarchive.com/media/videos/oppenheimer.html) I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that one way or another." - [[Julius Robert Oppenheimer - The American Prometheus]] > Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. > - विष्णु When Vishnu said "I am death destroyer of worlds," he was showing a Young Prince why it was his duty to kill in war even though he did not want to. Vishnu brought him on a great journey across the cosmos showing him millions of years of History, a million suns, and the vastness of the cosmos. ![[辰露-辰露-Vishnu-2024.jpg]] imagine if you took someone from 200 years ago and they were shocked by all the technological advancement of our times and all the wealth we have, but then we'd have to explain to them how our entire civilization hung under [[The Sword of Damocles]]. *Note: Most nuclear weapons of the modern age are still relatively concentrated, even those of the larger variety, would likely require multiple to fully "wipe out" our modern cities. That is to say, life in general is incredibly resilient, even the fall out and radiation wouldn't be enough to fully stub humanity, though it would undoubtably be a horrific tragedy. It's also worth noting that modern simulations say that "1 billion dead due to fallout and nuclear winter" projected by Cold-War era models, is not only inaccurate, but likely negligible, having no effect on both the large human population, and environment. I am not pro-nuclear war, In fact I am the opposite, but as we enter a new era, you must adopt the perspective of those with power, rather than the larger collective conscious. Furthermore, the political fallout from using nuclear weapons alone would be enough to dissuade those in power from using them, at least for now, as India and Pakistan remain an area of contention. The American Nukes on the Japanese were specifically devastating due to the wooden construction, burns, and psychological impact. However, the previous American fire bombings of Tokyo took more lives in a single run, than a single nuclear warhead did.* In many nuclear war scenarios, small countries could just shrug off the pain and keep going. It's pretty common in the pre-modern world for countries to sustain horrifying losses during wars. Even though the Black Death was a huge factor, France's population in 1420 was half of what it was in 1350. Over the course of the Hundred Years War, Germany lost one-third of its population in the 30 Years War, and China was the same with the Mongol and Manchu invasions. Rome lost a majority of its male upper class in the Second Punic Wars. These countries all kept their national identities, stayed unified, and rebuilt pretty quickly. There is a certain difference in how urbanized the industrial world is, however. In most countries, if you nuke the major cities, that's 80+ percent of the population, compared to the pre-industrial world where 90% of the population was rural and grew their own food. A big reason Mao Zedong was so liberal with nukes was China was so rural it would be hard to kill that many Chinese at the time through nuclear warfare. I think there's a very possible scenario where a nuclear war today causes mass civilizational collapse like the fall of Rome, and a big reason why is that people today are totally dependent upon food grown very far away, and a nuclear war like this would cause major collapses in the supply chain system. The worst part of nuclear wars, in my opinion, are actually biological weapons. I've read enough history that disease really, really scares me, given it easily killed a hundred times as many people as war in the pre-modern world. Not all the Russian nuclear warheads pointed at America during the Cold War were carrying nuclear bombs; some were biological. The Russians had genetically engineered a version of the Black Death and a couple others that modern science was immune to that they were willing to fire on America in a war. It would be so ironic and so true to our character if we humans beat the horrifying plagues of the pre-modern world only to let the genie out of the bottle again ourselves. You can't keep Pandora from opening the box or even from eating the fruit of knowledge, I guess. --- All eight modern family‐types from the transcript converge here into global ideologies: 1. **Exogamous Communitarian → Communism** - Authority, discipline, absolute patriarchal residue made centralized atheistic collectivism resonate in Russia, China, Eastern Europe, Cuba and N. India. 2. **Endogamous Communitarian → Islamism** - Clan-sealed worldviews and literal scripture spurred both medieval caliphates and modern Islamic theocracies; strong in-group solidarity, legalism, and gender-status norms persist. 3. **Authoritarian Family → Fascism/Nationalism** - Old-son inheritance and warrior ethos underwrote 20th-century fascist regimes in Germany, Japan, Franco’s Spain—and still inform hyper-nationalist movements. 4. **Egalitarian Nuclear → Revolutionary Liberalism** - Freedom + equality tension fueled the French Revolution, Latin American upheavals, and persistent oscillations between populist demagogues and technocrats. 5. **Absolute Nuclear → Liberal Capitalism** - Atomized parent‐child households of the Anglosphere (and the Netherlands, Scandinavia) fostered the world’s first multiparty democracies, laissez-faire markets, and global hegemony. 6. **Asymmetric Family → Southern Indian Exception** - Matrilineal/cousin-marriage systems in Kerala and Bengal produced India’s only stable, democratic Communist governments and a vibrant tech sector—uniquely breaking every rule. 7. **Anomic Family → Fragile States of SE Asia & New World** - Without strict kinship law, Bronze-Age polities (Egypt, Babylon, Inca) fell easily; today, Southeast Asian regimes hover between military rule and weak civilian authority. 8. **Flexible Family → Polygamy-Driven Violence in Africa** - Clan-and-polygamy networks yielded historic tribal warfare, modern civil wars, and today still shape HIV-AIDS patterns, state formation, and the slow rise of centralized authority. ### Cultural Evolution and Sexual Attitudes - After 1500 CE, the arrival of syphilis in Europe dramatically changed sexual attitudes. Societies across Eurasia invested heavily in controlling sexual behavior and keeping it within marriage to prevent the spread of this disease that caused insanity and death. This marked a major shift from medieval attitudes, which were sometimes more relaxed about sexuality. (Reference: _Sex and Power in History_ by Amaury de Riencourt) - The mainstream "traditional" sexual norms we recognize today largely come from the urban middle classes of the 18th and 19th centuries, who viewed prudish attitudes toward sex as a way to distinguish themselves from the lower classes and escape the "viscerally disgusting and filthy nature of the cities they lived in." (Reference: _Sex and Power in History_ by Amaury de Riencourt) ### Economic and Social Patterns - Throughout history, inflation has followed a cyclical pattern that can predict social collapses occurring approximately every 250 years. (Reference: _The Great Wave_ by David Hackett Fischer) - The "Greek miracle" of Aristotle, Plato, Xenophon, and Pericles is comparable to the Western achievements between 1850-1950, which included settling the American West, ending slavery, reducing disease and poverty, defeating multiple tyrannies, and advancing from cavalry charges to nearly landing on the moon. (Reference: _The Rise of the West_ by McNeil) - Four migrations from the British Isles during the colonial period created the cultural foundation of modern America, explaining many of its enduring cultural characteristics and regional differences. (Reference: _Albion's Seed_ by David Hackett Fischer) ### War and Civilization - War has been one of the primary drivers of technological progress throughout history. Examples include the development of antibiotics (driven by World War I), which saved 120 million lives - eight times the death toll of that war and twice the casualties of World War II. (Reference: _War in Human Civilization_ by Azar Gat) - Homogeneous nations like Sweden, South Korea, Japan, and Finland have historically been among the most successful and richest countries, while diverse societies have typically been autocratic empires where elites from one or two ethnic groups ruled over others (Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Roman, Mughal, Spanish empires). (Reference: _Conquests and Cultures_ by Thomas Sowell) ### Right-Left Brain Dynamics - The division between right and left hemispheres of the brain significantly influences human nature and society. This neurological split shapes how cultures develop and how individuals process information. (Reference: _The Master and His Emissary_ by Ian McGilchrist) ### Social Changes and Gender Dynamics - Women entering the workforce en masse has been the single biggest factor in depreciating wages over the last 50 years, more significant than immigration or globalization. This has created a situation where most couples with both parents working struggle to afford children, unlike the 1980s when a single father could support a stay-at-home wife and multiple children. (Reference: _Sex and Power in History_ by Amaury de Riencourt) - Women have become less happy as they've entered the workforce, with working women and those who work more hours reporting lower happiness levels. Countries with lower female labor participation show higher female happiness. (Reference: _Lost Connections_ by Johann Hari) - Children raised in daycare show "significantly higher anxiety, much worse attachment and ability to maintain relationships, and higher depression" compared to those raised primarily by their mothers. (Reference: _Lost Connections_ by Johann Hari) ### Genetic and Intelligence Factors - Intelligence is between 50-80% genetic, and "modern western societies are relatively meritocratic" with the "main road to wealth and influence [being] good grades and passing tests." This creates a selection pressure for intelligence. (Reference: _The Laws of Human Nature_ by Robert Greene) - IQ measures something real and important but not "full intelligence." The Flynn Effect (where IQ scores rise over time) conflicts with evidence of declining language complexity in public discourse, suggesting IQ isn't capturing all aspects of intelligence. (Reference: _The Righteous Mind_ by Jonathan Haidt) ### Political and Cultural Observations - The bureaucracy has become the dominant force running modern society, with middle management and bureaucracy expanding greatly as women entered the workforce, wanting "more order and less rough competition." (Reference: _Leviathan and Its Enemies_ by Samuel Francis) - A demographic crisis is coming that will determine which countries rise and fall in the next era. (Reference: _Disunited Nations_ by Peter Zeihan) - The psychological foundations of politics are rooted in moral intuitions rather than rational arguments. Different political orientations emerge from different moral foundations. (Reference: _The Righteous Mind_ by Jonathan Haidt) - Depression and mental health issues in modern society stem from disconnection from natural human needs and social structures. (Reference: _Lost Connections_ by Johann Hari) --- Western philosophy is obsessed with forming a logical premise then encapsulating the whole world inside of it, but that's too primitive a view of the world. This premise then purposely ignores any information that disagrees with it, which is like the opposite of the scientific method. Look at post-modernism, which says all social relationships relate to power and then says anyone who disagrees with it is just a tool of the oppressive powerful. Western philosophy only survives since the vast majority of the citizens in western countries are Christian—an emotional, humble philosophy that's counterbalanced the hubris of western philosophy. Whenever philosophy is given full reign without religion, it results in the deaths of millions as philosophers try to build utopias. Ideologies are philosophies trying to take the place of religions. The philosopher mocks religion as outdated and then builds an entire theory of life around capital, communes, the nation, or social justice, and then adds an "ism" with the worldview that simple and easy—the junk food of religions. It attracts the most unscrupulous and evil who hide behind the easy messaging. When you compare it to eastern philosophy, which was so successful that it became a religion, it totally dominated societies. You see a far more healthy and holistic look embracing emotion, society, and man's place in the universe. Compared to Hinduism and Buddhism, Foucault and Schopenhauer are intellectual masturbation. Also, I know I'm not being fair to the whole trajectory of western philosophy here. What I'm really talking about is continental philosophy, which tries to build a worldview from logical premises. I place western philosophy with humility, whether British empiricists who only look at what can be proven scientifically, in that situation Christian philosophers who know how little they are compared to God, and science, which is humility personified, as possibly the greatest contributions to the human race of all time. With the exception of Rousseau in the French Revolution, the enlightenment, which tried to solve problems in the real world rather than building an entire worldview from a single precept, thus sparked the greatest era of progress in all of history and was part of that tradition. Western philosophy, when paired with humility, which normally came either directly or indirectly from Christianity, accomplishing the greatest good of all time by creating a duality between humility and hubris. But at the same time, by itself, western philosophy has done some of the greatest evils in all of history. --- ## Negative Effects of Women Entering the Workforce *These past paragraphs, including this section are taken from a anthropology / historian on youtube, just here as place holder, will go over it when I get through the other era. I'm just writing a disclaimer because these paragraphs, while somewhat pragmatic, I feel do not fully encapsulate both the necessity and undercurrents of the changing dynamics which have played out over this ~150 year timeframe. It's a pressing issue of this era, as the 12HE will largely be defined by how societies come to terms with their falling birthrates, while men feel disenfranchised and women fear falling into a handmaidens tail world. Fear is the antithesis to reason.* God, I hope this one doesn't get me killed, but it's kind of shocking that one of the biggest cultural shifts of all time, where women's mass entrance into a male-dominated workforce, cannot be commented upon in society. To do an objective analysis of the pros and cons will end your career. However, realistically, anything on this scale that happens this quickly, with the internet being a great example, will cause certain problems. Before we get started, I do want to say that if you look at a balance sheet, in my opinion, women's entrance to the workforce was positive, but I would have preferred a slower and more recent process. And I'm not saying we should have stuck with the old housewife system either. Because due to changes such as the shrinking size of the family, where in 1800 your average family would have had eight kids and in 1950 you're at 2.5, as well as labor-saving devices like the washing machine and later the pill, it just wasn't working. And if you look at the culture at the time, it seems like many housewives were just bored to death and not that happy, and so you had to see a change, and it unsurprisingly went for a radical one. And I mean, the fact that women themselves made the decision to enter the workforce as quickly as they did means something was broken in the previous system. Women's entrance into the workforce allowed them a greater degree of freedom than any era in history, but I still think it's important to look at the negatives. One of the big ones is depreciation in wages. By far the biggest factor in depreciating wages over the last 50 years—far beyond immigration, globalization, or any other factor—is women entering the workforce at higher rates, simply since there are so many women. People often don't think about how back in the 80s, it was normal to have a single father support a stay-at-home wife and multiple children. Now I would say most couples with both parents working can't afford to have any kids. This has created a problem for many women who would have wanted to stay at home but now can't since other women have depreciated wages by entering the workforce. It's easy to overhype the economic growth that came with women entering the workforce, since housewives are actually pretty economically productive, having 80% of the economic value of a worker, and that was more pronounced before labor-saving devices. So if you go back to the world before, say, World War II, women had the same degree of economic value as the men who were working. It's just it wasn't being paid for, and a lot of the costs come down to stuff like child care, cleaning, or cooking food. It also created a lot of stress where, as a bachelor, I can say managing all the chores in a house between cleaning, cooking, and the like comes down to a full-time job. And so when both sexes are working, it leaves people with a lot less free time. The effects of this are borne out across society, ranging from collapses in sleep time to collapses in health since families are eating out with unhealthy food more often. The obesity stats are basically the same as high fructose corn syrup consumption or vegetable oil consumption, and I sure can tell you that I'm not the one who's using high fructose corn syrup and canola oil in my home cooking. It's almost entirely restaurants. We're also not counting the intangibles of non-working women as well. Women are generally the bedrocks of community and do things like hosting social events, keeping communities together, and the like. In analyses, we've found that women entering the workforce is one of the biggest driving factors for the collapse in communities, social circles, and trust in America over the last 60 years. On top of this, we have found women have become less happy over time as they've entered the workforce. This is spelled out for women as a total demographic, and you also find working women and women who work more hours are unhappier as groups. Women in countries with lower labor participation are happier. We're also at an all-time high for female mental health problems now across the historic record. My guess is that as women are forced into male work communities with high degrees of competition, which women, due to higher trait neuroticism and lower testosterone on average, find more stressful than men. Much of the modern feminist movement is women trying to redesign the workplace on a feminine basis, but the truth is that competitive organizations need to have a masculine edge to them in order to survive in a Darwinistic competitive world. There's a reason militaries are all manly, given militaries that aren't manly lose. The entrance of women in the workforce en masse has resulted in massive growths in middle management and bureaucracy as women want more order and less rough competition in the workplace. Finally, the massive mental health crisis among Gen Z may in a lot of ways be driven by children not having enough time with their mothers growing up, as mothers left for the workplace earlier, putting kids in daycares. We went through a giant social experiment never before seen in history, the results of which we're still bearing fruit of now. Children raised in daycares have significantly higher anxiety, much worse attachment and ability to maintain relationships, and higher depression. If you were looking for negative social effects of children not having enough time with their mothers growing up, the results would be exactly what they are. ## 4. Are Some Cultures Better Than Others? People like to say that all things are equal and you can never judge quality, but really that's a non-argument since no one acts like that. You won't treat Genghis Khan or Gandhi as the same. Almost everyone will take a Ferrari over a rickshaw. Reality is how people act, not what they say. Once you open up the subjective, differences do matter. You break apart all arguments that there is no difference in quality and good and evil don't exist. However, the idea that all things are equal and interchangeable is non-judgmental and thus in vogue now. The compromise of the post-World War II world was that all races were genetically equal, something I can firmly get behind. I think there's a lot of strong evidence. However, it concept-creeped into all culture as being equal, something that doesn't make a lot of logical sense. Look at it this way: why would immigration happen if all countries and cultures are equal? Why would people invest in certain countries and not others? Why would certain cultures vanquish others in wars? I mean, just look at the statistics for hours worked, crime, educational output, and you find massive differences between cultures. If cultures were all equal, why would you see certain cultures able to successfully incorporate others or cultures take on traits of other cultures? Japan wouldn't have westernized if the West wasn't doing something right, and people wouldn't have copied Roman fighting styles if the Romans weren't winning. The fact that you see such wildly variegated cultural norms and ways of life in the same geographies or in the same genetic pools means that culture is a very important factor in of itself. You can choose to explain these away with easy answers like geography or oppression, but those are pretty easy to disprove. Why do English-speaking countries with antithetical geographies like Australia, America, or the UK have the same income range, or Latin countries with very different geographies and histories the same income range? Why do large empires often become poor while tiny city-states become wealthy? Any serious person will tell you culture is important to history. Anyone who has traveled a lot will tell you that culture changes how people think. There are three broad motivating factors for culture—guilt, shame, and fear—that control almost every aspect of how people think in a society and how a society develops. In fact, you can see testable differences in how people from different cultures think in psychological surveys and what parts of their brains over/underdevelop. The idea that no cultures are better than others is really a faith-based argument to not judge and treat all cultures with decency and respect, which I understand and support. I will not adopt the customs of pygmy tribes in the Congo in my daily life, but I think they have a God-given right to practice them themselves and should be protected from exploitation. If I were to visit them, I would learn about their culture, partake in it, and respect and enjoy it. I think copying Peru's economic system is really dumb, but Peru is one of my favorite places to live in in the world. The people are amazing, the food is incredible, and it's a really pleasant country in a lot of ways. Like with IQ, I would say you really shouldn't compare cultures by metrics. One of the biggest things that's made societies weak across history is arrogance and underestimating supposedly lesser peoples or not taking from them. There's no way you can possibly measure the infinite variables that make up culture, so don't try. View them as people, or how you'd view a friend, as an individual with its own strengths and weaknesses. As an example, one of my best friends is an Afghan, and although Afghanistan's a country that's not doing so great right now, and there's not a lot to emulate from it, I have great admiration for their culture. They have a long and beautiful and proud history. They're remarkably brave people and often extremely kind, and amazing food. Their art is beautiful, and so even though Afghanistan isn't successful now, an Afghan would have so much to be proud of, and that's the case of every culture in the world. --- ## Are we Inferior to Our Ancestors? I remember the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the whole movement to tear down statues and the like was "oh boy, we really do envy our ancestors, don't we?" For those who don't know, I made a video about how envy affects societies, and it's really changed the way how I view the world and to see how deep envy does go. And the only way I could make sense of why young people today are tearing down statues of Winston Churchill, writing white men out of the school curriculum, trying to blacken their ancestors' names, is that now we know in the bottom of our hearts that we don't match up to them. Let's look at it through this lens: the United States in 1850 and 1950 settled the West, ended slavery, ended real disease and poverty, beat or held back the multiple tyrannies of communism, Kaiserism, the Japanese, and the Nazis, went from cavalry charges to nearly landing a man on the moon, turning cities from filthy disease-ridden traps to beautiful latte and park-filled places, and gave women and ethnic minorities much better deals in the world and legal equal rights. Have any group of men before or since accomplished as much as they did in that time? The men of the West in that era will in 3000 years be remembered the same way we think of the Greek miracle of Aristotle, Plato, Xenophon, Pericles, or the stand of the 300. Now what could we possibly do to compare? Make the iPhone? Legalize gay marriage? We can say that, but we know in our hearts that we cannot possibly compare. In our private lives, compare your life to your ancestors 100 years ago, or your grandparents, and how they triumphed over much harder conditions than you did. For those of us with parents from non-first world countries, these comparisons are even more acute. It makes sense on an emotional basis that after those generations of great western men, that their descendants would try to backlash, disown the culture they built, and even try to destroy the concept that comparison can happen so as to ease the pain of knowing they cannot compare to their ancestors. I was listening to a tape of someone who was born in the 1850s from Pennsylvania, my home state, a man who remembered the Civil War, and the conversation was recorded in the 1930s, and I was shocked to hear he talked in exactly the same accent as my grandmother. The people of the past were in many ways not too different from us today. I often think of how I could have had a conversation and been very good friends with many of the men who died in World War One. We could have talked about history, many of the same books, and would have shared many of the same notions. However, those men, many of whom came from middle-class backgrounds more comfortable than ours today, faced the utter unimaginable hell of trench warfare. One of my favorite historians is Amory de Riencour, who is completely obscure today and writes books about the history of civilizations, but when he was writing in the 1950s had every single one of his books get a glowing review from the New York Times. Look at Will Durant, who wrote 1,000-page histories of civilization in the 1930s, each of which was a bestseller. Alternately, just read the intellectual level of debate of the founding fathers or 19th century political debates, or how many of the names of American cities founded in the 19th century had classical names like Utica, Syracuse, Spartansburg, Hannibal, etc. Imagine that degree of intellectual poise in the modern world and our society obsessed with the Kardashians and the like. I love talking to immigrants. In a country like America, immigrants tend to often be the highest quality people from their home countries and often had to do crazy things to arrive here. It blows my mind to hear how an immigrant from Burkina Faso had to cross Sahara by bus, or a Bangladeshi immigrant had to wake up at 2am for the two hours his neighborhood got water from the government. The thing it leads me to think about is how my own ancestors had to flee Ireland due to potato famine or had to clear the frontier or fight Indians, and how they must have felt having lived through crazy life and death stories. I've had three life and death experiences, and each have changed my life in the most beautiful possible ways, as I've talked about in my video on decadence. As life gets easier, people get softer, less formed, and less ambitious. We've seen this play out with psychological studies with hardship and trauma forming character in many ways. What I see with our current era is how the medieval Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun's theory of how the first generation makes the empire, the second maintains it, and the third loses it. When I'm about to do something that scares me, I think about how many of my ancestors died in battle fighting for freedom and how they'd call me a pussy. At the same time, I'm sure I had many ancestors that were horrible people and cowards. History contains both immense ups and downs that we have to focus on. In the same way that you had many ancestors who were superior to you, you had many that were inferior to you. However, an understanding of history is in many ways liberating from the constraints of the present world and allows us to get a real perspective. ## 7. Does Society Need Drugs to Function? I'm writing this episode while drinking kratom, a low-level Malaysian and Thai powder that's used by plantation workers to work in the rubber plantations for their 12-plus hour shifts. I honestly drink it as a way to deal with the stress of my life. You might judge me, but briefly make a note on the amount of people who do self-medicate with some kind of substance. Also remember that most people don't talk about this. I think a majority of people I know do it in some form, with weed being the most common, and alcohol, tobacco, and vape being other forms. On top of this, look at the prescription drug epidemic, whether through opiates or antidepressants. If we want to expand this definition, practically everyone in our society is addicted to sugar and coffee, and that is the foundation of some of the most integral aspects of our industrial society. I mean, it kind of does make sense. This is an era of history in which most people live objectively hard lives and are incapable of achieving the things that our parents took for granted, like affording to start families, get homes, and the like, alongside mass political, social, economic, and other problems. That's a hard world to grapple with, a world in many ways out of the hands of control of normal people. If we look across the history of the world, this kind of coping, although it's not great, is very common. Most traditional societies consume a tremendous amount of alcohol, and those that don't find some other substitute like hashish, opium, khat, or kratom. If we look across the history of civilization, no one industrializes without stimulants like caffeine, and beer and other alcohol always come in with civilization. The question I posit is whether civilization requires drugs. My answer is probably yes. I think in a lot of ways, civilization differs so much from inherent human nature that we use drugs as a way to basically make up the psychological difference. Remember, we evolved to be in hunter-gatherer communities living in tribes, and now we live lonely in hyper-crowded cities, often hunched behind desks our whole day. Even before that, we spent all days toiling in the fields. I often view it like how carriage horses have their eyes covered so that street traffic doesn't panic them. As I sit in my New York City apartment looking out across the street to a shit ton of other more apartments stacked together like crates, I realize how we humans have constructed the same conditions for ourselves, and drugs are like our blinders. On top of that, when used appropriately, drugs are just fun. Think of how many positive memories are formed of alcohol or how many times a night out will let out steam from a rough week at work. Although it isn't healthy, I do understand it for coping. A big reason I dropped out of college was I was working myself to death trying to do classes and my full-time job as a YouTuber at the same time, and I was consuming an unhealthy amount of alcohol to calm my nerves down, and I knew it wasn't healthy, so I dropped school. An interesting trajectory that we're investigating is how much effect psychedelics had on early religions, being central to the formations of early Christianity and Hinduism at least, and probably other religions, and being central to almost every tribal and shamanic tradition. Societies mix them with rituals, dancing, and celebrations in order to gain higher levels and reach the spirit world to balance out the mundaneness of normal life. For those that have done them, reaching the higher spiritual level with stuff like ayahuasca, peyote, and the like is some of the most meaningful experiences a person can have. I'm not going to denounce drugs blanketly. However, I think we need to use them responsibly. We need to keep people from addiction and also use drugs for their positive effect. Now we're in a society that either fully denounces drugs or lets people use them whenever they want, and neither of those is really good. We can't get rid of civilization, but we can massage it more easily if we use substances correctly. ## 8. Why is Diversity Good? For the modern left and western countries, diversity is the number one thing they push for in every single circle. Having as many people as possible of different racial, ethnic, and gender backgrounds, that organization becomes automatically better for some reason. Likewise, western countries should import as many people from different ethnicities as much as possible all the time. However, I've never heard a coherent argument for why diversity is a good in of itself. I mean, many of the most successful societies in history were homogeneous. Look at ancient Athens, which was a tiny homogenous citizen population that accomplished an insane amount of everything, or look at how largely homogeneous countries like France, England, Germany, and the like accomplished a tremendous amount of things across their history. Likewise, when you look at the richest and most successful countries in the world today, they tend to be countries that have historically been exceptionally homogeneous or very homogeneous today, like Sweden, South Korea, Japan, or Finland. On average, homogenous countries tend to be more successful than diverse ones, given that it's easier to coordinate people who share the same cultural assumptions. Meanwhile, most diverse societies in history have been giant autocratic empires where the elite was a single ethnic group or an alliance of two ethnic groups, and they ruled over all the other ethnicities. Examples like this include the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian, Roman, Mughal, or Spanish empires. You really do not have a lot of examples of successful culturally diverse societies in democracies. Like Belgium, South Africa, or Canada that have multiple hegemonic cultures, all inhabitants will readily admit how difficult it is to coordinate these various ethnic groups and involves an incredible degree of pain, inefficiency, and hassle. Look at most African countries where one tribal group seizes power of the country and uses it as a vehicle to steal from the other tribe. This also ignores how many states across history and empires failed due to changes in ethnicity and ethnic dissolution. Look at the Roman Empire, where due to declining birth rates among the Roman citizen class and Germanic immigration, the empire fell apart. The same thing's true with the Turks entering into the Abbasids. Alternately, the lowering of the Russian and South African white birth rate in the dissolution of the unified USSR and apartheid South Africa. There are examples of diversity working, an example of which is the immense spreading of culture and ideas that came with the foundation of the Islamic caliphate in the middle ages, or how the United States is able to incorporate immense amounts of immigrants from different countries and continents to make it stronger, wealthier, and more interesting. However, in both of these cases, there were hegemonic cultures, whether Arabic or Anglo-American, that immigrants were allowed or expected to assimilate to and provided leadership to the broader society, which the modern left also views as evil. This proves diversity can work and can have positive effects, but also doesn't seem to be necessary for a successful society and can go very badly. The thing that holds society together is shared blood, shared beliefs, and common enemies, and this is totally ignored by people who push for diversity. There's no discussion of the effects of diversity or its history, which for the left is an element of religious faith in of itself and aims for diversity without any logical or historical argument. I think the fundamental truth is that this comes from a self-loathing in which these leftists think there is something fundamentally wrong with being white and western, even though they're the most successful societies in the world today, and would like to erase them as much as possible. There isn't really any other argument that makes sense for it, and I mean, given this is people who literally say they want to erase whiteness and western civilization, although it sounds bombastic, I think it's true. ## 9. Is War Good? God, this one feels so loaded. However, a very strong argument can be made for it, one that's made in the excellent book "War: What Is It Good For" by Ian Morris. The world is made up of incredible paradoxes almost by nature, and this is one of them. Let me explain. Competition is the biggest driver of progress, and war makes a lot of competition. The easiest examples of this are early in modern Europe, in which Asia crystallized into a series of vast empires that had little competition for survival, while Europe was a series of smaller states that were locked into permanent war. This meant that Asian militaries didn't have to innovate in a life or death manner, well, if, say, England didn't keep up with the latest innovations with France, England would get conquered. This is one of the biggest reasons why we see so much technological progress in this time period. To show how, I'm going to talk about European colonization of the Indian Ocean area, where first came the Portuguese, who were corrupt and decadent, followed by the Dutch, who were cruel yet competent, and they in turn were followed by the British, who by the standards of European colonial powers were the most competent and also benevolent of all these powers. However, in most places in history, the Portuguese would have stayed in power the whole time. I mean, one of the big things that resulted in the collapse of the cruel bondage states of the bronze age into becoming the more humane ones of the iron age was the intensification of warfare. We see that these kind of cruel slave states kept going in areas like Southeast Asia or the Sahel in Africa that never had the same degree of military competition as the areas in the main Eurasian theater of violence. At the same time, saying violence solves nothing is just blankly untrue if you quickly think about how violence solved American slavery or the Nazis. War is one of the biggest drivers of technological progress, with some examples in the modern world being the development of the internet, computers, tampons, antibiotics, highways, nuclear energy, cell phones, and I could go on. If you want to extend this across almost all of history, war has resulted in a tremendous amount of technological progress that has saved far more lives than war has taken. Compare war to disease, for example. All wars combined across history has killed somewhere in the range of 200 million people, a majority of which died of diseases during the wars, while improvements in health have resulted in 5 billion lives saved over the last 200 years, or 25 times that number of lives saved. The invention of penicillin, for example, which was driven by World War 1, saved 120 million lives, eight times the death in that war and twice the casualties of the bloodiest war in all of history, World War II. Likewise, vaccinations, which were pushed and implemented by societies in order to lower the deaths of disease in armies, which were a majority of deaths in war, have in turn saved hundreds of millions, if not billions, of lives. The state exists due to war. Every country in the world exists since a group of conquerors decided to subjugate it or a group of locals teamed up to form a government to hold off invaders. The thing is that the state has greatly increased commerce and safety and general quality of life. If you look at pre-state peoples, you see that 15 to 40 percent of males died from warfare every generation, and murders and revenge killings were extremely common. However, once you see the state become more powerful, this is a trend we've seen across history multiple times, you see death rates from war collapsed, not even being close to pre-state levels, and murder and violent crime rates collapse. I can't say war is good. War is one of those things that's caused so much unimaginable suffering across history that to say it's positive would be an evil joke to those that have suffered under it. However, since the world's normally paradoxical, war is necessary. It reminds you of a quote I read in a book on the history of disease that said "you may hate disease, but in the pre-modern world, it's the only reason why people weren't starving all the time." I view war as both a stabilizing and chaotic force in the human condition, much like death, that we will never be able to transcend because it is part of the game. War is the main thing that forces societies to be on top of their game, that forces them to excel to their highest levels while also bringing out their greatest barbarity. The reason big wars happen with very shocking regularity is that the history of the world is people constructing things to deal with the chaos of the real world, but those organizations in turn lose touch with the reality they're trying to stop, and then war calls their bluff. War and the four horsemen in general are the chaos of the real world smashing into the often decadent and rotting structures of human frailty. ## 10. How Much of Society is Driven by Envy between the Sexes? It's interesting to hear both men and women complain about modern dating. It's kind of funny and depressing at the same time. They both think they got the rotten end of the deal. Guys say they don't get any dates and all the girls they meet are psychos, and girls think that all the guys they meet are flaky fuck boys, they don't meet any good men who actually care about them as people, which brings me to the question: to what degree is this normal, and to what degree is our society doing something massively wrong? I'd like to posit the tension between the sexes as manifest in both positive and negative ways allows the survival and improvement of the human race. For men, the central point is that men are biologically less useful than women, given that a woman's egg is so much more expensive in real terms than a man's sperm, that a single man can impregnate a thousand women, meaning that those 999 men really don't need to be there. But the value of a woman's egg is stable. It's basically one child a year. However, men, coming from this fundamental insecurity, have built up a series of methods to compete with each other and also discount this female advantage, which when added together gives men a massive advantage over women. I once told a female friend that testosterone's like a steam kettle that just keeps on pumping the guy with energy until it gets redirected somewhere or the guy goes insane. This is historically accurate in the society in which men aren't married at a young age, universally start a shit ton of wars, and have really high crime rates. The brilliant feminist philosopher Camille Paglia once said, "The reason there isn't a female Mozart is the same if there isn't a female Jack the Ripper," and that testosterone gives men an unforgiving clock in the back of their heads that can either lead them to greatness or evil. The cruelest aspects of toxic masculinity include the Nazis or Imperial Japan, who took aggressive masculinity to an extreme. Alternately, the pathetic machismo of many third world countries in which masculinity involves fighting, drinking, and largely having your wife do the real work and support the kids and put up with your shit, thus preventing their societies from growing, or the truly toxic masculinity of enslaving women's personas and sexes for their egos, whether through female genital mutilation, foot binding, keeping women at home all day, or harems. The continuous male drive across history comes from the insecurity of knowing that if things go wrong, they lose the game of life, and weak men turn this into hatred of women. Meanwhile, the female insecurity and envy of men comes from them never building up the competitive advantage men have, given that they just never had to compete as hard. Women don't feel the need to pose as much in the same way as men do to justify their existences. However, at the same time, women feel envy that men built up the main organs of society, whether the military, government, corporations, and religions, as side effects of their competition, thus giving men massive advantages in turning all societies in the human race into patriarchy. And at the same time, the insecure edge men have from the clock in the back of their heads that is testosterone, women realize that human society is a patriarchy but don't have the inclination to build any realistic structures that would replace it, likely since they never had to form teams to hunt or wage war back in the stone age. Thus, toxic femininity looks like tearing down the organizations that hold society up while focusing on useless minutia, which gradually kills a society. This can look like social justice, the witch trials, or the siphering collectivism and family controls of China or India, all of which are women using their social pressures to turn society into madness or for raw social control through petty shit. Since men have the physical and social advantage, women have learned to be more socially adept and operate through relational warfare, which in some ways is more dangerous than direct combat since it can't be directly defeated. An example of this is the MeToo movement, in which we're at the point where any man's career can be ruined by any woman saying he sexually harassed her with absolutely no evidence, which anyone would realize would be a horrible way to structure a society. But toxic femininity basically pushing "you have to listen to women all the time with no rational argument behind it" is causing the social pressure which will have and is having horrible effects on society. Due to the differences in strength and aggression between the sexes, direct competition between them is extremely difficult to manage and means that women can get away with being more provocative than men because society doesn't take them as seriously. Let's just use an example of an intellectual debate where a man and a woman are in a rational debate, and the woman is being extremely provocative. If the man were to counter her in a direct yet rational way, forcing her to pull out her evidence and digging into each of her individual points to a great depth, if the woman breaks into tears, even if the man is doing what he has to do to prove his point logically, the audience will side with the woman. The female response to being held to aggressive male standards and competition is that those standards are inherently toxic and should be removed. But because women have never been expected to be in the competitive edge of society, they don't understand that those competitive aggressive standards are there, and we've put them because if they weren't there, we would all die. The extreme difficulty of coordinating competition between men and women is why basically every society in history, going back to the stone age, has structured occupations in a gendered way between men and women, with their own spheres. On top of this, our society has done a poor job of mixing up things that make more sense through a feminine mindset with things that make more sense with the masculine mindset. In our daily interpersonal lives, the feminine way of managing social relations and being forgiving and emotional works better, while in the modern world we try to over-rationalize and split people into different categories in our daily lives that's very mechanical and depressing. Well, meanwhile, using feminine forgiveness or lack of competition for stuff like war or business and the like is just a road to social decay and being conquered. At the same time, you do need a balance of both in their own places for a healthy society. What both sexes need is to basically take responsibility for their own problems and love and appreciate the other sex for where they are. A real man knows that women aren't evil and doesn't put them on a pedestal either but knows that we have to work together with our strengths and weaknesses for the further propagation of the human race. The other sexes aren't an amorphous blob; they're people. A good man is able to love women since he can love being a man. However, this is the opposite of what modern society pushes. Healthy relations between the sexes involve each sex knowing who they are while also empathizing with the other sex. What modern society does is to microscope all gender relations, offering no forgiveness for mistakes made, and then trying to create a war between the sexes to upset relations for social change but fails to ignore that you cannot have war between the sexes since they always need to work together for society to function. War between the sexes, not cooperation and understanding, is a road to insanity for both sexes and the collapse of society, both of which we're seeing now. I consider incels and radical feminists, cat ladies and weebs, to be these same symptoms of this social pandemic. --- ## Religion and science are at odds atheists who i have most profound respect for as a whole often tout their beliefs as scientific but in reality they normally put up value structures that come from religion and make distinctions as arbitrary and irrational as religions however this battle is even more foolish than when you get down to it science and religion really aren't at odds in fact a majority of american scientists are religious a major driving force here is a misinterpretation of what religion and science are trying to do supposed rationalists and religious fundamentalists often get caught up on mythic stories that say stuff like it's clearly impossible that the world was created 6 000 years ago or that noah brought all of the world's animals on a single boat however all the church fathers like saint augustine gregory of tours and the like knew that these stories were allegories the way religions worked in the classical world was that the general uneducated public was given these magical stories and the priest classes and the true believers were told the moral truths that these stories represented which brings us to the main point science is the how and religion is the why religions very rarely make metaphysical claims about science's house jesus literally says that the kingdom of heaven is not of this world or plane of existence buddhism is a purely psychological journey knowing how electricity works doesn't in any way invalidate the spiritual and moral teachings that religions give to us an interesting distinction jordan peterson makes is between reality as it's experienced in reality as it scientifically empirically exists in an empirical scientific worldview life has no meaning however in reality as we live it life clearly has meaning in an empirical worldview it doesn't matter if you starve in our real lives as we live them it matters a tremendous amount and before the scientific revolution people only viewed reality as we experience it with our emotions and our desires and stuff as the only reality and now the scientific world view we totally ignore reality as we experience it religion exists for reality as we experience it science exists for reality empirically it's interesting to see science reach philosophic conclusions similar to religion i'm not sure how they did it but a lot of ancient philosophers and prophets seem to have reached accurate conclusions without the scientific method look at the pre-socratic philosophers in greece who figured out atom theory evolution and heliocentrism there's a fascinating book called the eye of shiva by famous french historian emily gillian cool about how hindu mystics figured out a lot of modern physics in the ancient world realistically if a secretive abrahamic god were to be operating it would be through things like an unexplained big bang which the universe just came into existence in which things just randomly jump in and out of existence we haven't even gotten into all the bizarre possible different dimensions black holes or alternate universes open up emdr and cbt therapies are literally based on the same principles as stoicism and psychologists have found the buddhist principles of mindfulness are some of the best techniques for happiness out there jordan peterson again pulling on carl young has done a fascinating job of using research-backed modern psychology to look at how ancient traditions are often psychologically true in the modern world we often naturally gravitate towards sciencism or the aesthetic appearance of scientific rationality without the actual scientific truthful nature take marxism or nazism which were both supposedly rational and scientific but in fact the science involved was so bad as to make them as irrational as religions in reality our supposedly reasonable and rational views are built on a series of false assumptions which is honestly what i want these videos to be about 6. you should listen to what people say ## You should listen to what people say over what they do in the bible the devil is referred to as a lord of lies and that evil comes from our ability to rationalize whatever we're doing when you look across history our ability to rationalize what we're doing has been horrifically good every era of history thought they were doing what was just no matter how cruel or stupid as i said in the previous video nazi germany was the best educated nation in the world and people who perpetuated the salem wish trials the best educated in their hemisphere there's an interesting book written in the 19th century called extraordinary popular delusions the madness of crowds which looked at when entire nations were whipped up into frenzies over things that those people in their right minds would have realized were completely stupid such as massive investment schemes that had no clear way of making money obsession with impossible foreign invasions which creators are thinking the world was just about to end it always confuses me how people put so much emphasis on how people justify their actions which i don't really care about i think the proper study of mankind and society should come from mostly looking at actions without reference to their words there's no other rational way to do it i'm always confused when people are judged by the virtuosity of their words rather than the effectiveness of their actions i hate to keep hating on our friends the wokes but they're doing so much wrong just look at how organizations and people are supposed to make statements of support to social justice which accomplishes nothing i find it really depressing and amusing when people say they don't care what others think about them and then literally do everything they can to please their peers alternatively when third world rebels claim moral superiority and that they'll change the system and make it a wealthy free nation but then merely fill the shoes of their previous dictatorial governments number seven the subjective doesn't exist and judging is always bad ## The subjective doesnt exist i once went on a rant on twitter about how disappointed i was the most common music you hear played at parties as modern mumble rap music which is simultaneously slow depressing not catchy as lyrics no one can understand and no beat the truth is that most people if you ask them don't think that kind of rap is good to party to either they just want to play what's popular and are scared of going against the convention when i dj for example i try to put on 2010's pop 80's oldies or edm hype that's catchy that people can dance to people were really pissed off that i said this saying that who was i to say one genre is better than the other my reply was that the world is made up of subjective standards that matter tremendously our lives are a series of subjective choices that we can't make scientific studies to analyze which choice is better in most cases the same choice to elevate purposely worse music is the same mental trajectory that lets people leave trash on the street or pave over beautiful meadows for a parking lot they're all choices about the aesthetic quality of the culture we share this is since we can't see the subjective in our culture and in the way we run our culture like is this food good or bad rather than the objective like what's the temperature however the subjective rules our lives just as powerfully if not more powerfully than the objective whether you live in a loving community in the beautiful mountains with an amazing partner and a fulfilling job means the world compared to spending your life in a hong kong workhouse lonely and poor you can rationally tell me hitler and santa claus are at the same moral level but your actions won't show that and as the last point showed reality is shown through action rather than word however we fail to realize that when you get rid of subjective standards you automatically get the worst quality product our modern society is terrified of judging anything that's in any way subjective it's almost like we're scared of human judgment in anything we create regulations to lower the power of human decision versus society creating committees we encourage group identities while discouraging individual responsibility the legendary german historian oswald spengler said civilization switched into decay when the society starts to strangle the individual's sense of judgment and choice and replace it with social collective controls he feared this process would happen to the west in the 20th century which it largely started to one of the common refrains i hear is that if something's not hurting anyone you have no right to judge it however culture is a group project in which we all need to pitch in if we're not giving it to their honest feedback we're gonna grow weak when i criticize youth culture and say it actively promotes sociopathy criminality laziness narcissism and decadence i always get attacked for being judgmental and not cool not for saying what i'm saying is factually wrong i often hear the argument that being a loser is your choice and you should be respected for it which is not true your parents raised you and you're letting down all the investment they put into you your ancestors struggled and died to produce you and you have an innate loyalty to your society which provides for you similarly you have a loyalty to yourself and the person you could be or the abstract concept like good you can conceive this is how the vast majority of the world in history has viewed morality with modern western atheist societies being the bizarre exceptions if you choose to discredit all of that or your family society and your potential as an individual or morality there's something very wrong with you an attachment to this is people who ignore how the subjective influences the objective a great example of this is i read a fascinating book that compared india and china's development over time and found that until 500 bc both countries were on a very similar trajectory then china became confusion in taoist and india became hindu and buddhist religions that took diametrically opposite views of the world and then both countries developed on very different political paths because of the religions and i mean realistically so much of this youtube channel is meet us talking about how religion and ideology affects the real world in the same way that your attitude affects how you live life a tremendous amount ideologies and religions do the same for society and since ideas affect how we live our lives so much you can't make the claim that the world's entirely material number 8 information can be harmful nietzsche once said you can judge a man ## Information can be harmful by how much truth they can handle the truth is that the truth is the ultimate arbiter of existence having an understanding of how things work is the most important part of doing anything you can't be hurt by knowing information since knowing the truth is just knowing what you'd already have to deal with anyway knowing that a hurricane is coming your way might lead to short-term stress but it will allow you prepare for said hurricane however across history and the world today you see that regimes and ideologies try to shut off the supply of information saying it will hurt the public the truth however is just that information hurts these regimes in their power i remember an amusing anecdote of how catholic authorities in france were burning bibles during the reformation for fear that people would upon reading them become protestant which my reaction is wouldn't you realize you're the one at fault upon realizing that the appropriate reaction to reading your source material is that you're wrong when someone tries to hide information it means that they know they're on the losing side of the argument but want to keep power this is true between tokugawa shogun and japan stalinist russia or inquisition spain you can always tell who the bad guys are based off those who vilify the truth and tell you you should support party thinking above it there's a difference between this and the addiction models that come with modern social media however when an already beautiful model with photoshop and filters make women feel insecure they're not getting information they're getting propaganda of something that isn't real similarly social media apps are designed to be inherently addictive as an inverse to information propaganda is inherently harmful the low degree of trust in societies in the modern world is likely a result of the massive propaganda campaigns of the world wars that all outlied to their populations similarly although i think they're evil i do understand why authorities want to keep their stories about the world and filter out competing information because says stories are how societies work and by degrading the common myths of societies you degrade cooperation however i think what people should do is edit their stories so that they can fit into new information and that's difficult but i think it has to be done and also to be truthful i do draw an exception for very extreme situations for example how native peoples often saw the collapses of their social codes upon discovery by the europeans and realizing that their entire world view was wrong and many native societies collapsed into crime and alcoholism for said reasons number nine the world is naturally fair or --- _(From High Middle Ages through the 20th century—and its intellectual revolutions.)_ 1. **The Blank‑Slate Faith and Its Collapse** – Post‑WWII humanities adopted “nurture only” orthodoxy—denying millennia of evidence for innate differences in ability, temperament, and social roles. – _The Blank Slate_ (Pinker) – Genetic and twin‑study data show 50–80 percent heritability for IQ, personality, religiosity, political values, etc., smashing pure-nurture models. – _Who We Are and How We Got Here_ (Reich) · _The Righteous Mind_ (Haidt) 2. **Primal Violence Among “Noble Savages”** Ethnography and archaeology—from the Yanomamö (≈40 percent male war‑death rate) to the Maya and Iroquois—reveal endemic tribal warfare, contradicting idyllic images of stateless peace. – _War Before Civilization_ (Keeley) · _War in Human Civilization_ (Gat) 3. **Genetics as a Ticking‑Time‑Bomb** Once out of academia’s ghetto, genetic evidence of sex‑, race‑, and class‑linked differences has profound policy implications—and threatens ideologies built on universal equality. – _The Elephant in the Brain_ (Simler & Hanson) · _The Genetic Lottery_ (Harden) 4. **Modern Physics Mirrors Ancient Esoterica** Non‑locality, entanglement, and the observer effect echo Bronze Age notions of sympathy, magic, and participatory cosmos—yet Western institutions cling to 19th‑c. materialism. – _The Eye of Shiva_ (de Riencourt) · _A Brief History of Time_ (Hawking) 5. **Subconscious Drives Overturn Rational‑Choice Theory** ≈90 percent of our decisions originate below awareness. We craft post‑hoc rationales to maintain social standing—debunking the Homo economicus model. – _The Moral Animal_ (Wright) · _The Elephant in the Brain_ (Simler & Hanson) 6. **Bureaucratic Hegemony and Ideological Enforcement** In the 20th century, universities, media, and the CIA forged an illusion of pluralism while tightly controlling narratives on race, gender, and history—akin to Soviet censorship. – _Tragedy and Hope_ (Quigley) · _Leviathan and Its Enemies_ (Francis) 7. **Cyclical Dynamics of Inflation and Empire** Every ∼250 years Western economies hit inflationary peaks that presage social fracturing and state collapse—visible in Medieval, Early Modern, and modern eras alike. – _The Great Wave_ (Fischer) · _War, Peace and War_ (Turchin) 8. **The Rise of the West as a Multi‑Civilizational Synergy** Europe’s ascendancy depended as much on Indian numerals, Chinese technologies, and Islamic trade networks as on mere colonial plunder. – _The Rise of the West_ (McNeill) · _Conquests and Cultures_ (Sowell) 9. **Foundations of American Regional Cultures** Four discrete British migrations (Puritans, Quakers, Scots‑Irish, Cavaliers) bequeathed enduring patterns in religion, family, and governance across New England, the South, the Midlands, and the Frontier. – _Albion’s Seed_ (Fischer) 10. **Free‑Trade Dogma and the Rust Belt’s Ruin** The Washington Consensus treated deindustrialization as inevitable “progress,” even as Pennsylvania’s cities hollowed out—proving policy by fiat outpaces empirical testing. – _Basic Economics_ (Sowell) · _Disunited Nations_ (Zeihan) 11. **Dietary Science as Industrial Propaganda** Sugar and grain lobbies co‑opted government research to demonize fats and promote carbs—sowing the seeds of the obesity epidemic in the late 20th century. – _Basic Economics_ (Sowell) 12. **Digital Surveillance and the Next Axial‑Age Shift** Ubiquitous data—Google searches, social media, biometric tracking—offers an unfiltered window on human nature. The coming synthesis promises to upend 20th‑c. ideologies. – _Everyone Lies_ (Stephenowitz) · _Lost Connections_ (Hari) 13. **State as New Secular Religion** 19th‑c. faith in God gave way to 20th‑c. faith in the bureaucratic state—and, with it, a cult of equality that now strangles human complexity. – _Tragedy and Hope_ (Quigley) · _Leviathan and Its Enemies_ (Francis) 14. **Neo‑Tribalism and Identity Politics** As universal narratives fracture, we revert to primordial in‑group/out‑group signaling—mirroring our primate ancestors’ coalition dynamics. – _The Righteous Mind_ (Haidt) · _Disunited Nations_ (Zeihan) **On the Competence and Constraints of World War I Commanders** (Refuting the misconception: "World War 1 Commanders were Idiots") - **Misconception Addressed:** Commanders in World War I were out-of-touch, cold-blooded idiots, incapable of adapting to modern technology, thereby causing immense bloodshed (e.g., Somme, Ypres, Verdun). - **Speaker's Counter-Argument:** The situation was far more complex, shaped by unprecedented technological and strategic challenges, and intense societal pressures. - **Supporting Claims and Reasoning:** - **Unprecedented Nature of the War:** - It was the first lengthy European war in 99 years, occurring during an era of unparalleled technological progress. - It was the first major war where technological progress was an "immediately apparent variable," unlike previous conflicts where tactics remained stable for centuries. Armies had to adapt in months, not decades. - **Uncertainty of Solutions:** It was unclear what technological or tactical changes would achieve a breakthrough. - Generals experimented extensively: poison gas, massive artillery, cratering, infiltration tactics, attacking different geographic regions. - The tank's decisive role was not foreseeable. - **Technological Limitations:** Radio technology was insufficient for coordinating large-scale offensives. - **Defensive Dominance:** Machine guns and barbed wire made defensive positions incredibly powerful. - **Societal Bloodthirst:** - Populations were "unbelievably bloodthirsty," greeting the war's start with joy and excitement. - Massive casualties were seen as justification for continuing the war, with "national honor" demanding revenge and the enemy's capital burned. - Any government attempting an early peace would have collapsed due to electoral loss or revolution. - **Rhetorical Framing:** The speaker humorously notes the list has 11 points instead of 10, "like going over the top too much," but here he faces "internet comments and not machine guns." **Re-evaluating the Impact of Industrialization Against Pre-Industrial Life** (Refuting the misconception: "Industrialization was Awful") - **Misconception Addressed:** The early stages of industrialization are solely characterized by horrifying exploitation, with workers toiling 16-hour days in terrible conditions while owners grew rich. - **Speaker's Counter-Argument:** While elements of truth exist (though worst conditions are often "cherry-picked for political agendas"), industrialization was generally an improvement over the preceding agricultural life. - **Supporting Claims and Reasoning:** - **Comparison to Rural Life:** - Reference to Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854): A character observes North English working-class families living much better than South English rural peasantry (eating meat daily, good furniture, 10-hour workdays). - Analogy to modern China: People illegally migrate to cities for 12-hour factory days in terrible housing to escape rural fieldwork. - **Harshness of Traditional Agriculture:** - Traditional agriculture is "really horrifyingly bad." - People work "from sun up till sundown until their backs break," constantly worrying about food security. - This explains why people "fled on mass to the cities to work in the factories" wherever industrialization occurred. - **Acknowledging Negative Impacts: Psychological Stress:** - A "big factor people tend to miss" is the psychological stress of industrialization. - Cases of insanity "skyrocketed in 19th century Britain" as traditional village life was disrupted within a generation. - Analogy to modern China: Currently experiencing its "version of the roaring twenties" to deal with industrialization's side effects. --- **The Economic Realities of European Colonization in Africa (Late 19th/20th C.)** (Refuting the misconception: "The Europeans Exploited Africa" economically during the Scramble for Africa) - **Misconception Addressed:** Europeans went into Africa during the late 19th and 20th centuries, "raped the continent and then left." (The speaker explicitly distinguishes this from the Atlantic slave trade, which is acknowledged as exploitative). - **Speaker's Counter-Argument:** During this specific colonial period, African colonies generally cost European powers more than they yielded economically; motivations were primarily pride and geopolitical competition, not profit. - **Supporting Claims and Reasoning:** - **Investment Patterns (Britain, turn of the 20th century):** - 40% in Britain itself. - 45% in the USA, South America, and continental Europe (France being the biggest trade partner). - Only ~15% in the British Empire, with white dominions and India as major partners. - Africa constituted "less than two percent" of investments. - **Economic Unviability of African Colonies:** "Nearly every african colony cost the europeans far more than they got out of it." - **Primary Motivation for Colonization:** - Not money, as the Industrial Revolution created a significant technological barrier, and Europeans often bribed local chieftains. - Primarily "pride": - French sought to regain pride after the Franco-Prussian War. - British got involved due to concerns about French power. - Germans and Italians participated to avoid being left out. - **Nature of Colonial Budgets:** - Often criticized for focusing on military and administration. - Speaker's justification: In most of Africa, there was "no pre-existing state apparatus," and a functioning state is a prerequisite for effective education and health services. - **Investment vs. Return:** "Europe invested far more into Africa than it ever got at which it's difficult to describe as exploitation." - **Caveats and Nuances:** - "I'm not saying the europeans were good guys they were brutally racist and often cruel." - "They would have exploited Africa if they could but there really wasn't enough to steal to offset the costs involved." - **Limited European Impact (by decolonization):** - The average African colony had about 10,000 Europeans. - 60% of the continent was still animist. - Europeans worked through local African elites whenever possible. - "Very few africans saw european were involved in the european economic system or saw the printed word before 1950." - **Rhetorical Framing:** "boy this one's going to be controversial." **Deconstructing the "Noble Savage" Myth of Native Americans** (Refuting the misconception: "The Native Americans Were Hippies") - **Misconception Addressed:** Native Americans were inherently peaceful, "in tune with nature," and their warfare was mostly ceremonial. - **Speaker's Counter-Argument:** This view is "wrong on practically every level." Native Americans were diverse, engaged in brutal warfare, had complex societies (including urban ones), and significantly impacted their environments, sometimes negatively. - **Supporting Claims and Reasoning:** - **Warfare Reality:** - Native peoples "killed each other like any other group" and had "much higher deaths in war as a percent of the population than any european nation." - The Iroquois committed genocide against tribes in the upper Midwest, depopulating a vast region. - Archaeology suggests urban Mississippians fought a losing war against Great Plains tribes in the late Middle Ages (evidence of burned cities, massacres). - The Aztecs institutionalized wars to collect captives for sacrifice (estimated 2 million sacrificed). - **Societal Diversity:** - Even in what became the United States, Native Americans "weren't all forest tribes"; there were "very developed urban societies." - **Environmental Impact:** - Natives were "actually worse than the europeans" environmentally in some respects, as Europeans had a wider range of crops/animals to prevent land overuse. - Both Aztec and Inca empires faced "environmental degradation to a certain degree." - American Southwestern mountains, once tree-covered, were deforested by local Pueblo peoples. - In the Eastern United States, natives "purposely manipulated and burned the environment to make it as fertile as possible." - **Concluding Nuance:** "I'm not trying to justify the european colonization here but i want to make clear the native americans were people like any other subject to the same flaws and good traits as anyone else not in some special moral category." **Peasants Were Always Poor** - **Common Misconception:** The pre-industrial world, particularly the Middle Ages, consisted of a super-rich nobility and a massively downtrodden peasantry existing in abject poverty, with no middle class. - **Speaker's Counter-Argument:** The economic status and social mobility of peasants were far more varied and complex than this simplified view suggests. - **Evidence of Economic Variation:** Peasantry ranged from "cottage owners who only owned a tiny garden and worked for other people" to "massive peasant landowners...who held large amounts of their own land." - **Evidence of Social Mobility:** - The lines between peasant and nobility were "far more permeable" than commonly believed. - In France and Spain, well-off peasants could purchase titles of nobility. - In England or Germany, such peasants often became members of the gentry class, living like nobility without the title. - Conversely, a "massive population of poor nobility" existed, some of whom went into debt for basic knightly equipment and subsequently "sank into the peasantry." - **Implicit Conclusion:** Many peasants were wealthier than poorer members of the nobility. - **Evidence Regarding Living Standards:** - Peasant poverty was heavily dependent on the ratio of population density to arable land. - Peasants in the 12th, 15th, and early 18th centuries were often "well fed, housed and prosperous." - Conversely, those in the early 14th, mid-17th, and 19th centuries were "often on the verge of starvation." - **Critique of an Opposing Myth:** The notion that peasants in traditional societies lived in "harmony with each other in rural bucolic charm" is also incorrect. - **Evidence:** Medieval peasants engaged in disputes over small land parcels, constantly sought higher legal positions, and experienced "terrifying murder rates" by modern standards. **America Was Always a Single Nation** - **Common Misconception:** The United States has always been perceived and functioned as a singular, unified nation. - **Speaker's Counter-Argument:** Before the American Civil War, the U.S. was viewed as a collection of distinct smaller nations and ethnic groups within a confederation, rather than a single nation. - **Linguistic Evidence:** The U.S. was referred to as "these United States," not "the United States." - **Historiographical Evidence:** Pre-World War II historical accounts described American history as a mix of different ethnic groups with distinct ways of life (e.g., Yankees, Scots-Irish, Southerners). - **Genetic Evidence:** The primary genetic distinctions among large American groups today correlate with ancestral origins from different centers of the 13 colonies. - **Colonial Expansion Pattern:** Different cultural regions of the East Coast effectively colonized the rest of the country. - Example: Late 18th-century Ohio was politically divided and populated by settlers from Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, reflecting their home states. - **Cultural and Linguistic Divergence in the Colonial Era:** - Distinct dialects existed, e.g., "a New Englander might say 'I ain't,' a Pennsylvanian 'I'm not,' and a Southerner 'I be'ant'." - Colonies viewed themselves as closer to England than to each other, with Britain as the unifying force. - Different regions adhered to different sects of Protestantism, had distinct endogamous breeding patterns, economic models, and governmental structures, effectively constituting separate nations. - **Existence of Non-Anglophone Enclaves:** - Large parts of 18th-century eastern North Carolina were Gaelic-speaking due to Highland Scottish immigration. - The area around New York City was majority Dutch-speaking into the mid-19th century. - President Martin Van Buren, from this area, had no English ancestry and did not speak English as his native language. - **Conclusion:** Treating early America as a monolithic entity is a "huge mis-service." The various parts of the country cooperated based on self-interest and only gradually integrated, if at all. **The U.S. Lost the Vietnam War (Implying Inevitable or Comprehensive Military Defeat)** - **Common Misconception:** The U.S. definitively lost the Vietnam War, and victory was never achievable. - **Speaker's Counter-Argument:** The situation was more complex; the U.S. military was not defeated in the field but lost due to a decline in public will, influenced by media portrayal. - **Strategic Constraint:** The U.S. could not invade North Vietnam due to the fear of Chinese nuclear intervention, making the war a contest of attrition. - **War Aims:** - U.S. objective: Inflict casualties to wear down North Vietnam. - North Vietnamese objective: Erode American public will to fight. - **Role of U.S. Media:** The media "lied wholesale," claiming the U.S. was consistently close to winning. - **Impact of the Tet Offensive:** - The American public reacted with anger when the Tet Offensive revealed the war was not near its end, contrary to media reports. - Militarily, the Tet Offensive was an "American victory." North Vietnamese losses were so severe that their government later disclosed they would have given up if the war had continued much longer. - **Reason for U.S. Withdrawal:** The U.S. "lacked the will to keep fighting" and pulled back first. - **Conclusion on "Loss":** The U.S. "ended up losing the war," but this was attributable to the erosion of U.S. public will, not military failure. - **Comparison with the Korean War to Deconstruct Vietnam War "Mysticism":** - **Perceived Justification:** Korea is almost universally seen as a justified war, while Vietnam often is not, despite both being conflicts where a "communist north Asian land country invades a capitalist southern American ally." - **Horrors of War:** Vietnam is often highlighted for U.S. atrocities and horrifying combat conditions, but Korea involved 2 million more deaths and equally horrifying conditions (e.g., "fighting Chinese human waves in the freezing weather"). - **Key Differentiating Factors (according to the speaker):** - **Media Coverage:** Vietnam was televised, exposing the American public to the realities of war, while Korea was not. - **Generational Differences:** Korea was fought by the "Silent Generation" (accustomed to hardship from WWII and the Great Depression), while Vietnam was fought by "Boomers" (who grew up in unprecedented prosperity). **Pre-Colonial Africa (Addressing Dual Myths)** - **Common Misconceptions (Dual Myths):** - **Right-wing version:** Pre-colonial Africa was populated by "savages who needed Christian civilization." - **Left-wing version:** It was a "super advanced and civilized region that the Europeans destroyed." - **Speaker's Counter-Argument:** Neither extreme is correct; Africa's immense size led to vast regional diversity, with societies that were simultaneously "primitive and advanced." - **Evidence of Diversity and Varied Development:** - Examples of less developed societies: Tanzania, where 100 years ago, 60% of land was uninhabitable due to disease, and the remainder was inhabited by "illiterate iron age societies." - Examples of developed societies: Mali, which was "highly developed, literate, and cultured," and as technologically developed as contemporary Old World societies during the Middle Ages. - General Pattern: A string of states with medieval-level development existed along the southern Sahara, while most of the rest of the continent comprised "illiterate iron age cattle herders" and, in the far south, hunter-gatherers. - **Nuance and Complexity (Positives and Negatives):** - Buganda: A highly developed centralized state that also practiced "massive Aztec style human sacrifice." - West African societies: Afforded women high status but also had widespread polygamy, contributing to high male death rates. - **General Summary of Pre-Colonial African Empires:** - Technologically and governmentally as advanced as those in medieval Eurasia (e.g., Mali Empire, Dahomey's effective illiterate bureaucracy). - However, institutions were "quite primitive": - No African state had a "strong intellectual tradition." - Almost all were cast societies with no real social mobility. - No parliaments, scientific revolutions, or globally influential cultural movements originated from sub-Saharan Africa. - **Non-European Colonization and Influence:** - Muslims operated the largest slave trade in history from Africa, with traders in the central DRC and higher death rates than the European trade. - Muslims likely circumnavigated Africa before Europeans. - Omanis controlled the East African coast. - Egyptians had conquered territory down to the Congo by the early 19th century. **Russia Has Always Been a Terrible Place to Live** - **Common Misconception:** Russia has perpetually been a depressing land of oppression, starvation, and vodka. - **Speaker's Counter-Argument:** This is not always the case; Russia has experienced eras of prosperity and freedom. - **Medieval Russia (12th Century):** - One of Europe's more prosperous areas. - Had developed property rights and cities. - Most Russian states were parliamentary. - Serfdom only appeared in the 17th century, primarily in the northwestern region around Moscow. - **Under the Tsars:** - Many eras of prosperity and freedom. - 15th-century Russians were noted by European visitors for being well-fed. - Early modern visitors mocked Russians for frequent bathing and resolving disputes in court rather than through duels. - Life on Siberian and Ukrainian frontiers featured prosperous smallholders in fairly egalitarian societies. - Central Ukraine and parts of Siberia voluntarily joined Russia in the 17th century, indicating Russia was not seen as a terrible country. - Non-Slavic peoples were often treated well if they converted to the Orthodox Church. - Tsars were "far less morally corrupt" than often credited. - Example: During the Seven Years' War, the German-speaking Russian ruling class in the Baltics got along well with occupied East Prussians. - Early 19th-century Russia actively considered democratization. - The Kerensky government (WWI era) came close to democratization. - Tsarist Russia ended the Central Asian slave trade. - The Stolypin reforms (late 19th century) gave ex-serfs their own land. - Russia was industrializing rapidly and had one of the world's fastest-growing economies before the communist revolution. - **Comparison with the Soviet Era:** - Contrary to the belief that Russia was in terrible shape before communism, "nearly every metric of life with the exception of urban amenities declined to the soviet union in the period before world war ii." **Europe Got Wealthy by Exploiting the Rest of the World** - **Common Misconception:** European wealth is primarily a result of colonial exploitation. The speaker finds this myth particularly annoying due to its widespread acceptance despite being "so easy to disprove." - **Speaker's Counter-Argument:** This narrative is largely false; European wealth predates major colonization, and there is no clear correlation between empire/slavery and national success. - **Pre-Colonial Wealth:** Western Europe was already the wealthiest place per capita before extensive colonization. - National incomes in 1500 in the Eastern Hemisphere can predict incomes today, suggesting a return to a pre-modern norm as Western hegemony wanes. - **Lack of Correlation between Empire and Success:** - Spain: Gold from its empire mostly ended up in Italy and Spain, whose economies stalled, while England and the Netherlands, which underwent revolutions, prospered. - Atlantic Slave Trade: A correlation study for countries involved in the Atlantic slave trade showed it was "actually negative." - Most involved countries (e.g., Spain, Portugal) are now poorer in Western Europe. - Wealthiest European countries (e.g., Germany, Switzerland, Northern Italy, Scandinavia) often had no or minimal colonial history or slave trade involvement. - **Internal Economic Centers vs. Colonial Ports:** - England: Industrial centers were in the rural northwest, while major colonial ports (Bristol, London) were in the south. - France: Industrialization centered in the northeast, while slave trade ports (Nantes, Le Havre, Bordeaux) were in the west. - **Scramble for Africa:** Most African colonies cost more than they yielded. - **Post-WWII Decolonization:** Europe experienced a "massive economic revolution" after decolonization, while Africa and most ex-colonies underwent a "30-year active decline in standard of living." - **20th Century Colonialism:** Colonial empires were "basically economic liabilities." - **Acknowledged Counter-Examples (with caveats):** - Spain did fund its military for over a century by exploiting Latin America. - An argument could be made that the conquest of India helped British industrialization, but the speaker "generally think[s] this is window dressing." **Whitewashing the Worst Atrocities (Focusing Disproportionately on Hitler)** - **Common Practice:** While Hitler is universally acknowledged as evil, there is a tendency to overlook or downplay other mass murderers who were statistically worse, and whose ideologies still have supporter bases. - **Speaker's Claim:** Hitler was only the fifth worst mass murderer in history, and the four individuals/groups ahead of him often receive less condemnation and even have apologist communities. - **Groups/Ideologies Responsible for More Deaths than Hitler:** - **Communists (Stalin, Mao):** - Explanation for being "let off the hook": - The world has not collectively condemned communism as morally abhorrent. - Parts of academia wished Marxism had worked and have an "affection for communism" similar to right-wing affection for extreme nationalists. - Much of this is powered by "intelligence envy of the wealth and power of those who are less intelligent than them that's the point of communism." (Speaker's interpretation of communist motivation). - If the goal were helping the poor rather than hurting the rich, moderate socialist models (e.g., Sweden, France) with better track records would be chosen. - **Mongols (Genghis Khan):** - Explanation for lesser condemnation: - Events were "far away and long ago." - Their achievements as conquerors are perceived as "so badass we can't ignore them." - The distance in time and geography allows a focus on their "genius and manly" aspects, turning away from the "dark side" (e.g., 40 million deaths 800 years ago). - The speaker admits to a fascination with Mongolian metal music and daydreaming about their military prowess. - **Moral Equivalence Argument:** - Killing someone for their class (e.g., "son of a rich farmer") is as morally reprehensible as killing someone for their ethnicity (e.g., "being Jewish"), as both involve killing based on immutable, birth-ascribed characteristics. - If human life is considered equally valuable regardless of time or place, then life in 1940s France cannot be deemed more valuable than life in 1240s Iraq. - **Additional Overlooked Atrocity: The Taiping Rebellion** - The third bloodiest war in history, killing 20-40 million people in 19th-century China (more than WWI). - A civil war between "almost Christian fanatics" and the Manchu monarchy. - A "huge war almost no one's heard of." **Explaining the West's Unprecedented Success: The Competitivity Thesis** - A. Rejection of Conventional Explanations: - 1. "Guns, Germs, and Steel" Thesis: - a. Insufficiency: Does not explain why the West surpassed India, Islam, or China, which share similar Eurasian geographical advantages. - b. Critique of Geographic Determinism: Historical periods exist where other regions (Middle East, India, China) were more advanced than Europe despite identical geography. - 1. Colonial Exploitation Thesis: - a. Dismissal: Considered "laughable." - b. Pre-Colonial Wealth: Western Europe was "already the richest area in the world in gdp per capita" before colonization. - c. Post-Colonial Growth: European economies experienced "massive economic surges" after decolonization, while former colonies often saw declines. - d. Lack of Correlation: No consistent link between colonial empire size and economic success (e.g., poorer Spain/Portugal/Ottomans/Mughals vs. richer non-colonial Germans/Scandinavians). - e. Rhetorical Note: The speaker acknowledges the "fanatical fan base" for this theory and declines to "get bogged down." - B. Core Argument: Europe's Social and Political Structure Fostered "Competitivity." - 1. Political Competitivity: Perpetual Interstate Warfare. - a. Structural Condition: Europe "never united into big empires" but remained a system of "warring states (france austria spain etc)." - b. Consequence: "Endless military competition forced an arms race that resulted in massive technological and social progress." - c. Example of Social Progress via Competition: In the Indian Ocean, the "legendarily corrupt" Portuguese were replaced by the Dutch (who "worked terribly of the native population"), who were in turn replaced by the "best empire of the three by far," the British. This competitive pressure was absent for the Portuguese elsewhere. - 1. Social Competitivity: Divided Power Structure and Rule of Law. - a. Contrast with Other Civilizations: In China (bureaucrats), India (priests), and Islam (priests/warriors), a single social class dominated, allowing its "main flaw" to permeate society (e.g., Indian/Chinese military distrust leading to nomadic conquest; Islamic suppression of science/capitalism). - b. Medieval European Structure: A "really divided power structure" with church, towns, nobility, and kings vying for power, creating a "strong balance of power that kept all of these groups in check." (This counters the "myth that the kings of medieval europe could rule like despots"). - c. Emergence of Rule of Law: Prevents social superiors from "just stealing their lesser's work" (e.g., contrasting 18th C. Guatemala with 18th C. New Jersey). This was "critical for industrialization" requiring large, secure investments. - 1. Economic Competitivity: Primacy of the Market. - a. Unique Historical Period (West, 1000 AD - WWI): "The only era ever in which money was more powerful than authority." - b. Historical Norm: Authority paramount (e.g., Chinese emperor's power to command/inflate currency). - c. Western Distinction: "For most of western history the market was more powerful than the state." States defying the market faced consequences (e.g., Spain's currency tanked). Successful states "played with the market rather than against it." - d. Societal Impact: Society became "less structured around authority in class and more around ability." - 1. Intellectual Competitivity: Empirical Investigation Driven by Theology. - a. Medieval Catholic Church Doctrine: Concluded that "in order to find god one should study the outside world since god made the world." - b. Consequence: This "very easily led to modern science." - c. Contrast with Other Civilizations: Prioritized ancient texts (Quran, Confucius, Plato/Aristotle) over empirical study, leading to "logical rabbit holes without actually doing anything real," while "the west was studying the real world." **V. The Transformative Impact of Colonialism and the Rise of Anglo-American Dominance** - A. Limited Impact of Asian/African Colonialism on the West Itself: "The big conquests of areas like asia and africa didn't really have big effects on the west itself." - B. Profound Effects of New World Colonialism on the West: - 1. Agricultural Impact: Introduction of New World crops (e.g., potato) was essential for feeding industrial cities (e.g., German/British factory cities; Leeds/Liege fed from Argentina/Kansas), thus enabling industrialization. - 1. Demographic and Territorial Expansion via North America: - a. Decisive Factor: The colonization of temperate North America (US and southern Canada) was "decisive to western civilization." - b. Scale: More than doubled the West's land size and expanded its population by over 50%. (Oceania's impact is considered "demographically insignificant"). - c. Unique Process: Described as "one of the weirdest events in history," involving a 90% decline in native populations due to disease, followed by a new population that "bred like rabbits" and spread across the continent within a century "without really changing its social structure." - C. Shift in the West's Internal Balance of Power: - 1. From Continental Europe to "British Civilization": - a. Historical Baseline: Britain in 1600 was a "shrimp" (4 million pop.) compared to Greater Germany or France (20 million each). - b. Current Reality: English speakers are "by far the largest western group" (nearing 400 million), significantly outnumbering other European groups. - D. America's Anomalous Rise to Hegemony: - 1. Common Civilizational Unification Pattern: Often by a "continental highly militaristic often pseudo-fascist bureaucratic state" (e.g., Macedon, Assyrians, Chin, Tsarist Russia, Inca). - 1. Averted Western Unification: Prussian Germany (or secondarily Russia) "nearly happened" during the World Wars, but "america was there" to prevent it. - 1. British vs. Continental Values: Britain's values (democracy, liberalism, capitalism) suit a small mercantile island. Continental nations require a strong military above all. - 1. America's Unique Synthesis: Due to minimal military competition from Native Americans, America expanded across a continent "while maintaining a british social structure with british freedoms," gaining "all the benefits of a wealthy island nation at the scale of a continent." - 1. Consequence: America became "so huge and wealthy that it had no competition inside the west and became the dominant power." - 1. Analogy: "What if carthage colonized brazil used all the people that settled there to beat the romans and conquer the mediterranean spreading their weird system of democracy and capitalism." - E. Character of the American-led Western Order: - 1. Description: A "weird one," a "weird confederacy over europe that's really an empire but no one involved wants to admit it," held by "not really functioning legal identities like the world bank and eu." The speaker finds this "honestly make[s] sense given the west's history." - 1. US as "Reluctant Superpower": A "decently common thing across history," characterized by "half-asses a lot of its empiring alternating between blowing up opponents and forgetting they exist." In total, "a strange empire." **VI. The West's Contemporary Weaknesses and Existential Crisis** - A. The Illusion of Invincibility (Pre-WWI): For centuries, the West appeared dominant in all fields (military, agriculture, medicine, government, science). - B. Emergence of Weaknesses Post-WWI: - 1. Governing Principle (Aristotle paraphrase): "One's greatest strength and push to its extreme becomes one's greatest weakness." - 1. Erosion of Foundational Beliefs: The West's prior belief in its "racial moral religious and civilizational superiority" (which made its power tolerable/exciting) became "impossible to believe in" after the Holocaust, the trenches, Charles Darwin's theories, and witnessing non-Western powers (Japanese, Russians) defeat Westerners. - C. The Individualist, Guilt-Based System as a Liability Without Christian Moorings: - 1. Central Problem: "Without a god to forgive them the guilt became intolerable." - 1. Moral Vacuum: "Without the christian bedrock... there isn't a moral structure that can justify doing anything and so the act of doing anything is viewed negatively by the envious." - 1. Ideological Responses to Meaninglessness/Inequality: - a. Communism: Becomes a way to "redress inequalities in the real world" in the absence of an afterlife belief. (Speaker's Irony: "those inequalities have to exist or everyone will be a lot poorer"). - b. Romanticism: A way to deal with lack of meaning by "enjoying life," but "easily collapses into emotionality and depression when you have to face that most of life for most people is depressing and boring." - c. Modern Neoliberalism: Defined as "making people richer as fast as possible but pushing for more money as fast as possible without any other criteria is a great way to fuck up your society really fast." - D. The Paradox of Anglo-American Moralism: - 1. Unique Imperial Concern: The "british american world order is one of the few empires that cares about morality." (Contrast: Assyrians, Prussians, Mughals wouldn't care if subjects practiced slavery; killing villagers was pragmatic). - 1. Historical Examples: Americans killing "half a million of their own people in a civil war for the express purpose of ending slavery"; British campaigning globally against slavery. Also, attempts to expand personal freedoms, respect war rights, and avoid killing civilians are framed as unique to this order and its neighbors. - 1. Acknowledgment of Wrongs: "The west has done absolutely awful things in its history but it's also the only society that's felt guilty about it and tried to change." - E. Institutionalized Self-Criticism and Internal Division: - 1. Internal Hostility: "Its own worst critics are its own citizens. Many citizens of the west hate everything the west does." - 1. Unique Societal Behavior: "The modern west is basically the only society ever that institutionally flagellates itself." (Examples: governments funding artists who want to tear them down; youth imitating criminals for masculinity; universities training leaders to be "disloyal to their own societies"). This is deemed "absolutely bizarre" from other historical/societal perspectives. - F. Breakdown of Shared Values and Purpose: - 1. Root Cause: "Without the shared belief structure that came from christianity there's no shared positions that anyone can agree on." - 1. Consequence: Inability to achieve consensus on major issues like "waging wars figuring out an economic policy figuring out what should go in education." - 1. End of an Era of Avoidance: The West was wealthy enough for 80 years to "ignore these deep questions and pushing them into the future but that future is becoming now." - G. Manifestations of the Existential Crisis: - 1. Declining Birth Rates: "Heavily correlated with declining religiosity," leading to an aging population and loss of "youthful energy." - 1. Military Impotence: If the West "can't wage offensive war and a majority of the west has no desire to fund any military it's effectively tying its own hands behind its back against more brutal opponents like russia and china." - 1. Cultural Disintegration: "If every vector of western culture hates the west after a couple generations no sense of cultural unity will be left." - H. Philosophical Diagnosis of the Western Condition: - 1. Oswald Spengler's "Faustian" Civilization: The West "traded an easy understanding the world for looking for the truth and thus got an incredible amount of power." - 1. Friedrich Nietzsche's Criterion: "You can judge a man by how much truth he can handle." - 1. The "Truths" Confronted by the West: The world has "no real evidence for god," can still exhibit "the barbarity of the trenches after centuries of improvement," operates under "cruel darwinism," and faces cosmic insignificance ("a single supernova could wipe out life in an instant"). - 1. Psychological Consequence: "Western man believing he was guided by god towards greater and greater glory slunk back into depression in his lonely apartment and hated that he ever tried in the first place hating only those who still had the courage to try even more." ### II. Fairness: 19th Century Britain - **Relevant Era:** 19th Century. - **Definition of Fairness:** A belief in karma, where individuals reap benefits commensurate with their hard work and honesty. Conversely, "losers and slackers should be given no quarter by society." - **Evolutionary Basis:** Evolved from the need to maintain group work in hunter-gatherer communities, where societies that failed to manage "free riders" were outcompeted. - **Claim:** 19th Century Britain is the society where the fairness system was strongest. - **Supporting Evidence 1 (Workhouses):** The poor and debtors were forced into grueling labor in terrible conditions for minimal survival, reflecting the societal view on deserved hardship. - **Supporting Evidence 2 (Ideological Justification):** - Wealth and power were justified by a "natural order of competence combined with moral virtue." The rich were seen as morally virtuous. - Britain's global dominance was attributed to divine favor and "British racial and civilizational superiority." - The parliamentary system, limiting suffrage to the upper classes and "the virtuous," was seen as logical. - Individuals were expected to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps." - Colonial populations were deemed inferior due to lesser accomplishments, making colonization a "privilege" bestowed by Britain. - The poor were looked down upon; e.g., cholera outbreaks were initially blamed on their "uncleanliness." - Indifference to mass starvation in colonies (e.g., India, Ireland) was framed as the "natural order of things"; if the poor starved, their children would have more. - Welfare for the poor was seen as detrimental, discouraging "plucky spirit and hard work." - **Historical Conditions for Extreme Fairness in Britain:** - **Guilt-Based Culture:** Britain's rootedness in Western "guilt-based" civilization, emphasizing the individual's relationship with God for moral behavior (contrasted with "shame-based" cultures focused on tribal/group relations). - **Protestantism:** Further amplified guilt-based morality as the "most guilt-based branch of Christianity." - **Capitalism:** Geographic and historical factors made Britain highly capitalist, a system ostensibly based on merit, leading to more social mobility than most prior societies, making the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" narrative believable. - **Colonial Outlets:** Colonies (Australia, Canada, U.S.) provided an escape for those discontented with the British social order. - **Global Dominance:** Britain's unparalleled development (technology, agriculture, military) reinforced a moral system viewing the successful as virtuous. - **Malthusian Pressures (Early 19th C.):** Heavy overpopulation and harsh living conditions for many created a need among the elite for an ideology to justify societal cruelty. - **Industrial Revolution:** Subsequent increases in personal output and median wealth reinforced the belief in fairness through apparent good fortune. - **Decline of Extreme Fairness:** - **Inherent Unfairness:** The system was less fair than elites believed, with large class differences and a persistent underclass. - **World War I:** Shattered the "mystique" of the upper classes as a higher rank of being due to their role in the tragedy. Britain shifted from an "aristocratic republic" to mobilize for war, undermining the meritocratic facade. - **Consequences of Mystique Collapse:** - The British social code broke down. - Devaluation of Pound Sterling to pay debts and for welfare spending. - The empire was discarded as its justification (British superiority) eroded. - Rise in "anti-social behavior" (crime, teen pregnancies) in working classes post-WWII, speculatively linked to the collapse of belief in a fair system (similar to rises seen among Black Americans in the same era). - **Implicit Premise:** The "myth of fairness" was a crucial binding agent for the British Empire and social order. - **Speaker's Assessment of 19th Century British Fairness:** - **Effectiveness:** Despite hypocrisy, this extreme fairness made Britain "quite effective," leading the world economically, politically, technologically, and socially. - **Legacy:** Significant contributions, including "industrial civilization and democracy," are owed to 19th Century Britain. ### III. Purity: Wahhabist Societies - **Relevant Eras:** 18th Century (Wahhabism's origin); 20th-21st Century (spread, peak, and apparent decline). - **Definition of Purity:** The idea that certain things must be maintained as "untouchable and sacrosanct." - **Necessity:** A degree of purity is essential for societal cohesion (e.g., preventing incest, consensual cannibalism). Societies cohere around "ideas that are worshipped and not questioned" (e.g., individual human life in the West, sanctity of cows in Hindu India). - **Claim:** Wahhabist movements represent societies most extremely focused on purity. - **Clarification:** Groups like ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram are recent creations (last few decades), stemming from a school of Islam (Wahhabism) "about as old as the U.S." - **Origin of Wahhabism:** Invented in 18th Century Saudi Arabia, taking the "most hardcore interpretation of Islam someone could take," sometimes exceeding the Prophet Muhammad's teachings. - **Alliance with House of Saud:** Early Wahhabis allied with the House of Saud (then minor warlords), with clerics supporting the monarchy in exchange for Wahhabism becoming the official sect. - **Characteristics of Wahhabism:** - "Simultaneously super conservative and radically new." - **Conservative:** "Ridiculously socially conservative" (patriarchal, ethnocentric, dogmatic). - **Radical:** A "new interpretation of Islam that ensues much of the Quran and Hadiths." (e.g., traditional Islam respects Christians/Jews and views women as spiritually equal; Wahhabism has sought to exterminate the former and deny women rights). - **Analogy:** Wahhabism is to Islam as the Amish are to Christianity, pushing social codes beyond explicit scriptural mandates. - **Appeal:** Parts of the "more moderate Sunni world" have a "crush on Wahhabism," similar to moderate conservatives' views on extreme nationalists or moderate left-wingers on hardcore communists/certain critical theories. - **Spread of Wahhabism:** - **Historical Fluke (Saudi Arabia):** - Ottoman Empire imploded when Europeans were less inclined to colonize recklessly. - Oil became important, making Saudi Arabia wealthy right after the period Europeans might have colonized them for it. - **Consequence:** Wahhabism became the official religion of a wealthy state controlling Mecca and Medina. - **Psychological/Social Conditions for Spread:** - Trauma from centuries of Western dominance over the Muslim world, culminating in widespread colonization. - Post-colonial leadership by "Western-oriented militaristic thugs" who failed to improve conditions, leading to disgust with Western culture. - This created a "power vacuum" filled by radical political Islam (Shia in Iran, Sunni via Wahhabism). - Massive Saudi oil money funded its spread. - Disenchantment with Western culture. - Disruption of traditional peasant lives by mass urbanization, creating social rifts. - Massive population growth in the Islamic world, outstripping sluggish economic growth, creating a large, underemployed young male population seeking purpose, which Wahhabism provided. - **Manifestations:** Al-Qaeda (Sahel, Sahara, Afghanistan), Boko Haram (Nigeria), ISIS (Mesopotamia), and similar groups. (ISIS deviates from traditional Wahhabism but retains most features). - **Current Trajectory (Downturn):** - The movement seems to be on a "probably permanent" downturn. - Widespread disgust in the Islamic world. - Military defeats of ISIS and Boko Haram. - Changing attitudes in countries like Saudi Arabia (e.g., towards science, women's treatment). - Failure to achieve goals like a world-spanning caliphate. - Moral validity weakened by actions like ISIS's mass recruitment of sex slaves. - **Prediction:** More moderate (though not by Western secular standards) interpretations of Islam are likely "the order of the future." - **Weakness of Purity-Based Systems:** - Obsessive striving for purity leads to loss of "mental and strategic flexibility" and the inability to make alliances. - **Example 1 (Nazis):** If willing to compromise on racial views, could have allied with Eastern Europeans against Soviets and potentially won WWII. - **Example 2 (Crusaders):** Lost potential allies (Byzantines, Emirate of Damascus) by not differentiating among non-Catholics. - **Example 3 (ISIS):** If more moderate, could have allied with Turkey or Saudi Arabia and gained more funding. - **Potential Strength of Purity-Based Systems (as observed by speaker):** - Construction of powerful social cohesion. - Ability to convince followers to commit suicide for the cause, indicating extreme loyalty that prevents free-riding and creates a strong society. - **Analogy (Puritans):** "Religious fanatical groups like the Puritans" colonized North America and made advances in technology, manufacturing, and morality due to cohesion from religious fanaticism. - **Speculative Hope:** Whatever follows Wahhabism, or a future mutation, might achieve similar positive outcomes. ### IV. Harm: The Modern West - **Relevant Era:** Post-World War II to Present. - **Definition of Harm:** The belief that hurting others is bad. - **Biological Basis:** Stems from the need to keep children safe. - **Claim:** The modern West is the society most concerned about harm, to an extreme degree. - **Rhetorical Questions as Evidence:** - Self-censorship to avoid offense even when stating known truths. - Children growing up unable to play outside due to fear of kidnapping. - Extensive paperwork for basic activities (e.g., white water rafting) due to fear of lawsuits. - **Historical Development of Extreme Harm Focus:** - **Christianity:** Initiated the moral assumption that hurting others is bad. - **The Enlightenment:** Strengthened this by prioritizing measurable things (like people getting hurt) over immeasurable ones (like national honor). - **World Wars:** Horrific nature destroyed faith in pre-existing beliefs (religion, honor, progress) that made pain tolerable. Without these, pain lacked meaning. The death toll caused a "knee-jerk reaction" that all war and causing suffering, even if rationally justified, was wrong. - **Wealth:** The West became wealthy enough to afford to care about helping and protecting others. - **Manifestations and Negative Consequences of Extreme Harm-Avoidance:** - **Military Ineffectiveness:** - **Vietnam and Algeria:** French and Americans allegedly would have won but lost public support ("lose the heart to fight"), leading to massive subsequent deaths (e.g., ~5 million in Southeast Asia). - **Psychological Issues:** - Fear of infinitesimal kidnapping risks, preventing children from unsupervised outdoor play and world experience, has contributed to "massive depression and psychological issues among Gen Z." - **Economic and Technological Stagnation:** - Over-regulation has slowed technological progress and "tremendously neutered Europe's economic and technological growth." - **"Social Justice Philosophy":** - Described as a "bizarre manifestation" where culture is so terrified of hurting emotions that it makes disagreeable subjects taboo and fires people for factually true statements if they might offend "oppressed groups." - **Implicit Reasoning:** This is seen as an overextension of the harm principle. - **Infantilization of "Oppressed Groups":** The modern Left allegedly treats oppressed groups as "veritable children," not responsible for their actions and purely held down by systemic issues. - **Example 1:** Rappers not held accountable for misogynistic statements that would "cancel" pop or country stars. - **Example 2:** Discussion of the gender pay gap being potentially due to "inherent characteristics" is taboo. - **Critique of Harm as an Overarching Ideology:** - Not a coherent ideology to motivate people. - Terrible at making priorities. - Divides people into "countless little groups" rather than uniting them. - A "negative motivator against achievement rather than a positive one towards doing something." - **Geopolitical Implications:** - The harm function "basically neuters most of Europe, Canada, and parts of America from waging war effectively," posing a problem if a war with China, requiring the whole Western world, were to occur. - **Acknowledged Positive Aspects:** - The speaker refers to the "beauty of harm" and the "social justice movement" as an "orchid": a "beautiful hothouse plant that demonstrates an already empathetic and successful society, but must exist in the good times." - The West's insistence on harm has helped "countless oppressed groups like ethnic minorities, gay people, and women." - The last 100 years have seen the expansion of rights to almost all people in Western societies. ### V. Liberty: Medieval Iceland - **Relevant Era:** c. 900-1200 AD. - **Definition of Liberty:** The desire to keep tyrannical powers from controlling society and to keep as much freedom in individual hands as possible. - **Evolutionary Basis:** Evolved to prevent "alpha males" from gaining control of hunter-gatherer communities. - **Claim:** Medieval Iceland (c. 900-1200 AD) was one of the "queerest states in history" and the perfect representation of the liberty function. - **Societal Characteristics:** - No army, no centralized government, no head of state, no state religion. - Governance: People met annually in a valley to vote on issues; the state ruled through consensus. - Law Enforcement: Lawbreakers exiled; if they didn't leave, neighbors could kill them and seize their property. - Social Organization: People voluntarily organized under chieftains who represented them. - **Historical Conditions for Extreme Liberty in Iceland:** - **Founding Motivation:** Icelanders immigrated from Norway to escape the growing power of "tyrannical kings," founding an "entirely libertarian kingless society." - **Cultural Heritage:** Founders were from "two of the most individualistic societies in history": Vikings, often with Irish or Scottish wives. - **Geographic Isolation:** Iceland's remote location ("practically in the Arctic Circle") meant no one wanted to conquer it, so no external threats necessitated a strong government for defense. - **Strengths of the Icelandic System:** - "Rampant individualism" sparked "many chads" (individuals of remarkable agency/achievement) who achieved incredible deeds. - Reputation for greatness in the region (e.g., colonization of Greenland, reaching America). - Snorri Sturluson: noted as an "awesome poet and political mastermind" who preserved Norse mythology. - The lack of restriction allowed individuals to "manifest themselves in incredible ways," attested by "badass figures" in Norse sagas (e.g., Gunnar, Njáll, Egill). - **Weaknesses and Downfall:** - **Inability to Coordinate:** Lack of state force led to "horrific blood feuds" escalating into multi-generational killing sprees. - **Civil War:** Degraded into civil war as charismatic leaders accumulated family coalitions and attempted to become dictators. - **Colonization by Norway:** Eventually colonized by Norway, which Iceland, ravaged by civil war, did not resist. - **Environmental Degradation:** Deforestation of the entire island meant they couldn't build boats to leave, leading to ruthless exploitation. - **Long-Term Outcome:** Iceland settled into "hundreds of years of desperate poverty" as a colonial possession of Norway and Denmark. - **Comparative Case (Ireland):** - Similar conditions in Ireland: an "anarchic warlord system" where "every Irishman's king of his own home." - This lack of coordination also resulted in "centuries of brutal English colonization." ### VI. Loyalty: Imperial Japan - **Relevant Eras:** Tokugawa Shogunate (early 17th Century - mid 19th Century); Meiji Era to World War II (mid 19th Century - 1945). - **Definition of Loyalty (implied):** An extreme devotion and commitment to one's immediate social group (clan, nation) above universal concerns, often coupled with xenophobia. - **Claim:** Imperial Japan manifested loyalty to an extreme degree. - **Supporting Evidence (WWII):** - Kamikaze fighters committing suicide attacks due to "insane loyalty to the emperor and the Japanese nation." - Japanese troops routinely fighting to the death rather than surrendering. - Soldiers continuing to fight in isolation for decades after the war ended. - **Cultural and Historical Basis for Extreme Loyalty:** - **Cultural Emphasis:** For millennia, Japanese culture placed higher emphasis on the "local social nexus (like a clan or nation) above higher ones like humanity," fostering profound loyalty to Japan and deep racism towards outsiders. - **Rice Cultivation:** Requires tremendous cooperation, which manifested as loyalty to social superiors. - **Confucianism:** Arrival of Confucianism accentuated loyalty as the "ultimate social good." - **Tokugawa Shogunate (Early 17th Century unification):** - Context: Tumultuous era (failed Korea invasion, failed Christian uprising). - Nature of Shogunate: "One of the closest things to a totalitarian estate... in the pre-modern world." - Features: State-mandated politeness, rigid social caste system, state confiscation of weapons, control of books and ideas. - Isolation: Japan "nearly completely cut itself off from the rest of the world" for ~200 years, killing most foreigners who landed. - Cultivated "profound sense of xenophobia" and "its own uniqueness." - Bureaucracy: Cultivated profound loyalty among the bureaucracy (staffed by former samurai class), arguing that since they no longer faced death regularly, they must serve the state with incredible loyalty in their new, easier work. - **Post-1853 (Opening by Americans):** - Realization of being "far behind the rest of the world." - Society "pulled together" to catch up with the West, fostering a sense that Japanese people "had to stand together or fall." - State indoctrination of "extreme nationalism" in schools as the population became more educated. - **Effects and Consequences of Extreme Loyalty:** - **Military Prowess (WWII):** Japanese troops fought with "an insane amount of morale," capable of enduring horrific terrain, night fighting, and terrible conditions. - **Downfall/Negative Consequences:** - Focus on loyalty to their own tribe led to ignoring other value systems. - The "very hierarchical system" allowed top leadership to make "terrible decisions" (e.g., declaring war on countries 12 times their population), which the people followed unquestionably. - Loyalty to the Japanese nation above all else enabled "horrific atrocities" (e.g., headhunting, Rape of Nanking), making them widely hated. - **Speaker's Remark:** "Few in continental Asia cried when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked." **The Spanish Conquest (15th-16th Centuries): Foundation of a New World Order** - **Claim:** The Spanish conquest was militarily impressive, with small numbers of Spaniards (and crucial native allies) conquering large empires. - **Examples:** Pizarro's conquest of the Inca (approx. 200 Spaniards vs. 11 million people); Cortez's conquest of the Aztecs (approx. 600 Spaniards vs. 20 million people). - **Factors Enabling Conquest:** 1. **Technological Advantages:** Steel (especially swords) and horses were more significant than guns, as native fighting styles were not adapted to them. 2. **Brutality of Native Regimes:** Empires like the Aztecs (compared to Assyria for its brutality) were hated by subject peoples, leading to alliances between Spaniards and these groups. The Inca, despite being more benevolent, expanded too quickly and faced civil wars. - **Supporting Detail:** Spanish native allies often constituted 90% of their manpower. 3. **Disease:** European diseases killed approximately 90% of the native population within a century due to a lack of immunity. This was likely the biggest single factor. - **Claim:** The Spanish colonization of Latin America was an extension of the Reconquista (the centuries-long Christian Spanish reconquest of Muslim Iberia). - **Relevant Era:** The last Muslim kingdom in Spain fell in 1492, the same year Columbus discovered the New World. - **Manifestations:** 1. **Method of Conquest:** Similar to the Reconquista, local ambitious militias (conquistadors) conquered territories with little central guidance, then turned power over to the Castilian monarchy in exchange for titles. The New World empire was accumulated without direct effort from the central government. - **Analogy:** If Elon Musk colonized Mars with SpaceX using his own money and then turned it over to the US government. 2. **Ideological Energy:** Spain remained a "hardcore crusader" society during Europe's Renaissance humanism. This immense belief in a united Spanish mission, forged during the conflict with Muslims, prevented conquistadors like Cortez or Pizarro from declaring themselves independent kings. - **Claim:** The Spanish were most successful in colonizing pre-existing developed kingdoms like the Aztec and Inca. - **Reasoning:** These empires had highly centralized "god-king" structures (similar to Bronze Age Old World empires), providing a nexus for Spanish power. - **Example:** The Inca empire was described as a successful "communist state" with no private property, state-assigned jobs, and even state-assigned brides. - **Mechanism:** The Spanish utilized existing Inca governmental structures to enslave and then enserf the native population, often more oppressively. They also co-opted native aristocracies, recognizing them as nobility and marrying into them to maintain local legitimacy. - **Consequence:** The centers of Spanish America (Mexico and Peru) became the former native centers. - **Claim:** The Spanish maintained control despite being outnumbered by annihilating indigenous cultural leadership. - **Mechanism:** Wiping out indigenous priest classes (who were teachers, historians, bankers, community leaders) neutered cultural resistance. - **Ideological Reinforcement:** The argument of a superior Spanish God was heavily backed by natives dying from disease at 90% rates, leading to subservience among urbanized Indian societies. - **Claim:** Non-profitable areas were generally colonized by the Church. - **Reasoning:** Conquistadors sought to become lords with serfs and lost interest where this was difficult. The Church primarily sought converts, with serfs being a secondary benefit. - **Examples:** Mosquito-ravaged coasts of Venezuela, deserts of Texas/California, grasslands of Paraguay. - **Exceptions to the general pattern:** Brazil and Argentina. - **Brazil:** The Portuguese used it as a waystation en route to the Indian Ocean. - **Argentina and Brazil:** Developed as settler societies (like the US and Canada), inhabited by African slaves or white settlers, with little Indian influence. **III. Colonial Social and Imperial Structures (16th Century - Early 19th Century)** - **Claim:** The Spanish crown established a social structure with three main power centers: landlords, the Church, and the Crown (supreme). 1. **Landlords:** Largely descendants of conquistadors. Until circa the 1970s, a small number of families (12-15) controlled the majority of land and large parts of the economy in most Latin American countries. The Crown granted massive tracts of land (with serfs) in exchange for converting natives to Christianity. 2. **The Church:** Given vast land and power by a deeply Catholic society. It was the cultural nexus, providing welfare, education, art, banking, leadership, and investment. It was the most stable organization and often the most trusted by Indians. - **Nuance:** While often brutal and racist, the Church sometimes defended Indian rights against landlords who sought to enslave them. 3. **The Crown:** The most powerful element, despite the empire's vastness (orders took months to reach distant provinces). - **Claim:** The Spanish consciously modeled their empire on the Roman Empire, emphasizing hierarchy and religious homogeneity over economic maximization. - **Speaker's Assertion:** Spanish colonial officials were not "idiotic thugs" but well-educated (Roman law, Greek philosophy), operating under a different worldview than modern observers. - **Characteristics of "Old School Empires" (pre-modern):** - Not primarily economically based. - Controlled society through hierarchy. - Maintained religious homogeneity for social cohesion. - Centralized power. - Controlled trade to support social hierarchies. - Built societies as cohesive, supposedly symbiotic hierarchies, rather than maximizing freedom. - Trusted educated gentlemen/nobility to manage the state. - This was the perceived model of successful historical empires (Romans, Persians, Chinese). - **Contrast with New Imperial Forms:** - Starting with the Dutch and British, then French and Americans, empires became based on financial power, encouraging work through market incentives rather than social command. These empires aimed to maximize outputs and freedom of action for efficiency. - **Illustration (from a 1940s book):** Mexico was poor because the Spanish thought wealth came from controlling gold, while America was rich because the English thought it came from making things. - **Consequence:** These market-oriented societies "absolutely wrecked" hierarchy-based empires (Spanish, Ottomans, Chinese). - **Claim:** The Spanish Empire is best understood as a midpoint between a Muslim empire (e.g., Ottomans) and a country like France. - **Reasoning:** The most civilized and developed parts of Spain involved in New World colonization were heavily Arab/Muslim influenced not long before. - **Similarities to Ottoman Model:** Colonial warrior noble class, unified crusading religion as source of legitimacy, large centralized absolutist monarchy, stripping native populations of leadership, distrust of market economy and science, brutal suppression of attacks on religious authority. - **Claim:** The Spanish succeeded in creating a Roman-like empire, but one resembling the declining Roman Empire (c. 400 AD with Diocletian) rather than its height (c. 100 AD). - **Similarity:** Both used culturally coherent aristocracies to dominate diverse regions. (A wealthy Mexican from Mexico City could move to Lima and find the same culture, unlike the diverse British colonies in North America). - **Shared Problems with Diocletian's Rome:** 1. Over-centralization: Government trying to maintain excessive control over vast regions with slow transportation (mule-based). 2. Sclerotic Bureaucracies: Passed unenforceable legislation (Spanish Crown sent ~500,000 edicts, condensed to ~7,000 sensible laws). Complex legal codes were enforced "in the breach." - **Enduring Consequence:** Latin America today is known for bureaucracy and red tape, harming business. 3. Rotation of Viceroys: To prevent provincial independence, top positions were reserved for Spaniards from Spain, making American-born whites (Creoles) second-class citizens. 4. Forced Labor/Servitude: Indians and Blacks worked for Spanish nobility, similar to Diocletian's government-based serf economy. - **Consequences:** Profound inequality, strangled market economy, declining population growth due to excessive extraction. - **Claim:** Spanish America experienced rapid expansion followed by economic and demographic decay. - **Evidence:** Borders were roughly the same in 1590 as in 1790. Mexico's population in 1700 (4.5 million) was a quarter of its Aztec-era population. (Though the ~1 million European immigrants "bred like crazy," leading to a population of 10 million by 1820). - **Claim:** Spanish America, like Spain, was an urban civilization, contrasting with rural British North America. - **Structure:** Spanish landlords lived in cities, extracting resources from surrounding serfs (white, black, or native) with whom they shared little, leading to a weak societal fabric. - **Claim:** Latin America, alongside India, is one of the most multiracial and ethnically diverse civilizations, characterized by a complex caste system. - **Structure:** A white ruling class installed itself, leading to a system where different ethnicities performed different societal roles. - **Example (Venezuela):** Castilian Spanish (ruling class), native-born whites (economic power), Canary Islanders (merchants/artisans), mixed-race (herders), Blacks (plantation workers), mixed-race or full-blood natives (serfs). - **Claim:** Lack of social cohesion is a critical problem in Latin America. - **Reasoning:** Social cohesion, defined as trust that other societal elements are trying their best and that rulers are not cheating, is vital for success (e.g., Japan and US, despite differences, share this). Latin America scores lowest on this metric. - **Aggravating Factors:** Different races living together in stratified roles, a "parasitic ruling class," and a "docile peasant class" alienated from the modern world. - **Claim:** The peasantry and lower classes were unrepresented in the social structure, lacking accountability and feedback loops, leading to a profoundly aristocratic society. - **Illustration (from a 1940s book):** A mid-level Brazilian city would have an opera house but no functioning sewer system, while an average American city would be the opposite. - **Brazil as a "Weird Twisted Mirror":** - The Portuguese government was more relaxed than the Spanish but had similar policies (banned printing press, established aristocratic plantations with slaves, creating a white-black caste system). - The economics of sugar slavery inherently produced similar aristocratic results, comparable to how the Roman Empire became more similar to Latin America as its slave percentage increased. **Post-Independence Trajectories and Persistent Instability (Early 19th Century - Present)** - **Claim:** The Spanish colonial system, designed for direct administration, left newly independent Latin American colonies (c. 1810 onwards) unable to function independently. - **Supporting Observation (quoting another source):** "Mexico is one of the few nations that when it was born you couldn't tell if it was an abortion or not," and "Mexico as an epilogue to the Spanish empire." - **Consequence:** When Spain was invaded by France (Napoleonic Wars, c. 1810), Spanish-American colonies collapsed into civil wars, which were often brutal race and class wars. - **Comparison:** American Revolution (25,000 deaths) vs. Mexican Wars of Independence (400,000 deaths) with similar populations, because Spanish power collapse meant societal collapse. - **Claim:** Post-independence nations formed under "caudillos" (independent cults of personality) and unstable governments. - **Mechanism:** Caudillos formed factions (often drawing from herding tribes) and seized power until overthrown. - **Exception:** Countries furthest from the equator eventually formed coherent centralized states. - **Claim:** Latin America's inherent instability makes it susceptible to strong manifestations of external political fashions, driven by an aristocratic culture that allows "cults of personality" to thrive. - **Pattern:** Political fashions gain currency for decades, allowing a "chad" (charismatic leader) to gain power for himself and his associates, followed by another fashion when long-term change fails. - **Relevant Eras and Dominant Fashions:** - **1850-1920ish:** Republics of white landowners (voters <10% of population). - **1920-1960:** Dictatorial nationalist technocracies (mix of right/left policies). - **1960-1980:** Military dictatorships competing with (and usually defeating) communists. - **1980-2000:** Liberal democracies. - **2000-c. 2016:** Shift to left-wing governments. - **Post-c. 2016:** Shift back to further right governments. - **Claim:** While ideologies have some impact (e.g., neoliberalism fared better than communism), the region's relative global position has remained stagnant. - **Evidence:** In both 1900 and today, the average Latin American has one-quarter the GDP of the average American. - **Observation:** The region has been "running very fast to stay in the same spot" relative to global progress. The rise of Eastern Europe and East Asia makes Latin America's progress appear "downright pathetic and embarrassing." - **Claim:** Latin America faces severe contemporary problems. - **Evidence:** High migration to the US/Spain. Countries like Brazil and Mexico have more annual gun deaths from crime than war zones like Syria or Iraq. Many countries (e.g., Brazil, Venezuela) are in their worst-ever economic conditions, with the middle class shrinking. **V. Debunking Common Explanations for Latin America's Challenges** - **Preamble:** The speaker acknowledges that answering "why" Latin America has these problems involves "painful answers" that people often avoid, with proposed answers usually being self-aggrandizing. - **Debunked Argument 1 (Right-wing):** Inherent flaws in Hispanic culture (too collectivist, Catholic, etc.). - **Counter-evidence:** Spain did well after EU integration; Hispanics have done well in the US (e.g., prosperous Miami, which is culturally Latin American, and the Mexican borderland). - **Debunked Argument 2 (Racist):** Latin America isn't successful because it's "brown." - **Counter-evidence:** Immense diversity in Latin America. Argentina and Uruguay are "whiter than the US and Canada." No clear correlation between skin tone and success (e.g., Argentines are as poor as darker-skinned neighbors, worse off than mixed-race Chile). Among US immigrant groups, largely white Puerto Ricans are poorer than darker-skinned groups like Mexicans. - **Debunked Argument 3 (Geography):** Horrific diseases, massive deserts/jungles. - **Partial Validity Acknowledged:** These factors exist. - **Counter-evidence:** Countries like Argentina have "perfect climate, some of the best soil in the world, and a big river system" yet still failed. The US overcame similar geographical challenges (Southern diseases, Western deserts, Great Plains farming difficulties) through technological advance, which Latin America could have done if more technologically developed. - **Debunked Argument 4 (Left-wing):** Held back by colonialism/neo-colonialism from Europe or America. - **Surface Plausibility:** Latin America has been economically dependent (on Britain pre-WWI, on the US since). - **Counter-Reasoning (upon scrutiny):** 1. Local elites often welcomed colonial systems (e.g., Bolivar "simping for the British"). 2. The exchange of raw goods for produced goods is not inherently oppressive; all partners are voluntary. Almost every economy starts this way, but Latin America never progressed beyond it for centuries. 3. The argument that an American company mining copper in Bolivia oppresses Bolivia is flawed; without the company, the copper might not be mined, making everyone poorer. 4. Studies show greater trade with America, Europe, and China results in more wealth, not less. 5. **Critical Exception:** The US drug trade has devastated many Latin American countries. However, if these countries were already functional, they could control it better. 6. The British generally left Latin America alone politically. US intervention has been limited to "pinprick strikes in the Caribbean basin." 7. The CIA gets "way more credit than it deserves"; leftist destruction (e.g., El Salvador, Chile, Argentina) was almost entirely locally organized, with the US mostly observing. 8. The US "just doesn't care" much about Latin America, especially south of the Caribbean, though it does pick factions. 9. While the US made "horrific and atrocious blunders" (e.g., 1954 Guatemala coup, 1916 Dominican Republic invasion), there were times it arguably should have intervened but didn't (e.g., Haitians begrudged US inaction against Papa Doc Duvalier in the 1970s; Cubans/Venezuelans might prefer a stronger US hand). 10. The US has shown leniency (e.g., allowed Mexico to nationalize US oil companies in the 1930s; initially tolerated Castro hoping for reform). - **Harmful Consequence of this Myth:** The myth of foreign exploitation allows failed Latin American dictators to blame the US/West, avoiding responsibility and miring the region in further poverty. The idea reconciles the contradiction of nations being taught they are "rich" (mineral wealth) while people live poor lives. - **Counter-Assertion:** Wealth has little to do with resources (e.g., wealthy Switzerland/Japan with few resources vs. poor Nigeria/Brazil with massive resources). **VI. The Speaker's Core Thesis: The Iberian Aristocratic Legacy and Lack of Power Separation** - **Claim:** Latin America is poor because there is no division between legal, political, and economic power. - **Historical Root:** Iberian conquerors structured everything on an aristocratic basis, concentrating economic power with landlords, and judicial/political power with Spanish-born officials. When the Spanish monarchy fell, this power defaulted to the landlords. - **Consequence:** This lack of power balance has allowed profound corruption and distrust, as there's no competition incentivizing better behavior. - **Inertia:** The system's concentration of power means anyone trying to change it gets crushed by entropy and special interests. The powerful have no interest in being non-corrupt. - **Claim:** Revolutions in Latin America have generally failed to achieve their stated goals because revolutionaries simply fill the shoes of previous oppressors. - **Reasoning:** The system makes it "so easy and profitable" to become the new oppressor. Revolutions claiming to wipe out landlords "frankly just became new landlords." - **Illustration:** The stereotype of Mexicans shifted from "lazy" (in Mexico, where hard work wasn't incentivized as landlords would seize gains) to "hard-working and stealing American jobs" (in America, where incentives differ). - **Claim:** The main thing missing from Latin America is the **rule of law**. - **Consequence:** Nobody trusts the law to behave properly, so people cannot be ambitious for fear of predation by more powerful entities (government officials, drug lords, wealthy neighbors). - **Claim:** All of Latin America's main issues spring from the Iberian aristocrats' desire to totally control their societies, turning others into docile serfs. - **Examples of Iberian Control and Long-Term Effects:** 1. **Restricted Information Flow:** Spanish and Portuguese banned/controlled printing presses and book flow. - **Consequence:** Weakened educational systems, equality, and social mobility. 2. **Discouraged Economic Innovation:** Bans on banks and local trade between colonies. - **Consequence:** Strongly economically unequal society where wealth never trickled down for a capitalist revolution. - **Claim:** Latin America continued the precedent set by Spain itself, which was an extreme version of certain Spanish characteristics. - **Spain's Historical Context:** - Purposely isolated from the Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution, and Reformation. - Anthropological trend: Colonial societies tend to be extreme versions of their parent societies; Latin America is "in some ways a parody of the Spain of that era." - **Economic History of Spain:** - North Spanish crown conquered the South (Middle Ages), replacing productive Muslim farming class with underpopulated ranch land (13th century). - Evicted Jewish and Muslim merchant classes (15th century). - Muslim development was higher than Christian; this led to economic stagnation as Spain became highly aristocratic. - By the 15th century, Spain was the poorest, least industrialized, most unequal part of Western Europe, exchanging raw goods for produced ones from the Netherlands and Italy. - Latin America took this to an extreme. - **Claim:** Latin America's relative lack of wars has been a major liability. - **Observation:** Consistently the most peaceful part of the world over the last 500 years. - **Reasons:** 1. Countries often not organized enough for massive wars of conquest. 2. Borders "make too much sense" (opposite of Africa), typically organized around fertile heartlands with harsh terrain demarcating boundaries. - **Consequence:** Lack of inter-state competition means no strong impetus for reform or improvement. In Europe, such states would be "torn limb by limb" and forced to reform or die; no such desperation exists in Latin America. - **Claim:** The most successful Latin American countries (Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica) are those the Spanish government practically forgot and where powerful hierarchies were not imposed. - **Supporting Details:** Spain didn't even acknowledge Costa Rica or Uruguay's existence. These countries are generally homogeneous (rulers and ruled of the same ethnic group). - **Key Factor:** These countries have had stable rule of law and democracy. **Kaczynski the Man: Intelligence, Trauma, and Societal Misdiagnosis** - **Critique of "Death of the Author":** - The speaker dismisses the "death of the author" school of thought (judging works independently of authors' lives) as a tool to counteract "Marxist tendency to troll through personal lives... to create ad homonyms." - The speaker prefers a model where a philosopher's essence is "imbibed into his philosophy," citing the "founder effect" (character of a founder replicated in an organization) as a related concept. - **Kaczynski's Early Life and Intellect:** - Born in 1942 into a working-class Polish-American family in Chicago (Relevant Era: Mid-20th Century). - Exhibited exceptional intelligence (IQ 167, "1 millionth percentile"), graduating high school and attending Harvard at age 15. His original plan was an academic career in mathematics. - **MK Ultra Participation and CIA Misconduct:** - At Harvard, Kaczynski participated in an "illegal government testing program called MK Ultra," part of the CIA's research into brainwashing, the paranormal, and psychedelics. - The speaker emphasizes that MK Ultra is not a conspiracy theory, citing records and CIA's own admissions. Methods included psychedelics, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal/sexual abuse, and sleep deprivation. - The CIA shredded many MK Ultra documents upon realizing potential public backlash, begging the question of what else they concealed. - The speaker lists other known CIA activities from that period: manipulating news, spirit world research, manipulating foreign governments, funding modern art and the feminist movement, and selling drugs (cocaine in Latin America, crack in inner-city ghettos). - Kaczynski was part of an experiment where government agents attempted to "break apart his worldview" by systematically attacking his ideas. The speaker deems this "incredibly cruel" as it was done without consent and targeted the "reason they have to live." - Records show CIA verbally and emotionally abused Kaczynski. The speaker speculates he may have endured worse, unrevealed abuse, given men's reluctance to discuss abuse, especially by powerful government agencies. - **Evidence of PTSD and Kaczynski's Worldview:** - The speaker, claiming personal experience with PTSD, asserts it is "so clear and obvious" that Kaczynski had PTSD, citing his constant wandering, off-grid living in Montana, an inability to cope with academia (leading to immense shame), and distrust of psychiatrists. - The speaker posits Kaczynski's trauma, particularly his experiences with the CIA, informed his views on modern civilization: witnessing a "faceless bureaucracy" commit "objectively evil" acts with "zero consequences." He saw firsthand the "bureaucratic state of the banality of evil" manipulating human nature. - The speaker preempts claims that trauma biased Kaczynski, urging an assessment of his ideas on their own merit, not through "ad hominem takedown." - **Challenging the Schizophrenia Diagnosis:** - Kaczynski was diagnosed with schizophrenia after his murders. The speaker, based on reading "a few dozen books" on psychology, disputes this diagnosis, stating Kaczynski's behavior and writings do not align with paranoid schizophrenia. - The coherence and logical structure of his manifesto lack the "jarring logical and writing style gaps" characteristic of schizophrenia. Schizophrenics, the speaker argues, lack a coherent worldview, seeing it as "discreet, atomized, or cold," whereas Kaczynski's terrorism demonstrated a "pretty good grip on reality." - Kaczynski's refusal to plead insanity is seen as admirable, as it would have devalued his manifesto. He pleaded guilty, receiving eight life sentences. - The speaker views the schizophrenia diagnosis as society "literally just proving his point" about modern civilization being an "all-encompassing bureaucratic machine which exists to consume the human soul." The system used a bureaucratic process to invalidate his ideas and then incarcerated him in another bureaucratic system. - This is compared to the Soviet Union sending political dissenters to mental asylums, and modern society telling dissenters they have "anger issues or are repressed." The "authoritarian personality" concept is cited as a psychological manual that framed conservatism as a mental illness stemming from repressive parenting, advocating for permissive parenting to overcome racism and irrational conservatism. - **Academic Potential and "Surrogate Activities":** - Kaczynski, despite not getting tenure, was recognized as highly intelligent by former colleagues, some stating he was one of the most intelligent people they'd met. - His field was mathematics, evident in the logical structure of his manifesto. He developed "incredibly Advanced mathematical theories" comprehensible to only a few. - Kaczynski developed a theory of "surrogates for real things," where society engages in abstractions of reality (e.g., junk food for real food, social media for real community, Walmart for a general store). Video games simulate activities like hunting or warfare, which are "too destabilizing" for industrial civilization. - Academia is presented as a prime example of "oversocialization," with academics being "cowardly, envious, anxious, process-driven, and stuck in their heads." The speaker empathizes with Kaczynski seeing these reflections in academia, which lacked the self-awareness to engage with his ideas. Academia today is described as a "bureaucratic machine" that produces "engineered products" benefiting class interests rather than rewarding genius. - **Turn to Violence:** - Kaczynski moved to Illinois, then became a homesteader in Montana, living off the land without electricity. - He realized this life was "basically an impossible life today" due to environmental degradation by large companies and government dislike for those outside its control. This led him to violence. - He delivered and sent bombs, killing three and injuring 23, targeting leaders of technological industries. He blamed the Industrial Revolution for the oversocialization he feared would destroy the human race. - His bombing campaign was "brilliantly" executed, evading the FBI for a long time and becoming a "sensational National Story." The name "Unabomber" derived from the FBI case "University and Airline Bomber." - His goal was to make these fields "terrifying for people to work in, thus slowing down technological development." - He was caught after major newspapers published his manifesto at his demand (in exchange for stopping killings), allowing his brother to identify his writing style and inform the government. **III. Kaczynski's Thesis: Oversocialization and the Crisis of Industrial Civilization** - **Core Thesis of Oversocialization:** - Modernity is a complex, interconnected system that "forces humans to operate like cogs in a machine, repressing the things that make us human in order that the machine runs more smoothly." - **The Transformation of Family Structure:** - **Historical Family (Pre-Industrial Era):** The speaker, referencing one of their own videos, asserts the family was historically paramount, determining work, spouse, education, social network, and insurance. People lived in large clan compounds with extended family support. Even in individualist societies like Christian Western Europe, the family was integral. - **Modern Family:** It is now a "shell of its former self," evidenced by high divorce rates, declining marriage, crashed marital happiness rates, and common familial estrangement. This is viewed as incomprehensible or evil by historical standards. - **Industrialization as Catalyst:** - Referencing the book "The History of Work," the speaker notes the family was the dominant pre-industrial economic unit. Clocking in at a large company was rare, with most being independent farmers or self-employed artisans, merchants, or nobility, all operating as family businesses. (Relevant Era: Pre-Industrial). - This made the family critically important: one had to get along with family (father as boss), care for elderly parents, the husband-wife dyad was an economic unit, and children were free labor. This system fostered entrenched social classes and a weak state (family performed state functions). Religion was crucial for interpersonal rules. - Industrialization led to urbanization, replacing close-knit village communities with anonymity. Bureaucracies filled the void left by community and family. - Work patterns changed: fathers (and now 75% of adult women) work for large companies, child-rearing is outsourced to schools/daycares. Family members spend most waking hours apart. - Dependence shifts from family members to employers. The lack of shared work and life experience leads to children and parents not understanding each other – a "very modern complaint." This results in individuals feeling misunderstood and wearing "lots of different masks." - In contrast, pre-industrial communities involved living and working together, with an accepted understanding of human flaws. - **Human Nature and Happiness:** Citing "ancient wisdom and modern study," the speaker claims humans under-prioritize material wealth for happiness and over-prioritize interpersonal relationships, community, and religion. The weakening of these is not a side effect of modernity but its "main course," creating a "silent gnawing pain." - **Scale and Standardization in the Industrial Revolution:** - These are identified as two "depressing things" with negative social effects. - The old-style factory (e.g., Henry Ford's) symbolizes this, where a worker's life might be reduced to a single repetitive task, contrasting with the pre-industrial "pride of craftsmanship" and direct relationship with customers. - The Industrial Revolution (Relevant Era: 19th Century onwards) naturally selected for societies excelling in scale and standardization, which "crush those who weren't" (e.g., family farms outcompeted by industrial agriculture). - A significant shift in employment occurred: in 1920, 90% of Americans were self-employed or worked in small companies; by 1990, 90% were employees. Currently, 10% are self-employed/employers, with one-third in the gig economy (seen as a slight improvement). - **Freedom, Autonomy, and Pre-Industrial Work:** - The speaker, citing psychological books and Kaczynski, asserts humans sacrifice wealth for freedom and autonomy. - While acknowledging pre-industrial life was not utopian (life dictated by family, shame, stringent moral codes), the speaker argues it offered more freedom in "critical ways": no constant boss oversight, no extensive regulatory systems. People "just lived their lives" without sharp separations between work, family, religion, etc. - There was no concept of a "9-to-5" or "being employed." Servants or apprentices lived with their masters, who had responsibility for them as people, not just employees. Work was often seasonal, with periods of intense labor followed by inactivity. Apprenticeship was a temporary phase leading to master craftsman status. - The rise of lifelong factory employment in early 19th century England (Relevant Era: Early 19th Century) caused a "huge social crisis," seen as unnatural. An employee was not considered a "real man" with a right to marry. Discourse around Luddites and Marxism stemmed from this social turmoil. - **The Modern School System as Indoctrination:** - The speaker argues the modern school system was "explicitly designed to break people's will to make them easier industrial employees." This is supported by "loads of historic records" of American school system founders (Relevant Era: Turn of the 20th Century) stating this goal (referencing another of the speaker's videos). - The practical knowledge gained in school past age 12 is deemed mostly useless for adult life. The true purpose is selecting for traits like sitting still, working long hours, compliance, memorization, mechanical calculation, and waking early. - Pre-industrial people would view modern schooling as "incredibly strange and even tyrannical" (strangers raising children, mandatory attendance without parental input). - **"The History of Manners" and Increasing Social Complexity:** - Norbert Elias's book is cited, showing changes in Western manners from the Middle Ages (Relevant Era: Middle Ages). Examples include public animal carcass butchering, knights' poetry on loving killing, and public sexual activity, indicating a society with no privacy and different norms of disgust. - Elias's reasoning: as society became more complex and interconnected, people became averse to witnessing private acts by strangers. This is presented as "the other side of Kaczynski's thesis of oversocialization." - **Acknowledging Modernity's Benefits Amidst Sickness:** - The speaker expresses gratitude for modern material comforts: "infinite food, incredible medicine, rapid transportation, great entertainment, birth control, political Freedom, Air Conditioning, infinite free learning." - Despite these benefits, criticizing modernity feels "insane" to some, yet the speaker asserts that "you look into the soul of our society and you find something that's very very sick." For those who see it, this sickness is "overwhelming." - The lesson drawn is that wealth is "nowhere near the most important thing for happiness" once out of poverty, with wealth and happiness statistically having little correlation beyond that point. **IV. The Psychological Toll of Modernity and Perceived Suicidal Urges** - **Climate Change Discourse as a Symptom of Societal Suicide Wish:** - A conversation with the speaker's manager is recounted: "hyper woke" individuals asking if Texans feel guilt for using air conditioning (which the speaker deems "non-negotiable" for the state). - They discussed "silly things climate change people push for," like de-industrialization of agriculture or ending gas-guzzling cars, which the speaker claims would be "mass extinction events." These activists allegedly ignore "real issues" (China/India coal plants) and "real solutions" (nuclear energy). - The speaker and manager concluded that these activists "wanted suicide." - The speaker asserts, referencing previous videos, that "the aim of the modern left is explicitly suicide," desiring the end of "Western civilization, whiteness, the Industrial Revolution." - This suicidal urge is attributed to the unbearable psychological pressures of the Industrial Revolution, leading societies industrialized longest (Northwest Europe, Northeastern US) to "attempt to commit suicide the most." - Humans, described as "the exact same crazy monkeys as who were living in tribal communities... 100,000 years ago," are seen as ill-equipped for the jump to industrialization. - The "nihilism, dehumanization, atomization of modernity" are considered far more damaging than generally realized, with society being "in denial since it hurts so badly." - **The Repressed Modern Ruling Class vs. the Mischaracterized Victorians:** - The speaker poses a question they ask others: "if you're dying in a ditch now what do you have to live for?" For the speaker, during a suicidal teenage phase, it was "honor and my own Pride as a man." - The "ruling class" (defined as "bi-Coastal college educated globalist managerial Elite") is accused of projecting their own repression onto the Victorians (Relevant Era: Victorian Era), labeling them repressed and cold. - The speaker argues Victorians were not repressed/cold, citing Romanticism, their emotional letters, and dramatic view of history. Sexual prudishness coexisted with hypocrisy (prostitution, porn). - Conversely, the speaker claims the modern ruling class is repressed, defining repression as "separation from our natural human urges." Examples given: polyamory as fighting "natural biological urges of masculine protectiveness"; hating one's country as fighting biological wiring to love one's own people; hyper-rationalism (Redditor stereotype) as fighting natural inclination for magical/religious thinking. - This ruling class allegedly competes on "how malleable and compliant they are," submitting to authority because, in the "bureaucratic industrial system, your ability to submit to the machine determines your social value." - This results in a "feminine society" where saying "no" is taboo, and absurdities (e.g., "men are women," "the nation shouldn't exist," "we should print infinite money") are accepted. The ruling class engages in "competitive virtue signaling contest to demonstrate how servile to the machine they are." - **Kaczynski's Critique of Leftism:** - The speaker lauds Kaczynski's critique of the left as "one of the best... I have ever read" and "one of the top 10 most Paradigm building things I've ever seen." - Kaczynski's view: Leftism is a "resentful reaction to the oversocialization of modernity" and a "power fantasy of having total power over absolutely everything in society." The lack of a plan for a post-revolutionary state ("dictatorship of the proletariat") is because the "end point is to get a dictatorship itself." - The speaker plans a future video on "the anthropology of the left" to discuss this further. - **Contradictory Drives of the Left:** - They push oversocialization further, wanting to "break Human Nature" by removing "animal aspects of humanity" (sexual/family bonds, ethnicity, religion, martial values, honor, freedom) to be "sublimated into the state." The speaker states that a "society in collapse will push its worst trait even further." - Simultaneously, they push for "total Liberation from any standards or responsibility." - They desire "Total power with no responsibility," which is an oxymoron. - They advocate for the "collapse of modern civilization and industrialization" while also wanting a "fully automated space communist civilization." - The speaker concludes: "nothing the left says makes sense as a coherent strategy and it never has. It's a psychologically unhealthy person rebelling against conditions which they didn't evolve for." - **Speaker's Theory on Women and Leftism:** - Based on "studies and ancient wisdom," women are perceived as more dependent on community and religion than men. - The removal of these "pre-industrial stabilizers" led women to rebel against society "through leftism without actually understanding the actual psychological drivers." - They sensed the "cold impersonality, nihilism, soullessness, and loneliness of modernity" and tried to solve it in "the female way of we should just love each other and take care of everyone." - When this failed, they "begged to see the system burned down due to racism or climate change or whatever." **V. Kaczynski’s Proposed Path: Agreement on Diagnosis, Disagreement on Remedy** - **Agreement with Kaczynski's Diagnosis:** - The speaker finds Kaczynski's explanations for the flaws of industrial civilization "brilliant and original," with few other authors covering the topic similarly, though acknowledging Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford as influences. - **Kaczynski's Predicted Trajectories for Industrial Civilization (21st Century as Decision Point):** - **Scenario 1: Natural Collapse:** Psychological pressures of modernity (mental health issues, collapsing birth rates, rising crime, falling standards) lead to collapse. The speaker sees "wokeness or the collapsing birth rates as a form of this," a "collective social just giving up." - The speaker agrees with this, citing their own videos on a looming global crisis (Relevant Era: 21st Century), described by various terms: "population crash, the psychological Black Death, Mouse Utopia, the secular cycle, the crisis of the 21st century, the end of the Pax Americana." This is an "enormous historic crisis which must occur." - **Scenario 2: Transhuman Dehumanization (Feared by Kaczynski and Speaker):** Genetic engineering, AI, and other technologies gradually change human nature to ensure compliance with the industrial system, turning humans into "soulless Hive creatures like ants or termites." - The speaker notes genetic engineering is already used on animals. - This scenario is likened to Yuval Noah Harari's "Homo Deus." - Kaczynski posited this might occur not via overt authoritarianism, but through a "Humane social democracy" using genetic engineering first for physical illnesses, then mental illnesses (like depression), thereby removing "free thinkers or the people with independent spirits" whom the system naturally makes sick. - Over generations, this would lead to "Brave New World or 1984." - Foreshadowing examples: Canadian assisted suicide for mental health issues (which could extend to political opposition, like in the Soviet Union), World Economic Forum discussions of "degrowth," and Harari's "useless eaters" concept. These figures publicly aim to use automation and genetic engineering to "crush dissent" under the guise of constructing a utopia. - The speaker stresses that humanity's beauty lies in "our individuality... our inner soul." Removing this is "losing the game of human history," equivalent to "Mordor winning." - The human spirit typically "buckles under tyranny"; the terrifying prospect is changing human character so it no longer does. - Great artistic works of the industrial world (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Fight Club, American Beauty, Princess Mononoke, The Matrix) are interpreted as depicting the "fight against a giant depersonalizing Force so that the human soul can survive." - **Understanding Kaczynski's Rationale for Action:** - The speaker asserts Kaczynski was not "crazy"; his calculation was "completely rational from his perspective." The speaker "frankly would have done something similar if I was him but different in one important way." - Kaczynski's point about lack of true freedom of press due to media consolidation is acknowledged. The speaker notes their own channel "trolls for obscure but brilliant 20th century authors" and likely wouldn't have found Kaczynski (outside history/anthropology) if not for his terrorism. - If the speaker were Kaczynski, they would "try to do something crazy to get people's attention" (e.g., hyper-controversial statements, a huge raffle), but doubts its efficacy. - **Disagreement with Kaczynski's Terrorism:** - Kaczynski, in his manifesto, advocated for forcibly destroying industrial manufacturing capabilities, fermenting hatred of technology, and attacking tech workers. - The speaker deems this a "terrible strategy" that would only invalidate his cause and make the ideals taboo. It might work if the public disliked technology more, but "the average person loves the conveniences of modern technology." - The speaker infers Kaczynski was in "tremendous amount of pain psychologically," sought an "easy or quick solution," felt powerless, and "didn't really care much whether he lived or died." - **Kaczynski's "Victory" and Moral Ambiguity:** - Despite disapproving of his terrorism, the speaker states Kaczynski "won" in the sense that his ideas are now widely circulated ("hell we're currently talking about them"). If the 21st-century struggle is as critical as Kaczynski believed, he "might actually have indirectly changed the tide." He likely "wouldn't have been disappointed with the result." - This is compared to the speaker's prior statement that "Al-Qaeda won 9/11." - An analogy is drawn from "The Grace Of Kings" (fantasy novel), where a character breaks a treaty for a greater good (unification). This raises the question: "are the three lives Kaczynski killed worth changing history for?" - However, this line of thinking "eventually ends up with Hitler and Stalin." The speaker then notes that traditional world religions advise trusting God in such matters. **VI. The Unforeseen Variable: The Internet's Dual Potential** - **The Internet as a Disruptive Technology:** - A new technological discovery, the internet, emerged around the time of Kaczynski's crimes, "completely changed the calculus." This exemplifies modernity's rapid, unpredictable changes. - The internet has "radically pushed disunity," with significant geopolitical ramifications. - When Kaczynski was writing, the world was at "Peak Pro centralization" due to technological scale efficiency. The internet "flips the entire calculus." - Examples of decentralization: Etsy vs. single large companies, Uber vs. traditional taxis, YouTube learning vs. universities. - The internet has potential for "ruralization of society, the breakdown of top down government authoritarianism, organic social operation, and self-employment." The rise of the gig economy and digital replacements for legacy institutions are seen as proof. - **The Dystopian Potential of the Internet:** - The internet also enables governments to "monitor the entire population for their whole lives." - **Call for a Free Internet and Crypto:** - The speaker makes an uncharacteristic endorsement ("chill crypto"), arguing for an "encrypted secretive private blockchainbased internet which doesn't allow data oppression" to prevent authoritarianism. - The next generation must make an "active decision to keep the internet and our societies by extension free." - "Balaji" (Srinivasan) is mentioned as someone who "does a lot of this stuff around this topic and has built a movement around making sure hierarchical authorities can't use the internet to control people." ## Geopolitical Discussion Thread _June 23, 2025_ ## Initial Question **Borntoserve** — _6/23/25, 2:23 PM_ Hello I asked this question for the professor but I'd love to get some other opinions on it aswell! what are the main differences between the current events vs the US invasion of Iraq? Why is this current event more significant in signalling a wider war? --- **Parsecc** — _6/23/25, 2:25 PM_ The short answer is that it's not (imo), most middle eastern countries won't do anything. China might proxy the war, but even if it does it's not that significant. Russia wants to stay out of it. It's worth noting that the significance is control over trade routes and ability for asymmetric warefare which is a new convention (in its relative capabilities). --- **Borntoserve** — _6/23/25, 2:28 PM_ Thank you for your answer. So this is basically just the USA extending its reach? --- ## Analysis of US Power and Economic Systems **Parsecc** — _6/23/25, 2:35 PM_ More like trying to maintain it's power. Bretton woods (1944) is essentially (super high level) US saying, everyone will use the US dollar for international trade, in exchange our navy (because everyones was wiped out in ww2) will secure the trade lanes. However, because of asymmetric warefare the houthis (iran proxy) have been able to disrupt this, which is a big line crossed for US power. Then there also the transition from tangible to intangible asset economies (TRIPS Agreement 1994-95) which undermines Ricardian comparative advantage, as the non-rivalrous nature of knowledge goods eliminates mutual gains from trade, resulting in zero-sum rent extraction rather than positive-sum value creation. --- ## Follow-up on Asymmetric Warfare and TRIPS **Guest02** — _6/23/25, 2:49 PM_ your first point regarding asymmetric warfare is pretty interesting, I think if there's a difference, it's that asymmetric warfare is being applied to some degree of effectiveness in the seas. I don't think we've seen something like this before, no? The second point I didn't actually know about. So if I'm understanding you correctly, licensing and copyrighting key technologies and media basically artificially inhibits the relative advantages that some states may have. This therefore limits the amount that developing states can gain from trade. So, in your opinion, has TRIPS led to more industrial espionage, especially in relation to cutting-edge sectors that have potential military applications? --- ## USA-China Economic Competition **Parsecc** — _6/23/25, 3:02 PM_ Thats the big "unspoken" battle between the USA and China right now. There's so much industrial espionage going both ways, honestly surprising it doesn't get covered as much (1000 talents program for example). That agreement changed the game of global power, making foreign countries more into proxies rather than having mutual development. In that sense the chinese playbook, how they controlled their internal markets, as well as the US softpower through ideological media and movies (as a way to place individualist / capatalist markets as object of desire) both illustrate the dynamic. Part of the theory behind the TRIPS agreement was that manufacturing was trivial, and that the profits extracted from it were much less than IP. (ie, sell a shirt for $100+ at 4x multiple but have to manufacture at much lower profit multiple.) The idea was that the real value was in design, R&D, branding, etc., while manufacturing was becoming commoditized. Therefore, if China got too powerful / if US soft power couldn't make it more democratic, then they could just transition to any other country. (this is what played out a year ago with "friend/near shoring".) However, this doesn't work, just adding extra steps to the supply chain which lead back to China anyways. The Chinese have essentially proven that manufacturing is non-trivial and that the assumptions made were wrong, which means that some change needs to be seen by the US (leading trump to push for increased rent extraction through tariffs, probably more as negotiation tool, but that whole process was a reck, as well as reindustrilizing the manufacturing sector. --- **Guest02 [GBC]** — _6/23/25, 3:08 PM_ I see, this clarifies your point a lot. I never actually thought about it this way. Intuitively, I kinda held that manufacturing was never going to be as trivial as people assumed it was going to be. I was not very optimistic on the whole "bring manufacturing to the U.S." campaign when it was brought up in relation with the tariffs. Now I understand how this is one facet of the phenomenon which you described. --- Weimar Degeneracy, like Military was pride of their country and was completely neutered, years of family savings evaporated with hyperinflation, with no man and no savings, mothers and daughters took to prostitution, while networks of international elements bought every industry for pennies on a dollar and became owners of Germany overnight. Similar things happened with Russia after collapse of USSR, very similar. berlin was hyper liberal post ww1, to what extend the jews were involved is questionable. The first doctor for trans surgery was jewish for example (I believe he was also the first to be killed by the nazi's after book ban which largely targeted pornographic material) Enslaving people with debt is a likely a dramatic characterization, this was post ww1 which reperation devastated their economy, in that environment ofc interest was high. Hitler 100% blamed the jews for this, + many of the bankers were jewish. The history here is shady though for sure. The last claim is most dubious, and I can't comment on it as I don't know much. Marx was jewish, but he also hated the jews. Communism is certainly a result of his european-jewish upbringing though. Have to be careful though, the history is quite foggy would be interested in actual historical fact checking. 1. The ideology behind the nazi's was clearly insane. 2. They employed a degree of propaganda which scapegoated the jews and obfuscated history. Proof requires evidence, but what we have from that time is very propagandized perspectives on both sides. It is hard to find a grounded truth, doing so would require a lot of reading. Even then I've heard very biased takes from some professors / lecturers on the subject. We cannot know what's real which makes it easier to resort to simplistic reactionary behavior --- Looking back at the failures of all three waves of economic populism in the 2010s, it's worth asking how much did consumer guilt convince a downwardly mobile generation that they were merely temporarily embarrassed members of the middle class? After all, it's hard to feel like you're part of the 99% when you're being chauffeured, even if your destination is the roach-infested two-bedroom rental you call home. By masking austerity as abundance and individualizing blame, the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy didn't just dull political outrage, it erased the scale of theft. Though framed as a stimulus, Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) was a massive upward transfer of wealth to the exact same institutions that caused the 2008 collapse. In hindsight, there were countless better ways to stimulate the post-crash economy. The Fed could have sent money directly to households. It could have bought and restructured mortgages. The Fed could have issued low-interest loans to states for jobs, infrastructure, and public services. But instead, we got discount code scraps at the expense of meaningful reform. For $30 trillion of taxpayer money, we got Uber Pool instead of high-speed rail. We got Airbnb cleaning fees instead of affordable housing. We got metaverse expansions instead of public infrastructure. We got dog-walking gigs on Rover instead of union jobs. We got two free therapy sessions instead of universal healthcare. We got income-share coding boot camps instead of free public college. ZIRP gave us private innovation instead of public institutions.  And wait until you find out who funded the social justice ideology internally in the occupy Wall Street movement as well as the right wing reaction. Truly "The Art of Simple Sabotage" Trump who is edging 1940's rhetoric and consolidation of power, was recently quoted saying that the greatest period of America was 1870 to 1930. The gilded age, was 1870-1900, a period of rapid industrialization, of extreme wealth concentration, and where 40% of America had virtually no wealth. My take is unique, I have never once stated I am pro socialism, democracy, or anything of the sorts. I am admittedly closer to an elitist, who understands the power of public institutions, education and social mobility in relation to agency and emergence. In that sense, bringing about a new golden age, by the more socialist or even traditionally liberal class of ideologues, is a sin of the utmost degree of hubris. While that may very well be the case, I see things differently. I don't think theres much of a choice. The wealth concentration is already beyond the point where amendments and taxation can fix it, that opportunity for revolution was lost in 2008, and now I don't have much faith in the public consciousness for the next 20 years. It's no mistake the world wars followed the gilded age, and greater concentration means greater leverage and direction. This is what is needed when great opportunity arises. The original circumstance was globalization and industrialization. The new will be AI and Automation. There will be a class of worthless people unable to do what AI cannot, similarly to workers who could not compete with industrialization. There will be wars over resources, over IP, and ostentatious amounts of wealth and power. Those who says this is bad lack the means to contribute and leverage their situations - victims. With crisis comes opportunity. "Which would you choose? A world with pyramids? Or a world without?"