CAUSE, EFFECT, AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE SOCIAL WORLD
MEGAN T. STEVENSON

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Claim: most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space have little to no lasting effect when evaluated by RCTs (randomized controlled trials), and the occasional success usually fails to replicate when evaluated in other settings.

…people are only exposed to research that has made it through the distorting filter of research and publication incentives.15 This filter suppresses research that isn’t statistically significant, sufficiently novel, or otherwise exciting.16 Most people are only aware of the tiny set of studies that made it through the sieve. And these studies are biased toward showing that the intervention evaluated was more successful than it actually was…

In the 1980s, sociologist Peter Rossi argued that the failure of social programs was so ubiquitous that it should be known as the Iron Law of Evaluation.

What gets published is the single instance where the spurious causal effect is found. With an infinite supply of research questions, and thousands of scholars looking for interesting research, the literature will be full of false causal claims.

The first scholar to demonstrate a causal relationship between X and Y can reap large professional benefits: prestigious publications, respect from peers,increased likelihood of tenure, etc. But, in a field that rewards novelty, attempts to replicate the original result have little upside for the researcher’s career. If a subsequent study confirms the initial result, it will generally publish in a journal of lower prestige, if at all. If a subsequent study yields opposite results, it may earn the resentment of the original scholar whose work was challenged.54 Young scholars are often advised to avoid attempting to replicate the work of others.

If change is cumulative, then small interventions can grow in influence over time.99 Such low-cost, highbenefit interventions are the holy grail of social engineers.

Under the engineer’s view, social processes are structured and manipulable. RCTs and other causal inference methods are used to map the functioning of themachine, to see what impact a particular lever has. They can be used to identify interventions that yield consistent and replicable success. The uncertainty of reform is minimized because interventions can be piloted before scaling up….When it comes to the type of limited-scope interventions evaluable viaRCT and other quasi-experimental methods, the engineer’s view appears to be mostly a myth. More than fifty years of RCT evidence shows the limits in ourability to engineer change with this type of intervention.

… it teaches us that the social world is full of what I call “stabilizers” and short on what I refer to as “cascades.” …Stabilizers are the set of socioeconomic forces that resist externally-imposed change….” Cascades are forces that magnify small changes, that turn a small intervention into a large and lasting effect…

Types of interventions considered:

• financial (UBI)
• Big Brother type mentoring, My Brother’s Keeper (MBK, an Obama era initiative)
• education, job training
• variations in jail time
• Swift, Certain and fair (rapid minor penalty)
• Multisystemic therapy
• Project HOPE

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Essentially all securities “owned” by the public in custodial accounts, pension plans and investment funds are now encumbered as collateral underpinning the derivatives complex, which is so large—an order of magnitude greater than the entire global economy—that there is not enough of anything in the world to back it. The illusion of collateral backing is facilitated by a daisy chain of hypothecation and re-hypothecation in which the same underlying client collateral is re-used many times over by a series of secured creditors. And so it is these creditors, who understand this system, who have demanded even more access to client assets as collateral.

…it is now assured that in the implosion of “The Everything Bubble”, collateral will be swept up on a vast scale. The plumbing to do this is in place. Legal certainty has been established that the collateral can be taken immediately and without judicial review, by entities described in court documents as “the protected class.” Even sophisticated professional investors, who were assured that their securities are “segregated”, will not be protected.

These are the key facts:

• Ownership of securities as property has been replaced with a new legal concept of a “security entitlement”, which is a contractual claim assuring a very weak position if the account provider becomes insolvent.
• All securities are held in un-segregated pooled form. Securities used as collateral, and those restricted from such use, are held in the same pool.
• All account holders, including those who have prohibited use of their securities as collateral, must, by law, receive only a pro-rata share of residual assets.
• “Re-vindication,” i.e. the taking back of one’s own securities in the event of insolvency, is absolutely prohibited.
• Account providers may legally borrow pooled securities to collateralize proprietary trading and financing.
• “Safe Harbor” assures secured creditors priority claim to pooled securities ahead of account holders.
• The absolute priority claim of secured creditors to pooled client securities has been upheld by the courts.

Collateral transformation is simply the encumbrance of any and all types of client assets under swap contracts, which end up in the derivatives complex. This is done without the knowledge of the clients, who were led to believe that they safely owned these securities, and serves no beneficial purpose whatsoever for these clients. And here it is! Here is the automated, market-wide sweeping of collateral to CCPs and central banks in a time of market stress: In times of market stress, rapid deployment of available securities may be crucial in mitigating systemic issues. For instance, with better visibility of available securities and better access to them, firms may be better positioned to rapidly deploy securities to meet margin needs at CCPs in times of increased market volatility or to pledge to central banks in emergency situations to gain increased access to the lender of last resort. . . .The automation and standardisation of many operations related to collateral management . . . on a market-wide basis . . . may enable a market participant to manage increasingly complex and rapid collateral demands. And so as we have seen here irrefutably, the objective is to utilize all securities as collateral and hence to have the real practical means to take all securities as collateral.

Q (E.U.): Is the investor protected against the insolvency of an intermediary and, if so, how?

A (N.Y. Fed): . . . an investor is always vulnerable to a securities intermediary that does not itself have interests in a financial asset sufficient to cover all of the securities entitlements that it has created in that financial asset . . .If the secured creditor has “control” over the financial asset it will have priority over entitlement holders . . .If the securities intermediary is a clearing corporation, the claims of its creditors have priority over the claims of entitlement holders.

So, there we have it. In the collapse of the clearing subsidiaries of DTCC, it is the secured creditors who will take the assets of the entitlement holders. This is where it is going. It is designed to happen suddenly, and on a vast scale.

Ask yourself: if they don’t want your money, and they don’t really want or need your stuff, and they’re not trying to help you, what do they want? What’s the point of all of their efforts? This may be difficult to hear: It was deliberate strategy. It was about ultimate, complete power, allowing no centers of resistance. And so, it was about deprivation. It was about subjugation—and it still is, in more ways than we know.

It has been promised that there will be no taxpayer bailout this time—as if that is a good thing. Why? Simply because this will allow the banks to be closed rather than nationalized. Then all deposits and assets will be taken by the “protected class” of secured creditors. This is where it is going.

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APOE (apolipoprotein E) that is involved in cholesterol transport and processing, and it has three variants: e2, e3, and e4. Of these, e3 is the most common by far, but having one or two copies of the e4 variant seems to multiply one’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease by a factor of between two and twelve

The e2 variant of APOE, on the other hand, seems to protect its carriers against dementia

people who carried at least one copy of APOE e2 (and no e4) were about 30 percent more likely to reach extreme old age (defined as ninety-seven for men, one hundred for women) than people with the standard e3/e3 combination.

SNPs (or variants) in FOXO3 that were strongly associated with healthy aging and longevity.

Rising levels of ALT are often the first clue that something is wrong with the liver, although they could also be a symptom of something else, such as a recent viral infection or a reaction to a medication.

acceptable range for ALT is below 33 IU/L for women and below 45 IU/L for men

obese (defined as having a BMI[*2] greater than 30), while roughly another third is overweight (BMI of 25 to 30)

Metabolic Syndrome
high blood pressure (>130/85)

high triglycerides (>150 mg/dL)

low HDL cholesterol (<40 mg/dL in men or <50 mg/dL in women)

central adiposity (waist circumference >40 inches in men or >35 in women)

elevated fasting glucose (>110 mg/dL)

This is why I insist my patients undergo a DEXA scan annually—and I am far more interested in their visceral fat than their total body fat.

The Electric Car’s Shrinking Role in Reducing Oil Demand March 2022

Examining Transportation Oil Demand

There are over a billion cars globally and over 200 million in the US. The world can produce ~85 million vehicles per year. It would still take over a decade to replace the global car fleet with electric models assuming no growth in total car numbers. Many think that oil demand can't fall faster than this replacement rate or that only autonomous electric taxis can speed the process up. The vehicle count and oil demand relationships are more complex.

Where Does a Barrel of Crude Go?

Crude oil is a mixture that varies widely based on the geological conditions it developed in. It can contain gases, liquids, waxes, and asphalt. Transportation, industry, commercial, and residential sectors are the significant crude users in the US.

Source: EIA

Roughly 90% of the liquid products go to transportation. A small amount goes towards heating oil and industrial processes. Asphalt, wax, petroleum gases, and other products make up most industrial crude oil demand.

Source: Data from EIA

Transportation fuels in the US are gasoline for cars and other light vehicles, diesel for trucks (like semis), buses, or trains, jet fuel for planes, and residual fuel oil for ships. Only 2%-3% of passenger vehicles use diesel.

Transportation is the driver for crude demand. Refineries have techniques like catalytic cracking that turn heavier wax and asphalt into diesel and gasoline. They have some flexibility to adjust the product mix. Extreme changes would likely need facility retrofits and possibly cause market dislocations for minor components like lubricants.

The Commute is Overrated

Americans drive everywhere they go - 87% of trips are by car. But only 15% of household trips and 27% of household miles are for commuting to work. Household miles are only two-thirds of total vehicle miles, and the numbers are pre-COVID and reflect lower telecommuting shares.

Source: Bureau of Transportation Statistics

Most trips are for errands, visiting friends, and other non-commuting purposes. The heterogeneity of trips opens up cars to unbundling and oil demand falling faster than gasoline car numbers.

Death by 1000 Cuts

Gasoline cars will sit in garages for a long time to come. That doesn't mean their yearly mileage will stay the same.

The Improving Economics of Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles have lower operating costs than internal combustion engine cars and trucks. These savings come from lower fuel usage and less maintenance. They are usually more expensive to buy upfront because batteries are costlier than fuel tanks. As batteries decline in cost, more applications become economical to switch to electric vehicles and applications with higher annual mileage crossover first. Electric vehicles are already cheaper upfront in applications like delivery vans and will be for virtually every application by 2030.

Bots and Vans Take on Errands

Shopping and errands make up 45% of household trips. Amazon, Instacart, and other delivery companies keep growing their market share. Instead of a typical household driving 10-15 miles per day for errands, a vehicle serves multiple families driving 80-100 miles per day.

Vans and Cargo Bikes

Applications with predictable miles are the sweet spot for electrification. There is no need for a 400-mile battery pack "just in case." Driving lots of miles makes the operating cost reduction from electrification payoff sooner. The replacement cycle for these vehicles is faster because they accrue more miles per year.

Electric vans are already cheaper than gasoline vans in most delivery applications. The adoption speed limit is set by how fast automakers can design and build new electric vans.

In dense cities, electric cargo bikes are cheaper than vans. Their agility allows them to make deliveries faster and their smaller range and capacity isn't a problem.

Bots

Vans on long routes work well for less time-sensitive deliveries that are non-perishable. Bots look to take on time-sensitive deliveries.

The smallest class of vehicles, the sidewalk bot, is already scaling rapidly. The smaller and slower the bot, the easier it is to automate. The consequences of a fifty-pound sidewalk robot hitting something at four miles per hour is dramatically smaller than a five-thousand-pound car hitting something at sixty miles per hour. The result is that sidewalk bots have already completed millions of deliveries even as their numbers continue to grow.

Bike lane bots are the next size up and excel at small grocery orders. They go faster, further, and weigh more. They are still in testing but promise grocery delivery at a fraction of what Instacart must charge. Companies like Wal-Mart are already building partially automated grocery warehouses that allow employees to load bots without being forced to traverse the regular store.

Mini-car size bots like Nuro round out the list. Automation is still easier than robot taxis. The vehicle does not need to protect occupants, plus it can travel at reasonable 30 mph speeds and avoid congested streets. Nuro bots have been in testing for Wal-Mart and Dominoes.

Others think bots will travel in tunnels instead of on roads. Pipedream Labs hopes to use bots in a 12" tube to deliver groceries and packages to your house. Like fiber internet, this promises better and cheaper service but slower rollout times due to intensive CAPEX.

The upshot is that large numbers of gasoline car trips can be done cheaper and more conveniently with electric vehicles. These technologies are much more mature than robot taxis.

Moving Humans

Mode shifting promises to reduce oil demand even without autonomous taxis.

Long Car Trips

Cars dominate trips of less than five hundred miles. The hassle of large airports negates the speed of the plane. 6-18 passenger electric commuter planes flying from small airports promise to change the math. The savings from fuel and maintenance mean these flights will be cheaper and faster than driving.

Trips over 100 miles make up around 15% of total household vehicle miles. Electric commuters eating that share would double air passenger miles assuming only one person per car. Air passenger miles are already over 10x higher than transit passenger miles.

These aircraft can eat more traditional hub and spoke flights than their 400-500 miles starting range suggests because of improving battery energy density and their use of small airports. The possible impact is millions of barrels per day in the US alone.

One startup decided to make an electric sea glider instead of a commuter plane because the FAA is slam-packed with applications and won't review new ones for years. Sea glider approvals go through a different department with a shorter line. Better batteries and electric motors kicked off a sprint that will start to see fruition in the late 2020s - assuming some startups live through the FAA process.

E-Bikes and Scooters

People like riding e-bikes better than regular bikes because they can go faster and further. Many trips in cities are quicker on bikes than in a car. Trips under 10 miles make up the majority of trips and around 30% of vehicle miles.

Source: Average Trip Miles: Federal Highway Administration – 2008

The main holdup is cities building protected cycling infrastructure that makes riders feel safe. The infrastructure itself is cheap, but it is time-consuming working through planning and engineering departments. Ridership can jump rapidly once that infrastructure does come. The leading cycling cities can have almost 50% of trips done on bikes.

Rental bikes and scooters also have piles of potential. Early deployments were controversial, but things died down because the vehicles were expensive to charge and maintain. Newer models are more durable, and partial autonomy promises to increase value. When humans are riding, the humans steer. The scooter drives itself when there is no rider. The scooter can reposition to a better area, park itself correctly, move to a charger, or head to the location of the next rider. Costs go down while value goes up. Like the sidewalk bots, the technical challenge is manageable, especially with teleoperators that can intervene when there is trouble.

Light electric vehicles pair well with Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). BRT lines are another inexpensive technology that is difficult to move through city bureaucracies. BRT and light electric vehicles could provide speedy mass transit to American cities of any density without breaking the budget.

Within Household Substitution

Multi-car households tend to have one car that sees more miles because of a longer commute or always being used for joint trips. If a family buys one electric vehicle, it would be rational to use that car as much as possible due to its lower operating costs.

Robot Taxi Revolution?

Tony Seba is known for his radical opinion on electric, autonomous vehicles. Several years ago, he predicted rapid adoption of electric robot taxis that would be cheaper to use than owning a gasoline car. We'd send our gasoline cars to the scrap heap and ride electric Ubers.

Instead, we have seen incremental progress. Firms like Tesla, Comma.ai, and Mobileye keep improving their inexpensive driver-assistance software, but it still needs supervision. Competitors like Waymo and Cruise have built expensive, fully autonomous highway speed vehicles geofenced to small areas. Slow speed and fixed-route driverless bots and trucks have also made progress.

The flexibility of electric drive trains means that even if we get driverless cars, other form factors will unbundle many car trips. Traffic makes unbundling even more likely. A Seba vision world would lead to vehicle miles roughly doubling from additional empty trips between fares, not accounting for new demand. The autonomous revolution requires reforms to price road access and increase capacity through new tunnels, toll roads, or using current road space more efficiently. Regulatory hurdles and environmental reviews that drag on for years ensnare congestion pricing schemes like New York City's. Cheaper and more convenient substitutes, like delivery bots and e-bikes, should have strong demand.

Falling consumer oil demand looks much more like driving the Camry 6000 miles per year instead of 12,000 miles rather than a shiny new electric car in every garage or robot taxis swarming everywhere.

Medium and Heavy Trucks

Trucks use about a quarter of ground transportation fuel. Their electrification promises to have an outsize impact on oil demand.

The Technical and Economic Challenges

Until recently, most believed that long-distance battery-powered trucks were not possible. Automakers try to make electric passenger cars as light as possible to improve their range. Trucks carry heavy loads that sap batteries. But if you use high-energy-density battery cells, take care to reduce wheel friction, and have an aerodynamic design, you can make a practical truck. The Tesla Semi drives 10 hours per day (the legal limit for drivers) and only charges on breaks. Its total cost is lower than diesel trucks.

The Tesla Semi is not in mass production. The reason is that it is a battery hog. And the batteries it needs are nickel-based cells that are in short supply. Tesla makes more money putting nickel cells into luxury cars than semis. The chip shortage doesn't help, either. Designs like the Tesla Semi won't come to fruition until energy-dense cells are more available.

There is also a long tail of trucks and buses that run less often. An example is a farmer's truck he only uses for harvest. But most of the fuel usage comes from the everyday trucks that are first in line to switch.

Automation Changes the Equation

In response to the shortage of nickel-based cells, automakers are trying to substitute lithium-ferro-phosphate (LFP) cells into vehicles. LFP batteries are not as energy-dense as the lithium nickel chemistries like NCA or NMC. The lower energy density poses a problem for heavy trucks because it diminishes their range. Adding more batteries adds more weight and takes away weight for hauling goods. While LFP might work for local trucks running on "bread routes," they don't work for long distances. Drivers would waste hours charging instead of driving.

Automation alters the numbers. A self-driving truck doesn't care how many times it has to charge or when it has to, only the total charging time. LFP charges as fast as nickel-based chemistries. A robot driver can stop more times to recharge with minor time losses and can drive many more hours of the day. The total time charging is roughly 15% when using superchargers. Lower operating costs overwhelm any advantage a driverless diesel truck would have in hours driven.

Most trucking automation improvements are incremental. An example is Wal-Mart using limited numbers of driverless trucks. They travel between stores and distribution centers on fixed routes, making the automation challenge easier. In the same spirit, trucks may only be driverless on interstates at first. Trucks can drive themselves between cities while local drivers meet them and drive them to the final destination. Trucks increase utilization, and truck drivers get much better jobs.

Gauging the Potential

BLS estimates that there are two million heavy truck drivers in the US. In 2019 there were 281,000 sales of Class 8 Trucks (semis), and some of these drivers likely drive smaller trucks. Truckers replace their trucks more often than passenger cars because a fully utilized truck might be driving 200,000 miles per year. Partially automated trucks could double the yearly mileage by bypassing driver hour limits. The active fleet could meet the target for complete electrification in less than four years if one million trucks are the target.

Traditional trucks have unique engines, transmissions, fuel tanks, and emissions abatement technologies. Electric trucks can share components with passenger cars. Tesla designed their Semi to share motors, inverters, battery packs, and other accessories with the Model 3 sedan and Model Y crossover. Production can ramp quickly and benefit from economies of scale.

Once more nickel mines open or partial automation allows LFP batteries, the transition can happen quickly. A partially autonomous electric truck would reduce trucking costs by 50%-70%. Road pricing and capacity increases become a requirement as that pricing would increase shipping demand and induce switching from trains. Electric commuter planes could clear up space by removing cars from interstates.

For whatever reason, charging seems to be a popular topic. Chargers are simpler than fuel pumps and underground tanks. Tiny startups like Tesla pre-2015 were able to finance a nationwide charging system that covered most interstates. There are standalone charging businesses competing as well. Adding strategic chargers along interstates or at existing truck stops seems well within the market's capability.

Trucking fuel demand could see a several million barrels per day decrease in the US in a relatively short period through electrification and the spread of automation.

The Impact on the Oil Industry

Electrification is terrible for oil companies. Or is it?

Predicting Future Oil Demand

Predicting usage is difficult, but demand has a gravity to it. OECD countries have already decreased oil demand for decades while all increases have come from emerging markets, especially China. Automakers can only manufacture new cars and trucks so fast. Electrification will speed up OECD demand decline while blunting increases from emerging markets.

Before the pandemic, I thought peak demand would happen around 2027. It seems more likely now that peak demand was 2019, and we will see a plateau before significant decreases around 2030.

Oil Prices and Profits

Even small changes in the supply/demand balance move oil prices dramatically. Both supply and demand are relatively inflexible, so the pace of electrification matters. If oil demand decreases by 2% per year, oil companies could still have bumper profits. Each year existing production declines 5%-7%, so prices must reflect the cost of finding and developing new supplies even at 2% yearly declines.

The nightmare scenarios mostly happen for oil companies when demand decreases faster than natural decline. COVID showed us what that looks like with massive short-term demand destruction and oil markets going haywire. A similar disjointed market seems unsustainable early in the transition because gasoline and diesel users see low prices that delay switching to electric options.

It may seem like a 5%-7% decline is the limit for demand decline, but that isn't true. The United States used increasing domestic production to cover sanctions or interventions in Libya, Iran, and Venezuela that reduced oil production. Woe is to Mohammed bin Salman if he saws up another journalist when oil is $20 per barrel and demand is declining swiftly. Liberals, environmentalists, the oil lobby, and every other American would favor sanctions on Saudi oil.

Being an American oil producer might not be so bad as long as you can weather short periods of ultra-low prices.

Long Term Competition from Synthetic Fuels

Liquid fuels are difficult to displace from long-distance planes, ships, and plastics manufacturing. Because liquid fuels are pricey on an energy basis, synthetic fuels using dirt-cheap solar or wind could be economical. $60 per barrel of oil equates to ~$35/MWh. New solar is under $30/MWh today. Assuming a conversion efficiency of around 33%, the breakeven to make fuels would be ~$12/MWh. That is well within possible future non-grid tied solar technology costs.

Synthetic production pathways tend to produce relatively pure products. The barrel of crude could be unbundled, similar to how car trips might be. Changes in transportation demand could incentivize a wide range of new production capacity in chemicals that aren't classic synthetic fuels to replace crude byproducts.

Once synthetic fuels are below the marginal finding cost of oil, operators will only produce existing reserves. Traditional oil reserves can stay viable much longer than natural gas in competition with synthetic fuels. Gas has higher fixed costs that synthetic fuels can exploit. Transporting oil is so cheap that low production cost reservoirs can produce long into the future without government intervention.

A $100/tonne carbon tax adds ~$43 to a barrel of oil. Taxes would have to be steep to eliminate production that often has total costs under $20 per barrel. Many barrels will be going into industrial uses and won't burn, anyway. Cheap direct air capture technology can make existing oil reserves more valuable because it makes it harder for synthetic fuels to compete if it sets a cap on carbon taxes.

The economics of future oil production are hard to predict.

The Transition is Picking Up Steam

My original guestimate on peak demand comes from the difficulty of building millions of cars, trucks, planes, and batteries. E-bikes and other light electric vehicles are the only technology that could surprise. Their constraint is local governments' desire to build infrastructure.

Once more factories start up, the pace will hit an inflection point. Oil demand will start falling at a rate that allows high enough oil prices to continue to incentivize switching. There will be stops and starts or switching back and forth, similar to how natural gas and renewables are displacing coal in the US electricity market. Eventually, oil-burning capacity will retire, and there will be little support or service for more expensive internal combustion engines.

Oil sales will eventually stabilize as applications like plastics and jet fuel make up an increasing portion of demand. Traditional oil production will become a sleepy industry as synthetic fuels emerge and set the marginal cost, stopping most new development. The more oil production Americans take off the market through war or sanctions, the smaller the rump of traditional producers will be.

The diverse applications of electric power trains combined with increasing automation and a wide variety of battery chemistries promise to revolutionize transport and transport fuels.

1. VMT Data

2. Deeper VMT Analysis

The top 10% of gasoline superusers consume as much gas as the bottom 60% of users.

We could have had electric cars from the very beginning.

You Won’t Survive As Human Capital by Ash Milton palladiummag.com, November 24, 2023

You and I operate as human capital: an input in the process of social reproduction, rather than its master or even its goal. Much of our life from childhood onward is dedicated to proving our value within this paradigm. No one living today is responsible for this mode of life. Some people more directly enforce its norms, a few try to resist them, and most go along as best they can.

Our talents and abilities are quantified by large organizations like state bureaucracies and private corporations. The intangible aspects of our personalities that we think motivate our decisions—loves, hates, desires, fears—are conditioned in organized ways. These organizations only rarely answer to particular people, but rather to their own and often seemingly mysterious internal logic.

We all know this isn’t quite right, yet most of the world has staked out its existence on this logic. The places that don’t are increasingly rare in a world where even the Taliban of Afghanistan submit to the advantages of a professional bureaucracy. No one has yet come upon a different material logic to outcompete it.

Some of the shortcomings of the underwriting assumptions are becoming clearer as we travel deeper into the twenty-first century. One of the most important is reproduction: having children has become an inconvenient and inefficient trade-off. Many of our friends and relatives will never do so. No known form of natalism has been able to reverse the great dying taking place within advanced societies. Unable to exist without its human substrate, yet also unable to sustain it, this technocratic paradigm has a fatal contradiction within it: despite its hegemony, it is incompatible with life.

Already in 1945, the writer H. G. Wells had a fit of despair as the specter of extinction loomed over all of humanity’s apparent advances. He laid out his fears in an essay that was strangely discordant with his career as one of the century’s great utopian modernists: “[T]he human story has already come to an end…The stars in their courses have turned against [man] and he has to give place to some other animal better adapted to face the fate that closes in more and more swiftly upon mankind.” The various strains of transhumanists and accelerationists are only Wells’s latest disciples, finding a solution to the paradox of high modernism without people in the potential emergence of new beings. None of them have yet produced humanity’s successor.

For now, the human element is still the load-bearing one. As members of that element, you and I will only come out the other side by prioritizing our own success in biological and material terms over our usefulness to others as human capital. For our own lineages to increase in power and fame in the centuries to come, it is necessary for us to establish a completely different paradigm of life.

“Us” Is a People
When populations converge on a material and social paradigm of life that powers their expansion, history records it as the coming into being of a new people. Often, a truly great civilization can be traced to a very small founding population at its origin. At this stage, a shared form of life shapes a powerful in-group consciousness, kinship against enemies, stable intermarriage, and endogenous reproduction. The population shares a niche of material activity and production. They absorb or displace rival communities, and their form of life grows increasingly distinct and defined against those of other populations.

The name for this kind of event is ethnogenesis. Often, ethnogenesis begins with a population on the order of several thousand families, of which perhaps only a few hundred are really dominant. Sometimes, these groups rule over still-larger populations, in which case the initial population may become one dominant endogenous caste or class within a conquered society. An early status of nobility is a good heuristic in these cases since it often designates those families that helped establish a social order.

This pattern holds quite well throughout history. Roman historians record that the original patrician families of Rome numbered about 200 or 300 families that were descended from the very earliest senators, a number that expanded after the first generations. Classical Athens and Sparta ranged about 20,000 to 40,000 male citizens at their greatest heights, a number which was surely much smaller at their outset.

Centuries later, the numbers don’t change much: about 8000 Norman landholders are estimated to have settled and ruled England after the Conquest; in France, the number of noble families in the realm never grew to more than several thousand even on the eve of the French Revolution—and only a small number of these had truly feudal roots. At the time of the American Revolution, the major centers of power—Boston, Philadelphia, the Virginia plantations, and so on—were generally each run by insular collectives of hundreds of families, which eventually intermingled as the most prominent among each group established the national WASP elite.

The reason for such consistent numbers is that this is a practical and useful scale for an “us.” The range of a few hundred to a few thousand families is what makes up a collective in-group capable of real bonds, cooperation, and a sense of common destiny. This is the scale of a real community that can cohesively act on the world. This is far smaller than any modern nation-state or even large city. Populations may rise and fall, but the scale of agency stays much the same: in a solar system where 100 billion humans span multiple worlds and moons, it will still be coordinated groups of thousands of people that drive history.

When collectives of this sort rule far larger populations, as the Romans, Normans, Franks, and WASPs did, they make up the foundational element of the resulting regimes. Their marks are often felt centuries after the founding people themselves disappear as a distinct population: Latin remained an institutional language for millennia, and the modern British parliament still ritually uses Norman French phrases in procedures like royal assent to a bill. Such vestiges reflect that the state itself was initially an organized representation of a particular people’s interests and so reflected their mores, language, culture, and religion. Without their distinct state-founding people, those nations and empires as we know them would not have existed. At their founding, the formal purpose of such governments was to pursue the common interests of those groups that had established them.

The identity of state goals with the organized interests of a people defined by kinship and common consciousness is straightforwardly assumed by the ancient authors on politics—for example, Aristotle’s Politics and Cicero’s De re publica—and is also part of the English concept of the commonwealth. A state exists to handle the most general level of a community’s affairs, and doing this it all assumes that a defined community with a common purpose and interest actually exists.

The Modern State Is Not a Political Community
Western debates over topics such as immigration highlight a divide within liberalism on just what defines the body politic. Some countries, like France and Hungary, embrace an older mythos in which the democratic state rests on a real national community, either civic or semi-ethnic, that is capable of collective agency; others, like Britain and the U.S., have rejected this mythos, or see it as undesirable, and reserve collective action for special minority interests while seeing citizenship proper as focused on individual rights. In either case, the body politic is an ideological construct. The sort of collective action and identity possible among small groups of founding elites is not possible in a national population numbering tens or hundreds of millions. It was not mass populations that founded these states, but much smaller, highly coordinated subsets of those populations.

Like all institutions, states tend to drift away from the purposes for which their founders created them. In the course of time, the community that once erected the state often loses its original vitality, then hegemony, and finally its central position within its own regime. The displacement of the old Roman senatorial class, by upstart Latin-speaking generals and politicians of plebeian ancestry traces these steps.

When institutions become powerful and entrenched, the logic of state interest begins to override the more fundamental interests of continuity. The qualities which brought the state into being may ultimately conflict with and upset its stability and end up suppressed. The militant hero culture of the old patrician families gave Rome its empire, but also contributed to the civil wars that plagued it whenever expansion slowed or imported slaves conflicted with free plebeian interests.

The reformations of Julius Caesar and Augustus saved the institutional Roman state and its power, but they could not reverse the demise of its founding families. Plebeians had risen into Roman institutions for centuries at this point, and eventually, foreigners did so too. By the imperial era, the Roman state was at its height but most of the original patrician lineages that had built it up were extinct. The institutions of a people had parted ways with that people itself, and the former survived far longer than the latter.

Confusing your own material interests with the reifications that exist in the culture around you, whether those be symbols or institutions, is a lethal generational poison. You and I likely grew up in a culture where attachment to “patriotism” or “freedom” or “democracy” served an ideological purpose. These words stirred the feeling that we were part of the ruling regime’s own in-group. This assumption is at least notionally shared by nearly all modern states from North Korea to Canada.

Those reifications are echoes of a past era, but do not reflect the present. Not only does the regime you live under not represent your fundamental interests, but many Western regimes have no such conscious in-group at all. They are either no longer in the hands of those who once established them, or else their current descendants have substantively ceased to identify with their own forebears. They are not even in the hands of a new people—no process of ethnogenesis is underway in Paris or Berlin. Rather all these people and structures have become fuel for the technocratic world.

However, you still possess interests that you can examine and discover yourself. And further, you share those interests with your kin and collaborators. Your own biological existence and that of your lineage are tangible interests. So is the successful exploitation of a novel material niche, the continuity of a way of life, and the ability to pursue transcendent or spiritual goals. Once reifications distract from these goals, it is better to jettison them.

Modern states view their populations as human capital fully replaceable first by immigration, and then eventually by technology. A citizen may have rights and privileges, but these do not constitute a community that could make those real. The community of interest can’t be brought into being through paper. The idea that such a society can have a res publica is a fantasy, but the res publica of you and yours is not. It is only with the people with whom you undertake these things that you can share political life—the common matters of a real people that the ancient writers saw as the business of government.

Implicit in the technocratic paradigm under which we live is the idea that something other than human beings could be the agents of history: technology, institutions, good legal mechanisms, labor relations, or even the post-human intelligence yearned for by Wells and by modern AI accelerationists. In fact, no such replacement has arisen, nor is there any certain pathway to one in the near future.

Instead, we are left with a logic that leads to suicide. Either its expansion stalls due to forces beyond its control, or the process that has consumed all advanced countries finishes engulfing the entire world, eventually running out of resources and territory for further expansion. In any case, the result is the same: stagnation and decay under irreconcilable contradictions.

Your Material Future
Despite the dead end of the technocratic paradigm, it remains the null hypothesis of all thought and action, and the state to which all failed attempts at exit eventually return. This is exactly the process that is plaguing one of the most famous groups to resist modernity: the Amish.

The fanatical dedication of the Amish to a form of life, founded on religious conviction, determined their material existence. And despite their lack of explicit concern for material power and expansion—and outsize genetic maladies—they have won both these things. In the last 100 years, they grew from 5000 to 370,000 people, acquired huge amounts of land, and began to dominate the counties in which they were the most concentrated. While easy to romanticize, the Amish are showing more and more shortcomings.

The Amish spiritual vision translates in material terms into the life of the family farm based on communal manual labor. When prioritized, this translates into rapid expansion, because land quickly becomes locally expensive and so new colonies continually have to be founded. But despite the apparently large number of colonies being founded, new ones often house only a small number of people. The actual number of new colonies should be far, far higher, and the membership of each far larger, if the community wants to maintain its original vision of life.

When they deviate from the communal family farm, things degrade fast. In Holmes County, an Amish hub in Ohio with nearly half the state’s Amish population, one can find Amish men and women sporting smartphones and Adidas sneakers. Between a fifth and a quarter of the state’s Amish kids attend mainstream public school. The results are almost instantaneous: the fertility of non-farming families drops by a quarter, and that’s just in this early stage of the process.

When Amish families do not prioritize the material niche necessitated by their fundamental spiritual mission, they lose their center of gravity and assimilation follows. The smartphone and the public school are vectors of a more powerful rival consciousness. The only way to avoid it while maintaining the benefits of smartphone hardware would be to establish a closed Amish-only intranet for the hardware to operate on with a strict firewall against digital leaking from the mainline internet. Whether the Amish survive likely depends on whether they can achieve these kinds of collective-level updates instead of allowing their unprincipled exceptions to become new de facto norms which then eradicate their form of life altogether.

The collective consciousness that a form of life sustains is the most important thing your community shares. For your economic incentives to align with your social and biological ones, the work you do to secure material wealth should rely on the communal bonds formed under your collective consciousness as assets, not liabilities. If the bonds become liabilities, the incentive already exists to trade off against them—and even short-term gains on this front seem to guarantee defection. This is the major principle that the Amish get right, and their assimilation begins insofar as they stray from it.

But the Amish way of life is not relevant to our interests or ideals. There is no value to you or me in fleeing to the woods or the countryside. Fortunately, the principle is not unique to them, nor is it synonymous with a primitive form of life.

Industrial civilization itself leverages numerous traits: a population that is competent at it must be able to command loyal manpower, coordinate across large spaces with tight information, unite around high-risk ventures, and do all this while enduring physically and mentally demanding conditions. These are inherently valuable traits. Industry often seeks out such populations through offshoring precisely because this cultural complex is so hard to cultivate in a workforce that doesn’t already possess it, or which has lost it.

Our own task is not to preserve modernity or industrial society for its own sake, though we may yet preserve some parts of them. The real vital forces behind its development are not unique and could survive and thrive in other paradigms. Advanced technical achievements will continue only insofar as some part of the human substrate of technocracy finds a way out of this ideological trap.

This also means that advanced society is dependent on an agency that is willing to construct it for some higher purpose. It’s unlikely that agency can be constructed, but it seems that latent agency can be activated under the right conditions. Industrial titans like Matthew Boulton or Thomas Edison often had intense personal drives and motivations that can’t be replicated at scale, and fields like rocketry even depended on fully-fledged theologies motivating its pioneers to get off the ground. The same holds true of the corporate structures that make up the social organization of modernity: the first global corporate structures were religious orders and charter companies that drew adventurers to the ends of the Earth.

Historically, those periods where people shift from one way of life to another in ways that magnify and increase their best traits are extremely generative and can define entire epochs. The prerequisites of industrial and technocratic society itself—the corporate organization and commercial capitalism—themselves were born as English, Dutch, and French populations spread around the world. A mix of material, political, and religious factors led to significant populations becoming free landholders and merchants across the ocean, and eventually vectors of empire for the Old World. Their recent ancestors had lived in feudal serf societies where their talents were expressed in categorically different ways.

Acting on goals and ambitions that could not be expressed in the societies they lived in, these people formed an array of settlements, colonies, charter companies, pirate bands, religious orders, and other structures adapted to their particular goals and natures. Later empires told the stories of their growth as highly coherent and predestined affairs. But this was post-hoc myth-making. Their foundations were laid on the same scale of action that all founding populations historically act on: thousands of people, not millions.

These groups possessed common goals and ambitions that could not be expressed in the societies they lived in. The forms of life that they eventually developed could not be completely planned in advance, but grew in fits and starts. Our task at present is to identify those capable of this kind of action, and to enter into community with those who share our most tangible interests. It is only once we achieve a shared consciousness on these terms that a new “us” can exist, and with it the foundation for a new way of life.

p469

…The first phase was a rapid decolonization, the gaining of independence. It was characterized by a universal optimism, enthusiasm, euphoria. People were convinced that freedom meant a better roof over their heads, a larger bowl of rice, a first pair of shoes. A miracle would take place—the multiplying of loaves, fishes, and wine. Nothing of the sort occurred. On the contrary. There was a sudden increase in the population, for which there was not enough food, schools, or jobs. Optimism quickly turned to disenchantment and pessimism. The people’s bitterness, fury, hatred was now directed against their own elites, who were rapidly and greedily stuffing their pockets. In a country without a well-developed private sector, where plantations belonged to foreigners and the banks to foreign capital, the political career was the only road to riches.

…Everything is eaten, down to the last crumb. No one has any supplies, for even if someone did have extra food, he wouldn’t have anywhere to keep it, no place to shut it. You live in the immediate, current moment; each day is an obstacle difficult to surmount, and the imagination does not reach beyond the present, does not concoct plans, does not dream.

Bars contain one thing for sale - a beer: …The beers can be various—banana, corn, pineapple, palm. Generally, each of these women specializes in one kind. A glass of such a beverage has three merits: (a) it contains alcohol, (b) being a liquid, it quenches thirst, and (c) because the solution at the bottom of the glass is thick and dense, it constitutes for the hungry an ersatz nourishment. Therefore, if someone has earned only a shilling in the course of a day, he will most probably spend it in a bar…

…Modern civilization has not reached us,” he concludes. “There are no electric lamps here, no telephones, no television. The only aspect of it that has penetratred is automatic weapons.”

…it is true that what strikes you most in a place like Rwanda is its deep provincialism. Our world, seemingly global, is in reality a planet of thousands of the most varied and never intersecting provinces. A trip around the world is a journey from backwater to backwater, each of which considers itself, in its isolation, a shining star. For most people, the real world ends on the threshold of their house, at the edge of their village, or, at the very most, on the border of their valley. That which is beyond is unreal, unimportant, and even useless, whereas that which we have at our fingertips, in our field of vision, expands until it seems an entire universe, overshadowing all else. Often, the native and the newcomer have difficulty finding a common language, because each looks at the same place through a different lens. The newcomer has a wide-angle lens, which gives him a distant, diminished view, although one with a long horizon line, while the local always employs a telescopic lens that magnifies the slightest detail…

“Hatari?” I ask after a while (some kind of danger?).

The Amba are a highly unusual social group. Like other tribes on the continent, they take seriously the existence of evil and the danger of spells, and thus fear and hate wizards, but contrary to the widely held view that wizards dwell among others, that they act from without, from a distance, the Amba maintain that the wizards are among them, within their families, within their villages, that they form an integral part of their community. This belief has resulted in the gradual disintegration of Amba society, corroded as it has become by hatred, consumed by suspicion, confounded by free-floating fear. Anyone can be a wizard, brother fears brother, son fears father, a mother fears her own children. The Amba rejected the comfortable and comforting view that the enemy is the stranger, the foreigner, the man of a different faith or skin color. No! Possessed by a peculiar kind of masochism, the Amba live in torment and distress; at this very moment, evil can be under my own roof, asleep in my bed, eating from the same dish as I. And there is an additional difficulty: it is impossible to determine what wizards look like. After all, no one has seen one. We know they exist because we see the results of their actions: they caused the drought, as a result of which there is nothing to eat, fires keep igniting, many people are sick, someone is always dying. Plainly, wizards never rest, endlessly occupied as they are with raining misfortunes, defeats, and tragedies down upon our heads.

The war flares up, dies down, then explodes again. Although it has gone on so many years, I have heard of no one trying to write its history. In Europe, there are shelves of books dedicated to every war, archives full of documents, special rooms in museums. Nothing of the kind exists in Africa. Here, even the longest and greatest war is quickly forgotten, falls into oblivion. Its traces vanish by the day after: the dead must be buried immediately, new huts erected on the site of burned ones. Documents? There never were any. There are no written orders, no ordnance maps, cryptographs, leaflets, proclamations, newspapers, letters. The custom of writing memoirs and diaries does not exist (most frequently, there is simply no paper). There is no tradition of writing histories. Most important—who would do this? There are no collectors of memorabilia, curators, archivists, historians, archaeologists. It is actually just as well there are no such people nosing about the battlefields. They would be quickly spotted by the police, imprisoned, and, suspected of spying, shot. History in these parts appears suddenly, descends like a deus ex machina, reaps its bloody harvest, seizes its prey, and disappears. What exactly is it? Why has it chosen us to cast its evil eye upon? It is better not to think about it. Better not to pry.

People are not hungry because there is no food in the world. There is plenty of it; there is a surplus, in fact. But between those who want to eat and the bursting warehouses stands a tall obstacle indeed: politics. Khartoum restricts the number of flights bringing supplies for the hungry. Many of the planes that reach their destination are robbed by the local chieftains. Whoever has weapons, has food. Whoever has food, has power. We are here among people who do not contemplate transcendence and the existence of the soul, the meaning of life and the nature of being. We are in a world in which man, crawling on the earth, tries to dig a few grains of wheat out of the mud, just to survive another day.

In 1821, a ship arrived at a place near where my hotel now stands (Monrovia lies on the Atlantic, on a peninsula), bringing from the United States an agent of the American Colonization Society, Robert Stockton. Stockton, holding a pistol to the head of the local tribal chief, King Peter, forced him to sell—for six muskets and one trunk of beads—the land upon which the aforementioned American organization planned to settle freed slaves (mainly from the cotton plantations of Virginia, Georgia, Maryland). Stockton’s organization was of a liberal and charitable character. Its activists believed that the best reparation for the injuries of slavery would be the return of former slaves to the land of their ancestors—to Africa. Every year from then on, ships came from the United States carrying groups of liberated slaves, who began to settle in the area of present-day Monrovia. They did not constitute a large population. By the time the Republic of Liberia was proclaimed in 1847, there were only six thousand of them. It is quite possible that their number never even reached twenty thousand: less than 1 percent of the country’s population…Liberia is the voluntary continuation of a slave society by slaves who did not wish to abolish an unjust order, but wanted to preserve it, develop it, and exploit it for their own benefit. Clearly, an enslaved mind, tainted by the experience of slavery, a mind born into slavery, fettered in infancy, cannot conceive or conjure a world in which all would be free.

History is so often the product of thoughtlessness: it is the offspring of human stupidity, the fruit of benightedness, idiocy, and folly. In such instances, it is enacted by people who do not know what they are doing—more, who do not want to know, who reject the possibility with disgust and anger. We see them hastening toward their own destruction, forging their own fetters, tying the noose, diligently and repeatedly checking whether the fetters and the noose are strong, whether they will hold and be effective.

The increasingly important question in the world is not how to feed all the people—there is plenty of food, and preventing hunger is often only a matter of adequate organization and transport—but what to do with them. What should be done with these countless millions? With their unutilized energy? With the hidden powers they surely possess? What is their place in the family of mankind? That of fully vested members? Wronged brothers? Irritating intruders?

Between the people of the Sahara and the sedentary tribes of the Sahel and the green savannah there had existed for centuries in this part of Africa a form of commerce known as silent trading. The inhabitants of the Sahel traded salt and received gold in return. This salt, a highly coveted and priceless commodity, especially in the tropics, was carried from the interior of the Sahara on the heads of the black slaves of the Tuareg and the Arabs, probably to the River Niger, where the transaction took place. “When the Negroes reach the river, they proceed as follows,” tells a fifteenth-century Venetian merchant, Alvise Ca’ da Mosto. “Each of them forms a little hillock out of the salt he brought, and marks it. Leaving the salty piles arranged in one straight line, they retreat a half day’s travel time in the direction from whence they came. Then, people from another Negro tribe arrive. They come on large boats, probably from nearby islands, disembark, and place next to each mound of salt a certain amount of gold. Then they, too, withdraw, leaving behind the gold and the salt. When they are gone, those who brought the salt return, and if they deem the amount of gold to be sufficient, they take it, leaving the salt; if not, they take neither the gold nor the salt, and go away once again. Then the other ones come back and take those piles of salt that have no gold next to them; next to the others they place more gold, if they consider it appropriate, or leave the salt. In this manner they conduct their commerce, never seeing one another and never speaking. This practice has gone on for a very long time already, and although the whole business sounds improbable, I assure you that it is true.”

The African market is a great repository of everything and anything. A veritable mine of the cheap and the shoddy. A mountain of rubbish, gimcrack, and kitsch. There is nothing of any value to a Westerner here, nothing to catch your attention, arouse your admiration, tempt you to possess it. At one end are stacks of identical red and yellow buckets and bowls; at the other, billowing piles of thousands of identical undershirts and sneakers; someplace else still, pyramids of multicolored calicos and glittering rows of nylon dresses and men’s jackets. Only in such a place can one fully appreciate the extent to which the world is swamped with material tenth-rateness, how it is drowning in an ocean of camp, knockoffs, the tasteless and the worthless.

One of the differences between African and European societies is the latter’s division of labor: specialization, strictly defined expertise, professionalism. These principles are only marginally in effect in Africa. Here, especially these days, one must try one’s hand at dozens of occupations and do many things, most frequently not for long and—alas!—not too thoroughly. In any event, it is difficult to find anyone who has not had a brush with Africa’s prime life force and passion: the exchange of goods.

Noticing that inter-cultural contact is usually initiated by conquistadors: …intercultural exchange was monopolized by a class of ignoramuses. As one consequence, interpersonal contacts were informed from the outset by the most primitive criterion: skin color. Thus racism became an ideology according to which people defined their place in the world.

Interesting commentary/history concerning:
-Idi Amin
-Hutu/Tutsi conflict ~1960-90
-Dinka/Nuer conflict
-Monrovia and the ascension to power of former American slaves (Liberia)
-Tuareg/Bantu conflict

p230

The problem with the view of the social conservative is that it assumes a man’s duty to his wife and children is more natural, and therefore more easily enforced, than it actually is. They often do not see the immense work that had to go into making men good husbands or fathers, nor the great privileges through which men had to be enticed to accept these duties; still less do they see or dare to mention the great work—some would say oppression—that had to be exerted to make women faithful wives and mothers.

Modern societies are faced with men who either reap the fruits of sexual liberation through easy copulation, or men who for any number of reasons won’t or can’t put up with the stress of this chase and instead become apathetic, at least so far as women are concerned. The problem, as social liberals and feminists are finding out, isn’t that men seek by nature or education to dominate wives or children, but that men simply don’t care.

Men seek status above all because it is attractive to women and results in intercourse or breeding—in fact, in social animals, where status and hierarchy clearly exists, status serves precisely this purpose. Only males of high status breed.

breeding practices and human inequality are connected at the root.

Behind the Greek obsession with citizen quality, with excellence, with personal and generational biological improvement, lies the converse, a depreciation of the life of the slave, or, more generally, of the type of man who lives only to live, who is willing to survive at any cost, or who is willing to accept subservience to avoid death. To speak of superior and inferior ways of life is necessarily to deny that every form of life has dignity or meaning. But, in particular, the net effect is to deny that mere life has any worth.

If one can speak of one type of life being superior and another being inferior, it’s only a few steps to this conclusion. For this reason Nietzsche begins his early essay on the Greek state by pointing out that the Greeks would have rejected as vile lies and cant our modern ideas of the dignity of human life and the dignity of labor. Labor, as the mere maintenance or preservation of mere life, has no value in and of itself, because mere life has no value. The fundamental Greek insight is the “nihilistic” insight of Silenus: “Better never to have been born, and if born, to die as soon as possible. Mere life, a drudgery and bleak terror, is not worth the trouble.

The connection between philosophy and tyranny at bottom has to do with the necessities of educating the first philosophers. Such an education, in an era in which philosophy does not exist established as a tradition, that is, when philosophy is in its beginnings, necessarily risks the production instead of a tyrant—it depends on encouraging a political orientation that is tyrannical from the point of view of the polis; and it trains certain skills and abilities that are “tyrannical.”

The development of such a class of functionaries [magicians] is of great importance for the political as well as the religious evolution of society. For when the welfare of the tribe is supposed to depend on the performance of these magical rites, the magician rises into a position of much influence and repute, and may readily acquire the rank and authority of a chief or king. The profession accordingly draws into its ranks some of the ablest and most ambitious men of the tribe, because it holds out to them a prospect of honour, wealth, and power such as hardly any other career could offer. The acuter minds perceive how easy it is to dupe their weaker brother and to play on his superstition for their own advantage.

The pitfalls which beset the path of the professional sorcerer are many, and as a rule only the man of coolest head and sharpest wit will be able to steer his way through them safely. For it must always be remembered that every single profession and claim put forward by the magician as such is false; not one of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or unconscious. Accordingly the sorcerer who sincerely believes in his own extravagant pretensions is in far greater peril and is much more likely to be cut short in his career than the deliberate impostor.

The rise of one man to supreme power enables him to carry through changes in a single lifetime which previously many generations might not have sufficed to effect…Even the whims and caprices of a tyrant may be of service in breaking the chain of custom which lies so heavy on the savage. And as soon as the tribe ceases to be swayed by the timid and divided counsels of the elders, and yields to the direction of a single strong and resolute mind, it becomes formidable to its neighbours and enters on a career of aggrandisement, which at an early stage of history is often highly favourable to social, industrial, and intellectual progress.
or extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the perpetual struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of man.

The opponent of intelligence is the rule of the elders, the institution through which the rule of custom, the rule of the ancestral, is made concrete.

By contrast, in other parts of the world magicians and medicine men manage to make a relatively complete break with the rule of elders and the totality of custom…In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings…

nomos: ancestral law, custom, convention

phusis: nature, blood, body, (inheritance)

Nature of man only manifests itself in great deeds and in victory in contests… nature and heredity may lie fallow for a generation or two, but if they exist, they only manifest and prove themselves in great deeds that overwhelm the perceptive observer as an outward visible sign. Aside from this there is only convention, “tradition,” empty speech, chatter.

When nomos or convention outsteps this or pretends to, when it is forgotten that “he who wins rich renown in the games or in war” belongs to a different reality and owes his origins to a different principle, then nomos becomes something else, it becomes a systematic and perverse covering-up of nature, party to the forgetfulness of nature and the hierarchy between man and man that exists in nature. The highest type of man is the product of a breeding program, and not of an educational program of nomos.

Men pursuing high achievement should strive according to nature [marnasthai phuai] and not be misled or “educated” by convention or teaching. The “standard” high achievement for a man is to possess areta—and let us remember that “virtue” here refers ultimately to the ability to be a good leader in war, namely to possess andreia and phronesis, battle prowess and ability to give good war counsel

The primary function of nomos is “social control,” homogenization, taming, tribal survival, the continuation and preservation of mere life—through a regime of commands, speech and teaching that covers up and suppresses nature. Excellence, virtue, on the other hand, is a matter of nature, of blood, and it cannot be taught. [ccv] Maybe the climax of Pindar’s thoughts on nature are revealed in this explicitly negative attitude to teaching, the taught, what we might call the “try-hards”…

Machiavelli: You must know there are two ways of contesting, the one by the law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a prince to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man.

One of most absurd mystical religious beliefs is in equality of humans would you agree? Another is the belief in rights. Still another is the belief in the dignity of life or of labor. Another is belief in Creation out of nothing.

Very descriptive and disturbing narratives of diseases and pests that can attack the human body. Must reading for any aspiring jungle explorer. Will provide you with a greater appreciation of the comforts of civilization.

A Sane Solution to the Student Debt Crisis – Josiah Lippincott

Republicans should support student loan forgiveness…with some important caveats.

For the record, this is not a self-interested call to action. I have zero student loans and never did. Nor did I receive financial assistance from my parents; I do not come from a wealthy background. I paid for my private school college education using academic scholarships and cold hard cash that I earned from summer work. My argument here is political, not personal.

After three years of the COVID panic induced interest rate freeze, the 43 million Americans with student loans are set to begin paying on their loans in less than a month.

At a time of sky-high inflation and economic uncertainty, that additional financial burden will hit millions of households hard, as the average student loan borrower owes $37,000. It is no wonder that Joe Biden and the Democrats are eager to try and find a way to stave off this financial hit. The minute the economy stops limping along and plunges into full-on recession, there will be an enormous price to be paid by our political class. Resuming student loan payments could very well hasten that day of reckoning.

The conservative response to this situation has been to flip the bird to the student loan borrowers: “you took out loans, so you pay them back.”

That’s right, suck it up cupcake!

This response might be emotionally satisfying (“take that, you avocado toast-eating, Prius-driving, Joe Biden-voting, college-educated libtard!”) but it papers over key considerations. For one, student loan holders are a huge voting bloc, and a politically diverse one at that. Telling any group of voters to shove it, even if they have no intention of supporting you, is politically risky.

It’s also bizarre to see conservatives on the side of big banks and the federal government. Why is it always “you took out a loan, so pay it back” and never “you loaned out money to an 18-year-old who wants a gender studies degree; you’re an idiot”?

Mainstream conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro treat student loan debt as more sacred than marriage vows. This is an inversion. Paying back a bank is far less important than keeping your family intact. Many have rightly pointed out that student loan forgiveness is unconstitutional, which is true. But it was unconstitutional for the federal government to loan out that money in the first place. There is no provision in our founding documents that says the feds are supposed to subsidize higher education for the whole population. Indeed, it was the federal government pouring money into the university system that caused the price of college to skyrocket to such absurd levels. From 1963 until now, the price of a college education has tripled, after adjusting for inflation. Meanwhile, the inflation-adjusted starting salary for college graduates has remained flat at around $55,000 per year.

At the same time, mass immigration and outsourcing has hammered wages for non-college educated jobs. This economic situation has placed young people in a vise grip: either take on massive amounts of debt in order to have a shot at a middle-class life, or accept a place in the unstable and often grueling world of blue-collar work. Even today, a bachelor’s degree confers a 75% boost to lifetime earnings over a high school diploma.

Colleges have become the government-sponsored gatekeepers to economic wellbeing. The point of college in the modern degree-mill university system is to gain the social and political capital necessary to have access to high paying and high-status work. What is respectable today is liberalism. College is where young Americans acquire the social skills to navigate the politically correct world. In order to get a high paying job in finance, law, government, media, or the non-profit world, you need to know how to speak fluently about how much Black Lives Matter, “female penises,” and the pandemic of “disinformation.”

America doesn’t need re-education camps; we already have them in the form of our colleges. The American Right, therefore, has an enormous incentive to shatter the stranglehold that a college degree holds on economic success. Student loan forgiveness offers a powerful tool on this front. Republicans should support forgiving the vast bulk of the publicly held student loan debt in this country with the condition that the federal government stop giving out student loans altogether. Congress should forgive all of the current student loan debt AND pull all future higher education funding. That means no more Pell Grants, no more FAFSA, no more earmarks for colleges.

Right now, the federal government holds $1.65 trillion in student loan debt. Leaving the taxpayers holding the bag on these notes is fiscally painful, to be sure. But there are ways of meliorating that blow. For one, the total value of all college endowments in America is $800 billion. Along with student debt relief, Congress should pass a one-time 100% endowment tax that affects all colleges and universities that take federal aid (my alma mater, Hillsdale College, would be one of the very few institutions of higher education that would not be affected, because it takes zero dollars in federal aid). This one-time tax would cut the taxpayer’s burden in half. Cutting all federal aid to higher ed would save another $150 billion per year. That means that in less than 6 years, the combination of the one-time endowment tax and the savings from future student aid would make the student loan forgiveness pay for itself. Instead of punishing non-college-educated Americans, my plan for student loans would punish the people responsible for putting so many students into debt: the colleges and universities themselves.

The upside of this tax and cut plan is that our institutions of higher learning would have to figure out how to survive without suckling on the taxpayer teat. A lot of schools would go bankrupt. Good. I say this as someone working on his PhD: the best thing that could happen to American higher education would be the complete elimination of all state money from the education system.

The influx of taxpayer cash has corrupted academia, turning the whole enterprise (with the exception of a few holdouts) into a repulsive grifting operation. Our country would be a better place if we razed every college in this country to the ground and started over.

Most people do not need college degrees. The best way to learn how to run a business, for instance, is not by getting a business degree but by working in a business. The same is true for most trades. The system of credentials and government licenses that dominate our lives are shackles on the creativity and productive power of the American people. The massive debt burden on the college-educated gives corporate human resources departments a powerful tool to wield against politically incorrect employees. Without a high paying job, most college- educated Americans cannot afford to pay the mountain of debt that comes along with access to middle class life in modern America.

In medicine, the massive debt load that doctors must take on ensures compliance with the regime’s edicts. Much of the corruption in the medical field that we’ve witnessed over the last several years is traceable to the rigid political enforcement that flows from financial dependence. A free market in education would make America’s colleges much healthier. In reality, the only type of person who needs college is the sort of young person who wants to read Plato in the original Greek, or who wants to dedicate years of their lives working through the more complex and pressing questions connected to human learning. The inducement to higher education should not be salary and compensation but spiritual fulfillment. In turn, the quality of American high school education should become better. An army of unemployed PhDs from the implosion of American higher ed would mean that the worst scholars would have to get jobs more fitting for their natural talents…such as cleaning toilets, picking crops, and sweeping streets. Better teachers would find a place in America’s public schools, providing high quality education to high school students free of charge.

Forgiving student loans might not make college-educated voters support the Republican party, but it could very much weaken the motivation these voters have to go to the polls against the GOP. More importantly, forgiving student loans now—with the right caveats attached—would severely weaken the liberal academic stronghold. Democrats don’t have an answer to this proposal. If they refuse to go along with debt forgiveness, then they lose face with their voters. If they allow future cuts to higher education, they weaken their ideological grip on the populace. Either way, the Left loses and the American people win.