The Mother of All Sunk Cost Fallacies
How a simple concept from Economics 101 helps explain the illogical behaviour of the elites
The most perplexing thing about the age we live in is not the rapid decline of Western Civilization. Empires rise and fall. All great societies go through periods of both prosperity and hardship. That’s been the case since the dawn of man. What is most puzzling is not that we are in an era of decline. It’s that all major institutions - governments, media, corporations, and universities - are not only doing nothing to stop the decline, but relentlessly trying to facilitate it.
Western governments are in the process of mass importing record numbers of migrants from the third world. It has gotten to the point that they need to rent out entire hotels just to find a somewhere to put them. Hordes of migrants either pass through the US-Mexico border or cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe day in, day out with the assistance of governments and NGOs. In addition, legal immigration is also at record high levels.
Along with demographic change, governments and corporations are intent on pushing their native white populations out of positions of power in favour of non-whites. The media and education system are deliberately demoralizing the masses with a ceaseless anti-white propaganda campaign and actively promoting every destructive lifestyle imaginable such as homosexuality, transgenderism, or prostitution. Law enforcement is being made increasingly permissive of substance abuse and being made to turn a blind eye to non-white criminality.
While these Western countries are embarking on a campaign of ethnic replacement, they are simultaneously pushing ahead with implementing their Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. This involves kneecapping key industries, deindustrializing Western countries, and dramatically reducing quality of life in the West. This also involves a radical change in the role technology plays in the economy and our day-to-day lives. In 2020, the living meme Klaus Schwab of the WEF famously called for a “Great Reset” to reshape the economy and our way of life in the wake of COVID with “sustainable development” as a priority.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution, as Schwab has dubbed it, is to involve new and innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence, gene editing, cloud computing, 3D printing, and augmented reality playing increasingly important roles in industry and daily life. The divide between the digital and physical realm is to be blurred as humans are integrated into a globe-spanning technocratic grid which some have called The Internet of Things.
It doesn’t take a genius to see a massive contradiction in all of this. The powers that be want this high-tech, fully automated, eco-friendly future while they are simultaneously implementing social policy which will make such a future impossible. Earlier this year, Harrold Robertson wrote an article titled ‘Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis’. In it, he documented the decline of human capital in the United States, how affirmative action policies have brought this about, and the negative impact that this has had on the infrastructure of the country. He argues that simply maintaining the current infrastructure of the United States, let alone actually improving it, will be extremely difficult in the coming decades due to this self-inflicted decline in competency.
This trend can be seen across the Western world. In Europe, North America, and Oceania, governments are deliberately shifting the demographics of historically white-majority countries to resemble that of the third world. Furthermore, these foreigners are being artificially promoted into positions in which they would be responsible for upholding the intricate systems which a first world society depends on, the same systems their countries were never able to develop for themselves.
Bloomberg recently released a report which showed that in 2021, following the anti-white mania of BLM the year prior, 94% of new corporate jobs in S&P 100 companies in the US went to non-white candidates. White people form 57.8% of the population of the US and significantly outperform both blacks and Hispanics in metrics such as IQ and academic achievement on average. Asians perform slightly higher in these metrics, but only make up 5.7% of the population. The only explanation for why so few white candidates are being hired by these companies is that they are deliberately being passed over in favour of non-white candidates, regardless of competence.
And this is happening in companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon, the private wing of public-private partnership. These are the companies which are supposed to lead the way to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Yet they are purposefully reducing the quality of their own human capital solely for ideological reasons. It’s also clear that the public sector is going down a similar path, seeing as the same anti-white policies in place in corporations are also in place in the US government. It’s also safe to assume that the phenomenon of declining human capital which is well documented in the US is also going on in other Western countries such as France, the UK, and Canada.
To get an idea where such a decline in human capital will lead, we can look no further than South Africa. After 30 years of ANC rule, South Africa, a country which once had world-class infrastructure under white minority rule, is now having difficulty keeping the power on. South Africa has the most extreme affirmative action laws in the world, which severely limit white South Africans’ opportunities in education, employment, and private business. I discussed further lessons which can be learned from South Africa in my article from earlier this year.
South Africa can give you an idea of the trajectory which these egalitarian delusions have set Western countries on. Yet while quite deliberately setting this course, the same set of elites are also attempting to pull off a massively ambitious restructuring of society to make it vastly more reliant on complex technocratic systems. They want this high-tech, environmentally sustainable future in which the majority of humans will be increasingly expendable, yet they are devoting a huge amount of resources to bringing in a biomass which would be nothing but an enormous liability for the system they want.
It’s as if on the one hand, they want to create a society resembling Jetsons, while on the other, they are turning the West into a favela. So, what is really going on here? I’ve spent years trying to understand the logic behind this. I’ve formed countless theories about how this is a Machiavellian scheme for total control only to have those theories fall apart and replaced by new ones. From a rational perspective, it makes absolutely no sense.
But here, I want to explore this from a somewhat different angle which might shed some light on the thought process behind the seemingly irrational actions of the elites. Rather than this all being a calculated plot which will fit together like a jigsaw puzzle once all the pieces are in place, there might be something else going on here. And I think that can be explained by a simple concept from both economics and psychology 101 known as the sunk cost fallacy.
The sunk cost fallacy occurs when someone considers unrecoverable past expenditures put into a venture when deciding how to proceed further, when they really should only be considering future returns. Imagine you started your own business three years ago and over the course of those three years you have lost $30,000. Some would be tempted to push on with the business, not wanting the time, money, and effort they had already put into the business to go to waste.
In reality, this is fallacious thinking because that time, money, and effort is sunk cost. It cannot be recovered. The only thing which should factor into your decision on whether or not to remain in business the potential for future profit. If it doesn’t look like the business will be profitable in the future, the correct decision would be to go out of business. Staying in business on the basis that you don’t want to allow your past expenditures to have been for naught would only result in additional time, money, and effort being wasted.
The sunk cost fallacy is not only relevant to business, but any kind of venture. Another situation where this could be applicable is in war. For example, if an army has lost 10,000 troops in a failed campaign, the only thing which should be considered when deciding whether to further pursue the campaign or not is its realistic possibility of success. The loss of 10,000 troops should not factor into their decision to continue the campaign or not because those who died cannot possibly be brought back. Continuing to pursue a failed campaign on the rationale that too many troops have already been sacrificed to change course would only result in the number of dead increasing.
This might seem obvious when looking at theoretical situations, but in the real world, the human psyche has a very hard time simply letting go of sunk costs emotionally. Losing $30,000 of your own money to a failed business, much less 10,000 lives to a failed military campaign is extremely difficult to emotionally detach oneself from. The adage “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” exists for a reason. It sounds obvious, but in a real-world situation, people often commit themselves to one course of action far beyond the point when it is clear that it should be abandoned. And it’s because they are falling prey to the Sunk Cost Fallacy.
So, how does this relate to the state which the world finds itself in today? I think that actions of the elites are not so much based on a meticulously thought-out plan, but a vision. The pervading vision of the intelligentsia resembles a mix of Star Trek and John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, a borderless globalized world in which all human differences have disappeared, and all can share in the prosperity brought about by technological innovation.
While there certainly are agendas in place to try to bring that about, I don’t think there really is a realistic roadmap to getting there because such a world is a utopian pipe dream which doesn’t accord with the realities of mankind. But the actions of the elites are motivated by a desire to create such a world, regardless of how unrealistic that might be. How does greatly reducing law enforcement’s ability to police “diverse” crime-ridden urban areas help bring about the Fourth Industrial Revolution? It doesn’t. But both are pursued simultaneously because the dream is to bring the fantasy world of those flashy WEF promo videos of smiling mixed-race people scanning their eyeballs to unlock their refrigerators into reality.
Anyone who takes an objective look at the trajectory Western countries are on will tell you that they are not on the right track. But those who rule the West aren’t looking at any of this objectively. The vision they are pursuing has been in place since the end of WWII. That’s almost 80 years. Every single powerful and influential individual alive today has lived their entire adult life under this consensus. They were educated into it, it was reinforced by the media they consumed, and it’s under this consensus that they rose to their positions of prominence. And they have brought about the wholesale social, political, economic, and demographic restructuring of the West in an attempt to fulfill their vision.
Herein lies the mother of all sunk cost fallacies. If you were at the helm of Western civilization right now, the correct decision would be to acknowledge that things are headed in the wrong direction and change course. The ambitions and efforts of the past 80 years should not factor into that decision at all because that expenditure cannot be recovered. Further pursuit of such aims under the rationale that too much effort has been put in to them not to see them through will only make the situation worse. However, for our elites, to abandon pursuit of this dream would mean to admit that the values they’ve always believed in, the foundations of world they’ve lived their entire lives in, and the direction they’ve taken the West in have all been wrong. And that would be extremely difficult for anyone to have to do.
So, they stay the course and things continue to get worse. The question is, how far will they go before reality forces them to rethink this all? Those who fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy are known to make disastrous expenditures in their attempt to prevent past efforts from being lost in vain. Sometimes, they can even make their situation several times worse in this futile pursuit. And we aren’t just talking about money here, or even the lives of soldiers in an army. This is about the entirety of Western civilization. So, it’s quite worrying to imagine what irrational decisions could be made in a desperate attempt to hold on the dream of the globalized egalitarian technocratic world and the destruction that could wrought.
Unfortunately, the answer to the question of how much more are the elites prepared to sink into this project before they admit it was a failure is more than they already have. Lampedusa is still overflowing with Africans waiting to get to Europe. There is still a constant and unopposed flow of migrants into the US across the border with Mexico. Corporations and government agencies are still purging their white employees in favour of less qualified non-white candidates. And while all of this is in process, they are still trying to push ahead with the implementation of their digital control grid and sustainable development goals. So far, nothing would suggest that the elite are soon going to stop and rethink this all.
However, there is something else to consider which is a greater cause for optimism. That is that the elites believe in this vision to varying degrees. Some really are dyed in the wool true believers, motivated by either delusional quixotism or resentful malice. But there are also those who are not as ideologically committed to the current zeitgeist but have gone along with it in order to attain high-status positions within the elite class. It’s these types who would be confronted with another question. What is more important, staying loyal to an ideology which they don’t really believe in or maintaining the amenities of the society in which they rule over?
In order for a billionaire to fly around the world in a private jet eating wagyu beef and caviar, there needs to be an aircraft industry to manufacture the jets, skilled pilots to fly them, functioning airports to land them at, a farming industry to produce these luxury foods, and a supply chain to deliver them. All of this is reliant on tremendously complex systems which require a high degree of competency to run, the same competency which egalitarian delusions written into law are cannibalizing. Do they really want to give all of that up so they can idolize Africans and transsexuals instead?
Take Elon Musk for example. I’m just using him as an example here, but I’m sure the same is applicable to numerous members of the elite. Now, I know that Musk is not “our guy”. However, he is not a true believer in the utopian egalitarian vision of the post-war era either. He seems more like a 90s-era Gen X liberal, nostalgic for the days before things went too far. And to his credit, while he might not agree with every dissident right-wing perspective, he will at least engage with them and grant them a degree of legitimacy. These ideas are not beyond the pale for him. He also has something of a chip on his shoulder. Both his battle against the ADL over free speech on Twitter/X and his son being assimilated into the transgender cult must have given him some degree of a grudge against the establishment and their ideology.
The vision which really captivates Musk is dream of taking humanity to the stars. He is a vocal advocate of the colonization of Mars, stating that he wants humans to become a multi-planet species. The problem is that the West’s ruling egalitarian creed will ensure that this will never happen. This year, Musk’s company SpaceX was sued by the Justice Department for “discriminating against asylees and refugees in hiring”. The same “civil rights” legislation which Harrold Robertson wrote about in his article on the competence crisis is being used to force Musk’s company to hire less qualified applicants, which won’t bode well for an organization and a man whose ambition is to colonize Mars. So, the question Musk will need to ask himself is if he really wants to take humanity to Mars, because if he does, there needs to be a fundamental change.
There are sure to be others within the elite class who will have to ask themselves the same question. Is holding on to the dying post-war dream of an egalitarian technocratic globalized world really worth it if it results in the destruction of the West, the very civilization which their elite status relies on? Or is it time to let go of the sunk cost of the past era and take things in a different direction? I’m sure we’ll get our answer to that question in the coming years.
Marvellously thoughtful as always.
My concern is that there are genuinely malicious actors with a burning hatred for all things European or Euro-descendant. They are not true-believers per se, but they understand how the current direction of the West is in line with their hatred and desire to see us all humiliated and detroyed, and so they may come off as those "dyed in the wool true believers".
I wonder how much they really care about their elite-status and lifestyle if their malice is realised or to what degree they believe themselves to be the future inheritors of a new total rule over a population of low IQ third-worlders who will be too dumb to offer any meaningful resistance.
I too hope we could wake up the elites but some of them already are and they do it willfully. It's always difficult to know how to deal with true evil.
In practice, successful companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google ruthlessly prioritize competence. They pay lip service to ideological considerations, but it’s really just PR twaddle to stay in the regime’s good graces. Companies that are foolish enough to prioritize ideology over competence will face a financial reckoning sooner or later. I suspect in the years ahead, other large and mid-sized corporations will figure this out and tailor their hiring practices just enough to keep the Justice Dept. off their backs.
I think Musk’s problem is that he’s on the autism spectrum, and doesn’t see the social necessity of playing silly rhetorical games. He draws too much attention by openly pointing out the hypocrisy of our ruling class, so they’re making an example of him. Since most government agencies are staffed by people who used to work in the industries they oversee, we’ll reach an equilibrium where companies will publish meaningless DEI statements, get a pat on the head from regulators, and then go back to running their operations based on actual business logic.