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.
Excellent piece. Not sure if post-WWII is the starting point -- WWI was already a dry run for the whole 'end of history' war to end all wars unite the world under democracy & League of Nations stuff, and the British Empire was already Globalism 1.0, with one currency and telegrams as email. Still, it is a "salient point" as they say. If so, contemplating who won and who lost WWII may suggest some insight into what's happening. A Certain People not known for their love of "Western civilization" or their ability to run a functioning nation. The sort of People who think its acceptable to move into someone else's nation and genocide the population, expecting the world to go along with it, because they wrote a book saying God told them to. A People whose book also predicts the End of the World arising from just such a conflict. A People who, until now, were expelled over and over from their host nations when they went too far. "Sunk cost fallacy" gives them too much credit for rationality.
To answer a question you raised, nothing will make them reconsider. They live in a delusional false reality in which a) the problems you identify aren't happening, they're just a reactionary hallucination and b) technology is developing at an exponential pace and will naturally overtake any linear-scale problem (like decrease in competency) that might arise from their policy initiatives.
I don't think much more needs to be said about A.
On B, I am endlessly disappointed that much of the dissident right buys into this fairy tale. It is not true, and it was never true. Every apparent exponential curve in nature is a nascent sigmoid. Reality is place of limitations, not infinities. Reality is a world of growth, plateau, and decline.
We have already reached the plateau and begun decline in most of the lines-going-up that sold a generation on the singulatarian cult in the first place. Most failed to notice because noticing it was inconvenient to their world view.
Notably Moore's Law, however you like to define it, ground to a halt over a decade ago, with increasingly marginal gains and most growth happening in non-generalizable niches like parallel processing, which themselves are already plateauing (your super cool graphics in your super cool vidya are the most notable example of this). Since most of the techno-utopian pseudoscience-fiction ideology rests fundamentally on Moore's Law, they should have cause for alarm.
But they don't. And they won't, because noticing is inconvenient. Just like noticing certain things about certain demographics is inconvenient. They will burn civilization to the ground in utter conviction that they're doing the right thing and what's best for everyone, and then they will Pikachu face and defend their positions at the top of the rubble heap with the resources they have hoarded as sole beneficiaries of the demolition program.
The veil of sunken costs is only skin deep here. The systematic collapse of nations itself is the point. Turning them all into helpless ghettos until they start the slow death into irrelevance, and leave the elites with a board free from riff raff with all the technology and data they have collected. Thinking that the play they put on amounts to their primary goals, and that their constantly pushing the same things is their grip on the sunken costs, or that they have some investment in the advancement of humanity as a whole is a complete red herring, I think.
Excellent essay, and completely true.
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.
Excellent piece. Not sure if post-WWII is the starting point -- WWI was already a dry run for the whole 'end of history' war to end all wars unite the world under democracy & League of Nations stuff, and the British Empire was already Globalism 1.0, with one currency and telegrams as email. Still, it is a "salient point" as they say. If so, contemplating who won and who lost WWII may suggest some insight into what's happening. A Certain People not known for their love of "Western civilization" or their ability to run a functioning nation. The sort of People who think its acceptable to move into someone else's nation and genocide the population, expecting the world to go along with it, because they wrote a book saying God told them to. A People whose book also predicts the End of the World arising from just such a conflict. A People who, until now, were expelled over and over from their host nations when they went too far. "Sunk cost fallacy" gives them too much credit for rationality.
To answer a question you raised, nothing will make them reconsider. They live in a delusional false reality in which a) the problems you identify aren't happening, they're just a reactionary hallucination and b) technology is developing at an exponential pace and will naturally overtake any linear-scale problem (like decrease in competency) that might arise from their policy initiatives.
I don't think much more needs to be said about A.
On B, I am endlessly disappointed that much of the dissident right buys into this fairy tale. It is not true, and it was never true. Every apparent exponential curve in nature is a nascent sigmoid. Reality is place of limitations, not infinities. Reality is a world of growth, plateau, and decline.
We have already reached the plateau and begun decline in most of the lines-going-up that sold a generation on the singulatarian cult in the first place. Most failed to notice because noticing it was inconvenient to their world view.
Notably Moore's Law, however you like to define it, ground to a halt over a decade ago, with increasingly marginal gains and most growth happening in non-generalizable niches like parallel processing, which themselves are already plateauing (your super cool graphics in your super cool vidya are the most notable example of this). Since most of the techno-utopian pseudoscience-fiction ideology rests fundamentally on Moore's Law, they should have cause for alarm.
But they don't. And they won't, because noticing is inconvenient. Just like noticing certain things about certain demographics is inconvenient. They will burn civilization to the ground in utter conviction that they're doing the right thing and what's best for everyone, and then they will Pikachu face and defend their positions at the top of the rubble heap with the resources they have hoarded as sole beneficiaries of the demolition program.
The veil of sunken costs is only skin deep here. The systematic collapse of nations itself is the point. Turning them all into helpless ghettos until they start the slow death into irrelevance, and leave the elites with a board free from riff raff with all the technology and data they have collected. Thinking that the play they put on amounts to their primary goals, and that their constantly pushing the same things is their grip on the sunken costs, or that they have some investment in the advancement of humanity as a whole is a complete red herring, I think.