10
Aug
Mark Yuray on the disintegration of Atlantis:
The collapse of the U.S. government and balkanization of North America will provide many great opportunities, if not a decent amount of strife. Nationalist and separatist sentiments previously suppressed by the Harvard clerisy will be unleashed. Whole regions will fragment into localized and decentralized rule. The new borders crisscrossing North America will conform much more closely to the natural geography of the continent than they did until now. It is in this moment, when trust in centralized authority is low, desire for autonomy is high, that a neoreactionary “patchwork” of small city-and-otherwise-states can come to exist. The United States’ high deposits of human and natural capital will make for a particularly vibrant new quilt of Singapores and Hong Kongs. As the original forging of the American superpower was largely a quirk of history and political suppression (suppose 1776 failed? or 1812? or 1848? or 1865?), it is unlikely that an emergent patchwork would turn back into the massive state that America is today.
The North American continent would, ideally, become a South America of the Northern Hemisphere in terms of geopolitics — benign and stable — and also an East Asia of the Western Hemisphere in terms of economics and government — technologically advanced and governmentally diverse.
In the spiral search for ‘Neoreactionary consensus’ — will the desirability of this outcome do?
(There is much else of interest in Yuray’s post — read it all.)
02
Aug
Heartiste (finally) discovers Weiss.
Of Heartiste’s six proposed policy responses, #2 (introduce counter-dysgenic incentives) is the only one this blog endorse without reservation. High-IQ immigration, assortative mating, and open markets all make a positive contribution to general social competitiveness, although due theoretical deference to IQ-Shredder problems is required. His point #6 is valuable if it is inverted, to make socio-political fragmentation a primary objective, rather than a consequence, or subordinate instrumental goal. Point #5 (“Eliminate all female-friendly public policies”) is unobjectionable because all ‘X-friendly’ public policies are objectionable, and its specific emphasis is material for consideration within a disintegrated oecumenon, where polities could experiment with all kinds of things. Talented people will tend to flee a heavy-handed authoritarian state, even if it’s social policies have impressive traditional validation. Consequently, as a response to local dysgenics, the outcome of any attempt to socially engineer a restored patriarchy from the top-down is likely to be counter-productive.
Social Darwinism, seriously understood, is the theoretical default that every attempt to neutralize spontaneous selection processes (entropy dissipation) will be subverted by predictable perverse effects. It’s no more possible to suppress Social Darwinism than it is to annul the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and social philosophies which teach that this can be achieved are the strict equivalent of plans for perpetual motion machines. That’s what Weiss is explaining, as Outside in understands it. Subsumption into an effective competitive environment is the only possible response that could work to reverse dysgenic trends, and this will eventually occur, whether human politics cooperates or not. Patchwork is the gentlest way this could be realized, since it enables a multitude of societies to decide on their own levels of entropy-accumulation tolerance. (That is not, of course, to suggest that a Patchworked-world is gentle in any sense we have grown accustomed to.)