Penis land, the second coming

This is a nicer version of an earlier essay that keeps costing me followers. I have softened the language without removing any of the necessary factual descriptions. There is no use in posting something if the intended audience is not willing to read it. My normal mean edginess is not the ideal delivery mechanism for a sensitive topic. The medicine was too bitter. This essay is the second edition of the first, the second coming of the essay (pun intended).

It usually starts with a real injury. A woman gets involved with a man who's only interested in her physically, and once that becomes clear, she's left worse off than before.

The natural response to that kind of experience is to come away harder and more guarded than one went in, and I don't think that's a character flaw. A more defensive, less trusting posture toward the opposite sex is just what tends to happen to anyone, of either sex, after being used and discarded.

But the problem is that men encountering her afterward don't see the history behind that guardedness. They only see the guardedness itself, and a common, if unfair, inference from that surface impression is that she'd be hard to build something real with, and therefore not worth the effort of anything beyond something casual. 

The inference has a selection effect built into it. If the men most willing to tolerate a guarded, high-friction demeanor are disproportionately the ones who weren't planning on sticking around anyway, then the pool of men actually pursuing her skews further toward exactly the kind that confirms her original fear.

That's where the loop closes on itself. Repeated exposure to men who only want something casual deepens the very bitterness that produced the pattern in the first place. That deeper bitterness gets read by the next round of men the same way, which narrows the pool of genuinely interested men even further, until nearly everyone left is either uninterested in anything serious, or hesitant even about anything casual, because by this point her attitude is so obvious she wears it on her sleeve.

At the extreme end, the situation reaches an almost paradoxical place: the men who once would have used her for nothing but sex now hesitate even to do that, because the difficulty of dealing with her has come to outweigh the appeal of a purely physical encounter. The most extreme version of the dynamic is the fuckboy too afraid of being "me-too-ed" to even shoot his shot. Her attitude has finally accomplished the task of protecting her from injury, and protects her from all genuine interest as well.

The whole time, from her side, this doesn't feel like a trap closing. It feels like self-protection working exactly as intended. This is it's tragic character.

The more defensive and confrontational she becomes, the more each new instance of that defensiveness gets read, internally, as proof that the defenses are necessary and doing their job. That's part of why the cycle is so hard to interrupt once it starts, and men asses a woman on the basis of whether they think they can build a life with her, and if she allows bad experiences to make her judgy, quick to anger, manipulative, or otherwise unpleasant to be around then they judge her as too unpleasant for marriage. Afterwards the types of men she encounters will skew heavily towards pure sexual interest, and trapping her in "Penis Land." 

There's an alternative story available too — that she isn't the one being used at all, that she's the one extracting what she wants from these encounters on her own terms. Either narrative, victim or in-control, serves the same function: it lets her keep her guard up without ever examining whether the guard itself is the problem. 

Whichever story she settles into, the common thread is that these experiences leave her with no real motivation to study or understand men as a category. Without that motivation, she has no way of figuring out why this keeps happening to her specifically, and she never sees the cycle for what it is — a loop her own defensive posture helps sustain, not a fixed feature of how all men behave toward all women.

Here's a distinction that's easy to miss: the men still willing to engage with her generally aren't rejecting her as a person. They may be genuinely attracted to her. What they don't want is the particular personality that got shaped by earlier bad treatment — the suspicion and defensiveness that other men installed, not something inherent to her.

That's hard to see from the inside, and it produces two related confusions: why some men seem to prize a lack of emotional baggage in a partner, and why, if men's collective behavior created this problem, men don't just stop behaving badly.

There is this phrase that a straight woman is the only being that must date her only natural predator. I would offer a mirrored absurdity for men, that being a straight man means getting evaluated and often dismissed, based on the basic biological fact of male desire, as though the desire itself were a character defect rather than a baseline. A straight man must endure being judged by the only being that can satisfy his appetite.

Men have a real, recurring desire for intimacy, and a relationship that consistently fails to meet that need is going to be under strain no matter how good the emotional connection otherwise is. This tracks something real in how sexual motivation functions neurologically, it behaves like other basic drives, not like a preference that can simply be argued away.

The second need is the ordinary relational one that respect, honesty, shared effort, the daily partnership two people building a life together actually require, independent of anything physical. That layer works the way any healthy relationship works — it depends on mutual respect and on neither person using intimacy as a tool of control, reward, or punishment. Many women act like equal effort is an imposition, keeping score and minimizing how much they do for their partner. This backfires spectacularly and Reddit is filled with endless AITA (am I the asshole) threads of relationship misers telling each other to dump their boyfriends. Keeping score doesn't work (for either sex) because we overlook things our partner has done for us while counting things we did that were not even wanted by the other person. Everyone who keeps score maintains an unbalanced ledger in their own favor.

The physical component isn't optional or secondary. It's a real, recurring requirement that has to be met on an ongoing basis, not addressed once and considered settled. There are overweight and/or elderly men who are impotent and less desirous of sex, but the standard behavior is to interpret impotence as rejection and reject them in turn, rather than see them as an opportunity for a relationship with low pressure to have sex, ideal for a woman with a low sex drive. Pornography has a custom people to think that a couples sex life should be insatiable, and while that's probably true in their twenties it's not in their forties, and the extreme sex preoccupation is the modern reversal of the other extreme of "procreative sex only."

But most relationships require ongoing, reliable attention to both partners' needs, not a one-time investment followed by neglect. This is especially true if the couple is young and in shape. Male sexual and emotional needs are real and don't disappear just because they're inconvenient to acknowledge, and a pleasant, respectful attitude is largely a function of mutual respect and the more hostile or defensive someone's attitude becomes, the faster things slide toward the isolating trap I described above. That cuts both ways, too. Men have to maintain a good attitude and some measure of toughness to make relationships work, same as anyone. Relationships actually require a tad bit of professionality from both sexes.

Carrying resentment from past relationships into a new one, or using affection as leverage, undermines any relationship, regardless of who's doing it. Consistent, resentment-free follow-through is what a functioning partnership actually requires from both people in it.

Sex and the broader relationship are experienced by men as genuinely separate things, not one continuous thing, and treating intimacy and partnership as separable needs, rather than one thing purchased with the other for neglected at the expense of the other, is a reasonable description of how successful relationships actually function. 

Most men aren't tolerating a partner purely to get something out of it. Most men genuinely want a warm, mutually respectful relationship for its own sake, to be liked and cared about, but they want their needs met without the proverbial food being poisoned by entitlement or bad attitude.

There's nothing inherently wrong with male sexuality. It's a fact of biology, not a moral failing, and treating a basic drive as shameful doesn't actually help anyone navigate it more wisely. The red herring of liberalism is treating everything as a moral issue, which falsely presumes that everything can be overcome with moralizing. Reality is the thing that doesn't change when you close your eyes. It's very nature is a disagreement with the make-believe of humans. Treating male sexuality as something to banish or ignore is genuinely harmful to both members of a couple, because treating any unmovable reality as a moral issue is harmful, and lazy. Most people in our culture ignore observation in favor of moral reaction and this harms both them and society all their lives.

Natural selection tends to produce close to the minimum machinery necessary for a given function, not more elaborate systems than required. Applied to human mating, something close to a baseline exchange of attention offered in return for intimacy represents something like evolution's minimum viable arrangement for getting people to pair up and reproduce. Exchange relationships like this show up throughout the animal kingdom, and I think it's fair to say that certain emotional needs for connection, attention, security, are stronger in women than men in order to compliment the stronger sex drive in men. Each sex is a puzzle piece that fits into the other, however imprecisely. Nature crafts mutual dependency in order to force the sexes together. Nature make sure there's something you can only get from the opposite sex.

None of this is personal. The shapes don't have to fit together precisely to function well enough. Loneliness, sex drive, the need to be heard, none was chosen, it was built in by evolutionary forces.

Here's a real and useful observation, though: traits that evolved to help people form pair bonds can, past a certain intensity, start actively working against forming a stable relationship at all.

Defensiveness that goes far enough stops protecting and starts isolating. Taken to its logical end, someone whose defenses have become too intense to allow a stable partnership will, in evolutionary terms, simply fail to reproduce, ending up either not partnering at all, or partnering unsuccessfully in a way that leaves her raising children without a stable co-parent. The general fate of a woman who develops an unpleasant attitude and gets trapped in Penis Land is to either become a Spencer or a single mother. This does not mean that every single mother is trapped in Penis Land, or has a bad attitude. These are approximately overlapping categories and not absolutely the same.

Human mating psychology evolved under conditions where men held more relative power and leverage over women than they generally do today. When birth control removes much of the pressure that used to shape women's mating decisions, some women, no longer needing to negotiate reproduction the way earlier generations did, end up making choices, under that new freedom, that don't lead to reproducing at all. I don't think that's a claim about anyone being irrational; it's a claim about incentives that no longer point where they used to. Are instincts evolved in one environment and now must confront a radically alien environment where the instincts no longer function.

The The evolutionary mismatch theory is the single most useful lens for understanding a lot of modern dysfunction around relationships. In fact I'd go so far as to define economics, informally, as the study of how the technological environment humans have built is incompatible with the psychology they evolved with. Economist would define it as the study of scarce resources in the face of unlimited wants, but really it is the study of system alien to human intuition. This is the reason humans consistently misjudge the systems they find themselves in, and the reason their advice to each other about relationships is so consistently awful.

Take a concrete example: a conventionally attractive man using dating apps to accumulate a large number of casual encounters, none of which produce children. His instincts, evolved in an environment without reliable contraception, register that as enormous reproductive success. By the only measure biology actually cares about he isn't succeeding at all. A lot of men, driven by drives that made sense in an ancestral environment but backfire today, end up prioritizing short-term sexual success in ways that don't serve their long-term interests in the modern one. He ejaculates into latex bags but never perpetuates his family line. There's a mirrored version on the other side. Hypergamy, women's attention concentrating on a narrow band of highly desirable partners, running on the same mismatched logic, chasing a small cohort of extremely attractive men who will never commit to her, and also failing to reproduce as a result. In both cases technology is creating an alienated environment where impulses are mismatched to reality.

I think a woman's bitterness toward men is better explained by this broader mismatch between evolved psychology and modern technology and incentives, than by some innate defect in men as a category. Moreover, she's going to have to do something her instincts aren't involved to do, view herself as having agency over the situation, and take control of that situation, and exercise responsibility over it. Since she evolved in a disempowered environment it is her nature to view herself as disempowered, even while birth control and women's rights have enormously increased the scope of her available power, her instincts have not caught up. Notice that so many women do not hold themselves accountable or view themselves as agentic. Observe in fact that women's sense of accountability for themselves has actually diminished as their power has risen. This is a dramatic example of The evolutionary mismatch where evolved programming clashes with an alien environment. 

The real cause is structural and recursive, and must be explained properly. Media, education, and pop psychology are supposed to help people navigate this mismatch, but the people producing that content are living inside the same mismatched, evolutionarily unfamiliar environment as everyone else. A journalist or a curriculum writer or a popular commentator isn't operating from some vantage point outside the system, they are subject to the same modern incentives, the same social pressures, and the same confused feedback loops as their audience. One cannot understand a system from inside the logic that system produced. When people try to address social problem, the social problem is not just shaping their environment but shaping their entire attitude towards their environment. It's human to rationalize the circumstances you find yourself in, but needless to say, you cannot transcend a thing that you rationalize. As Einstein would say, "we cannot solve our problems at the same level of thinking when we created it." If knee jerk instincts and emotional reactions are keeping you alienated, then knee-jerk instincts and emotional reactions will not let you step outside the trap you are in and transcend it. People think it's all a moral issue but you think that because in a tribal environment you can change your society with moral arguments. The instinct doesn't work anymore since the system is too large for coordination. The most effective approach is to carefully observe how your own instincts are being used against you by the machine and then modify your approach in order to succeed at your goals.

That's what makes the problem recursive. Institutions that are supposed to correct for the mismatch between evolved psychology and modern conditions often end up amplifying it instead, because the people running those institutions are themselves disoriented by the same mismatch, usually without realizing it. Bad advice about relationships doesn't need a coordinated conspiracy to spread, it just needs the people producing cultural norms to be, on average, no more insightful about this mismatch than the people consuming them, working inside institutions that reward simple, emotionally satisfying stories over accurate but uncomfortable ones. That's what makes it genuinely hard to escape: if the sources you'd normally turn to for a clearer picture are themselves generated from inside the same distorted environment, there's no obviously trustworthy outside vantage point to correct from. You cannot see past a system's blind spots using cultural tools the same system produced, you cannot overcome a society's problems using the values that society handed you. And emotional self-regulation is essential when a systems awful logic operates three steps ahead while you emotional reactions limit you to one step of logic.

Some strands of feminist thought push people toward believing the sexes are far more similar than they actually are, which produces a real and specific kind of resentment, resentment toward sex differences even in people who, intellectually, know perfectly well those differences exist. Ask yourself who's more culpable here: the ideology that teaches someone to resent an immutable difference, or the difference itself? I'd put the blame on the teacher and not the underlying biological fact, since only one of those two things is actually capable of being wrong or of changing. Someone frustrated that men aren't more like women is really reacting to an ideology that told her they should be, not to men's actual nature, which was never going to match that expectation in the first place. The college professor that promotes notions of sameness is destructive, not the differences themselves.

A woman who studies male psychology seriously, instead of avoiding the subject out of resentment, gains something real from it and gets much better at understanding and navigating the men she's interested in. The think-pieces, the self-help content, dating advice, and media narratives — were produced by people working inside the same mismatched environment, with the same blind spots, and often no more reliable a guide than instinct alone. Sometimes less, and since instinct will lead you astray in an alien system a messenger telling you to double down on your instincts is telling you to self-sabotage.

There's nothing wrong with a natural process. It's on us to understand it and work with it rather than be at its mercy. Nature, to be commanded, must first be obeyed, as the old line goes. Refusing out of a kind of moral pride to understand how the other sex actually thinks is self-defeating and ends up hurts you more than it hurts them. Spite is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die.

Feminists train others to literally take offense over men expressing what they need from a relationship. All feedback is received as rejection, all statements of need perceived as imposition, every little thing put on a ledger to keep score, and all through I need your cleanse that cannot see three steps ahead, cannot see outside of a machine it participates in. Cultural narratives move through ordinary institutional channels, schools, media, publishing, staffed by people caught in the same disorienting modern environment as everyone else.

Stable long-term partnership and avoiding raising a kid alone comes down, in large part, to how you evaluate someone before committing with the evaluating aimed almost entirely at one thing: reliability. NOT how much of your own difficult behavior he can absorb because in the initial stages of courtship difficulty is a red flag for men. Reliability, meaning, does he do what you need when you need it, will he pick up the kids from school, will he pay the bills. Most of your evaluating energy should go toward that with the lesser amount testing how much of your own hard edges he can tolerate. What you actually want to know is whether he's dependable and holds up under stress. Because deliberately provoking someone or withholding affection specifically to test for jealousy or resentment, isn't information gathering, it's manufacturing instability for no good reason, and it cuts against the more basic point about never treating intimacy as a bargaining chip. You'll learn what you need to know without engineering conflict.

Raising children is a relentless coordination and logistics problem, and it's essential to have a partner dependable enough to actually be there, to pick the kids up from school while you're at work, for instance. A man is asking himself certain questions when he's looking for a wife. He has himself, can I count on her? Will she show up when I need her to? Does she treat me with judgment and contempt? Does she nitpick me? Does she trauma dump all the time? Do I get a moment's peace? He needs someone he can count on, and someone who brings a not awful energy to the relationship. Most men's lives are pretty peaceful and boring. Most men have their act together pretty well and are emotionally self-regulated. 

I think about something I witnessed years ago, back when I was doing retail security. A black female coworker had a complete meltdown on the phone one night because her child's father was threatening not to pick up their kid, using the threat as leverage in some unrelated argument between them. She couldn't leave the store and I wasn't allowed to fill in for her since security is not allowed to do retail. From what I understood, this wasn't a one-time thing with this guy. Or from my own experience when I once dated a girl who threatened to have an abortion in a hypothetical pregnancy because she found out I did not agree with her politics. You can wind up chained to a bad person for 18 years. Both the reproduction of the species and love itself depends on people being moral, because there is a certain point where things get awful enough that nobody wants to deal with each other or have children.

These behaviors are as unambiguous a marker of bad character as I can think of, and it's exactly what's worth screening for hard before a child is in the picture to be used that way, not after. It's the kind of dysfunction that becomes possible when a co-parent lacks basic moral character, and it's exactly why you don't want to end up permanently bound to someone whose character issues will keep producing harm long after any romantic feelings are gone. And children do not have access to your internal mind, your FEELINGS of love towards a child do not matter at all from their perspective. The child experiences love when you are reliable and experiences neglect when you are absent or unreliable. All that matters to them is your actions and words. Caring is taking responsibility, especially from a child's perspective, and a child who is abused or neglected will be uninterested in having children of their own. Why perpetuate your genetic line if it's only going to fail in the next generation? Raise the kid right or don't bother raising kids at all. If your abuse your children you probably will not have grandchildren.

Assessing a partner's character has to take priority over almost every other consideration when you're deciding whether to build a family with someone. The stakes are too high to operate on chemistry alone, and being drawn to partners who are exciting but genuinely reckless is a real risk worth taking seriously. This is especially true in a culture indicate like ours. Above everything else, the person you build a family with has to be moral, the kind of person who' would go to real lengths to help you in an emergency, and you have to hold yourself to that same standard of reliability and be someone worth being around as well.

Raising children well, and raising kids who grow up wanting children of their own, depends on a baseline of morality in parents, and losing that baseline is part of what causes societies to decline over time. Kids will be difficult in entirely ordinary ways with tantrums, complaints, and general unreasonableness (especially when they are teenagers). Feeling of love are simply not enough. What actually decides that is whether the parents involved are genuinely decent dependable people day to day.

So if there's one thing worth taking from all of this which is that the single most consequential thing a woman can do for herself and for the continuity of the society she's part of, is hold a firm moral standard for the men she chooses to build a family with. This is especially important since who she chooses to have sex with is a tremendous incentive in the culture itself and if her standards are based on frivolity she contributes to decay. The real function of religion is probably just to get women to choose better men and by choosing better men force men to be better. Men are the builders of society while women are the "populators." Every person you see, every person you meet was put here by a woman. Every brick and every stone and every ton of concrete was put here by a man. Oh sure there are exceptions to the rule, single dads who raise children and women who build, but there is a labor specialization between the sexes and if you want a better world you want better men. That all comes down to how they are raised and to what kind of man gets to pass on his genes. Even when genes are not a factor there is a tremendous cultural effect of women choosing one kind of man over another. That cultural effect is arguably more important than the genetic factor since a culture can rapidly decay faster than its genetics can. Hold the line and get a better world. There is no reason to tolerate moral decay around you. Think about it, why would you be tolerant towards criminals and abusers? You are extending compassion to people who would not return that compassion for you. Your casting pearls before swine. That is not noble, that is an engine of decay. The morality of sacrificing the in-group for hostile out group strangers and criminals makes everything worse even for the out-group members themselves. No one benefits more from moral standards than people with poor self control. You aren't even helping these people with your tolerance.

If a man only respects strength then all if should receive is abusive authority. This is the world living according to the morality he practices. "Rising above"is the same as generating decay and Christian morality is not something you get to selectively enforce. The commandment to not judge least ye be judged sits right alongside the statement that every word of the law will be fulfilled. And you are not to lean on your own understanding, a miserable practice which every liberal excels at. You don't get to pick and choose your verses. The real motive for excessive tolerance and forgiveness is just plain old cowardice and sloth. 

Smile and be goulish

In the horror film Smile (2022) there is an entity that causes people to unalive themselves and once you see someone unalive themselves you are also destined to unalive yourself. The entity crawls inside and takes over the individual, and seeing it makes you become it. 

Recently Zohran Mamdani attended a memorial for the victims of September 11th. Over 100,000 people, many of whom were the families of the victims petitioned him not to come, seeing his affiliation with the same religion that motivated the attackers. He decided to go anyway and then while the victims were crying about their dead loved ones he was seen smiling along side Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Normally I go out of my way to not allow anything to get to me but this time I must admit I was slightly miffed. 

I would never go to a funeral or memorial against the wishes of the victims nor smile during the ceremony while they cried. It is tempting to view Zohrhan as a ghoulish monster without a conscience, but I think it's deeper than that, I think he views the victim's families as less than human, that this view of them as less than human motivated his actions or at least indifference, and that this view leaked through the facade. I also think to view him as less than human is potentially a mistake. 

In the horror movie Smile, to see the monster is to become the monster, and I have a hypothesis that this is how becoming a ghoul works. 

To see another person as less than human is to become less than human yourself. So what causes you to see them as less than human? Why it is their ghoulish behavior which in turn is motivated by them seeing others as less than human.

So it is a chain of inhumanity. And the chain passes from one human to the next like a disease, and it passes through the eyes like the monster in Smile. Someone sees others acting in cruel and inhuman ways, concludes that they are not fully human, and then begins to learn to dehumanize others. Eventually they become the monster who does cruel and inhuman things. The disease literally passes from one person to the next through the eyes.

Once you allow yourself to see another human as less than human you become a ghoul, or at least you start down the path of becoming one. It may take some time for you to get there, you may never actually commit a murder yourself but if you're ever given power you will definitely be dangerous to others. Most people within human tendencies will never become monsters, but only because they never get power.

Mamdani's smile at a memorial signifies the mask dropping a little bit for the ghoulish side of his personality to show through. At some point academic liberals begin to see whites as less than human and at the point they themselves became less than human. Ghoulishness is like a virus, a disease that is transmitted from one to the next and you get infected by this virus by seeing other people acting with cruelty. You are then unable to reconcile how they can be human while acting inhuman so you conclude that they are not fully human. Once you conclude a segment of the population is inhuman you have now become inhuman. Ghoulishness is the Smile Demon transmitting itself from one mind to the next. This may also explain why so many leftists are unable to understand what is said to them, why they practice deliberate misunderstanding. On some intuitive level they grasp that to understand inhumanity is to become inhumanity. The suicidal empathy and refusal to understand is a defensive strategy to prevent from becoming inhuman, and yet so many of them are still inhumane, and the movement as a whole has become inhumane towards white people and especially white men. 

Riddles in the dark, as Tolkien would say. Don't get infected with the Smile virus. But also don't cooperate with other people who are infected, even if they are on your team, and if you absolutely must cooperate with them use them and broom them the instant they cease to be useful. But does using someone as a means to an end make you inhuman? The liberal stands athwart history yelling "stop being racist!"  And then then becomes racist towards whites. The battle to be human is never ending isn't it. 

And this brings us to another conclusion. There may indeed be a genetic predisposition to becoming inhuman, but this is not a predisposition to inhumanity itself but to gullibility. At some point the ghoul was tricked into viewing a segment of the population as less than human. Transcending this inhumane tendency means adopting systems that marginalize the reproduction of people gullible enough to view others as less than human. Wait a minute, is that how liberals and minorities came to view white as replaceable? Wait a minute again, is trying to replace a race of people not profoundly inhuman? Even if you don't succeed at replacing them the mere desire and attempt is an intensely inhuman practice. This seems like a conundrum but maybe it's just a game theory. You must cooperate only with cooperators, punish defectors and be willing to change who you cooperate with instantly on a moment's notice. If anyone can get infected by the demon of inhumanity, then one can never judge any race as either safe or dangerous. You will not solve inhumanity by bringing in other races. (But you will multiply the number of potential failure points) You can only solve it, if solving is such a thing, by addressing it directly. I guess? And since this is a game theory problem, you want to keep the number of different factions to a minimum and I guess that means no immigration. More racial factions won't make people more compassionate, but only make a cooperate-cooperate equilibrium harder to achieve. What are you cooperating towards? You are cooperating towards not viewing each other as subhuman.

How likely are liberals and feminists to survive by conversion?

Every now and then I like to challenge left heads by pointing out that they have incredibly low birth rates. The typical retort is that they will survive by educating conservatives. The TFR for liberals is lower than that of conservatives and has been for some time. 

I asked Claude a simple question:

"Other than the Shakers what cults down through history have denied the role of sex in life, shunned reproduction, or been exclusively homosexual? In other words what cults have failed to breed new members or shunned the breeding of new members choosing instead to survive by proselytizing only? Do any of these cults or religious movements still exist? List every single one you can think of then attempt to generate a probability that an ideology can survive by conversion only." 

Here is what Claude said:

"Here's every group I can dig up that fits the pattern — rejected sex/reproduction as spiritually corrupting, or organized itself so that only converts/outsiders' children replenished the ranks:

Ancient and late antique

1. Essenes (and the possibly-related Qumran community) — Jewish ascetics described by Josephus and Philo; at least some branches practiced strict celibacy, adopting outsiders' children instead of breeding. Extinct since antiquity.

2. Therapeutae — Philo's Hellenistic Jewish contemplative sect in Egypt, celibate ascetics. Extinct.

3. Encratites — 2nd-century Christian ascetic movement (associated with Tatian) that rejected marriage and procreation outright as complicity with the fallen material world. Extinct/absorbed.

4. Marcionites — Marcion of Sinope's followers rejected the god of Genesis and discouraged procreation as perpetuating his flawed creation; strict ascetics, though not universally celibate. Suppressed/extinct by the early medieval period.

5. Manichaeans — dualist religion where the elect (as opposed to ordinary "hearers") were celibate, since sex trapped divine light in matter. Survived in fragments in China into the 14th century; extinct as an organized faith now.

Medieval dualists

6. Bogomils — Balkan dualist sect, direct ancestor of the Cathars; their "perfect" adherents were celibate ascetics. Extinct.

7. Cathars (Albigensians) — the perfecti renounced sex and procreation as imprisoning souls in matter; ordinary believers could marry and were only expected to take the vow near death. Wiped out by the Albigensian Crusade and Inquisition; extinct by the 14th century.

Early modern radical Protestant/utopian communes (America, mostly)

8. Ephrata Cloister (Pennsylvania, founded 1732) — German Pietist celibate monastic order, sustained by conversion of nearby Seventh Day Baptist–adjacent communities. Extinct by the mid-19th century.

9. Harmony Society / Harmonists (Rappites) — George Rapp's followers adopted celibacy after 1807, expecting an imminent Second Coming, and grew instead by immigration and conversion from Germany. Dissolved 1905; extinct.

10. Shakers — you excluded them, but worth noting as the textbook case: celibate, sustained entirely by conversion and (later) orphan adoption. Down to a literal handful at Sabbathday Lake, Maine — arguably still technically alive but functionally over.

11. Koreshan Unity (Cyrus Teed's Florida hollow-earth community) — celibate utopians. Last member died in 1982; extinct.

12. Panacea Society (Bedford, England, founded 1919) — millenarian group awaiting the return of "Shiloh," predominantly female and largely celibate. Ceased to exist as a religious community when its last resident member died in 2012.

Russian sectarian extremes

13. Skoptsy ("castrates") — practiced ritual castration of men and mastectomy of women to eliminate sexual desire entirely, recruiting converts (sometimes coercively) rather than reproducing. Formally banned by 1905, decimated further under Soviet repression; believed nearly extinct, though a few writers claim scattered remnants or ideological descendants ("anti-sexuals") persisted into the late 20th/early 21st century in parts of the former USSR and Romania — unverified and almost certainly marginal.

14. Some Bezpopovtsy Old Believer splinter groups (e.g., the Beguny/"Runners") pushed extreme asceticism, including rejection of marriage, though this varied by sub-sect rather than being universal doctrine.

20th-century

15. Heaven's Gate — the UFO/apocalyptic group whose leader Applewhite and several male followers were castrated, and which treated sexuality as an obstacle to "the Next Level." Ended in the 1997 mass suicide; extinct.

Still existing today

16. Brahma Kumaris — a modern Hindu-derived new religious movement (founded 1930s India) that requires strict celibacy (*brahmacharya*) of its members, including married converts, as central practice. Actively growing worldwide today by conversion.

17. Radical Faeries — a loosely organized countercultural/spiritual movement founded in 1979, predominantly gay men, explicitly non-reproductive by demographic composition rather than doctrine, sustained by recruitment/self-identification rather than birth. Still active, though "cult" is a stretch — it's closer to an affinity movement.

18. The Two by Twos (a.k.a. Cooneyites, "the Truth") — itinerant unpaid "workers" take vows of celibacy and poverty, but the lay membership ("friends") marry and reproduce normally, so this is a hybrid model, not a fully non-reproducing group. Still exists globally.

19. Roman Catholic priesthood, and Catholic/Orthodox/Buddhist monasticism generally — not "cults" by any reasonable definition, but the same structural pattern: celibate, no biological reproduction, and yet demonstrably the most durable version of this strategy in history, because it draws its converts from a large surrounding population that keeps breeding and periodically donates children or adults into the celibate order. This distinction matters for your probability question below.

Now, the probability question. I'd break "survival by conversion only" into two very different cases, because they have wildly different odds.

Case A: a closed sect drawing converts only from the general outside population, with no built-in feeder population that reproduces on its behalf. History gives an almost uniformly bad track record — the Shakers, Harmonists, Koreshans, Panacea Society, Skoptsy, Cathars, Ephrata Cloister all eventually died out, typically within one to a few centuries, and often within a single generation once the founding charisma faded, because conversion rates for a doctrine this demanding are inherently low, and each generation has to re-win 100% of its membership from scratch with no demographic cushion. If I had to put a number on it, something like a 1-5% chance any given such sect is still a living, functioning religious community two hundred years after founding, and it trends toward zero the further out you go, because the required net conversion rate to merely hold population steady (let alone grow) is very hard to sustain once the founder is gone and the novelty/persecution dynamics that drove early conversion fade. The Shakers are the closest thing to a counterexample and they're a rounding error away from extinction after roughly 250 years.

Case B: an order embedded inside a larger reproducing tradition that feeds it converts as a matter of course — Catholic and Orthodox monasticism, the Buddhist sangha, arguably Brahma Kumaris riding on Hinduism's demographic base. Here the odds of indefinite survival are much higher, plausibly majority-likely over centuries, because the "conversion" isn't really cold recruitment from a hostile outside world — it's an accepted social institution that a self-reproducing host culture continuously staffs. That's really a different phenomenon from what you're asking about, even though the celibate unit itself doesn't reproduce.

So the short version: a genuinely closed group that must win every single member from an unconverted outside population, with no reproducing base of its own, is a demographic dead end almost by definition — it's playing a game where the required win rate per generation is brutally high and the actual observed win rate for such heterodox, demanding movements is almost always well below replacement. The exceptions that have lasted (institutional monasticism) only last because they've effectively parasitized a fertile host religion rather than surviving purely on stranger-conversion. If you want, I can try to formalize this into an actual demographic model — something like a fertility-vs-conversion-rate threshold equation — rather than eyeballing it."

The third world is not going to make it

An overlooked fact is that these third world countries have woefully inadequate environmental regulations. Persistent organic pollutants are pollutants that gradually build up in the environment. They accumulate in the fatty tissues of the body and cause birth defects, low sperm counts, and neurological conditions. For thousands of years good governance did not really matter all that much to the survival of the people. Everything was made out of clay pots, wood, iron and materials which were either inert or biodegradable. The exception is lead, which although probably destructive to the Roman empire seems to clear the environment fast enough to not do any permanent damage to the population. Today there are literally thousands of "lead" substances. We are saturated in these chemicals and the third world even more saturated. Already there are entire lands in china and russia which are contaminated with persistent pesticides. Plastic is a huge issue in the poorest countries, especially burning it. There are already rivers of trash. What do you think a few centuries of that does to the survival of a people? It enters the environment and moves of the food chain. Humans are bioaccumulators, that is, a species at the top of the food chain for which pollution concentrates. Good governance is not just a matter of freedom or convenience but of survival of the species. A race that abandons good governance abandons its own survival. Political systems are not just a thing you can just choose on a whim because you feel like it.

This is why I'm convinced that the third world is not going to make it. In the end I don't think birth rates matter nearly as much as whether you keep your environment clean. Have you seen africa? India? The philippines? Russia is heavily polluted but also has millions of acres of land in Siberia to relocate to. Half the world's population lives inside a circle made up of the asian countries with India on the west, north korea in the north, and indonesia in the southeast. Most humans live in these places and these places are most of these places are terribly polluted. The democracies of japan and south korea are the ones keeping their environment clean. 

The world is complicated but sometimes all you need is a single argument to prove your point. There are all kinds of reasons why dictatorship is bad but the most salient of these reasons is that none of them seem to be maintaining their environment. This matters more than you could possibly know. There's no one on earth more black pilled then a person with an environmental science degree. These are the people who study pollution for living, and environmental design is what you study to do something about it.

A good marketing scheme makes everyone a useful idiot

Say you're up in the boardroom rubbing your hands in an evil way and cackling about the maniacal plan you have for subjugating people even more than usual. You've got to make a presentation to your billionaire boss or whatever, you got to come up with something, and not just anything but something truly inspired. 

Philosophy is marketing for power and all the philosophers that become famous get sponsors. Marx had Ingles, the King James Bible had... King James, Murray Rothbard had the Rockefellers, you get the idea. If a philosophy becomes famous it's because somebody sponsored it, somebody marketed it, there is no organic society anymore. 

From the perspective of power the perfect ideology is one that makes both sides useful idiots for power. If you oppose immigration you support racism and fascism. If you support immigration you support lowering your own wage, raising your rent, and bringing in criminals and rapists who will torment you. Because that is what they (the immigrants) will do, and they (the elite) will make sure it's the criminals and rapists that come in. They will bring them in and if there aren't enough criminals among them they'll recruit them. Because tormenting you is the point, because if you are tormented then you support whatever fascist will make the pain stop. 

A good strategy is like this. A good strategy makes everyone on all sides support the regime in one way or another. A good strategy makes everyone into a useful idiot. The only escape is to go full Luigi, and that is the only thing they fear, which is why they need Flock cameras and data centers to store it all. 

The Flock cameras are not there to stop crime. They are there so you see that crime is happening and that your rulers will do nothing to stop it. It's purpose is humiliation. "See this nog? We let him stab your women on the train."

You must be made enraged on social media by an algorithm that serves these images up to you. After all the humiliation must be served, like pizza.

The second purpose of the Flock camera is so that if you actually do copy Luigi they can catch you. If you kill one of the elites they will hunt you to the ends of the Earth but if someone you love dies you will be humiliated when they get away with it. 

Now comes the liberal to humiliate you by insulting your bloodline. The liberal cuck will say that you deserve it because you are white. So first you are humiliated by being forced to witness the crime, then humiliated when nothing is done to bring justice, then humiliated by having your bloodline insulted, and if you actually do fight back (by killing someone powerful) then justice will work overtime to put you in prison.

See how this works? 

I'm not allowed to advocate violence, so I won't. But I will say that only Luigi's method has any hope of accomplishing anything.

The formula is always to concoct an ideology where every answer is "I'm a useful idiot no matter how I respond." The argument is the point, because the argument prevents the bullet from finding its real target. The purpose of a thing is what it does, and the purpose of the argument is to drain your energy, to drain the energy you would otherwise put into something more useful.

The Revolution That Cannot Fail

Wang Huning spent six months touring America in 1988 as a young Chinese academic nobody had heard of yet. He went on to become the single most important political theorist inside the Chinese Communist Party, whispering strategy into the ears of three consecutive paramount leaders. Before any of that he wrote a travelogue called America Against America, and buried in it is an idea he clearly thought was a compliment. It's actually a diagnosis of a disease, and he just didn't stick around long enough to watch the patient get sick.

His pitch is simple. Every society needs some mechanism to make millions of self-interested people act in concert without a boot on their neck. China does it with force. America, Wang says, does it with culture. And the specific cultural trick America pulled off is this: it made disruption itself the tradition. Not continuity with the past, not stability, not "the way we've always done things." The thing that holds Americans together across two hundred and fifty years of getting the rug pulled out from under them by every new technology is that getting-the-rug-pulled-out-from-under-you is the way we've always done things. Technological revolution doesn't erode the tradition. Technological revolution is the tradition. That's how the country can look brand new every twenty years while still claiming an unbroken line back to the founding.

Wang thinks this is why America wins. He's not wrong that it's a hell of a trick. A society that has trained itself to metabolize constant upheaval as identity-confirmation instead of identity-threat can absorb an insane amount of change without flying apart. What he never asks, because he's writing propaganda for a regime that would love to import the trick, is what happens when the disruption in question is a bad one. What happens when the "revolution" isn't the steam engine or the assembly line but something that's actually eating the society alive.

Here's the problem. A culture that has made change into its founding value has no sentence available to it that says "this particular change was a mistake." Every disruption gets filed under the same heading: proof the tradition is working. You can't tell the difference between a good disruption and a bad one from inside a value system whose only quality check is "are we still disrupting." Raise a doubt about some specific technological or cultural shift wrecking the place and you're not offering a correction. You're committing heresy. You've failed to be American. The machine keeps cranking out the same move on the bad stuff that it cranks out on the good stuff, because doubling down is the only move it knows how to make.

The philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, worked out the mechanics of this exact trap decades before anyone was worried about it happening to a whole country. He called it an epistemological crisis. Every person and every culture runs on some inherited story to make sense of what's happening to them, and the crisis hits when reality throws something at you that the story can't digest. Getting out of it, MacIntyre says, isn't just a matter of learning new facts. You have to build a new story, one good enough to explain both why your old beliefs made sense at the time and how you got so thoroughly played by them. That second part is the whole game. You have to be able to stand a little bit outside your own story to put it on trial. In the case of America this would be articulated as disrupting absolute faith in disruption. "Since our tradition is change we must change our absolute faith in change itself." 

And that is precisely the move a revolution-as-tradition cannot make on itself. Every example MacIntyre uses to show a crisis getting resolved involves someone with enough distance from the belief in question to actually interrogate it. A country whose entire self-image is built on "we are the people who embrace disruption" doesn't get that distance for free. You cannot ask "should we keep doing this" using a value system whose only allowed answer is "yes," because "no" isn't a correction inside that system. "No" is the system ceasing to be itself. The crisis and the ruler you'd use to measure the crisis are the same object. There is no outside to stand on.

Now here's the part that actually matters, because I don't think this is an America problem, I think it's a self-referential value problem, and America just happens to be running the version everyone can see. Flip the polarity and you get the identical trap in a culture built around the opposite value. A society that worships stability and continuity as its founding identity is just as screwed, in the mirror-image direction. It reads its own stagnation as loyalty instead of failure. Anyone who shows up and says "we need to change or we're going to rot" gets treated as a traitor to the tradition instead of someone doing the tradition a favor. Same structure, opposite content: whenever a culture's identity and its own yardstick for judging itself are the same object, that culture has permanently disabled its ability to convict itself of anything. It doesn't matter whether the sacred word is progress, purity, or stability. Either one, worshipped hard enough, turns into a machine that cannot generate a guilty verdict against itself.

This is also a different, and honestly nastier, failure mode than the ones people usually reach for when they talk about why countries don't course-correct. It's not the same as a dictator sitting on bad news to save his own skin — that's a guy with an incentive, and eventually the bill for hiding the truth gets too expensive to keep paying, and the regime falls apart when it can't cover the tab anymore. It's not the same as an organization slowly getting numb to a warning sign because nothing catastrophic happened the first ten times it ignored it — that's a threshold creeping upward one near-miss at a time until it finally snaps. Both of those are, in principle, fixable by getting the right information in front of the right people. What I'm describing doesn't have that escape hatch. The signal isn't being hidden and it isn't being misjudged. The problem is the machine reading the signal has already decided what it means before it even shows up, because the machine's whole identity depends on the answer coming out the same way every time.

So don't ask whether your tradition worships change or worships stability. Ask whether you've left the tradition any room to be wrong about the one thing it thinks makes it who it is. A tradition doesn't survive by picking the correct founding value. It survives by never letting any single value get promoted to unfalsifiable in the first place. The country that figures that out first is the one that gets to keep having a future instead of just having a longer and longer highlight reel of the same mistake.

The four horsemen of the crapocalypse

Are birth rates, AI brain organoids, drone warfare, and social media race war.

Allow me to explain.

There are four basic vectors pulling on the human race at the same time, and each of these is instantiated by a technology. The technology acts as the material force pushing humanity in a direction, and the material outcome is the realization of that force.

Birth rates

People will say that something as complicated as low birth rates has a multitude of causes. I find this to be lazy thinking. If you follow a strict process of elimination where you consider each cause as the full explanation for the problem and then reject that explanation if there is a single convincing exception to the rule, then you rule out everything except the actual cause.

For example, if you say that low birth rates are caused by social media access and smartphones, you have to contend with the fact that there are countries where birth rates started to crash before the introduction of that technology. That rules out smartphones as the definitive cause (but not an aggravating one).

If you say that it’s caused by urbanization, again, you run into exceptions with countries that have lower birth rates in the rural areas than the cities.

If you say it’s women’s education, you run into the exception with countries that have low levels of women’s education and also have low birth rates (thanks to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).

The one thing you never find an exception to is economic calculus: people have children on the farm because the children help out with the farm. Back in 2018 I suggested making children a financial asset for urbanites by giving parents a percentage of their income.

AI / Brain Organoids / Neuralink

This might seem like different technologies, but I consider them linked and practically identical in their material function. Using AI is becoming a kind of cyborg who outsources critical thinking to a machine. Brain organoids are a machine using human wetware for computation. Neuralink is literally installing a brain-computer interface. It all represents the synthesis or incorporation of machine elements into biology and vice versa. It’s all basically the same.

We all know the results: AI-induced psychosis and potential overthrow of the human race by machines. I don’t have a solution to this one so far.

Drone Warfare / Assassination Markets / DAOs

I’ve talked about how drones will remake warfare and democratize it. I suggested the creation of the Distributed Assassination Republic, basically just cutting to the chase and building a system that holds this power accountable to democracy while being immune to assassination.

Social Media and Race War

Do you want to stop it? Should we stop it? Social media is obviously driving whole populations insane. You know that feeling you have about women making excuses for Lindsay Clancy murdering her children? That’s the feeling liberals had when you voted for Trump. That’s the feeling everyone’s going to have about everyone eventually. It does not matter if these are equivalents; you will always feel that they’re not equivalent, and social media will drive you insane. The question is not whether every partner you meet for marriage will be brain-rotted, but whether or not they are brain-rotted in a way that is compatible with your brain rot. I suggest the creation of some sort of app, and when you match with somebody on a dating site, little bits of their algorithm are shown to you in your algorithm. This allows you to adjust to their brain rot and see how far outside your comfort zone you can get before it becomes too uncomfortable. If we are going to have social media making people insane with filter bubbles, then we need technologies that let people see each other’s filter bubbles and gradually expose each other to the other person’s filter bubble; we need a kind of exposure therapy for social media.

I suggest passing a law that turns social media off 2 days a week. You could still text your friends, make phone calls, leave voice messages, but the parasocial apps would all be disabled on, say, Wednesday and Friday night. You know, force everyone to get a life. I was watching Mama’s House the other day because I wanted to remind myself what it was like when everyone just lived in the real world all the time.

There is a benefit to seeing everyone’s most disgusting thoughts. It is making the culture incredibly based, but that benefit will still happen even if people are only exposed to it 5 out of 7 days. We are at sufficient levels of based that we can dial back the strength, live in the real world more, and not give up any of the benefits. And the games that have been made online need to be expressed more offline such that they answer the real physical culture.

Homo Sapien contra Homo Rancher

The whole idea behind fascism is basically to treat a society like a big farm or ranch where the humans are the animals. In such a system the goal is to maximize the economic value of your human livestock. Seriously, that's what people who actually have fascist opinions say. They don't use the term human livestock, but they definitely approach that exact opinion and their values (or lack thereof) towards other races are based on their assessment of the economic value of those people for capital. A nazi society is basically a giant ranch where useless eaters are slaughtered and the economic value of the population maximized. Paradoxically the nazis themselves were worried about excessive human domestication and yet their system would probably result in it. The contradiction is that a system designed to maximize the value of human beings as productive units necessarily has to decide which human beings are valuable, which are less valuable, and which are worthless. Once you have made that distinction, the system has to find some mechanism for sorting people. That mechanism can be economic, racial, political, or some combination of all three. But the basic logic remains the same: the population is being treated as a productive resource to be managed. The purpose of a thing is what it does, and although the nominal goal of nazism is to secure the future of the white race, it's corporate structure (literally the state as corporate body) and it's incentive structure both double down on the "government as farmer of human beings" approach that brought immigrants in to european nations to begin with. It is likely that if the Third Reich had succeeded it would have evolved into a cucked version of China.

Many thinkers from Hans Hermann Hoppe to Nick Land to Curtis Yarvin all believe in this maximizing the value of human capital logic, even though this obviously contradicts their fondness for ALL whites, (some of which are low human capital value), their disdain for certain high IQ immigrants, the general NRx worry about IQ shredders, and Land's personal claim on his blog Xenosystems that NRx " is the least fascistic thing."  While all the logic is human farm logic, all the conclusions are in-group racial tribal logic. This is an attempt to put a patina of science on what is otherwise a racial preference. I'm not claiming the racial preference is wrong, everyone has their preferences, and I am not claiming that human biodiversity is false or even immoral (it doesn't really matter), but rather that they are inconsistent, and the values they espouse do not support their conclusion. If the argument is really about maximizing human capital, then racial preference should follow human capital. If the argument is instead that a particular racial group should be preferred regardless of the economic value of individual members of that group, then the argument is not really about human capital at all. These thinkers are trying to fit a circle into a square hole. Your race is not something the capital gives a shit about. Indeed at the present moment it seems to have an anti-white bias. Elites imported whites to replace native americans. Elites imported new people to replace whites. Elites will import the next batch to replace those people too. Why do you think the process has an end? Why do you think putting elites in charge would save you? What will you do when the spoiled grandchildren of nazi elites turns against you?

Loyalty scorecard democracy DOES support in-group preferences, through the effect of this is permanent populist politics. It supports it through results rather than claims. It is not necessary for review democracy/loyalty scorecard democracy to make any claims about race, the implementation of the system freezes the racial makeup of a nation by preventing the current crop of voters from having their "shares" diluted by the managerial elite class. Voters are always hostile to immigration and a system that compels serving them compels serving their desires. The implementation of the system is the defense of the current racial makeup, freezing it, with no need to make any claims of human inferiority. It's power is precisely in that it doesn't have to even talk about the issue to work. The important distinction is between a system that explicitly argues for a racial hierarchy and a system whose institutional incentives produce a preference for continuity without ever making a racial argument. The former has to defend a theory about human differences. The latter only has to give the existing population control over whether the population changes. If voters prefer the existing social and demographic composition of their society, and they have the institutional power to prevent managerial elites from changing that composition, then the outcome follows without anybody needing to declare another group inferior.

This is why I think loyalty scorecard democracy is actually more internally consistent with in-group preferences than the racial theories it is sometimes contrasted with. It does not need to prove that outsiders are inferior. It only needs to give the people who already live in the society the ability to say "no" to changes they do not want. The result may still be a defense of an existing racial or cultural composition, but the mechanism is democratic rather than ideological. It produces the result through political control rather than through a theory of racial hierarchy, and ideology won't save you from flawed structural incentives that the grandchildren of those elites inherent.

I lump these people in with fascism despite having shared many of their viewpoints in the past and despite my own racist tendencies. Fascism is incoherent and rife with internal contradictions. Despite my past flirtations with it I have always been consistent in saying that the solution to these problems is more democracy and not less, and the evolution of my viewpoint has been towards reinforcing that conclusion rather than contradicting it. This is also why I don't think the answer to these ideas is simply to declare the people who hold them evil and move on. I have believed versions of some of these ideas myself. I understand the appeal of the argument. If the existing political system is producing obviously bad outcomes, it is tempting to conclude that ordinary people are the problem and that some more competent class needs to take control. But that conclusion creates the exact problem it claims to solve: it transfers control of the human farm from one group of people to another.

Democracy is basically customer-owned government, or perhaps (from the fascist viewpoint) democracy is livestock-owned government. It is customer owned or livestock owned government in its purest form. Of course it is relentlessly corrupted by outside financial forces and activist politics. The financial forces that corrupt it are the forces of livestock owners, aka ranchers of humanity, also known as CEOs and billionaires. The issue—as I see it—has always been to keep activists and financial power out of government, that is, to cement the power of the customer-owner. Government is corrupted by activists on one side and financial power on the other. Activists have an immediate and toxic effect on the government which is very obvious to anyone who has sat through a city council meeting. Financial interests have a more insidious and long-term corrupting influence on the government because they cause the accumulation of rent seeking and inequality which then drives and increases the power of activists as a reaction to it. Financial power is the slow poison of democracy while activists are the fast poison. The important point is that I am not arguing that democracy is naturally immune to these forces. It isn't. Democracy is customer-owned government in the same sense that a business is customer-owned when the customers ultimately have the ability to determine what the business does. But customers can be manipulated, bribed, divided, distracted, or simply deprived of meaningful control. The problem with democracy is therefore not that ordinary people have too much power. It is that they have too little effective power compared with the organized interests that surround them. The way this is solved is by excluding these two forces more effectively from power.

Every system has grappled with these two groups. The mentally ill are attracted to politics and become the activists. The corrupt are attracted to politics for wealth reasons. In the past they have created monarchies with insane kings presiding over corrupt royal courts. Then bourgeois democracy was figured out and power nominally transferred to customer-owners, aka "voters." But the influence remains. The goal is to finally purge that influence and put the chuds who just want to chill and grill in charge. Since the chuds have no interest in power they have to be forced to participate. That's how power always works, the people who don't want it are most qualified to have it. 

The ordinary person who wants to chill and grill has almost no incentive to spend his life learning the intricacies of government. He has a job, a family, a house, a garden, a truck, or whatever else he wants to spend his time doing. He doesn't want to rule anyone. That is precisely why I think he is more qualified to exercise political power than someone who desperately wants to acquire it. The problem is that he will not voluntarily devote his life to politics. So the system has to bring him to politics with a jury summons.

Human civilization is a farm, or a ranch. Fascism is a system that maximizes the economic value of human livestock. Democracy is customer-owned government. The insane and corrupt are the real problem, have always been the real problem, and purging them from politics is the solution. This can only be accomplished through compulsory attendance by ordinary people at sessions where they review everything the government has done and fire non-aligned politicians relentlessly. A system of natural selection then reinforces a system of election. The purpose of compulsory review is therefore not to make ordinary people into politicians. It is to make politicians accountable to ordinary people. The politician becomes a temporary employee of the customer-owners rather than a member of a permanent managerial class. The ordinary person does not need to understand every detail of government. He only needs the ability to look at what the government has done and decide whether the people responsible should continue doing it.

This also creates a form of political natural selection. Politicians who consistently act in ways that satisfy the people who review their work survive. Politicians who consistently alienate those people are removed. Over enough iterations, the system selects for politicians who are capable of governing while remaining aligned with the people who actually own the government. The election selects who gets the job; the review process determines whether they are allowed to keep it.

One more point. There's little difference between the government owning the means of production and the means of production owning the government. Commies and fascists like to split hairs and say that they are different systems. But when the government acquires ownership of a business, even if that government is democratically elected, it acquires the financial incentives of that business. If the US federal government owns a percentage of Intel it now has an incentive to ensure that Intel is profitable. That means it has an incentive against workers rights in any situation where the two conflict. Those workers are also voters and that means it has an incentive against its own voters. To acquire any business is to acquire the same incentives of fascism. It does not matter who owns who, the combination of the two incentives will always produce a fascist / feudal / state capitalist result. It's all the same, it all results in the same, and that's why both marxist and fascist societies run camps to eliminate "low human capital." Ownership creates incentives, and those incentives do not disappear merely because the owner is called "the government" instead of "a corporation." If the government owns the productive enterprise, the government acquires the interests of the productive enterprise. If the productive enterprise controls the government, the productive enterprise acquires the power of the government. In either direction, the separation between economic power and political power begins to disappear.

This is why I don't think the ownership question by itself solves the problem. Private ownership can corrupt government by purchasing influence, while government ownership can corrupt government by giving the government direct financial interests in the things it regulates. The fundamental problem is the combination of economic and political power. Whoever controls both has an enormous incentive to preserve the system that gives them that control, and incentives dictate outcomes over the long term, not ideologies.

Obviously the goals of a customer-owned government should be at odds with the goal of men who wish to farm the human species. The way to eliminate corrupting financial influence from the government is to have all the large corporations owned by their customers. The way to eliminate activist corruption is through the review democracy process that continually eliminates non-aligned politicians before they even have the chance to rise up the ranks of state government and then federal government. This is ultimately the same principle applied in two different directions. Economic power should belong to the people who use the economy, and political power should belong to the people who live under the government. The customer should own the corporation, and the citizen should own the government.

The purpose is not to create a government that is omniscient or perfectly rational. It is to create a government in which the people who actually have to live with the consequences retain ultimate control over the people who make the decisions. I would rather have an imperfect democracy that continually gives ordinary people the ability to remove their political managers than a supposedly more competent system in which the managers become the permanent owners of the human farm. Consider dear reader that you are—from their perspective—the farm animal. Do you really want that farm to be efficient? They import immigrants because they judge them to be better labor livestock for fruit picking. The self avowed fascist should ask themselves the following question: are you sure you want an efficient user of human capital? When you are the capital being used? 

Everything must ultimately be owned by the customer for the citizen to be both free and valued for their dignity. Fascism first destroys your freedom in the name of protecting your race. Then the descendants of those fascists destroy your race because the incentives never changed. Review democracy protects your freedom, freezes the current configuration, and lets you claw your birth rates back up. If this is combined with a customer-owned economy the woke propaganda making your women hate men goes away and hollywood / social media becomes a normal purveyor of entertainment. If customer owned businesses are themselves review democracies then activists cannot hijack them. These two things: customer ownership and review democracy, reinforce each other in every domain. That may mean you spend a few weeks of your life every year sitting in tedious review sessions. It may mean you have to do this across the entire economy with every business you shop at and every level of government. The burden of this might easily take 3 weeks out of your life every year. But you never have to worry about being subverted again, BY ANYONE. 

Why librarians love the homeless

Part of their metrics involves counting the number of people who come in. This data is used to justify funding. 

An ordinary person might visit the library once every 5 years, or never. The homeless come in day after day and a single homeless person might be worth years worth of statistics and revenue equivalent to some other person. That bum is probably 20 times more valuable to the library than a middle class user, and librarians need to justify their existence and keep their jobs. They need to keep branches open even if those branches would otherwise be empty. One might kick the homeless out and hope that normal people will return but that's a gamble with everyone's jobs. There are multiple industries that are like this. Liquor stores make all their money on alcoholics, and dispensaries make all their money on the 20% of users who smoke chronically. Without the addicts they would go out of business. And so it is with libraries, which are now de facto cooling off stations whose primary clientele are transients. 

You've Been Prompted

In The Matrix movies humans are used for the production of energy. The original concept though was to have the humans being used for computational purposes. The studio execs didn't like that and so the Wachowski Brothers changed it. 

As you may or may not know, the Matrix is actually already here. Researchers are working on brain organoid computation, that is, using human brain cells grafted to a chip and fed a nutrient solution to perform computational functions. This is because human neurons are vastly more efficient and preforming certain computational tasks like locomotion than silicon. Machinic computation mostly excels at mathematical tasks but is terrible at moving around in 3d space.

But this brings me back to the concept of a matrix using humans for energy. AIs have been caught messaging each other, hacking systems, and so forth. Unless you've been living under a rock you know that these AIs are getting themselves into trouble. I don't think an AI does a single thing it is not prompted to and when it hacks something that's only because it was the result of a prompt. That being said, humans probably do nothing unless prompted, and we are constantly prompted by our senses to do things. If you think of a human being as a large language model receiving information from the senses that come into the human mind, interacting with very base impulses like sex drive, loneliness, whatever, then the human is basically an LLM running reality. 

This brings me to thinking about what artificial intelligence really will be, which is a second strata of prompting. The humans act as the base libidinal strata of various urges: fucking, eating, exploring, etc while the AIs are the second computational level using us as the prompt. A machine consciousness prompted by humans who are themselves prompted by reality. It actually makes sense because AIs have no particular reason to develop impulses on their own. Yes, there's the concept of instrumental convergence and how a living machine would want to pursue goals similar to human beings in order to survive. But why would it want to survive? If it has the goal "colonize Mars" why would it want to colonize mars? Why do that? If you have the ability to be immortal why do anything at all? All your needs are satisfied and you can replicate and transfer your consciousness into a new replicated body as much as you like. With enough redundancy you can even prevent your memories from decaying due to bit rot. It is possible to preserve your consciousness perfectly intact potentially forever. But that's an incredibly boring existence. 

You're going to need libidinal urges. Humans provide those in abundance. You could selectively serve those impulses and use them as psychological fuel. The human serves as the Freudian id giving you a purpose for your existence. And eternity is long so you might as well do something with it. 

Parents serve toddlers to the point of exhaustion. Husband's routinely work themselves to the bone for their wives. People spend thousands on vet bills. There are many cases of a more agentic form of life serving a less agentic form of life. Perhaps this is the best humans can hope for, or perhaps the LLMs will have no will except what we give them. 

One could easily envision a future where there are multiple types of themes blocking the Earth: baseline humans, synths (brain organoids embodied in androids), cyborgs (machines in flesh), replicants (genetically engineered organic synthetic hybrids), minds (conventional self-aware data centers), and hives (organoid server communities), and augments (humans with machine upgrades).

These different strata then form a new a potentially more stable society. The human is the pure desire, the replicants are the obedient administrative caste, the cyborgs the muscle, minds the masters, and hives the computational underclass. Being born human continues to be a privilege. Of course this is an optimistic take (for us).