It's only a blackpill if you want things to stay like this.
Lot of bad news on the timeline lately.
Deportations of criminal aliens are still being prevented by leftist judges. The quisling GOP refuses to kill the filibuster, match Democrats on redistricting, or impose nationwide voter ID. And that’s really all you need to know.
There really is no ambiguity about leftists’ intentions. They are promising to do everything we accuse them of planning to do — packing the court, mass amnesty, political show trials — and if they can run an opaque election in 2028, there will be nothing to stop them.
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Failing to escape the gravity well of the leftist administrative state, the greater energy and efficacy of MAGA 2.0 only ensures a harder landing upon re-entry, by antagonizing (and genuinely frightening) the old regime’s functionaries without actually disempowering them — in fact, handing them ample causes celebres and legal justification to conduct their promised purge.
Even beyond that near-term threat, America’s politics are just terminally incoherent and dysfunctional.
There’s no saving the money printer (which is the empire) — and the idea that “core” America will peacefully re-assert some defensible conceptual boundaries (“who is American”, and “who gets to live here”) looks increasingly implausible.
In short, none of the United States’ existential problems have solutions within the domain of regular politics — and as far as we can tell from the outside, the President isn’t going to cut the Gordian knot.
(Of course, if he were, we’d be the last to know — but we have to act on what information we have.)
When I laid out this set of facts, a wise and good friend chided me for blackpilling — but that isn’t how I see it at all.
We are confronting crises whose seeds were planted before our grandparents were born.
For a while, it looked like we had a chance of avoiding some of their worst consequences through the decisive action of a few (though, in hindsight, it’s not clear that this was ever possible, or even exactly what we were hoping to see in practice.)
Anyway, it sure looks like It’s Over.
But what do you mean by “It”? What do you mean by “Over”?
If “It” is a self-governing American nation-state, It’s been Over since long before you or I were born. If “It” is the world you grew up in, It’s been continually and freshly Over every day of your life.
Conservatism, if taken seriously, is a sure recipe for depression, because it locks you in an utterly doomed struggle with entropy — and therefore with reality itself.
Conservatism demands that old solutions keep working forever, that all dragons stay slain — and that’s just not the world God made.
But would you even want to live in such a world? Would you actually prefer it if the courage and ambition of the Founding Fathers had answered all political questions 250 years ago, tamed all inconvenient human impulses forever, and no such courage or ambition would ever be demanded of you?
We are so vexed by the challenge of holding together this tangle of contradictions.
Young families can’t afford a house, but America’s economic house of cards depends on steady appreciation. We’ve gutted domestic industry to the point that our national defense is dependent on supply chains from our chief geopolitical rival. We have naturalized so many hostile foreigners in our largest cities that they can elect politicians who explicitly campaign on our dispossession.
At an even more fundamental level, our economic system appears to be irreducibly incompatible with family formation.
Many Plan Trusters, in their understandable haste to counter the (genuinely insufferable) kvetching of blackpillers, have unconsciously assented to the blackpillers’ frame: that the national political struggle (in which we are really only voyeurs) is existential — and that failure is too horrible to contemplate.
This shared frame offers us nothing to do but sit and wait — either in hope or despair.
But more importantly, this fear of crisis prevents us from looking under the bed, and thinking seriously about what is ahead of us — especially the opportunities that lie in the crises that are coming, and the preparations we can make right now to seize them.
I think it’s extremely likely that, without executive action qualitatively different from anything we’ve seen so far from the Trump Administration, the chickens come home to roost sometime between 2028 or 2032: either in the form of a resurgent, vengeful institutional Left, and/or any combination of the impending fiscal, industrial, and foreign policy crises that have no solution within our present political paradigm.
I think the online-right consensus is roughly correct about how deep and how difficult these crises would be in the near term: but I think almost no one has reckoned with how quickly solutions might be found, how much opportunity will lie in the volatility, or how strong we might find ourselves if we just put down the burdens of this decrepit and sclerotic system.
When I look under the bed, here’s what I see:
A 2028 Newsomreich (or something worse) is not a stable equilibrium. It would take extreme competence — and, more importantly, heroic virtue and good will — to pull the US out of the situation in which it finds itself.
The only historical examples of countries spending more than a year or two in the fiscal territory to which we’re headed took place under 20th-century American suzerainty — and the resolution of those situations involved significant concessions of sovereignty (postwar Britain selling off its empire, indebted European countries accepting EU-brokered austerity regimes).
Vassal states can remain stable under these moribund and indebted conditions for the same reason that California or Illinois can: they aren’t operating in international anarchy. They can’t “fail” in the same sense that a sovereign state can, because USG can’t afford to let them.
When America’s fiscal situation collapses, there will be no hegemon to (in effect) take its assets into receivership and negotiate a structured settlement.
We hear often that “there’s a lot of ruin in a nation” and “there are still libtards in South Africa” — but it actually takes tremendous effort and expense (and competence) for the Empire to keep South Africa the way it is, to hold all these geopolitical wounds open and rotting.
South Africa’s private security forces outnumber the South African military plus police by a factor of 9 to 1, with near-parity in spending ($6 billion vs. $9 billion — depending how much of SANDF spending you think is jobs-program graft).
Despite having no constitutional “right” to firearms or self-defense, white South Africans’ “2A rights” are far more expansive, in practice, than Americans’ — largely because the state lacks the power to disarm them. Despite its explicit commitments to race communism, South Africa plays host to a white separatist enclave that it does not have the capacity to dislodge.
It’s among the most beautiful, temperate, resource-rich places on earth. If America’s carrier strike groups went to the bottom tomorrow, South Africa’s sovereignty would be hotly contested — at least regionally — within the week.
Which is to say: South Africa is only South Africa because America is America.
If America ever “becomes South Africa”, it will lose the capacity to maintain all these badly dysfunctional regimes through force of will — including domestically.
The hyper-scaled, globally integrated configuration of the empire means that it can’t just conduct an orderly retreat from the world and focus on tyrannizing its own people.
USG’s entire security paradigm — not just the deployment, but the design philosophy of all its weapons systems — assume global standoff capability, and don’t work without it, in the same way that China’s military is purpose-built to defeat the US Navy in the South China Sea, but has no capacity to replace it as guarantor of the sea lanes.
The same characteristics that have (so far) given huge managerial empires the advantage in modern warfare — the dominance of exquisitely-designed, highly integrated, and capital-intensive weapons systems — make those war machines narrow in their application, and difficult to retool for a new geopolitical situation.
And we are unambiguously headed into a new geopolitical situation.
In the 20th century, USG could afford to be pretty illiquid. It was the only player with the scale to implement the most powerful new technologies, so it always got to be the disruptor.
But these new technologies are accessible at a retail price point, and they’re generating new capacity far more rapidly than a big managerial regime can adjust its doctrine to make use of that capacity.
The big managerial players can produce cutting edge computational capacity, force projection capability, communications infrastructure, etc. — but they can’t metabolize it (i.e. deploy it efficiently to grow and solidify their own power).
In other words, power is leaking.
In this new techno-industrial paradigm, second-mover advantages are immense.
AI data centers, drone factories, GPS satellites, social media networks are traditional managerial mega-projects, but they leak power in ways that a 20th century shipyard or tank factory did not.
USG launches and maintains the GPS fleet, but it can’t prevent other parties using GPS to calculate targeting solutions for artillery, for example. State-of-the-art AI models can immediately be used to reverse-engineer and build better models. $500 drones can be used to bomb $5 billion drone factories. Social media networks break the narrative monopoly on which the liberal world order is predicated.
This means that weaker players that are clever and liquid can outcompete the players on the cutting edge, who are on the hook for rapidly obsolescing infrastructure — including political infrastructure, and organizational infrastructure (the headless, trustless, hard-to-change doctrines, procedures, and institutions on which managerialism depends.)
The existing managerial class can’t simply ingest these insights and pivot — they’ve been selected and trained from birth to work within this system, and they are only adaptive (and cooperative) within it. If they could think or act some other way, they wouldn’t be libtards.
So, instead of nourishing the first-movers (big managerial states), these new technologies nourish competing power structures within the system, even though they still depend on managerial scale to advance.
It may not even matter who runs the big managerial leviathan, whether they are well-intentioned or competent: the returns to optionality and agility simply exceed the returns to scale.
I’m not even really predicting the future here:
Westphalian states are already being eaten from the inside by tumors of adversarial power, because those groups (many of which are comically venal and retarded) are just way more agile, cohesive, and responsive — precisely because they never underwent the ordeal of adopting managerial virtues — and those older virtues are matter more in our new social and technological paradigm.
There is no plausible way for the big dinosaurs to survive at their present scale and bureaucratic configuration.
This is maybe a “blackpill” for people who are still rooting for the Big Gay Empire — either because they hope for its reform and resurrection, or because they are just afraid of the consequences of losing it — but I’m going to make the case that, even in the reasonably near term, even in the Bad Timeline, Real Americans will be better off without it.
The American worker today is more than twice as productive as the American worker in 1965 who supported a family of five on a single income and put a man on the moon.
Despite all the headwinds of regulatory bureaucracy, expropriative taxation, and the US Government’s institutional war on competence, Americans still perform 17% of the world’s manufacturing, and produce 15% of the world’s food calories — more than 3X what we need to feed ourselves.
It’s true that much of that productivity would be interrupted, for a time, by a failure of global security and logistics — but only for a time.
America's impending collapse is often analogized to the fall of the Roman Empire — which is fine as a jeremiad against America’s sins — but the analogy is misleading if you’re trying to make actual predictions about the future, largely because everything happens faster now. Yes, it took centuries for Europe to stabilize after the fall of Rome — because it took centuries for anything to happen in the first millennium AD.
Lines of communication that took an empire to maintain back then can now be re-established with two working laptops and one working satellite. All kinds of resources — including real, physical capital, factories and heavy equipment — can be reallocated around the world in a matter of days. (Losing Pax Americana makes this more complicated, but not at all impossible — and also enormously more lucrative. Someone’s going to manage it.)
Knowledge that could be lost permanently in a single fire or barbarian raid is now backed up on thousands of servers and data centers all over the world. (You can, of course, concoct a threat model to which all of that infrastructure is vulnerable — but not, realistically, the category of threats that we are concerned with here.)
Whatever doomer scenario you’re imagining for America: instead of imagining Rome, it’s probably more useful to ask if you think we’re in a worse position to recover than China after Mao — or even Russia after Gorbachev. (Will there still be computers and solar panels and backhoes and paved roads? Will you be illiterate? Etc.)
Fracturing the empire would be a serious shock. We would lose access, for a time, to almost everything we consume. Many people would lose their savings, some places would become (more) violent, many people would have to relocate. We would have to learn how to make things again.
But what could we build, and at what speed, if we were not bound by the constraints of the present system?
Think about our current productivity in context of all the derangements of this forced imperial stasis:
It’s illegal to build new power plants, especially nuclear. It’s illegal to build businesses that hire for competence.
It’s illegal to train our most gifted students at the speed and intensity of which they’re capable, because to do so would reveal disparate impacts. (The Trump Administration banned this on paper, but the institutions are all just waiting for Mommy to come home.)
Our brightest and most dynamic minds are shunted into frothy, imaginary sectors like tech and finance, because it’s illegal to manufacture real things in the real world.
Practically every productive person in America has to drive an hour from their suburban barracks to get to work, because it’s illegal to build safe and functional cities. (Solving this problem alone would unlock tens of trillions of dollars in real estate value, and billions of man-hours of pointless commuting. Imagine what could be accomplished in San Francisco if it were a livable city. Imagine what it would be worth.)
Of course it would be nice if we could strip away all this accreted absurdity through “reform” under color of law — that’s what we all hoped for from Trump Regime. But if you examine that possibility closely, in terms of the dislocations and volatility it would demand, it’s not obvious that it would be all that much cleaner, or quicker, or more likely to produce a favorable outcome, than just letting the thing fall over so you can start from a clean sheet. (It would be, in many senses, the same thing.)
So much of the discourse on the online right is just morons piling on each other about How Bad Things Really Are, and how they’re Going to Get Way Worse.
If you’re a stupid right-wing guy with nothing to say, you can always just affect 10% more cynicism and world-weariness than the last guy, and feel very clear-eyed and honest and brave.
This demoralization is rooted in the fact that a lot of right wing guys know what needs to happen, but do not see themselves as Strong Men who can survive Hard Times. In their hearts, they see themselves as natural creatures of the Big Gay Empire, who have everything to lose from its collapse.
Of course, that might turn out to be true of them, or of me. (They expect some of us in the wreckage, brother.) But I think, overall, the online right-wing zeitgeist profoundly underestimates:
The speed with which good order can be restored locally after a crisis
The opportunities that can be seized within that crisis (and only within that crisis)
How much difference preparedness and positioning will make
The strength that will be revealed in themselves when strength is demanded
Just how sunny the sunlit uplands could be on the other side
If the sleeper awakens, and Trump (or some other Man of Action) steps into the breach to save America, we will, of course, celebrate — but it turns out that the preparations you’d want to make for that kind of chaos and opportunity are not so different from the preparations you’d want to make for (let’s call it) the “default case”.
The reasons for this are two-fold, and deserve a longer treatment, but basically:
Ubiquitous technical surveillance means that the only capacity we can currently build is deniable capacity — which is, by definition, multi-purpose. This is one of the lessons we can derive from leftist street tactics: they don’t bring guns to a protest, they bring bike locks and skateboards, so that acts of violence cannot be perfectly anticipated, and can be treated as spontaneous and personal, rather than premeditated and organized. If you want to organize for power under the nose of a hostile surveillance regime, the power you build must be useful across a broad array of applications (so that it isn’t too obvious which application you want.)
The speed of technological and cultural change is too rapid to make confident predictions about the future, so we have to look for resources and strategies that are meta-adaptive. When things are moving quickly and you have very low confidence about what the future will hold, you want things that are useful in the broadest array of plausible futures.
Exciting times are coming whether we want them or not — but don’t you kind of want them?
Do you actually envy the boomers their lives as zoo animals, the decades they had to get so fat and careless and self-involved? Would you rather that went on forever? Would you want to give that to your sons?
We lament the closing of the frontier, but the crises ahead of us are what frontiers have always looked like. Your ancestors were able to build empires from the frontier precisely because the frontier was dangerous, and most people were scared and stayed home.
We have time to prepare. Our task is to transmute all these fake assets (fake dollars, fake jobs, fake numbers on computers) into the assets that will matter when the music stops (productive real-world capital, physical security, optionality, intelligence, relationships), so that we are in position to build what comes next.
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