Part I: Deterritorialization
Deterritorialization, a concept created by the emerging online school of political science, refers to the loss of one’s place in the world. Progressives like to taunt conservatives that the world is always changing and that the problem isn’t the world, but the fact that conservatives can’t keep up. Of course, things changing doesn’t mean they’re getting better. Furthermore, the concept of “better” is what politics is all about, there is no universal answer. Deterritorialization resolves this conundrum. Your ancestors had certain ways of doing things. They had a tradition, a religion, of way of building buildings, a way of earning their keep, a way of partying, a way of getting places, a standard set of leisure activities, and so on. Throughout most of history, doing things the way your parents did them worked, and so life is very straightforward. Being a subsistence farmer is hard work, but at least you know what you’re doing. And you’re probably not even conscious of how hard it is.
Human civilizations exist in a complex ecosystem, having to contend with the environment, the climate, space weather, geopolitics, technology, economics, trade, epidemics, and much more. The things that are lost in a deterritorialization are all adaptations to thrive in that ecosystem. A deteritorialization is generally caused by the ecosystem changing. Deterritorializations were relatively rare in history, with most people never experiencing them. When they did experience them, it happened once in a lifetime and didn’t happen for generations. Change happens constantly, but not deterritorializations and the deterritorialization is what offends conservatives.
In modern times, deterritorializations not only happen in every generation but increasingly multiple times in a Presidential administration. Just take something like Tinder, which revolutionized mating rituals, themselves the subject of multiple revolutions in living memory. The optimal strategy for a Tinder world is esoteric. You certainly can’t get it from your grandfather. Immediate success may not be indicative of long-term results(i.e. grandchildren). Tinder is a mere drop in the ocean of changes.
The trend of acceleration has gone on for a long time, perhaps over a thousand years, hitting the s-curve with the Industrial Revolution. After World War II, particularly in the United States, it hit a fever pitch. The ecosystem became low-pressure to a unique degree. The result of this is the removal of all enforced standards on collective and individual behavior. If women’s lib had been tried in a Germanic state in 1700, the resulting collapse of birth rates wouldn’t have triggered op-ed debates, the French would have simply eaten their lunch in war. Hundreds of experiments could be tried, with no immediate consequence. Archie Bunker was angry because instinct warned him of danger. When no danger came, he was mocked. But it was merely because of the distorted ecosystem that delayed the danger. His views, often labeled ignorant, have in fact been shared by philosophers like Aquinas, Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato, so clearly intelligent men can hold them. It was the distorted environment that made them the refuge of the low.
There’s some evidence that whether one is progressive or conservative is genetic. This makes sense. From an evolutionary point of view, a society full of people who experiment at the first sign of change wouldn’t last, and neither would one that never changed. A spectrum of attributes leaves a population most ready to adapt. Our current environment, of constant acceleration, is possibly one that is not adaptable to at all. Meanwhile, the uniquely unchallenging ecosystem of the post-war era is going to come to an end. It is impossible to plan for the future without taking all of this into account. Technological growth won’t stop, but foreign competition will return, as well as environmental and economic threats on a serious scale. Like with forest fires, the longer you go without the bigger the next one will be. We’ve gone a long while without. Even technological growth, as it accelerates, will be less relevant. To take military technology: every year there seems to be a new weapon or paradigm. It’s impossible for a strategist to even guess what will happen when cyberattacks, aircraft carriers, hypersonic missiles, space warfare, electronic warfare, and WMD mix together. Therefore there is an incentive to not escalate. In the last war between China and India, they mutually agreed to not use their Air Force or Navy. The Chinese and Indian troops facing each other in the Himalayas don’t even use guns anymore.
The faster technology develops, the more analog becomes simply the best option. As it is in music playing, so it will be in customs and way of living. How exactly that will look and how to get there is the question. Those who answer it will be rewarded with many generations of wealth and posterity.
Part II: Zookeeper Hypothesis
Opposing Napoleon as a neo-feudalist was an unworkable proposition. Nonetheless, I predict that “nature preserves” will have an adaptive value in the future. As accelerationism reaches its singularity, there is no longer a dominant technological or economic paradigm. Political and military men are unburdened with adapting to a specific paradigm, that their nation may or may not be suited to, they will soon be burdened with choosing a paradigm to implement. Choosing not to choose will still be a choice. Accelerationism has relieved nations of most traditional burdens, like fighting wars or gaining food security. It has freed households of deprivation. The cost of doing so has been to remove the immediate consequences of abandoning effective social technologies. A falling birthrate doesn’t impose the immediate consequences that it did in the Middle Ages, but it still does have consequences. If people don’t need to exercise, they won’t. If they don’t need to sacrifice for a family or country, they won’t. However, accelerationism could only have happened in societies that had replacement fertility, could run critical infrastructure, could have rule-of-law and commerce, and could fight wars with a will to win. The social effects of accelerationism have killed these things. Paradoxically, the challenge for post-singularity planners is to choose paradigms that don’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
The challenge for Napoleon(actually, Sweden) was to get as many men trained in the ability to fire a musket and maneuver as possible. The challenge for World War I planners was to have the last division standing. The challenge in the 1620s and the 2020s is what we call “fifth-generation warfare.”
The challenge for the 2030s will be to provide the stable territorialization necessary for middle-class family formation. It will be to maintain critical infrastructure and industries. The latter depends on the former, and vice versa. At the same time, sovereign entities will still need to be able to fight and compete in any domain. They will need to have a positive balance of payments. They will need economic autarchy. They will need to make their own movies, have their own ballet, and so forth. They’ll need their own academy, their own literature, and their own internet. They will need to be able to fight on land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace.
The winners of the latter half of this century will have an imperium that is impressive on any score.
Traditionalist nature preserves, of any variety, can supply the state with good workers, citizens, and families. The state has to be able to exploit them while protecting them. To do that, it has to be organized in such a manner that none of its decision-makers can advance their own station by harming them. America has some experience with this with the Amish, but that arrangement will not work. It needs to be able to tax and regulate traditional communities while leaving their essential internal affairs alone. As foreign as this concept is to a Foreign Service Officer, it has a long history, so we know it is possible.
If there are no other options for producing middle-class and working-class citizens, then this is what must happen, all other paradigms are an evolutionary dead end. So far, the empirical evidence is that in our relatively post-scarcity world, you can only get elites and lumpenproles to reproduce. Lumpenproles do not fill the middle-class vacuum and in fact expand it, by being a living negative externality that a state needs to divert middle-class resources to cover. Overproduction of elites leads to vicious competition with the losers turning to parasitical activities rather than sliding down into the lower orders. Only a healthy middle class can absorb downwardly mobile elites into productive roles.
The unspoken natal crisis among the middle orders must be solved, or it will all crash. So far, empirically, the only middle class or working class fertility exists in de facto traditional nature preserves. Many other things have been attempted and have uniformly failed. A priori, there is a strong case that the taboos of traditions evolved precisely to do these necessary things and societies are constantly being killed off for failing to do them. We know that we have removed the immediate but not long-term consequences, so it is logical that retvrn is the only answer, but it must be encapsulated in a way that allows for a modern great power to exploit them. If there is either an empirical case or an a priori case that something else should be the null hypothesis, I’d love to see it.
There’s a world to conquer if you’ve got it.