Tag: decline and fall

The last Republican

Thanks to the suicidal pro-immigration policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations, Mitt Romney may be the last viable Republican candidate.

The demographic threat to the Republican Party grows out of the fact that every four years the electorate becomes roughly two percent less white and two percent more minority, primarily as a result of the increase in the Hispanic and Asian-American populations and the relatively low birth rate among whites. By my computation, this translates into a modest 0.85 percentage point gain for Democrats and 0.85 percentage point loss for Republicans every four years. In other words, the changing composition of the electorate gives Democrats an additional built-in advantage of 1.7 percentage points every four years.

Contra some optimistic left-liberal assertions after the 2008 election, I was confident that the demographic tipping point hadn’t been reached yet.  It could, however, happen as soon as 2016, and it will almost certainly happen by 2024.  Once Texas becomes a reliable Democratic stronghold, which it will thanks to its Hispanic immigrant population, it will be virtually impossible for a Republican to win the presidency again.

Unless, of course, the Republican party becomes the party of white nationalism and starts winning 75 to 80 percent of the white vote, which seems extremely unlikely given SWPL cultural influence, white female left-liberalism, and the party elite’s preference for irrelevance to “extremism”.  So, my prediction of a US collapse by 2033 would appear to be progressing rather nicely.

The decline of human capability

Bruce Charlton posits a dark possibility:

I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around
1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been
declining ever since.  This may sound bizarre or just plain false, but the argument is simple.
That landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the
supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever
solved by humans. 40 years ago we could do it – repeatedly – but since
then we have *not* been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we
have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it.
Humans have lost the capability.

Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon
only because we no longer *wanted* to go to the moon, or could not
afford to, or something…– but I am suggesting that all this is BS,
merely excuses for not doing something which we *cannot* do.

It is as if an eighty year old ex-professional-cyclist was to claim that
the reason he had stopped competing in the Tour de France was that he
had now had found better ways to spend his time and money. It may be
true; but does not disguise the fact that an 80 year old could not
compete in international cycling races even if he wanted to.

As true as this rings, I think Charlton is mistaking the decline of the West for the decline of humanity in general.  While our generation is the first in many generations to be less wealthy than its predecessors, while I am without question less generally capable than my father, and while it is easy to imagine most of the idiocracy starving or descending into savagery about one month after the system breaks down, all of these things only apply to the West.

Unlike the West, the East has not lost its values.  Even the Middle East may hope to see an imperialist renaissance of sorts once the New Caliphate is constructed and it continues the expansionary phase that began back in the 1950s.  But as for the USA, it is important to keep in mind that Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the medieval caliphates all saw a significant decline from their technological heights.  It would not be surprising, therefore, if 1972 was one day seen as the peak of America. 

Especially given that 1973 marked the point at which real wages began declining as the increase of women and immigrants into the workplace finally outpaced the exit of older white men from it.  There is no singular cause of societal decline, but it increasingly appears obvious that the secular equalitarian ethic that replaced the traditional Protestant one over the course of the 20th century was one of the more important factors.  Certainly, we have not seen the unleashing of human potential and capability that was repeatedly promised by its progressive advocates.

Road Warrior, California-style

VDH continues to chronicle the decline and fall of the Golden State:

Sometimes, and in some places, in California I think we have nearly descended into Miller’s dark vision — especially the juxtaposition of occasional high technology with premodern notions of law and security. The state deficit is at $16 billion. Stockton went bankrupt; Fresno is rumored to be next. Unemployment stays over 10% and in the Central Valley is more like 15%. Seven out of the last eleven new Californians went on Medicaid, which is about broke. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients are in California. In many areas, 40% of Central Valley high school students do not graduate — and do not work, if the latest crisis in finding $10 an hour agricultural workers is any indication. And so on.

Our culprit out here was not the Bomb (and remember, Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit, despite the inverse in 1945). The condition is instead brought on by a perfect storm of events that have shred the veneer of sophisticated civilization. Add up the causes. One was the destruction of the California rural middle class. Manufacturing jobs, small family farms, and new businesses disappeared due to globalization, high taxes, and new regulations. A pyramidal society followed of a few absentee land barons and corporate grandees, and a mass of those on entitlements or working for government or employed at low-skilled service jobs. The guy with a viable 60 acres of almonds ceased to exist.

Illegal immigration did its share. No society can successfully absorb some 6-7 million illegal aliens, in less than two decades, the vast majority without English, legality, or education from the poorer provinces of Mexico, the arrivals subsidized by state entitlements while sending billions in remittances back to Mexico — all in a politicized climate where dissent is demonized as racism. This state of affairs is especially true when the host has given up on assimilation, integration, the melting pot, and basic requirements of lawful citizenship.

I find it amazing that even still, those who are generally cognizant of the dangers of immigration still cling to the notion that there is any meaningful difference between legal and illegal immigration. I note that a simple amnesty would render all that illegal immigration legal at a single stroke; would VDH or any other legal immigration supporter genuinely imagine that legalization would make all the problems he observes go away?

To be clear, I am not intrinsically opposed to all immigration in all circumstances. But history indicates that once a single immigrant population exceeds around 1-2 percent of the total population, they begin to present a long-term societal problem.

Complexity and the fall of empires II

In which we delve deeper into Ugo Bardi’s explanation of complexity, collapse, and the way in which the collapse of the Roman Empire offers a means of understanding the ongoing collapse of the American empire and the global financial system:

Tainter goes well beyond the simplistic interpretation of many earlier authors and identifies a key point in the question of collapse. Societies are complex entities; he understands that. And, hence, their collapse must be related to complexity. Here is an excerpt of Tainter’s way of thinking. It is a transcription of a interview that Tainter gave in the film “Blind Spot” (2008)

“In ancient societies that I studied, for example the Roman Empire, the great problem that they faced was when they would have to incur very high costs just to maintain the status quo. Invest very high amounts in solving problems that don’t yield a net positive return, but instead simply allowed them to maintain what they already got. This decreases the net benefit of being a complex society.”

So, you see that Tainter has one thing very clear: complexity gives a benefit, but it is also a cost. This cost is related to energy, as he makes clear in his book. And in emphasizing complexity, Tainter gives us a good definition of what we intend for collapse. Very often people have been discussing the collapse of ancient societies without specifying what they meant for “collapse”. For a while, there has been a school of thought that maintained that the Roman Empire had never really “collapsed”. It had simply transformed itself into something else. But if you take collapse defined as “a rapid reduction of complexity” then you have a good definition and that’s surely what happened to the Roman Empire.

The Romans kept increasing the size of their army even after the economic returns that they got from military activities went down, actually may have become negative. It is exactly the same behavior of whalers in 19th century who kept increasing the size of the whaling fleet even it was clear that there weren’t enough whales to catch to justify that….

So, I think we have enough data, here, to prove the validity of the model – at least in qualitative terms. Maybe somebody should collect good data, archaeological and historical, and made a complete dynamic model of the Roman Empire. That would be very interesting, but it is beyond my possibilities for now. Anyway, even from these qualitative data we should be able to understand why the Empire was in trouble. One of the main causes of the trouble was that it had this big military apparatus, the legions, that needed to be paid and didn’t bring in any profit. It was the start of an hemorrhage of gold that couldn’t be reversed. In addition, the Empire bled itself even more by building an extensive system of fortifications – the limes that had to be maintained and manned, besides being expensive in themselves.

The story of the fortifications is a good example of what we had said; the attempt of a complex system to maintain homeostasis. The Romans must have understood that legions were too expensive if you had to keep so many of them to keep the borders safe. So, they built these walls. I imagine that the walls were built by slaves; and a slave surely cost less than a legionnaire. Slaves, however, were not good as fighters – I suppose that if you gave a sword to a slave he might think to run away or to use it against you. You know the story of Spartacus, the leader of a slave revolt in Roman times. I am sure that the Romans didn’t want to risk that again. But with walls the Romans had found a way to replace legionnaires with slaves. You needed less legionnaires to defend a fortification than to defend an open field. That was a way to save money, to keep homeostasis. But it wasn’t enough – obviously. The Romans still needed to pay for the legions and – as a disadvantage – the walls were a rigid system of defense that couldn’t be changed. The Romans were forced to man the walls all along their extension and that must have been awfully expensive. The Empire had locked itself in a cage from which it would never be able to escape. Negative feedback kills.

Military expenses were not the only cause of the fall. With erosion gnawing at agricultural yields and mine productivity going down, we should not be surprised if the empire collapsed. It simply couldn’t do otherwise. So, you see that the collapse of the Roman Empire was a complex phenomenon where different negative factors reinforced each other. It was a cascade of negative feedbacks, not a single one, that brought down the empire.

The key phrase, and the one that is particularly relevant to the current situation, is this: “the great problem… was when they would have to incur very high costs just to maintain the status quo”. So, what are the primary aspects of the current status quo that require increasingly expensive maintenance?

I see two areas that fit the description of a response to a problem that creates a destructive series of feedback loops. The first is debt and the second is immigration. The debt issue is obvious, since new debt keeps being created to pay off the old debts; this strategy will work right up until new debt can’t be created, in which case default which destroys a significant percentage of the powerful financial institutions or increased inflation which further hammers the economy and the populace is inevitable.

Immigration was posited as the solution for the declining native birthrates that threatened the intergenerational Ponzi scheme of entitlements, but it is proving to be far more expensive in a broad variety of ways than its advocates expected. It was intriguing to see Ann Coulter finally, after all these years, turn openly against legal immigration, although she unsurprisingly, and erroneously, attempted to blame it on Democrats despite the Republican elite’s unstinting support of it. I note that one seldom hears the Bush-era claim that Hispanics are “natural conservatives” any longer, which I and others pointed out was totally ludicrous at the time.

There are, of course, other elements that have contributed heavily to American decline and fall, indeed, Bardi and Trainer both specifically deny the idea that there is any one causal factor in societal collapses. But for all that free trade, domestic spending, and foreign wars have added pressure to the structure, they have not created negative feedback cycles of the sort that debt and population demographics have.

Complexity and the fall of empires I

Ugo Bardi has a fascinating post on the way in which Rome hit its limits and how even those Romans who perceived its decline failed to understand why it was happening:

The Meditations [of Marcus Aurelius] is a statement from a man who was seeing his world crumbling down around him and who strove nevertheless to maintain a personal balance; to keep a moral stance. Aurelius surely understood that something was wrong with the Empire: during all their history, the Romans had been almost always on the offensive. Now, they were always defending themselves. That wasn’t right; of course.

But you never find in the Meditations a single line that lets you suspect that the Emperor thought that there was something to be done other than simply fighting to keep the barbarians out. You never read that the Emperor was considering, say, things like social reform, or maybe something to redress the disastrous situation of the economy. He had no concern, apparently, that the Empire could actually fall one day or another.

Now, I’d like to show you an excerpt from another document; written perhaps by late 4th century. Probably after the battle of Adrianopolis; that was one of last important battles fought (and lost) by the Roman Empire. This is a curious document. It is called, normally, “Of matters of war” because the title and the name of the author have been lost. But we have the bulk of the text and we can say that the author was probably somebody high up in the imperial bureaucracy. Someone very creative – clearly – you can see that from the illustrations of the book. Of course what we see now are not the original illustrations, but copies made during the Middle Ages. But the fact that the book had these illustration was probably what made it survive: people liked these colorful illustrations and had the book copied. So it wasn’t lost. The author described all sorts of curious weaponry. One that you can see here is a warship powered by oxen.

Of course, a ship like this one would never have worked. Think of how to feed the oxen. And think of how to manage the final results of feeding the oxen. Probably none of the curious weapons invented by our anonymous author would ever have worked. It all reminds me of Jeremy Rifkin and his hydrogen based economy. Rifkin understands what is the problem, but the solutions he proposes, well, are a little like the end result of feeding the oxen; but let me not go into that. The point is that our 4th century author does understand that the Roman Empire is in trouble. Actually, he seems to be scared to death because of what’s happening. Read this sentence, I am showing it to you in the original Latin to give you a sense of the flavor of this text.

“In primis sciendum est quod imperium romanum circumlatrantium ubique nationum perstringat insania et omne latus limitum tecta naturalibus locis appetat dolosa barbaries.”

Of course you may not be able to translate from Latin on the spot. For that, being Italian gives you a definite advantage. But let me just point out a word to you:”circumlatrantium” . which refers to barbarians who are, literally, “barking around” the empire’s borders. They are like dogs barking and running around; and not just barking – they are trying hard to get in. It is almost a scene from a horror movie. A nightmare. So the author of “Of matters of war” is thinking of how to get rid of these monsters. But his solutions were not so good. Actually it was just wishful thinking. None of these strange weapons were ever built. Even our 4th century author, therefore, fails completely in understanding what were the real problems of the Empire.

Now, I would like to show you just another document from the time of the Roman Empire. It is “De Reditu suo”, by Rutilius Namatianus. The title means “of his return”. Namatianus was a patrician who lived in the early 5th century; he was a contemporary of St. Patrick, the Irish saint. He had some kind of job with the imperial administration in Rome. It was some decades before the “official” disappearance of the Western Roman Empire; that was in 476, when the last emperor, Romolus Augustulus, was deposed. You may have seen Romulus Augustulus as protagonist of the movie “The Last Legion”. 1Of course that is not a movie that pretends to be historically accurate, but it is fun to think that after so many years we are still interested in the last years of the Roman Empire – it is a subject of endless fascination. Even the book by Namatianus has been transformed into a movie, as you can see in the figure. It is a work of fantasy, but they have tried to be faithful to the spirit of Namatianus’ report. It must be an interesting movie, but it has been shown only in theaters in Italy, and even there for a very short time; so I missed it. But let’s move on.

Namatianus lived at a time that was very close to the last gasp of the Empire. He found that, at some point, it wasn’t possible to live in Rome any longer. Everything was collapsing around him and he decided to take a boat and leave. He was born in Gallia, that we call “France” today, and apparently he had some properties there. So, that is where he headed for. That is the reason for the title “of his return”. He must have arrived there and survived for some time, because the document that he wrote about his travel has survived and we can still read it, even though the end is missing. So, Namatianus gives us this chilling report. Just read this excerpt:

“I have chosen the sea, since roads by land, if on the level, are flooded by rivers; if on higher ground, are beset with rocks. Since Tuscany and since the Aurelian highway, after suffering the outrages of Goths with fire or sword, can no longer control forest with homestead or river with bridge, it is better to entrust my sails to the wayward.”

Can you believe that? If there was a thing that the Romans had always been proud of were their roads. These roads had a military purpose, of course, but everybody could use them. A Roman Empire without roads is not the Roman Empire, it is something else altogether. Think of Los Angeles without highways. “Sic transit gloria mundi” , as the Romans would say; there goes the glory of the world. Namatianus tells us also of silted harbors, deserted cities, a landscape of ruins that he sees as he moves north along the Italian coast.

But what does Namatianus think of all this? Well, he sees the collapse all around him, but he can’t understand it. For him, the reasons of the fall of Rome are totally incomprehensible…. There would be much more to say on this matter, but I think it is enough to say that the Romans did not really understand what was happening to their Empire, except in terms of military setbacks that they always saw as temporary. They always seemed to think that these setbacks could be redressed by increasing the size of the army and building more fortifications. Also, it gives us an idea of what it is like living a collapse “from the inside”. Most people just don’t see it happening – it is like being a fish: you don’t see the water.

What Bardi’s illustration of complex system dynamics and decline make very clear is that Robert Prechter is almost surely correct and collapse is not only unavoidable, but we are already firmly into the decline. One need merely look at the decaying state of American infrastructure to see an echo of the decline of Roman roads; travel is still safe but that may not be the case in another century.

The most important thing to draw from Bardi’s article is the realization that most people, including those at the very top, will find the process incomprehensible and whatever policies are taken will prove to be irrelevant and pointless. As with companies, it is the success of the great societies that sows the seeds of their eventual failure, with Rome it was the limits of legionary utility, with the USA it is more likely to be the limits of trade and immigration utility. It is the continued reliance upon that which made a society strong that tends to prove ultimately fatal because nothing proceeds on linear paths.

One thing the discussion with the free traders has taught me is that most Americans can no more grasp the idea that too much trade is possible any more than most Romans could understand that too much farming or too many legions were possible. After all, those two pillars of the Roman economy were the historical basis of Rome’s original enrichment, so how could a source of enrichment ever prove to be a source of impoverishment, let alone societal decline?

I’ll have more thoughts on this in another post tomorrow.

What’s next, glory holes?

Peep shows are now art:

National Gallery invites ‘voyeurs’ to peek through keyhole at naked woman in bath

Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger took to Twitter to find six women, all called Diana, willing to take turns to be spied upon by the public while they sit naked in a mocked-up bathroom. The work, also called Diana, is inspired by three paintings by Titian which form the centrepiece of the exhibition and features scenes from Greek mythology.

This is obviously an indication that one of the prizes for winning the Turner Prize should be an immediate death sentence. And any artist who voluntarily applies for public funding should be taken out and shot. I’m sure someone can figure out a way to do it artistically and thereby justify federal involvement in the arts.

Seriously, even bankers and pedophiles contribute more constructively to society.

History speeds up

From Zerohedge:

I would also like to quickly note that mainstream economists back in 2011 were predicting the U.S. would reach 101% of GDP by 2021. It is now 2012, only one year later, and we have already crossed the 101% marker.

I may have to rethink that 2033 estimate….

Vanished kingdoms, shifting cultures

“One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if ‘Scottishness’ or ‘Englishness’ were essential constituents of some national genetic code. If this were so, it would never be possible to forge new nations – like the United States of America or Australia – from diverse ethnic elements. The capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated. In reality, just as individuals can go abroad and merge into a foreign community, so a stationary population, if subjected to a changed linguistic and cultural environment, can quite easily be persuaded to follow suit. Dominant cultures are closely connected to dominant power groups. As the balance of power shifts, the balance of cultures shifts as well.”
– Vanished Kingdoms, Norman Davies

This is exactly why I consider it to be so significant that the racial, ethnic, and cultural mix of the USA has been transformed so dramatically since the two major immigration “reforms” in 1965 and 1986. In the course of half a single lifetime, the USA has gone from a white, Christian nation-state to a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-national state. While many people celebrate this, they do so foolishly because they wrongly believe that such transformations are possible without changing all of the aspects of the dominant culture. It’s not that the American people will vanish altogether, but they will become something that can no longer be reasonably considered American, just as the Brythonic Celts of the kingdom of Alt Clud first became “Scottish”, then “British” despite having been ethnically and linguistically distinct.

This is why the USA is now wracked by the same sort of corruption, crime, and legal inequality that occurs in most non-WASP cultures. And this is why we can safely assume that as long as the population mix continues to move towards the polyglot, basic aspects of WASP culture that are assumed to be intrinsic to the geographical location will continue to disappear. In Europe, the nationalism is stronger and the minority populations are smaller, which is why ethnic cleansing of the sort advocated by Greece’s Golden Dawn is the likely outcome, but in the USA, where there is already three, and arguably four, distinct nations, a breakup of the political entity is more probable.

Some are expecting war as a consequence of the failure of the Euro and the coming dissolution of the European Union, but I think it is much more likely to take place in the United States when the people of Aztlan demand their right to self-determination and all the Wilsonian neocons are hoist upon their own petard.

On a related note, the Obama administration is taking the law into its own hands by bypassing Congress and granting amnesty and legal residence to around one million young illegal infiltrators, to use the Israeli term:

The Obama administration will stop deporting and begin granting work permits to younger illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and have since led law-abiding lives. The election-year initiative addresses a top priority of an influential Latino electorate that has been vocal in its opposition to administration deportation policies. The policy change, described to The Associated Press by two senior administration officials, will affect as many as 800,000 immigrants who have lived in fear of deportation…. It tracks closely to a proposal offered by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida as an alternative to the DREAM Act.

The demolition proceeds

Homogamy has never been about the imitation of marriage. The vast majority of gays don’t even want the public pretense of monogamy that “gay marriage” typically entails. The entire political effort has never been much more than an attempt to force the organized Church to sacrifice Christian values and submit to the mores of the secular state. While the American aspect of the movement is vowing up and down that no church will be forced to perform such “marriages”, the spearhead Danish aspect has already made it clear that no resistance of the state-imposed morality will be permitted.

The country’s parliament voted through the new law on same-sex marriage by a large majority, making it mandatory for all churches to conduct gay marriages. Denmark’s church minister, Manu Sareen, called the vote “historic”. “I think it’s very important to give all members of the church the possibility to get married. Today, it’s only heterosexual couples.”

Denmark has been a pioneer in gay rights since 1989, when it became the first country in the world to offer civil unions for gay couples.

This sort of thing is why I am completely relaxed about the coming decline and devastation of the secular West. Seldom has a civilization more fully merited its fate. The secular hypothesis is that a society built upon a foundation of Christian morality can not only survive, but thrive, after systematically demolishing its foundation. Seculars believe they have already proved the validity of the hypothesis by the fact that the societies of the West have not completely crumbled yet, but they forget that they have only removed a portion of the foundation to date and the demolition process continues. The empirical test is not over, indeed, it is barely underway.

Game over

The demographic sun sets on the USA:

After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history. Such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would arrive — signaling a milestone for a nation whose government was founded by white Europeans and has wrestled mightily with issues of race, from the days of slavery, through a civil war, bitter civil rights battles and, most recently, highly charged debates over efforts to restrict immigration….

Minorities accounted for 92 percent of the nation’s population growth in the decade that ended in 2010, Mr. Frey calculated, a surge that has created a very different looking America from the one of the 1950s, when the TV characters Ozzie and Harriet were a national archetype. The change is playing out across states with large differences in ethnic and racial makeup between the elderly and the young. Some of the largest gaps are in Arizona, Nevada, Texas and California, states that have had flare-ups over immigration, school textbooks and priorities in spending. The nonrural county with the largest gap is Yuma County, Ariz., where just 18 percent of people under 20 are white, compared with 73 percent of people over 65, Mr. Frey said.

It is most certainly a milestone, but precisely what does that milestone signify? At the risk of being accused of historicity by Karl Popper, the answer seems fairly obvious. Historical multi-ethnic societies have traditionally been empires, more specifically, empires ruled by hereditary monarchs. And as the ethnic differences grew, those empires, even those sharing the bond of an all-encompassing state religion, tended to break apart on ethnic lines. So, even if we discount any possibility of qualitative differences between the various ethnicities that have now replaced the relatively homogenous white population, we should expect a) a move towards increasingly authoritarian, winner-takes-all, short term-oriented government, and b) an eventual breakup into two or three political entities.

The obvious one, of course, is the split between Hispanic America in the southwest and the rest of the country. However, as we’ve seen with the Euro debacle, once it becomes obvious that one split is on the cards, others will become seen to be increasingly viable. And once the Hispanic portion of the country exercises its legitimate right to self-determination and goes its own way, presumably before 2033, it seems readily apparent that White America will at long last separate into its “liberal” and “conservative” halves when conservative America finally realizes that the country, to say nothing of the nation, was literally unable to survive the self-destructive tendencies of its liberal population. These political separations won’t necessarily require civil war or even large-scale violence – Czechoslovakia peacefully divided into Slovakia and the Czech Republic after 74 years of political union – but in this case, it probably will due to the heavily ideological aspects of the divide.