The World Has a Human Capital Problem
The Disasters Will Continue Until IQ Improves
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Things are not going well right now, even in the relatively advanced countries of the West. To begin, let’s take a trip around the world and see where things are going wrong.
In America, foreign crews crash ships into bridges that will never be rebuilt1 as politicians claim earthquakes are caused by climate change2 and the public realizes police department crime data is being fabricated to cover up who commits crimes.3 Speaking of crime, utter incompetents like Fani Willis, Nathan Wade, and Judge Engoron torment Trump, wielding the regime’s state power against its main political opponent. Meanwhile, we never made it back to the moon, science hasn’t advanced much since the middle-late 20th century,4 and Boeing planes have a nasty habit of falling apart in the air.5 As all that goes on, a sword of Damocles hangs over “our democracy”: the debt and unfunded liabilities crises will soon blow up,6 and the government does nothing to even step off of the gas pedal, much less fix the problems.7
Across the pond in Europe, the Airbus turbofan planes hold together better than Boeing’s, but decades of terrible policies mean that now most of Europe is flooded with foreigners who hate it8 and is reaping the whirlwind of that. And speaking of winds, the continent went all in on “green” energy like wind power instead of highly effective nuclear power,9 then slammed the door in Russia’s face, so now it can’t produce enough electricity.10 As a result, its economy is melting far faster than ice caps.11 Worst of all, fertility rates are at rock bottom across the Old World.12
Both America and Europe have trouble building things due to environmental codes,13 allow various agricultural chemicals that are poisoning their populace to be used,14 and haven’t managed to beat the Houthis in Yemen,15 much less lead the Ukrainians to victory.16
Africa is Africa. The elephants are being murdered (though America is partially to blame for this as well),17 what infrastructure was once built by the imperialists rots to dust,18 and famines and other disasters remain common despite the massive amounts of aid shoveled into the continent and the great agricultural advances of the 20th Century.19
Israel somehow managed to turn the world’s October 7th sympathy into a situation where now only the American Establishment remains in its corner.20 Meanwhile, its army is suffering far too high a casualty rate in Gaza,21 and it squanders what goodwill it has left by doing things like filming war crimes22 and bombing aid convoys.23 The Gulf States appear surprisingly competent at first glance, though their inability to defeat the Houthis24 and the ridiculous “Line” city Saudi Arabia is building,25 the least efficient form of city possible, are warning signs that all is not well there. Meanwhile, Assad hangs on to power in Syria, but his country is a disaster, as are Iraq and Lebanon,26 and Turkey suffers from persistently high inflation.27
In Asia, South Korea’s total fertility rate (TFR) is at apocalyptic levels,28 Japan is suffering from letting in Third World migrants29 and has a similarly bad TFR,30 and China is facing a TFR disaster of its own making after decades of One Child policy31 at the same time its real estate-dominated economy hit the rocks.32 Indonesia and the Philippines are following in their centuries-long tradition of producing nothing of note or value, and India is a disaster.33 Indochina has benefitted from American anti-China policies pushing industry into it, but, like Indonesia, contributes little to the world other than cheap goods.
In Central and South America, organized crime runs rampant at nearly every level of society,34 Milei struggles to implement his reforms,35 and Venezuela is in a state of collapse.36 Meanwhile, the Caribbean is somehow even worse, with Haiti under the thumb of cannibal gangs37 and Jamaica the deadliest country in the world.38
There are a few bright spots, most of them functional monarchies able to avoid democracy’s pitfalls and the deadly whims of tyrants.39 In Europe, Lichtenstein is governed well by a monarchy that has near-absolute power and uses it prudently,40 and both Viktor Orban’s Hungary41 and Putin’s Russia42 have avoided the worst issues of America and Western Europe. In Central America, Bukele’s El Salvador is a beacon of hope,43 and has carried out his reforms effectively.44 Singapore, in the Far East, is generally successful,45 though its low TFR is cause for concern.46 Similarly, some non-state actors still accomplish great feats; the private space industry in America, for example, is impressive.47
What happened? Why are a few places and companies succeeding while the rest fade into a soft grey of continual decline? In short, the steam engine of the world died with Belle Epoque Europe in the muddy fields of Flanders. Then, after the few empires that accomplished most of the world’s achievements blew their civilization to pieces in two World Wars, America committed seppuku by going all in on critical theory, DEI, and other competence-shredding policies,48 pulling the plug on what could have been the new engine of the world.49 Since then, competence has been in a race to the bottom everywhere except for in the few places that, like Space X in industry or Singapore as a country, both have the resources to attract the best and the fortitude to turn the rest away.
That is a major problem because, since democracy overtook aristocracy, meritocratic competence has been upon what the regime’s legitimacy rests, and the tool with which it has bettered the world. Without a laser focus on merit and talent, the world is drifting back toward stagnation at best and decay at worst, though without the benefit of a prudent aristocracy to keep democracy’s worst instincts at bay as it does so.50 In short, the aristocrats ruled because they had the superior brains and brawn that made their right to rule obvious. Then democracy made meritocracy the basis of legitimacy. But now that meritocracy is dead, murdered by DEI (or should we say DIE?). The result is a global competence crisis. Such is what will be discussed below.
The Right to Rule and the Shift to Meritocracy
An abbreviated, somewhat simplified history of how we got here is in order. Some things are compressed and simplified, but hopefully, it serves as a helpful lens through which one can view what went wrong as the world largely failed to make the transition from the age of aristocracy to the age of democracy in a way that prioritizes human achievement.
From the first farming societies until the mid-Victorian period, the aristocrats that ruled had good cause to do so. As former hunter-gatherers were forced into crowded, filthy cities and began farming,51 their diets deteriorated. People supposed to eat mainly meat, fruit, nuts, and roots, suddenly found themselves eating grains near-exclusively, and that stunted their growth.52 Meanwhile, their rulers, living off the surplus generated by agriculture, grew weak from sloth rather than poor diet. That left such communities open to attack from stronger societies outside the walls, and attacked they were.
First, in the Neolithic age, the Indo-Europeans from the steppe, chariot-riding warriors whose diets consisted mainly of milk and meat,53 descended onto the settled Early European Farmer societies and wiped them out. Their high-fat, high-protein diets gave them a substantial advantage in terms of size and muscle mass.54 See that size advantage in the graphic below (sedentary farmers on the left, Indo-European pastoralists on the right):
Using that advantage, they steamrolled everywhere from the Aegean, where they became the chariot-riding rulers of the Homeric myths,55 to India, where they cemented their rule with the caste system, one that lives on to this day (the reason higher-caste Indians have lighter skin stems from their Indo-European descent).56 Those warriors were the original aristocrats, and they were the rulers of the Bronze Age, with the vast reach of their conquest evidenced by language: they’re the reason Gaelic and Sanskrit have similar roots.57 In short, the Indo-European conquerors who became the aristocrats of myth everywhere from Homeric Greece to early India ruled on the basis of the superiority granted them by their superior diets.
That pattern then repeated itself throughout history. Whether the meat-eating and milk-drinking Mongols crushing the rice-eating Chinese,58 the meat-eating German tribes overpowering the decayed, Late Empire Romans, or the Huns laying waste to wide swathes of Europe, those who conquered did so mainly on the basis of better diet giving them the ability to take and hold onto power. And, in the case of Greece and Rome, it led to some of the most intelligent and talented societies to ever exist. Francis Galton, for example, calculated the average IQ of ancient Athenians to be around 115-125,59 at least one standard deviation higher than even modern America, but likely closer to two.60 For reference, that means we are to Ancient Athens what Mali or the Congo are to America.
The cycle largely ended with the Northmen and their civilized descendants, the Normans. Those terrors from beyond the North Wind, buoyed by their better diets and fighting prowess, crashed into Europe, Russia, the Byzantine Empire, and eventually all of the Mediterranean with a vengeance, easily overpowering those who stood before them. In France, they battered the Carolingians to a pulp and seized the duchy of Normandy.61 Once acquainted with the stirrup and the power it gave heavy cavalry after settling in Normandy, they were unstoppable.62 In Sicily and Southern Italy, a few Norman knights like Robert Guiscard threw out the Muslims and Byzantines and took over all before them.63 In England, they were fended off somewhat by Alfred (an Anglo-Saxon, so also a meat-eating German) and his son, but by the time of Aethelred the Unready,64 Anglo-Saxon society was defeated by the Northmen. Further wars of conquest in which the grain-eating peasantry was won as a spoil of war resulted, culminating in William the Conqueror, a Norman, defeating Harold at Hastings.65
Once the Norman conquests were complete, the European nobility was settled, and largely remained distinct from the average commoner because of the height, strength, and intelligence advantages that were granted by a better diet.66 There were imbecilic and weak rulers, of course, Edward II being a notorious example,67 as was Henry VI.68 But, generally, the nobility had the brains and brawn to rule society, similarly to how the Greeks of yore were both brilliant and incredibly strong. As a result, Europe’s peasantry generally accepted those nobles as the rulers (not that they had much choice).
That state of things largely continued through the middle of the 19th Century, with the exception of America (even the Italian republics and Dutch Republic were generally ruled by aristocrats), as it lacked the Malthusian problems of Europe that led to the Old World’s ruling class made obvious by its difference in stature and wit. Otherwise, the nobles both thought they had and were accepted by the populace as having the Mandate of Heaven. Even during Victoria’s wars, for example, the officers were noticeably taller and healthier than the men.69 The Parliament was composed near-exclusively of nobles, as they had the time to focus on learning and received enough nutrition as children to grow into intelligent adults.70
With that power, they built the great cathedrals that still awe us with their beauty, raised the beautiful country houses and chateaus that are yet to be equaled in their aesthetics or splendor, and forged the great empires that brought rule of law, global commerce, and modern infrastructure to most of the world. What’s more, they did so in a generally competent manner.71
However, that system broke down as democracy advanced in the latter half of the 19th Century. Increasing societal wealth meant the restless commons wanted a share of the political action. Further, though most of the day laborers were still underfed, the urban middle class and yeomanry were not, and steadily bettered themselves.72 So, when granted the opportunities of the great to educate themselves or head to school, they proved just as bright, if not more so, as the sons of the peers. They then used those brains to build large industrial and merchant enterprises, as the great lords generally didn’t deign to dirty their hands with commercial activity,73 and their newfound wealth created yet more pressure for political and social change.
As discussed in our article on democracy and Barabbas,74 those pressures led, after the end of Lord Salisbury’s time as Prime Minister, to a Liberal government composed of commoners rather than gentlemen and which used its power to tax the great and powerful and slash their power.
Though this history has largely focused on English society, much the same played eventually played out across Europe, particularly after the First World War brought the great houses to a bloody end and shattered the belle epoque everywhere from St. Petersburg to Provence. The nobles lost their Mandate of Heaven as the populace gradually became theoretically as capable of governing well as the aristocracy. Simultaneously, great advances in infantry weaponry meant nobles and the sort of shock cavalry with which they had cemented their rule were outdated and could be defeated by the commons; democracy triumphed on the battlefields and in the voting booths.
The democratic revolution, in turn, gave opportunities for those with more talent than heraldry to act on their talents and rise in power. Meritocracy blossomed from the early 20th Century on and society raced upward as it gradually became more equal. Or, at least, that was the hope. Within just a few decades of the Second World War, the civilization that had survived for centuries is now on the brink of collapse after admitting invaders and largely failing to keep its economic engine going. So, what happened?
The American Experiment and the Triumph, then Failure of Democracy and Meritocracy
To answer the question of what went wrong, we must turn to America as a case study of how meritocracy turned in on itself once those who attained success were uncomfortable with it.
As Europe built the glittering civilization of the Victorian Age on the back of nobility and centuries of civilizational capital, America forged a new path. First, it had to decide what sort of society it would be. Would the Republic follow in the footsteps of medieval Europe and be a land of aristocratic planters, yeoman farmers, and slaves, as the South wanted, or a land of Yankee work ethic, Big Business, and commerce, as the North wanted? That question was answered on blood-stained fields of battle from Texas to Pennsylvania, and the Yankee vision won.
After winning, it built an economic engine of the likes the world had never seen. Carnegie and Morgan built American steel, displacing the once-powerful British steel industry.75 Rockefeller built Standard Oil into a global behemoth that powered an increasingly oil-driven future.76 Skyscrapers rose in New York, steel rails crossed a continent, and vast ranges of the West were devoted to growing grain and beef that fed not just this continent, but others.
Powering that titanic growth was a meritocratic system. While the Old World flaunted its titles and shot grouse on the Scottish moors, dirt-poor common men in America like Rockefeller and Carnegie built vast industrial empires. Even relatively aristocratic JP Morgan, with its close ties to the Old World, was known for admitting new men who showed talent.77
That American system of finding the best and helping ensure their advancement continued through the 1950s. While Europe had millennia of civilizational capital to call upon, America had an entire continent of well-fed, hard-working talent to call upon. And call upon it America did, with established men like Patton and new men like Eisenhower leading armies, boys from the cornfields of the mid-West walking on the moon, and engineers from El Segundo getting them there. What America did well was plucking the best men of talent from whatever small town in which they lived and putting them in a position where they could be someone, if only they put in the effort. Whether a Boston Brahmin or a boy from a sod house in Kansas, if they could be the cream that rose to the top, they generally would. That was a very different situation than in Europe, where the titles of old still dominated most things into the 20th century,78 and held onto a large degree of capital power, if not political power, to the present.79
That system broke down by the 1960s; even as the system that powered America put men on the moon, it turned on itself in dramatic and terrible fashion. As Europe had largely run out of steam after World War I and then was regressing after World War II, America confronted Civil Rights and the Vietnam War and changed itself dramatically, and much for the worse. Instead of armies of rich and poor alike marching to battle, anyone in America who could pay for college or knew someone to get a medical deferment stayed out of war did so.80 Thus, while the middle class and rich partied it up in college, the poor were sent to die in the jungles of Vietnam, with the government never articulating why they needed to do so. That’s not to say they were the only ones who fought; many men of all classes volunteered and did their duty in the bravest of ways. But the draft fell largely on the poor, outlining class distinctions in a way not present since rich Yankees like JP Morgan bought deferments from service in the Civil War.81
Meanwhile, the civil rights movement was used not as a battering ram for meritocracy, as some still hope and believe, but rather as an anti-meritocratic force that eventually created specially protected classes and made it easier for less qualified people of certain races to find and take advantage of opportunities than more qualified but discriminated against groups.82
Together, the shifts of the period came to mean that white men without connections, even if highly competent and qualified, had trouble finding jobs, getting access to the best educational opportunities, or getting selected for important projects. What had been a society that plucked the best and brightest out of their towns and into positions where they could do great things and make America better turned into something new. Instead of a talent detector, the university system and Big Business became a degree and HR job mill for “oppressed” classes into which an ever-smaller sliver of the well-connected could slip if they mumbled the right pieties of the ruling regime. Describing that process, Palladium noted:83
The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.
By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.
Exacerbating the human capital problem is that those who do succeed under the current system are generally overworked and underpaid in dangerous and highly expensive cities. Thus, rather than settling down in the suburbs with a spouse and building a family in their mid-twenties, even the successful are grinding away in some corporate sweatshop and still unable to afford a house and kids.84 That, in turn, means the TFR of the bright has plummeted, turning places that were once vibrant centers of talent into IQ shredders.85 Many issues are involved their, of course, with everything from agricultural chemicals like atrazine to the gradual dominance of two-income households to mass migration making wages lower and real estate more expensive.86 But, together, they mean that the people who should be having kids so that there is a next generation of smart people largely aren’t. Instead, we have Idiocracy-type reproductive patterns.
By now, we’re feeling the full brunt of all those changes. Boeing is a good example of what has happened to America generally. When Boeing planes aren’t falling apart because of DEI-related incompetence, they’re falling apart or never getting off the ground because of idiotic and sclerotic management focused on the stock price rather than engineering.87 What was once a vibrant, dominant American company is now a laughingstock, and its entire apparatus is to blame. DEI has poisoned the well and what wholesome parts would otherwise remain were destroyed by gross mismanagement. Like in Atlas Shrugged, there are a few, increasingly older, competent people left…but not enough to stop disasters from occurring.
Across America, that same process has played out time and time again. DEI from grade school through corporate hiring practices means many qualified people are discouraged, shut out, or both. Further, general hostility toward non-upper-class whites means the people who used to be plucked out of obscurity because of their smarts and talents no longer are. Palladium, describing that process, noted:88
Diversity KPIs are a tool to embarrass leaders and teams that are not meeting their diversity targets. Given that most organizations are hierarchical and pyramidal, combined with the fact that America was much whiter 50 years ago than it was today, it is unsurprising that senior leadership teams are less diverse than America as a whole—and, more pertinently, than their own junior teams.
The combination of a pyramid-shaped org chart and a senior leadership team where white men often make up 80 percent or more of the team means that the imposition of an aggressive KPI sends a message to the layer below them: no white man in middle management will likely ever see a promotion as long as they remain in the organization. This is never expressed verbally. Rather, those overlooked figure it out as they are passed over continually for less competent but more diverse colleagues. The result is demoralization, disengagement, and over time, departure.
Democracy replaced aristocratic leadership with meritocratic leadership, but then lacked the follow-through to make that work over the long term, and now the competence crisis is hitting.89
The Human Capital Crisis
Altogether, those terrible policies have created a human capital crisis of the sort the Old World largely didn’t need to worry about after the Normans. A settled aristocracy with obvious brains and brawn advantages both has the ability to rule and the force to back it up; there is neither a better alternative nor an easy way to replace it. Further, as the aristocracy is large enough for internal competition, iron sharpens iron and the key players better themselves competing, meaning it doesn't get sclerotic.
Things are different in a democracy. It needs a continual well of renewal from across the country and its component groups. Otherwise, a ruling caste settles, angering the democratic populace. Worse, if there is no renewal, everyone gets dumber. America currently has managed to effect both. Everyone is getting dumber, and an “aristocracy of pull,” as Ayn Rand called it,90 has settled into power, able to place its kids in the positions others can’t get into thanks to DEI and affirmative action mandates. The result has been a massive crisis of human capital, with structures rotting for lack of competence. Palladium, describing that process, wrote:91
Think of the American system as a series of concentric rings with the government at the center. Directly surrounding that are the organizations that receive government funds, then the nonprofits that influence and are subject to policy, and finally business at the periphery. Since the era of the Manhattan Project and the Space Race, the state capacity of the federal government has been declining almost monotonically.
While this has occurred for a multitude of reasons, the steel girders supporting the competency of the federal government were the first to be exposed to the saltwater of the Civil Rights Act and related executive orders. Government agencies, which are in charge of overseeing all the other systems, have seen the quality of their human capital decline tremendously since the 1960s. While the damage to an agency like the Department of Agriculture may have long-term deadly consequences, the most immediate danger is at safety-critical agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
…
Given the sheer size of the U.S. military in both manpower and budget dollars, it should not come as a surprise that the diversity push has also affected the readiness of this institution. Following three completely avoidable collisions of U.S. Navy warships in 2017 and a fire in 2020 that resulted in the scuttling of USS Bonhomme Richard, a $750 million amphibious assault craft, two retired marines conducted off-the-record interviews with 77 current and retired Navy officers. One recurring theme was the prioritization of diversity training over ship handling and warfighting preparedness. Many of them openly admit that, given current issues, the U.S. would likely lose an open naval engagement with China. Instead of taking the criticism to heart, the Navy commissioned “Task Force One Navy,” which recommended deemphasizing or eliminating meritocratic tests like the Officer Aptitude Rating to boost diversity. Absent an existential challenge, U.S. military preparedness is likely to continue to degrade.
The decline in the capacity of government contractors is likewise obvious, with the largest contractors being the most directly impacted. The five largest contractors—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon Company, and Northrop Grumman—will all struggle to maintain competency in the coming years.
…
While all businesses subject to federal law must prioritize diversity over competency at some level, the problem is worse at publicly-traded corporations for reasons both obvious and subtle. The obvious reason is that larger companies present larger targets for EEOC actions and discrimination lawsuits with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. Corporations have logically responded by hiring large teams of HR professionals to preempt such lawsuits. Over the past several decades, HR has evolved from simply overseeing onboarding to involvement in every aspect of hiring, promotions, and firings, seeing them all through a political and regulatory lens.
The more subtle reason for pressure within publicly-traded companies is that they require ongoing relationships with a spiderweb of banks, credit ratings agencies, proxy advisory services, and most importantly, investors. Given that the loss of access to capital is an immediate death sentence for most businesses, the CEOs of publicly-traded companies tend to push diversity over competency even when the decline in firm performance is clear. CEOs would likely rather trade a small drag on profits margins than a potentially career-ending scandal from pushing back.
…
Promoting diversity over competency does not simply affect new hires and promotion decisions. It also affects the people already working inside of America’s systems. Morale and competency inside U.S. organizations are declining. Those who understand that the new system makes it hard or impossible for them to advance are demoralized, affecting their performance. Even individuals poised to benefit from diversity preferences notice that better people are being passed over and the average quality of their team is declining. High performers want to be on a high-performing team. When the priorities of their organizations shift away from performance, high performers respond negatively.
The result of that, of course, is that the remaining competent people tune out or drop out, worsening the competence spiral:92
Some demoralized employees—like James Damore in his now-famous essay, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”—will directly push back against pro-diversity arguments. Like James, they will be fired. Older, demoralized workers, especially those who are mere years from retirement, are unlikely to point out the decline in competency and risk it costing them their jobs. Those who have a large enough nest egg may simply retire to avoid having to deal with the indignity of having to attend another Inclusive Leadership seminar.
As older men with tacit knowledge either retire or are pushed out, the burden of maintaining America’s complex systems will fall on the young. Lower-performing young men angry at the toxic mix of affirmative action (hurting their chances of admission to a “good school”) and credentialism (limiting the “good jobs” to graduates of “good schools”) are turning their backs on college and white-collar work altogether.
This is the continuation of a trend that began over a decade ago. High-performing young men will either collaborate, coast, or downshift by leaving high-status employment altogether. Collaborators will embrace “allyship” to attempt to bolster their chances of getting promoted. Coasters realize that they need to work just slightly harder than the worst individual on their team. Their shirking is likely to go unnoticed and they are unlikely to feel enough emotional connection to the organization to raise alarm when critical mistakes are being made. The combination of new employees hired for diversity, not competence, and the declining engagement of the highly competent sets the stage for failures of increasing frequency and magnitude.
Altogether, the departure of competent people from the system means that it is starved of human capital. Thanks to a decade of easy money, there’s more than enough financial capital sloshing around for building factories, creating new technology, or even exploring and settling the solar system.93 But a plethora of financial capital means nothing if there’s no human capital. Even if the government were to appropriate trillions to NASA, for example, it wouldn’t matter. All the Wernher von Brauns are gone,94 replaced with “hidden figures” by government policy. When applied generally, as Palladium describes above, the issue is clear: the human brainpower necessary to make great things happen, or even to maintain complex systems and make ordinary things happen, no longer exists. Decades of affirmative action discrimination wiped it away, whether by screening people out of top jobs and programs or by depressing them to the point of quitting if they somehow make it into the top jobs and programs.
In the end, what their leaving means is complex systems are collapsing for lack of human capital:95
The idea that competent organizations can devolve to a level where the risk of normal accidents becomes unacceptably high is barely addressed. In other words, rather than being taken as absolutes, complexity and tightness should be understood to be relative to the functionality of the people and systems that are managing them. The U.S. has embraced a novel question: what happens when the men who built the complex systems our society relies on cease contributing and are replaced by people who were chosen for reasons other than competency?
The answer is clear: catastrophic normal accidents will happen with increasing regularity. While each failure is officially seen as a separate issue to be fixed with small patches, the reality is that the whole system is seeing failures at an accelerating rate, which will lead in turn to the failure of other systems.
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The path of least resistance will be the devolution of complex systems and the reduction in the quality of life that entails. For the typical resident in a second-tier city in Mexico, Brazil, or South Africa, power outages are not uncommon, tap water is probably not safe to drink, and hospital-associated infections are common and often fatal. Absent a step change in the quality of American governance and a renewed culture of excellence, they prefigure the country’s future.
Problematically, much of the world is having similar issues. England is sclerotic and is importing millions upon millions of foreigners, very few of whom are future Sir Isaac Newtons. China has an even worse version of the “aristocracy of pull” dynamic,96 and its population is decreasing thanks to the One Child policy. The DEI race communism has now sunk into most countries, making it hard for ethnic Europeans to advance, a problem given their generally higher IQs than non-ethnic Europeans. Thus, both the populations and those ruling them are getting dumber,97 with little hope of renewal in sight.
Those issues, either separately or combined, depending on a particular country or region’s neuroses, explain most of what is going on right now. Israel taking false step after false step. America letting manageable problems like immigration and the debt turn into potentially civilization-ending bombs while its foreign policy is a disaster. Brazil being a shitshow.
All of those problems could be solved by competent people, just as Boeing could theoretically make planes that fly without falling apart. But, though avoidable, all those disasters are happening because the smart people are dying out because of public policy and social pressures, similar to how the aristocracy nearly died because of government policy.98
Theoretically, that can be reversed. The West got smarter over time and could get so again. But to do so would involve seriously examining the issue, including the “third rail” DEI and affirmative action components, being determined to address the problem no matter what. Unfortunately, no one with any degree of power or proximity to power, with the exceptions of Vivek, Erik Prince, and some members of the PayPal Mafia, such as Peter Thiel,99 have shown any willingness to do so. So, instead, we’ll just get Idiocracy but with more overt anti-white racism.
See, Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew
See The Aristocracy in England by Beckett
See The Aristocracy in England by Beckett
See American Colossus by HW Brands
See Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Chernow
See The House of Morgan by Chernow
See The Aristocracy in England by Beckett
See The Case for Space and The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin