Back from the Dog Park

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks since Trump’s inauguration, and the Elites that historically have run the government have been set back on their heels by Elon’s DOGE. There are a couple of important dynamics to observe that I wanted to nail down before I forgot about them. Or scrambled in my head.

We’re watching Peter Turchin’s classic scenario of Elite Overproduction play out in real time. What do I think is happening? I think we’re seeing the final fading of the social influence of the old Elites, embodied by the crowds in the Hamptons, against the rising influence of Silicon Valley. That’s not anything close to a novel observation, of course.

But what does it mean from a memetic perspective? Old money, from old fortunes (America’s manufacturing base, as well as oil and other natural resources) has been around long enough that we’re 3-4 generations at a minimum down from the original founders. What THAT means is that the grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even further back have been bubbled up inside their rich cocoons their entire lives, and have lost any contact with reality. The help has known its place for a while, generationally, and in a world with already too many elites, there are no open slots in the Musical Chairs game. We’re seeing luxury beliefs aplenty, as this cohort slowly runs out of money, and makes the case Rob Henderson, in Troubled, made with clarity. More esoteric coding, more insane stated beliefs that don’t match what they do. But they make everything that their lessers do obvious, so the Elite Wannabes can clearly identify who wants in the game.

But it’s No Can Do. The end goal of making people do ridiculous things, like chop off their children’s genitalia, is to make them easier to identify for exclusion. You’re not in the club. And even if you’ve been President, you’re not gonna get in the Club.

And then in rolls Trump with Turchin’s Counter-Elites, determined to take on the elites. Nothing is a larger affront to the Elites than to have others with money expose them for the frauds they are. Money was supposed to buy protection from exposure. And it just isn’t working.

Worse, people like Elon Musk are showing what elites actually spend money on, when given the reins of power. Turns out it’s playing some weird role-playing LARP in other parts of the world, like funding transgender movements in Bangladesh to disrupt the government there. The list of projects funded by agencies like USAID is so absurd, it beggars belief. My favorite had to be donating money to Peru for LGBTQ comics for Peruvian youth. I hypothesize that the reason for the Peruvian angle is it’s likely to include lessons for kids on how to give blow jobs in Quechuan, the native language of many of the Indians in Peru. How can you even make that kind of shit up?

For the most part, the elites have doubled down on the insanity — the war in Ukraine must continue, or Putin will roll tanks through the Fulda Gap. Please. Putin’s tanks don’t roll. They are transported on the Russian rail system to the border. Good luck with that 1000 mile swath into the European homeland. They can’t hardly get 50 miles inside Ukraine. And then there’s the chronic transgender disruptive mischief. America used to sell hot women, Hollywood, and heterosexual sex as a cultural attractor. Now we’re selling castration services, because Biden’s primary cohort of political advisors were a bunch of 20-something troons with purple hair. The chaos oddly enough suited the Elite Old Guard, because they were primarily interested in the chaos serving the arrival of Klaus Schwab as our One World overlord. Bugs are on the menu.

But it made them easy to attack by the counter-elites. And certainly no one save those of us following Elon Musk for a while had any idea how his entry into politics would play. Here’s a note for the novices. Elon wants to GO TO MARS. He really wants to do it, and he realizes that it’s likely a civilizational play, and a once-in-an-eon window. Whether you think Elon has a beautiful mind or not, he can do the energetic calculus. And he’s not going to let a bunch of skiing psychopaths mess up his big view.

This insight is unfathomable to the Elites, who really have rotted on the vine, attempting to keep their endless ski resort vacation going. They’re certainly socially sophisticated. But they’re low- to anti-empathetically evolved. Which means all they can do is scream at Elon that he’s stupid (he’s obviously not) and scream at the rest of us for not going along with their endless longing for collapse to add excitement to their droll lives. None of this means that all the counter-elites are on the upward path for the rest of us. But at least, they’re forced to lip-sync the words. And Elon’s gotta make sure they don’t blow up the Earth before he gets to the Red Planet.

I actually also believe that the Silicon Valley elite, while not being particularly clever themselves, also want to keep the civilizational party rolling. Why? They’re just into hatching their own Next Generation of detuned elites, and they still maintain fantasies that their kids will be able to circulate in public. I fully understand that’s already probably not the case. But they’re maintaining the fantasy, and so have to deal with stepping in human excrement in the middle of San Francisco. As opposed to the old money, which is already living off-world in the Hamptons, or Martha’s Vineyard. That level of empathy the counter-elites have might be enough to get us through, from a complexity perspective. We’ll see.

No better example of the war between old-guard Elites and Counter-Elites could be evinced than the blood warfare in the Kennedy clan — in particular, the crazed attacks by Caroline Kennedy, against cousin Bobby. The conflict is multi-layered. First, you have the memetic implications of an institutionalist (Caroline was a perennial ambassador) and a dedicated personal agency-promoter like RFK Jr. But it goes down to the tribal level. RFK Jr., at least on the surface, is working to elevate the health of the Poors. Which was also a big concern of JFK. And look where that got him. On top of that, RFK Jr. is obviously on testosterone, so my guess is that this conflict goes down to the biological level. And hey — there’s also nothing worse than an apostate, which RFK Jr. most definitely is.

One useful mental model in dealing with all of this is the notion of implicit and explicit corruption. I’m not going to claim this dichotomy for my own, but I’ve certainly seen it afloat around the globe. China, for example, has explicit corruption. You build a skyscraper, and wrap it in that green plastic they’re fond of, and you pay the local officials their 5% of the cost. This is unseemly to us in the U.S., but is accepted because the pay differential between China’s new entrepreneurial elite and its Old Guard of military and party officials is so vast. $20K/year is just not enough to send your One Child to an elite overseas school. And bills have to be paid. Plus, that handle of explicit corruption allows the CCP to yank truly evolutionary actors off the screen when they want. Anyone seen AliBaba’s Jack Ma lately?

That’s very different than the U.S.’s elite manipulation of implicit corruption. Here, we pass a law to create pass-throughs to NGOs, staffed by the Elite’s kids, to play stupid games and win virtuous prizes. All of it is legal, if not exactly above-board. Witness the whole “we’ll have to pass the budget to see what’s in it” school of political gamesmanship. No one has been better in exposing this than Mike Benz, of the Foundation for Freedom Online. Mike is a one-man wrecking ball, directed toward Elites wanting to keep stuff secret but still legal. His Joe Rogan interviews (there are multiples) are all worth listening to. I had the privilege to talk with Mike on an X Spaces, and it was useful. Mike was a career guy in the State Department before going rogue. And what does he do? He follows the money. Which convinced me that maybe it wasn’t just all Agent Smith, when it comes to memetic alignment in the press. Maybe it’s also Cold Hard Cash.

Why do Benz’s various efforts at exposure matter so much? If you are a Peter Turchin fan (and I am) the Elites continue to run the show as long as the Wealth Pump — the set of societal dynamics that transfer money upward to the Elites — still functions. Elon and Trump and the whole kit and caboodle seem destined to shut the last vestige of that down. When you get past 2-3 generations away from the old money, the only way that set of Elites is gonna make money is by keeping the same parasitic scams running off the federal government. They no longer have the ability to innovate. It takes up too much time from hanging out in Aspen or Park City.

That’s an opening for the Counter-Elites to move in, if they can. And while many of the Counter-Elites are nihilistic as well, then there’s Elon. Dude wants to go to Mars. He’s a multi-path and solution thinker, that realizes there are multiple societal, technological, and governmental hands that have to be played to win. He’s got the money. And he’s serious.

The Elites, stuck at the level of development that they’re at, which is basically somewhere close to post-adolescent and watching their Black Rock fund returns, can’t do anything but project onto Elon their wants and desires, which is to look cool inside their circle, and get that 30% ROR on their portfolio, which supports the multiple ski house cotton candy bubble they live in. They can’t conceive of meaning greater than that — which is why they’re chronically projecting on Elon that his primary driver has to be money. And he’s gotta be a Nazi. Bad news, losers. Elon wants to GO TO MARS.

Look at the bright side, normies. The Trump/Elon/Vance/Kennedy shit show is going to eliminate that Elite Overproduction problem. And potentially without war. That’s something we all should be happy about. After the next couple rounds of NGO defunding, a lot of people are going to be learning to code. If they’re lucky.

One final note — the evolutionary axis of civilization runs N/S through development of agency in all people. You can always tell who’s on the downward vector by how they want to control you. Fun fact — memetically speaking, these people simply cannot produce the information a complex society needs. Hell, they can’t understand it themselves. And so we drift towards catastrophic collapse.

That doesn’t mean distributed decision making is painless, nor that it always gets it “right” (whatever that means.) But long-term, this should make us double down on evolving the agency in our young people. It’s the only long bet worth making.