history

Iran, The Complexity Crisis, and War

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 6 Comments
Weippe Prairie, North Central Idaho – to the left of the barn is a 2000′ deep canyon

As I write this, for those that, in the future, won’t be able to place the date, we are still in the middle of Israel and Iran bombing and launching missiles at each other. Last night, there was a declared ceasefire brokered, or imposed (depending on your perspective) by Donald Trump, after airstrikes on the nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan in Iran. For context, we are in such a bizarre blending of the information space, I decided to write to give some context for people hearing absurd things about the state of Iran.

I write this as someone with a profound personal connection to Iran. My father was a Tudegh member back in the early ’50s — the Iranian Communist party — that supported Mohammed Mossadegh, the moderate and truly progressive leader that was overthrown by the CIA in 1953. Led by Kermit Roosevelt, the coup installed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as the king/dictator as the leader of Iran. The secret police in Iran, called Savak, and allied with our own CIA, killed my uncle during this time period, though I’m unsure exactly of the timeline. My father, a revolutionary himself, tells the story of how he came to leave Iran thusly. He was standing before a checkpoint with a briefcase full of pamphlets, and realized that if he crossed that checkpoint and got discovered, Savak would shoot him on sight.

So he threw his satchel in the ditch, turned around, and started the process to take him to America – the very country that was working so diligently to kill him. My father was a doctor, and at the same time all this chaos was occurring, East Coast hospitals were sweeping major metropolitan areas in Iran to recruit physicians who would be brought to these same medical facilities. They would occupy a role as kind of “super-nurses” — indentured, but not given staff positions at the hospitals, so their immigration status would remain in limbo. It would only be by marrying my mother, a poor girl from Dickinson, Texas, and then moving to rural Ohio that he would become a citizen of the United States. In spite of all the carnage, my father was profoundly an assimilative immigrant. During his career, he estimated he delivered over 4000 babies, and more than paid back his debt to the U.S.

The situation in Iran that led him to leaving, though, is accurately described in the book All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer. Why my father made the choice that he did, at that checkpoint, is given context by Kinzer’s book, and I highly recommend, if you want to understand the current situation, that you read it. In 1953, there was a wave of anti-colonial sentiment moving through this part of the world, and the short version is that populist wave led Mossadegh to get elected. And once elected, he nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP) which then started the intrigues led by our own CIA.

Here is the key point. My father, and his entire country, had just passed through the Depression, as well as WWII. People were literally starving, and my father was righteous. The colonial powers were still controlling key elements of most of the world. Winston Churchill, as former Vice Lord of the Admiralty in Great Britain had over 20 years prior made the monumental decision to move the Royal Navy to being oil-powered instead of coal-powered. And that oil was to come from Iran.

The problem was that then, as now, Iran was split into three primary demographic categories. My father, as a doctor, was one of the urban elites. There was the clerisy and mullahs. And lastly, there were the rural poor, alternately insular, and easily swayed by the mullahs. The difference between the elites my father circulated with (our last name itself means ‘Doctor’ in Farsi) and the current progressive elites running our own country into the ground, was that they circulated with the poor, primarily with military service. My father KNEW the problems of the peasantry in Iran. And while much of his history is extremely fuzzy, one point he made emphatically during my childhood was that while he believed that the poor could be helped, they could not be SAVED. When he made that decision at that checkpoint on that fateful day, he had witnessed the Iranian poor lining up behind the Shah.

And he said “screw it.”

There are all sorts of descriptive holes in my father’s story, that I’ll never know. That he showed up at Ellis Island, supposedly never having seen a flush toilet (likely an apocryphal, funny family myth) is indisputable. His manifest from the S.S. France is below.

But we’ll never know about his larger journey, across Turkey, eastern Europe, and finally France, leading to the port of Le Havre, in France, where he purchased his ticket and sailed to America. Like many people with traumatic pasts, he refused to speak of it, save in those few stories.

Modern Iran has structurally not changed much from the Iran my father lived in, as far as social demographic castes go. There are still the urban elites, who are highly educated. The plight of the peasantry has somewhat improved, though they are still backward and prone to believing in whatever the mullahs tell them. Treatment of women, which used to be abominable in my father’s time (my father’s family had a functional slave girl they had purchased out of humane considerations,) remains terrible, aside from the respite the urban class felt during the Shah’s reign. The old Shah, and his father, were tyrants only barely modified by Western influence. And here’s an interesting catch — the reason that the mullahs hated the Shah so much was for one of the few good things the Shah did — land reform in the countryside, which took away holdings from the faith.

The urban elites currently in Iran are living as Iranians for literal thousands of years have lived — in the context of a hidden, if not exactly secret society. Even after the sanctions, and the turmoil present from 1979 and the Islamic Revolution, the middle class has found ways to get by. Iranians are hooked on education — and unlike most of their Arab cousins, they are serious about it. Requests to study in the U.S. come regularly into my email account at the university. Educated Iranians are not particularly nationalistic at all, and so the various speculations that if the Iranian nuclear sites have been destroyed, the literati will rally to rebuild Iran’s nuclear capacity is highly unlikely. The nuclear program in Iran is a paranoid fantasy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the mullahs, who like all disordered religious leaders, dream of the apocalypse. The various scientists participate, I believe, somewhat reluctantly. And as with all hostage situations, implicit or explicit, their mania is tempered. And especially so — regardless of whether sites like Fordow have been completely destroyed, you might imagine being a nuclear scientist and walking into that venue and seeing what had to be massive destruction. It’s not going to fire you up to repeat the B-2 scenario on your head. This time, you just got lucky. And for those true believers, there are Mossad agents circulating, anxious to put a bullet in your brain.

Who actually controls Iran will become clear in the weeks to come. I happen to believe that the IRGC has more in common with paranoid English majors at Microsoft than ISIS. Iran is a western venue, and people like their creature comforts. The IRGC knows that without the help of the educated technical elites, there is no functional economy in Iran, and like those English majors, they cannot reproduce, nor maintain the tech. necessary for making the domestic situation work. Pictures I see of the IRGC also indicate a far greater age spread than in a situation like ISIS, which consisted largely of 20-30-something male transplants from across the Islamic world. Revolution sounds great when you’re a 20-something year old loser from Dagestan. Less appealing when you’re 50, and living in a relatively urbanized country like Iran. Remember that the Islamic Revolution has been going on now since 1979. That means the folks that took over the U.S. Embassy have more in common with our idiot boomers at a No Kings rally, worried about losing their version of Social Security, than any fiery idealistic radicalism they possessed in their youth.

One of the things about the current news cycle that is absolutely infuriating to me is the comparison of Iran, and its potentials, to other Arab states. This isn’t some strange point of personal pride. Iran has literally a 4000 year old sedentary culture. Cities are multiple, and highly regionalized. Tehran has a population of 9 million people; Isfahan, close to 2 million, and Mashhad 3 million, to name only a few. Contrast this to Iraq, whose civilization was centered around Baghdad (8 million) or in Libya, Tripoli (~1.3 million). Urban culture — not tribal culture runs Iran, and it has been that way for thousands of years. And it matters. Even in places like the oil-rich UAE, tribal sheikhs sit on top of their dragon pile of gold and skyscrapers. Iran may be benighted by the destructive rule of the mullahs. But it remains a distributed empire, with a strong intellectual component.

One of the other prevailing myths circulating in the argument about Iran is the notion “if we bomb it, they already know how to build it, so they’ll just build it back.” That is emphatically not true — and I’ll put my engineering professor-working in nuclear nonproliferation hat to address it. The most important thing to understand is that there is no new tech in creating a nuclear weapon. Making them small is another thing entirely. But since 1945, the world has known how to make nuclear fire.

The problem with making one, though, is that it requires a complex manufacturing operation to create enough fissile material to make a bomb. And that requires social cohesion and coordination. One of the wildest things I learned about making nuclear weapons is the delivery system is only a modest part of the problem. If you create a bomb, you can load it on a 747, fly it into any major airport, and detonate it. The real problem is creating enough fissile material. And that requires a complex supply chain — with lots of people talking to each other, in a coordinated fashion. Hardly a trivial problem in such a factionalized country, as I’ve described above. When you add a dollop of Mossad agents into the mix, your odds of success drop precipitously. It’s not that it can’t be done. Pakistan showed that it could. But it is non-trivial.

The images in the press of a monolithic culture immediately recovering and pulling this off are false. There is no overarching enemy that most Iranians view in fact. Only the mullahs chanting “Death to America”. All the rest of the Iranian elite want to move to L.A. 700,000 already live there. One of the most taboo subjects to discuss in the US is the effect of brain drain on underdeveloped parts of the world, to developed nations. Do you really think that the 700,000 Iranians living in L.A. were formally peasants in Iran? How might that affect the current dynamic?

One of the most important things for perspective to read are descriptions of the various Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in other countries like Iraq and Libya. Iraq, before the Gulf Wars, was a nation centered in Baghdad, but mostly tribal, with coherence provided by the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein. Libya was not much different, though I happen to have a more ambivalent view toward Muammar Qaddafi. Don’t believe in the factionalized view? Look what happened when those regimes collapsed. Libya now has open slave markets — and that’s a tribal artifact. It’s simply not conceivable in modern Iran — no matter how much you hate the mullahs.

And the nuclear enrichment sites in those two countries? Portraits of mass disarray. I remember descriptions of bundles of tubes found, scattered like chopsticks. And that was without any major bombing. We don’t understand the role of social order in creating manufactured tech. And it shows. There’s a reason, for example, that Taiwan is the center of silicon manufacturing for the world. It’s an outcome of 50 years of social grooming of an entire population to get to the level of discipline and coordination to pull it off. But that kind of thing isn’t easily transferable. Iran has far more tech and ability than its Arab neighbors. I wouldn’t completely discount it. But rebuilding a series of bombed out facilities is not trivial. If you don’t think there’s mass confusion in Iran right now, you’re off your rocker.

Confusion in the information space — years of gaslighting regarding Presidential action — has really created many of the problems in the West in even understanding what’s going on now. My estimated date for mass confusion traces back to the ’80s. But it was truly in high gear by the early ’90s, and was profiled in one of my favorite books by William Greider — Who Will Tell the People? The Betrayal of American Democracy We’ve existed in a gaslit world where we have been so inundated with disordered myths, we can hardly think of any action that might work unless we cut in the elite class to make money off our ignorance.

One of the most prominent was started by Secretary of State, Colin Powell, with his famous quote regarding countries — “If you take a government and you break it, you own it.” What Powell was really advocating for was the nascent growth of the Blob — the NGO-industrial complex deeply involved with ostensible nation-building. USAID-sponsored organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy have always made bank of creating chaos– and so they have.

And it’s the seething from this contingent that is an enormous part of the problem. Trump is using our military at the time of this writing in a hegemonic, punishment-based, but fundamentally goal-based mode. He doesn’t intend to continue the war. He wants to punish Iran enough, and remove enough strike capacity so he doesn’t have to worry about them any more. Think Rome invading Carthage. And while what Powell said isn’t entirely wrong, the notion that we have to put ground troops into Iran to achieve our own goals as a nation is also wrong. Punishment that scares whatever group of elites running the show is not such a bad notion.

And Iran with a bomb is a frightening prospect. You better believe that the upper-class Iranian elites smoking Gitanes and eating baklava won’t be the ones deciding to nuke Tel Aviv. They may be key in making the bomb. But it will be culled fanatics from the IRGC flying the 747 into the city center. We’ve been fighting an 46 year war with Iran already. Taking out a key military capacity is in everyone’s interest.

The deep memetic problem we are actually having is that we’ve had that 40+ years of our own gaslighting governance, which has alternately funneled enormous amounts of money to our own nation’s elites, who continually dream of being let into the club of global power brokers, and the sycophantic press corps wanting to accompany them on their private jets. Someone like Trump is an ice-cold bucket of water over their head, in that he says he’s going to do something, and then acts on it. And then ends our participation.

But the problem goes deeper. Once a public is gaslit long enough, in a complex world, we lose the cognitive ability to even come up with alternate scenarios about what might actually be happening. I was talking to one of my extended network, who is heavily involved in the nuclear sector. We have a publicly accepted scenario regarding Israel’s attacks on Iran that they have been primarily air-directed, with the aim of that campaign to take out Iran’s air defenses, which seems to have worked. But my friend maintains that most of Iran’s air defenses, though, were not taken out from the air. They were taken out by sleeper commandos on the ground. And that there are a whole range of possibilities had Trump not acted to bomb Fordos and Natanz, including commando raids by the Israeli army to remove those threats. Planefuls of commandos could’ve landed in those remote locations and done the job that the bunker busters did in silence and stealth. It could be that Trump was compelled to act, to profoundly mitigate the broader inflammatory scenario of Jewish troops on the rampage inside a Muslim country.

And another surprise twist — along with Iran’s air defenses, apparently the same commandos focused on removing Iran’s attack helicopter fleet, which was an apparent success. Why does this matter? Attack helicopters are key in suppressing any armed rebellion. Perhaps not lethal enough to take on an advanced military, like the US. But plenty powerful enough to annihilate a homegrown insurgent population. It is highly likely that Israeli, as well as US planners, put a homegrown uprising on their bingo card, and created contingencies to make it potentially successful — if it happened.

None of this is surprising for those of us familiar with the capacity, if not the details of US military (as well as Israeli) planning. But we see more profound failure in our press corps, as well as uninformed members on both sides of the Congressional aisle. Intentionally or not, their lack of complexity in their thinking contributes to the crisis. Why? Simplistic messages travel virally far more quickly throughout the media. And no one’s had the chance to make a blockbuster movie on the actual scenario. So the LARP proceeds at the scale of the aggregate public’s awareness.

As I wrap this piece up, it appears that the cease-fire is holding. This is not surprising, as it is highly likely that Iran’s nuclear sites have been destroyed, and their command capacity for making trouble with their Hamas and Hezbollah proxies has been seriously degraded. Further, it appears China has stepped in from behind the scenes and yanked Iran’s chain. As the mullahs and the IRGC do some delicate dance behind the scenes about who is running the show, there appear to be enough elders in the mix who are not completely bonkers, who realize that further degradation of Iranian defense capacity leaves them vulnerable to other neighbors who are none too fond of the constant turmoil, with no apparent end in sight. Just as the Arab world is tiring of the Palestinian cause, the larger circle around Iran is done with the Ayatollah. I think pure, remorseless projection of force has a lot to do with it.

One also starts understanding how much the American NGO community, by blathering on about future monetary opportunities for nation-building, contributes to the unending nature of all these crises. National collapse of Iran is in none of the interests of the primary three demographics I named above. Urban elites are aware of the results of chaos. The IRGC and the mullahs lose their retirement plan. And the rural poor are still bereft, and powerless. There is no land war even for their sons to be drafted into. And the Iran-Iraq War is not that long ago – only 38 years.

So, stay tuned. The plot will likely be far more complicated than you can dream up.

Collapse Narratives and the N/S Axis of Societies

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 12 Comments
Punta Marenco, Costa Rica — Corcovado National Park

I haven’t really written much about the Trump administration since the election. Most of it, quite frankly, because of the derangement of the Left, and unfortunately, in particular, my age cohort (I’m 62.) Upon being told that I voted for Donald Trump, I’ve dealt with long-time friends basically disowning me. And even though I live the life of an oddly functional hermit, I still find it disturbing.

There is an axis of civilization that runs N/S through society, with independently generated, empathy-driven relationships on the north end, and with externally defined, belief-based, and title-driven relationships on the south end. One of the reasons that you make so many friends when you’re young is your neuroplasticity is high, and you have few ingratiated experiences leaving isolated biased tags in your hippocampus, causing you to have limbic withdrawal for nonspecific reasons. As people age, though, most folks do not continue to proceed upward along the path of wisdom, acceptance of metacognition, and a more conscious, questioning and data-driven perspective toward life’s circumstances. Instead, biases become even more rigid, and if you’re not in an environment where you’re encouraged to keep a flexible perspective, mental decline is inevitable.

And so it’s happened with my friend cohort. I have yet to be asked by almost anyone exactly “why” I voted for Trump, among anyone that I’ve known over 10 years. I have my reasons. The Democrats kept a man with a pudding brain in office for four years, and offered up a combo cipher/alcoholic as the replacement, in a midnight coup that turned out to be disastrous for their political fortunes. I voted for the counter-elites I describe in this piece.

But worse were the narratives that the Ds rallied behind. Almost all of these, outside of the typical bland “we’re going to fix the economy” non-specifics, were what I call Collapse Narratives. What is a Collapse Narrative? It’s a governing story that can be detected by a series of factors:

  1. No absolute metrics of any particular policy issue. Everything is relative, and explained in relative terms.
  2. Expectation of the national interest to forfeit any larger sense of self-survival.
  3. Demonization if one protests the myth, instead of consideration of personal interest of any constituency.
  4. Boundary collapse across the psycho-social landscape of a society.

It’s not hard to dissect any of the policies of the Democratic Party along these four lines. Take open-border immigration, and the flood of illegal immigrants into our country. While there were vague discussions of immigration (we need more LEGAL immigration, whatever that meant!) there were never any numbers discussed (#1). Additionally arguments were constantly generated along the lines of allowing more people in, regardless of national origin, because relative to the general population, suspicious figures were floated saying “any immigrants are just better people than the people already here.” Things like the fact that more people add a quantum to your chance of being murdered, raped, or robbed simply didn’t matter. If they weren’t here, your numbers wouldn’t go up.

And subsequent to that is the current war over deportation of various gang members and criminals that are already here. Look folks — if you entered the country illegally, then you are a criminal by definition. But there is quite a gradient even among that crew. The recent procedural doubling down on Juan Abrego Garcia, a domestic violence perpetrator and likely gang member, shows that the Democrats aren’t really interested in having a functional country. All the various cries about “due process” are largely irrelevant, as “due process” as a term means, a la Humpty Dumpty, whatever we want it to mean.

The Democratic goal is derailment of society, building on the efforts already started by the non-functional Biden regime. What is especially laughable is that currently, in our legal system, what is known as “prosecutorial justice” — where a perp strikes a deal with the prosecutor — dominates some 97% of all criminal justice. That means “due process” means someone accusing you, with a modest basis, and then you figure out how you’re going to give in to avoid time in the Big House. It only involves an investigation by police, with the prosecutor’s assent. And that’s for citizens — which is NOT required in immigration law. “Due process” is another Collapse Narrative.

That leads us to #2, which then gets back to some needed sense of cultural homogeneity. Countries can be diverse — but you get to the point where societies have no assimilative power whatsoever. That is inevitably going to lead to conflict among parties, in unexpected ways. I was raised as a Catholic, with a Muslim background (my father was Iranian, but an avowed atheist) — but I have no desire to live in a predominantly Muslim country. Islam has lots of problems that I’m directly familiar with, that I haven’t written about because it would distort a lot of the other information I’m transmitting on this blog. And I can tell you there are reasons that various Islamic countries are societal backwaters.

To even voice these types of observations — that there is a scale we can measure cultures on regarding being better or worse for human flourishing — can rapidly lead to demonization (#3) of the writer. Post-modernism has led us to the point where we see LGBTQ people protesting FOR Palestine as some kind of Promised Land. I can guarantee the idiocy of this level of affinity of self-interest is appalling. I view the current Israeli/Palestinian War as a profound tragedy, for both sides, which is also why I haven’t written about it. But it’s also true that the same constituency screaming against Israel would be rounded up and exterminated by those same people they’re ostensibly attempting to save. It’s just a fact.

I also view the outcome as historically predictable. You fly a bunch of males organized by a neo-medieval government in motorized parawings into a country, who then kill, rape and kidnap 1400 or some odd women and men, you’re asking for total war. The only parallel I can come up with is Arthur “Bomber” Harris in World War II, head of RAF bomber command. Given the job of stopping the Nazis, he was paramount in making a Nazi surrender irrelevant. He did this by functionally leveling literally every German city of a particular size, by fire-bombing them. I absolutely do not condone genocide — but patterns of history repeat themselves.

And getting back to the point — it’s a profound Collapse Narrative when you advocate for people who, given the chance would kill and enslave you.

Finally, looking at #4, boundary collapse is written all over the various Collapse Narratives the Left ascribes to. Men in women’s sports, or bathrooms — talk about a historic removal of sex boundaries. The war in Ukraine — we have nothing to gain by continuing the war, other than loss of national treasure as part of a perverse globalist enterprise. Yet I have many acquaintances that would demonize me if they knew my views. That’s a crazy Collapse Narrative — that our friendship is more worthless to them than a particular In-group view, on a conflict with no geographic resonance, that has absolutely no bearing on our actual relationship.

Organisms, including nations, collapse if they cannot maintain homeostasis and intact boundaries. Every organism alive exists with some combination of flux of nutrients and influences from the outside world, along with the ability to modulate those same inputs. A human being is itself only a modestly 3 dimensional prospect, with a mouth, fractal structures called alveoli in one’s lungs, and an alimentary system for absorbing food. Too much stuff comes in over the boundaries and a person dies. Collapse Narratives demand exceeding those boundary limitations, both biological and psychic.

What’s even worse is that we have an entire elite class championing obvious Collapse Narratives as virtuous. None of the dominant myths used to signal virtue by our elites have any practical benefit to the majority of the population. And they’re directly fraudulent. When Trump’s immigration crackdown commenced, all the major news outlets binged on the notion that vegetables would rot in the fields, and a famine would ensue across the land. Yet every day, going to the grocery store, there was nothing but the usual fresh vegetables available for sale.

On the issue of Trump’s tariffs — an attempted re-balancing of trade, at least with the intention of moving us back from the heavy financialization of our work sector to more manufacturing, the elite class screamed bloody murder. I’d like to think that at least a little of this screaming was rational — tariffs and global trade are an evolutionary system, and interconnections are many, and hidden. But it turned into more screaming that an international order that had benefitted elites was actually what was at stake. The isolation of the professional class from the needs of the working class had been thorough before 2020, and certainly exacerbated by COVID. Populism had been mapped to Nazism in the press. And the resistance toward this was another example of a Collapse Narrative.

One of the most pervasive of the Collapse Narratives has been the very real societal war around mainstreaming transgenderism — especially in youth. California and other Blue states have been famous for going so far to hide childrens’ depression and gender dysphoria away from parents with legitimate guardianship rights. Destroying families is directly advocating for collapse. Families are far from perfect as support mechanisms for individuals. But I can tell you, as someone who only has my immediate children and wife, they’re far better than nothing.

And then there is the issue of men in women’s sports. Democrats, even in the face or realizing how divisive this issue is to the public, constant dissemble on it. “It’s only a few kids,” is the classic riposte. If it’s only a few kids, then why die on that hill? The more I dig into this, the more obvious it becomes that there is a ton of psychopathy behind many of the transgender champions, as well as the champions of the champions. Giving in would mean giving away a powerful tool of disruption of society. And so another Collapse Narrative is born.

Societies are oriented, North/South, along a line that maps to the v-Memes I talk extensively about on this blog. The north end of societies are predicated on cultures that support individual choice, and develop people who are actually capable of handling those individual choices in a responsible, connected fashion. Down at the bottom are non-differentiated Tribal societies, where everyone inside the dominant group are “the people”, and everyone outside is worse than disposable.

You cannot have the current complexity of society without a well-scaffolded stack, because without that, your society has no hope in hell of generating the complex web of information such a society needs to exist. And that stack is based on data-driven, trust based relationships. You have to have scaffolded trust not just for moral values. You actually need it or you can’t support the number of transactions, information and otherwise, to make it happen. Transaction velocity matters, and translates to sophistication of products, as well as diversity and quantity of goods on the shelf.

And the core of that is development of the individual, as what my friend Daniel Goertz calls the “dividual” — the person in context of themselves, and the society.

Collapse Narratives are crafted by psychopaths to undermine that concept — through an advocacy of self- and societally destructive myths that break down an individual and their boundaries and turn them into an organic soup, not unlike what happens to a caterpillar in a chrysalis. But it’s highly unlikely, after the mass killing that actual collapse will entail, that much of a butterfly will pop out.

Forks in the Timeline and the Future of the West

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 7 Comments

Countryside in Winter, outside Milton-Freewater, OR

One of the more interesting plot lines of stories, along the lines of musing about the Multiverse, is the alternate timeline idea. Of course, “what ifs” along historical perspectives are nothing really new. And as far as literature goes, my intellectual engagement with the idea probably goes back to Michael Moorcock and the Elric series. But more recently, I’m a fan of the TV series Community, which has lots of fun with this particular literary trope. Community is a show about the producer’s idealized community college experience, which seems fantastical in all ways as someone who has worked in academia for most of their lives. There are study groups, engaged individuals, and of course, hot women and men who occasionally sleep with each other. This does not resemble in any way, shape or form, the modern university, which is more akin to a modern gulag, where students stare disinterestedly at professors, work 40 hours/week outside their classes, and the only community-building ritual is football.

But that brings one to the notion of an alternate timeline. Community has lots of shows contained therein where characters step outside of themselves at various branching points, with dramatically different outcomes dependent on varying choices the cast members make in their lives.

And as go the cast members, one can draw parallels to nations. Across Western civilization right now, there are all sorts of nations, making all sorts of timeline choices regarding civilizational outcomes, that are far more likely to yield unpleasant ends, or civil wars, than a make-out session in a car in the community college parking lot.

In the most recent election in the U.S., Kamala Harris, VP under Joe Biden, ran a strong negative campaign based on turning the country more Woke, and lost to Donald Trump, who, with a preselected “dream team” of counter-elites, managed a modest win in the national elections. While Donald Trump, an elite himself, runs as a counter-elite, officially aligning himself with the Republican Party, a firm majority in that party still identifies itself with an elite globalist agenda. Make no mistake.

More importantly, Elon Musk, billionaire and owner of multiple paradigm-busting companies himself, maneuvered himself into a key role, along with fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, as chief advisor to Trump. Even before Trump’s election, Musk had spoken out against many of the Woke issues of the day, such as continued support of the war in Ukraine, Internet censorship, and the elevation of transgender rights. And consistently, both Trump and Musk have spoken out against the key Immiserators in contemporary society, which Harris had passionately embraced.

When Harris lost, it was a profound fork in the timeline for the US. Harris had promised more Internet and social media censorship, under the mask of fighting “disinformation” and “misinformation”, more enforcement of DEI policies, as well as control of AI development. The press had (and still is) lined up behind Harris. Even as I write this, a moribund economy is being billed by the mainstream media as the strongest in the last 20 years. It’s easy to get paranoid and assume that the financial press believes there will be a fall, and that will be blamed on Trump, even though the lag times for any economic policy implementation is at least a year or two. But regardless, Musk and others have been running numerous moments of grounding validity across the political landscape, from buying Twitter (now X) and wading into the various culture war agenda items like transgenderism, and DEI policies that I’ve explained are prime tools of the Immiserators. At least for the present, the United States is on the upward path toward increased personal agency, and less government. As an example, Trump himself announced the creation of the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), eponymously named after a meme based on a Shiba Inu dog. DOGE’s job will be elimination of government regulations — a subject of a post in itself.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Great Britain, an entire nation is in the middle of a horrific branch in their timeline involving a sex scandal where primarily Pakistani immigrants ran large rape rings targeting white, underage girls in a variety of towns, including Rotherham, Telford, and other towns in the north of England. Authorities from both the local communities, and all the way up to the top ranks of British governance suppressed the scandal on the basis of maintaining racial harmony by not naming or prosecuting the Pakistani perps. The magnitude of the numbers involved is mind-boggling. Some 7000+ rapes were documented through these rape rings even this year, with basically no law enforcement efforts to stop the crimes, as well as plenty of victim-blaming.

Initially, when I heard about these crimes, I was very suspicious of a mass hysteria event, similar to the early ’80s McMartin pre-school trials in the U.S. In that situation, children had been interviewed for ostensibly repressed memories of devil worship inside of daycare centers. All of it turned out to be false, and you can read about it at this link. Instead, what the rape rings are shaping up to be is a civilization-ending event. Musk is tweeting about it on X even as I write this, and the British high command is condemning him for bringing up the unpleasantness. Apparently, the behavior has been historic, and tracks with surges in immigration in Britain — even dating back to the early 2000s.

Both these events — Trump’s ascendancy, as well as Britain’s collapse, would be worthy of a book. But what they show in the context of this blog is how during times of Elite Overproduction, which manifests itself in multiple ways, where the number of chairs available for both elites and their children shrink, and the number of elites themselves grow, there is profound societal pressure on immiserating the larger populace. As I wrote in a previous piece, in the US, the trans issue quickly gained ground as an elite signaling device, and luxury belief that elites could communicate with each other that they deserved to win the game of Musical Chairs.

The fact they were creating a more oppressive, authoritarian social environment for the larger population they believed to be in their favor. But fortunately, the votes and the governance system was in place in the U.S. that hopefully this will stop peacefully. We were simply not that far gone. While the immiseration of the populace was indeed real, what was also true was that the actual grounding of the entire trans issue involved a minute number of people. The number of trans male->female athletes, while high profile, were/are still relatively small. It’s wrong and vexatious, but it’s not civilization-ending if a man posing as a woman wins a bicycle race. And DEI has been noxious, but once again, not civilization-ending.

Nothing gives that impression of the rape rings in Great Britain. There have been massive numbers of British girls raped in a systematic fashion, by primarily Pakistani immigrants. Incredible system failure, under the guise of Woke policies and ostensible racial harmony, has been covered up. And Musk, and the entire X platform, has given voices to both the advocates for the victims, as well, incredibly enough, to the proponents of the coverup. Predictable elites have called the non-prosecution of these heinous crimes a “noble cause” and any notion that the people responsible, such as Jess Phillips, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, should be held to account as immodest and unfair. As I write this, the British press is in alignment against Musk, protecting obvious Immiserators. It can be argued that Britain, for all of its history, has a far more comprehensive culture of elites getting away with literal murder. So it’s no surprise that Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and even King Charles, have lined up with fellow elites to defend the mass immiseration scheme. The problem with all authoritarian regimes, de facto or official, is that the people under them can only take so much. Then, psychopathic revolution becomes the stock in trade. Talk about a grounding validity moment.

The other key element to note here is that both large scandals, in both the US and Great Britain, are at their core sex scandals involving sexual abuse of minors. Transgender surgery on youth is the one thing that has profoundly fired up the larger population, as well as access of grown men to women’s spaces so that sexual violence can more easily occur. In Great Britain, the massive size of the rape ring scandal, once again directed at children, is emergent out of elite desires for immiseration in this latest regime of Elite Overproduction. As I’ve written before, sexual abuse of children is psychopathic in nature. But worse, it has the growth effect of producing even more psychopaths. And those relational disruptors go on to create broader psychosocial devolution across societies. You want to destroy the collective conscience of a culture? Rape a significant number of its young people. That train is never late. And it arrives at the station hosting the Tribal/Magical v-Meme. Which is no way to run a large, multi-cultural contemporary society.

This plays into larger psychosocial trends in the collective psyche of all of Western society. We are at a point where we have not kept up the agency-driven developmental needs of our societies. As such, we see elites establish elite coding to sort their kids into the winners’ circle, and everyone else into the loser’s category. How we reverse this, and prompt what in the short term will likely manifest itself as decentralization is an open question. But at the U.S. has some breathing room.

In the U.K., it’s going to be decentralization, followed by relational devolution. Stay tuned.

End Times and the Politics of Immiseration

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 9 Comments

Snow Peak, St. Joe National Forest

A book so interesting, I’m listening to it twice, as I digest the implications is Peter Turchin’s End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. In this book, Turchin explains his approach toward cliodynamics — a new field of his and his friends’ invention about mathematical modeling of history. Turchin uses large data sets to identify large-scale trends in history, borrowing from his own background in nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory. He is down deep in empirical data, which has its problems. But his top-level insights are outstanding, and his book is well worth reading twice, if nothing except for the fact that it fits the historical moment so well. (I’ve attempted to contact him a couple of times, but he doesn’t write back. Which is a shame, as many of my more faithful readers know my own work in this field is highly complementary to his own.)

Turchin’s work is significant in that he tracks the rise and fall of elites in human societies, and their influences and antics. He notes there’s somewhere between a cycle of 50 to 200 years in which societies rise, and then must go through historic readjustment based on one important phenomenon — elite overproduction. The short version of this is that elites rise for various reasons, then have too many kids which want the same thing (or more) that their parents had, and then upon not being able to achieve this, form counter-elites and other disintegrative forces in societies. Polygamous societies, for obvious reasons, are worse than monogamous societies, primarily along the lines of one elite man being able to produce many multiples of offspring that a monogamous couple cannot produce. It would be fascinating to read Turchin’s cliodynamic analysis of Saudi Arabian society.

Along the way, what accelerates decline is creation of what Turchin calls a Wealth Pump — some mechanism that transfers wealth from the poor to the rich. This varies, obviously, dependent on the bases of the society, and is also driven by the number of elites’ children that need that Wealth Pump to insure their own entrance into elite society. We’ve seen this phenomenon ourselves in the last 50 years. Our own wealth gap has grown and grown, while the poor have grown demonstrably poorer, largely because of increased tuition costs at colleges and universities.

Turchin doesn’t talk about relational dynamics beyond his concept of popular immiseration — as the rich need more, they get more and make the poor more miserable. One can hopefully see how this separation might be attenuated a bit if we focused on empathetic human development. But this doesn’t fall under Turchin’s purview as a major factor driving societal evolution. And another factor Turchin ignores is the multiplication of psychopaths and their manipulation of mental models that also happen as societies stagnate. Considering the resurrection of racism through the drumbeat of anti-racism is a great example of this. Pot, kettle?

It was in Rob Henderson’s recent book, Troubled, that he introduced the idea of “luxury beliefs” — as elites ran out of money to buy goods and live lifestyles that appear elite, they tend to adopt beliefs to virtue signal to other elites that they were indeed part of that upper class. An example he explains in detail is the Defund the Police movement. Often these beliefs are sociopathic gaslighting, which the elites actually don’t adhere to themselves (he uses the example of decriminalization of drugs, which the elites can buffer, but is highly destructive to the lower classes.) But almost to a one, they are aimed at, if the poors follow them, immiseration to the lower classes. They’re a characteristic of how societies come to crisis. The basic pattern is this:

  1. The elites overproduce kids.
  2. The kids, having no truly economically beneficial way of becoming an elite, invent other high-status virtue-signaling modalities (think of the explosion of NGOs and their staff) to assure their position.
  3. These kids create situations for depopulation/beat the shit out of the poors, or their own ranks (think wars here for the most basic form) until there are finally enough chairs in the crazy musical chairs game they’ve started so that they all have seats again.

These behaviors seem to be memetically coded into entire populations. Witness the current U.S. Presidential race for a great example. Using Turchin’s framework, it’s pretty obvious that Donald Trump is, at least, declared on the side of the peasantry and anti-immiseration, while Kamala Harris is solidly on the side of making those Deplorables pay for being deplorable.

Many of the various tricks we’re seeing on a large scale have been tried before. Importing labor from immigrants to do this is a classic modality, and one in play, with elites in charge ignoring whatever historic restrictions might have existed in order to secure slave labor for themselves. This augments their own Wealth Pump, as well as deplete jobs for the poor and lower middle class, driving down wages even more, which then directly contributes to immiseration.

This coupling of the Wealth Pump to popular immiseration has multiple forms. I hadn’t really considered it before today, but the entire transgender movement is an amazing example. The larger blob takes advantage of people with gender dysphoria (someone who believes they are a sex other than their birth sex) whose presence, both passive (just dressing up and walking around) and active (entering opposite sex restrooms, advocating for pedophilia) causes a lot of misery, as these codes are enforced top-down on the peasantry. Simultaneously, the mainstreamed surgeries and hormone treatments demanded by the gender-confused individuals further enrich the hospitals and medical staff delivering these surgeries. Since the procedures involve essentially lifetime medicalization, the money never stops flowing from the general population to this group of people.

Much of this involves chronic gaslighting of the public. I wrote about this in my most recent piece on the normalization of obesity through propaganda here. Even the prurient pleasure of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue has now been co-opted as a psychopathic weapon. You can’t even look at pictures of women with a nice rack and fantasize. Instead, you’re expected to, against your own deep genetic urges, to adulate a fatty. Because that’s the best you’re going to get.

Another current, ongoing example is the situation in Springfield, OH. “Someone” (not quite clear who) has resettled 20,000 Haitian refugees in Springfield, OH, a declining Midwestern industrial town of 60,000. The hue and cry in Springfield in the news mostly surrounds the question whether the immigrants are turning local pets and waterfowl into barbecue. And while the mainstream press, an arm of the elites that has been more than happy to press forward with immiseration of the lower classes, declares such claims false, the reality is that 20K translocated Haitians, in such a modest size community, have no pressure to assimilate. They are also supported heavily by various federal refugee resettlement programs, distorting the local real estate market and availability of public services. And with such a skew, likely are actually governed by gangs.

The two political candidates, as stated above, in the U.S. Presidential election, perfectly exemplify this binning phenomenon. The Democrats are squarely in the elite’s corner, constantly condemning ordinary white people as “Deplorables” and even worse, gate-keeping any potential access to elite ranks through mandatory indoctrination in our colleges and universities. If you don’t subscribe to the belief structures, you don’t get your degree. And if you don’t get your degree, then ostensibly you’re condemned to the underclass you were attempting to escape. Talk about getting your mind right, indeed.

And on the Republican side, you have Donald Trump. Trump is hated perhaps on the surface for his manners and crudity. But the reality of what Trump proposes is a dismantling of the institutional class/caste. Trump as a President was a mediocrity — I can’t think of a single thing he did that was seminal. But by posturing himself against the institutions and threatening to stop the Forever War posture of the U.S. (drop out of NATO, stop sending arms to Ukraine, etc.) he’s attempting to kill two birds with one stone: stop the popular immiseration of the poor by not recruiting their sons to die overseas; and secondly, kill the Wealth Pump for the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex. All this makes him a threat in both the memetic, as well as the monetary space. And that threat of destabilization of institutions, even though these very institutions are corrupt, creates irrational rage among those in the top 10% of the population that perceive themselves as elite.

And worse. Call it what you will (Trump Derangement Syndrome) but even when you speak against those institutions, you’re going to excite every Flying Monkey in the mainstream press corps that aspires both to be a member of the elite, as well as seeks to promote luxury beliefs in some way to prove their own virtue. This piece was written after the first Harris/Trump debate, which was notable primarily for the fact that the ABC network moderators continually fact-checked Trump while leaving Harris basically alone. Why there are even such a Praetorian Guard associated with a debate, where every larger societal truth is deeply nuanced, is mind-boggling.

I’ve already received feedback from friends and acquaintances who certainly don’t support Donald Trump. Yet when questioned on the basics of Trump’s policies — no Forever War, control of immigration, and stopping various programs of immiseration — they are firmly on that side of the issue-driven debate. Yet they’ll still declare themselves voting for Harris, even though Harris has promised more of the same, while actually delivering on those outcomes as Vice President. Why do people vote against their actual interests, even when issues are broken down clearly? Never doubt the power of the tides of history, or the devolutionary state of a country’s v-Memes. The Matrix rules over all.

How all this ends is fundamentally opaque. Other periods like this, as Turchin notes, ended when the various nobles killed enough of each other off. The problem with any total war where this might occur is obvious — not just mass immiseration of the entire population, but devastation as well. But other, more positive outcomes require elites to rein themselves in. It has happened in the past — Lyndon Johnson’s New Deal was also an example.

At this point, at least to me, it’s looking into a glass darkly. But at least, viewing things through Turchin’s lens, as well as understanding the memetic structure of the argument, the larger meme-scape is framed. Hang on. Let’s see how many folks wake up.

Back to Basics – Conway’s Law – the Mechanics of It All

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 4 Comments

A day at the beach

In between babbling about memetics to friends, every now and then one will get a word in edgewise, and ask “OK, Mr. Smartypants. How do we change outcomes?” My answer is always the same. “You have to consciously and deliberately apply Conway’s Law and change the social structure. If you don’t change the social structure, the emergent outcomes that you’re complaining about won’t change.”

They look at me, somewhat knowingly, like they MIGHT have gotten it. And then they walk away, just hoping their organization is going to suddenly morph into something that will produce different outcomes than the current version. Of course, this is insane. What they’re really doing is retreating back into The Matrix. And what people don’t get is that The Matrix has physical laws. You don’t get to break them. Like Grandma always used to say, “wish in one hand, shit in another, and tell me which one fills up first.”

That Grandma.

If you’ve read this far, I’m going to assume that you might be looking for an example (or something) that really conveys to management how this is true, and how they might need to readjust their thinking, as well as their org. chart, if they want a different product design.

Look at a nuclear reactor power plant. It’s a big thing, and at the center is a nuclear reactor. The reactor has support services that connect to it, like cooling fluid, and maintenance departments in charge of things like pumps, environmental controls and whatnot. You better believe that the org. chart looks like that hierarchy.

Last week, I had a visitor from Germany, an organic farming advocate. I was explaining to him that if he wanted small, robotic crawlers and grabbers, as opposed to enormous wheat combines (he got to ride in one) that had to start with a change in social structure of the organization producing them. Not easy to do with no obvious market, and folks making fine money on giant machines, now even driven by satellite.

But let’s take an even simpler design example. An airplane.

Virtually all but a handful of modern aircraft have a tube, called a fuselage, in the middle, upon which are hung wings. Engines then are hung off the wings, and then of course, there are subsystems inside the wings that drive things like flaps, ailerons and control wires.

But getting back to the social configuration, you’d better believe there is a wing group, concerned with the aforementioned components, and there is a primary structures/fuselage group. (Remember this is a simplification.) Within the wing structures group is a sub-group who talks to the fuselage folks regarding attaching the wings to the fuselage. Those folks might even hang out together, because pinning the wings to the fuselage correctly has all sorts of issues, and is obviously critical to entire system integrity. This probably seems obvious (it is). There’s also going to be a vertical stabilizer group (that’s the tail) and a horizontal stabilizer group as well. That’s aircraft 101. The people that interface all that in the design will talk to each other. And then at a large aircraft manufacturer like Boeing, they even have people called “Liaison Engineers” (which they pronounce “Lie-uh-zon” accent on the first syllable) that basically cruise around and make sure the interface people, as well as other folks having integration issues, are taken care of.

I’ve trained my share of Liaison Engineers.

All this seems obvious. But how would such a group ever change an aircraft design to something like a blended wing/body design? See below.

They couldn’t, of course. They are locked inside their social structure, refining the parts of the airplane they are responsible for. This is not entirely a bad thing, in that in the process of refinement increases reliability of the current configuration. Which is a primary reason that airplanes don’t drop out of the sky, and the biggest thing you have to worry about on a flight is whether you’re going to get a package of mixed nuts. Or not.

Any development of such a blended wing-body aircraft would require major redesign, with a major reshuffling and pulling of experts out of all the current groups into an entirely different social structure. Because you’d take some of the old v-Meme NA of the design (e.g. probably attaching engines works much the same way, and trust me, Boeing has specialists for nailing engines to wings) but other things would be entirely different. You’d definitely have to have an entire group for ground crew liaison, and on and on. Those people would then have to talk to the outside vendors providing those sky bridges we’re all accustomed to.

Short version — you’d have to create an entirely new social structure, which then would have to create an entirely new CAD model (think knowledge structure) which would then be instantiated in the final blended-wing-body design.

On top of that, I’m willing to bet that the people in the current organization aren’t used to jumping out of their hierarchy to talk to other technical specialists in the other hierarchies producing the other large parts. Remember — they have those Liaison Engineers for reasons. But you’d need that, and then you’d also have to have some evolved leadership so that if people aren’t “staying in their lane” they know that’s OK, and even encouraged to bring issues that the other parts of the new configuration might need to know about. People that are used to phoning it in because they’re master of their small square of real estate in the old design are going to have to be encouraged to seek out places where the new design requires design synergy.

And without that, you couldn’t make that cool new design at all. Now take that down to manufacturing and you’ll have a markedly different assembly line for such an aircraft. Boeing 737s are built on a continually moving line. If you wanted to build that new plane, you’d have to rethink all of that. And that would require a very different org. chart as well. As well as integrating the manufacturing people far earlier in the process, so you could actually build the thing. It would be revelatory to put the 737 assembly process org. chart up next to a B-2 assembly org chart. While there would be commonalities, I guarantee they’d be significantly different in topology.

If you’ve been reading much of this blog, you now can start seeing how you have different conflicts, as well as synergies in reliability and validity. And that’s going to require different brains, with different abilities to talk to other people with different brains. If you haven’t had an organization that has evolved empathy, that’s not going to exist. And trust me on this one — the thought of jumping out of the org. chart won’t even occur to most people, except in the context of whistle-blowing wrongdoing.

So that’s Conway’s Law in a nutshell. Your org. chart, and how you develop your people, which is largely due to how you set up your communication culture, is destiny.

Because Conway’s Law is The Law.