politics

Iran, The Complexity Crisis, and War

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 5 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.

The L.A. Riots and Memetic Coherence

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

It’s always the ear with that damn borzoi

For the last couple of days, riots have been building across the poorer parts of Los Angeles — supposed protests of ICE actions to deport illegal aliens. The riots had been escalating, to the point where Trump called out the National Guard, going against the will of both Karen Bass, the mayor of LA, and Gavin Newsom, the governor of California. It’s hard to know exactly what is going on in LA right now. I have solid friends on the ground, who don’t live in the various neighborhoods (majority Hispanic and poor) where these types of actions would take place, and they say “nothing is happening.”

But something is happening (they also confirm that) and it’s important enough to consider the dynamics. We know enough to know that Karen Bass, the mayor in most need of replacement in all of our urban centers, was a former organizer for a variety of groups tied to actors like USAID, and most importantly the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA-cutout organization famous for organizing overthrow of legitimate governments around the world. We also know that while Bass has a history of sucking up to governments like Fidel Castro’s in Cuba, (all this could be construed as some kind of bizarre LARP if it weren’t so) she’s obviously woefully incompetent as any kind of manager. We know she hasn’t learned much in her 40+ years of political activism by watching her appalling performance during the recent Palisades fire in LA. Sometimes having no coherent political philosophy other than proto-socialism will gain you a sinecure in one of our corrupt, government-funded NGOs. But you still don’t know what to do when excrement hits the respective ventilator.

But there are other actors afoot in this. It’s easy to focus on Bass and Newsom, who only yesterday evening backed off from their encouraging the public to confront ICE in the streets. Yes indeed — that is bad enough. But there are other coherences and convergences that are interesting. In the spirit of “follow the money,” who stands most to lose if ICE eliminates the potential for importation of large numbers of illegal aliens into the U.S.? The various Mexican gangs (they are numerous) who are making bank literally rounding up people, mostly young males, from around the world to transport to the US. I’ve read articles before the current crisis that this business of human transport was equivalent to the drug trade in terms of raw dollars. Think they might have opinions? Especially if the mayor and the governor were throwing down on the side of the rioters?

And speaking of those gangs, one thing they know how to do is buy politicians and run a shadow government behind the scenes in Mexico. We chronically ignore the social sophistication required to pull off the fact that Mexico is essentially run by gangs, because our news media feeds us polemics about how that would work. The portrait is that if an area is run by gangs, there are constant public executions and whatnot.

But the reality is that the gangs, like any organized force, can only deal with so much chaos in any given time. Chaos doesn’t lend itself to some level of organized economic activity. And people can be poor, and if the weather is good (as it so often is in Mexico) they can get by. But any population is only nine meals away from anarchy, as Alfred Henry Lewis once said. Make no mistake — they are still violent. But psychosocial evolutionary lines must be drawn. Or there is mass death. It’s the reason folks can still fly into Cancun and have a pleasant vacation. Life must go on.

Here’s the point. Those gangs have learned how to buy politicians, and to a limited extent, manage the civil society that matters to them. They bump up against this in LA, where there are poorly organized, but at least legitimate political organizations at work. So they seek out the various tribally aligned politicians, and court the psychopaths running the American side of the show under a variety of guises. The point is that there may be disagreements. But not by much. Both the gangs, and the current political caste in LA have an interest in continued dilution of the voter pool. Especially as the established minority population (in this case Latino) becomes more and more disillusioned with the decline of their communities. The Democrats in LA may be blinded by race, and unconstrained in screaming at Trump and the Republicans, but the people actually adjacent to the violence of this recent unprecedented wave of illegal immigration are not.

And this is what I call Memetic coherence. When memetic coherence exists, it’s not important for everyone to be a conscious actor. They can help. But the broad interests in how society is structured is really not in play. That dramatically eliminates conflict, at least in the short run. It can be a powerful thing, rapidly evolving societies up or down. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is a great example of disparate forces coming together to eliminate Jim Crow and create an integrated society. But it can also happen when devolutionary forces band together to provide cover and distract from the real psychosocial mechanisms at hand. The elite psychopaths like Bass, as well as other white folks (this is NOT race-delimited) are going to work to drive society back to that tribal level where their behavior is not anomalous. And they’re not going to have a hard time forming alliances with complicated organizations like the Sinaloan gangs, or Latin Kings. Those people mastered that playbook in Mexico. They bring logistical game to the table. No learning curve required.

And LA politicians who are simply avaricious are available for sale.

What none of these people are counting on is that these types of Tribal/Authoritarian societies are poorly organized. And up against any group with real military training, they’ll run away. Which is exactly what is happening this morning as I write this. It’s historic. Very few tribal societies can stand strong against an actual, organized government — Cortes’ 500, with a little help from friendly neighbors, dropped the 1M member Aztec empire. It wasn’t just guns, germs and steel. All those Brave Warriors on the ostensible Left, riding motorcycles and waving Mexican flags, have vamoosed.

One thing that people also don’t realize, when leadership is psychopathic, is while there are certain things psychopaths do well, they are also chronically dissociated. That inability to focus in on real events is super-important. Organization beats chaos almost every time. But they are still going to cast their spells of illusion broadly. And the MSM is going to be there to help and amplify — they crave collapse so badly, mostly because it’s exciting. But also even today in L.A., they’re up on the 405, with their fellow white elites, and don’t have to experience anything other than the game they hear over their mass media channel of choice. Just as long as they don’t take the wrong exit.

Stay tuned. This was written the morning of June 8, 2025. It’s going to be an interesting day.

P.S. One fair question might be “why aren’t these Tribal/Authoritarians fighting with each other?” The answer is “no real overlapping economic interests.” Gangs fight over turf. In this case, Bass, Antifa, and the other DSA partisans have no physical things they’ll be denied by aligning with the Mexican gangs. Groups may have conflicts due to ideology. But when your ideology is chaos, and no one is stealing your very real cheese, it’s just getting as many idiot actors out into the street as possible.

And that’s what we’re seeing. Bass and Newsom only started backing off when the feds started doubling down on removing more of California’s sovereignty. Cuz that’s where the real money is.

PPS — just to reiterate — there is no conflict in the two camps regarding their Deep feeder streams of money. Bass and the CA gov’t gets money from the feds, which is now being threatened to be cut off. Activists get money from the feds due to NGO cut-outs (CIA/USAID/State). The Sinaloan gangs get money directly from the immigrants they’re smuggling. SoCal politicians get money from the cartels, and from the NGOs, but the actions are coherent, so everyone is happy.

It’s the Perfect Racket. Everyone gets cut in. And the only victims are legal immigrant communities, as well as the rule of law.

Collapse Narratives and the N/S Axis of Societies

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 9 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.

Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment and Elite Overproduction

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 3 Comments

Cold Desert Rain, US 95 north of Winnemucca

One of the better pieces I’ve read recently is this one: titled Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment, by David Samuels in Tablet Magazine. Samuels is obviously an Old Dog, and describes in detail the head game that the combo of David Axelrod, a communication specialist and marketing guru, and Barack Obama played on the American people — especially the American tech. elite, that led to the incredibly destructive political climate of the last 16 years.

The short version of Samuels’ thesis is that Obama, with Axelrod’s help, took Axelrod’s strategy utilizing permission structures,(the linked piece is pretty good!) that Axelrod had successfully used in various Chicago races (Harold Washington’s mayoral success is highlighted) to get white folks to vote for black candidates, often against their own interests. They did this by creating a false morality inside people’s value structures to make them believe that morally it was a greater good to vote against both their own interests, and their own grounded intuition. The closest analogy I can come up with essentially Obama’s and Axelrod strategy was the equivalent of unleashing an HIV virus on the natural belief immune systems that any cohort develops, that insures long-term cultural continuity. Once convinced that moral posturing and virtue signaling was somehow in their long-term interest. And it worked — something like 80% of white folks voted for Washington in the mayoral contest, as opposed to only 35% of African-Americans.

The problem with completely disconnecting any group of humans from what I call grounding validity — making sure what you believe has some actual, observable data to back it up– is that it has unintended consequences. My favorite go-to of an entire civilizational collapse due to a lack of it is the parable of the Aztecs, who obsessed on raiding neighboring tribes for human sacrificial tribute to make sure the Sun would rise by cutting out their hearts on the Pyramid of the Sun. Once you believe that level of bullshit, your civilization is uniquely fragile. And 500 badass Spaniards, led by Hernan Cortes, and accompanied by his translator and personal consort Malinche, proved the point. The consequences for ungrounding are wildly tragic. My fun statistic is that 95% of the Aztec genome is carried on the X chromosome. Which mean those conquistadores killed all the men and literally raped all the women.

What is great about this piece is it is obviously written by a pro, who can describe the ins and outs of how they actually did it, as well as the consequences of it coming undone. My analogy of why when these systems fail, they fail rapidly, is that ungrounded systems are prone to what we call signal drift — the difference between a signal with appropriate ground, and whatever the rest of systems and society decide to make up as true. This seems to have a pernicious effect on human brains. When you practice unreality, your brain gets worse and worse detecting reality. It simply doesn’t practice it. And what THAT means is that it is far easier for a cult (or national) leader to seize control and program people with whatever beliefs they want. Like 50 year old men wearing a wig have a right to enter women’s spaces. Or if you want to get into a women’s prison, and you’re a man, just tell the guard you’re a woman. But I digress.

The other thing that happens when you practice unreality, is that your belief system for navigating the actual world is prone, just like an electrical circuit, to arcing when it has to ground itself against actual reality. Arcing is inherently destructive (it’s how we weld metal) and there are sparks. I think it’s a worthy analogy — and we’re witnessing it right now in the aftermath of the Trump election. Samuels makes the point in the piece (and I agree with him wholeheartedly) that Kamala Harris was perhaps the worst presidential candidate in the last 100 years, and the permission structuring around attempting to force people to vote for her using racial and misogynistic guilt (she’s a woman! She’s African-American even though she’s not!) just couldn’t work. It was so unbelievable that enough of the electorate couldn’t just party line NPC it in. And she lost to a candidate who was widely reviled, and the entire press corps had fallen into lockstep of chronically attacking. The result was truly a silent revolution. Because of social shaming, you couldn’t even admit that you might consider voting for Trump without public ostracism. I voted for Trump myself, and still can’t bring up that issue with the majority of liberal friends I still hold. That’s majorly fucked up.

Where Samuels’ analogy falls apart, though, is that these types of outcomes and conflicts are literally occurring across Western civilization. The tendency that Samuels exhibits is to attribute the temporary success of Obama’s campaign to an amalgamation of old and new cunning, and particular individuals. If that were the case, though, we would not be seeing similar types of conflicts across a spectrum of countries, with different outcomes across a variety of countries. One might rack up conservative victories in Hungary/Orban and Italy/Meloni to nations that are in the process of re-grounding toward more appropriate national self-interest. As well, one might consider nations like France, Britain and Canada still in flux.

What is far more likely the overriding dynamic is that we are seeing Turchin’s Elite Overproduction in action across the globalist landscape. Elite Overproduction comes once every 150 years or so (do read Turchin’s book linked here) and happens when there just are too many elites’ kids, and not enough spots for them to assume the same social position as their parents. Why does that matter? If you look out across the political landscape, what we’re actually witnessing is emergent behavior, with the tools of elite manipulation being pulled out of the last century’s toolbox, and finally having the appropriate environmental conditions that they proved to be useful. And it’s U.S. – agnostic. Obama and Axelrod may be clever. But they are just men of their time.

Further, this also gives potential insights into how wider wars get started through Elite Overproduction. When you have too many people competing for too few chairs, then what’s not to like about a Crusade to seize Jerusalem back from the Turks? And the worst conditions for this kind of social virus are when you have an In-group and Out-group that hit the same point of Elite Overproduction at the same time. Then everyone’s raring to go.

If there’s a bigger lesson here, it’s that you’ve got to ground your kids — especially the elite ones — in reality. Or there’s a proclivity for elites to make up self-serving fantasies, and use lots of fancy words to project a preferred image of reality that has nothing to do with it. In our case, I feel like we got lucky by having a robust enough electoral system to elect Donald Trump, and his A-team level staff of advisors. Because the current crop of elites were converging on burning it all down. Or make us vulnerable to a modern day Cortes burning the ships at Veracruz.

P.S. — one thing that is interesting about Samuels’ take on all this is it links Turchin’s book, End Times, that I’ve written about with Rob Henderson’s Troubled — in particular his concept of ‘luxury beliefs’ — with the actual modality — permission structures — that’s a how-to for generating political anarchy. But the circumstances have to be right. Otherwise, the virality you need just ain’t there.

P.P.S. I’ve also recently been taken by Mike Benz. His Joe Rogan podcast lays it out. Another post-mortem way worth listening to.

The Immiserators

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 10 Comments

If you try to immiserate Cecilia, she’ll let you know what she thinks of that.

I’m writing this on the eve of our Nov. 2024 election. It took me a while, but I think I’ve finally figured out what’s going on in the US, as well as around the world. One of the things I’ve spent a lot of time pondering (too much, actually) is how, after the end of the Cold War, when we were literally on the edge of blowing the planet up, we ended up, instead of seeing a flourishing and evolution of the human spirit, we ended up being probably as miserable in society and culture as any time in my lifetime.

Let me give a little background. For those that don’t know, I live in a small college town (Pullman, WA) adjacent to yet another small college town, just six miles away (Moscow, ID). Both towns are simultaneously adjacent to some of the most magnificent mountains, wild rivers and forests in the Lower 48, which most of the residents have no inkling exist at all. You have to drive a little ways to get to them (2.5 hrs) but a sizable hunk of folks that have any interest in that kind of thing will get in the car and literally drive seven or so hours to a National Park for their yearly fix. That’s how insular they are.

People fantasize about retiring in a small college town — the theatre! An almost pro- sports experience! Concerts! Young people! But they don’t realize that the two communities, while great places to visit, are, at best mediocre places to live. It’s the reason they don’t really grow. And they’re not particularly cheap, either, for small town living. The residents running the show are a mix of locals from the conjoint farm community (we live in the most productive wheat country in the world) some strong church affiliates, as well as some professors.

But there’s no question what runs the culture. It’s the university, and the people associated with it. And as university culture either rises or falls, so do the fortunes of the culture. You may have noted that universities are on the wane in our society — declining demographics certainly play a part. But Woke politics have become so obnoxious, it’s intolerable for anyone who is remotely “normal” in today’s contemporary culture.

What does “normal” even mean any more? It used to mean a reasonable level of independently generated relationships (friends) with institutions to live your life and raise your kids with. I do realize that this hardly exists anywhere any more, especially if you compare it with where I grew up — a dysfunctional steel town on the Ohio River. But it’s saying something that there was a much more profound sense of community in a town in economic freefall than there is in a cosseted island of privilege, funded solely by outside revenue.

People think about retiring here because they come here to become educated, and that produces a lot of memories. They return here because of those memories are powerful, and they want to watch football, get drunk with old friends, and tailgate. It’s a powerful tribal alignment. In a time when the Immiserators (we’ll get to a more precise definition of them in a moment) have destroyed anyone’s desire to affiliate with state or nation, folks migrate to the university to recover that sense of community. But then, after the game, they leave. And leave this community, dominated by the ethos of the current academy, which is relationally disruptive, and inherently elitist, to its own devices. Which is not in the community’s favor.

One of the interesting things about being a professor for my entire career (north of 37 years) is that I’ve seen exactly every different stereotype of what the rest of the world think a professor is. I’m a Renaissance Man with a potty mouth — I write, I craft, play musical instruments, and talk about politics as well as engineering. Blah, blah, blah. People say “hey — you’re what we always thought a professor should be!” Because they know, from their own experience, what professors actually are. If you think, in the modern academy, you can succeed by NOT being neurodivergent in some form or another, I’ve got news for you. You’ve got to have some form of OCD to study flea anuses, or squirrel penises (I had a friend that actually did that, and was wildly successful – he was/is a decent human being, so don’t get carried away with that) for your entire life. But you have to be different.

And inside that difference, the majority become anti-rational. They might apply logic or complicated methods in their research. But when it comes to human relations, they sit in a rigid, hierarchical system that heavily penalizes any developmental nonconformity — such as actually evolving as a human being. University towns are filled with functional adult toddlers with some form of oppositional defiant disorder. It might move the science of squirrel penises forward. But it’s hell to live here.

Before we move forward, let’s define what an ‘Immiserator’ is. An Immiserator is any individual whose primary (or even secondary) function in life is to make other people miserable and deprive them of joy. There are lots of tools in the toolbox to do that, but the primary one is rules. Any time an exception happens, that can produce any kind of negative outcome, a rule must be propagated. (Big Hat Tip to Peter Turchin and his book, ‘End Times’ — credit where credit is due.)

And those rules must be enforced. The joy is in the enforcement! At least for the Immiserator. You may be miserable, and the exception may never occur again. But rules allow immiseration to be applied across-the-board. Everyone gets to be miserable! Which is, of course, the point.

Immiseration is a primary tool of relational disruption. No one wants to talk to anyone when they’re miserable. They might say the wrong thing, or blow up. That would lead to more enforcement of more rules, and more emotional flow to the Immiserators. So people start shutting down. That doesn’t really suit the Immiserators either — if everyone is quiet then there’s no one to punish. So instead of just letting people re-form social networks outside the Immiserators, they want to send you to talk therapy. Or Healing Circles. Or other such icks.

As we’ve seen in the last 10 years, Immiserators are very often female. Immiseration profoundly fits inside the foundational elements of women’s personae of Nurture and Social Control. When Nurture is minimized, then that energy has to go somewhere, and Social Control is where it goes. Whole societies are built on this. Who enforces the Taliban’s anti-woman edicts? It’s the Taliban grandmothers. Who are at war over the increasingly confusing rules governing access to young women’s uterine real estate? Middle-aged white women.

But if you think men are off the hook, you’re also wrong. Men pivot around the dyad of Protect and Provide. We see this on the Right side of the political spectrum. Increasingly hostile edicts for Protect also provide immiseration – we can get back to the extreme example of the Taliban preventing young girls from attending school. And Provide, at some level in recession because of failing differences in M/F incomes and job positions (note — women get more college degrees, more promotions, and lots of other stuff) still has the ability to hold hostage and immiserate people dependent on that good old Do-Re-Mi.

But back to my university town. In my town(s) we have a local newspaper, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. For over 20 years, I’ve written for the newspaper as an op-ed columnist. It was a biweekly gig, paying the handsome sum of $25/column, which NEVER changed over the time . But I was happy to write. I figured it was my charitable donation to news in the area. I’m an educated man, with broad, international experience. By sharing my insights, I’d improve the information level of my community. I did try to write about local issues, as well as the larger ones more in my expertise.

Sometime in the last 15 years, the newspaper made a decision to go every day with op-eds from people like me. Well, at least ‘like me’ in the community. This was relatively innocuous, until the community (especially the folks in Moscow) decided to double down on religious persecution of a fundamentalist, Full Bible Church in their community. Their pastor, Doug Wilson, has even appeared on the Tucker Carlson show. The paper’s op-ed columnists would regularly scream and wail about Doug, and his congregation, which interestingly enough, are maybe a little older than the college kids, but far younger than the liberal/progressive elite that believed they ran the community. Doug is indeed an asshole, and he DID make it easy. We have (believe it or not) about 6 mega-churches in our combined towns, population of 65K. Doug is that nail sticking out begging to be hammered down by the Immiserators. He may or may not have had it coming. But as Clint Eastwood said famously, when it comes to the Immiserators, we’ve all got it coming.

But if you’re not growing, you’re dying. And those progressive didn’t have kids. And now they’re old. They’re almost entirely composed of people that perceive themselves as the intelligentsia. But in reality, they’re idiots. Screaming idiots.

The Moscow/Pullman Immiserati.

During COVID, they screamed so much at me, as I made my steady progression toward the truth of COVID, and ended up profoundly on the ‘defending young people’ side of the non-issue for them, I finally quit. They would write their op-ed columns about me and my op-eds — what I would consider an op-ed journalistic violation. When you have a column, you have an obligation to inform your readers. You get the bully pulpit. And the first word. But your readership gets the last word — in the letters. Instead, they wrote columns that would probably be considered libelous about me. They would dance and holler. And so I finally just gave up.

This cadre definitely immiserated me. And when I left, they went back to the standard themes. We are all racists. Donald Trump is a fascist. If you’re not hanging your head in shame for living in our little isolated enclave, you’re a member of the KKK. And so on. A lot of people in that caste (as well as the letter writers) had done yeoman work in the past, when we actually had problems, at least regionally. Coeur D’Alene, and Hayden Lake, ID are not that far away. Who can forget Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations? But that ship has sailed, or at a minimum, burrowed underground. Escalating real estate prices are never good for true believers.

It’s too painful to count, but at least in the last year, every op-ed that runs from the ostensible Left side, is about Donald Trump, or Christ Church, and how their supporters/followers are evil racists. Folks, we don’t functionally have an African-American community in this middle-of-nowhere burg. There are no reported instances of racism, though we have had black-on-black gang violence. Every now and then, we do see something directed against the Native American community, the Nez Perce. But even that is literally a once-in-two-years episode. If that. Hell, we don’t even have a Hispanic community outside the university.

But Immiserators gonna immiserate. And well-meaning people who are NOT the members of the Immiserati line up behind them. When you have a community where a fair share of the members have OCD or OCPD, and you stand up and say surgical masks don’t work to stop COVID, and we should stop torturing our students in grade school with this crazy bullshit, you should expect to take some heat. In the fragmented world of Pullman/Moscow, they managed to completely isolate me. I literally was screamed at in the street. No shit.

How do these Immiserators immiserate? They take the issue of the day, and scream. Over and over. Take the trans issue. You don’t want a 50 year old man, dressed up as a woman in your daughter’s locker room? You bigoted transphobe. Let’s talk about how you don’t know about “the science.” You don’t want to castrate a confused young child being bombarded by social media that the only way they’ll fit in is with body-altering hormones, and complete loss of sexual function, as well as an inability to easily urinate the rest of their lives? You’re promoting child suicide. You don’t want your daughter playing volleyball against boys wearing pony tails and claiming they’re girls? There is no one worse than you.

And they’ll let you know it. It’s the beauty of immiseration. In the parlance of this blog, I call this “emotional state matching.” They want you to be as miserable as they are. And they’re going to double down with some mix of social pressure, rules and generalized screaming until you do. It doesn’t make any difference how preposterous it is — how crazy is it, really, that anyone would advocate for middle-aged men sporting a euphoria boner in a girls’ high school locker rooms, or how rare it is (if this was happening all the time, I guarantee there would be dead bodies in the street.) That’s NOT the point. The point is misery. Yours. Oh, and the self-righteous screaming.

Which brings us around to Donald Trump. I’ve written extensively about Trump on this blog (you can Google it) and none of it is complimentary. I’ve called him a narcissistic psychopath, among other things. But I’ve attempted to keep it real. Trump was, and is a moderate Republican in policy. He is not a fascist. He has a big mouth, and he violates institutional social codes of speech by saying the quiet part out loud. We have been seized by an institutional class that has, in league with the Immiserators, figured out how to successfully loot the Treasury, on every level of American society. Does he care about the American people? I think at some level he does. But he cares far more about his own personal image. I’m not as sure as I used to be that he is a narcissistic psychopath. But he’s still definitely a narcissist.

And he’s found his niche — fighting the Immiserati. He’s got some allies who actually have some policy sense on the misery — Vance, Kennedy, and especially Elon Musk. Elon Musk, who in any other time in America’s history would be a hero — putting people into space, creating WiFi for the world, electric cars, and the list goes on — is now chronically vilified by the Immiserati. One of Elon’s main messages is to young people — look forward to your life, there are not too many people on the planet, have children and families — the Immiserati beat the drum, and the sub-Immiserators chime in. Musk is bad. Evil, in fact. People are not nearly immiserated enough. Get ready for de-growth. They’re still functioning, aren’t they?

And a peace deal for Ukraine? Nothing is more immiserating than the threat of thermonuclear war hanging over everyone’s head. Lest you get carried away and think the Immiserators actually WANT nuclear war, I really don’t think that’s the case. But operating where they do, in the limbic zone, with its desire for depressive emotional state matching, they don’t care. It’s short term misery they seek, and damn the long-term consequences. I’ll still bet dollars to donuts that 95% of Americans can’t find Ukraine on the map. And Ukraine has its own Immiserators that are propagating policies that will annihilate their young male class. They’re emotional state-matching with our own US foreign policy Immiserators, that are watching the rivers of blood run while our own arms merchants get fat.

In order to fix this problem, we first have to recognize it. We have to dismantle the Immiserati, and their larger caste of Immiserators. That’s why the latest head of the Immiserati, a sock puppet as far as I call tell, Kamala Harris, tried to float the whole ‘Joy’ message. The fact that this whole campaign fell flat tells you that the public isn’t falling for it. Kamala went back to the drumbeat of the other side being Nazis, fascism, and the Handmaid’s Tale. They were more in form, and didn’t cause so much cognitive dissonance that people just tuned out.

We’ll see who wins. We’re still in a tight spot, regardless of who wins. But I’ve found that naming something is the first step in either saving something, or defeating. Let’s get out there and get busy.

End Times and the Politics of Immiseration

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 8 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.

On Trump’s Assassination Attempt, Civil War, and Leaky LARPs

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Yosemite Fire Sunset, 2024

It’s increasingly hard to keep up with any cogent view of the news cycle, in these last couple of weeks in July. Short version — Donald Trump was nearly assassinated on July 13, 2024, at a rally in Butler, PA. The breathless press first didn’t want to admit that Trump was shot, but then that was followed by an endless litany of calls for essentially civil war, especially in the subjunctive (“If Trump had been killed,” for all of those that weren’t forced to study Latin) and then followed on the heels of all this, the announcement by Joe Biden on July 21 that he was dropping out of the presidential race.

Screenshot from CNN after Trump was shot. Even then, CNN was attempting to monkey with the script

Everyone assumes that each of these events are independently momentous, finally, FINALLY leading to some Manichaean conclusion and Götterdämmerung, after which the world will be destroyed and born anew. History must have SOME inflection point, no? The press insists.

But no one’s asking any structural questions on any of this (except for a few voices like this blog.) If Donald Trump had died, how would that civil war actually have taken place? Other than gathering for meetings in the town square, or local park, with their pussy hats, or marching along avenues reserved by the multi-billion dollar entertainment mountebanks known as Black Lives Matter, Americans can’t hardly organize anything political. I have yet to be at a large rally where anyone was collecting names and phone numbers for future contacts. The Old Gods in both parties know this. But the show must go on.

And it does. Geography, as I’ve explained, is functionally dead, save for looting stores in Blue states. What you see on your computer screens, via TikTok, or X, is a postcards-from-the-edge approach to news. Some people manage to get together and break some windows. But more and more, what’s really happening is a slow slide into decay. I visited an old friend in Portland a little more than a month ago. There was some evidence of rioting activity present in downtown Portland. But the biggest sign obvious to me was the lack of shopping in what was once an energetic downtown retail district, as well as miles of dilapidated RVs parked along Lombard Street.

And fat people everywhere, of course. The national obesity rate has passed 42%. The real crisis is in the metabolic health of Americans, as well as a constant slide into poverty and homelessness. As well as the adaptive reality that if you’re going to live in a broken down RV, it’s a whole lot more comfortable to do it someplace where it is warm, and food is still relatively cheap. Folks have some eatin’ to do.

I still marvel at the people in the press claiming that the nation is on the brink of civil war. Wars are physical things, historically fought by young, healthy males. That’s just a statement of fact, with the truth of it aligned in our genes. When all your young males are fat, you’re not fighting anyone. Regardless of how many AR-15s you spread around.

And I still am impressed with the raw stupidity associated with calling January 6, 2021, an insurrection. Do people have any idea how utterly impossible it is to control anything from the U.S. Capitol? The elected officials on salaries of $200K, with a complete complement of near-slaves, in the guise of interns, can’t do it. Insurrections put different people in power that actually command some level of authority and respect. Not dudes with buffalo headdresses made from Gray Owl kits. It is a mystery to me how to get the federal government to do anything. How would the ostensible insurrectionists even know who to call to bark orders or threaten? I’ve said over and over that most people don’t even have any idea where their electricity or water comes from (give yourself a quiz and see if you can accurately answer that question before feeling smug.) “The Grid” is not a valid answer, though I’d be impressed if most people could even say that.

What’s really going on in front of our eyes is what I’ve decided to name a Leaky LARP. LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing game, a combination of re-enactment, storytelling and gaming—players are given a role and act out their character’s actions within an overarching story, from the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The reporters on said LARP are actually intrinsic, and important Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in the game. They certainly can’t comprehend the extent of complexity of modern society themselves. But they do know where they’re supposed to line up with the general story line. And they also know their paycheck depends on them delivering, through clicks and other measures of engagement on the Internet. So the story must be exciting.

The problem is, with all this “through a glass darkly” stuff, is that it’s like a fictional movie that leads with a trailer that says “this movie, while a work of fiction, is based on historical events.” Except those historical events are actually real, and are happening, and usually involve the harm or death of someone in the Real World. It’s all scripted. Until, well, it isn’t. Trump was nearly killed by a 20-year-old male (at least at this current time I’m writing) who set himself up as a LARP-player extraordinaire. The incompetent bureaucracy assigned to President Trump played their part as incompetent bureaucrats, replete with local law enforcement clowns, and DEI agent hires unable to holster their guns. Trump dutifully played his part as well, not dying, of course, but then standing up with the help of agents and raising his fist in the air and mouthing “fight, fight, fight!”

Of all the players in this Leaky LARP, Trump has known he’s a central figure, and his performance didn’t disappoint. Whether he authentically, instantaneously shoved his fist into the air, or did a great piece of improv. doesn’t in the end really matter. When someone nearly blows your head off, at least in my book, they get the benefit of the doubt. Fight, fight, fight it is. He was still a 30 degree twist of his head from getting his brains blown out.

I wrote a piece on Donald Trump back in 2016, right after he was elected the first time. It still holds up, and contains one of my favorite lines I’ve ever written. It’s solid, and I recommend reading it.

But in the larger Theory of Empathetic Evolution scheme of things, he’s just another relational disruptor inside a system declining for other reasons. 

And like a play based on characters violating the Fourth Wall with the audience, our LARP only occasionally grounds itself to the outside world in real terms. Bullets hit ears of presidential candidates. Small sections of major urban areas get turned into No-Man’s Lands, with looted Walgreens, or spin-out competitions in intersections. And while the line may seem blurred between fantasy and reality, the other truth is that people actually die, and lives are wrecked in the context of those grounding moments. As Melania Trump’s letter to the American people elegantly stated, Donald Trump has a family too. Regardless of which part of his brain center lifted his fist into the air.

If there’s a takeaway from this, it’s that we need to pay more attention to the backdrop, and less to the scripted moments. Shit never stopped getting real. And it would behoove us to focus on the long line of trailers on Lombard St. in Portland, or the fat folks waddling through the local Walmart — or Food Co-op. Not nearly as exciting — but a telling signal in a pattern of nationwide decline.