For decades now, as an amateur opinionator, I’ve been writing critical things about cultural and political developments in the Western world. I’m still far from being elderly, and certainly haven’t stopped writing about more specific, technical topics for my day job. But I’ve now mostly lost interest in condemning specific deleterious social trends, because I can see that they all stem from, and are sustained indefinitely by, the root problem of human foolishness. Human beings, even “advanced” Western ones, are just not all that bright. Remember the Clinton campaign slogan from 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid”? Better to say: “It’s the stupid, stupid.”

Because we are stupid. We are apes. As individual animals, and as animal collectives, we are cognitively too limited to grasp the complexity—and enormity—of the reality in which we find ourselves. We also have, as our evolutionary firmware so to speak, many error-inducing psychological biases. My writings about cultural feminization have included lots of points about female cognitive bias, including the apparent female preference (relative to males on average) for short-term feelgood policy choices, blindness to long-term consequences, preference for non-rational methods in group and interpersonal conflicts, emotional alignment and groupthink, etc. But males have their own biases and blinders, and, arguably, as the physically and emotionally stronger, more independent-minded sex, should bear most of the responsibility for the fragility of human civilization. The bottom line, in any case, is that H. sapiens always seems to promote itself to its level of incompetence, where it cannot manage its societies well and—hubris having long been an adaptive trait for it in inter-civilizational competition—cannot even see its own shortcomings. Thus “man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”

This isn’t the place for a catalogue of modern human folly, but here are just a few significant examples of recent sociopolitical phenomena that we don’t understand enough to manage successfully, or simply represent stupid mistakes:

• “Democracy”
• GDP-maxing
• “Diversity is our strength”
• Market regulation and financialization
• Large-scale national welfare programs
• “The sexual revolution” / “women’s liberation” / “feminism”
• New media technologies
• Strip malls, billboard-infested highways, centerless “bedroom communities” etc.

Sure, we often argue about such things, but we seem incapable of resolving those arguments successfully—i.e., in ways that won’t blow up in the long run. It’s not just that we are too nearsighted to see the probable long-term consequences of bad social changes; we also are relatively blind to the existing selfish and “tribal” interests that initiate and/or defend such changes. In general, in assessing ideas and their consequences, our attitudes and habits seem primitive in comparison to what they could be.

Accepting our limitations would require a deep transformation, in which, at least, we replace our oblivious hyper-confidence with self-critical humility, and our faith in progress with a wary, “small-c conservatism”—an Amish-like instinct against changing long-evolved and thus probably adaptive lifeways. If we in the West were a bit less blinded by our collective ego, we would see that the most robust and fertile forms of contemporary human civilization—some of which are already replacing our progressive societies in situ—are relatively conservative in this sense.

Yet Western peoples so far show little sign of wanting to abandon their more “dynamic” and “progressive” mindset. Perhaps they are by now effectively addicted to it—require the relentless stimulation of error-prone social change, and at least subconsciously, and stupidly, choose its likely terminus in chaos and ruin over the boredom of stasis.

* * *

On a recent Saturday in always-sunny Palm Springs, California, a 25-year-old who could have been your son or mine drove his car into a parking lot behind a fertility clinic and set off a homemade bomb within the car, in an effort to obliterate the clinic and himself. The first media report I saw gave me the impression that the bomb was not very big, as the people in the clinic were only injured. In fact, the device was remarkably powerful, nearly destroying the low concrete clinic structure despite detonating five to ten meters away, and throwing pieces of the car—and of its driver—blocks away. It seems to have been the largest bomb built for such a purpose since 1995, when Timothy McVeigh used a 7,000-lb truck-borne fertilizer bomb to destroy the ten-story Federal building in downtown Oklahoma City.

The bomber of the Palm Springs fertility clinic, whose name was Guy Edward Bartkus, shared some important characteristics with McVeigh. He was young, male, and girlfriend-less. He was fascinated by things that go bang—explosives and incendiaries in his case. He felt alienated from modern society and hated its trends. He was functional but showed at least mild signs of mental illness. He seemed to have found a cause for which he was willing to die—and kill.

The particular cause that Guy Bartkus embraced might seem a parody of Internet-nurtured extremism were it not for the tragedy it engendered. Bartkus described himself, in online writings and a recorded manifesto before the attack, as a “pro-mortalist.” He hated being alive, believed that life brought only suffering, and held, moreover, that birth itself was wrong because the unborn could not consent to being born—thus his targeting of an IVF clinic.

Some media organizations fastened on this “pro-mortalist” theme in the days following the blast, declaring for example that there were “fears the movement may be on the rise.” Of course, there was and remains no real evidence of a substantial movement of pro-mortalists. In the world of the always-online can be found every half-baked idea and ideology imaginable—if you can imagine it, someone will have posted about it somewhere—but it is rare that any of these mutant mindsets results in an organized social malignancy. Why? Probably because the people who are captured by these fringe beliefs tend to lack the necessary social skills.

Still, while there may be no real pro-mortalist movement as yet, I can’t help wondering if the appearance of this unusual worldview in the ongoing story of American Performative Violence (my term for it) offers a useful hint about what is driving this story—a hint that reminds us of the deficiencies of the standard expert explanation.

The standard expert explanation for the acts of the Bartkuses and McVeighs is that they are lonely, resentful, mentally friable and socially inept males, usually young ones, whose crime would never have occurred but for American society’s libertarian laxity. In regard to the latter, the experts—in every big-publisher book on this subject—specifically blame weak restrictions on access to large-magazine firearms and bomb-making materials, weak restrictions on violence-inducing Internet content, and inadequate law-enforcement and social-services monitoring.

Since the experts’ prescriptions appear to require gun laws that violate the Constitution, as well as a police-state-like surveillance of citizens and restriction of Internet content, they haven’t been adopted to the degree needed to be effective. Thus, the problem continues to fester, even as the expert view of it remains unchallenged.

*

The idea I would like to introduce here is that the expert opinion and “received wisdom” on the causes of this type of violence place far too much emphasis on policy shortcomings, and far too little emphasis on cultural shortcomings—especially the loss of identity, social connection, and the overall sense of meaning and contentment.

First, though, some caveats and clarifications: The spectacular mass killings (actual or attempted) at issue here are distinct from the stealthier, one-by-one murders of “serial killers” such as Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy. The latter represent a comparable problem for law enforcement and public safety, but these men (rarely women) are, in a sense, psychopathic killers we will always have with us. They are not exclusive to modern technological societies—think of Jack the Ripper—nor even to the First World; the serial murderer Luis Garavito killed hundreds of young boys in Colombia in the 1990s, for example.

Moreover, mass shootings/bombings/stabbings/car-rammings and so on have two non-policy-mediated causes or inspirations that everyone already acknowledges, namely 1) militant Islam, for a subset of Muslim perpetrators; and 2) simple “monkey-see-monkey-do” imitation of acts that reliably (albeit mostly posthumously) bring fame/notoriety. Both are recent cultural developments—militant Islam is largely a reaction to modern secularizing influences and trends, while the imitative aspect of these crimes is enabled and enhanced by modern globalized electronic media and especially the Internet.

We should look to recent cultural developments for the causes and inspirations of American Performative Violence for the simple reason that it represents, at least in its frequency and intensity, a new social phenomenon. For the same reason, we should give less weight to policy-related explanations: American gun laws were much looser, and gun ownership per household much higher, in the mid 20^th century when these performative or “rampage” mass killings were still very rare[1].

In relation to these killings, I expect the most important difference between the mid-20^th century and the present is the difference in the overall health and structural integrity of American society. I could reel off a hundred sets of statistics, but probably the most relevant facts are that the US population in the pre-performative-violence era was mostly based on two-parent families, was relatively religious and churchgoing, was relatively socially interconnected, and (not counting African-Americans, who were sequestered by the apartheid system of the day) was racially and ethnically homogeneous. Most Americans, in short, had healthy and intact senses of identity, meaning, purpose and social rootedness in 1950—whereas a lot fewer have all that three quarters of a century later.

When people don’t have these things, they become more susceptible to despair, even if they are not consciously aware of it. And within any large population affected by despair, the most unstable and disconnected ones will be the first to “snap.” How will they snap? Mostly by killing only themselves—directly with a gun or pills or homemade noose, or indirectly through food, drink, and/or dangerous recreational drugs. Only a tiny minority, acutely affected by a compulsion to redeem their sense of uselessness, will opt for performative murder-suicide—a paradigm that the culture in effect has chosen for them. As loathsome as these murderers of the innocent may seem, their deaths too are “deaths of despair.”

*

The underlying problem therefore is not loose gun policy any more than it is loose “knife policy” that causes contemporary mass stabbings, or loose “car policy” that causes the increasingly common practice of driving cars murderously through crowds. Unfortunately, the roots of this cultural problem lie so deep that there probably isn’t any policy in a contemporary, democratic Western society that could solve it.

Western—and even “Western-adjacent”—societies have been going through rapid cultural, structural and demographic changes. These changes have multiple drivers, including the socially atomizing “technologicization” and related power of corporations in virtually every domain of ordinary life; the historically sudden establishment of parity or dominance by women in virtually all institutions and organizations [link]; and the strong rejection—as a concession to the fait accompli of mass immigration—of the old ethnonationalist basis for societies in favor of the new “contractual” or “free agent” model [link].

The new Western model of society, is, in short, an emasculated, polyglot conglomeration of lonely—and mostly childless—consumers, relatively bereft of any sense of identity or social connectedness, or even any stake in the future. The God that once animated this Western civilization and its feats died long ago, or switched to being some sort of not-very-effectual personal therapist.

Arguably the hardest problem here, though it may be the most neglected, is that the comforting cosmological sense of place that religion once provided has been left to science. If you listen to cosmology popularizers supported by the contemporary publishing industry, or to a high-profile space nerd like Elon Musk, the main message of science is that the universe, vast and wondrous, beckons us to explore it—so that maybe we shall even “become one with it” someday. However, if you ignore all the hopium and the book-selling propaganda, you may begin to grasp what the discoveries of science over the past few hundred years really have been telling us. This message, not such a nice one, is that we are, most likely, in comparison to the complexity of the universe and the development of its older entities, much as ants or even bacteria are to the human world. To grasp this, one doesn’t even have to believe in an infinite universe or an infinite multiverse of parallel universes—but once those potent concepts and the evidence for their reality are also grasped, it becomes hard to ignore the likelihood that our lives, our hopes, our moral systems, our efforts to invent “meaning,” are all incurably naïve, even delusional.

And, of course, once that dark reality is glimpsed, even unconsciously, inhibitions against antisocial behavior of all kinds will tend to be weakened.

In this view, then, American Performative Violence belongs in a broader category that I suggest could be termed “Positive Despair” because it features positive, or added, symptoms and behaviors—in this case, mass-murdering violence—in comparison to what is normal. If I am right, the incidences of this and other manifestations of social and existential despair are going to keep rising, increasingly blurring the line between “sick” and “healthy.”

***

[1] https://en./ wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Unruh

The term “empathy economy” has been used to describe the practice, in our feminized age, of appealing to or claiming “empathy”—usually meaning empathetic compassion—in business advertising. I think it is more useful to consider the term in a different sense, that of a resource that flows in its own system or economy.

The idea here is not complicated. Humans have various resources they spend, or employ as catalysts, to obtain things for themselves and others. The resource that dominates discussions is, of course, the external resource we call money. But humans in their quests also routinely draw on their personal stores of energy, intelligence, inventiveness, wit and charm, social status, “a sense of style,” acting ability, psychological stability, and many other traits and characteristics. Empathy—the ability to understand another’s mindset or emotional state, not in a detached way but by feeling, to some degree, what the other is feeling—is another one of these resources.

Men do not lack empathy, but women on average have a stronger capacity for it, not least in regard to empathy that triggers feelings of compassion for the poor, the hungry, migrants, etc. This trait presumably has deep biological roots as an adaptation for women’s traditional roles centering on child-rearing.

Since women, just in the past several decades, have begun venturing from their traditional domestic domain to become present and powerful in all public domains and institutions, their greater capacity for and tendency towards empathetic compassion has made this sentiment more important in the shaping of policy and culture. That’s putting it mildly—the shift has been massive. Western societies since the 1960s, the period of women’s rapid ascension to power, have embraced policies that would have been hard to imagine in the 1940s or 50s. Politicians often had low partisan motivations for these policies, e.g. liberalizations of immigration law brought in new voters, while more generous welfare programs kept poorer minorities on side. But they were able to justify such policies with unprecedented ease, thanks to women—by framing them as compassionate and therefore virtuous.

The cultural ascent of women has brought another strong albeit not-too-surprising trend: the decline of marriage, childbearing and the stay-at-home mom. The feminist movement, which both drove and was driven by women’s new power, encouraged this trend by telling women and even girls to attach less value to marriage and homemaking, and more value to career-oriented lifestyles. By the 1990s, Western societies were essentially saturated with this messaging, which could be found even in books and TV shows for toddlers. This had many knock-on effects, of course. For example, as it became the norm for women to have careers and to add their salaries to their husbands’, home prices rose—creating an ever-higher barrier to the formation of families, and limiting the average size of families that did manage to form.

What does all this have to do with the empathy economy? My suggestion here is that the ascension of women to cultural and political power, and the related trend towards a more atomized, low-marriage, low-fertility society, have greatly reduced the traditional use or absorption of empathetic compassion within the family-centered domestic sphere. Since this ancient, instinctual resource is produced naturally and automatically in women—it cannot easily be shut off—it must flow somewhere; thus, it has overflowed into the public sphere.

To put it more crudely: childless “cat ladies” and “wine aunts” have natural womanly stores of empathetic compassion, and tend to spend it on (apart from their cats and their wine) “starving African children” or “the homeless” or “undocumented immigrants”—both directly and by steering government policy—if they don’t have loved ones to absorb it instead.

It’s not hard to see as well that, as the demographic presence and cultural power of these compassion-givers have expanded, society has catered increasingly to their needs, e.g. by making it ever easier for these women to pour succor over the world’s unfortunates. And, of course, politicians, businessmen and their marketing experts have sought to exploit the sentiments and sentimentality of this important group.

By now, moreover, greater flows of empathetic compassion in the public sphere have become very much the norm. In that “cultural norm” sense—and cultural norms appear to bind women more strongly, on average compared to men—we should expect these sentiments to be prominent not only among single, childless women but even among women who have children.

My central point here, then, is simply that Western and other societies in which women have strong public presence and power are necessarily awash in empathetic compassion, which at least helps to explain many new and remarkable cultural and policy trends.

I haven’t attached a “value judgment” to all this. But the fixation on short-term emotional payoff that is typical of compassion-driven or compassion-justified new policies and cultural traits seems inherently dangerous, due to its relative blindness to long-term consequences. It is also dangerous, and frankly stupid, to assume that a trait evolved for the domestic sphere (or a relatively simple paleolithic social sphere) will work well in a modern complex social setting.

In any case, it follows from my argument here that, ceteris paribus, increasing fertility and family formation to more traditional, demographically healthy levels would eventually—against the resistance of the new cultural norm—reduce the current surplus of empathetic compassion in the public sphere. This in turn should make government policies and non-governmental actions aimed at “helping people” more judicious and sustainable, though of course Western societies face so many other problems that we may never experience a solution to this one.

***

If you have spent significant time outside the Western world, you may have noticed that non-Western peoples retain many of the traditional cultural traits that Westerners have abandoned. One of these traits is ethnonationalism: the basing of the nation upon a supermajority core ethnicity or cluster of related ethnicities.

The retention of ethnonationalism by non-Western countries is fortunate for Western tourists who value “experiencing other cultures.” If all countries were made of the same gray, global blend of ethnicities, there would be—almost by definition—little to differentiate one from another. Westerners also tacitly idealize ethnonationalism whenever they sympathize with the plight of some Amazonian rainforest tribe threatened by modern ranchers, or lament what was done to Native Americans, or take the side of ethnic minorities anywhere. The principle underlying these sentiments is that a grouping of people of at least broadly shared lineage—a family at the smallest scale, a clan or tribe at medium scale, an ethnicity or nation at the largest scale—has an inherent identity and worth, so that its preservation, and its ability to exercise a meaningful degree of autonomy, are desirable, and its deliberate dissolution is something like murder.

It is surely one of the most remarkable developments of modern human history that in the near-century since World War II—in schools, in media, in legal and political discourse—the West’s educated elites have done their best to discourage their peoples from applying this principle to themselves. “Discourage” is putting it mildly: Mainstream public opinion in the West now typically frames Western ethnonationalism as a harmful outdated attitude that lives on only in the hearts of a few embittered racists (“white nationalists”). Even “right wing” thought leaders now commonly reject the old ethnonation model and accept the new model of a heavily polyethnic, “contractual” or “creedal” nation.

In practice the term [“self-government”] seems most commonly to refer to “government by persons of the same race, culture, language, or social class or as oneself.” Since I am not, in fact, a bigot, it’s quite unclear why this should matter to me. (Curtis Yarvin, “Democracy as an Adaptive Fiction,” 2007.)

The Whys

What prompted the West’s elites to want to discard this ancient, basic, in-group-favoring element of culture?

We can’t experiment on societies to resolve such questions conclusively, but there are some broad influences that—at least to me—seem obvious:

• The principal religion of the West, Christianity, essentially was conceived as an update of Judaism that, among other innovations, would not be limited to ethnic Jews but would instead hold in its “catholic” embrace the many distinct peoples of the world—particularly those of the Roman Empire. In that sense, Christianity has always been at least mildly pro-globalist and anti-ethnonationalist. In modern times, that “we’re all God’s children” sentiment has remained as an influence on Western peoples even as the rest of Christian theology and ethics has mostly been eroded away.[1]
• In the World War II era, the development of malignant forms of ethnonationalism in Germany, Italy, Japan and other Axis countries served broadly to discredit this model of nationhood and encourage a more globalist mindset.
• That turbulent wartime era also brought large refugee flows, which reduced the dominance of core ethnicities in many Western countries, directly and by adding foreign-born intellectuals—many of them leftists who detested ethnonationalism—to the ranks of Western elites.
• The United States, throughout its history and largely for reasons of political expediency, has admitted to its citizenry a wider and wider range of ethnicities, including even a large West African-derived population for the past 150+ years. This demographic reality—a fait accompli—is plainly incompatible with the ethnonation model, even though the U.S.’s founders (e.g., the anti-German Franklin and the anti-French, anti-Irish Hamilton) would be considered far-right ethnonationalists by today’s standards. Americans didn’t really have to confront this incompatibility until their extensive racial segregation system was disbanded in the 1960s. When that happened, they began embracing the polyethnic, contractual-nation ideal in earnest, and the enormous influence of the U.S. ensured the spread of that new ideal to other Western countries.
• Over the past several decades, the unprecedented increase in the presence (and therefore influence/power) of women in public life in the West essentially has given women an opportunity to review and remodel Western civilization in accordance with their own distinct set of preferences. Women, on average compared to men, are more easily moved to compassion by stories of desperate refugees, etc. They also seem more vulnerable to feelings of guilt and shame over the West’s financial and technological supremacy and the related inequalities they observe between European-heritage whites and other ethnicities in daily life. All this has made them more susceptible to and supportive of the pro-polyethnic—or even anti-white—mindset.
• As political (the left) and demographic (non-whites, women) centers of support for the polyethnic, contractual-nation ideal grew, these proponents learned to use labels including “racist,” “white supremacist,” and even “Nazi” to stigmatize and marginalize their opponents and suppress debate, and this moral bludgeon was very effective.

So what?

Does it really matter that the ancient cultural tradition of living among one’s own kind has been rejected or at least suppressed in Western countries? Can’t we live without that potentially malignant mindset?

Perhaps the best way to answer, at least initially, is with a simple invitation to look around. What do you see? Are things going well? Do Western polyethnic societies seem healthy?

Surely it’s fair to say that, to most Westerners, the most prominent and meaningful social trends here in early 2025 are profoundly negative ones—often plainly featuring the decay of traditional Western social structures and cultural traditions.

Presumably the globalists, the anti-ethnonationalists, would blame such negative perceptions on racism, their go-to bogeyman, or would aver that a certain amount of social upheaval is necessary in the transition to a polyethnic Benetton-ad utopia.

But I think that if we specify the problems of contemporary Western countries in more detail, it becomes clear that the polyethnic-society project, while it may have created enormous economic benefits for non-Westerners and (via cheaper labor) some Western business owners, is just unsustainable:

Economic:

• Higher costs of scarce/non-producible resources such as real estate.
• Higher costs of goods and services due to higher crime, dishonesty and other difficulties associated with having non-Western customers and employees (and a lower-trust society generally).
• Suppression of wages due to increased labor-market competition (at all levels) from immigrants.
• Loss of economic opportunities (and efficiency) due to (politically inevitable?) policies that favor non-Western peoples over legacy populations in hiring, contracting, academic placement etc.
• Colossal fiscal burden from welfare programs that essentially exist to buy the votes of the less industrious non-Western residents of Western countries.

Political:

• Increasing fracturing of politics along racial/ethnic lines as one or more parties scramble to capture the votes of immigrants and/or different non-Western ethnic groups—corrupting and destabilizing electoral systems, and making consensus impossible in many areas.
• Increased favorability of extreme political parties and policies.
• Authoritarianism—ultimately the only way to hold a polyethnic society together in the long run.

Psychological:

• Greater fear, uncertainty, and discontent due to the loss of the sense of community and steep declines in social trust.
• Depression, apathy and despair from the sense that “my country doesn’t belong to me anymore,” “the leaders/elites of my country have sold my patrimony to foreigners,” etc.
• Loss of national identity, which may lead legacy citizens to seek alternate sources of identity, e.g., Israel—and of course many immigrants will alleviate their own sense of disconnectedness by flocking together with members of their own ethnicity or by joining social/religious movements that are mostly based on shared ethnicity (e.g., militant Islam).

Behavioral:

• More selfish and less communitarian behavior.
• Greatly reduced collective ability to solve problems and endure hardships.
• Greatly reduced birthrates, family formation and other pro-social behaviors.
• Reduced “provide for the future” behavior.
• Violent lashing-out by the least stable members of society.

As real and as dangerous as these problems are, it feels odd to have to list them like this. I am old enough to remember a time when we all just implicitly knew that bad things would happen if our ethnonations were dissolved.[2] We also implicitly knew that ethnonationalism (again, in the simplest sense of wanting to live among one’s own kind) was a trait that was ancient probably because it was adaptive—good for us—offering nourishment and empowerment as any collective does, but on the greatest possible scale. That implicit knowledge, that broadly shared (but seldom explicitly articulated) feeling of how things should be, is how a major, long-established cultural trait tends to manifest. The West with its imperial and catholic history, its elevation of the status of women, its cultivation of high verbal intelligence, above all its hubris, has talked itself into rejecting this healthy primordial feeling as somehow terribly sinful.

A higher order

The existence of this primordial feeling in our past, and throughout the non-Western world in the present, should remind us also that a strictly reductionist, individualistic approach to cultural traits may be missing something important—”missing the forest for the trees.”

Suppose, for example, that some biological experimenter knocked out a certain gene in a lab animal, and found that this always led to the lethal invasion of the animal by microorganisms. It wouldn’t really be adequate to conclude simply that “the absence of this gene is bad for cells,” would it? To understand properly, we would need to have the concept of an organism as a meaningful collective of cells, and we would need to identify the role of the gene in some organism-level system—such as the immune system—that normally defends against infectious invaders. Moreover, once we had this concept of an organism as a thing with its own properties, we would be able to grasp intuitively that destroying the integrity of the organism would not “free” or “empower” its constituent cells but would simply doom them.

The analogy that compares an organism and an ethnonation is only a rough one, of course. But it should clue us in to the likelihood that the destruction of a human collective will harm its members in ways that cannot be seen from a strictly individualist point of view. From there it’s no great leap to conclude that, if only out of caution, we should treat ethnonations with more respect—indeed, in the absence of signs that they have become malignant, our first thought should be to preserve and nourish them as distinct entities with their own inherent worth.

Without this higher-order perspective, how could we make sense of this famous lament by the African-American writer James Baldwin?

[Western white people] have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.

Similarly, without grasping the importance of ethnically rooted identity, how could we understand the ongoing collapse of what is perhaps the world’s oldest major political party, the UK Conservative Party? For well over a decade since 2010, this party was dominant over its increasingly feminized and leftist main rival, the Labour Party. Then, after a series of stumbles by Boris Johnson, prime minister at the time, it chose as its new leader and prime minister—in an internal process among party elites—a man of Indian heritage, Rishi Sunak. Despite the fact that Sunak was an intelligent and perfectly likeable technocrat, everything collapsed. Labour, under the whiter-than-white Keir Starmer, was swept into power in a historic electoral landslide. The Conservative elites, doubling down, replaced Sunak with another nonwhite leader—Kemi Badenoch, a woman of Nigerian heritage—and despite her preaching of conservative policies on matters such as (ironically) immigration, popular support for the Conservatives continued to bleed away to a new, white-led Reform Party, which now looks set to take the Conservatives’ place.

Is ethnonationalism recoverable?

As obvious as this ethnic factor seems from my perspective—and as obvious as it continues to be from non-Westerners’ perspective—it has been, to date, virtually un-acknowledgeable in mainstream public discourse in the West. Even among so-called conservatives in Britain, the unpopularity of Sunak and Badenoch are said—in the major newspapers and journals of opinion—to be only skill- and policy-related. To admit that these politicians are nationally unpopular and unsuitable as party leaders because of their foreign ethnicity—which is to admit that most British voters retain ethnonationalist feelings—would be too painful. The elites in Britain, the “chattering classes,” have been working for decades to erase such feelings, in part by pretending that they are harbored only by low-status types: skinheads and hooligans. If such feelings are still widespread despite this multi-generational brainwashing, then they are likely innate and resilient, which would imply that the post-ethnonationalist project was always doomed.

It would be nice if the collapse of this unsound edifice could happen in an orderly fashion, smoothly giving way to a new order—an improved version of the traditional order—in which everyone recognized and respected ethnonations as the essential collectives around which countries and their governments form. It would be nice if self-determination for ethnonations were the first principle of our politics, and love of nation/country the first sentiment among citizens. The many large and culturally/ethnically distinct groups that are currently trapped as minorities in larger societies would at last be allowed to live in worlds of their own making. And in general, at an individual level, people would benefit from the reversal of the many problems inherent in polyethnic societies—and probably would feel significantly more content just from having a clearer national identity and sense of belonging. There would continue to be ethnic mixing, of course, but at a slower pace, dominated by the traditional process of intermarriage.

Unfortunately, a re-adoption of ethnonationalism still seems a distant prospect. It would require social surgery on a scale that no democracy would countenance except amid the most severe crisis. It would require full-throated support from Western elites who, so far, have never seemed ready to let go of the polyethnic ideal. In the United States, for example, the permissible focus of public ire over mass immigration is not the dilution of the legacy ethnonation, but instead the much narrower issue of illegal immigration—a law enforcement problem. Even in the current, supposedly “far-right” US administration, both the president and vice-president are effectively supporters of the contractual nation model, being married to non-Western-Europeans who obtained US citizenship or residency long before their weddings. And of course, in Western Europe, to speak publicly about non-European immigrants’ disproportionate lawlessness, welfare-consumption etc. remains socially verboten, and in some countries is treated as a serious criminal offense punishable by a lengthy jail term.

Even if an ethnonationalist party were somehow able to gain power in a major Western country, and attempted to reverse that country’s polyethnic transformation, it would be opposed fiercely, especially by the multitude of individuals and institutions who have helped shape, and now benefit from, the status quo. Thus, to take an obvious example, any attempt to treat African Americans as a distinct nation deserving sovereignty would be met with shrill cries of “racism” by their current masters in the Democratic party. And any encouragement of that old-fashioned sentiment, “love of country”—amor patriae, meaning love of ethnonation—would be condemned by the usual suspects as a form of “hate.”

And let’s not forget that in political systems with elections this also about math: In many Western countries, white people are well on their way to becoming minorities demographically. Moreover, half of whites—the female half—have, as noted above, an innately stronger sentimentality that makes them significantly more susceptible to anti-ethnonationalist messaging.

In short, then, the traditional ethnonations of the West are still a long, long way from recovering their traditional power of self-determination—that “separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” in the words of the American Declaration of Independence.

So, assuming that the contractual-nation model is unworkable, how will it ultimately fall apart in the West? The most obvious possibility, given the current situation, is that it falls apart in ways that chiefly benefit non-Westerners—Westerners having mostly psyched themselves out of having a future. In other words, the Western world, overrun with migrants, will splinter politically into states dominated by different non-Western or less-Western ethnic cores (e.g., Latinos/Mesoamericans take the American West and Southwest, MENA peoples control Western Europe), in a manner reminiscent of what happened ~1,500 years ago as the Western Roman Empire collapsed.

Of course, it remains conceivable that a political/social movement favoring a return to ethnonationalism by the peoples of the West—and validating the de facto ethnonationalism still practiced by everyone else on our planet—will emerge and overcome the many barricades that have been put in its way; and I believe we and our descendants would be much better off if that were to happen. I can’t help thinking, though, that such an movement, if it were to have a reasonable chance of success, should have emerged and become popular long before now.

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[1] The somewhat related but narrower—and to me less persuasive—“WEIRD” theory of Joseph Henrich holds that some specific Church practices in the Middle Ages caused Western societies to evolve, culturally and even biologically, to be more individualistic and less communitarian than other societies.

[2]“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” claimed Lyndon Johnson when he signed the 1965 Hart-Celler Act liberalizing immigration law. “It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives.” He said this, obviously, because he knew that the legislation (which certainly would transform the country and provide the Democratic party with tens of millions of new loyal voters) conflicted with Americans’ essentially ethnonationalist feelings.

In the summer of 1950, Nobel-winning nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi didn’t understand the scale of the cosmos as we understand it today. But he knew that it was at least hundreds of millions of light-years across, encompassing thousands of galaxies and more than a trillion stellar systems. Unless Earth was a vanishingly rare exception, the universe should be teeming with life-forms, whose civilizations often would be far more advanced than ours.

And yet, as he asked his lunchmates at Los Alamos one day that summer, “where is everybody?” ET visitations to Earth seemed either absent entirely, or—even if some might be marked by UFO sightings—impossible to pin down as such. This discrepancy between the theoretical abundance of ETs and their observed scarcity or elusiveness became known as the Fermi Paradox.

Ponderers of this supposed conundrum have devised dozens if not hundreds of potential solutions. The most popular, unsurprisingly, are those that echo contemporary human concerns over climate change, nuclear war, rogue AI, etc., positing that such self-made disasters—and maybe also natural disasters like asteroid strikes and supervolcano eruptions—tend to extinguish civilizations before they can reach the star-faring stage. Elon Musk has made clear that he worries deeply about such hazards and hopes to minimize their impacts by making humans “multiplanetary,” for example by colonizing Mars.

The popular, accident-centered conjectures explaining the Fermi Paradox generally assume that in the absence of such cataclysms, civilizations will continue to advance scientifically and technologically, eventually venturing out to the stars. This premise also underlies the contemporary talk of a science- and tech-driven “Golden Age,” in which space travel will become routine.

But what if civilizations normally do not continue to advance beyond a stage of very limited and local space travel? What if the very process of scientific advancement in understanding the cosmos creates a toxic byproduct, analogous to pollutants from industrialization but psychological rather than chemical, such that people inevitably lose the will to explore that cosmos—and ultimately can survive only by regressing to static, relatively pre-scientific social forms?

A Bizarre Conceit

Although at first this might come across as unhinged doomerism, the idea that at least some important parts of science are psychologically toxic is an old and somewhat respectable one. Humans, plausibly as a condition of their civilization-building dynamism, tend to cling to a worldview in which they are very intelligent and special, there is higher “meaning” and “purpose” to their existence, and the universe is somehow about them. As philosophers have been pointing out for hundreds of years, science’s most consistent theme has been the refutation of this grandiose self-image: ”dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been nothing but a piece of bizarre conceit,” in the words of Nietzsche, who certainly did consider this a bizarre conceit:

However high mankind may have evolved – and perhaps at the end it will stand even lower than at the beginning! – it cannot pass over into a higher order, as little as the ant and the earwig can at the end of its ‘earthly course’ rise up to kinship with God and eternal life. The becoming drags the has-been along behind it: why should an exception to this eternal spectacle be made on behalf of some little star or for any little species upon it! Away with such sentimentalities!

But can humanity survive without such sentimentalities, as science smashes them one by one?

It’s a tough question to answer, since it concerns an influence that probably works mostly beneath conscious awareness, in a psychosocial environment that is complex, to put it mildly. But one thing that seems obviously true of pretension-puncturing scientific discoveries is that they can take generations to “sink in.” Even evolutionary theory, which was already broadly accepted by scientists more than 150 years ago, does not yet seem to have fully replaced our ancient picture of ourselves as creatures made in God’s image. That delay may be attributable to powerful mechanisms of “denial,” to simple ignorance of science, to the residual competing influence of religion, and presumably also to various other socioeconomic factors that tend to counter or crowd out existential questions.

In any case, scientific advances that can create such “existential dissonance” tend to be relatively recent developments on the human timeline. Neuroscience’s refutation of our “free will” illusion occurred only in the last two decades, so unsurprisingly it has hardly begun to be assimilated into our self-image and our moral structures.

Among the sciences, cosmology is plausibly the greatest producer of existential dissonance, and in that sense its influence too has developed only recently. While it is often said that Copernicus demoted us from the center of the universe in the 1500s, his theory was not as revolutionary as it is commonly portrayed. The traditional, pre-Copernican model of the cosmos held that the Earth with its God-chosen beings lay at the center of existence, while all else revolved around it. Copernicus’s model made just one change, putting our sun at the center, which allowed a simpler, more elegant account of celestial motions even as it kept our stellar system in its place of supreme privilege. Thus, a fundamentally anthropocentric view of the universe continued to dominate cosmology—and as late as a century ago, astronomers still believed that the cosmos was very small and tidy, consisting of just our galaxy, with our solar system at or near the center.

It was only with the development, in the 1920s, of better techniques for measuring stellar distances that astronomers finally understood that the universe was much, much larger, consisting of multiple galaxies, among which ours held no special status—just as our Sun, in a spiral arm far from the Milky Way’s center, held no special status among its galactic peers.

That was a major change. Even so, when I was coming of age a half-century later, the scale of the universe still seemed somewhat manageable. Like millions of other children, I watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos documentary series in the early 1980s, learning that the universe contains not just a handful of galaxies but at least tens of thousands of them, yet I wouldn’t say that that put an irreparable dent in my belief in human potential. It still seemed conceivable that mankind, with exponentially improving scientific knowledge and technology, could spread outward and someday comprehend—maybe even “conquer”—it all.

The expansion of our cosmic model was still just getting started, though. By the turn of the millennium, with the help of tools like the Hubble Telescope, standard models assumed billions of galaxies. Astronomers also were starting to use the term “observable universe” to delineate the space their telescopes could reach, which, despite its vastness, was apparently incomplete. Indeed, they increasingly embraced the idea that the universe is ever-expanding, and is not just tens or hundreds of billions of light years across but infinite—in all dimensions, presumably including dimensions we can’t perceive.

In a truly infinite cosmos, any local reality would have essentially identical variants elsewhere: “parallel worlds.” As physicist Brian Greene put it in his 2011 book The Hidden Reality, “I find it both curious and compelling that numerous developments in physics, if followed sufficiently far, bump into some variation on the parallel-universe theme.”

MWI

The best-known and most widely held parallel-world theory these days is the “Many Worlds Interpretation” (MWI), initially devised by Hugh Everett III (1930-1982) in the mid-1950s while he was a physics PhD student under John Wheeler at Princeton. Everett’s work was mostly ignored while he was alive, though other physicists, notably Bryce DeWitt and David Deutsch, did much to popularize it later among physicists and the general public—and to extend it and give it its present name.

MWI is called an “interpretation” because it tries to make sense of a conundrum at the heart of quantum mechanics: In certain types of experiment, any quantum-scale particle such as an electron or a photon seems to possess an innate multiplicity. In other words, it manifests as a ghostly ensemble of particles (with different positions and velocities) and only when an experimenter tries to detect it more directly does it stop acting like a ghostly ensemble and resolve to just one particle. The leading interpretation in quantum mechanics’ first half-century or so was that this “collapse” to just one state is induced by the experimenter’s act of observation, and that the other, left-behind states are somehow not real. Everett proposed instead that all these states are real and essentially represent different versions of the particle that end up being captured—by different versions of the experimenter—in different universes. In short, MWI holds that reality consists of multiple universes, in which, collectively, anything that can happen does happen.

Everett’s idea was rejected at first, as new ideas that threaten the status quo and its defenders typically are. But the reaction to MWI wasn’t just the usual circling of the wagons by the old guard. Even many who admired the theory’s elegance were discomfited by it. As Oxford philosopher of physics Simon Saunders said to a reporter in 2007, “The multiverse will drive you crazy if you really think about how it affects your life, and I can’t live like that. I’ll just accept Everett and then think about something else, to save my sanity.”

Still, MWI was and remains elegant and consistent with experimental results. As alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics have fallen by the wayside, it has risen steadily in popularity, not just among physicists but also among science popularizers—and popular audiences, as suggested by the success of the MWI-themed 2023 movie Everything Everywhere All at Once.

MWI recently received further support when Google reported a “quantum supremacy” demonstration by its experimental quantum computer Willow. A feat of quantum supremacy is a feat that a quantum computer—whose computational bits exist not as discrete 0 or 1 bits but in ghostly superpositions of both—can achieve that an ordinary “classical” computer can never match. It is regarded as an empirical proof that quantum computing is real, which for many physicists also bolsters the validity of MWI, because the idea of quantum computing—first developed by Deutsch in the mid 1980s—is that such computers gain their advantage in effect by performing computations across different universes.

—from Google Quantum AI blog post 9 Dec 2024

A Concealed Toxicity

The scientific and technical elites who have brought us these developments have been, at best, silent about their implications, and at worst, actively deceptive—although maybe they have been deceiving themselves too. As I was rewatching Cosmos (1980) recently, I noticed it was now prefaced by Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and a writer and director on the series, who invokes the “soaring spiritual high” of science’s “central revelation: our oneness with the universe.” Essentially every mainstream author or commentator on cosmology has had similarly upbeat things to say—about the beauty of the universe, and/or the cleverness of humans in their recent leaps of discovery. This is not just self-deception—these experts have to sell books and other media content, and publishers want positive themes.

But it is all deceptive. Why? Because, again, science’s central revelation—cosmology’s especially—is the insignificance of humanity, and for MWI and other infinite-cosmos theories this is not just a relative insignificance but an absolute, one-over-infinity insignificance.

The MWI cosmos is, in a technical sense, more splendid and elegant than anything found in human religion. What could be more perfect, what could be more complete, than an infinitude in which everything that can happen does happen? The problem is that this perfect completeness, or maybe unendingness, leaves no room for “purpose,” “meaning,” or “achievement” in any substantive sense. It also mocks our childish notion that we could somehow explore and/or “conquer” it all.

In fact, MWI implies that there is no higher purpose or meaning to any human being’s actions or existence, other than by filling out, in an infinitesimal way, the infinite space of possibility. Are you a good person in this universe? Are you “successful”? How can this be substantially meaningful (from the perspective of a Creator who transcends the multiverse), if otherwise indistinguishable variants of you are bad and unsuccessful in other universes—and presumably average to a mediocrity across all instances? When you combine this “MWI view” with the modern neuroscientific view of behavior—as being determined moment-to-moment by innumerable, mostly subconscious factors while our conscious selves stand by as purblind spectators—you start to get a picture of humans as “non-player-character” (NPC) automata in a sort of video game with infinite parallel playthroughs.

To the extent that people see themselves and their lives from this perspective, they are likely to lose a lot of their motivations for doing things—and not just the great and ambitious things but also the ordinary, pro-social behaviors that keep societies from coming unglued. Such behaviors are rooted in concepts of good and bad, meaning and purpose, and MWI erodes all that as completely as would a revelation that we live in a simulation.

MWI defies our traditional self-image so starkly and extensively that it also calls into question the “sapiens sapiens” label we have given ourselves. Perhaps, when compared to other civ-building species in our galaxy, we aren’t very smart at all. Perhaps our simple ape brains are already nearing the limits of what they can do—limits that fall well short of what even the most basic star-faring endeavors require.

Signs of Despair

Again, big changes in our understanding of our place in the cosmos can take generations to sink in, and MWI and other infinite-cosmos notions began seeping into the popular mind only recently. It may be that only children born in this millennium are being—and have been—forced to confront these ideas in a substantial way during the impressionable years when their models of the world and moral structures come together. If so, it may take another decade or two for this particular form of despair to be recognized as a mass phenomenon, distinguishable from all the other forms of despair out there.

In the meantime, despair is undoubtedly prevalent in our materially prosperous civilization, particularly among the young. “Adolescent mental health continues to worsen” reads a recent CDC headline, over a story that notes that in 2023 about 40% of American students had “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.” A commission set up by Lancet Psychiatry issued a report last summer concluding that “in many countries, the mental health of young people has been declining over the past two decades, signalling a warning that global megatrends and changes in many societies are increasing mental ill health.” Whatever is driving this pandemic of despair and depression seems also to be promoting “nihilism” and “doomerism” among the same youthful demographic.

While this putative trend may be attributable mostly to other social and economic disruptions of recent decades—from electronic media overexposure to the high cost of family formation—perhaps some is being driven by science, which after all has been moving in the same direction, displacing religiously based beliefs and ethics, for centuries now. In any case, despair caused by other factors is treatable in principle, whereas the one served up by science seems incurable.

One of my premises here is that the people who built Western civilization couldn’t have done so without believing, at least subconciously, that there is (or probably is) meaning and purpose in life and the universe. If so, then removing that sense of meaning and purpose would likely remove that civ-building dynamism our ancestors had, and the only way to recover meaning and purpose—perhaps the only way for humans to survive, in the long-term—would be to renounce and suppress most science and technology and revert to more primitive social forms.

One would expect to see this cultural arrest and regress play out first in the Western societies that have been the most diligent in jettisoning religion. And indeed, the essentially post-Christian societies of Northwestern Europe now look pretty moribund in most respects compared to their peers; certainly, they lack the “ad astra” energy of the contemporary USA.

The current hoopla over AI raises the question: Couldn’t we create advanced robots and robotic starships that self-replicate and relentlessly explore outer space, without regard for the apparent pointlessness of the endeavor—in fact, without any emotion at all? Yes, in principle, if we could remain motivated long enough to develop the necessary AI and robotics tech. But autonomous robot exploration is not the same as human exploration. Moreover, it’s not hard to imagine these clever creations eventually finishing off their depressed, listless, impotent creators, in a perfect and final example of a “cure” that kills the patient.

The idea that cosmology and other key branches of science eventually become toxic to a technological society offers a solution to Fermi’s Paradox because it is plausible that not only humans but also other intelligent species that emerge in the cosmos and start venturing into space face this same problem—this fundamental conflict between, on the one hand, the self-delusions needed for basic civilization-building and progress, and on the other, the delusion-bursting science needed to reach the stars.

Incidentally, cosmology’s hint about our relative inferiority as a species suggests another, complementary solution: The few star-faring civs that do exist in our vicinity either do not care about us, or, even if they are curious enough to visit, don’t waste time trying to communicate—firstly because we are too primitive to process what they would have to say, and secondly because almost anything they could convey, particularly regarding the nature of the cosmos, would injure us. 

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