Human societies today occupy a bewilderingly vast range of social complexity and technological development, from spear-shaking paleolithic clans with bones through their noses to very large, tech-worshipping, early-stage-spacefaring countries. Yet there seems to be a popular assumption—far from universal, but certainly widespread—that every human society can be placed onto the same long-run curve of progress: a hyperbola that ultimately reaches to the stars. According to this view, societies at any given moment will be spread all along that curve, the less advantaged ones at the lower end, the more advantaged ones higher up, and all will trace the same triumphant swoosh of progress, given enough time.

I think that that view, though wrong, is useful as a foil for an alternative view, which is, firstly (and most obviously) that societies’ “curves” can and do differ greatly, and secondly (much less obviously) that their development always ends in a flattening out against an asymptotic ceiling, rather than a run to infinity. Some societies will fly much, much higher than others before their progress ends, but, even for the high-tech ones, a ceiling is always there.

A related idea is that, at any given moment—in the span of history that stretches from the present back perhaps to the Neolithic Revolution—there are two fundamentally different kinds of society: “progress” societies that still have substantial positive rates of scientific, technological and other forms of cultural development, and “stasis” societies that essentially have stopped developing on their own.

These are simple ideas applied to a complex world in which “progress” has a somewhat hazy definition; and any “society” usually is connected to and influenced by others, and may be snuffed out or absorbed by one of those neighbors/rivals long before it matures. There is also a substantial genre and history of academic theorizing about civilizations and their supposed life cycles, vulnerability to climate change, etc.

But sometimes even a simplistic hypothesis can illuminate and clarify—and I think it’s fair to say that my amateur take here is at least rooted in evolutionary principles and in the historical record.

That record suggests pretty clearly that the true “progress” societies in existence today—the ones that would continue to develop substantially on their own without external help—make up only a small minority of humankind, and are chiefly European-derived. The dominant, default mindset for our species is instead the stasis mindset, and even if, at present, the societies ruled by that mindset are elevated by handouts and hand-me-down technology from their rich and progressive cousins, and might look as if they are progressing too, they will probably regress when that influence ceases.

Stasis as equilibrium

It should interest us, more than it evidently does, that stasis societies are seen also among some non-human animals. These include large-brained ones (chimpanzees, porpoises, elephants) whose cognitive abilities and social structures are probably at least comparable to those of our earliest paleolithic ancestors.

I think that by considering the situations of these animal societies, we can understand better why the progress of most human societies has been so limited. Long before humankind became a factor in their lives, each of these species-groups reached a sort of equilibrium with its natural environment, featuring stable populations, relatively long lifespans, and few if any serious predators—and thus, no heavy selection pressure favoring substantial change.

We can infer from this observation that human subpopulations and societies generally have experienced similar developmental trajectories, from fast change to slow change to no change as they adapted more effectively to the challenges presented by their environments. In other words, even if human developmental trajectories reached greater heights, especially after the neolithic revolution introduced new societal dynamics and new selection pressures, they still tended to flatten out at some equilibrium level, some happy Eden—usually corresponding to what we would now consider a low level of development: Think of the Mayans Cortes first met on the shore of the Caribbean, the Visayans bullied by Magellan, the Powhatans of Pocahontas, and the Polynesian kingdoms that hosted (and ultimately roasted) Cook.

Humans’ collective success at populating the Earth eventually led to substantial crowding and clashing of societies, which, where it existed, would have been a significant new source of pressure to become larger, more sophisticated, more coordinated, more powerful. With a bit of luck, “first movers” in this sense could quickly have turned themselves into local hegemons. But the imperial civilizations encountered by European adventurers in the heathen world were in most respects far behind their conquerors—the Aztecs had only an early Bronze Age level of metallurgy, for example—and generally seemed to lack the cultural traits needed for long-term scientific and technical progress. Even the most progressive non-European civilizations, in China and the Islamic Middle East, had more or less fallen by the wayside by the time Europe began industrializing.

Proxy conflicts

The factors underlying European civilization’s substantially greater capacity for progress have been debated for a while now. Presumably they included geographic- and resource-related advantages, cultural developments in the Hellenic and Roman worlds, Christianity and its variants, and other more obscure psychological traits. Given the complexity of Western civilization and the millennia that separate us from the factors in question, that debate over causation might never be settled. That debate might also not matter much, for every civilization has a set of progress drivers, and yet it seems that every civ stops progressing and/or dies eventually—and we have no special reason to think that the “exceptional” civ in which we live will remain an exception forever.

One thing that I am convinced does matter is the gap that exists between progress societies and stasis societies—and between their respective mindsets. If there is a novel idea in this essay, this probably is it: the progress vs. stasis divide underlies and helps give rise to a lot of other, more evident divides, though its presence and its influence are never acknowledged.

What more evident divides? I think the clearest example is what we call the “Left” vs. “Right” divide. Marx and Engels, who deserve as much credit as anyone for the modern concept of Left politics, were smart enough to notice that “primitive communism,” in paleolithic, kinship-based, essentially static societies, was the dominant social model for humans until the relatively recent advent of farming. Here in the early 21^st century, with the benefit of a century’s experience and hindsight, we can see that communism and stasis are connected causally, not just coincidentally. Even modern, “advanced” communism ultimately freezes an affected society in time.

That Marx and Engels, like Leftists today, preferred to see their stasis ideology as conducive to “progress” reflects the bias of our progress-dominated era—and of course reminds us of the virtually limitless human capacity for self-deception.

“Conservatives” have hardly been less deluded about their own ideology. In theory, conservatism restricts social change to conserve adaptive cultural traits. In practice, conservatism has been relatively permissive not only of technological and scientific changes, but also of destabilizing social changes including avarice and exhibitionism. Essentially, conservatism in the modern era has become an individualist, libertarian, narcissistic, not-conservative-of-anything ideology—a progress ideology—and as practiced today seems unsustainable to put it mildly.

Thus, I suggest, when the Right shouts for “equality of opportunity” and the Left for “equality of outcomes,” they are, to a great extent, shouting across a much deeper divide than the one they can see. In effect, they are shouting for more progress or for less, imagining in each case that they really want something else.

What about sex differences in policy attitudes? How would men and women have ended up on different sides of the progress/stasis fault-line? As I suggested in a brief 2022 essay, modern women’s relative preferences for ideals such as “equity” and “inclusivity”—and I would now add traits such as cancellations, lenient-policing attitudes, and preferences for low-complexity social structures—may be rooted at least partially* in the paleolithic, essentially static world, which in a sense women never left, their principal social roles having been fundamental and thus highly conserved. In contrast, men have had much greater exposure to the social upheavals following the advents of agriculture and industrialization, and thus have been much more shaped by those changes, especially in progress societies, so that they now possess, on average, a more “modern” set of preferences and biases.

If we examine how the stasis/progress divide corresponds to race and ethnicity, we see only a small, mostly European-derived minority on the progress side, and the vast non-European majority on the stasis side. Non-European societies are often highly stratified, and people in the upper strata of those societies often seem to adapt easily to the progress mindset. But the general picture suggests that there is something about European heritage especially that makes one much more likely to have the progress mindset.

Putting these simple ideas together suggests, for example, that we should expect Left-type, redistributionist, essentially pro-stasis policies to come mainly from women as compared to men, from people in developing societies as compared to Westerners—and from developing-society women most of all. That is, of course, what we do see in our world today.

The End of Progress

So far, this essay may come across as yet another negative depiction of non-European-derived peoples—an overwrought way of saying “We’re Number One” as I think my American compatriots still like to do—and maybe also a bit misogynist.

But that is not at all the message I am trying to convey here. Distinguishing the progress mindset from the stasis mindset is not the same as making a judgment about which one is better. In fact, the train of thought that runs through this essay originated several years ago with my idea that European-derived civilization, despite all its talk about becoming star-faring, medically immortal, entering a Singularity of hyper-development, etc. etc. may instead be well along in the process of abandoning its drive for progress—i.e., undergoing the usual flattening-out against a ceiling of stasis. Thus, according to that hypothesis, whatever ideological or other struggles are kept in play now by the progress-stasis divide will soon be resolved as the last locomotives of progress shudder to a halt.

What makes me think that this could be happening in the progress-worshipping West, the West that keeps inventing stuff like tail-landing rockets and single-cell multiomics? Here are a few signs:

• Science has triumphed over religion, but scientific advances, especially in theoretical physics and cosmology, are confronting humans as never before with a model of reality that completely contradicts their grandiose self-image and need for “meaning.” [link, link]
• Many emerging technological advances, including AI and robotics, also are problematic for human psychology. [link].
• Western civilization—the epitome of progress civilization—has already mostly lost its traditional, vital drive to explore and subdue, has become soft and feminized, has lost its fertility, has burdened itself with enormous welfare systems supporting enormous populations of non-productive citizens, and is beset by epidemics of mental illness and drug use. As one would expect of a dead or dying organism, the West is being colonized by high-fertility, essentially saprophytic invaders from static societies.
• Above-replacement-rate fertility in the world is now concentrated in the most static societies, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, which in that very real and tangible sense represents the human future.
• Even in the West—and even apart from political ideologies like socialism—recent rapid technological, economic and social changes have provoked strong enthusiasm for reversions to overtly static modes of living. Examples of this enthusiasm include the “hippie” movement of the 1960s, the popularity of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books (decent static pastoral societies vs. a malignant industrial state), and various contemporary “trad” movements.

If I am right that human societies invariably become static, then we must let go of the popular assumption that humans are impossible to satisfy fully, and—like cartoon characters chasing carrots that dangle just out of reach—will keep pursuing progress in one form or another ad infinitum. Indeed, the advent of advanced weight-loss drugs that non-addictively curb food appetite, but also suppress other motivations—they generally dull the brain’s reward system—already suggests that the drive for progress can be dialed down even in progress-mindset humans.

The rising popularity of “happiness” drugs like cannabis, and even methamphetamine and heroin/fentanyl, tells a complementary story: Humans ultimately are going to find a shortcut across the long and winding life-path they traditionally have had to tread to achieve enduring contentment. In other words, they may be able, soon, simply to choose, as they choose cars or clothes, lives of artificially induced deep satisfaction and even euphoric bliss—lives that run indefinitely without interruption, without hangovers, and without any of the blood, toil, tears and sweat that have powered our species until now.

________

*Obviously, female psychological traits are rooted largely in the biology of sex, child-bearing and child-rearing.

I could start with some anecdotes about high pharmaceutical and medical-procedure prices in the USA, and about much more reasonable prices that I and many others have encountered abroad. But why bother? Every American knows that healthcare-related prices in the US are insane. This crisis needs no introduction.

I should point out, though, since many Americans seem to have forgotten, that this crisis originated long before the risibly named Affordable Care Act took full effect in 2014 (ostensibly to help fix the situation). Thus, any enduring solution needs to cover not only the problems the ACA a.k.a Obamacare added, but also the more fundamental problems that have been festering for decades.

Some of the reasons for America’s grossly inflated healthcare prices are obvious. A law from 1986, for example, forces most hospital emergency departments to provide screening and stabilizing care regardless of patients’ ability to pay—which means that paying customers foot the bill via higher prices. In an environment where many patients don’t pay, hospitals also deliberately inflate prices so that even selling medical debt “cheaply” to debt collectors allows them to recoup most/all of their actual costs. The cartel-like organization of American doctors, and the American tort system with its lottery-like jury awards, have clearly made their own contributions to healthcare price inflation.

But there is one feature of American healthcare that towers above all others as a driver of high prices. I am referring to health insurance, which generations of Americans have been gaslighted into seeing as a critical necessity.

Insurance makes sense in principle as a way of protecting against rare and extreme costs. In reality, Americans long ago got into the habit of using insurance to cover even minor and routine healthcare. That gross overreliance on insurance has allowed the entire structure of healthcare prices to drift ever-upward.

Insurance inflates prices by inserting insurers, with their bureaucracies and need for profit, into what should be relatively simple cash transactions. It creates situations of costless consumption once out-of-pocket limits have been reached. Worst of all—by far—it erodes buyers’ sensitivity to cash prices by replacing those prices with streams of smaller premium payments. (Via the same behavioral mechanism, credit-based purchasing has lifted the cash prices of houses, cars and higher education.) Employer and government/taxpayer subsidies for health insurance premiums reduce buyers’ sensitivity further. Again, Obamacare has worsened this mess in various ways, but didn’t originate it.

Essentially, America’s healthcare system tries to make healthcare affordable by spreading costs around, but fails utterly because the method it uses for cost-spreading removes the natural, market-based brakes on prices.

That failure, by the way, entails not only a huge amount of financial stress on the tax-paying, premium-paying Americans who have to support the whole thing, but also a correspondingly stupendous undeserved windfall on the provider side.

That the current system is defended fiercely by its beneficiaries—including hospital chains, Big Pharma, insurers, and politicians who use the federal healthcare bureaucracy to buy votes—is to be expected. Unfortunately, their gaslighting is made much easier by commentators, including “expert” health economists, who continue to encourage the assumption that insurance is the only valid basis for modern healthcare.  (The only clear attack on insurance-based medicine I’ve ever seen was published in 2009 by a TV-industry executive.)

As a straightforward reality check, though, consider what would happen if insurance and all other forms of cost-spreading and cost-hiding were banned in healthcare markets, so that patients and providers had to revert to simple, transparent, cash-on-the-barrel transactions. If you run a drug company that has been charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for a course of some drug treatment, or if you run a hospital that has been charging similarly exorbitant amounts for a few days of inpatient care, would you keep your prices up at those levels, where almost none of your customers could now afford them? Of course not—you would now be in a normal, competitive market situation, where survival requires making products and services affordable. And by the way, roughly a million American “medical tourists” every year fly to foreign countries where cash payment for private healthcare is still the norm, prices are much lower, and quality of care is often superior.

A better way

That part of the solution is obvious, then. But what about Americans who could not afford even the dramatically lowered prices of a de-insurancized, market-based healthcare system?

Until modern developments including Medicare and Medicaid made them largely redundant, charity hospitals were ubiquitous in the US, and often were supported not by government budgets but by private philanthropists and even community funding drives. Some of these hospitals had endowments large enough to keep them going indefinitely without further external funding.

How much would it cost to convert 20% of US community hospitals—roughly 1,000 of them—to fully endowed, free-care status? The annual operating cost for an average, 150-bed US hospital has been estimated at about $250 million. For a no-frills charity hospital, an estimate of $200 million annually is probably conservative, and could be outright excessive if costs come way down with the elimination of insurance. In any case, multiplying that $200 million by 1,000, then dividing by a standard 5%-of-endowment-per-year expenditure assumption, suggests endowments totalling $4 trillion. That one-and-done cost, though it might seem huge, is only about twice the annual cost of Medicare/Medicaid/Obamacare—and of course it is just a tiny fraction of the philanthropic potential of America’s wealthiest.

Again, if a network of charity hospitals were to be endowed to this extent—or if all hospitals had endowments allowing the same proportion of free and/or subsidized care—little or no further support would be needed to keep this charity-care system afloat. Charity hospitals and market hospitals together could replace the current Medicaid/Medicare/Obamacare systems, removing entirely those gigantic taxpayer burdens, and no one would ever have to worry about their insurer’s willingness to cover a treatment.

Important details would have to be worked out, including how to confine charity care to those who really need it, and how to transition to the new system. But overall and in the long run, it could hardly fail to be a significant improvement over the current arrangement—an arrangement that is not only unreasonably burdensome and stressful, and a major driver of socioeconomic inequality, but also an ever-present reminder to citizens of the inadequacy (thus illegitimacy) of their government and elites.

***

The United States by any money-based standard is a wealthy country. Yet much of its population struggles financially—and this struggling subset extends well beyond the demographic groups that are traditionally dependent on handouts. Around 50 million people in the US use food banks, implying that they couldn’t feed themselves otherwise. A third of citizens and legal residents earn so little that they pay no federal income tax. A third—perhaps the same third—live paycheck-to-paycheck without savings. Meanwhile about nine million Americans work more than one job, presumably in a desperate attempt to make ends meet.

I could go on citing stats, but everyone knows that the “struggling class” is very large now, and struggles not so much because they can’t find work but because the prices for important things in their lives keep rising, while their wages fail to keep up.

Why their wages have failed to keep up is not hard to grasp. Mass immigration—including the legal immigration of skilled and semi-skilled foreigners—has put downward pressure on wages, as has the weakening of labor unions, DEI-based preferences (especially in years past) for blacks and browns over whites, offshoring, and automation/AI.

Why prices for important items keep going up—and up and up—also should not be hard to grasp, though it has been a remarkably under-covered story, as if the beneficiaries of those prices don’t want consumers to understand what has been happening.

What has been happening is that, mainly over the last century, American markets for healthcare goods and services, for housing, for college tuition and other big-ticket items have been modified from their traditional forms, financialized, in order to boost demand.

Financed Purchasing

Expanding credit has been the main form of financialization. Consumers like to think of expanding credit as a development that benefits them—empowers them to buy more stuff. But in an easy-credit society, it is really the business owners who are empowered. The business owners have no downside—they simply get more customers into their stores. The customers, on the other hand, while they can “buy” more stuff, are apt to be burdened increasingly by debt. More importantly, the advantage that customers think they have, in terms of buying power, is largely fleeting.

More customers means more demand, and we all know from Econ 101 that more demand, all else being equal, means higher prices. Conceivably in the long-term higher prices invite an increase in supply, which then brings prices down again. What they don’t teach in Econ 101, or at least don’t emphasize enough, is that the ramp in prices from expanded credit and other demand-boosting measures is not necessarily temporary.

Suppliers of goods and services don’t like to lower prices once they have raised them. Public companies tend to be punished in capital markets if their revenue ever drops. But even privately held companies in a given industry tend to adhere to their own industry culture or set of standard practices, and those practices, including pricing, can be very “sticky” once they are widely adopted. (Most American industries are effectively cartels in this loose sense.)

There are also technical, structural, and/or legal factors that can make it harder for producers to create enough supply to meet excess demand, even when they want to do so. Real estate is an obvious example: For decades now, there has been a finite and probably dwindling supply of real property in the vicinity of desirable places with good jobs and good schools. Even when there has been undeveloped land available for new home-building, states often have blocked such construction—or, worse, have devoted it to “low-income” or “multi-family” construction that dooms the quality of local schools and jobs. Moreover, corporations can and often do buy up much of the scarce stock of available housing, forcing would-be home buyers to rent from them instead. Meanwhile, mass immigration, the rise of two-earner families, and ultra-low mortage rates during 2009-2022 have helped keep demand on the boil.

The story of the American housing market and its levitation away from affordability thus illustrates that financialization in the form of expanded credit can, over time, paradoxically weaken consumers by reducing their buying power and burdening them with increasing debt. On the positive side of the ledger, businesses and their investors are enriched, overall economic activity (GDP) is expanded, and the stock market goes up and up—all of which tends to discourage any talk of harmful side effects.

There is another, more intuitive way of looking at this issue, which focuses on the actual payments made by the consumer. Actual payments are, after all, what the consumer is considering as he or she mulls over a potential purchase. When the price is a simple cash price and there is no credit in the picture, the buyer considers whether that full cash amount will excessively draw down (or exceed) his or her savings, whether the purchase represents good value in that context, and so on. When the price is, instead, not a lump sum but a string of much smaller payments including interest—let’s assume monthly payments—the buyer starts to consider how the size of each monthly payment relates to his or her monthly disposable income. The net price, in other words, stops being the principal basis for the buyer’s decision, which means that the buyer no longer exerts direct and downward pressure on that price, which in turn means that, ceteris paribus, the cash price can float upwards. Only when the size of each monthly payment becomes unmanageable in the context of monthly income, other credit sources, liquid savings, etc., does the buyer’s resistance start to intensify meaningfully.

We have seen this phenomenon at work not only in the housing market but also in the credit-goosed market for college tuition. Both of these markets are, of course, notorious for their price inflation in excess of CPI. The market for automobiles is well on its way to the same destination, though cars are not yet as badly overpriced because the switch to a credit-based norm for buying cars has begun relatively recently, and the used-car market is still largely cash-based.

This idea or hypothesis that financialization drives prices higher we can test with a simple thought-experiment: What would happen to real estate, college tuition and car prices if loan-based purchasing were suddenly outlawed? Obviously, prices in all three of those markets would have to come down dramatically, and stay down, due to the disappearance of a large subset of buyers. It should also be obvious that regaining and sustaining the previous levels of per-capita sales would require these industries to redesign their products and services so that selling them would be profitable at much lower prices.

Leasingization and Insurancization

Credit-based purchasing is not the only form of financialization. Another is to replace purchasing altogether with “leasing” or “subscribing,” as has been occurring, for example, in the markets for cars and higher-priced software. Both leasing and subscription replace lump-sum cash-on-the-barrel payments with long-term streams of monthly, quarterly or annual payments, and in that sense have the same magical effect as credit-based financialization: expanding the pool of buyers while raising effective prices.

Nowhere in the American economy is the malignancy of financialization more evident than in the market for healthcare goods and services. Here, of course, the old-fashioned practice of simply paying cash for doctors, hospital procedures, pharmaceuticals, etc. has been replaced by a system of “insurance”—which deserves to be in scare-quotes because it increasingly resembles a leasing or subscription-based system rather than a true insurance system.

The modern American health-insurance disaster originated, of course, from the understandable desire to insure people against medical costs that their savings could not cover. Health insurance in that sense was compellingly analogous to home insurance against a catastrophic fire or flood. Over time, of course, the insurancization of healthcare has come to cover not just catastrophic medical costs but virtually all medical costs. “What insurance do you have?” is the first question any American medical receptionist or pharmacist will ask a customer these days, even for small things like checkups or generic pills. And as I know all too well from my own profession, academic discussions of how to fix the American healthcare system universally assume that healthcare must be insurance-based—it is never an object of debate, other than in the context of advocacy for 100% socialized medicine.

Insurancization lifts costs principally in the way that other forms of financialization do: by replacing traditional cash prices with a stream of usually monthly payments. It also interposes a large industry between buyer (patient) and seller, even for small transactions—indeed, in the eyes of the care provider the insurer becomes the true “customer.” There is also the insurance-related phenomenon called “moral hazard,” which, after deductibles and co-pays are exhausted, manifests as greater risk-taking and less sensitivity to expenditure (“someone else is paying for it”). Other price-inflating factors include the law that mandates effectively “free” ER care for those who won’t pay, rules that force health “insurance” policies to cover pre-existing conditions, the cartel-like practices of the doctors’ lobby, and the rules and traditions by which corporations help hide costs by covering employees’ healthcare insurance premiums. (A 2009 piece in the Atlantic by David Goldhill does a decent job covering all these factors, even though it was written before the ruinous Obamacare law took effect.) Not all of these factors fit into the category I call “financialization,” but I think it’s fair to say that when you disrupt a market with financialization, it becomes easier to disrupt it in other ways too. I think it’s also obviously true that the American healthcare fiasco serves as the ultimate cautionary tale of how well-meaning “tweaks” to markets can end up inflating prices, hurting consumers and widening economic inequality.

And speaking of inequality, the impacts of financialization clearly extend beyond the economic realm. When a modern society stratifies into rich and poor, it becomes inherently less stable politically and fertile ground for radicalism. When young people can’t afford to buy a house or pay for healthcare (including pregnancy/childbirth care) they are less likely to marry and have children, and ultimately this can cause a society literally to die out. When citizens are overburdened with long-term financial obligations (mortgage payments, car loan payments, college loan payments, health insurance premiums) they are made much weaker relative to corporations and the state. In that sense, of course, corporations and the state have a strong interest in continuing and expanding financialization, and in discouraging discussions such as this one. Still, it is not hard to imagine that the vicious chain-reactions set in motion by financialization must eventually reach a point of crisis.

***

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 some 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—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-European women 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.

***

[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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