2/
That's what terminal rot looks like.
When the Soviet Union was rolling out rural electrification and sending the barefoot sons of farmers to study math and engineering, they didn't HAVE to lie about change and growth
The lies started later, when growth dropped to or below 0
3/
Compare the Soviet Union in 1955 to 1975 or 85. In 55 there were lots of true believers.
The Berlin Wall didn't go up the day WWII ended.
It went up 16 years later.
For 16 years, the story that "Communism is better" was plausible enough that they didn't NEED a wall.
4/
The American Cathedral didn't NEED to censor people say "the election was stolen" in 1976, because no one was credibly saying such a thing, and everyone believed in the basic morality of the Other Party.
5/
The urge to censor, to crush, to humiliate, to silence ... that's not an urge that a strong, stable, self-evidently successful government needs to indulge in.
6/
So I don't worry that "they've won, for all time, and our side will never get a nostril above water again".
This is the death throws of liberalism.
We all know that the word "liberal" originally meant "in favor of freedoms", and look how far the brand has mutated.
7/
We've gone from "The radical free speech movement" 50 years ago to "people voicing their opinions via a podcast is a 'loophole' that must be shut down."
This is an ideology that's run out of all successes, all ability to persuade with results.
8/
But that's not the PARTICULAR blank pill I want to address today.
Today's ani-venom is aimed at a different poison: the poison that "but the American PEOPLE have gone soft and are in love with communism".
9/
And, yes, many have, and it's pathetic.
But it's a Generations theory thing. These poor bastards were raised in an environment suffused with feminism, lies about the utility of liberal arts education, incompetent leaders who simultaneously told everyone to go to college >
10/
AND helped created sufficient supply of loans for college by promising lendors that the loans were not dischargeable in bankruptcy.
This generation of communists was shafted by a generation of incompetents (Biden, etc.) and they grew up blinded, punched in the head
11/
and LIED TO about who was doing the punching.
Are they soft? Yes.
Are they pathetic? Yes.
Were they actually screwed by factors outside their control? Absolutely.
Will this phenomena continue in perpetuity? Absolutely not.
12/
But even THAT is not the primary antivenom I want to share today.
Today's antivenom is that we are living through the death of the Westphalian system.
You complain to me "but half of my countrymen are communists".
I say to you "no. You are not a citizen of USG >>>
13/
you are a citizen of a new, secret country that is being given birth right before your eyes.
This country does not [ yet ] control territory. It does not [ yet ] have beautiful buildings made out of marble and granite. It does not [ yet ] have a flag.
14/
And this country, the one that's being born, this country without a name, is going to be far stronger and far more powerful than the US ever was.
Heck, it already is.
Let me explain what this country is and who the citizens are >>>
15/
Our tribe is tempted to say things like "ah, 1789 America, those were my people."
That's a country of about 3 million people, and actually you would have hated 1/3 or 1/2 of them. Puritan scolds from Harvard whipping people for disrespecting their orthodoxies.
16/
Tidewater bullies, whipping slaves and fighting dogs for fun. Scots Irish idiots, doing Scots Irish idiot things.
You can paint a [ fake ] rosy picture of the era, but the truth is that only a fraction of those people were our tribe.
Maybe 1 million of us back then.
17/
1945, tho - that was REAL America, right? GIs , gun ho, get stuff done! 139 million of us back then.
Except...again, I don't think you can count all of those people are True Americans / our tribe. These people had just voted for FDR two or three dozen times,
18/
believed in Big Government heard and soul, etc. They were more than happy to herd American citizens into camps based on ancestry. The excesses of government-run Jim Crow were everywhere.
H L Mencken, Laura Ingalls Wilder, that whole crowd - those were the DISSIDENTS.
19/
This was before the 1960s push for more free speech (which I strongly defend).
So of the 139 US citizens in 1945, how many were "our tribe" ?
I'm guessing 1/4 or so.
So the population of our tribe was maybe 35 M back then.
20/
2021 - how big is Our Tribe now? I think it's still about 1/4 of the US population ... which makes it 82 million people.
...but now we've got connectivity. A tribe is defined not just by shared characteristics, but by shared culture and connectivity.
Our tribe >>>
21/
In South Africa, Russia, Germany, Japan, Australia, Chile - all over.
I don't think there are 82 million people in this New Country Without a Name - I think there are more like 150 or 200 million.
That's still a huge minority of the Earth's population ... but it's big.
22/
Our tribe includes people building spaceships and people building alternative crypto currencies. It has randos hacking the vaccine distribution network to create better efficiencies, and it has classical artists improving the aesthetics of the world. It has authors & moms.
23/
The New Country Without a Name is hard to see, because we were all raised in the Westphalian System and we don't yet have words for such things, or eyes to see it.
But look around your twitter mutuals These are the patriots of the new country.
24/
My friend
@skiballar once said "I realized that I'm a patriot of a country that never really existed".
I'm going to turn that around.
"I've realized that I'm a patriot of a company that doesn't yet [ fully ] exist."
@skiballar 25/
The Cathedral can [ and will ] try to push us underground, but they're working off a broken and outdated model. They think that they're preserving their own decaying incompetent kleptocracy which is based on geographic borders.
...but what they're actually doing is >
26/
telling the competent, the truthful, the unintimidated, the skillful, the prudent, the brave, the family creators: "This society has no place for you. You don't belong here. You're not One of Us."
I agree with them!
The Bidens, the AOCs, the Kamalas - they're right.
28/
The USG is a quarter millennium old pile of garbage with a veneer of marble and red-white-and-blue bunting, wrapped in a rainbow flag, decorated with anti-intellectual "tRuSt tHe sCiEncE" propaganda posters.
It can't launch a spaceship.
It can't distribute a vaccine.
29/
It can't prevent Great Power infiltration and subversion.
It can't secure its borders.
It can't rig an election well enough to convince people.
It can't convince its citizens, so it has to silence them.
30/
Moldbug is right that we should not take up arms against this gray, incompetent, Brezhnevite joke of a regime.
...but I don't think he's right that we should wait for Emperor Thiel to free us.
I think that's still 19th century thinking.
31/
The new world that I see being born is spread across the Earth, and is in orbit, is on the moon and Mars, and elsewhere.
...and the nations and tribes of that new world are not crisply geographically distinct.
We live in a privileged time. We're witnessing great things
32/
About once every 500 years the world changes fundamentally.
~ 0 AD: the birth of a new kind of administrative state [ Rome ] and a new religion that was supportive of individuals [ Christianity ]
33/
~ 500 AD: birth of post-Roman world, integration of administration & German tribal democracy
~ 1,000 AD: formalization of the above, developments in art, philosophy, some tech
~ 1,500 AD the Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution precursor
34/
End of the ~500 year run of the Westphalian system, beginning of something new.
Neal Stephenson had more than a small glimpse of this, with his neo-Victorians.
35/
Nothing build on a lie can long survive, and can never thrive.
The Cathedral system is built on SOOOO many lies:
* credential education, even in made up nit wit topics, is good
* family is meaningless, children are bad
* "merit" and "intelligence" are fake concepts
36/
I could go down the list, but you know all the lies that we're all being asked to believe. You know all of the pinches of incense that we're being asked to burn for Caesar.
37/
So what is this New Invisible Country?
More or less the inverse of all of that
* Competence is real.
* Results matter.
* Credentials don't.
* Social lies are laughable.
* Moral bravery matters; following the latest trends is actively bad
* Family, marriage, children matter
38/
* Free speech is good.
* Rights are real.
* Producing value isn't the ONLY thing in life, but it's an important thing.
* Piety and decency matter.
* Western civilization has more good than bad.
* People who are willing to accept our culture are welcome to join our project
39/
I could go on and on, but lunch is on the table.
TLDR: don't despair because the old corrupt system is failing; rejoice because we few, we happy few, we band of brothers, are building a new nation, right under their eyes.
And we're succeeding.
40/
Yep.
TFW "there's a lot of ruin in a nation" means that the boss villain has far more hitpoints than you'd hope.
https://t.co/nLwCvvJECe
41/
The arc of things in the long run is good.
The arc of things over the next 20-30 years is chaotic AF.
https://t.co/8Im9H4Jrbw
42/
If you liked my white-pill thread about how Our Tribe is gonna win in the end, you might be interested in some novels I wrote on the same topic.
https://t.co/2cOsS2VKh5
43/
Can you imagine Reagan and the entire Republican party in 1981 trying to regulate 'zines out of existence, because mimeographed newsletters about music and anarchism were a threat to the powers that be?
No.
And yet here we are, 40 years later.
https://t.co/RYRC8RFsfO
44/
relevant to this thread
https://t.co/I3FK5uLkoV
45/
Sure. I like "phyle" a bit better, and that's the one I use in Aristillus 3 and 4 ... which I intend to get back to as soon as Escape the City ships.
https://t.co/loUmoljqaH
