A Sketch of Near Future Political Prognosis

I want to speculate for a minute about what kind of revolutionary or reform potential exists in our political-economic system as the current era of boomer senility and liberalism reaches its breaking point. I'm going to skip over a lot of reasoning here for the sake of brevity.

First of all I don't think we have revolutionary potential the way we did between the middle 18th century and the middle 20th century. Revolutions are for when you have a big overhang between fundamental material possibility and current political arrangement, or the details really haven't been worked out yet. I don't think we have anything like that. The state space of modern industrial regimes is fairly well explored at this point. The peak is the developmentalist state-capitalist nationalist-socialist synthesis displayed in modern China, Showa Japan, midcentury US and USSR, and pre-war Germany. That peak comes shortly after the initial modernizing revolution, and thereafter probably can't happen again the same way because the original overhang is no longer present, and the social parasite load has caught up.

Instead, dy default we're getting decay coming off that peak. In one view, decay can go on forever until the whole civilization is exhausted and replaced. But we may be seeing more specific regime decay on a faster timescale than that. The liberal boomer regime is aging out and becoming too corrupt to function, but there's still a lot of functionality lying around in the system. This is what ultimately happened to the USSR, and it's about to happen to us. So I want to speculate about the longer timescale contradictions within modern industrial/capitalist regimes and how they will likely play out.

I'll post my extended predictions in my next reply:

>>2211
>I'll post my extended predictions in my next reply:

1. The nuclear soveriegnty deep state will stay intact. The taxation capability, rebellion suppression, intelligence agencies, core especially nuclear military forces, and military-adjacent industrial ecosystem are simply too important to too many live players to be dropped on the floor. Decay may drop almost every other function of the central state, but these will remain as the kernel of the state. Even in a total state collapse as in Russia, these functions were preserved by far-seeing live players. But after the current collapse cycle, we could also see a resurgence of meritocracy within this system.

2. The modern unitary state will otherwise fragment into bureaucratic feudalism. As everything else gets worse in the decay of the unitary modern state, bureaucracies and agencies will take on an increasingly feudal relation to each other and central power. We already see bureaucracies setting their own foreign policies, acquiring their own funding streams, having their own self-preservation logic, and even having their own armed forces. Roscosmos and Gazprom deployed troops in Ukraine. The line between regulatory capture and bureaucratic independence will blur, leaving a patchwork of function-serving but self-interested national champion agencies in a state of feudal competition and cooperation with each other. Much of this politics will take place within the legitimacy and legal frameworks of the central state just as Charlemagne and William the conqueror needed imprimateur from the pope.

3. Competetive firms (and agencies) will need in-house human capital. National culture and education increasingly can't product human capital. No one reproduces, no one can read, no one has a work ethic. Firms and states compete for the remaining functional human capital. This is a key contradiction in the modern system: human capital is not on the ledger of capitalist firms; they are pure consumers of it and cannot afford to produce it because they don't own it. But cults escape this: a cult that owns its human capital can get below-market labor and also afford to train them and help them reproduce. For example, I've heard of a construction firm that wins because it can get mormon FLDS guys to work for below market rates in exchange for FLDS wives. Many remaining religious communities are trending this way too, besides the obvious ones like the Amish. OpenAI is largely a rationalist operation, and the rationalist cult overall is doing well financially. Even if they haven't yet cracked above-replacement reproduction, any cult that does will take an increasing share of a shrinking future.

On that last point: the key contradiction of the modern regimes is the human capital question. Only a state or firm or cult that couples its economic development imperatives to the reproduction and improvement of its biological substrate is truly sustainable. Everything else is going to burn out. Midcentury modern regimes tried this at the national scale, but couldn't sustain it for longer than a generation nor make the national and international politics work (maybe next time?). But the right equilibrium might actually be a competetive social darwinist landscape of cult-firm-polis-agencies that produce and retain their own human capital and relate to each other and higher powers in a feudal patchwork. The key thing is coupling the economic logic to the human logic through "firms" that own both.

Another way of seeing the problem is that the modern liberal regime places the human subject beyond the reach of social planning (their individual preferences are notionally axiomatic). But this means human problems that need planning don't get solved, we get incoherent consumerist economics (waste!), and we get incoherent politics swamped with irrational manipulation.

The cult idea is interesting. Many of the most ambitious companies in the U.S. that attract the most elite talent can be thought of as cults. Jane Street, Palantir, SpaceX, OpenAI and others fit this description.

Many SpaceX and Palantir alums have started impressive startups of their own and are creating their own ecosystems filled with people who have deeply bought into the belief structures of their previous orgs.

SpaceX has considered building a village for their employees at StarBase and engineers with elite credentials are living in dorms and trailers working absurd hours for below market pay. SpaceX is als building its own schools with a completely different educational philosophy than current public schools.

I think there will be more of these cult-companies that invest more in human capital development and supply workers with housing, education for their children, and a sense of meaning and community.

But one of the more interesting developments could go beyond the individual cult-companies to the ecosystem of companies that are developed by their alumni. The most functional and high agency groups won’t just be these cult-companies but the extended ecosystem that develops around them. Once they start coordinating like a post war Keiretsu new possibilities will emerge.

>>2213
All of these companies are highly selective in their hiring. Part of what makes the cult work is the kind of people the employees are in the first place.

Hence, this cannot be a mass phenomenon. Selectivity and scaling are not compatible.

>>2214
This is a good point. Mere selectivity and a particular culture isn't enough to work in the way I'm speculating will become more normal. The key is going to be ability to actually reproduce human capital, not ability to attract and shape. I'll believe SpaceX et al pass this test when they are hiring primarily the children of alumni.

I don't think this will really hit until we hit real worldwide labor shortages, and it will not be done by companies directly, but by high-fertility and culturally divergent cults and possibly state governments. The key speculation is the ability to breed and retain below-market labor within your taxation or labor planning domain.