Empire Without Frontier Is Dysgenic

People will leave their shtetl and cultural identities behind to participate in The Empire if there are opportunities available to them that wouldn't be available at home. And I'm not talking about computer job opportunities. I'm talking specifically about the roles that do not exist under the discoordination and small numbers of the homestead – namely the opportunity to be trained and equipped to survey land, take land, contribute to a project like space travel, etc. These are things that small peoples do not do, they are only possible under the coordination of some larger power. These are the things that make Empire attractive, otherwise I'd rather stay just on the shtetl or splinter off with friends to explore.

And in moments when the empire is wavering, the two options are two correct the ship and maintain the projects and ideals that make people want to come join, or it's to retreat back into our ever smaller groups. What the mainstream right is implicitly saying with their in-group messaging is that we should retreat from empire and return to the smaller, safer groups. Again, this is the losers path between the two options. What's actually needed in this moment is a reorienting and a reopening of *any* frontier as that's what makes civilization feasible in the first place – projects that would otherwise not be possible under the discoordination and small size of the shtetl. Because if the empire is going to use its immense power to bully me and the other productive people instead of using its power to direct our energies, then I'd rather just not participate.

Frontier – ocean, new world, space, and the opportunity to explore it, is what makes empire sustainable. It is not consumption or comfort. Those things can show up as side effects but they are not the north star. Coordination matters and frontier is the nuclear material that powers it.

Peter Turchin develops Ibn Khaldoun's concept of asabiya (roughly social cohesion--the feeling of solidarity and capacity for collective action) which in agrarian states he claims is cultivated on meta ethnic frontiers, that is border regions of established states/empires between 2 distinguished ethnicities (the wider the differences the greater the antagonisms) and through decades and centuries of violent conflict groups are selected for more asabiya on both sides of the frontier (groups that manage to upscale and cooperate with each other tend to survive). New states emerge on the outskirts of old empires on one side of the frontier, and break away states can emerge on the “inside” portion of the same frontier. The center of empires tends to decline and lose asabiya over time because of a lack of a frontier (hence when empires collapse it's center is a literal black hole where nothing happens--see Rome, Athenian empire for the 2 greatest examples). How social capital (or asabiya) is generated in industrial/post-industrial states is a bit of a mystery but it's clear it's been in decline in the West and if you ask me anon we sure do need a new frontier or it's the end.

>>3048
Have you read a thread on Yockey's Imperium here? You may find very interesting thoughts on that topic. https://sofiechan.com/p/2954

>>3060
I have skimmed it but will give it a more thorough read. While I appreciate Spengler (I understand Yockey has a spenglerian approach) I don't know how illuminating he is for our time. There is a failure to explain what makes cultures/civilizations tick (while this is acknolwedged by Spengler himself as the proper approach to History, as it cannot be understood mechanistically but only morphologically, through intuition) that leaves me unsatisfied and yearning to understand more. I refuse to believe that nothing can be done and that we can only remain dutifully at our post--I believe an empirical approach to these sorts of things is superior, and I have faith that proper understanding of our material conditions can help us navigate towards the best available solutions to steer our way through the crisis of our times, if not to save civilization, then at least to save our friends, and to find refuge where we can build the next center of humanity.