I didn’t get into video games until I was in my 40s. Oddly enough, it was a historian who triggered my interest. Niall Ferguson, the bestselling author, columnist, TV personality and Stanford professor, penned a 2006 New York Magazine piece, “How to Win a War,” that persuasively extolled the virtues of video games as tools for learning about history. He was particularly impressed by a certain turn-based PC strategy game that purported to model World War II—playing it, he said, had seriously challenged some of his own beliefs about the war.

I was not as impressed when I played that particular game, and later a more sophisticated competitor. The limitations of consumer-level computers and developer teams meant that these games simply couldn’t model the dynamics of the WW2-era world very well. However, even at that very modest level of simulation, the experience of replaying a historical period again and again, for dozens to hundreds of playthroughs, did prompt some thoughts about history in general.

One was simply that replaying a given stretch of history, which is to say, generating one variant history after another, has the effect of diminishing the significance of any of those variants. Naturally, in the highly abstracted milieu of a video game, one expects to be far less sensitive to details than one would be in real life. But I noticed that I became progressively desensitized to the details of the real-life WW2 as well: they seemed less interesting and meaningful.

To put it another way, my picture of this period of history was no longer formed from one clear image-capture, but from many—and in that multiple exposure, so to speak, most details were nonrecurring; they therefore tended to fade away as the number of exposures grew.

Would real-life history look different each time if we could re-run it from the same initial starting point? It absolutely would. Even one modern country is an enormously complex and nonlinear system—it will always vary significantly in how it runs from the same starting conditions, and the details of its course will be hard to predict very far in advance. (Think of how hard it is for us to foresee the course of a much simpler nonlinear system, the weather.)

Even so, we almost never think of history in this way. Experience encourages us instead to think of any historical episode as a singular phenomenon—one unique block of spacetime, never to be repeated—and that in turn leads us to frame any history as a sets of events linked by cause-effect relationships. Typically, we also try to draw big lessons from it all: the “lessons of history.” By contrast, when we have the ability to simulate replays of that block of spacetime again and again, seeing how things play out differently each time, it makes the inherently probabilistic nature of history stand out much more sharply. We are, in effect, forced to face a reality we normally wouldn’t acknowledge.

To illustrate again with an extreme example: Suppose one had a large bucket filled with a million marbles, each with its own identifying number, and suddenly dumped them onto some perfectly flat, expansive surface—and recorded precisely how they all bounced and rolled and reached some final arrangement. To the average person, that “history” of the marbles wouldn’t be particularly interesting, would it? The average person would understand intuitively that this marble-history was basically random, would look different in every re-run, and had nothing to teach, other than that marbles reliably obey known laws of mechanics. For that reason, writing a detailed History of the Marbles—or worse, having a dozen marble historians write their own competing tomes—would be absurd. Possibly such histories would be of interest to marbles, who might be curious about all the individual collisions that had brought them to their present positions. But to beings capable of a wider perspective, a history of the marbles would seem pointless—a measuring of statistical noise, as mathematicians would say.

*

Apropos of all that, at some point in my WW2-gaming sojourns I came up with a weird thought-experiment:

Suppose the virtual soldiers and citizens populating any given playthrough had human-like feelings, and regarded that playthrough—their playthrough—as the only one that had ever happened? What would these virtual people do if I, as the Player-God above them, suddenly revealed to them the true nature of their existence—in other words, revealed their “history” as but one chance-ridden playthrough among many?

They would despair, wouldn’t they? Not only at the revelation that their existence was a mere simulation, but also in the recognition that it was merely one of many variant, stochastically determined existences—one semi-random timeline among thousands, or really billions considering the wider universe of players with their separate copies of the game. They would see that, even as a simulation, their existence was effectively meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

Someday, computer games may be invented that not only simulate human events with a high degree of complexity, but also, via the right hardware, imbue their human-like characters with some degree of consciousness. Given the situation of these simulated humans, aware that they are trapped in worlds of no meaning or consequence, we as godlike players will feel sorry for them. However, the sufferings of our virtual creatures should be the least of our worries at that point—for by then we should have recognized that, as creatures of no consequence ourselves, we are in the same damned boat.

*

Can that be true? Is what you or I experience as “real life” merely one probabilistically determined playthrough among an infinitude of them?

The short answer is: very likely yes. And this is arguably the most important revelation—or, if you like, compelling theory—produced by science to date. Moreover, the idea I propose here is that any human civilization capable of grasping this true nature of our reality will eventually enter a state of deep and chronic despair, which perhaps can end only in human extinction.

This putative process of discovery and despair has an interesting, foreshadowing parallel in the most famous Western account of human origin, that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. For we are, with our science, compulsively eating a forbidden, toxic fruit (of the Tree of Knowledge) and are thereby, in effect, exiling ourselves from the lush, blissfully ignorant existence we briefly had.

And this may not be just a human affliction. It may be one that always strikes species once they reach a certain level of technical and scientific advancement. If so, then plausibly it has already extinguished most of the smart species across the universe, and has made the rest avoidant lest they transmit to us truths we cannot handle. This would explain the paradox—“Fermi’s Paradox”—that the universe probably has incubated trillions upon trillions of alien civilizations, yet the latter’s visits to us appear to have been relatively few and furtive.

*

Science, as we know it, is a very recent development. Broadly speaking, it is one of the fruits of the Neolithic Revolution, which began in the Eastern Mediterranean about 15,000 years ago, and by about 1000 A.D. had spread to almost every human society. This major shift in the human lifeway, from nomadism to farming and settlement-building, triggered a rapid, self-catalyzing increase in the scale and complexity of our societies, and the development of many new institutions. Science, however, was one of the slowest to emerge—and as an ongoing, global institution, dominant over magic and religion, has existed for only about a century and a half.

The progress of science has been bittersweet. On the one hand, it has led to better living standards through better knowledge and technology—e.g., better crop yields, better sanitation, better medicines, and a vastly better understanding and command of our environment. On the other hand, it has relentlessly belied man’s instinctive, high opinion of himself as a special creature of God, “made in His image.”

One of the earliest and most famous examples of this type of psychologically problematic scientific knowledge was the idea (introduced by Copernicus in 1543, and later refined and popularized by Kepler and Galileo), that our planet is not at the center of the universe. It took hundreds of years and considerable technical developments in astronomy for this painful truth that the universe does not revolve around us to be accepted. But in a sense, we are still struggling to cope with the implications. If we are not situated centrally in the universe, how could it have been made specifically for us, as our religions have led us to believe? A cosmology that placed us in one wispy spiral arm of one nondescript galaxy among trillions of galaxies might have been an important step forward for our science—but it was a giant leap downward for our self-image.

Then, of course, there was Darwin. Humans as mere animals, evolutionary cousins of apes? Impossible! The Church resisted that theory as it had resisted Galileo and Copernicus. But by Darwin’s time, science was much stronger, the Church much weaker, and within only a few decades, serious opposition to the theory of evolution by natural selection started to fade away.

It was also becoming clear, by then, that Earth couldn’t have been around for only a few thousand years, as accounts such as Genesis implied. Empowered by the discovery of radioactivity and radioactive decay, geologists by the mid-1920s understood that Earth was formed billions of years ago. This implied that we, H. sapiens, are merely an incidental and very recently developed addition to our planet’s fauna. In fact, many paleontologists now suspect that, had that asteroid not hit our planet about 65 million years ago, largely wiping out the then-dominant dinosaurs, tool-making primates like us might never have evolved.

Since the end of the 1900s, cosmologists generally have been in agreement that our observable universe has existed for roughly ten billion years before our solar system was even formed. That means that humans are almost certainly latecomers to the higher intelligence club—and may be as primitive and uncomprehending, in relation to truly advanced species, as ants or amoebas are to us.

All this points to the conclusion that a God of the Universe, if anything like Him exists, has no special interest in humans; and, moreover, that all human “meaning” and “significance” is strictly local—strictly confined to our tiny speck of reality.

*

Probably like most people who grew up in the latter half of the 20^th century, I’ve tended to react to these scientific revelations by ignoring them. To the extent that I did think about them, in my younger years, I assumed with vague optimism that humans someday, through better technology, could spread from one star system to another, and so on until they establish their universality, perhaps ultimately melding with whatever force or entity made the universe. I think it’s fair to say that a lot of other people, including prominent advocates of space exploration, still think the same way.

I now see such optimism as a form of denial—a denial that is going to be harder and harder to maintain, as time goes on and we humans are increasingly confronted with the nature of our reality.

How we understand that reality is something that I expect will undergo various elaborations in the coming decades. But it should already be apparent that the idea we could ever “conquer the universe,” or in any way escape the utter insignificance of our existence, is naïve.

The most obvious (though not even the worst) part of the problem is that the universe is just unmanageably vast: larger than we can ever observe, expanding faster than light, and very likely infinite—which would mean that the human realm or contribution, in relation to the whole, could never be more than infinitesimal. This idea that space is effectively infinite the physicist and cosmology popularizer Brian Greene has described as “consistent with all observations and . . . part of the cosmological model favored by many physicists and astronomers.”

The human mind is not really adapted for contemplating infinities, but as Greene has pointed out, a truly infinite universe would contain, at any moment, infinite numbers of worlds identical to ours, some moving through time precisely as ours does, others with variations—in fact, all possible variations.

Again, compared to the whole of this Infinite Universe, and, we might also say, in the eyes of its Creator, the histories of individual worlds within it, along with their systems of morality and meaning, should be of infinitesimal significance. If we could take a God’s-eye view, zooming out from our planet to encompass our whole galaxy, and then galaxy clusters, and clusters of clusters, we would see the histories of individual worlds much as the video game player sees our world: less as sets of interlinked events, and more as manifestations of a broader, stochastic process, whose function is essentially only to ink over the space of possibility.

Contemporary physics, specifically quantum mechanics, delivers us to an even colder, darker destination. Quantum mechanics has at its core an equation, the Schrödinger wave equation, that implies a weird multiplicity of states for any given quantum-scale particle (an electron, for example) traveling through time. Physicists in the early years of quantum theory clung to the belief that these multiple states somehow probabilistically “collapse” to one state whenever one tries to observe the particle with a measuring device. However, in the past few decades the field basically has abandoned that rather hand-waving interpretation, mostly in favor of a simpler, more parsimonious one: that the multiple possible states a particle can be observed to have are all, in a sense, real.

In other words, these alternate states represent multiple actual particles existing in different “worlds” or “universes.” Thus, a physicist recording the impact of one particular state of an electron has, at that moment, otherwise identical counterparts in otherwise identical alternate universes who record the impacts of all the other states.

The reality implied by this interpretation—now called the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI)—encompasses not just one very big universe but, rather, an infinite number of them, a “multiverse,” across which everything that can happen does happen. There is a perfection here that, at least in a technical sense, should impress those who always believed Creation would be flawless and complete.

Of course, from the usual sentimental human perspective, MWI looks bizarre and horrifying. Even so, its superior simplicity and parsimony, as a way of thinking about quantum phenomena, has enabled it to survive and spread despite its implications—which physicists don’t “like” any more than you or I do.

As Greene has noted:

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.

*

“The multiverse will drive you crazy if you really think about how it affects your life, and I can’t live like that,” the philosopher of physics and MWI theorist Simon Saunders once told a reporter. “I’ll just accept [it] and then think about something else, to save my sanity.”

Is thinking about something else a viable strategy to escape the psychological consequences of modern cosmology?

Conceivably it is, up to a point. Humans evolved with basic, powerful drives towards survival and procreation, and even religiosity; they thus probably have, on average, a significant innate resistance to nihilist worldviews. Even now, well into the third millennium A.D., most of the human population professes belief in one religion or another. Also, obviously, the average person has no deep understanding of, or interest in, MWI or other modern cosmological theories.

Yet the things we do learn and think about ultimately affect our behavior, if only subconsciously. One doesn’t have to be a philosopher or a psychologist to understand—to take another extreme example—that if we all knew our solar system would be obliterated within a year, making it obvious that our existence was and always had been inconsequential, enough of us would fall into despair that our societies would start to disintegrate immediately.

I think the reason we’ve largely been able, so far, to resist the toxic implications of modern cosmology is simply that we haven’t been forced to confront them. But that situation is changing.

When I was growing up in the 1970s and early 80s, cosmology was expansive but still quite tame compared to what was coming. Carl Sagan’s 1980 Cosmos TV series on PBS, for example, was hardly despair-inducing. One could contemplate the large universe depicted by Sagan and other pop cosmologists of the time, and, as I noted above, could still fantasize about humans’ someday traversing and conquering it. MWI and other infinite-universe theories had not yet caught on, certainly not at the popular level.

These days, by contrast, MWI and similar “parallel universe” themes are essential elements of pop cosmology, and, perhaps more importantly, are also common in pop culture generally.

Moreover, although technologies based on quantum mechanics (such as lasers) have been around for decades, newer quantum tech such as quantum computing and quantum encryption emphasizes, for the first time, the spookier, multiplicity-of-states aspect of quantum mechanics—the aspect that MWI essentially was devised to explain. Thus, from popular science to tech to popular media culture generally, people are being exposed to the infinite-universe/multiverse idea as never before, and in ever-stronger doses.

The impact of that rising exposure won’t be immediately obvious. There are, and in the coming decades will continue to be, many other drivers of despair, disruption, suicide, and social disintegration in the modern world—drivers such as cultural feminization, mass immigration, and human-displacing AI systems. Trying to disentangle the effect of one of these from the others is going to be challenging, to put it mildly. But, if my hypothesis is correct, “cosmological despair” will weigh more and more heavily and evidently on developed societies—especially among younger people, who will encounter MWI and similarly harsh cosmologies in their formative years, never having had the comforts of older, friendlier worldviews. In other words, if the world is now entering an Age of Despair principally for other reasons, cosmology will keep it there terminally.

*

There probably aren’t very many clear examples, yet, of people taking their own lives as a result of belief in MWI or other toxic cosmologies. However, something like this seems to have happened in the case of Hugh Everett III—the physicist who developed the original version of MWI (“’Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics”) as his Princeton PhD thesis in 1956.

Everett eventually became a financially successful tech entrepreneur and, in most ways seemed normal, being married with children, having friends, and pursuing ordinary hobbies and pleasures that included wine-making and ocean liner cruises. However . . .

Everett firmly believed that his many-worlds theory guaranteed him immortality: His consciousness, he argued, is bound at each branching to follow whatever path does not lead to death—and so on ad infinitum. [link]

Probably at least partly due to this belief, he smoked, drank, and ate with abandon, which ultimately gave him a fatal heart attack in 1982, when he was only 51 years old. In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated and his ashes were thrown out with other household garbage.

A decade and a half later, Everett’s troubled 39-year-old daughter Liz took her own life even more directly. She left a note to the effect that she wanted her own ashes thrown out with the garbage, so that she might “end up in the correct parallel universe to meet up w[ith] Daddy.”

***

When labor becomes scarce, expensive, and/or unreliable, business owners start looking for alternatives. For most of the past 30 years, a very attractive alternative was offshoring—to countries like China, where labor was cheap, plentiful, and reliable. In the past three years, the COVID pandemic and the maturing of once-cheap labor markets, plus the increasing obviousness of China’s IP theft and overall hegemonic ambitions, have begun to reverse that trend. Economists are now forecasting “the end of globalization,” with labor scarcity continuing for decades as the workforce shrinks. Big companies, desperate for workers, are even indicating a willingness to hire people without college degrees for positions that traditionally required them.

To me, though, the idea that labor will continue to be scarce seems wrong. As I see it, mechanization and AI are now moving onto the steepest part of the innovation slope, and will soon start “disemploying” people all the way up the labor value chain, from manual trades to those overpaid millennial marketing girls sipping lattes on TikTok. Even I, with my fairly challenging profession and decades of experience, am likely to be left jobless at least a few years before I’d like to retire.

AI has taken longer than expected to arrive in useful forms, but is now definitely arriving and ready to start disrupting. It can, technically if not yet legally, drive cars, tractors, trains, and boats; fly planes and drones; and guard warehouses. The mechanization technology underlying humanoid robots has been making big advances too—such robots now can open doors, climb stairs, recover from falls, hold and manipulate heavy objects, etc. Once such robots are mass-produced and made available for leasing, their use as replacements for factory workers, waiters, construction workers, checkout clerks, etc. will become a viable proposition. Will we have to wait as long as five years before that starts?

AI language-processing software that can be taught, or can teach itself via the Internet, should start displacing office worker bees well before then—and by worker bees I mean basically anyone whose job consists largely of emailing, writing reports, filling out spreadsheets, and doing other routine kinds of paperwork. And we’ve all seen the AI text-to-image and text-to-movie packages that were unleashed recently and have been improving at a rapid pace. How long will it be before a single writer, working with one of those algos, generates a feature-length film on his own? A year from now? Two?

Essentially, we’re facing the prospect of the abrupt end of the labor market, an institution that has been at the center of human civilization for millennia.

I’m aware that critics of earlier forms of labor-saving technology, such as the Luddites and their ilk, were somewhat shortsighted in their predictions of mass labor displacement. These early industrial workers were themselves displaced in large numbers, and in that sense had every reason to complain. What they failed to see was that the labor-saving innovations that displaced them would, on the whole, lead to greater productivity and economic growth, and ultimately a net rise in demand for labor.

But that was then, and this is now. The tech that’s going to be released into the world in this decade will be capable of displacing humans from their jobs much faster than the latter will be able to keep up. In other words, if you are laid off because your employer or clients can just buy an AI package to do the same job more cheaply, and you then decide to retrain for some “AI-proof” job, it’s quite likely that that “AI-proof” job will be overtaken by AI long before you can get into it. Even if that job stays available, you’d be competing for it with an exponentially rising number of other displaced human workers.

It’s impossible to predict in detail how this will all play out. But I can easily imagine an early phase in which language-processing AI, vehicle AI, warehouse robots, and a few other related innovations are hailed as game-changers for businesses and other organizations, allowing them to do much more with fewer workers and at less cost—and alleviating inflationary labor shortages along the way. Close on the heels of that “denial” phase, though, will come the bargaining, depression, and acceptance phases, as the pace of disemployment accelerates. I see this as an ouroboros—snake-eating-its-tail—process, because it involves the economy effectively consuming itself, i.e., destroying, with every increment of growth and investment in innovation, the employment earnings that are the principal fuel for a modern economy.

There may be no stable equilibrium in this process for a long while. Governments probably will try to tax businesses, especially AI-using businesses, to fund welfare payments to the unemployed masses, but will that work? Even if governments could manage it fiscally, what would be the psychological effect on tens of millions of people who can no longer earn a living for themselves? (We already know that men become easily depressed when unemployed.)

It also seems unlikely that Western governments would ever simply disallow the use of AI and robotics. One of the great lessons of the mass immigration era is that Western governments, ostensibly “democratic,” like having electorates made up of financially stressed people whose votes can be bought with government largesse.

It stands to reason that the disemployment situation will be easier in countries that currently have relatively small workforces—or rely on guest workers who can be sent quickly back to their home countries if needed. By the same logic, countries with open borders and huge, low-skill, permanent immigrant populations, like the US, could be in serious trouble. Those countries will suddenly have many millions of excess mouths to feed, and to do so might easily require taxation levels that trigger capital flight.

I’m not totally averse to the idea that at the end of this transition lies a society in which robots do everything for near-zero cost and humans can stay busy however they like without worrying much about money. But it’s hard to believe this transition will occur without historic levels of pain. I’ve written often in this space about various drivers of Western decline, collapse, and general upheaval; the now-imminent “ouroboros economy” of AI and robotics is surely another one.

***

This is a just a brief, minor note about an aspect of human populations that seems to be overlooked much of the time in popular discourse, namely the existence within countries of distinct strata of individuals. In discussions about the United States, this stratification is less overlooked, given the country’s huge African-derived population, its more recent Latino and Asian influxes, and its intense political and cultural focus on racial identity (for nonwhites anyway). But most other countries, and occasionally even the US, are treated as if their populations could be summed up in simple averages. My point here is merely that for stratified societies, this averaging will often be misleading, making it hard to understand phenomena such as the relative performances of emigres, or national achievements in particular fields.

The example that triggered this short train of thought is the “national IQ” comparison favored by HBD aficionados. Here is part of a typical national IQ chart:

Source: worldpopulationreview.com

Now consider the following chart from Wikipedia, showing the median household incomes of Asian-Americans. Note that the two top groups, numbering in the millions each, are Indian-Americans and Filipino-Americans, and that their median household incomes are quite a bit higher than that of Chinese-Americans.

This is not an ordering one would have predicted based on the national IQ chart. According to that chart, Filipinos and Indians have two of the world’s very lowest average IQs (~82 and ~76)—in fact, India’s score puts it below several sub-Saharan African countries. In contrast, the “Chinese IQ” is near the top at ~104.

Now of course there are at least several factors that could help explain this seemingly unexpected outcome. One, obviously—argued by many, though it’s beyond the scope here—is that “IQ” is not everything it’s cracked up to be. Another is that “national IQ” scores are inaccurate, or, at least, vary wildly in accuracy from one country to another. A third possibility is that some ethnic groups have had more time than others to build social capital and wealth in the Land of Opportunity. A fourth, a very well known phenomenon, is that the immigration process effectively tends to select for people of above-average drive and intelligence.

What I would like to add to this list of (non-mutually exclusive) factors is the simple observation that many societies around the world are highly stratified. This is due to the natural tendency of individuals to marry others of like educational background and socioeconomic status, such that the rich beget the rich, the poor beget the poor, the smart beget the smart and the dumb . . . well, you get the idea. India is one of the world’s most strongly and overtly stratified societies, with formal names for its social castes. The Philippines for its part is still notoriously feudal, with a thin but powerful politician/tycoon class (heavy with Spanish and Chinese blood), a small middle class, and a fertile majority of mostly ethnic Malay folk who exist more or less at rural African levels of development. China may be getting more stratified (a trend that worries its current leader Xi), but it still seems much less stratified than India or the Philippines—as a lingering effect of the Maoist decades, and probably also due to its greater racial homogeneity. (Published “Gini coefficient” estimates suggest that China has a lumpier wealth distribution than the other two, but long story short, I don’t have much faith in such estimates.)

The point, in any case, is that when it comes to comparisons of “nations” defined as immigrant populations of different national origin, one is comparing mainly the performance of the upper castes from those nations, not average citizens—and, roughly speaking, the upper castes of more stratified nations will tend to be further above their national averages, compared to the upper castes of less stratified nations.

This is true also in considering achievements in specialist fields, or feats where relatively small numbers of excellent individuals are needed. India, whose “average IQ” is about what one would expect of a high-performing person with Down Syndrome, has nevertheless produced a significant number of research Nobel Prize winners, certainly more than any other tropical nonwhite country.

By the same token, considering the performance of a country based on a metric, such as GDP, that covers* the entire population, is going to be misleading, in the sense that it obscures the differences—vast gulfs in many cases—between the benighted, down-in-the-mud lower castes and their wealthy, entitled, sharp-elbowed overlords.

That’s it. That’s the only point I wanted to make here.

***

In prior essays on this site and elsewhere, I’ve argued that the spread of wokeness and its recent marked intensification (the “Great Awokening”) is best seen as a social contagion—of feelings and sociocultural ideas that broadly reflect women’s maternal instincts, and are much more transmissible among women than among men.

I’ve also suggested that wokeness is apt to be ultra-transmissible among females whose feminine, maternal energies aren’t absorbed by husbands and children and may seek another outlet. The terms “cat lady” and “wine aunt” refer to a subset of these individuals, but many unmarried girls and young women, as well as successful career women, also fit this description.

I’ve proposed, moreover, that wokeness is driven into institutions not just by the conversion of (especially female) workers already in place but also by the takeover of those institutions by women and tamed males, via biased hiring.

I’m more certain now than ever that all these hypotheses are correct, as far as they go. But I think there is one more aspect of wokeness that requires an explanation. I’m referring to what could be called wokeness’s spiraling frenzy—its tendency to move away from norms of belief and behavior and towards extremes, wherever it takes hold.

To put it another way: The woke women and their enablers who in the past decade or two have effectively taken control of virtually all major American institutions and professions have not been content to implement a modest set of reforms and leave it at that. As their power has grown, they have increasingly attacked the core values of Western civilization: everything from due process of law to meritocracy to the shielding of children from sexual deviants and predators. As their policies have become extreme, so have their methods. They have made it clear that they don’t want sober deliberations—they want emotional shock and awe!

One could argue that there is a counter-cultural logic to this movement—that it wants to collapse the existing order as completely as those hijacked planes collapsed the Twin Towers on 9/11.

But is the Great Awokening replacing the old culture with a new one that can bind society sustainably—a “successor ideology”?

Wokeness and the Great Awokening are driven chiefly by women, who have their own ways of thinking and persuading—ways that typically seem more emotional and less rational than men’s. So one might suppose that there is a genuine ideology being built here, albeit a feminine one that seems alien to the average male, and that the Great Awokening is just the final, dramatic dash in this “pink shift” takeover of Western culture.

However, to me, that’s not the full story. To me, the Great Awokening’s spiraling frenzy, and its attraction for people who are evidently mentally ill, suggest that it is for the most part only a temporary and reactive social phenomenon: a social “mania.”

Logic and Madness

As many have noted, the Great Awokening bears a strong resemblance to the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.

The CCR’s spearpoints were cadres of “Red Guard” fanatics, young people (even teens) whose instability and restlessness, suggestibility, and high susceptibility to fanaticism were probably comparable to what one finds in today’s millennial Antifa brigades. These howling Maoist minions sought the erasure of whatever competed with Maoism, which in practice meant just about anything predating Maoist China—history books, art, architecture, temples, even genealogical records. Red Guards and their camp followers toppled statues of Confucius, pasted huge banners with their slogans everywhere, and went around attacking intellectuals or anyone even lightly connected to the teaching of pre-Maoist history or philosophy.

That was the counter-cultural logic part of it. But there was also the crazypants part—shocking, obscene, savage stuff, ultimately including murder and even cannibalism.

At some high schools, students killed their principals in the school courtyard and then cooked and ate the bodies to celebrate a triumph over “counterrevolutionaries” …  Government-run cafeterias are said to have displayed bodies dangling on meat hooks and to have served human flesh to employees. [NYT]

Not content with attacking living reminders of the old China, Red Guards also broke into cemeteries and dug up the skeletal remains of ancient Chinese emperors and nobles, desecrating them and denouncing the persons these remains had once been.

Other examples of these social frenzies come to mind. In some of the pre-Christian feasts of Rome and northern Europe, open drunkenness and debauchery, and various other intentionally shocking inversions of everyday social norms, were encouraged, at least in part as cathartic but controlled ventings of accumulated stress. (Modern parties, especially the ones teens and young adults have, seem like echoes of these displays.) As Samuel Johnson famously said, “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

Or a woman. The infamous convent hysterias of 1500s-1700s Europe supply many illustrations of spiraling frenzies among women, especially sexually frustrated younger ones. In the 1632-34 Loudoun case, for example, at a public exorcism of supposedly demon-possessed Ursuline nuns, a Sister Claire “fell on the ground, blaspheming, in convulsions, lifting up her petticoats and chemise, displaying her privy parts without any shame, and uttering filthy words. Her gestures became so indecent that the audience averted its eyes.” [link]

Sexual themes dominated the antics of “possessed” nuns, although there were maternal—or inverted maternal—themes too, for example claims of mystical pregnancy, and stories of secret witch conclaves (“witches’ sabbaths”) at which children were eaten.

Themes of sexual violation and impregnation, theft or killing of unborn babies, and witchcraft, along with the same spiraling of fantastic claims and odd behavior, were also typical in the medicalized versions of possession—”multiple personality disorder” and “UFO abduction”—that were popular among young women in the 1970-90s, and ended up discrediting many therapists and psychiatrists, as well as the whole idea of “hypnotically recovered memories.”

To me, these are examples of social manias—not just contagions (for even healthy, sustainable behaviors can be contagious) but contagions that spread intense and increasingly bizarre, often counter-cultural activities, and are essentially reactions to excessive stress.

A holiday from stress and inhibition

As the comment by Dr. Johnson implies, human beings in modern civilizations are inhibited and stressed by the social rules they are supposed to obey and the complex social environments they are supposed to navigate—the “pain of being a man.”

It makes sense that women nowadays would be relatively hard-hit by such stresses. Women’s basic lifestyle has shifted dramatically—much more than men’s has—over the past few generations. Women during this interval generally have had to face new stresses from:

• • higher education and the pressures at higher levels of the working world;
  • the postponement or abandonment of marriage and child-bearing;
  • a new (or newly de-civilized) courtship environment in which their natural desire for love and motherhood is taken advantage of again and again without being fulfilled.

All the while, women have been told (by the most authoritative sources, including Hollywood and feminist activists) that these changes represent “progress” and must not be resisted.

Women also, compared to men, appear to have an innately greater desire for “equality” and social harmony. Yet these lofty, sentimental social goals, during the same critical period, have slipped—frustratingly—further and further out of reach, as the West has intensified its effort to remake itself as a highly multi-racial/ethnic civilization.

In addition to having to face these new stresses, women are (on average) more emotionally sensitive than men, and thus are apt to be more affected by the same stressors.

Small wonder, then, that a very large proportion of women and girls in Western societies can now expect to be diagnosed with a mood or anxiety disorder. It probably also should be unsurprising that the essentially feminine notion of “trauma”—a highly stressing psychological injury—has now taken on an outsized role not only in Western medicine but also in the wider culture.

On the whole, then, the recent changes in the standard female lifeway, and the demographic makeovers of Western societies, have created a large and chronic background level of stress for women. But the severe emotional contagion of the Great Awokening was triggered only after additional, more acute stressors appeared in the first half of 2020: the pandemic with its lockdowns, social isolation, and widespread fears of illness/death; and then the inflammatory treatment—by left-leaning media, activists, and politicians—of various police killings of miscreant African Americans.

Thus I think one can fairly easily fit the Great Awokening into the broader category of stress-induced, stress-relieving social manias. Amid the furious revels of such manias, inhibitions are necessarily going to be relaxed (for some more than others, of course) and people who were relatively labile, even frankly nuts, to begin with will also be drawn in, given the camouflage these frenzies provide for their behavioral issues.

The function of boundary-pushing

A social mania—one that is true to the concept of mania—cannot run forever. It must end by depleting its energy source or by inducing resistance, just as an individual with psychiatric mania will become exhausted after many days without adequate sleep, and/or will cause herself to be hospitalized and treated by exhibiting increasingly abnormal behavior. If a social mania’s deep purpose is to relieve accumulated social pressures, then its tendency to be ever more immoderate might even be seen as functional—in the sense that the spiraling further and further away from social norms serves to reduce support and induce opposition, thus limiting the damage while allowing the requisite venting of steam. To put it crudely, a social mania with its spiraling frenzy is a societal “cry for help.”

This is all speculative. It’s also a group-level, forest-not-the-trees view that people with an ordinary individualistic bias might find hard to wrap their heads around. But it’s a novel take that I (obviously) think should be considered. On the whole, it suggests that the Great Awokening should interest us less as a new cultural movement, and more as a signal indicating deep problems with the existing culture and society. In other words, it’s a social version of a seismic tremor, or even earthquake, and its intensity and direction of slip are interesting mainly for what they tell us about the underlying stresses at work—stresses that are unbearable and thus have be relieved, in one way or another.

***

America’s leftist elites regard white American nationalism as their principal ideological adversary. But they have another adversary that is often overlooked: black American nationalism.

Black American nationalism is very easy to overlook, here in the third decade of the new millennium. Although it has had its day in the sun—even Lincoln was in favor of it, once upon a time—its best-known proponent since the Civil Rights Era, Malcolm X, died 56 years ago, at the hands of rival black nationalists, and the movement seems to have gone only downhill since. Already by the mid 1970s Richard Pryor was mocking the “Back to Africa Movement” in his stand-up routines. Black American nationalism also has been tainted (or so one is supposed to think) by the moral support it has occasionally received from overtly white supremacist organizations. In any case, although there must still be millions of black Americans of the nationalist persuasion out there, their movement has by now been relegated to the fringes—the black nationalists who make the news these days seem mostly violent, deranged and disorganized.

By contrast, black American activism that is not nationalist seems to have been doing pretty well lately, judging by the recent wildfire contagions of enthusiasm for BLM, the 1619 Project, the George Floyd hagiology, and Critical Race Theory. Last year, leading Democrats actually donned kente cloth stoles and bent a knee on the US Capitol’s marble floor during the announcement of police reform legislation, as if genuflecting to a Justifiably Angry Black God.

Non-nationalist black activists also seem to have been doing pretty well for themselves personally. Consider Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a co-founder of BLM, whose income as an activist has enabled her recently to purchase several homes collectively worth several millions of dollars. Or Nikole Hannah-Jones, of the 1619 Project, with her consulting, if that’s what one should call it, for Shell and other large corporations, and her remarkable habit of promoting products in interviews and speeches. Or the so-called family of George Floyd, with their $27 million payout from the city of Minneapolis. Or Stacey Abrams with her novel and its lucrative adaptation for TV. Or Ta-Nehisi Coates with his comic books and film scripts. Or reparations-demander Ibram X. Kendi with the miraculous largesse he attracts from wealthy whites.

Now, granted, some of this flow of wealth to activists could be framed as prudent purchases of insurance by white-run organizations—inoculations against the cooties of “racism” and “white supremacy” that can afflict, and cancel, any prominent organization if it’s not careful.

But even moreso I think this wealth transfer reflects elites’ desire to reward and incentivize those who tamely do their bidding.

Malcolm X viewed elite-approved “black leaders” in his day with similar skepticism. He famously called Martin Luther King Jr. a chump and a stooge of white liberals for promoting the idea of peaceful integration within white America—an idea that to him was an empty promise, aimed as always at perpetuating white control of blacks.

I think he was basically right about that. And if contemporary America’s leftist elites have banished black nationalists to the fringes, and have instead anointed a bunch of racial-equity grifters as the approved “leaders” of black America, then surely black nationalism is something that Legacy Americans should support as energetically as they can.

I’m not just being enemy-of-my-enemy tribalistic here. I’m trying to be coldly logical. The leftist elites of the US, which is to say the leaders of the Democratic Party and their allies and henchwomen in academia, media, entertainment, big business, etc., need to keep American blacks in the country and on their side for the most basic electoral reasons. They cannot abide a black separatism that would lead to a new, black nationalist political party or—the elites’ ultimate nightmare—a substantial black exodus from the US to a new homeland, even an internal one. Obviously, such an exodus would, among its many consequences, fatally weaken those leftist elites, in part by removing most of the radioactive core that powers their racial-factionalist ideology.

There is also a strong moral argument here. African-Americans of today are descendants of West Africans who were brought to the New World against their will. Theirs is a population that was literally enslaved for a long time, and then was oppressed for a long time after that. Even as their oppression has eased it has become clear that they are, for the most part, trapped in a world not of their making. In other words, for all this time they have been denied the basic rights of ethnic nationhood and self-determination that most peoples around the world have traditionally enjoyed. The fact that European-derived whites, with their hyperverbal brains and their sentimental, empire-adapted ideology, have overwritten ancient wisdom about the primacy of ethnic nationhood and self-determination, and no longer consider it important, is—American blacks might say, with some heat—not their problem.

It shouldn’t be their problem, anyway. And yet it is. And it’s not just their problem, is it? This idea that nations should be substantially multi-racial/ethnic (“multicultural”), bound merely by civic nationalism, economic opportunism, and kumbayah songs, is really the ur-problem, the most deeply planted seed of destruction, in the United States and most other Western countries. This idea seems essentially Christian in origin, but was also elaborated in response to the circumstances of the modern West, including colonialism and the globalization of trade and labor. In the US, it was shaped inter alia by the issues surrounding the Civil War, and was used, e.g., to justify turning African slaves into Union soldiers and then Republican voters in the Reconstruction South.

Despite multiculturalism’s clash with traditional ways of organizing societies, and its century and a half of failure in the US, it persists—persists even as racial/ethnic factionalism ravages the country, burns its cities, corrupts its democracy, and ruins its quality of life.

Even worse, multiculturalism’s elite proponents have become ever more suppressive of traditional ethnonationalism—declaring it “white supremacy” if favored by whites—even as they openly stoke nonwhites’ racial/ethnic grievances to build their political factions.

So black American nationalism is really only one of a thousand notions rendered unacceptable by America’s multiculturalist cult—whose mindset has managed to colonize both of the major political factions, and has successfully compensated for its evidentiary shortcomings with an hysterical, Inquisitionist crushing of dissent.

Nevertheless, black American nationalism does have advantages that make it a more practical aim amid this woke, antinationalist Inquisition. For one thing, it’s about what American blacks want, and if they declare they want to live apart and self-governing, the elites have no good alternative to the granting of that wish. Again and again those elites have declared American blacks holy and inviolable. Even if the elites’ motive in saying so has been only political and expedient, many blacks, and liberal whites, have taken the assertion at face value.

Another practical advantage that should make black nationalism more viable as a white cause is that American whites, I guess for reasons relating to their Christian backgrounds, prefer to think of themselves as helping others, not as acting selfishly for their own benefit. What could be more unselfish than to carve out thousands of square miles from their fair land, and donate it to their black brothers and sisters, to give them a new and truer freedom?

Would the blacks who lived in such a country experience a decline in living standards? I expect that they would, at least initially and in material terms. But as naïve as it may seem for me to say so, the issue here really goes deeper than material considerations: It’s about self-determination and human dignity. There are about fifty million black descendants of slaves living in the United States, enough to form one of the world’s most populous countries, and in many ways they have made clear that they are a distinctive people who prefer their own kind to others. The claim that they must nevertheless be the permanent captives and pawns of one political faction or another, in a society of European origin that is majority nonblack—a society that also jails them at sky-high rates—is actually ludicrous. It is one of the many toxic lies Americans foolishly think they can continue to live with.

***

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“Don’t feed the animals” is a concept I didn’t really learn until late childhood, when I traveled one summer to Yellowstone with my family, and saw signs everywhere with that warning. It’s a central concept of wildlife management in wilderness areas where humans intrude.

It’s a counterintuitive concept, but a crucial one. Many and perhaps most people, especially when motivated by compassion, tend to assume there is no real harm in their feeding an individual elk or bison, particularly one that looks hungry. What wildlife managers know is that such feeding endangers not only the food-bearing humans but, more importantly, the local animal populations that are being fed. Uncontrolled feeding by humans of wild animals makes them dependent on that artificial food source, effectively reducing their adaptation to their wild environment even as their population balloons from the sudden nutrient abundance. It sets up the possibility of a crash of the animal population, perhaps to zero, due to an interruption of the artificial food supply, a nutrient deficiency caused by the new supply, or perhaps an infectious disease that takes advantage of the new density of hosts.

The key point, from a wildlife management or conservation biology perspective, is that doing what seems beneficial at the level of individual animals can, in the long-run, be utterly disastrous at the population level.

It’s the Population, Stupid

Conservation biology is functionally akin to politics in the human realm. Both aim to manage populations of animals in their natural habitats, the big difference being that politics involves humans managing other humans, which obviously introduces many complications and complexities. When humans manage animal populations they are much more emotionally detached from their charges. They get no direct feedback or pushback from them. They focus on the goals that are most important and most objectively measurable. They would consider it absurd to promote “equality” among the individual animals in a given population, or to strive to eradicate harmful stereotypes, or to do away with patriarchal oppression, or to promote the civil liberties of animals that want to engage in homosexual activity, or to change their sexual identity, or to “increase the diversity” of an animal population by mixing in other populations or subspecies from other habitats.

Conceivably if we could read animals’ thoughts or emotions better than we can now, we would discern greater complexity in their lives and “cultures.” We would more routinely see animals as distinct individuals with individual needs. But for a conservation biologist, the overriding goals wouldn’t change. Those goals center on the idea of conserving animal populations, as populations, at natural, self-sustaining levels in harmony or equilibrium with the habitats for which they are evolutionarily adapted. Implicit here is the notion of an animal population as a distinct group with a distinct lineage and territory, and a relatively small inflow and outflow of genes from and to outsider groups. The survival of that population in its natural, wild state is the essential aim, compared to which the fleeting joys, sufferings and neuroses of individual animals are immaterial. In other words, the biologist “sees the forest, not the trees”—because the forest really is all that history will ever see.

Humans in the ancient world tended to think of themselves in similar terms: as members of distinct populations, extended families really, whose general health, prosperity, fertility—above all, survival—was the proper object of human politics and governance. Even if they focused on other cultural goals as well, they would have regarded an expanding or at least stable population as the ultimate measure of success. As Yahweh is quoted saying to Abraham in Genesis 22:17, “I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore…”

A word here about diversity: Conservation biologists value it highly, but the diversity for which they aim is not the same as the “diversity” that gets so much attention in the human political realm. Diversity in the lexicon of conservation biologists, or what is usually called “biodiversity,” refers to a diversity of distinct, habitat-linked animal populations, many of them representing different species or subspecies. It does not refer to genetic diversity within an animal population. In fact, conservation biologists tend to view a large flow from one population into another, or from one habitat into another, as a negative outcome, a destroyer of biodiversity, i.e., an invasion or conquest—thus the term “invasive species.”

Free-Agent States

Many people in the modern West, especially among the elites, prefer to see themselves as members of populations that are no longer like extended families of one ethnicity and culture. These post-traditional populations are more like modern sports teams, with flexible rosters of free agents whose attachments to the group are merely contractual.

Why has this new notion gained so much currency? The main reason is that it is a fait accompli. Prior to the 1960s virtually all Western societies were essentially ethnostates, and as such had at least mildly and implicitly racist policies in place, including policies on immigration. But the memory of toxic ethno-nationalism in the WW2 era, the post-1950s feminization of culture and policy, and a growing sense that nonwhites represent a relatively untapped source of electoral power, led the West’s political elites to try to expiate their racism with various policy changes, including relaxations of immigration laws. Unsurprisingly, these border openings were followed by ever-increasing inflows of nonwhites from developing countries—nonwhites in search of better standards of living via more generous welfare systems and more prosperous, stable economies. Heavy multi-ethnicity eventually became the status quo that the political system organized itself to benefit from and justify: Immigrant-citizens and the wider political and business-owning class that are favored by this arrangement now say what they must and vote as they must to maintain it. At the same time, the legacy populations that don’t benefit, and might have defended themselves, have been disarmed by threats of being tarred as racists or even “white supremacists.”

There is a long history of thinking about one particular Western country, the United States, not as an ethnostate but as a new type of nation, bound by a single set of beliefs in liberal democracy (“creedal” nation) or, even more loosely, by the mere rule of law (“civic” nation). However, even if one thinks those explanations are valid for the USA, they have never been expressly adopted by other Western countries, which—again—have long had ethnic bases for their nationhoods.

In any case, multi-ethnicity has happened and is here and for the immediate future will remain, because the factors that drove and allowed it still pertain.

But do free-agent states command the allegiance of their citizens sufficiently—are they knit together well enough—to allow them to compete, in the long run, with ethnostates? And anyway does the survival of a “group” with rapidly changing membership and no common culture really mean anything? What do its members have in common, other than possession of the same territory? If we really were to think of societies without attention to underlying changes in their ethnic composition, we would blind ourselves to certain stark realities, such as invasions and conquests, and even the slower national collapses that are maybe just as common and important. If one set of ethnically and culturally distinct people moves into a country, replacing its relatively infertile natives over a few generations, is there any sense in pretending the country has remained the same?

What if Ethnic-Group Survival Were Priority One?

Is doesn’t imply ought. People can, and will, practice politics any way they like. For most, being reminded that we in the West think of animal populations in one way and our own human populations in a quite different way would probably draw little more than a bewildered shrug. Others would warn, rightly enough, that the traditional ethnocentric view has its own hazards, on full display in the WW2 era, or in more recent, sometimes very bloody, inter-ethnic conflicts—or even during a relatively peaceful interlude a century or so ago, when many governments adopted eugenics policies including forced sterilization, essentially to “improve their stock” as a farmer might try to improve his herds of cattle or sheep.

But have these past excesses frightened us into running too far in the other direction? It just seems worth considering how our politics and societies would look if we reverted to the usual practice of defining our populations, our “nations,” in ethnic terms, with reasonable allowance for urban cosmopolitanism as well as the ethnic mixing that occurs at the margins of any population. Such a reversion would mean making the maintenance of our Western nations—under the wider goal of human population diversity—our first priority, as is the case, effectively, in traditional societies and even some of the West’s more successful and happy groups (e.g., Jews, Amish, Mormons).

We also would recover traditional, intuitive, easily recorded metrics for our nations’ health, namely their sizes and fertility rates. We would see our present low fertility rates and fast-dropping population numbers (i.e., for people of European ethnicity) as sure signs that something is wrong. Stability, or even rises in a population to fill its undeveloped territory, would be the goals.

This logic has the added virtue that it aligns with our deep sense that things have been bad and are getting worse, and it clearly belies the polyanna pronouncements—based on other, less relevant “data”—that we’ve never had it so good.

Returning to this way of thinking wouldn’t mean abandoning a humane approach to governance. But by making the sustenance of our nations, properly understood, our first priority, we would create a sensible barrier to the kind of social experimentation that tends to harm family formation and fertility. Moreover, thinking of populations in the traditional way, as extended families, should help restore the traditional sense of, and need for, community—that basic higher good that has been increasingly suppressed and lost in the individualistic modern West.

At bottom, thinking of nations in ethnic terms is realism, or at least a lot closer to realism than modern liberalism gets. Much of the energy of modern liberalism is spent in covering up its own irreconcilable contradictions, arguably the worst of which is the promotion, for political purposes, of ethnic identity and cultural separatism among nonwhites despite the implicit (if unrealizable) need to bind these groups, with whites, somehow in a shared sense of nationhood. And of course it is hard to find historical precedents for multiethnic/ multicultural societies that inspire optimism. Multiethnicism may have been tolerable at times amid the growth and wealth-building of empires, but it also seems to have torn its host civilizations apart whenever wider allegiances weakened. In any case, there are all too many, all too convincing historical precedents for population replacement through migration or invasion, aided by the consequent social decay and demoralization among the natives. It may be the way of the world that “peoples” and their civilizations don’t last forever; even so, there are fundamental reasons why we—even as conquerors—have been inclined to see such collapses as sad and tragic events.