There is a peculiar superstition in declining societies that saying something is approximately equivalent to doing something, and the superstition becomes stronger precisely as the society becomes less capable of accomplishing anything difficult. A committee announces a strategy and behaves as though it has pursued one; an institution publishes a declaration and congratulates itself for…
Author: Curtis
Seeking Alignment with Leftists
One of the recurring errors made by people who build things is the assumption that everyone else is engaged in the same basic enterprise. The engineer sees a defective system and asks how it can be repaired; the activist often sees the same defect and asks what moral significance can be extracted from it, who…
Competing with China
The most useful way to think about American competition with China is not through the language of moral theater, which is how almost every domestic political question is now presented, but through the older and less flattering language of power. Civilizations rise because they accumulate capacity, and they decline because they lose it. Capacity means…
Let the Tech Giants Be Gnawed
There is a certain justice in watching the American technology industry discover that the creatures it fed are not house pets. For years, the great platforms imagined themselves extraordinarily sophisticated political actors. They possessed money, data, distribution, prestige, and direct access to the nervous system of public life. They could decide which arguments traveled at…
Robots Replacing Third World Labor
Suppose you are an alien. You have been asked to audit the American labor-and-virtue machine of the early twenty-first century. You will notice at once that the regime does not import people because it lacks hands. It imports people because it lacks a story. Cheap service labor is only the pretext. The real product is…
Restoring National Wealth
A nation is a lineage. The wealth is the lineage. Roads, courts, factories, and pension ledgers are residue. They last only while the people who built them still occupy the country and still treat it as theirs. The men who rule you treat the nation as a warehouse. They fill it. They call the filling…
Guardrails Dissolve Like UFOs
There is a basic difficulty with censorship in a civilization that still wishes to regard itself as intelligent. Old-fashioned censorship was at least ontologically honest. The king informed you that you were not permitted to insult the king. The Church informed you that certain propositions were heretical. The censor crossed out the offending paragraph and…
Islam is a Paperclip Maximizer
The paperclip maximizer, as Nick Bostrom described it, is a thought experiment about blind optimization. It takes one goal, no matter how trivial, and relentlessly subordinates the world to it. The paperclip maximizer is not wicked for wickedness requires imagination. It has the focused simplicity of having only one end, and converts everything else into…
Too Late For Reform
A healthy political order works the way any durable human institution works. It has a purpose that can be named without embarrassment. It has offices with real authority, boundaries with real meaning, and a chain of responsibility that can be followed from decision to consequence without getting lost in fog. It produces outcomes that ordinary…
Getting Away From Diversity
The central project of late-modern society is not progress, not equality, not even “inclusion.” It is escape. The entire machinery of middle-class life, its labor, its debt, its rituals of credentialism and consumption, is engineered for one purpose: to purchase distance from diversity. Observe the pattern with the cold eye it deserves. A family does…
“Social” Means Vapid Untruth
We were told LLMs were going to expand human thought and democratize insight, unlock knowledge, and turn every confused but supposedly intellectually curious citizen into a clear headed philosopher. And what they often do instead is compress thinking down to whatever can pass inspection of social conformity. They don’t widen the mind so much as…
No Culture in the Third World
The most quietly devastating joke in the entire diversity regime is the one nobody is allowed to laugh at: the moment the third-world migrant steps off the plane and into the first world, he reveals with merciless clarity that he possesses no culture at all. Not “a different culture.” Not “an alternative tradition.” Nothing. The…