Sympathy for the Devil
Of the managerial class, mice and men, and behavioural sinks
Let’s look at post-industrial post-modernity from the point of view of the people whose nominal function it is to keep everything from going off the rails, and try to do so as charitably as possible. If we can see the world as they do, their actions may become more understandable. For the sake of argument, we’ll assume that the majority of them are at least partly well-intentioned, with the proviso that many are of course willing to do unethical things if strongly indicated by self-interest. In other words, we’ll make the assumption that they aren’t a ponerogenic mass of pathocrats, but by and large composed of psychologically normal Homo sapiens sapiens who are just trying to do the best they can in the situation they’ve found themselves in1.
The human world is now composed of thousands of cosmopoles, which we’ll define as any urban centre large enough to house an international airport. The ability to shuttle people across continents in hours, and ubiquitous nigh-instantaneous telecommunications, has turned each cosmopole into something more like a neighbourhood in a single global city, than an authentic expression of the local or national culture. That global city is a fantastically complicated, interconnected machine, moving around food, energy, information, and people on a vast scale and at a high velocity.
The managerial class are tasked with keeping it all from breaking down or blowing up. Growing it tends to be the domain of entrepreneurs, and those who find success as founders of successful enterprises aren’t really managers. Managers are brought on board to operate existing enterprises, not to start new ones.
The first thing you’ll notice as a manager in this global megalopolis is that people can show up on your doorstep from anywhere at any time. Occasionally they might be dangerous, and there are bureaucrats whose theoretical job it is to do something about that, but for the majority of middle-management types the main issue will be foreigners with strange customs behaving oddly. This isn’t just an issue with high immigration rates, although that exacerbates the consequences, but rather a function of the technology itself. There’s not much that any given manager can do to prevent it, so instead he tries to smooth the way by telling those under him in the org chart to be tolerant.
Of course, the ability to move people around very quickly opens new economic possibilities, such as importing large numbers of immigrants to undercut wages while bolstering the real estate market, or converting coastlines to scenic resorts and ancient cities into gaudy tourist traps. Since the managers are there to keep whatever systems they’re responsible for operating, once these options for boosting the bottom line become available, management will default towards acting on them. Increases in the flow of human capital will inevitably result in interpersonal friction, and it’s a manager’s job to make sure that the flow remains laminar. The vast economic machine must operate smoothly if it is to operate at all. Tolerance for the stranger naturally becomes an even higher priority.
Then there’s the telecommunication issue. Everyone on the planet can talk to whoever they want at any time, and as a general rule is in continuous conversation with multiple people all over the planet. Since the human brain can really only maintain relationships with so many people at any given time2, it follows that they’re developing fewer relationships with the people immediately around them. There are all these invisible lines of social force connecting every human being the manager has to deal with to people he has no idea about all over the globe. Each one of those is a potential line of influence. That line of influence could become a source of social friction.
The humans flowing through the global machine are like a high-energy plasma: particles stripped of their electrons, unable to form bonds with one another, but responding to magnetic fields that move unpredictably in response to their own motions and therefore potentially highly unpredictable. For the debt tokamak to continue producing, the humans that keep it in motion must continue to flow, without instabilities arising that cause the reactor to shut down or break.
Along comes an ideology that elevates tolerance to a sacred virtue. Remarkable how its historical appearance followed so quickly on its necessity, isn’t it? Management immediately falls in love with it, converts, and demands everyone below them in the org chart observe the new faith and put away the old gods of their fathers, the spirits of faith and folk and land. As in all religious upheavals, the old gods are cast in the role of demons, associated in the public mind with the antagonists of foundational wars such as Mid-Century Moustache Man, and their malign influence linked to the past sins of the people themselves3. This provides the ruling class with a moral stick to beat the troublesome with, which is always handy.
The global ideology of tolerance that pertains throughout the managerially organized world order requires scapegoats. While the majority of its most fanatical adherents are as white as lilies4, the official scapegoat in almost every case, and certainly in every country where it’s been successfully applied on a large scale, is the indigenous white population. This follows as a necessity of the fact that, at the moment, it is their countries that are seeing some of the highest migrant flux through the global system, and therefore their instinctive defensive reactions to strange humans showing up in their territories that are most urgently in need of being disarmed. The easiest way to do that is to make them feel bad about who they are, and therefore disinclined to defend their territory. The choice to belittle and demonize North American whites or the various European nations in their own countries is not made out of hatred, but arises from simple pragmatism. Should other locales require replacement migration to keep the system moving, the same thing will be done to whichever majority populations live there, and skin colour will be no obstacle. Asians, for instance, are already being increasingly depicted as white-adjacent.
It is curious that the managerial class seems disinclined to worry too much about the long-term consequences of scapegoating majority populations. Not every personality type submits to this, and as it continues resentment and disobedience have a tendency to spread. Historically, this tends to be an unstable situation, and that certainly seems to be the case across the Western world. The Spartans had to resort to regular campaigns of arbitrary terror to keep the Helots in line, and even that system broke down after a few centuries. Populist revolts continuously erupt into protest movements that paralyze economies and upset electoral politics in this nation and that, each another little fire that the local branch managers of the global machine must rush to put out. You’d think they’d want to find a better way of keeping local populations pacified than continuously alienating and antagonizing them.
However, it could be that at the highest levels, they just don’t care.
Consider the Asian countries. China, South Korea, and Japan all have extremely low birth rates, as is also the case in Europe and North America. Falling birth rates can be seen in historical records, in every case accompanying the adoption of an industrialized economy. One of the primary reasons that Western countries have such high immigration rates is that their local populations are simply not reproducing themselves, and the machine requires fresh humans to operate it. It’s notable that birth rates fall for the newcomers, after a generation or two, to more resemble those of the natives than their countries of origin, once again emphasizing the role played by the economic system rather than the culture.
The Japanese have experimented with various incentive programs to try and get their young people to make babies. The problem isn’t that there aren’t enough resources to go around to start a family, although decades of a deflationary economy haven’t been great for Japan’s Gen Xers. The problem is that so many of them are ‘herbivores’, living their lives utterly disinterested in sex.
There’s an epidemic of sexlessness among the Western youth, as well. Something like a quarter of young men are now kissless virgins. The explosive growth of the incel population is probably exacerbated by Tinder, although precipitously declining testosterone rates aren’t helping. Nor are all the women removing themselves from the game by embracing big is beautiful.
Even when people do have sex, there’s the pill and other forms of contraception to stave off the natural consequences of the reproductive act. What babies do get made are often made offerings to Moloch. Meanwhile, the marriage rate is down and dropping, while the average age of marriage rises, due to the steadily increasing length of time that must be devoted to education before one’s productive career can begin, combined with the high and increasing cost of living and, in particular, housing. Even those who desperately want to have kids often have to wait until their 30s, and then settle for 1.8 of them.
The causes of the reproductive collapse are multifactorial. Some say it’s all a plot by the cabal of depopulationists eager to reduce the world’s population ... although this is a bit inconsistent with the eagerness of the philanthropaths to maximize the Bantu growth curve with their endless food aid programs. Others say that it’s just a natural consequence of women being able to control their own reproduction, combined with the industrial economy converting children from an economic asset as they were in the agricultural economy, to a luxury good. Given the conceit of this essay – that the managerial class are acting in good faith – we’ll run with the second option. In any case, population collapse in developed (and increasingly, developing) countries is a very real thing.
Decades ago, a series of rat utopia experiments were performed by the animal behaviourist John B. Calhoun that yielded remarkable (by which I mean terrifying) results, which have become justifiably notorious in recent years. In case you haven’t heard of these experiments, the idea was to put a small breeding population of rats in an environment that contained all the living space, food, water, and so on that they needed, and then sit back and watch what they did with it. In every case the same scenario unfolded.
At first the population would boom, as the rats would breed like, well, rats, and enthusiastically fill the available space. Carrying capacity in these environments was not limited by food and water (which the researchers provided in whatever quantity required), but by physical space. When the environment became saturated with rodents, the rats would begin to exhibit certain neuroses and social pathologies which became more pathologically exaggerated and severe over time. Females would begin refusing sex, and would gang up to attack males. Bullying became savage. Some males would hide away in private spaces, obsessively grooming themselves, emerging only to obtain food, and exhibiting no interest in social activity with either sex: these were dubbed ‘the beautiful ones’. When every once in a while a female gave birth, she’d show no interest in her young, which would tend to die of neglect. Those babies that miraculously did survive were so horribly traumatized by this upbringing that they were utterly unable to mate.
The hypothesis developed to explain this behaviour is that social mammals don’t only require physical resources in terms of food, water, and air, but also social resources in terms of connections to other animals and (of relevance to the experiment) room to find their own space in the social order. When the rat utopia reached saturation, there were no more open spaces for new rats to occupy. The resulting competition for social space then became increasingly vicious, with the result that the rats either became monsters or mental cases. The utopia became its opposite: a pressure cooker that broke the rats’ brains.
After reaching rodent saturation density, the environment’s population would then collapse, and it would not recover. Whereas on the upslope during the beginning of the experiment the rats were all relatively psychologically normal, on the downslope the population was composed of emotional trainwrecks who could not get their shit together. It was therefore irrelevant that the smaller population meant that, in principle, there was now plenty of social space for the rats to occupy. The ruthless bellum omnium contra omnes of the peak population density had shattered them completely.
By design, the rat utopias resembled our urban environments rather closely5, and sure enough, we are exhibiting analogous behavioural anomalies on a mass scale, so perhaps we’ll end as they did: extinct because we’re all just too broken and aren’t capable of caring enough to have or care for kids. Maybe that’s something that a high-abundance, post-industrial,, post-scarcity urban environment inevitably does to any group of social animals that enters it. They fill the space, fill all the available social niches, and it becomes increasingly difficult for newborns to find a niche of their own; that then leads to extremes of neurosis, viciousness, obsessiveness, and withdrawal. Even as social niches open up as the population begins to crash, the animals remain so psychologically bent by their warped experiences that they are simply incapable of sexual activity or caring for offspring, which when they do have them they leave to die. As soon enough they all do.
Perhaps the urban debt reactors are also charnel houses for ethnic groups. They generate fantastic wealth for their owners, but the price is the reproductive virility of the human groups that fuel them. Each group that enters signs its long-term death warrant, and the Western peoples – disproportionately elderly as they are – are simply the furthest down this path, although the Asians are following hot on their heals. The plan in the white West seems to be to keep the machine going with a perpetual flow of human capital from more fecund nations; as the 21st century progresses and post-modernity seeps into the developing worlds of Eurasia and South America, birth rates there will fall, and the available population surplus necessary to make up the baby deficit in the industrialized world will be found almost entirely from Africa. Hence the switch from the now-dated ideology of tolerance to the imperative language of diversity and inclusion. The managerialists are prepping the ground for the replacement of the doomed populations with their successors. The addition of equity to the formulation is a tacit admission that Africans are a less ideal fuel source for the debt tokamak (although you aren’t allowed to say this openly), but beggars can’t be choosers.
It’s quite possible that the rise of multiculturalism as official state ideology throughout the Western world may have been motivated by the rat utopia results. Calhoun’s experiments wrapped in 1962, and it was in the decade after this that multiculturalism began to be implemented at the legislative level in countries as diverse as Canada (the pioneer), Sweden, and Australia. The abrupt change to US immigration laws which rescinded the national origins quotas were implemented in 1965. Over the next two decades immigration remained at a relatively low rate, while the native populations were gradually acculturated to the presence of strange foreigners. In the 90s, as the low birth rates began to really bite, immigration became mass immigration; a generation before this would have been greeted with riots and burning parliaments, but by the 2010s Europeans had been sufficiently indoctrinated that their women could greet millions of North Africans and Arabs with signs reading ‘sex with refugees is jasmine-scented and beautiful’.
That scenario might sound like a bit of a conspiracy theory, which I suppose it is. The suggestion is essentially that at very high levels, the results of the rat utopias were internalized, their implications considered, and a plan of action implemented in order to ameliorate the expected results as far as possible. In this case, the promotion of homosexuality, transgenderism, feminism, and the like, might be less related to a deliberate desire to reduce the population, so much as due to the expectation that these things were going to happen in any case, and that it’s best to keep things as peaceful as possible as it all unfolds.
After all, the flow must be kept laminar.
Recently, during a long family road trip, I found myself explaining the rat utopia to my preciously intelligent ten-year-old niece. She was quite horrified by its implications, and I felt a bit bad about terrifying her given that, after all, it was her future environment we were talking about, so when she asked if I had any good news about the future I had to give it some thought.
“We’re not rats,” I finally told her.
“Thanks,” she replied with that acid tone that only ten-year-old girls can deploy. She evidently thought I was simply being flippant, and was letting me know what she thought of that.
“What I mean is, rats couldn’t have designed those rat utopias themselves. They can adapt to an environment, they’re clever animals, but they’re ultimately just animals. They can’t create new things. Humans can. Creating things is what we do. So, these cities we live in now, those are environments we created. And we can create solutions to the problems they create.”
The problem with the managerial class, ultimately, is that they aren’t very creative. They aren’t brought in to build new businesses, invent new technologies, develop new artforms. That isn’t their function. Their function, which they are exceedingly well-adapted to, is operating whatever system they’re given, and keeping it running according to whatever parameters it operates by. It’s probably not an accident that the only prominent personality to be drawing attention to the seemingly intractable issue of demographic collapse is Elon Musk, who isn’t remotely managerial class, but is rather a visionary industrialist in the old mode.
The managers found themselves in charge of an industrial civilization, and then they found themselves faced with intractable societal problems arising from post-scarcity conditions, the resulting population boom, the consequent filling of the available social placements, and the inevitable emotional pathologies that emerge when humans are trapped in owned space.
They can’t see a way out. Dismantling the system they run isn’t an option, and they can’t really imagine an alternative because they simply aren’t very imaginative. Their ‘great reset’ and ‘UN sustainability goals 2030’ are really just a means of managing what they expect to be an inevitable decline. There’s nothing really, genuinely new in any of it. It’s nothing but increasing micromanagement, based on extensions of existing microprocessor and telecommunications technologies, which they hope to use to prevent the worst of the sort of violence that accompanied the psychological breakdowns in the rat utopias.
That lack of imagination means that they’re Malthusians at heart. The see an existing level of technology, and an existing resource base, they have their accountants run the numbers, and extrapolate the future on that basis.
Fortunately, the Malthusians have always been wrong.
Like communism, it’s a great theory, it’s just applied to the wrong species.
None of this is to say that I, personally, have the answer to this problem of catastrophic demographic collapse in the context of generalized psychoemotional breakdown. Maybe part of it is simply abandoning the cities, exploiting telework and 3D printing to make village life great again. Maybe part of it is finding uncolonized social space in the infinities of the Internet (although this seems like a cope). Personally, I think space exploration and colonization is likely to play an essential role – there’s an infinite frontier out there, with all the potential for social space that we could need, along with every other resource besides.
The one thing I do know is that we won’t find that solution as long as we leave the managers running our society. They’re algorithms in human form. That was fine for a while. But the challenges of the coming age will require more imagination than they’re capable of.
The high-IQ, low-brow shitposting with the Neo-Gonzoid army of digital fremen gathering at Deimos Station is proving to be as much fun as we’d hoped. It’s a wild party for the party of the wyrd. If you aren’t yet a paid subscriber with VIP access to our orbital observation platform, you’re missing out. But you don’t need to wallow in FOMO, on the outside looking in, wishing that you too could feel the hut rush of activated Atlantean chromosomes coursing through your nerves like high-octane Andromedan amphetamines. Deimos Station is open to every paid subscriber – buy your ticket today!
In between writing on Substack you can find me on the rocket man’s blue bird site @martianwyrdlord. I’m also send a lot of Telegrams From Barsoom on the messaging platform that shifty Russian free speech guy set up.
And yes, typing that sentence made me throw up in my mouth a little.
Dunbar’s number being something like 200 people.
You might think I’m talking about America here, but I’m not. That basic formula has been applied in every Western country. Canada? Stole land from the natives. UK? Empire. France? Empire. Germany? Holocaust. Belgium? Belgian Congo. Sweden? Some of the iron from their mines in the north probably got used to make chains and collars for slave ships. I’m not making that last one up. The Swedes are really that desperate to join the cool kids’ club of Evil White Oppressors Wracked By Guilt.
Albeit not as pure as the driven snow. Especially after the mRNA. Schwing!
Or is it vice versa?
Awesome read.
You know, I’ve read about the rat experiment in recent years. But I had forgotten the part about how now only did they struggle to reproduce, but we’re disinterested parents when they did have offspring.
That right there helps answer something pretty dark we’re seeing now. Drag queen events aimed at children, parents allowing and facilitating trans ideology, drug abuse and freaking TikTok for teenagers...none of this happens if the parents aren’t checked out in some way or another. Or are such poor parents that they embrace the trash and willfully allow it to infect their kids.
Also, is part of the problem for the rats that they’re literally given everything? They don’t have to struggle for their survival. Seems that the struggle changes this dynamic. That’s your point, to a degree - the creativity and pushing boundaries is what creates thriving societies.
Modern society does feel very lab-rat-like! What you said to your niece about humans being able to create new environments to overcome the limits of existing ones is true. It also seems to be true that we, like the rats, have a built in psychological limit to the amount of bullshit we will tolerate; but whereas the rats were in cages controlled by humans, we're in virtual cages controlled by other humans who, being part of the unimaginative managerial class you describe, are unable to anticipate all the ways the inmates might pick the locks on the cage door and free themselves, as well as all the ways that humans can creatively sabotage the machine their supposed to be maintaining, but which they recognize as operating to their own detriment. I believe things will break down before they can truly create an unbreakable worldwide prison for our species. They desperately want to do it, but they are limited to using the idiotic and unimaginative middle-management types to make it work; and that will be their undoing.
Great essay, and one that leaves me feeling more hopeful than before I read it!