It’s only going to get weirder. The level of contradiction is going to rise excruciatingly, even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradiction. So, I think it’s just going to get weirder and weirder, and weirder, and finally it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. And at that point novelty theory can come out of the woods, ah, because eventually people are going to say, “What the hell is going on?”… The systems which are in place to keep the world sane are utterly inadequate to the forces that have been unleashed.
-Terence McKenna
In terms of human social structure, first came the relatively tiny tribe of highly interrelated, ethnically homogenous hunter-gatherers; then came the city-state with the advent of agriculture and permanent settlements; then came feudal kingdoms; then came nation-states; next, perhaps, comes a globalized neoliberal so-called community in which all borders and distinctions between peoples have been annihilated by design — all, of course, with various gradations in between.
The through-line between all of this “progress,” if that’s what it can be called, is greater and greater abstraction away from actual kinship to some kind of enforced and increasingly artificial social construct stitched together by vague ideas allegedly held in common by all members with equal conviction.
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The United States has been, inarguably, the grandest experiment in world history in terms of expanding the concept of the nation-state beyond all previous constraints, like a shared ethnicity that binds the people of that nation by blood.
America is a nation of ideas, you might have heard.
Via EXIT (emphasis added):
America is not presently a nation of ideas.
One could argue about whether it once was, or could be, or ought to be — but it isn’t.
This is the same argument generally levied against a racial construction of American identity — that American identity is already mongrelized beyond recall — but as heterogeneous as we may be genetically, we’re far more heterogeneous in our values, virtues, and beliefs.
Under these circumstances, civic or values-based nationalism is purely imaginary, and the only purpose it serves is rhetorical: to deny the existence of a coherent American people, with reciprocal claims on one another and the American state.
Elon’s version of this broader civic-nationalist argument is that America is specifically a land of winners.
He likes the analogy of America as a professional sports team that recruits for the “best”, by which he means specifically the smartest, the hardest-working, the most productive. (In other words, America is whoever is most useful to a tech employer.)
The analogy is apt, as professional sports teams are generally owned by billionaires with no connection to the city in which they’re based, and staffed by mercenary armies of imported criminals.
But more importantly, if America is just “the set of people most profitably deployable at a tech company”, this implies that there are multitudes of non-Americans who are more American than the average American.
It even suggests the possibility that there may be whole peoples and nations who are more American than America.
(China as a whole appears to be much more American than America lately — except for their lack of an H1B program, that is.)
A further corollary of this belief, articulated this week by Vivek Ramaswamy, is that an immigrant possessing the True Spirit of America may actually be obligated to reject assimilation into America as it is.
This notion of America falls apart in your hands as you try to take its measure.
In short, trying to construct a nation built on shared ideas — an ideology, in other words — that will last across multiple generations is tenuous at best and futile at worst, and more like the latter once you begin importing mass quantities of outsiders who have not been inculcated in that ideological milieu.
The entire essay above is worth reading, and I couldn’t possibly do it justice here by quoting snippets; I have only attempted to present what I believe is the essential point — an accurate one, in my view. The punchline is that something has to give.
The question becomes, then, which the essay concludes with: what comes next?
Will we remain on the current trajectory all the way into what the author and others have colorfully called WEF-style “gay race communism” in which all in-group/out-group preferences, including nationality, have been eradicated and we’ve been conglomerated into a “blob” devoid of any of the psychological qualities that made humans human in the first place?
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Or will the untenable present situation trigger the dissolution of the nation-state and devolve into entropy with a return to tribal social groups?
Or will, which the author doesn’t offer as a possibility, the transhuman revolution produce something entirely beyond the constraints of the biological human after the species is integrated into a Borg-like hybrid, rendering the “biological substrate” that all prior civilizations were necessarily built on — human psychology — irrelevant? Robots, after all, have no group loyalty and require no social conditioning.
Only time will tell.
