Avoiding Thucydides’s Trap: Essential Theory, Practical Tactics, and a Call to Action for Responsible Citizens (Part I)

Defining the Elite, Theories of Conflict, Theories of Control

The rise of China is inevitable. The decline of the American empire is no less so. This constitutes the greatest shift of global power in several hundred years. All we—the American people—can do is choose how to respond to the foreordained. Without action on our part, starting now and continuing until the geopolitical rebalancing has progressed to the point of absolute incontestability (which will almost certainly occur before 2030), the American elite are bound to engage in extraordinary and counterproductive violence to preserve the position the empire affords them. This series will examine different means of controlling human behavior, some based on Positional Insecurity Theory, others based on Substitution Theory, and others still based on Distraction Theory, and explore their relevance to the problem at hand. By applying strategic monkey wrenching informed by these theories to annoy the baddies—the elite—we may well prevent a great catastrophe, have fun, and humble those who would level the world.

Defining Overproduction of the Elites and Thucydides’s Trap

Before going into abstract reasoning, two major theories need be briefly explained:

Elite overproduction/overproduction of the elites—when a society produces more candidates for positions of power and prestige than it can employ. Peter Turchin, the developer of this theory, has argued that this has the potential to lead to political instability as competition for elite status grows fierce.

Thucydides’s Trap—described by Graham Allison and named after Thucydides, an ancient Greek historian and general, is the tendency of an established and an emerging power to go to war when they have overlapping regions of hegemony. Within this text, it will refer exclusively to the potential for such a conflict to happen between the United States and China.

How these mechanisms stand to amplify the effects of each other and what we can be done address the potential problems from that amplified effect are the subject of this text.

Defining the National Elite/Understanding the Threat They Pose

Positional Statement

The American elite, particularly the national elite, are incompetent.

They are unable and unwilling to learn from their mistakes. They are overconfident regarding their expertise, their virtuousness, and the universality of their values. They are profoundly ignorant. They are provincial. And despite their alleged differences in ideology, national elites on the left and right have more in common with each other than fellow political travelers outside their class. They are raised in nearly identical environments (although in different cities). Most importantly, they all share a capacity for self-worship and overestimation of their worth to society. At least some of them are well-intentioned, but they will not take kindly to losing their prestige and power, and they will feel entirely justified in using any means at their disposal to protect their interests. After all, they are the best and brightest the world has ever seen, and the best suited to lead, so by protecting their position of authority, they are doing the entire world a favor (or so their reasoning goes).

The American people must be aware of the hazards of the elite mindset and potential actions and actively work to prevent these egoists from causing great harm during the current global power transition. China’s rise is inevitable, not due to any failing of the West (although Western trade policies likely accelerated China’s rise), but because China has a demonstrated ability to resume its historical role of superpower.

This is the position taken throughout this text. Those who disagree with these would be well advised to stop reading. There is little here of value for them.

The evidence to support this position spans at least five decades. Consider this short and incomplete list of some of the many failures of foreign policies devised by the national elite:

1. (1953) The Central Intelligence Agency facilitates the overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian government of Mohammad Mosaddeq and his replacement with the less-than-loveable Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In theory, this was supposed to help a United States ally—Great Britain. In practice, it led to the establishment of an Iranian theocracy under the leadership of the even-less-loveable-than-the-aforementioned-less-than-loveable-person Ayatollah Khomeini—and Iran became one piece of the tripartite Axis of Evil.
2. (1954) After complaints from the United Fruit Company—a powerful force in politics at the time, with a major presence in Central America—the CIA initiates Operation PBSUCCESS, with the intent to remove Jacob Árbenz, Guatemala’s second democratically elected president, a leader who is in favor of higher wages and widespread suffrage (with higher wages being what draws United Fruit Company’s ire the most). Árbenz is quickly replaced with Carlos Castillo Armas, a violent dictator who does not long remain in power. After the fall of Armas, the country plunges into a civil war, a war in which more than 200,000 people died. On the plus, Americans probably enjoyed several years of slightly cheaper bananas.
3. (1961) The Bay of Pigs invasion, an attempt to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro, occurred. The anti-communists, trained and equipped by the CIA, were captured almost immediately. In theory, this was supposed to remove Castro from power. In practice, the United States government lost the conflict and provided the Cuban government with 53,000,000 USD (about 442,142,000 in 2021 USD) worth of food and drugs for the release of more than 1,000 fighters—an exchange that almost certainly would have been perceived as a victory by the communist government.
4. (1960s and onward) The CIA made more than 600 attempts on Castro’s life. In theory, he should have died many times over. In practice, he ruled Cuba for almost 50 years before retiring. He died at the age of 90, probably from extreme old age.
5. (1955-1975) The United Stated engaged in conflict throughout southeast Asia. Generally called the Vietnam War, a more accurate name is the Second Indochina War, as significant military action (namely bombings) occurred in both Laos and Cambodia, rather than in Vietnam exclusively. In theory, the government of South Vietnam should have remained a stable force of democracy in the region, providing a bulwark against communism. In practice, the Vietnamese government fell, the nation became communist (which it remains), Operation Menu—the bombing campaign against the Khmer Rouge—failed, and Cambodia descended into an ideologically driven purge that killed between 13% and 30% of the population. Laos became a communist nation in 1975. In total, the War resulted in more than one million deaths and approximately 800,000 refugees.
6. (1980s) In an effort to fight communism, the Reagan administration financed the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. Weapons, including the Stinger anti-aircraft missile, were provided to radically conservative Muslim groups. One of the few inarguable victories for the CIA, the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan achieved its goal of collapsing the Soviet-backed government and forcing the Red Army to withdraw from the nation. It had the secondary effect of allowing one of the most oppressive and violent governments in recent memory—the Taliban—to take charge. It also facilitated the rise of Osama bin Laden amongst radicals and left the country awash in high-quality small arms.
7. (2001-2021) The United States invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the very same bastards it helped install a few decades ago. The Taliban quickly fell, but a viable alternative to it was never established. After approximately 20 years of combat operations and more than two trillion USD in expense, the United States has decided to withdraw, with there being a high probability that the Taliban will return to power.
8. (2003-2011) The United States invaded Iraq to look for apparently invisible weapons of mass destruction because it had been attacked by terrorists from Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The Iraqi government fell almost immediately, which led to the capture of leader Saddam Hussein (a former American ally). This was as intended. The resultant power vacuum facilitated the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which was (presumably) not as intended.

All the actions described thus far have been international. Perhaps, thinks the open-minded reader, the American national elite have less talent for creating ideal global outcomes than they do in effecting the changes they desire within their nation. After all, one is likely to understand his people better than he does others. This is sensible thinking.

It is also wrong.

The welfare state and horror-show-quality public housing may have led to an increase in the number of children born outside of intact families and certainly led to the establishment of vertical hellscapes more often found in developing nations. Efforts at forced integration of schools led to extensive white flight and astounding wastes of money (and probably the further impoverishment of the inner cities). And reform of the educational system has made colleges and universities into centers for ideological training and learned helplessness that would put the most skillful of Manchurian brainwashers to shame. The list of recent failures of the elites is so long that fully describing it within a single essay is impractical, although a few people have made honest efforts to do so.

The difference between a strong chess player and a weak one is not in the player’s ability to determine what effect a good move would have on the board at the time the move is made: Those with no more than a few hours’ training can understand the advantages of capturing a queen. The difference is in the ability to predict.

It is not true that the best players see twenty moves ahead, despite some claims to the contrary. Given that one’s opponent is likely to have three or four viable options from which to choose at every turn, thinking about every possible progression of moves for 20 turns would be computationally impractical for most computers. Rather, the skilled player thinks a few moves ahead for many possible moves. Still, this requires some foresight, and it requires developing an understanding of the perspective of one’s opponent.

Even a mediocre chess player will assume that the opposing side has some will—the desire the win—and considers the strength of his opponent’s desire, but the absolute worst chess player will take none of this into account. He will think no steps down the line. The board is seen as still life. And he will regard the other side as inert. He will make no effort to know the enemy, with each of his adversary’s moves presenting him with an entirely new board and new problems.

This is the level at which our national elites play. They are blessed fools—blessed because each day is entirely new to them, with whatever misfortunes that befall them being either the result of bad luck or the dastardly dimwits who fail to recognize the greatness of the elite mind and the elite plans. If only the world would play along with our game and let us win (as it should!), all would be well!

This is a happy way to live—right until it lands you in the tomb, the prison cell, or the poorhouse. Even then, the American elite will always take comfort in their unwavering belief that they did nothing wrong.

And this mindlessness is why we cannot leave the world and its fortunes to them.

Definitions

Elite is an inherently broad term. It suggests excellence or prestige within a given domain or domains, but such a description leaves much to be desired. The most significant limitation is that most definitions of elite fail to distinguish between context-dependent and context-agnostic elite status, thus failing to separate those who are elite within a competence-evident domain (an elite marksman, an elite welder, an elite chef) from those who are members of the elite—a social class that derives its function solely from its relationship to institutional authority.

Within this text, the elite refers to the latter—those who have high prestige in society due to their affiliation with the structures and institutions of legitimate power. To further remove ambiguity, the elite and the elites will only be used to describe those whose function within these institutions is to control society at large, either by way of direct commands (as an executive, commander, or judge would have), policy decisions/policymaking, or modulation of the official narrative. They are generally trained in management, business, social sciences, journalism, or law—fields that are far removed from the natural and material worlds—although they may have other training that they rarely use, except to enhance their credibility. Thus, a highly regarded neurosurgeon—an elite physician—is not to be regarded as a member of the elite, whereas a policymaker with a background in neuroscience (from the right school, of course) likely would be a member of the elite. The first is a skilled mechanic of the body. The second, a manager who, one hopes, understands science.

The elite and the elites overlap with Chomsky’s New Mandarins, with the greatest difference being that the national elite/elites within this text only refer to the highest levels of that class. Of course, elites, much like samurai, mandarins, and European nobility, are all assigned rank according to rules that are as complicated as they are opaque to outsiders. All established elite, regardless of standing, have a vested interest in maintaining the existing institutions of legitimate violence—and this includes everyone from the assistant prosecutor of Bumpkin-Semiliterate County to the members of the United States Supreme Court to the senior researcher at the D.C. think tank to the editor at a national newspaper—but only a few have (and can have) true prestige and the authority to change policy, rather than merely enforce it with varying degrees of selectivity. And it is upon those select few, the national elite, whom we focus.

The only other categories considered within this text are insider/established elites—those who turn the wheels of power in the direction of their preference—and outsider/overproduced elite—those who have been trained at the same prestigious institutions as are the established elite who operate the wheels, but have never been given hold of them. This difference—that of having power or not having power—gives these two groups nearly perfectly opposing goals—a point critical to understanding several of the tactics developed throughout this text.

Foundational Assumptions

The assumptions on which this document is grounded are that:

1. The American national elite, as described above, will lose much of their power and prestige over the coming decade as the American empire and American institutions decline. The national elite are aware of this as a possibility but do not consider it an inevitability yet.
2. This eventuality described in the first assumption can be neither stopped nor substantially delayed, as it is the result of both irreversible global economic shifts and long-unaddressed tension within the American power structure.
3. The national elites’ efforts to delay or reverse these trends are likely to be destructive to this nation, many other nations, and the elites themselves.
4. The national elites’ response to signs of declining power will be one of desperation, not rationality. Thus, they cannot be counted upon to moderate their aggression without external guidance and manipulation.
5. The most demented and feverish response from the national elites would entail both expanding the already-underway war against the rights of the American people and initiating a shooting war against Mainland China.
6. The only people capable of containing and controlling the frantic viciousness of the destabilized national elites are a dedicated few of the American citizenry. Without their efforts, the worst-case scenario—a prolonged land war in Asia and a violent civil conflict at home—may well be realized.
7. Redirection of energy—both by way of induced confusion and by way of the promotion of (metaphorically) fratricidal behavior on the part of the elites—is the safest, surest, and most ethical means to prevent both serious civil conflict and armed conflict between China and the United States from occurring.
8. To avoid a calamity during the transition period of unipolar to multipolar world the American citizenry must do nothing more than buy time. The elites need not be kept preoccupied indefinitely, only until they have no choice but to realize their inferior position relative to the elites of other nations. Once they are unable to deny that their time has come and gone, they will have no rational or emotional incentive to foment wanton destruction.
9. The tools required for the task at hand are available to the American people. They have only to use them wisely and practically to protect themselves, the nation, and the world in this time of metastasis.

The informational and theoretical underpinnings of these statements are the subject of a portion of this text. How to turn them into an actionable plan constitutes the remainder.

The Nation-Destroying Risk of Thucydides’s Trap

Thucydides’s Trap has been set. It has only to be sprung. And the American national elite are uniquely likely to plant Lady Liberty’s foot in said Trap due to the mechanisms from which they derive their power and the vulnerability of these systems to attack and decay.

Modern America—highly industrialized, technologically advanced, perpetually mobile—is a modern invention, and we may easily forget how little history is behind it. The United States prior to the Second World War was so radically different from the United States of today that it cannot be regarded as the same nation. Before the War, the country was a regional power. It had a presence in the Philippines, but its role in determining the outcome of most world events was relatively minor. Britain’s empire—including Greater India, Hong Kong, and Australia, Canada, and several smaller territories—vastly exceeded the size and importance of anything controlled by the United States now or in the past.

American industry, American infrastructure, and American cuisine—these were either built up to support the War, built afterward to prepare for another war, or so radically remade by during the War that what was once homespun and organic, became stable, consistent, and ready to be dropped in a rucksack and consumed when needed.

The modern American mindset, culture, clothing, cities, and people—have been so reshaped by the War and the industries of war that it is difficult to imagine anything even vaguely resembling the nation as it now stands having ever formed without the perceived imminent threat of extermination or invasion.

This puts the post-Cold War national elites in an unenviable position. What previous generations built, was built to kill, preferably something big (hence a massive nuclear arsenal and weapons systems built for industrial-scale conflicts). Yet since the Evil Empire collapsed—leaving only a constellation of minor countries, the names of which no God-fear American would even attempt to pronounce; vodka; tough guys in track suits; and Putin-riding-bears memes—the national elite have been at a loss. Stalin went out for a pack of Herzegovina Flor and a liter of kvass decades ago and has not returned. His suitcase seems to be missing. Wait . . .

Daddy has abandoned us!

And the current crop of elites was deprived of an enemy/father in their tenderest years.

So they have daddy issues. And their daddy issues are our daddy issues. This is worse than just taking up with some middle-aged, spray-tanned record producer their mothers rejected in high school and who takes Tom Leykis’s advice a bit too literally. This is seeking out every problem, every nightmare, every terrorized and tearful moment of youth and endeavoring to recreate it on a never-ending loop. This—the need to have an enemy to define one’s purpose—is part of the human condition. It is limited to no one nationality, age, race, sex, ideology, or religion.

Still, the intensity of this desire is greater for some than others. And much of what we want and psychologically expect is the result of what is familiar to us. The modern American elite are not defined by centuries of heritage, nor are they defined by ancestral connections to the land. These are not viscounts, lords, barons, or descendants of noble warriors—they are technocrats. Their nominal fields of expertise are large-scale human mobilization, industrial production, and management grounded in psychological and sociological theory. Unfortunately for them, the current crop of national elites are not particularly adept at any of the aforementioned, partially due to generational decay (generations of easy living making for lower average levels of performance); partially due to complacency and a lack of immediate incentive to cultivate excellence, and partially due to self-destructive policies they deployed against the American people, and (somewhat indirectly) themselves.

Outsourcing the means of production of critical supplies; relying on immigrants as skilled workers, rather than training Americans; and promoting ideological education and time killing over substantial education in the second and third-tier schools that should be readying the technicians who keep an industrialized society running—these gave the national elite short-term power and profit, but they also weakened their long-term position. When work is outsourced, control of the workers is outsourced as well. When immigrants replace local workers, they bring with them values, perspectives, and loyalties that make them behave differently from multigenerational Americans—not always a bad thing. And immigrants often have family bonds and loyalties that make atomizing their communities into loosely affiliated clusters of perfectly malleable and perfectly isolated consumers difficult. Finally, there is the matter of the Revolution of Culture within the schools for the subordinate classes (lower managers and regional elites). The same ideology that allows the national elites to justify their cyclical deconstruction and reconstruction of the national mindset and the diminution of their forebears’ legacy has inevitably been turned against them.

If every part of American life is corrupt, toxic, abusive, and shameful, why should the institutions—including the national structure of authority and legitimized violence—be spared the destruction that all corrupted things so richly deserve? And if the privileged are inherently bad, and degree of privilege corresponds with degree of badness, are not the national elite the worst of all?

From the perspective of the elite, the most terrifying aspect of impossible standards of purity is that they may someday be applied to (against!) those who devised them.

The effect of rapid deindustrialization—promoted at both the corporate level and the policy level by the national elite—is to make the national elites’ position more precarious and the national elites more dangerous. Transfer of technology and industry to other countries (namely China) accelerated their development, and it had the additional effect of displacing the working class and compelling them to either resign themselves to poverty and addiction, in which case they retained little incentive to invest in society, or to climb atop the credential treadmill and attempt to join the ranks of the managerial and symbolic-information-processing elite. This has tremendously increased credentialing pressure and inflation at every level and has accelerated the overproduction of the elites while ballooning the conglomeration of citizens who are deeply dissatisfied with the national elites and power structure, who are disconnected from the civilization and indifferent to its survival, or who are opposed to the continuity of America in its present state on ideological grounds.

Almost every action undertaken by the national elites over the last three decades has accelerated the decline of the United States, accelerated the rise of somewhere else, and weakened the elites’ ability to lead by way of inspiration, rather than sheer force or fear.

Stated another way: The national elite have hammered the steel of happenstance and their unearned good fortune into Thucydides’s Trap. Likewise, the overproduction of the elites is the result of unforced errors on their part. Given that these outcomes imperil them, they likely did not desire for them to occur. They almost certainly intended the opposite—to strengthen themselves and their position. Thus, we have observationally established that they are inept within the domains of global and national strategy and likely to shoot themselves (and America) in the foot while intending to shoot their enemies and challengers in the head.

It is this shocking incompetence of the American national elite that makes Thucydides’s Trap of present global concern. A wiser, more mature, and more sophisticated elite could have delayed the rebalancing of global power by decades. An even reasonably competent elite could devise a graceful passing of the torch—during which the American people could see their standard of living increase due to reductions in grossly excessive military spending; the elites could preserve their power within a reasonable sphere of influence; and the dignity of the Chinese and American government, power apparatus, and people could be preserved. This would be so easy to arrange that one needs either great malice or active and profound ineptitude to force any other outcome.

Lamentably, there is much evidence that the national elite are inexpert experts (or expert at being inexpert, depending upon one’s preferred phraseology). We, the dedicated and responsible few, must prepare accordingly. We must act as though our inaction will lead to the greatest of disasters, bombs and all.

Violence and Positional Insecurity Theory

“War is a mere continuation of policy by other means.” —Carl von Clausewitz, On War

When one is in a position of absolute and unquestioned authority, there is not much need for violence. The potential for violence need exist. The instruments of violence may well be present. But not every bodybuilder has punched someone in the face (most probably do not—such would take time away from their fitness and diet regimens), and a great many swords never leave their scabbards, except when in need of a good polish. Absolute power has an (almost) absolutely deterring effect.

Likewise, when potentially adversarial powers have established effective and non-overlapping boundaries for their authority, violence is greatly reduced, even if the organizations establishing these boundaries have reputations for sadistic brutality. Thus, regions in which gangs have well-defined turf have less violence than those in which battles for blocks and corners are ongoing—one reason the Mexican government has established checkpoints to keep different gangs and associated vigilante groups out of each other’s territories. This general observation about instability and violence can be scaled down to the level of the interpersonal just as easily as it can be scaled up the realm of the international.

Interpersonal violence has been on the decline in Europe for more than 800 years. And America has gotten consistently safer since the colonial era. There is no epidemic of interpersonal violence in the United States. America’s infrastructure and cities may be crumbling, but one is less likely to die at the hand of another in them than at almost any other time in history.

The theories for this are as numerous as they are incomplete.

More than one person has argued that America’s tough-on-crime approach has done much to make the nation safer. This is suspect. First, the available research suggests that the relationship between harsh punishment (mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, etc.) is weak. Second, crime has dropped throughout the developed world, with most European nations (such as Norway) not having implemented policies like those in the United States.

A different idea (popularized in Freakonomics) is that increased access to abortions led to more potentially violent people being eliminated before they were born. Another is that the elimination of lead from paint and gasoline resulted in fewer people being born with behavioral problems. Another still suggests that the increasing average age of the population of the developed world—and the resultant smaller number of young men—has resulted in less violent crime.

The abortion argument seems logical enough, but Ireland, where abortion was illegal until 2018, has both homicide and rape rates far below those of the United States, where abortion has been legal decades longer. This does not disprove the abort-the-future-con theory, but it does cast some doubt on it.

The lead-reduction argument is intriguing, but difficult to evaluate on a global scale, with lead-reduction and abatement policies varying widely across the globe, and it does nothing to explain a drop that began in Europe before automobiles were invented.

And the age-increase hypothesis likely has some truth to it; however, it does not entirely explain why the current generation of young people are less likely to commit crime than were those in their age group decades ago. Nor does this explain why teen pregnancy rates have dropped throughout the United States. Fewer teens would make for fewer teen pregnancies overall, but such would likely have nothing to do with the rate of teen pregnancy in an age cohort.

While any of these theories stand to be at least partially correct, none of them can entirely account for the recent decrease in violent crime. Of course, they may work in concert, which does not negate the possibility of yet another civilizational shift being relevant.

Rather, I would propose a simpler argument—a major reason we are less violent is that we have less need on a personal level to engage in violence to maintain our position in society. This is not so much about prison and punishment as it is about providing alternative routes to resolving disputes of position and resource access and about greater access to resources in general (more abundance or supply/reduced scarcity). We are less likely to need to engage in violent struggle to obtain essential resources (food, etc.); to obtain/maintain social rank/position in a community, tribe, or team; or to gain access to forms of amusement and ways to dispose of our surplus time.

The last does not obviously follow from the evidence and hypotheses thus presented, but that makes it no less worthy of consideration (as will be done in a later section). Unfortunately, our non-violent methods of positional and resource conflict resolution work imperfectly on a personal level. On the class, national, and international levels, they are even more inconsistent in their performance.

And a problem unique to the issue of resolving class-entry and class-gatekeeping questions (meaning determining who gets the coveted class positions in a society) is that these positions in the higher classes are inherently finite. Technology has very nearly eliminated hunger in the developed world, thus reducing battles for food. It has increased access to entertainment, thus reducing competition for amusement. It has exponentially added access to communications and knowledge, so much so that even working-class Americans can easily afford to communicate with working-class citizens of any number of developing countries daily if they are so inclined. Access to even the highest quality information has followed a similar trajectory, and this pattern is likely to continue so long the price of communications bandwidth continues to drop, as it has for more than 30 years.

Medicine, corrective lenses, photography and imaging systems, synthesized micronutrients, publishing technologies, artificial lighting—innovation can provide abundance of many forms, but regarding status, it can do little. The closest it affords is the creation of new, interest-specific virtual communities, in which one can achieve some prestige through knowledge, competence, presence, or dedication. Still, this does not provide more status. New technologies enable us to cut the status pie into thinner slices, but they make the pie no bigger. The pie cannot be made larger than a certain size. Communication can be democratized. Being superior cannot, as elite status (within this text) is something one has because of who or what one is, not because of what one has done. It is the being elite that gives one’s opinions weight and credibility, not the strength of one’s arguments and reasoning that makes one’s opinion special.

Thus, conflict for status is a gnarly problem. No matter how many improvements in life quality are afforded by technology, the quest for elite status dictates that participants in the status market go bigger (as in buying giga-mansions on the West Coast) or that artificial scarcity be imposed—that being a major reason that Harvard, despite having an endowment of more than 40 billion USD (the world’s largest), has a total enrollment smaller than that of a state school with an endowment less than 1/8^th the size.

The second problem worthy of note about the status gatekeeping system is that it must be perceived as having some relationship to the worth of those assigned positions of power. This is a trait common to all social systems. In an earlier era, hereditary titles and positions were tolerated (at least in part) due to the fatalistic belief that one’s merits are determined by station of birth—from good blood come good men—and that ancestry or the gods will cause those who should get power to have it. The truthfulness of this belief is less relevant to the strength of the elite than is the widespread faith in its truthfulness.

Technical competence can be independently verified, as can natural fitness (strength, speed, beauty, etc.), but deservingness to rule over others, especially at the abstract, policy level, is almost impossible to verify. Off the battlefield or the playing field, much of the relationship between executive decisions and outcomes is difficult to ascertain. Thus, elites, the national elite most of all, must have the implicit confidence of at least some of the people (the enforcers, if no one else) if they are to be more than the objects of resentment.

In a nominally meritocratic society, buy-in to the myth of earned status is critical. The elites can point to neither their ancestry nor their deities to justify their powers, so they must instill faith in the institutions that declare some to have won the competition for power and others to have lost. Without the societal presumption that government, schools, and businesses will pick the good over the bad, not only is the credibility of these systems undermined but so is both the willingness of the people to obey the elites and their inclination to put forth the extra effort that makes such a society uniquely productive. If respect for the power-granting structure collapses, the institutions will be despised, those granted authority by these institutions will be ignored or mocked, and the populace will stop trying to win what they recognize as a rigged game. Finally, those who are peripherally connected to elite systems but not fully accepted by them (a group discussed in the next section) will grow increasingly likely to destabilize these systems by way of developing alternative systems or by striving for the destruction of the present systems.

This describes the present situation in America to a T.  

The shortage of elite positions, the overabundance of elites, and the conflict that arises from as much were considered by Turchin. The utility of this conflict and the means to exploit the weaknesses of the belligerents, however, is untrod and fertile ground.

Positional Violence, Overproduction of the Elites, Thucydides’s Trap, and the State of Emergency

Positional violence is not inevitable on an interpersonal level, nor on the level of the state. There are simply varying incentives and disincentives to armed conflict, the ratio and nature of which change over time. With few exceptions, wars and great acts of violence are not initiated by the peasantry. Rather, they are begun by the elite with international conflict being more the domain of the established elite and internal conflict being more the province of the (often provincial) outsider/overproduced elite.

To fully understand this, one must consider the overproduction of the elites and Thucydides’s Trap from the perspective of positional violence. Overproduction of the elites is likely to lead to intranational (or intra-empire) manifestations of positional violence. Turchin, the developer of the elite overproduction model, sees disorder and violence resulting from elite overproduction as a negative, but that is not to say that it cannot be put to positive ends.

In contrast, Thucydides’s Trap is a state-level outwardly directed (international) embodiment of the same human tendency towards positional violence demonstrated by the battle of the elites, but on the level of the nation-state.

It is at the intersection of these two that we may find either war or peace, depending upon our volition.

Elite intragroup (civil) conflict can occur at the same time as intergroup (international) conflict, but they tend not to because both civil and international armed engagements consume similar resources, hence the Russian withdrawal from the First World War. Still, the relationship is more complex than external conflict = no internal conflict or internal conflict = no external conflict. Civil wars—largely fueled by positional struggles between the established and outsider elites—demand a nation’s full attention, but the threat of civil war may make external conflict more likely if the established elites believe that a common enemy will force the people of a nation (outsider elites included) to put aside their differences for a common goal. Muscular interventions on the part of the state are also more likely to be tolerated and sometimes welcomed in times of external threat. And these interventions include methods to coerce or silence all who challenge the status quo.

It is no accident that America has been in a state of permanent emergency for nearly two decades. Since the Global War on Terror began, the state, as directed by the established national elites, has grown ever more extensive in its reach, both at home and abroad. And as the number of underemployed college graduates—a group chiefly consisting of those who were trained to join the American mandarinate, if only at the lowest levels—increases, so has the government’s power to surveil, manipulate, and coerce under the flimsiest of pretenses.

So long have the alarms of invasion and panic been ringing that we are nearly deaf to them. Thus, new alarms have been installed. Russian hackers, COVID-19, the North Korean cyber army, and who knows who and what else—the threats just keep on coming, with most of them proving less fearsome than the terror-porn delirium that heralds them, which is not to say they are entirely harmless. The problem with this desensitization is that more alarms are not enough. Each alarm must be louder than any that came before. Given time, this begs for war, not against a state armed with nothing more than rusting Kalashnikovs and diarrhetic goats, but a real enemy—one who can fight a real war against us. Perpetual escalation is the long-term cost of the permanent emergency.

Thus, the better part of discouraging the positional violence instigated by the elites in the form of activating Thucydides’s Trap is that of timing of two sorts. There is a danger zone in which a nation is most likely to fall into the Trap. This region of greatest hazard lies at the nexus of elevated (but not extreme) elite contests within the nation and the rising of a (new) power concurrent with the falling of an old power as they approach equilibrium in their hegemonic significance.

It is only in periods of transition or immediately before or after them that state-sponsored positional violence is likely to serve the elites well. Once the time of transition has completely passed, normalcy will return.

If the fratricide of the overproduced and established national elites can be disciplined and regulated by responsible parties, the chances for reducing carnage to a minimum are good. This possible engine for peace was mentioned at the beginning of this text, but how to elicit the needed behavior will be explored later.

Now that we have considered Positional Insecurity Theory, we will turn to Substitution Theory and then Distraction Theory. Finally, we will consider how all these theories can be applied to the manipulation of the national elite to render them less dangerous than they are at present (Part II).

The Needs of Mankind: Substitution Theory and Its (Dis)Contents

What does one need to survive?

Food, water, protection from the elements—the necessity of these have been considered. The need for community—common to almost all people, regardless of social rank—is implied in Positional Insecurity Theory. Without community, social position means nothing.

Finally, one needs amusement. The last may not seem to be a need, but without it, I would argue that life becomes so difficult to bear for so many that they are likely to become destructive, either towards themselves or towards others. And such is profoundly dangerous to the health of a person so afflicted and the things and beings around him. Thus, we turn our attention to this previously unexplored matter.

Violence and Time Abundance/Violence and Amusement/Violence and the Tribe

If the male warrior hypothesis is to be believed, the greater part of male intrasexual violence has been for access to women. From an evolutionary standpoint—given men’s relatively high degree of reproductive elasticity and the winner-take-all outcome of male sexual competition—this makes sense. And lensed through our modern understanding of reproduction and science, we can even see this is an existential issue—men without children were unlikely to leave much of a legacy before the advent of the city-state.

Without dismissing the significance of reproduction to the psyche, it is important that we not attribute modern knowledge to ancient ancestors. Although humans likely developed an understanding of the relationship between sex and offspring long before the development of the written language, exactly when this happened is impossible to say. To someone in the natural condition of ignorance, how one leads to the next is not obvious. Not all sex results in pregnancy, and the delay from impregnation to its outward signs would further obscure the connection between the two. And there is no reason to assume that primitive people saw the primary purpose of sex being reproduction. A great deal of sex had today is more for entertainment than to pass down one’s genetic heritage. Our ancestors were likely of no purer heart.

From the perspective of man in the most primeval state (and animals in the state of our pre-human ancestors), sex is not about reproduction, it is about the satisfaction of an urge for an activity that is not necessary to sustain his life—For the most primitive man, sex was a form of itch scratching, entertainment, sport, and a way to pass the time. In learning and culture, we have exceeded the primitive man by orders of magnitude. In instinct, we are not much different.

We may well philosophize about the importance of family, generativity, and the noble bonds of nation, but our instincts are quite far removed as much. We desire comfort, social relationships and position, and amusement. We desire a tribe. And the deepest desires are all barbaric at heart. The extent to which we understand these desires does not much change our tendency to act upon them. Consider how many otherwise capable men have thrown themselves to the wolves for the momentary pleasure of sexual congress. It is doubtful most such men were thinking about their legacy—of either the genetic or historical sort—when penetrating Penny, the perpetually pleasant (and perennially pregnant), punctually present paralegal from Pennsylvania.

Intelligence has only a moderate effect on overcoming the baser instincts of man. Knowledge has not much more. If anything, they allow one indulge his animal desires in more destructive ways—the ignorant idiot lusting for power and respect may kill a few here and there. At most, he may terrorize a school’s worth of innocents—but the man of intelligence, education, charm, and ambition can torment and oppress a nation until his insecurities are resolved (or he grows tired of killing). And if a considerable amount of research is to be believed, we—as a species—may be less intelligent now than we were a few thousand years, when interpersonal violence was nearly as much the norm as the exception.

When considering why the world is a more peaceful place, we should bear in mind the limits of intelligence and knowledge. We have already considered decreases in violence from the perspective of reduced positional conflict as well as the role both abundance and systems of arbitration have played in making the world safer. This reduction in violence can also be considered from another angle—that of Substitution Theory—with the knowledge that what the modern world provides to sate our appetites is oftentimes quite different from what nature and tradition afford.

Time Substitution and the Necessity of Entertainment

Despite the ever-growing list of physical, mental, and environmental limitations and concerns facing us, and the decline of so many of the things we have long assumed necessary to maintain an orderly civilization—intact families, traditions and national culture, a sense of connection to concrete place and community, and religion—we survive without great difficulty. So much of what we thought a people and a nation required to function has proven to be, much like the hapless barista and the hard-drinking realtor of 2020, nonessential. This observation does not establish that we thought wrong, only that what we once may well have needed, we now no longer do.

Rather, we have excelled at creating substitutions—a significant number of them preferable (in at least some ways) to the things they have eclipsed. In a nation where more than 40% of adults are overweight, it is difficult to argue that our foods are neither sufficiently plentiful nor sufficiently delectable. They may be faker than prostitute’s protestations of love, but they are real enough. The same good-enough-ness goes for simulated combat and the virtual teams/community of the gaming world.

One of the more interesting correlations in crime reduction and technological development is between that of the release of the first PlayStation and a drop in hooliganism—which occurred within a few months of each other. Playing a drug dealer in Grand Theft Auto may not be as exciting as beating the streets with little baggies in hand (or in Carhartt jacket, more realistically), but given consistent declines in youth drug-use rates, it certainly appears to be more popular.

Finally, there is the matter of sex, which if not the primary motivator of male excess economic productivity, is a major historical factor.

Yet in an age and nation where sexual restrictions and taboos have very nearly vanished, American men are becoming less sexually active by the year, with a growing number of them having no sex at all. And they seem fine with it. Apart from marijuana, they use fewer drugs than they did a decade ago. They are not uncontrollably violent. The unattached and underemployed many have proven to be of no great threat to modern society. This—the hollowing of a truism—that young men without sexual access, life structure, or externally imposed purpose are dangerous—is a technological accomplishment too little observed and far too infrequently lauded.

Pornography serves as a partial alternative to meatspace fornication and sexually aggressive interaction, and online ersatz relationships—the sort one might have with an OnlyFans girl—are growing more popular. But one should not think of sex as a discrete and irreplaceable thing, but as one of many low-tech forms of entertainment to have been pushed away by the great waves of digi-ero-info-engagement.

Thus, we can see how technology has allowed for the substitution of the natural with the unnatural in four domains of concern: 1) essential resources (food, etc.); 2) social rank/position (although this has many limitations); 3) community (which closely relates to social rank/position); and 4) amusement/surplus-time disposal. And all have been made entertaining in the process: This may well be the greatest accomplishment of them all. And the same technologies that have so effectively placated the peonage (peonage meaning most of us) can be applied to pacifying the elites at every level, including the national elite, although these technologies will require substantial modification.

Substitution Theory Summarized

Substitution Theory is a theory that dictates when, how, and to what extent one thing may replace another.

Despite their triumph over the real, the substitutes considered are not perfect replacements for that which came before them. Arguably, modern food might be an improvement of the low-technology predecessors of a few generations ago—at least if one is to consider declining rates of serious nutritional deficiencies, such as those resulting in goiter and scurvy. As for the other substitutions, they are almost all thinner than their predecessors. They lack the complexity and depth of the pre-technological alternative. Online communities, game-based or otherwise, entail less complex interaction compared to physical communities (with their reliance on body language, etc.). Virtual social status is more fragile than more organically developed alternatives. And online relationships (and pornography) are less physically stimulating than the meatspace variety.

From an examination of their successes and failures and their strengths and limitations, one can derive a condensed Theory of Substitution:

A substitute designed to meet a basic human want or need will supplant its predecessor to the extent it is good enough for a specific purpose to provide a reasonable degree of satiation; is at least as reliable in its operation as that which came before it; and is sufficiently cheaper in terms of time, money, risk, and energy. It need not provide every feature of the original, nor need it share a common construction or lineage with that which it has displaced.

Degree of substitution may vary across domains, with the substitute entirely usurping its predecessor in one domain, partially in another, and negligibly in a third.

And here is an Economic Corollary of Substitution Theory:

Those who control access to the substitutes have great power. They will retain that power so long as their product remains market competitive.

And here is a Critical Caution of the Corollary:

A substitute becomes market uncompetitive when the provider fails to innovate with sufficient speed and creativity, gets greedy, or both.

Next, Distraction Theory.

Distraction Theory

Distraction Theory relies upon four assumptions:

1. Human attention is a finite commodity. There are no known means of increasing the amount available beyond its natural limit.
2. Human attention has a range of optimal performance (maximum and minimum duration envelope) outside of which it cannot work effectively.
3. The number of tasks requiring attention has a roughly inverse square relationship to performance (e.g., doubling the number of tasks—2x—reduces attention effectiveness to ¼—1/x²). Multitasking is so deleterious to mental performance that even sitting next to someone who is multitasking decreases cognitive performance.
4. Attention is engaged and redirected more efficiently by emotions than by either logic or facts.

Distraction Theory is used in almost every marketing and propaganda technique in vogue. Other methods exist, but they are both more complicated to deploy and narrower in their effect. Sex sells, so does prestige, so does a sense of belonging. But what a teenybopper considers a tasteful display of flesh, the Fixodent-black-coffee-and-fiber-laxative klatch may well consider grotesquely immodest. And what the elders find to be tastefully suggestive, is likely to consider granny-underpants boring to their Alien-Sex-Fiend-bopping youths. The urbanites’ sleek Italian dream of a sportscar suggests a certain delicacy (meaning questionable sexuality) to the country boy, and the lifted F-250 of the Proud ‘Murican is a road-hogging abomination to the Perrier drinker in the skinny suit.

But distraction is universal.

Scream in someone’s ear, beat their door with a hammer, drop their bone china on the floor and take a pratfall—your target may not know what you are saying or why, but his train of thought will derail nonetheless, be the rails standard-gauge, Russian-gauge, Bosnian-gauge, or the not-quite-interoperable-with-anything-else-gauge used by the Hong Kong MTR.

Social media is the closest that exists to a system built exclusively on Distraction Theory. The actual content is singularly irrelevant—it is not designed to be processed with any sophistication, nor is it likely to be in front of the viewer for long enough to make a distinct impression—so long as it effectively draws the attention from somewhere else.

And the more social media evolves, the more dependent on Distraction Theory it becomes. Myspace—a music site turned social media site turned music platform (again)—was too song-centered and too inconsistent in design from one page to the next to facilitate the mindless page hopping and petty arguments of Facebook. Facebook relied too much on long messages to encourage the hate scrolling and shoot-from-the-hip responses of Twitter. Twitter required reading, and thus some token level of cognitive processing relative to TikTok. TikTok, being a video site, requires use of the visual cortex. Presumably, the next social media platform will use direct-to-the-limbic-system wiring to effectuate flashes of pure feels­—finely tuned and corporate-controlled focal seizures.

The goal of this technology is simple—to incentivize attentional shifts in such rapid succession that higher intellectual operations remain either perpetually nascent and never growing past the stage of shrieking and shit-excreting, or better yet, are aborted before they are much more than zygotes, unattached to the blood-rich walls of a fertile mind.

This is “Harrison Bergeron” with a twist—the handicap radios are purely voluntary, and the line for them stretches to the most remote reaches of the internet.

Distraction Theory can be applied to one of two major ends—either the inhibition of movement (overload paralysis) or the induction of malleability (causing the target to become so overwhelmed that the decision-making process is handed over to another party or to the subconscious). Properly implemented, techniques based on Distraction Theory can induce one state as easily as another, or both states in quick succession. Either way, the individual will is rendered inert and replaced with inchoate excitement and the direction of the distraction makers—effectively propagandists.

The most widespread application of Distraction Theory is simple but economically critical in a consumer society—that of encouraging impulse purchases of things the targets do not need, do not want (except for during the most transient moment), and cannot very well afford. But one should not underestimate Distraction Theory’s remarkable utility based on this pedestrian application.

Distraction Theory would seem to overlap with Substitution Theory, and in certain domains, it may. Our willful Bergeron-ization relies upon both, with Substitution Theory being what gives electronic media much of its appeal (by providing lower-cost substitutes to older forms of interaction and entertainment) and Distraction Theory underpinning its ability to produce a captive population that has more monkey-brain emotions than well-ordered thoughts.

Thus concludes our theoretical preparation. In the next section, we consider the application of what we have learned.

Please turn your attention to Part II—Practical Actions, Desired Outcomes

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Brant von Goble is a writer, editor, publisher, researcher, teacher, musician, juggler, and amateur radio operator.

He is the author of several books and articles of both the academic and non-academic variety. He owns and operates the book publishing company Loosey Goosey Press.