Part III—Towards a Practical Tribalism: Human Nature and the Technosphere (Page 1)

Fools’ Errands, Objectives, and Oversized Glasses

There is a certain hopeful foolishness in any program to make the world a less awful place. Just as importantly, there is a confidence in one’s power and the power of one’s readers. The truly powerless can do nothing. They cannot so much as resign themselves to their fate, cultivate their equanimity, or develop a sense of humor. Even these require some power—the power over one’s mental condition and worldview.

This essay, the third in our trilogy, assumes that all is not lost. It is founded upon the belief that we are not all bound to be victims of circumstance, knocked about by the tidal forces of politics and technology and dashed against the rocks of human instinct and apathy. More optimistically, it is written with the assumption that at least some who read this can act (in however small a way) to effect some of the suggestions made herein.

My general objective in writing this essay is to provide ideas for accelerating the peaceful economic, cultural, and environmental development of the United States and China. More specifically, I desire to see the United States become more resilient and for China to develop in a way that is well-suited to her people’s present needs while honoring her traditions and heritage.

Many suggestions presented on the first page of this essay—the page addressed to the United States—will require either legislative or judicial initiative to execute. This is bound to be difficult. But I can see no other way to redirect the energies of the United States towards existentially non-threatening interaction with China and enduring prosperity within the realm of the rapidly developing technosphere. The second page—the page addressed to China—is more of a mental exercise intended to provide my readers with some insight into what actions the Chinese government might take if making reasonable and creative decisions on behalf of its people.

I have designed the proposals described in this essay to be both modular and emergent. They are modular in that they can be broken up and effectuated in parts. Such should have some of the desired effects, with the desired effects being incrementally improving life in the United States and China. My plan is emergent in that the cumulative effect of its full application should be much greater, more complex, and distinctly different from those of incomplete action.

That said, this is a flawed plan outline. I have not (and cannot) account for every possible complexity and intervening factor. I would like to think this plan is a good plan. But I might well be wrong.

If nothing else, I hope this essay inspires something—thought, action, or the development of a better and more comprehensive strategy—anything other than peanut gallery grumblings and endless, paralyzing prattle of the internet commentariat.

As for those who insist on inaction until a course of action without flaw emerges, I argue that this plan is near enough to good. We had better execute an imperfect plan now than wait for perfection, Godot-like and forever looming in the distance, to grace us with its presence.

Regarding the glass referenced in the title of this section: Is it half full or half empty? An optimist would give one answer, a pessimist, another. An engineer would say neither. It is twice as large as it needs to be. I have my answer, as will you. I have presented you with a glass—this essay—with something in it. Fill the glass with ideas of your own, cut it down to size, or throw it and its contents out and find a vessel and beverage better proportioned and suited to your thirst. All are valid options. Choose according to your preferences, and drink as much or as little as you like.

Deconstructing Universalism, Defining the Local and Regional

The meta-purpose of many ideas presented within this essay—those addressing structural issues in the United States most of all—is to deconstruct universalism. Even seemingly unrelated suggestions, such as several of those in “Banks, Job, and Financial Stability,” are designed to slow the flow of money across state lines and make local production and commerce more economically and logistically attractive.

By universalism I mean the belief all are brothers or sisters and should regard each other as such; the notion of universally applicable values; the decontextualization of the particular. This essay is an argument for (and celebration of) the regional, the local, and the tribal. It is not anti-technology, nor does it advocate ethno-supremacism. It does promote nationalism over globalism, regionalism over nationalism, and localism over regionalism. And it is supremely anti-abstraction. If anything, my proposals may well serve as an unguent to ethnic divisions to some small degree. The tribe to be cultivated by the enactment of these proposals is the real and local rather than the imagined brotherhood of race. In-group ethnic biases may always be a part of the human condition. But one can come to learn and understand that his survival is more intimately connected to that of his neighbor than to that of someone thousands of miles away with whom he shares an ancestor six generations prior.

And the plan I have developed for restoring the tribe does so with little reliance on the notion of family. This last point may come as a surprise to traditionalists, but I see no realistic means to return the family to its former state of importance without disintegrating modern civilization and eliminating no-default divorce and birth control. For reasons to be examined shortly, efforts at returning to a lower state of technological development are bound to end badly. Rather, we rely on two mechanisms to create and strengthen the local tribe. The first, incentivized regionalism, is largely to be the work of regulatory and infrastructure changes—economic and logistical incentives to invest and engage at the regional level. The second, fraternal/martial regionalism, is to be the work of an intensive training program for boys and young men. Some separate training will be provided for young women as well, but until women begin to fight and die for their tribe/group/nation at a rate even roughly approaching that of men (assuming such ever happens), this will be of less importance.

The anti-universalist strategies presented for China will be somewhat different. They must be. The distinct culture and heritage of China allow for nothing else. The considerable history of the Chinese as a more or less ethnically homogenous people (with the Han being a supermajority) and their well-established heritage of closure negates some concerns for their regional unity and introduces others. And how China can engage in limited, goal-oriented interaction with the outside world while retaining her cultural heritage will be given special weight.

With all this in mind, I suggest that my readers remember that this essay proposes a balancing act of sorts. And this does something to explain what may appear as contradictions. Anti-universalism is encouraged, yet the development of a Chinese global brand is as well.

So the Chinese should preserve their culture while out-marketing (and subsequently destroying) other peoples?

No. The purpose of branding—national, regional, or local—is both economic and structural. The Chinese brand; the American brand; the Alabama brand; the New York brand—all of these serve to reinforce a sense of identity both outside and inside a community. Brands may be used for cultural colonization, but may is not must. And even a people with a strong sense of regional brand and identity can have some interest in and respect for brands and cultures other than their own. They will likely favor their own. They should favor their own, but that does not demand they despise all others.

Again, a balancing act.

Finally, I define local and regional as used in this essay.

Local is defined as being within a radius of 50 miles from one’s permanent/primary address. (I chose 50 miles as the outer boundary of a locality because it is about the most distance a person in good health can walk in two days.)
Regional is defined as being within a radius of 500 miles of one’s permanent/primary address. (I chose 500 miles as being the outer boundary of a region because it is about as far as a person in good health can walk in three weeks.)

*This woman is prepared for a stroll, not to outrun a gang of cannibals. The difference—proper footwear.*

Never forget that if all else fails—infrastructure, modernity, and civilization—you are walking.

Ideology, the Technosphere, Koestler’s Regression, and the Singularity of Infants

The thesis of the section and the divisions thereof is simple: Technology and man are not separate. Technology is both a concentration and concentrator of human nature and beliefs. We must take man and machine together. Thus, the technosphere.

What is the technosphere?

The technosphere is the sum of all human technology and every person who uses, maintains, or advances that technology.

As a sphere—much like the biosphere—the concept is resistant to division or simplification. And just as is the case with the biosphere, determining the technosphere’s exact parameters is impossible. For the purposes of this text, we will state that the technosphere came into being when man commenced using tools of any form to manipulate the natural world. I would argue that the technosphere emerged in the paleolithic era. Depending upon estimates and the somewhat subjective determination of what defines a tool, this era started between 2.5 and 3.3 million years ago. The older number necessitates that we broaden the definition of man from homo sapiens exclusively to include Australopithecus—a likely ancestor of our species, but hardly human in the fullest sense.

The technosphere is the sum of all human technology and every person who uses, maintains, or advances that technology.

With that definition in mind, we can come to see technology as being not an alien force—that which is delivered to us from the engineers or industry—but as a part of a larger mechanism to which we can actively contribute. For engineers and scientists, routes for contributing to technological development are easy to identify. But governments, consumers, arts, builders, hobbyists, and technicians all play a role in shaping the direction of technological progress. Technology is materialized ideology, is an oft-used (and useful) assertion that is potentially confusing, so we will define it according to four foundational declarations:

Techno-ideology requires a belief in the capacity and need of people to change the world (an ideology of intervention).
Techno-ideology requires confidence in the systematic nature of the universe. (Experimentation will lead to learning—what works once will work again—the universe is not inconsistent and capricious.)
Techno-ideology defines productivity as an inherent good. (Inaction is economic waste.)
The direction of techno-ideology is influenced by both the state of existing knowledge and the will of those who engage in innovation or subsidize, tolerate, or (conversely) persecute those who do.

One should not take this assertion to mean that only a specific ideology—Communist, nationalist, et cetera—is required for technological innovation. And the spirit of creativity may flourish just as well in one system of metaphysics as in another—a point we deliberated in the previous essay. Rather, to invent or construct a technology is to act on the belief that the world should be changed, that all is not right, and that it should be changed according to the will of the technologist. This applies as much to the builder of nuclear power plants as to the designer of food dehydrators. One believes the world needs more electricity. The other, that the world needs more chewy apples. Neither would very likely be content to sit in an unlit cave eating fresh fruit.

As much (if not more) a salesman as an inventor, Ron Popeil peddled ideology as much as pasta makers. The ideology—implied if never articulated—posits that life can, should, and will (assuming you buy our product) get easier and more convenient—for you—by the day. Machines will make it so. Contrast that to the underlying premise of hard fatalism or the assumed self-sacrifice of collectivistic ideologies. Contrast that to the presumption that the old (and difficult) ways are the best. Other inventors sell ideologies of their own.

This is the technosphere of our creation: One that values the convenient and the time-saving. It devalues the durable or the slow-moving. But convenience need not be our priority. We can reshape the technosphere to serve other ends.

Koestler’s Regression and the Singularity of Infants

A defining element of the technosphere (at least as it is currently constructed) is that it demands ever-greater specialization and higher levels of implicit trust. And the more complex the product or system of the technosphere, the more faith one must have in the system—be it either a mechanical system, a human system of production (a factory), or the system in which the system operates. Take air travel as an example. The average pilot cannot verify the proper operation of every part of a modern commercial jet. The average passenger knows less, having (at best) a rudimentary understanding of aerodynamics. A supremely gifted mechanic might be able to assess most of the machines within the flying machine, but he would rarely have the time to test and evaluate every system, subsystem, and structural component of an aircraft.

And even were someone to meticulously inspect every part of a plane before flying it, he would still be dependent upon other elements of the technosphere to enable him to survive his trip. The ground crew, ground control, air traffic control, and other pilots in the sky—even a minor error in any of these systems or entities could lead to a catastrophic result.

The technosphere places two peculiar demands upon us. The first is that we be highly credulous, which is to say that we be willing to accept at face value the words and integrity of people we have never met. The second is that we process much of the world around us abstractly, meaning as parts of larger intangible systems. Such abstracting of the world is profoundly unnatural. With each iteration of the technosphere, we move further away from interpersonal relationships and concrete reality (with most attention dedicated to the tangible) to institutional relationships (with most attention focused on systems too complex to visualize properly).

This leads us to Arthur Koestler, a Communist turned anti-Communist, author, repeated prisoner, and survivor of some of the worst times in the 20th century. Rather than reinvent the wheel, we would do well to offer two quotes from Koestler and explore their relationship to the technosphere, both in regards to the complexity of technology itself and the change it induces in social dynamics. We begin by evaluating the more direct effect of technological development.

Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people’s level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization.
Arthur Koestler

This first quote establishes what we shall refer to as Koestler’s regression. To anyone who has read comments online, engaged in public discourse, or followed the politics of the last few decades, Koestler’s regression is familiar. The defining elements of this regression are not rudeness. They are befuddlement and insecurity.

We should entertain no romantic delusions of a past of perfect civility. Complaints that the world is getting coarser go back generations. Unless one wants to argue for the existence of some halcyon days of perfect etiquette and gentility, these claims are suspect. In very traditional cultures—meaning those that exist in a preliterate state—infanticide is often tolerated, and in the case of the Kaulong of Papua New Guinea, aged women were (until the 1950s) killed by strangulation upon their husband’s passing. Granted, not all ancient cultures were quite as admirably HMO-like in their administration of elder care, but the point is to distinguish between genteel and mature.

If anything, we may well be more sensitive to (and more respectful of) the emotions of others than we were generations ago. But this observation does not negate the one that rapid changes in technology overwhelm and perplex. The accumulated social and cultural knowledge of old—what one might generously call wisdom or mastery—is often invalidated or supplanted. Technical expertise can quickly become irrelevant. This much we expect. Somewhat less obviously, social wisdom can become obsolete nearly as quickly. For example, taking marital or relationship advice from someone with a 1950s mindset might well result in one’s divorce, with the devastating expenses and financial stress and attendant risk of suicide.

The problem of Koestler’s regression is not that it invariably leads to brutality, but that it leaves us lost. Technological development tears down old social structures and norms far faster than they can be replaced. It demonstrates the limits of the old beliefs—of the questions no one thought to ask or needed to answer before. We are left confused, frustrated, and detached from our forebears (who are functionally immigrants to the modern world), family (which has been supplanted by other systems), and community (which has been replaced by industry). Thus follows our second quote by Koestler.

The continuous disasters of man’s history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church, or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation. We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.
Arthur Koestler

Koestler’s regression is more a product of alienation from the past and present—the memory and the real—than it is from the more mechanical and procedural issues of being overwhelmed by the frustrations of new phones and software updates. The destruction of old collective identities and long-term bonds has highlighted a vulnerability of many—the need for a tribe. Without some tribal connection, a large number of people (many of them young men) are singularly alone, which renders them spectacularly open to manipulation.

A critical popularizer of the notion of technological singularity, Raymond Kurzweil argues that one is fast approaching. Kaczynski (mentioned soon) takes issue with Kurzweil’s predictions, his optimism, and his fundamentally technophilic worldview. At least one theory holds that a singularity already happened in the form of the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps singularities come in cycles. If so, how they stand to interact with China’s cycles of openness/closure stands to be interesting.

Technological progress (whether sponsored by the United States or some other nation) is likely to continue. Even if the rate of progress remains perfectly steady, our cultural norms will fall further behind. We will be left with a singularity of infants—an expanding mass of people dependent upon advancing technologies they do not care to understand and who are without any moral or community framework.

And these infants suspended in the technosphere (and unmoored from any moral code of substance) can be led to engage in horrors of the sort that would shock even the members of a Third Reich Reserve Police Battalion. We may delude ourselves into believing that the American culture of individualism will guard us against the horrors of mass brutality—that ordinary men will obey Szasz’s imperative for “more understanding, and appropriate action based on such understanding.” We may convince ourselves that the average American will struggle in Nietzschean fashion against the collective. But such pleasant lies are dangerous. The superficial faux-rebellions of tattoo culture and polyamory, much like the American fixation on partisan politics, are not so much signs of individualism as they are a search for tribe.

The voracious appetite of Americans for brand is that of hungry ghosts. And efforts to turn back the clock to some morally simpler era will falter. We must examine new possibilities—informed by the lessons (and self-concept and brand) of old, but distinct from the ancient ways—as much will not survive the technosphere and its erosive and corrosive force. Reinvention and reinvigoration of national spirit are the heart and soul of this essay. As for destroying the technosphere, such is singularly foolhardy.

Koestler very much took issue with Communism. But I would argue that his critique of Communism was actually a subset of a larger critique of techno-ideology, with Communism merely being a distinctively austere school of a broader set of beliefs. Koestler would likely have been appalled by the application of his theories to the improvement of life in a Communist nation, and reasonably so. Fortunately, he is thoroughly dead, and the thoroughly dead have no complaints. (As for the less-thoroughly dead . . . ) So I acknowledge this potential offense to a ghost, not because I think the ghost will make an issue of it, but to save my readers the trouble of trying to determine if I reference Koestler obliviously or ironically. The answer is neither. I borrow, beg, or steal useful ideas from any source available to me. The extent to which this might offend any spirits is irrelevant.

No Escaping the Future: The Impossibility of Kaczynski’s Anti-tech Revolution

In addition to being a well-known terrorist and mathematician, Theodore (Ted) John Kaczynski is the author of several books. These books, like his terrorism, take aim at technological development, suggesting that technology must be stopped if humanity is to survive. However much one might disagree with Kaczynski’s anti-technology methods, his ideas are worth reviewing, if only because they are logically relevant to the question at hand—How do we survive the technosphere? Kaczynski’s answer is simple—We do not, and we cannot. We destroy it. This is an interesting proposal (and one which Kaczynski explored at length), yet it is bound to fail.

We must work within the technosphere. Deconstructing it is functionally impossible. The arguments against fast deconstruction can be boiled down to a single word—starvation. Try as we might to feed the world without modern chemistry, claims that doing so are feasible amount to less than a mountain of chicken manure. (If they amounted to a large enough mountain of chicken manure, they might well stand a chance.) Plants require nitrogen to thrive, and our intensively farmed agricultural land is seriously short of just that.

The technology behind modern farming may be easily ignored. It should not be. Our lives depend on it. In a later section, we give even more attention to nitrogen.

This—the fast deconstruction of the technosphere—is a strawman so argues the dedicated anti-technologist. The world population will likely peak within a few decades and decline thereafter. Slow deconstruction of the technosphere could avoid catastrophic loss of life by accelerating existing trends towards smaller families and then incrementally removing the scaffolding of modernity. There are several problems with this.

The first problem is that technology is both what allowed the population to increase to extraordinary levels and what is causing birth rates to drop. Fertilizer has made for more of us. Better access to education, birth control, and entertainment is making for fewer. Removing sources of amusement—largely provided by technology—may well cause the population to grow, reinforcing our dependence on one type of technology even if weakening our dependence on another. Said another way: If entertainment is reduced or removed from society and agricultural output is abruptly diminished, we may have few sources of amusement but copulation and slaughter and we may have little to eat but each other.

The second problem is that technology is surprisingly resilient to destruction. We may find stories of ancient Egyptian electricity plants fascinating, amusing, or absurd, but there is not much evidence to support theories of long-lost civilizations of marvel. Of course not, answers the true believer, if we knew how the lost technologies worked, what they did, or who created them, they would not be lost. They would be . . . found. This is a fair point, but arguing over the existence of that which is inherently unknowable is a poor use of time.

What we can say with some confidence is that knowledge, being portable and replicable, is not easily eliminated. The Middle Ages was not an era of stagnation. Progress did occur in the sciences, the arts, and technology (if slowly). And the Greek classics escaped destruction and decay through the diligent efforts of scholars of the Abbasid caliphate, who translated them into Arabic.

National efforts to ban technology, such as Japan’s near elimination of firearms during her most recent period of closure (which lasted several centuries), may do much to slow the development of technology within one country. But they do nothing to stop its development elsewhere. And imposing development moratoriums from the outside is even harder. Consider how much time and effort the United States has devoted to attempting to prohibit other nations (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for one) from developing nuclear weapons. Despite the nation’s extreme poverty, she has successfully built and tested several weapons at least as large as those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is from a nation where the average monthly income is several dollars. And in North Korea, there is such a shortage of chemical fertilizers (the importance of which should have been planted firmly in the reader’s head by now) that factory workers have allegedly been given a feces quota. North Korea may be an odd case, but the argument remains unweakened: If the demand for a technology is sufficient (and the technology is not impossible to develop), efforts to arrest its development will inevitably fail in time.

And this demonstrates another failing in Kaczynski’s thinking: He overestimates the tendency towards the consolidation of the mechanisms of discovery. When he was arrested in 1996, the United States was still the global dynamo of innovation. A collapse of the American industrial base might well have led to a tremendous loss of knowledge. This is less the case today. Were the United States to cease to exist, the rate of innovation would slow, but only for a few years. Asia is now a major producer of technological progress. Whatever reservations Kaczynski has about the United States, he continues (wrongly) to see the country as the center of the world.

The Resilience of Techno-ideology

Technology is materialized ideology. And ideologies are difficult to control. China has had some success in ideology control, but her efforts, despite her great resources, general willingness to crack heads (er . . . persuade the citizenry), and her generally compliant people, have proven imperfect successes. Techno-ideology is the amongst most irrepressible ideologies of all.

This is partially the result of techno-ideology being grounded in natural observation. Techno-ideology might well be destroyed locally. But even if the destruction were to happen on a global level (which seems unlikely), the ideology can easily enough be reformulated. Anyone who is sufficiently discontent with the situation in a society and observes that experimentation can result in learning is apt to rediscover the first two of the four foundational declarations of technology as ideology. Just as the North Koreans can pull a nuclear warhead from an inadequate manure pile, so can smaller groups of dedicated individuals rediscover the process of discovery.

As for the third declaration, which asserts that productivity is an inherent good and inaction is economically wasteful, this is likely to be rediscovered in any competitive and resource-scarce environment. This argument—what is not being used is being wasted—was one of the justifications for taking American Indian lands. It is too convenient to ignore.

Techno-ideology is an ideology backed by an incentive. Any people who adopt the ideology of technology have a short-term survival advantage over those who do not. The ideology of anti-technology is brittle. It, much like pacifism, works only so long as everyone agrees to it. The first group of people who abandon anti-technology has a distinct conquest and domination lead over those who remain steadfast in their beliefs.

None of this is to say that we should ignore Kaczynski’s warnings. Massive engineering projects—geoengineering projects in particular—should either be avoided or undertaken with extreme caution as they have the potential to concentrate authority amongst a techno-elite (if successful) or lead to mass loss of life (if unsuccessful). And reliance on chemical fertilizers and overexploitation of the water table should be massively reduced—something that can only be done by decreasing the human population, preferably by way of humane enticements.

The Problems (and First Solution) in Brief

So here are the problems we—Americans—face:

As the technosphere develops, we become more dependent upon it.
Due to both Problem No. 1 and the many points addressed in the previous section, the dismantling of the technosphere is not something that will come to pass. We must learn to work within it.
Technological development—advances to the technosphere—infantilize, isolate, and discombobulate the population. (This exacerbates the first problem.)
The disconnected new man is occasionally dangerous. He can be nudged towards extremism of the most profound sort—the sort identified by Koestler and in Eberstadt’s Primal Screams. The potential harm of the ideologically driven actions of a group of such men is amplified by the increased organizational ability and better weaponry the technosphere affords him. Even if only a small percentage of disconnected new men wreak havoc, the potential harm is still non-negligible.
The technosphere permits the illusion of sanitized violence—particularly sanitized warfare—to fester by way of physically distancing man from death (the drone war/video game effect). This encourages uninvested militarism (meaning militarism/interventionism in which the advocate takes no obvious personal risk.)
The emerging techno-elite (those existing within the siloed matrix described in Part II) are a threat to societal continuity of their own.
The old structures—family most of all—cannot be restored to their ancient pride of place. Family as a binding entity is unworkable within the context of the sexual revolution. And the sexual revolution—made possible by the technosphere—cannot be undone.
Techno-ideology, most significantly in its third declaration that productivity is an inherent good and that inaction is economically wasteful veers perilously close to omnipredatorial culture. Without regulation, the two may synergize each other to a state of supercriticality.

So what is to be done?

The American answer—at least the best answer I have been able to develop—is to embrace the tribal aspect of human nature and channel it towards useful ends. This must be done with great care. The technosphere need not and should not be destroyed. The nation-state can remain intact (albeit with modification), and the authority of the techno-elite can be kept in check without destroying their capacity to advance the state of the art. All of this can be done while retaining—and often selectively amplifying—many of the unique cultural traditions and the mindset of the American people.

At the heart of this practical tribalism are an understanding of constructal law and efficient design, wu wei, the American matrix of values development, and the American brand.

We will begin by providing this American answer. The problems faced by the Chinese imperfectly overlap those described above. They are not identical, nor are the solutions. They warrant their own enumeration and resolution, both of which will come later.

American Dao: Doing What We Already Do, Better

In this section, we will contemplate a series of interconnected strategies to improve American military preparedness, teach young people useful skills, replace the collapsed family structure with a different bond, and build a sense of regional loyalty and cellular (regional) redundancy and semi-autonomy. The ultimate goal of this section is to create a more resilient nation and a less isolated and despondent citizenry. The strategies herein will affect adults of every age and (to a lesser extent) children.

High School: Training, Resilience, and Survival

We begin this section with a simple premise: As it now exists in the United States, high school is worse than an abject waste of time. (Other nations might well have equally mediocre schools, but that does nothing to negate the point.) High school is a mechanism of pacification and spiritual castration. First and foremost, it teaches students to be resignedly bored. In the industrial era, this might well have had its uses. Conditioning one of the most violent and dastardly of primates (and by extension, violent of animals) to docility and obedience is no mean feat. Modern schools may not have been directly modeled after 19th-century factories, but they largely succeeded in preparing students for a life of unquestioning submission. They also excelled in destroying the master-apprentice training relationship.

We take public education as an integral and inevitable part of our lives. We idealize it and the little schoolhouse of yore as being patently American. But by any reasonable definition informed by our culture and values, extensive schooling is un-American. High school is a recent invention. And formal education is fundamentally regimented, anti-individualistic, and Prussian. The Prussian aspect of education suggests to anyone familiar with history an aggressive unifying militarism. This much is true, but to be militaristic is not necessarily to be competent in the art of war (in the same way being religious only weakly relates to one’s adherence to the foundational principles of a religion). Our schools are (at best) training students for jobs that no longer exist and to serve in militaries that are little like those of today.

What, if anything, do we do to address these shortcomings?

Defunding high school would appear to be one option, yet this is ill-advised for three reasons. First, schools, as bad as they are, are familiar to us. We are unlikely to simply walk away from them unless given some alternative. Second, they keep young people busy. Granted, work would keep young people busy as well, but the suitability of minimally trained adolescents for any but the lowest level jobs is questionable. Third, the abolition of high school would constitute the destruction of an opportunity to address four problems faced by the United States—those listed a few paragraphs ago as Nos. 1, 3, 4, and 5.

A partial solution to all of these is to transform high school from years of sitting passively and preparing to do nothing, well and at length into a local militia training program.

Militia is a potentially loaded word, so we should define it clearly before we continue. In this context, we mean a group of male citizens trained to defend their nation in times of war or emergency, but otherwise living as civilians and subject to civilian law. As for girls and young women, their suitability to combat is questionable. Yet this does not establish that they should make no contribution or undergo no militia-style preparation, only that their preparation should be focused on non-combat roles and should be separate from that of the boys and young men. In practice, training for boys and girls should vary more by degrees than by absolutes, as the members of a militia defending their homeland may well come under fire even if they are not assigned combat roles.

Caveats, conditions, and definitions aside, high school regional militia disaster and survival training (HSRMDST) for boys and young men should contain the following elements:

Intensive fitness training
Essential weapons training, including rifles and (possibly) pistols
Close quarters combat training
Survival and subsistence training, including fundamentals of land navigation and local geography
Guerilla warfare/insurgency techniques, including infrastructure demolition/scorched earth tactics
Specialized support training, including that for medics, mechanics, radio operators, navigators, et cetera
Natural disaster preparedness and survival training
Law maintenance and order training (addressing the rudiments of law, justice, and law enforcement to facilitate the continuation of civil society in case of central government collapse)

(The training for girls and young women would omit Elements No. 3, 5, and 8 and dedicate more attention to Element No. 6.)

One could argue quite convincingly that the average man is unlikely to use these skills. There are two counterarguments. First is that it is better to learn something interesting and potentially useful than to learn nothing at all (with nothing at all being what high school students learn at present). Second is that the process of acquiring these skills, even if rarely used, is of societal benefit.

Consider the problems described in the last section.

We are extremely dependent on the technosphere (Problem No. 1), and although it is unlikely to fail completely, disruptions occur. As it stands now, the average American is profoundly unprepared for local or regional disasters—earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods. The HSRMDST described above would be immediately useful in such circumstances. It would also prove of demonstrable utility in the case of a first-strike nuclear scenario—a war in which the United States government is collapsed by way of a nuclear attack followed by a ground invasion.

Next, there is the matter of infantilization and de-infantilization (Problem No. 3). Providing students with real skills and training that better equip them to survive the natural world should have some maturing effect. One can make too much of this. A few months of living off the fat of the land will not turn zero into hero, but it will give him an appreciation for the vicious indifference of the natural world and his daily dependence on the technosphere. Another de-infantilizing effect would come about from the physical fitness training incorporated into this program.

We then turn to Problem No. 4—that of the isolated man. It would be profoundly unrealistic to believe that everyone who trains together will form lasting bonds and friendships with his peers. Some friends are made in times of struggle. Some enemies are as well. But there will be common tribulations and a common knowledge base either way. A cohort of young men schooled intensively in the same unit for several years will, if nothing else, get to know each other. And if instructors are not changed too often, they can be deeply integrated into the educational/regionalizing experience. A community of fighters may well not be entirely interchangeable with family, but that is not to say it is inferior to family. Furthermore, the highly location-specific nature of combat preparation will give trainees something many now lack—a sense of place. To learn the lay of the land is not to learn to love the land, but doing so gives one an understanding of the environment and that one is being prepared to aid and defend somewhere in particular. On a more tactical level, competent guerrilla fighters who know every inch of their territory pose a formidable challenge to invaders.

And then there is the matter of sanitized violence (Problem No. 5). The technosphere is founded upon the techno-ideology of efficiency. Drone pilots and remote combatants may well suffer psychological trauma from killing, but a public that has no engagement in (or understanding of) warfare can be easily driven to calls for slaughter. Training is not combat. Combat is not training. But rigorous and difficult training would at least impress upon those so trained that actual prolonged combat is unlikely to be enjoyable and that real people will suffer real consequences and miseries.

HSRMDST should emphasize to participants exactly what defeating an enemy entails. And this is where some of its aggressively defensive elements come into play. Stopping the advance of an aggressive and competent invader can demand nearly complete infrastructure leveling. The Soviet counterstrategy to Operation Barbarossa demanded the mass destruction of crops and bridges and the disassembly of factories and their relocation great distances away. In 1938, the Chinese burned Changsha, a city of 500,000 at the time, to the ground to prevent the Japanese from capturing it. That same year, the Chinese breached the dikes of the Yellow River to slow the advance of the Japanese. The action in Changsha killed 30,000 Chinese. The breaching of dikes killed 500,000 (if not more). Preparing students for the annihilation of everything that they know—down to their homes, pets, and elderly relatives—is both strategically advantageous and psychologically affecting. The uninvested adventurism of the ever-clamorous internet tough guys (and occasionally gals) is likely to be muted (or less well-received by the public) when the citizenry has been trained extensively in the non-niceties of war.

Some may be disturbed by the reality presented to them. But it is better to be frightened and prepared than furious and impotent.

There are parallels between HSRMDST and some Cold War propaganda and training programs, but there are differences, the most significant being that Cold War tactics produced a deep mindset of passivity. The United States Office of Civil Defense, founded in 1941 and operating until the 1970s, provided some basic disaster preparedness. The focus of this was on encouraging the public to prepare for nuclear war and its immediate after-effects (fallout if you will). Anything beyond that was largely left in the hands of the military or the civilian government.

When it comes to surviving attacks by whimsical monkey suicide bombers (one of the more insidious and underappreciated categories of terrorists), Burt has it all figured out. When it comes to surviving waves of invaders, his strategy is lacking. Don’t be Burt.

The purpose of HSRMDST is different from anything thus far attempted in the United States. It is not designed to prepare students to await instructions from on high. It will teach them to survive and restore order if there is no central authority left or if the central authorities cannot be contacted. This is not conventional military training, although many of the strategies and command elements taught within this framework would be transferable. Rather, HSRMDST promotes a spirit of self and community reliance. It repersonalizes the processes of protecting and repairing the community and maintaining civilization.

HSRMDST is profoundly in line with the American tradition. It capitalizes on the American desire to see the world in apocalyptic terms, yet it redirects that impulse from the antisocial and despairing to the community-oriented and preparing. It both engages American gun culture and provides Americans with essential weapons training, likely reducing the number of unintentional firearms deaths. It builds upon our distinctly rugged yet technologically engaged concept of masculinity. And HSRMDST does all of this while making Americans safer, more engaged, and less inclined to pathologically moronic global interventionism.

These many laudable goals and outcomes aside, we should be careful to avoid presenting HSRMDST as a social panacea. The HSRMDST graduate may be better prepared for survival and not as isolated as he would be otherwise, but that is not to say he will be compliant. If anything, years of intensive militia training would likely give the average American man a more realistic (or less “reverent but disengaged” as another author described it) view of the armed services and law enforcement. As of 2022, more than 90% of American men do not have military experience. This is not an accident, nor is it some demonstration of the American elite’s desire to shield the average citizen from hardship. Rather, it sets the public up to be fearful of seeming unpatriotic if they criticize (however indirectly) the warrior class. And it ensures that they perceive war as being so abstract that it will leave them unmolested, even though war with a worthy opponent—anything better than a battalion of bush-league goatherds—would affect nearly everyone.

Then there is the matter of rebellion. A few well-trained men who chose to take up arms against an injustice—either promulgated by the government or perpetuated by someone else—would make a better show of force than would an entire platoon of cheesy-poof-fed gamers. The former group would be more dangerous were it to act, yet almost certainly less likely to act. Those who underwent HSRMDST would understand the difficulty of such an endeavor and probably hesitate to either initiate such plans on their own or be manipulated into participating in them by the powers that be.

Finally, we should remember that ordinary violence—beatings, murder, and mayhem—will forever be with us. No training (HSRMDST included) can perfectly channel or discipline the vicious nature of mankind.

A word of caution before we continue: Intensive training, no matter how physically and psychologically grueling, should not be allowed to degenerate into torture. The United States has no deficiency of humiliated men. Adding to this legion is not what the nation needs. Rather, the structure and discipline of HSRMDST should be designed with an eye towards forming a tribe of industrious and creative fighters and survivors—those willing and able to defend their communities—not mechanistic killers or blindly vengeful savages.

Next, we contemplate other comprehensive initiatives to better prepare the nation for conflict.

No Half Measures: Making Conflict a Serious Matter

War, like debt, can be entered into more easily than it can be escaped. And both lend themselves to entrapment by degrees. Someone with otherwise perfect credit rarely indentures himself for life all at once. The process is usually more gradual. The indebted man is more the metaphorical (and fictitious) slowly boiled frog than he is an amphibian with a death wish.

Declaring war should be serious business. A people should think long and hard about the systematic destruction of another, and their government should not be primed or positioned for automatic or reflexive activation. War should be a matter of deliberate defense not impulsive offense.

Here are the measures I advocate implementing to keep the war camel’s nose out of the tent:

Terminating the power of the President of the United States to send soldiers overseas without a declaration of war
Closing all overseas military bases
Prohibiting export of all weapons
Eliminating all foreign aid
Terminating all international alliances
Compelling registration of dual nationals as foreign agents

Only in the time of declared war—

Enacting total conscription. If a war is declared, all men from 18 to 65 should be called to fight, with medical exemptions granted in only the most extreme of cases (quadriplegia, for example) and industrial exemptions granted begrudgingly.
Suspending all social welfare. Additionally, all child support, alimony, and women’s services funding should be redirected to the war effort.
Suspending all loan interest accumulation and home foreclosures
Suspending all stock markets and stock transactions
Taxing all stock dividends at 100%
Closing all industry not deemed strictly necessary for the continuation of the war effort or the survival of the citizenry
Mandating that all women from 18 to 65 work a minimum of 60 hours a week in an industry essential to the war effort, with all earnings above 50,000 USD (2022 dollars) taxed at 100%
Prohibiting/pausing lawsuits, with only eight of the nine common law felonies (arson, burglary, larceny, manslaughter, mayhem, murder, rape, and robbery) and crimes against the state (espionage, profiteering, treason) being subject to sanction in the civilian courts (The ninth common law felony, sodomy, will not be prosecuted. Doing so would not be in the national interest when every reliable man of fighting age and ability is needed for combat, support, or industrial purposes.)
Barring all government officials at the federal and state level, elected or employed, and their immediate families from making any stock or bond transactions or interacting with any registered lobbyists for the duration of the war and 20 years afterwards
Barring all categories of people described in Measure No. 9 from serving on any corporate board or as an advisor or employee to any defense contractor for the duration of the war and 20 years afterwards
Preparing for the demolition or corrupting of all strategic infrastructure, water management infrastructure, agricultural lands, and real property potentially useful to an invading enemy (with the demolition/corrupting only being carried if the enemy approaches said targets)

In regards to the attacking enemy—

Prohibiting spousal visas from being issued to any person from the enemy country for the duration of the conflict and 20 years afterwards (ban on war brides)
Prohibiting any assets being looted from the enemy country and prohibiting the collection of any war reparations (ban on perverse economic incentives likely to provoke war)
Mandating that (if possible) the United States destroy all military, hydrological (water management), economic, and agricultural infrastructure—including heavy equipment and transportation machinery (aircraft, et cetera)—of an enemy country

To those who argue that the measures described above (at least those to be enforced specifically in wartime) seem onerous, my response is Good! No one and nothing (banks and businesses included) should be indulged or needlessly enriched in times of war. None should think Glory be, this sounds fun! Nor should war be prolonged needlessly. If we must fight, we should fight to win, and we should fight in such a way that the enemy does not think us an indulgent people. We will have peace, even if we need make a desert in the process.

There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.
Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu generally had the right idea, but his words may need clarification. He was correct in stating that a nation does not benefit from prolonged warfare, but such does not mean that a certain number of individuals within a nation will not benefit greatly. We (and any people who care for their nation or region) should work to keep the number of those who would cannibalize their fellow countrymen for mere profit as small as possible. The policies advocated in this section should well do just that.

The notion that war is a racket goes back generations (and was already mentioned in the first essay in this series), but it is easy to forget just how large and influential the defense industry is. Restricting overseas weapons sales would do much to reduce the hazard of the United States being dragged into one of her debtor’s wars.

The exact nature of the aforementioned policies should be publicized both within the United States and around the globe. This has two benefits. The first is that it will make Americans carefully consider the matter of war and not enter it willy-nilly. The second is that will make other nations recognize that the American people and government are serious about defending their nation and that they are unlikely to take kindly to being attacked.

As for the deployment of troops overseas in times of war, this will depend upon circumstances. Men who have undergone HSRMDST should be well prepared for the defense of their communities. And in the case of a rapidly invading army, it may well be enough to slaughter enemy combatants as they march to their doom. But the guerrilla and survival tactics taught in HSRMDST would not prepare soldiers for the use of all weapons systems required for modern warfare, nor would HSRMDST train them in the logistics of large-scale troop movements.

Even with an optimized militarization scheme, the United States would not be able to immediately make full use of her fighting force—around 80 million men (all men 18 to 65, minus 20% disabled/essential to industrial work). Training and equipping tens of millions of men could take several years. And of this 80 million, probably no more than 50% would be deployed at any one time.

To anyone familiar with the size of historically significant militaries, 80 million should seem large. And it is. At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet armed forces numbered a few more than 11 million. A military of 40 million is excessive for anything short of a third world war.

And that is the point. The American history of small wars has been one of disasters, with little achieved but a gradual undermining of American prestige and the installation and maintenance of tyrants. Managed conflict has managed to cost the United States (and the world) many lives and the American taxpayer an extraordinary amount of money.

What has been laid out in this section is preparation for total war.

At its heart, the strategy described above might be attributed to Clausewitz, but such is not entirely accurate. This is not a mere continuation of policy by (or with, depending on the translation) other means. Certainly, this aggressively defensive approach to warfare is a part of a country’s policy. But war is to be treated as a binary, not regarded as an enhanced form of international engagement or political manipulation. War is a thing unto itself, and a soldier is not (and should not be) a diplomat with a gun.

War is, within the matrix thus provided, categorized as an acute existential crisis from which the nation must extricate itself with deliberate speed. Thus, we have turned from the Germans to an American—General Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay, former leader of Strategic Air Command—who saw war in stark, total terms.

We summarize the content and message of this section before moving to the next.

War is no laughing matter. It should not be treated as an ordinary political tool.
In times of war, every citizen should sacrifice, and none should profit any more than necessary.
The people should never be shielded from the horrors of war. It must affect them. They must be made to understand that war—real, fully engaged war—will put their lives and everything they own and value at stake.
If the United States is properly prepared, only those burdened with egomania or the omnipredatorial impulse would be bold enough to attack her. If we are to ready ourselves at all, we must ready ourselves to fight the armies of bedlam. Those who would attack us are not the mentally unwell defended by Szasz. They want more than to exercise their right to be unhappy and not to be molested for it. They want (or feel compelled by instinct) to destroy everything. They are a danger to everyone, their people most of all. We must act definitively against them, unencumbered by mercy.
We must work to avoid prolonged war. Prolonged war is of no benefit to most of the citizenry or to any state that serves the people. Those who advocate ongoing conflict do not have the best interests of their people or nation at heart.

Next, we explore the matter of sustaining regionalism in times of peace and restoring it after times of war.

Regions and Regionalism: Strategies and Tactics for Building the Local

Let us begin with the thesis for this section: National identity should almost always be a secondary identity. One’s primary community identity should be local.

To achieve the end of putting this thesis into practice, I propose several ideas in the social, economic, legal, and religious domains.

Promoting Distrust in (and the Ending the Imperium of) the National Elite

For the purposes of this section, we must admit our gratitude to the national elite. They have given us a gift—a non-stop display of their incompetence. They are both blessed fools and foolish blessings. They are blessed insofar that they can retain their authority and avoid any responsibility due to the robustness of the command-and-control structures they inherited. They are foolish blessings to the extent that they are easily caught flat-footed by any rejection of their grand plans and schemes (no matter how quixotic and contrary to custom) and often left perplexed by their failures. This is understandable in that the elite have faced little opposition over the past decades. But from easy victories can grow arrogance, and from arrogance, foolishness. To not grow foolish and arrogant after generations of uncontested wins would require unusual maturity and wisdom. In theory, the ego of the elite should be tempered by the nearly perfect record of post-Second World War losses. But these were far away from home. And messes that are out of sight can easily be placed out of mind.

Educating the public about the incompetence of the elite is easy. But getting a profoundly incompetent and defensive elite to surrender national dominion to the regional level is more challenging. The solution to this is to act through the judicial system. The American tradition of adversarial legalism provides dedicated individuals—knights of the courts, if you will—with a unique means to circumvent the authority of the national elite. Whatever else one thinks about Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which the United States Supreme Court declared that abortion was not a constitutional right, he should be able to recognize its noteworthiness. The Court caused the government to do something those with highly concentrated (national) power rarely do—release their death grip and hand the authority they fought hard to accumulate back to those below them.

This is historically memorable both on an international level and in the context of the last several decades of Supreme Court cases (several of which were referenced in the previous essay). Almost all of the mentioned well-known cases took discretion from the states and assigned it to the federal government. In the matters of determining the operation of their schools, informing the accused of their rights, and defining marriage, the states have seen their authority lessened. And in regards to making hiring and promotion decisions (Griggs v. Duke Power Co.), employers have seen their autonomy restricted. Irrespective of the justice (or injustice) of any of these cases, they demonstrated a pattern of weakening state and business authority and establishing a stronger relationship directly between the centralized authority of the federal government and the individual.

We are now in a different era. The number of national elite who regard their peers as unworthy of unlimited authority may be small, but their presence in the courts—a presence long championed by the Federalist Society—gives their opinions weight. We should not assume this reflects some great love of the common man or local autonomy on the part of this outsider group. Rather, it is more likely an indication of the struggle between factions of the elite as described by Turchin.

With competent and dedicated counsel, those who are so inclined may be able to take advantage of this struggle and interfere in efforts to centralize governance. One excellent target for those who wish to weaken the national elite’s grip on society is the United States Department of Education. This may seem an odd choice. The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) controls the airwaves, and the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has considerable authority to enforce laws. Why not bring cases against either of them? First is the matter of them having some legitimate utility. The FCC serves a purpose. Airwaves can travel across state lines, and an inconsistent bandwidth allocation system could render telecommunications extremely difficult. And the DOJ, while both behemoth and sometimes opaque, does have a legitimate role in enforcing federal laws (which should be simplified and reduced, but not altogether eliminated). Additionally, both agencies’ actions frequently touch on interstate commerce, which is within the constitutional purview of the federal government.

But the United States Department of Education is singularly redundant.

States and private and religious institutions established schools well before the federal government claimed any authority over them. And arguments that in-person schooling funded directly by the state government can be fairly regulated under the Commerce Clause are questionable. Finally, there is the matter of power. At one time, the FCC claimed control over the allocation of airtime for political issues (the Fairness Doctrine), but this was abandoned in the late 1980s. And given the dominance of the internet as a means of political communications, the reinstatement of the Doctrine for broadcast stations would have limited effect. Now the FCC serves as a technical regulatory body more than it does anything else.

The DOJ is still powerful. It can influence the enforcement of local laws by controlling the allocation of funds to local law enforcement. It can also conduct influential policy research (and publish policy papers), adjusting the way it gathers statistics, which can change the public’s perception of crime.

But none of these have the same direct effect on the minds of young people—people who are still mentally malleable—as does education. At the primary and secondary level, Department of Education policies can influence school goals and structure in ways that may bureaucratize the educational process but are not overtly political (No Child Left Behind being one such example). At the tertiary level, the policies can be explicitly activist—with the Obama-era “Dear Colleague” letter demonstrating this quite well. The authority of the Department of Education is less from its law enforcement capacity (although it does have one) than from the power of its purse strings. As of fiscal year 2022, the Department’s budget exceeded $180 billion. Not all of this went to schools, but enough did so that educational institutions are acutely aware of the importance of Department decisions in determining their fate. Schools that desire to be free of persistent federal intervention have the option of not participating in the federal financial aid system. And the schools that choose to do this can remain fully accredited and retain the same level of legitimacy as schools that accept funds, but not many choose to do so. Busloads of government money are simply too tempting.

Trust me, I know the way to salvation! Higher educational institutions in the United States have almost the same level of integrity as do televangelists’ ministries and offer nearly the same value for dollar. And despite their accumulation of filthy lucre, both benefit from their non-profit status. Both also benefit from resilient branding—the sort that gives them the ability to recover from scandals.

Nevertheless, this level of funding does not establish that the Department of Education cannot be dismantled (or massively reduced in size and importance). The first step to undermining the effectiveness of the Department of Education is to attack its more controversial policies as being somehow discriminatory. Discrimination is where you find it. And discrimination can be defined either by statute or by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

The second is to examine the legal authority of the federal government to fund higher educational institutions. As it stands now, the federal government is engaging in lending practices in such a way that private interests cannot compete. And the government’s unfair practices may not withstand federal scrutiny (depending upon the specifics of the case brought, how well it is argued, and the perspective of the judge and jury).

Finally, there is the possibility of attacking the Department of Education’s role in the manner in which it enforces existing law. Are religious institutions treated fairly and equally by the Department of Education? Does the Office of Inspector General violate the civil rights of those it investigates and arrests? Any of these strategies might work. None of them might work. They might well work together. Without being tested in courts, one will never know.

The federal government and its teams of experts micromanage our lives in ways unimaginable to the Founding Fathers. To lessen the control of these agencies and departments is to reduce the dominion of the technocratic class that controls them.

As for a more purely psychological approach to undermining the authority of the elite, I outlined these in an essay I completed quite some time ago.

In theory, there’s no difference . . . (Practice Over Theory)

At the heart of every bureaucratic structure, every abstraction of reality, and every elite power structure is theory. In the previous essay, we considered the role of Chinese and Western beliefs in the history of national development. The argument built in that essay suggests that beliefs, metaphysics, and physical theories trail innovation more often than innovations trail them. Given the thoroughness of this presentation, affording the theory versus practice discussion more attention would seem a waste of time.

And it would be, save one point: We—the American people—must fully embrace the notion of practice over theory. Elegance, beauty, ideological consistency, obviousness, or nonobviousness—if a theory has or lacks any of these traits matters less than that it works. We must promote a utilitarian and non-academic view of theories. Theories are merely imperfect tools to help predict the behavior of the world. So long as they serve as well enough, we can continue to use them. When they fail us, we should move on to something better. This is not to say that we should cease to develop and study theories. Rather, we should have no loyalty or attachment to them.

The physical theories used to develop the Thompson submachine gun were proven false. The bullets such weapons fire are real. Which matters more to the sucker downrange?

We must drum the message of practice over theory into the head of anyone who will listen—the young most of all—just as we must promote distrust of anyone who proposes a non-falsifiable concept. A theory should be ridden hard and not put away at all. If it dies from exhaustion, exposure, or hunger, so be it. It can be replaced. Its carcass is worth exactly what the knackers will pay for it. The thinking advocated here—that of pragmatism and a lack of deference to authority—is profoundly American. And it is entirely compatible with positivism and science, although it may not sit well with those in the research community who have made their careers promoting certain models of the natural world.

Promoting the correct mindset is a matter of education and marketing (the functions of which overlap). We must educate the young to be skeptical, and we must market the American brand element of independent-mindedness. Yes, theory ultimately follows practice, but it follows faster if an anti-theoretical mindset is actively cultivated in the citizenry. We will evaluate a way to do this in our section on innovation in the local community (“Innovation: Unstable Geniuses, Unstable Communities, and the Inventor’s Spirit”).

Next, we turn to the matter of allowing the arts, engineering, and science to continue to function in a more compartmentalized nation.

Technologists, Creatives, and Regionalism

Regionalism and Big Science

The notion that science can only take place at the largest scale is wrong. Big science has its uses, but it also has its limitations. Where there is big money, there are big social pressures as well. This—the money/pressure relationship—applies to the United States Department of Education and the sciences no less. The last is a point made by Sabine Hossenfelder and referenced in the previous essay.

And even when big science is necessary, its deleterious effects on regionalism can be minimized. Only a relatively small percentage of the population is connected to the research community. Consider physics. In 2018 (the last year for which I was able to find data), fewer than 10,000 students in the United States graduated with degrees in physics. From January to October of that year, 1.8 million traditional-age students graduated from college. If the college graduation rate held steady for the remainder of the year, something like 2.16 million students of traditional age completed their bachelor’s degrees. Not counting non-traditional students, we can determine that no more than 0.5% of all college graduates majored in physics. Granted, physics is a difficult major, but even if other science and research majors are far more popular, it would be difficult to imagine more than 10% of all college graduates studying the non-social sciences.

This is a decided minority of the population. A larger number of people are required as support staff for research facilities, but such is still a comparatively small percentage of the population. CERN—the biggest of big science programs in Europe and owner of the world’s largest particle accelerator—has 2,500 staff members and 17,500 participating researchers. This is a noteworthy number of people. But let us keep in mind that CERN is an example of global-scale science and is affiliated with institutions in more than 70 countries.

In other less-abstract fields—tending more towards applied research—the number of researchers is certainly greater. NVIDIA, famous for its graphics cards, has about 22,000 employees as of 2022. This certainly qualifies NVIDIA as a large company, but relative to the population of a small city, it is underwhelming.

It is highly unlikely that more than 10% of the United States population is capable of advancing technology. This percentage is not particular to the United States. Rather, it is a function of cognitive distribution. Only about 10% of the population would score at or above 120 on an intelligence (IQ) test with a standard deviation of 15. Intelligence assessments are imperfect. Some highly capable people may not test well; however, these numbers can be treated as meaningful at scale. And the odds of someone studying and succeeding in science with an IQ below about 120 are not high.

The point is that fundamental work of innovation does not require the majority of the population. Technical progress is the work of the few. Some large scientific and technical operations, spread over several sites, are necessary for technological progress. Many of the people who work in science and technology organizations will need to relocate to be closer to research facilities and other researchers. But most of the population does not need much mobility for progress to continue apace.

Regionalism, Invention, and Small Science

There is also the matter of the individual inventor, discoverer, and innovator. A certain amount of equipment—computers, conventional fabrication tools, and emerging technologies (3D printers, et cetera)—will prove indispensable to the independent creator. But many of these technologies lend themselves to easy transport and require limited support systems. They, combined with improvements in communications technology, should allow for the relocalization and decentralization of creativity, just as electronic music distribution, print-on-demand and e-book technology, and digital video and audio equipment diminish the importance of concentrated content production and distribution. This is the domain of small science, small arts, and small invention—small not because they are insignificant, but because they do not require a big, dedicated infrastructure.

Regionalism and Production

The decline of national gatekeepers makes for a more chaotic creative environment and a more fragmented market, but if anything, this stands to be good for the promotion of regional culture and innovation. And then there is the matter of local production of goods.

As it exists now, 3D metal printing produces results that are inferior and expensive when compared to those of traditional metalworking. But new methods to improve the quality of printed/non-machined parts have made (and are continuing to make) rapid progress in this domain.

The transition from outsourced, globalized production to local and regional production of sophisticated goods will likely be slow, but that is not to say it will not happen. Let us bear in mind that the highly complex supply chains of today—the backbone of globalism/anti-localism—have problems and weak points of their own. And relocalization of production is not purely a matter of advancements in the state of the art.

Some critical parts of the technosphere, including chemical fertilizers, semiconductors, and reliable energy supplies cannot be manufactured using purely small-scale technology. But they can be produced either regionally or nationally, with minimal need for importation from other countries. This—regional and national industrialization—is still preferable to globalized sourcing, which no sensible people would rely upon for essential goods or systems if they could avoid doing so. We will address the matter of locally sourcing commodities in more depth later, and we will frame this within the context of transportation minimization—a goal on which both localists and environmentalists should be able to agree.

Next, we turn to other methods to encourage the uniquely American culture of innovation.

Innovation: Unstable Geniuses, Unstable Communities, and the Inventor’s Spirit

While large-scale funding of innovation should continue, it is critical that the United States not dedicate all her efforts to head-to-head competition against the growing number of big science countries. What can we do to excite innovations on the individual and small-group level? Here are a few of the many options:

Valorize the necessary sacrifice of independent research and innovation
Promote the image of the inventor/creator as rebel
Promote innovation and inventors as points of regional pride
Establish a small-inventor grant and loan system for those unaffiliated with institutions
Automate repetitive work and bullshit jobs

Options Nos. 1 and 2—Valorize the necessary sacrifice of independent research/Promote the image of the inventor/creator as rebel

We have come to take for granted that the ease of undertaking an endeavor and the strength of its appeal are synonymous. If a process is made to appear easier, more people will be inclined to engage in it. To be difficult then is to be repulsive. Yet this is not uniformly the case. Strict churches—meaning churches with many rules that are consistently enforced—are stronger than those that have weak rules and inconsistent enforcement. In the case of churches (and social organizations in general), demanding entrance and behavioral requirements weed out free riders. And there is the matter of pride. That which is too easy means nothing.

*But what if you are not and you know it?*

Pride of achievement is commensurate with investment. By acknowledging and advertising the difficulty of devising anything new (and the real likelihood of failure), the interest of a certain type of person—the person with a point to prove, with a refractory passion—will be increased. And this ties to the idea of presenting the inventor as rebel.

Few want to be rebels or visionaries in the purest sense—rejected by all, receiving nothing in their lives, not recognized until years after their passing. But some do! Some are so devout in their conviction to their ideas and the magnificence of their vision, that their passion has become a faith of its own. The rest might well enjoy standing out, but not so far as to risk being entirely alone.

Stable geniuses may win Twitter wars. But unstable ones—those dedicated to something beyond the realm of rational return on investment or widespread recognition—are the type we require for true innovation.

Our goal here is to promote communities of rebels. This demonstrates a perplexing aspect of rebellion—that one can rebel from one group yet want some limited acceptance in another.

There is no easy way to manage the competing pressures of the desire to stand apart—to be one of the few, the proud—without falling to the pressures for conformity within the out-group. The closest that exists to a workable option for this exercise in cat herding is to allow for the establishment of social groups, collectives, or syndicates that have non-deferable expiration dates. Advocating that this type of community—the time self-limiting one—be created may appear to contradict the recurring objective throughout this essay of building stable communities. It is not. Collectives/communities/syndicates of unstable geniuses—those willing to invest themselves obsessively in the pursuit of a goal for years on end—should complement, not compete, with regional communities. We should not facilitate the development of a regional technocratic elite otherwise disconnected from ordinary life. As is so often the case in the social solutions proposed in this essay, we want some of something (rebellion, determination, and creativity) without so much of it that it destroys something else (the preexisting community).

And the rebel, the unstable genius (and his little community of the like-minded) may often be unhappy, with the uneasy balance of in-group and out-group forces keeping him disquieted, but such is fine, at least to a point. We should not allow our potential innovators lives of complacency. China’s history of well-satisfied mandarins demonstrates how much harm too much comfort for those who should be made uncomfortable can cause.

Option No. 3—Promote innovation and inventors as points of regional pride

We have established that our innovators need to be somewhat on the edge of society, but not too far. Pushing those who are different out of society is easy. Keeping them confined within that society is harder (but not impossible). Keeping them perched on the knife’s edge boundary where they should be is harder still.

One way to keep them on this edge is by carefully celebrating the successes of the unconventional. This is not uncommon in the United States. Consider the tremendous internet fame of Nikola Tesla—a man with no shortage of eccentricities. And with the passage of generations, Tesla’s reputation as a geeky, slightly unstable genius has added to his appeal.

Tesla, an immigrant who never married, mismanaged his fortune, and fell in love with a pigeon, has become a popular culture icon. Extending a bit of this tolerance of the unusual towards local and regional inventors should not prove overwhelmingly difficult.

This is where several themes intersect. American acceptance of difference has waxed and waned (with less regularity than the Chinese cycles of openness and closure, but still . . . ). Views on mental health and variations in behavior—related topics—have likewise oscillated.

I would argue that the United States is closer to a period of libertarian tolerance than she has been in a generation. Corporate America and academia may be under the thumb of national ideologues, but Americans are generally supportive of freedom of speech and expression. With a bit of nudging, more people within regional communities can be brought to see the value of those who think differently, without growing laissez-faire regarding social order and cohesion. The United States should not model her treatment of the unusual after that of San Francisco—a community where public defecation is so common that an interactive map was designed to track it. But touting the achievements of those who worked alone (or in small groups) to achieve innovations outside of the technocratic framework could only stand to help our nation.

Option No. 4—Establish a small-inventor grant and loan system for those unaffiliated with institutions

However much one may be dedicated to his ideas, he must eat if he is to long survive. And for that reason, there would be many benefits to establishing a small-grant system for the promotion of innovation. There are already some funding sources for inventors and creatives, but the application processes for federal grants can be complicated and may favor those who can write over those who can do. With that noted, given that government inventor grants tend to be relatively large (more than 100,000 USD), a certain amount of paperwork is not unreasonable.

What is proposed herein is different—small grants, with a maximum value of 10,000 USD—enough to develop a relatively simple invention and (more importantly) give the would-be inventor a chance to prove himself and provide him some formal acknowledgment. This grant system should be locally funded, privately funded, or some combination of the two. As we noted in the last essay, private industry (Westinghouse, for example) has played a major role in the development of science and technology in the United States. There is no reason that the United States cannot or should not encourage a private grant/local grant system.

And an inventor should not be ignored once handed his check. A limited amount of technical and legal support and the occasional question as to the inventor’s progress could both reduce the probability of funds not being used judiciously and help the inventor to stand on what may be wobbly legs.

Option No. 5—Automate repetitive work and bullshit jobs

This last point may seem only tangentially related to innovation, but the connection is stronger than might appear evident at first.

The industrial age was one of mindless repetition and subordination. Being subordinate to a boss, repeating the same motion (to the point of the act causing injury), and being the subject of time and motion studies that can reduce man to meat machine—these are novel and destructive. The wearing down of one’s will so much so that he is completely submissive is an alienating process. Inspiring inventors and innovators, local inventors most of all, to automate away injurious work and tedious paperwork stands to enrich innovators and fortify the soul of the community. We will be a less miserable people if concerns of bureaucratic compliance rule less of our lives.

One should consider two cautions when automating repetitive work and bullshit jobs. The first is that automation should be designed so that it does not promote the centralization of real production (meaning the making of useful things) to a few major factories or organizations. The second is that the automation of bullshit work—the automatic filing of forms, et cetera—should not be used to enable the creation of even more paperwork. This—the creation of paperwork to fill the capacity to process it—is a real concern. One way to decrease the chances of this happening is to introduce business and government standards that incentivize year-over-year reductions in the amount of time spent on paperwork and compliance. Another way is to introduce a performance incentive scheme for those who can develop more efficient bullshit processing and minimization systems. An example: For every dollar saved by an invention/innovation in reduced paperwork-processing costs, its inventor/creator might be given five cents.

Any reasonable person might well wonder Why not eliminate bullshit work altogether? This is worth asking. I would hold that doing so is extremely difficult. A more viable option would be to incrementally automate bureaucracy and diminish bureaucratic structures by atrophy—denying them funding increases and not replacing workers as they retire.

And the elimination of the profoundly extraneous would hurt none but those who make their livings by making others’ lives worse.

Genius and Rebellion: A Caveat

Before going any further, we should eliminate a potential misunderstanding: Curiosity, a rebellious and bold spirit, and a willingness to take risks may demonstrate themselves as eccentricities. But they may well not. Let us not lean on assumptions and stereotypes. Edwin Armstrong, the inventor of frequency modulation (FM) radio, was a superficially conventional man by most accounts. His ideas were radical, and he was somewhat of a loner. But to see him on street, one would likely think nothing of him. His apparent normalcy may have counted against him. His technology was marketable. His genius and presentation were less so. Today, he has little in the way of a fan base and is unknown for any fascinating habits or stylistic quirks. Few would openly emulate him, and fewer companies are named after him.

*This man—Edwin Armstrong—does not look the part of rebel. Yet the novelty of his ideas and the intensity of his struggles against industry and the status quo were entirely real.*

We should tolerate (but never demand) eccentricity from the independent mind. Outcomes matter more than appearances or theory. Practice above all.

Making Obsolescence Obsolete

So long as the predominant industrial design philosophy is one of planned obsolescence, localized production and economic control will remain forever out of reach. At its most extreme, planned obsolescence makes all product ownership a lease by another name, but worse. The consumer uses a product for such a short time that he may not finish paying his purchase agreement before having to replace what he bought.

We are so acclimated to throwing away certain products that we forget they could be made to be repaired or upgraded. Consider the modular cellphone design referenced in this video as an interesting alternative to the buy-break-upgrade-repeat model you have now.

We add the but worse to our description of planned obsolescence for a reason: A leasing system has integrated into it a plan for the end of the product’s lifespan—return it to the lessor for resale or repair. Planned obsolescence makes for junk, which must be destroyed or recycled, with both options being environmentally calamitous in the case of electronics and complex machines.

Recycling electronics is supposedly a more responsible action than pitching them in a dumpster. Watching this video, one might reasonably come to question that orthodoxy.

Planned obsolescence necessitates the constant flow of products from factory to purchaser to landfill, with little space for small businesses or individual technicians. A centered regional economy cannot survive when its population functions exclusively as consumers. A radically different philosophy—one that allows for repair, upgrading, and modification of products—provides both economic opportunities in the local market economy and room for small-scale innovation and improvements.

We can see much of the last—opportunities for restoration and improvement—for products designed to endure. Take the aftermarket motorcycle parts industry as an example. There are thousands of upgrade and repair parts available for Harley Davidson motorcycles.

This reflects three distinctive elements of this market.

First, the initial purchase (the motorcycle) is made to last. The company’s reputation depends on this. There was an era when Harley’s manufacturing quality was seriously neglected—the AMF years—but buyers proved unforgiving of this lapse, and the company needed several decades to fully recover. Such market-driven punishments prevent companies from repeating their mistakes.

Second, there is consistency in design. Constant design and aesthetic modifications, even if completely irrelevant to product performance, are undertaken by planned-obsolescence-driven companies to encourage new purchases. This is the modus operandi of the fashion industry, where clothing is made to be perceived as obsolete (due to style changes) almost immediately, but where little real innovation occurs. Such also allows for small changes to be made to the dimensions/shape of a product that render aftermarket parts and additions incompatible. Chicanery of this sort is rarely done by Harley Davidson, which has but slightly improved some of its models over the last 60 years.

Third, the product is designed to be repairable. The average motorcycle is not a simple machine, but it is simple enough that any reasonably dedicated person should be able to buy a guide, watch some YouTube videos, or take an online course and learn the fundamentals of repair. This repairability is a result of engineering choices. Depending upon the decision of the manufacturer, a task as simple as replacing a phone battery can be made difficult or incredibly easy.

So what can be done to transition from a culture of disposability to one of repairability?

Establish a tax model that makes buying certain categories of new goods vastly more expensive than buying repair parts for said goods
Introduce a tax/fee for the disposal tax of environmentally hazardous goods (electronics, et cetera)
Introduce standardized/modular connections and parts sizing for automotive, industrial, and electronics systems
Require manufacturers to release the source code for their embedded systems after 5 years
Shorten copyright protection for all non-embedded software to a reasonable length (30 years)
Improve and accelerate patent approval procedures so that the number of patent extensions granted can be fairly and reasonably reduced
Demand improved case design (using metal instead of plastic whenever possible) for electronics and demand consumer-replaceable batteries and screens

Only two of these proposals (Nos. 5 and 6) require federal intervention. The others can be done at the state and business level. State sales taxes now rely on a relatively simple model—tax all goods at a certain rate (with exceptions sometimes made for food and medicine). But this need not necessarily be the case.

Proposal No. 1 is much like a value-added tax (VAT). The difference is that it is designed to tax machines based on their complexity—with replacement parts being simpler than the machines in which they function—rather than the number of steps involved in their production. Such a tax could be levied at the state level. Michigan had a VAT for several years, and there is no reason that a repair-incentivizing tax model could not be effectuated at the state level.

Proposal No. 2 should be no more complicated to implement. It should also prove popular with state environmental organizations, which might well serve as useful political allies. Manufacturers will object to steps taken to reduce the toxic burden of the technosphere. But few others should find fault with this measure.

Proposal No. 3 can be addressed by consumers. Anyone who remembers the bad old days of brand-specific phone chargers and how much trouble replacing them could be is likely grateful for the advent of the USB port and cables. Standardized cords and connectors made life more convenient for consumers, and their introduction had the added environmental benefit of reducing the number of chargers, cables, and connectors one needed to keep on hand.

Proposal No. 4 addresses a critical concern in agriculture and industry—that of being able to repair one’s own equipment. Legislation enshrining the right to repair is growing more popular by the year, with 25 states considering the enactment of such laws in 2021. Demanding that the source code be released for embedded systems after a reasonable time would do much to allow individuals and smaller organizations to develop novel repair and improvement strategies for electronics, cars, and anything else with an embedded computer. And this relates back to agriculture, with corporate control of embedded systems in farming equipment seriously harming small farms.

Proposal No. 5 may prove controversial, but I would argue that copyright law is too long in general and far too long for software.

As it stands now, a creative work (including software) retains copyright protection for the life of the author plus 70 years. In the case of works for hire (such as what Microsoft pays its programmers to create), the term of copyright protection is the shorter of 95 years from first publication or 120 years from the time of creation. For most creative works (of any format), this means that the copyright protection extends until the work is effectively worthless. And extremely long terms of copyright protection do little to benefit authors. The commercial life of most intellectual property is short. All extended copyright protections are likely to do is crystallize a work and render it useless for sampling and creative repurposing. In the case of an individual artist’s works, even determining who controls copyright 50 years after his death (less than the full term) is likely to be so expensive and time-consuming that receiving permission to use said works will be impractical. Fear of infringing on copyright stands to impede creativity and allow rent-seeking organizations (music publishers) to intimidate and harass small creators with the threat of litigation against which the average person cannot afford to defend himself.

And software is even more perishable than other types of intellectual property. Someone might desire to read a book written 50 years ago, but the odds of him having any use for software written in a computer language that no one remembers and compiled for a long-defunct computer architecture are approaching zero. One expects some protection of private property rights. But restricting the use of software until time has completely exhausted its worth is such an extreme violation of the American techno-ideological presumption that inaction is economic waste that it cannot reasonably be allowed to stand.

Making copyright protection of software an even greater burden on small and local innovators is the concept of non-literal elements of software. Not only can one be sued for plagiarizing source code or compiled code of software, but he can also be sued for designing software that has the same inter-modular relationships as an existing program—as nebulous a concept as one could have the misfortune of meeting.

The vaguer the term, the more latitude competent attorneys have in interpreting its definition. And good attorneys cost money. Thus, the small and local developer or modifier of software is likely at an insurmountable disadvantage if brought before the courts. Changing copyright law so that it is less anti-competitive might be complicated (with the United States needing to withdraw from or renegotiate the terms of the Berne Convention), but that makes it no less worth doing.

Proposal No. 6 should offend no one. The patent office has a backlog, and this makes the timely granting of patents impossible. This backlog hurts the small inventor and slows the advancement of the state of the art. It delays the process of obtaining a patent, potentially complicating the process of bringing an innovation to market (likely costing a small inventor money he cannot afford to spend). And it necessitates the issuance of patent extensions, which are intended to afford the inventor the full term of his legally guaranteed monopoly but have the inadvertent effect of reducing the pressure to develop new ideas.

Proposal No. 7, the final proposal, ties closely to the right to repair but builds upon it. Plastics are notoriously difficult to recycle, and they lack durability, particularly when exposed to ultraviolet light. Low-cost alloys, such as those made of aluminum, are both less sensitive to environmental factors and less difficult to recycle. And consumer-replaceable components in electronics would make extending their lifespan easier and minimize the need for the constant shipping of old goods to recycling centers or landfills and new goods to consumers. At the risk of roasting existing design paradigms, electronics should be more hog and less Apple.

*We should consider ourselves lucky if we can get our electronics companies to behave with the good grace of this fellow.*

With all these measures brought to bear on the issues at hand, local economies could be strengthened and made more independent, local innovators and inventors could be more prosperous, and environmental conditions would improve.

Concentric Circles of Production: Essential Material and Energy

A decentralized economy with redundant production capacity is more resilient than one without production capacity or one with centralized production capacity without redundancies. This statement is self-evident and requires no citation. It is better to have a backup and not need it than to need a backup and not have it.

The goals of this section are to boost national resilience, expedite the localization of the economy, and develop the concept of concentric circles of production. Ideally, everything a community requires would be available in the nearest (local) circle of production. Unfortunately, this is impossible because of certain technical and logistical issues. Nonetheless, we shall do the best we can and keep production and consumption as close together as is feasible.

*Unless it absolutely* cannot be made locally, anything essential should be produced within a few hundred miles of the consumer. This benefits both the environment and the community.

In this section, we will focus on essential components of the technosphere that should be sourced locally, regionally, or nationally, never relying on imported goods. These items are:

Water (locally sourced)
Energy (locally sourced)
Food (locally sourced)
Fertilizer (regionally sourced)
Agricultural equipment (regionally sourced)
Essential medicines and medical supplies (regionally sourced)
Complex electrical equipment (nationally sourced)
Semiconductors and essential electronics (nationally sourced)

Without any of these, a technologically advanced civilization cannot long survive. (Without the first—water—no civilization can survive.) The locally sourced items are easier to produce than are the regionally sourced ones. The nationally sourced items are the most complex of all.

The relevance of the first component should be apparent to any living thing. On average, each American used 82 gallons of water per day as of 2015. And a 2014 report indicated that 40 of 50 state water managers predicted shortages within their state by 2024. Time is proving these managers correct: At present (2022), several major American cities are facing water crises. Las Vegas is going so far as to rip up lawns to decrease water use. And even were the city’s per capita water consumption reduced to 50% of the national average, Phoenix (facing a water shortage and with a population of approximately 1.6 million) would require around 70 million gallons per day. Bear in mind that Phoenix is in the middle of a desert.

Watering the American West would be expensive, and it would require a complex system and decades of construction. Few other initiatives could do more to make the United States more fragile.

Popular assertions that water is more important and valuable than oil are true. Gasoline can be replaced with coal gas, wood gas, or (with heavy modification to a vehicle) batteries. And natural gas and oil-fired power plants can be replaced with nuclear facilities. For water, there is no substitute.

Cities in dry areas should either reduce their water demand to levels that can be locally sourced with existing technologies or develop and build new systems to allow for local water extraction. (Desalination plants and systems designed to extract water from the air are two options.)

Next, there is the matter of energy. Since 2019, the United States has been a net energy exporter. If the country were to stop energy exports altogether, she could be energy independent. That much good news noted, energy production in the United States is not evenly distributed, and energy movement across great distances demands infrastructure that is vulnerable to failure and tampering. It is not enough to source energy nationally. It should be sourced locally. Energy resources vary from one part of the United States to the next. In a few, green technologies—wind, hydroelectric, and solar—may be viable. In many others, they may not. Albuquerque gets 278 days of sun per year, whereas Bangor, Maine, gets 177. Solar power might well be a workable option for the first city. For the second, it is actionable if a significant number of residents can be persuaded (at gunpoint, perhaps) to live in icebox-cold homes during the winter months.

The best option for much of the United States is local nuclear. Billed as Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), the necessary compact generator stations are modern, factory-built, and resistant to meltdown. Both an American company (NuScale Power) and a British company (Rolls Royce SMR) are developing this technology, which requires no fundamental advancements in physics and could be deployed within a few years.

With relatively minor changes to the United States electrical grid, it could be made resilient against widespread electrical failures, such as the 2003 Northeast Blackout. And assuming sufficient generation capacity is built for each region, a national grid may not be needed. The complete deconstruction of the national grid would do much to promote regional autonomy and reduce the right-of-way footprint of power transmission lines.

Unfortunately, none of this eliminates the current vulnerability of the liquid fuel (gasoline and diesel) supply. But coal gasification technology combined with good management and development of the oil shale industry would allow for almost immediate energy independence. And the short-term transportation energy needs of the United States should be at least somewhat reduced by the localization and regionalization of production advocated throughout this essay. Long-term reliance on liquid fuel could be further decreased by massive increases in electricity production by way of SMRs and advancements in batteries that use little (if any) metals that cannot be sourced within the United States.

There is also the matter of food. The average grocery store in the United States carries more than 30,000 items, which inevitably makes for complex logistics and supply issues. Yet 90% of Americans could survive on food grown within 100 miles of their homes. The transition from regionally or nationally produced food to locally produced food might well reduce the variety available to consumers. But this is a minor matter when balanced against improved food-supply resilience and increased energy efficiency. An additional method to reduce food instability and allow for more robust food reserves would be to convert perishable foods to a more durable form. Our current food distribution model relies heavily on fresh and frozen items, which can be ruined during blackouts lasting less than two days. And an astounding amount of fresh produce is thrown out of grocery stores, some of it before it has become inedible.

One of the simplest solutions to this—to reduce the fragility of food stock and the need for a cold chain, to reduce waste, and to allow for the accumulation of food reserves—is canning. Fresh food may last days or weeks, frozen food may last months, but canned goods remain in top condition from 18 months to five years. Mass canning allows warehouses to smooth over year-to-year variations in regional production. And in case one part of the country suffers catastrophic crop losses, canned goods can be shipped great distances without fear of spoilage.

Food is important, and feeding the United States without the use of chemical fertilizers would be difficult. As of 2015, about 3.5 billion people—half of the world population—would have starved without the use of agricultural nitrogen supplementation. If the United States is to be a resilient country, she should develop the facilities to produce 100% of her fertilizer needs. The goal should be total nitrogen independence.

And there is no reason that we cannot meet this goal in short order. In 2022, the country imported $5.34 billion of fertilizer and exported $3.68 billion. This demonstrates one of the major oddities of the globalized economy. A nation may simultaneously export something and import the same thing in greater quantity. On a microscale, this may make sense (one company profits from exports, another from imports). On a macroscale, it amounts to a waste of the energy required to move heavy commodities across the ocean. Either way, the United States appears to have a nitrogen deficit of more than a billion dollars. This is a major point of vulnerability.

This is what happens when tons of fertilizer explode. Texans, being Texans, are protected the from worst effects of such massive shockwaves by their cowboy hats and extensive football training. Normal people, however, would do well to keep their distance.

The United States should not produce all of her required fertilizer in a few key locations. Fertilizer factories stand to be attractive targets in aerial bombing raids (one gets quite a bit of bang for the buck), and the dangers of transporting what amounts to truckloads of explosives over the highways are real.

Thus, a better option from a public safety and wartime survival viewpoint is to produce fertilizers regionally. This has the added benefit of providing regions of the United States with demolition supplies in case of attack by an invading army. With essentially no modification to fertilizer factories, their output could be used to destroy tunnels, dams, bridges, levees, and industrial facilities to slow an enemy’s advance and prevent any supplies or facilities of value from falling into enemy hands.

The benefits of producing agricultural equipment regionally are nearly the same as those of producing fertilizers regionally. It is more difficult to turn a tractor into a weapon than it is to do the same with a ton of chemical fertilizer, but modern parts for agricultural machinery are no less essential to our survival.

The value of personal protective equipment, essential medicines, and micronutrients should need little in way of explanation. And there is no reason for the United States to import any of the several hundred compounds listed in the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines. Nor is there any reason for the United States to import any vitamins, as she does currently (primarily from China). All these can and should be made within the region of their consumption.

The last few items on this list of necessities—complex electrical equipment, semiconductors, and essential electronics—are probably too complex to make at a regional level. A limited amount of electrical supplies (circuit breakers, transformers, et cetera) might well be manufactured by regional groups with limited technical expertise, but other devices require greater resources than any but the largest interests can muster. And the production of the most modern electronics is far too complex and expensive for regional industry.

Intel recently announced plans to build a $20 billion plant in Ohio. This is good news, and similar projects should be undertaken to afford the United States complete semiconductor independence. Unfortunately, completing even one such plant takes years, and building dozens could take a decade. Until then, we should delay the destruction or replacement of useful electronics.

Making an integrated circuit of complexity in one’s garage is a technical achievement worthy of praise. Yet as impressive as this is, it is only fractionally as challenging as fabricating a modern processor.

Drive Less, Live More: Against Unnecessary Travel

There are few activities better suited to inducing anger than driving. And long commutes, even if they do not result in accidents, impose a physical, psychological, and time burden on the driver. Additionally, any vehicle—electrical vehicles included—demands energy and space resources. The more dependent a society is on the motor vehicle, the more fragile it is bound to be. And the commuter community is a sterile community, without meaningful social bonds.

Prioritization of the local and regional will reduce unnecessary travel. Granted, major metropolitan areas will still suffer from their shockingly inefficient, sprawling design. But this may be somewhat reduced by changes to zoning laws, tax codes, interstate transportation regulations, and the financial system to discourage urban spread, encourage working from home, and gradually rehumanize smaller American cities and suburban communities.

Reshaping the American automobile city into something less dependent on fuel and long commutes may not be possible for generations, but the steps outlined above can make it marginally less fragile.

Banking, Jobs, and Financial and Regional Stability

The operation of the American banking system has done much to destabilize the economy of the United States over the last 20 years. This was partially the result of greed, mismanagement, and deregulation. But it was just as much the product of regulations that were worse than nothing. In both cases—that of deregulation causing harm and that of the wrong kind of regulation causing harm—the belief at the heart of the problem is the same. The belief (in brief): Money should flow freely.

The thesis of this section is that the flow of money both from the United States to other countries and within the United States should be slowed. A secondary thesis is that loans should be given cautiously and in such a way that discourages recklessness.

Other People’s Money: The Problem of Credit

We will begin by focusing on two pieces of legislation passed in the 1990s that weakened our nation. Later, we will evaluate some ideas to address these and related problems in the American economy.

The first noteworthy piece of legislation is the Financial Services Modernization Act (also called the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act after its sponsors). This Act, signed into law in 1999 by President Bill Clinton, effectively stripped the much older Glass-Steagall Act (effective 1933) of any enforcement power.

What was the Glass-Steagall Act and what did it do?

The Glass-Steagall Act separated the activities of investment and commercial banks. Banks that chose to operate in the commercial sphere were not allowed to invest in equities (except for some government bonds, which were accepted as being safe). And banks that chose to operate as investment banks were limited in the conventional financial services they could provide to clients. The intended effect of this was to eliminate the opportunity for banks to lose their clients’ deposits in uncertain investments or to issue highly speculative loans to companies before encouraging clients to invest in those same ventures.

Thus was drawn a bright line between savings and investment. The caution incorporated into the Act—which more than a few bankers thought restrictive—made sense within the context of the Great Depression, which was in full swing when the Act was passed. The defanging of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 enabled banks to invest in ways that would have been illegal during the prior 60 years. Some of these investments were prudent, some were less so.

This leads to the second legal change that destabilized banks, which was less a matter of deregulation than it was one of misregulation, in the form of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Originally, signed into law in 1977, the Act was designed to encourage banks to invest in parts of communities that have less access to credit or were historically deemed less likely to repay their loans. The law was well-intentioned insofar that it was meant to address racial discrimination in lending practices (the redlining of Black communities, in which a red line was drawn around them on a map and they were declared unworthy of credit). But good intentions do not always lead to good results.

The CRA was expanded in 1995, and banks were given regulatory incentives to give loans to comparatively disadvantaged people. Again, this sounds all well and good. Poor communities should become more prosperous if a greater percentage of their residents have the resources to invest in them. But combined with the growing willingness of banks to make questionable loans and then package and sell them as financial products (and the low interest rates of the Greenspan era), this led to a market unregulated by common sense.

Not everyone should be given a loan. That we need to state this truth testifies to the stupidity of the collective and abstract. Individually and personally, we know this. Collectively and theoretically, it escapes us. And our group idiocy cost—and costs—us trillions. The CRA (as adjusted in 1995) was deleterious to the ability of banks to carefully vet lenders, and this contributed to the growth of liar loans, also called NINJA loans—no income, no job, no assets. As access to credit expanded to absurd levels, we saw (to the shock of no one who understands finance on even the most basic level) inflation. When banks spin money out of thin air—which is essentially the process they use to give loans—they increase the money supply. Increase the money supply enough and inflation ensues.

The fact they are called liar loans might be a hint that there is something wrong with them. We might do better to simply lend liars to each other—a liar loan of a different sort—with the greatest challenge to that being that any liar lender who advertises himself honestly is unsuited to his job.

Encouraging mass money manufacturing leads to market booms and busts. We saw this with the 2008 housing crisis. We have seen (and are seeing) this in the higher education market, with a loans-for-all policy enabling decades of tuition increases and a student debt bubble.

Economic collapse is bad. Highly interconnected systems can be fragile in ways that are difficult to predict. The goal of the proposals herein is to stabilize the banking and financial systems, decrease regional financial interdependence, and slow the flow of money and people. My proposals are:

Reintroduce the Glass-Steagall Act
Terminate the Community Reinvestment Act
Ban the selling of mortgages by commercial banks
Introduce unlimited liability for all commercial bank officers (vice president or above)
Introduce extraordinary interstate banking and processing fees (no less than 20% of the money being moved)
Impose a 20% minimum down payment requirement for all mortgages granted by FDIC-insured banks
Introduce federal legislation requiring that employers compelling/coercing their workers to move more than 50 miles from the location of their hiring pay each employee six months’ salary (or average wages) to offset relocation costs. Impose the same requirement on companies that relocate and do not offer workers the chance to relocate
Introduce a comprehensive separation policy (with elaborate paperwork) for relocation of those undergoing HSRMDST

Some of these measures—reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act for instance—should garner public support. Termination of the Community Reinvestment Act might prove more controversial, but that is not to say that it could not be done with aggressive marketing and persuasion.

A few measures would be more provocative but are not without precedent, and they are most certainly not without utility. The third and fourth proposals would do much to stabilize the lending market and are easy to understand with a bit of explanation.

We begin by evaluating Proposal No. 4.

It is rare for bankers to have unlimited personal liability for their professional decisions, but unlimited liability was the norm for the Names of Lloyd’s of London.

First, a bit about Lloyd’s. Despite what one may have heard, Lloyd’s is not an insurance agency. It is a market where underwriters and those seeking insurance meet. Originally, it was not even that. It was a coffee shop where ship captains, vessel owners, and businessmen bought and sold cargo insurance—insurance to cover cargo losses or damages to cargo at sea. Since that time, it has expanded greatly, and the types of insurance offered are more diverse. But until 1994, the structure of Lloyd’s remained the same. All members of Lloyd’s—meaning those who underwrote (backed promises of payout) insurance policies—were individuals, referred to as Names. These Names were obligated to put all their personal assets on the line. In good times, they could make quite a comfortable living doing this. In bad times, they lost everything. More than a dozen committed suicide from 1988 to 1992, when asbestos and pollution policies changed in the United States and imposed liability on many groups insured at Lloyd’s. (The United States has long been a major market for insurance from the Lloyd’s market.)

Later, Lloyd’s changed this policy. Larger organizations and structures that limited liability were introduced. But should Lloyd’s have done this?

Total accountability for losses is a strong motivator for rational thought. One of the defining elements of the 2008 financial crisis was extreme recklessness. Much of this was caused by the complexity of determining the risk of loan-backed securities and enforcing the terms of the loans that backed them. Who owns your home loan? Who knows? Fractionally, it is owned by many. Who functionally controls it can be a matter of debate.

Financial instruments as complicated as those that contributed to the 2008 crisis have been created to invest in the subprime automotive loan industry. And the collapse of this market may be but somewhat less disastrous than its mortgage-backed predecessor.

One of the simplest ways to stop all this confusion is to make shifting liability for a loan effectively impossible. By putting bank officers’ finances on the line, they are ensuring that they take the evaluation of borrowers seriously—giving them the much-referenced skin in the game. Proposal No. 3 makes this liability non-transferable.

Proposal No. 5 stands to be complicated (but not impossible) from a legal standpoint. States cannot discriminate against interstate commerce, but the federal government retains the power to regulate interstate banking and finance uniformly and carefully. Money laundering, terrorism, and drug dealing—the possibility of any of these is a perfectly valid reason to slow the movement of money across state lines. Federal regulations to inspect or examine interstate transactions could greatly impede money transfers. And this stands to stabilize financial markets by making the spread of interstate economic risks difficult. In effect, good (extremely thorough) financial regulations can serve as both a circuit-breaker mechanism to reduce the risk of national economic crises and can encourage investment within a community by making investment outside the community less profitable.

Proposal No. 6 has two purposes. The first is to decrease the risk financial institutions face in the housing market. A 20% down payment both reduces the amount of money that the lender must provide and decreases the risk of the borrower walking away from his responsibilities. The second purpose is to discourage premature purchasing and sales of homes. As of 2022, the median American home price is $428,700. That is an extortionary amount, so we shall assume that at least some of it is the result of easy credit and divide it by two. Thus, our hypothetical home price is $214,350, of which a 20% down payment would be $ 42,870. The median American savings amount is $4,500, which is slightly more than 10% of the required down payment for a reasonable house under our model. With this as a starting point, an American with average earnings should be able to save the required down payment in no more than five years. To put all of this into context, the average (median) down payment for first-time home buyers was 7% (and 17% for repeat buyers).

If one only has a 7% investment in a property, it is difficult to consider him an owner in any real sense.

Making home purchases a matter of lifelong investment and controlling inflation are the goals of this proposed change. And this is part of a larger construct of family and community building—promoting pragmatic, economic, and community-based stability over romantic relationships and attachments. Our goal is not to promote happy marriages—as irrelevant a thing as could ever exist—but to restructure the economic underpinnings of the United States to increase geographical and community connections for the married and the unmarried alike. Couples should be more likely to take home purchases seriously when they are considerably invested in the property. Individual home buyers should do the same.

Proposal No. 7 serves the same fundamental purpose of slowing human migration. And Proposal No. 8 ties directly into the mandatory training of young people to discourage them from being shifted from one community to the next during their formative/relationship-building years.

The effects of free trade agreements are complex and difficult to predict. Not all of them are good.

The reasons and rationale for every action proposed in this section should be clear. Local and regional communities cannot endure constant changes in population. And these proposals are part of this essay’s larger rebuttal of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s free trade policies—policies that harmed American factory workers and Mexican corn farmers amongst many others.

When relocation of work and workers is allowed to occur, it should be restricted to jobs that do not matter. Certain back office and low-value bureaucratic tasks may be outsourced (or better yet, automated into non-existence as advocated in “Innovation: Unstable Geniuses, Unstable Communities, and the Inventor’s Spirit”). But the production and provisioning of anything important must be kept regional, redundant, and readily accessible.

Essentially everything in this section demands legislation. Persuading elected officials, many of whom are either unconcerned or actively hostile to the average American, to sponsor or pass any of these laws would be difficult. And this assumes that the average American can be brought to care about any of these issues, which is itself uncertain. Nevertheless, I would rather present an imperfect roadmap for improving American communities and national survivability than do as many others have done—complain about the current state of things and offer those seeking solutions nothing better than the status quo.

Will and Unhappiness

The rhetorical flourish is an insidious thing. It takes the plain and makes it confounding. It takes the meaningful and makes it less so. And it does this to serve the author’s need for self-aggrandizement. First amongst abuses of this ill-omened tool is a centuries-old phrase by Thomas Jefferson—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The full sentence is compelling. And although it is widely known, it is worth including for the sake of close examination.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable [or inalienable, depending on source] Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
United States Declaration of Independence

A problem with sentences of this sort is that they are written inspirationally but interpreted literally. Another is that the careless reader tends to omit words when interpreting or quoting them. The right to the pursuit of happiness becomes the right to happiness—a variance of great consequence. The third (and most serious) problem is that the values underlying these sentences remain hidden under a pile of attractive verbiage and unexamined.

Implied is that the pursuit of happiness is a natural and universal thing. But is it? Are happiness and its pursuit integral parts of the human condition? There is no way to answer this question empirically, and the anecdotal evidence is thin. Perhaps a better observation is that we do not pursue happiness so much as we are pursued by pain and try to escape it.

This is a distinction with a difference. We seek comfort insofar as we seek to avoid discomfort. And this goal—more modest by far than that of seeking happiness—is attainable at best but briefly. One study (small and conducted online, but still . . . ) suggests that the average American has no more than 13 days a year free of physical pain. Add to this the psychological stresses of work, family, and human existence, and the average person likely experiences no days in an average year without suffering. There is an opportunity here to relate these findings to the Buddhist concept of dukkha—suffering—but there is not much need. We no more require profound minds to establish that life is nasty, brutish, and long in the wrong places than we need to cite a celestial almanac to determine that the sun rises in the east. Some things we know for ourselves to be true.

Granted, one can be in pain and be happy. Break your leg while winning a gold medal or achieve your life goal in your dying moments—happiness and pain are not mutually exclusive. But happiness is an exceptional condition. There are few faster ways to guarantee misery than the pursuit of happiness.

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights has 30 articles. The United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights consists of 10 amendments. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen includes 17 statements of rights.

Nowhere in any of these is a right to be unhappy.

Functionally, the right to be unhappy and the right to express one’s unhappiness are protected under these documents. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution protects expressions of unhappiness. The 10th article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man dictates that “No one should be disturbed for his opinions . . . provided that their manifestation does not trouble public order as established by law.” The 11th, that “Every citizen may therefore speak, write, and print freely, if he accepts his own responsibility for any abuse of this liberty in the cases set by the law.”

The great philosophers of liberty did not consider the importance of the right to be unhappy. Perhaps they did not need to do so. The nanny-state tendency to help us to the point of killing us was unknown before the modern age.

But implied rights are not enough. That which is not articulated is often ignored. Recall Szasz: “Freedom gives you the opportunity to be unhappy and not to be molested for it.” And this is true but not as comprehensive a statement as it should be.

In the spirit of Jefferson, the French revolutionaries, Szasz, and anyone else inclined to examine the human condition with care, I propose the Unhappiness Bill of Rights. It states:

We have the right to be unhappy. Unhappiness needs no specific excuse, regardless of circumstances of wealth, health, or status. Life itself is excuse enough.
We have the right to express our unhappiness, even if such is to the consternation of others. In turn, these others have the right to express said consternation with us and with their condition.
We have the right to care as much or as little about the unhappiness of anyone as we please. We need never justify our compassion or lack thereof.
We have the right to the pursuit of unhappiness. No permission is required. If we aim to fulfill some greater purpose; demonstrate loyalty to the powers, deities, or demons of our choosing (or that have chosen us); correct an injustice; or indulge our masochism is the business of no one else. This right does not extend to imposing unhappiness on others, save to the extent we have the right to express our own.
We have the right to abandon happiness and its pursuit. This we may do to ease our misery, embrace our pain, conserve our energy, or for any other reason, known or unknown to our conscious minds.

If we are forever vigilant in the remembrance and preservation of these articulated rights, our world will be the better for it. The Unhappiness Bill is a shield against interventionism—against imposing happiness and its pursuit upon other peoples—and a sword for attacking our delusions.

There are many delusions that need be hacked to bits, but some stand out as more deserving of the blade than others.

The first delusion we must attack is that of the families that raised us (birth families) being inevitable sources of comfort or happiness. Some people may sometimes rely upon their families for such, but there is no imperative in the modern Western world to so much as fraternize with those of common blood. Many avoid their families altogether: About 25% of Americans report being estranged from at least one close family member. The reasons for these estrangements vary, from physical abuse and molestation to property disputes to differences in values and opinions. We—the American people—have a (limited) right to freedom of association. By that measure, any of these reasons are valid.

The second delusion is that the families of our choosing will give us anything better. At the heart of this second issue is romanticism—the belief that we will get happiness, love, affection, or companionship from a sexual partner. This is too much to ask. More than half of women prefer their friends to their husbands, and about 30% of women surveyed in the United States indicated that they would not choose to marry their husbands again if given the chance. The middle class—the group that longest held fast to traditional family structures and that was presented as a rebuttal to predictions of family’s inevitable decomposition—is marrying at lower rates than it was decades ago.

Based on the above, we can safely say that whatever people want from family, they are not getting. Let us summarize this in the most direct terms: There is a high probability you will be unhappy with your family. And your spouse will probably be a disappointment in several (if not every) regard, just as was your birth family. I hold that there is nothing wrong with any of this. American society is not irreparably harmed by unhappy families, nor is it catastrophically injured by their disintegration. These—attachment, non-attachment, active detachment—are fine. Happiness is not owed to us, nor is kinship.

The problem, the source of harm related to this, is the belief that we must find—must be in pursuit of—happiness. Such introduces singularly unnecessary instability, risk, and waste. Consider the revolving cast of characters that enter and exit fairly typical post-divorce households. Mom has boyfriends. Dad has girlfriends. Sometimes Mom remarries. Sometimes Dad does. And then there are the stepbrothers and stepsisters one may (or may not) get to know any better than strangers. Divorce is expensive. A second divorce is expensive as well (and more likely to occur than the first).

There are costs and hazards of other sorts. Children living in a home in which the single parent had a partner at home—meaning someone (boyfriend or girlfriend) other than the biological parent—were 20 times more likely to be molested than those in conventional two-parent homes.

At every step of the way, we—the American people—have unrealistic expectations for relationships. Here is how we could avoid the problem of serial matrimony and relationships—a wellspring of unintended misery and poverty:

Lower or eliminate romantic expectations for long-term relationships. Romance as the foundation for a marriage is a new concept, a bad concept, and one to be annihilated.
Lower faith in finding post-divorce happiness, for those with children most of all. Stress to parents the perils of having strangers around their children.
Make more people, particularly single parents, aware of their limitations and that they may well be unworthy of love. Millions (if not billions) of people are unlovable. The faster they can accept this, the less profound and counterproductive misery they will unintentionally inflict on others.

Once these delusions are reduced to bloody masses on nothingness, one can move down the line.

As there is a right to the pursuit of happiness and there is a right to the pursuit of unhappiness, there are synthetic (derivative) rights to the pursuit of unhappiness by way of the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of happiness by way of the pursuit of unhappiness.

I would argue that the latter—the pursuit of happiness by way of unhappiness (or happiness by unhappiness: HBU)—is the more explicitly common and has long been an integral part of religious and spiritual training based on self-denial. The former—the pursuit of unhappiness by way of happiness (or unhappiness by happiness: UBH)—is the more common overall, with the difference being that a greater number of people engaging in UBH are unaware of what they are doing. Although one has the right to engage in either of these (and the larger right to be an idiot), tactfully informing someone who is unknowingly engaging in UBH of as much can be a matter of courtesy and pragmatism.

*There might be more effective ways to recover from the trauma—the unhappiness—of losing a pet than having him stuffed and hung above your sofa. But you have the right to mourn Wolfie’s (or* Wile E.’s) passing however you see fit.

It is courteous to inform the ignorant of their mistakes (although they may not appreciate your doing so). It is pragmatic to inform them of as much so that they do not unintentionally drag others down their primrose path, necessitating heroics and expenditure to maintain a functional society.

And in lieu of bedeviling matters of heart and soulmate (or of the twin enigmas of happiness and its pursuit), we should propose an alternative. We cannot coerce anyone to be happy, nor should we try. Unhappiness is a right, as is its pursuit (inadvertent or otherwise). But we can offer every American something of greater consequence than emotions in all their transient triviality—purpose and the common bonds of mutually assured survival within a community.

The best and most effective way to make a greater state of realism come to pass (as far as I have been able to devise) is to popularize this message: You have a right to be unhappy. There is nothing wrong with you and nothing that needs fixing simply because you are.

The last section (“Banking, Jobs, and Financial and Regional Stability”) demanded government intervention. This section demands little. Americans have made a habit of declaring that they know their rights (even when they do not). Wonderful! If there is to be any legislation spurred by this section, it should be to codify into law some variation of the Unhappiness Bill. This would allow us to better understand, articulate, and have protected this most essential of freedoms—that to be unhappy and not to be molested for it.

Beyond that, we need but to educate.

The Limits of (My) Limited Imagination

Hope may well be a bigger refuge of fools than patriotism is of scoundrels, but I will dare to hope nonetheless. (If the suggestions I have made thus far prove me a fool and a scoundrel is for my readers to decide.)

I hope that the ideas proffered in this section will make for a stronger United States, a more sustainable United States. I desire that this improved nation endures without succumbing to her omnipredatorial impulses and that her people find bond and communion in a practical tribe stripped of frivolity and delusion.

We need not more happiness, but character.

If nothing else, a few should find some inspiration to interrogate their understanding of their nation and evaluate their goals in relation to the present reality.

That done, we now consider China and a series of proposals to enable her to coexist with the United States and prosper accordingly.

(Continue to Page 2)

The Rules

The Rules is a philosophy and self-inquiry text designed to help readers develop mental discipline and set life goals. It does this by way of guided readings and open-ended questions that facilitate the rational and systematic application of each Rule.

Put another way: The Rules is a book designed to help men survive and thrive in the West.

Foresight (And Other Stories)

Four tales across time and distance. Always satirical and frequently dark, this collection considers the breadth of isolation and the depth of connection.

The author has never led a revolution, but he is quite skilled at nobly gazing into the distance.

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.

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It saddened me to hear of Russ Bentleys death. Many years ago in the time when Givi and motorola were…

Well said. Take care. Bill

It's a very good point about misjudgment of sentiments, attitudes, red lines in intercultural communication.

Yes in this one I did not say much until near the very end :)

You didn't say much, I'm disappointed :p