Amerika

Before modernity, people recognized that each had a place in the order of life. This was both hierarchy and niche, meaning that someone would be the best blacksmith in the land, but it was possible to be a really good blacksmith in your local area trusted by lots of people. We all were as status and power what we were in utility.

This era of sanity gave way, starting with the Mycenaean collapse, to an Age of Symbolism in which mass manipulation was more important than literal, tangible reality. Humans abandoned tangible idols for abstract gods, and gradually split the concept of the individual away from role in society and nature.

As we like to say, history runs in cyclic patterns, meaning that that certain types of events lead civilizations from birth to death. In many ways, we are reliving the collapse of the Mycenaean empire as our societies gain power and wealth, then bloat up and lose competence, finally collapsing in lower caste revolts:

The Mycenaeans were indigenous Greeks who were likely stimulated by their contact with Minoan Crete and other Mediterranean cultures to develop a more sophisticated sociopolitical culture of their own.

That the Mycenaean civilization had trading contact with other Aegean cultures is evidenced by the presence of foreign goods in Mycenaean settlements such as gold, ivory, copper and glass and by the discovery of Mycenaean goods such as pottery in places as far afield as Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Levant, Anatolia, Sicily, and Cyprus.

The reasons for the demise of the Mycenaean civilization, which occurred in stages from c. 1230 BCE to c. 1100 BCE, are much debated. We do know that several sites were destroyed between 1250 and 1200 BCE, ushering in the so-called Post-Palatial period when the centralised system of palace control declined. There is evidence of a different degree of destruction across sites, and some places escaped the chaos altogether.

The destruction of sacred sites corresponds to Revolution, and the war of the have-nots versus the haves always goes in one direction, with the poor overthrowing the competent and then finding themselves unable to successfully maintain the system that existed before the Revolution. Likely a combination of factors gave the lower classes an opportunity to seize control.

What might be the most interesting here is that diversity, even among related societies, provided for instability. First the absorption of the Minoans, and later the trade within the region, made Mycenae dependent on more factors than purely its own will nad productivity, which meant that a domino effect occurred if any one of these civilizations ran into trouble.

Diversity in the ancient world meant both inter-dependency and the presence of foreign agents who would ally with the drones (proles, helots, serfs, workers) per what Plato recorded centuries later. Most likely, a cascade of crises converged with war, famine, drought, and Revolution working to destroy this ancient empire.

In fact, the same thing happened across the late Bronze Age, adding support to the idea that inter-dependency brought down these civilizations together:

In the 50 years between 1200-1150 BC, all these civilizations suffered a mysterious decline. A sudden, precipitous drop in activity was experienced. Cities stopped trading with each other, and many literary records were destroyed. Urban centers were abandoned, and there were massive outflows of population. Once formidable cities were torched to ruins, and capitals were razed to the ground. To quote Robert Drews:

“Within a period of forty to fifty years at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the twelfth century, almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again.”

It was a calamitous destruction of proportions unseen till the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. A dark age would ensue for more than 400 years, until the Greeks began to colonize and the Assyrians re-established control over the Near East. However, there was little to no inter-regional relationship

Everything was fine, up until it self-destructed rapidly. This is the type of collapse you would expect if you set up an irrational basis for civilization, like diversity, and then could not criticize it until it had replaced your competent people with political functionaries, which means that the first even small catastrophe will kill off the aged and doddering civilization.

This feels like the history on which the story of Atlantis or the Tower of Babel is based: humanity set up a progressive ideal, made themselves an advanced civilization, had great trade and interaction with their neighbors, and then that early system of internationalism (“globalism,” or maybe “mediterraneanism” in the time) collapsed within, at which point a drought and war delivered the coup de grace.

Similarly, the modern world exists in a time defined by English might, but the power of Britain is tainted by diversity:

At the beginning of the year 1845 the state of Ireland was, as it had been for nearly seven hundred years, a source of grave anxiety to England. Ireland had first been invaded in 1169; it was now 1845, yet she had been neither assimilated nor subdued. The country had been conquered not once but several times, the land had been confiscated and redistributed over and over again, the population had been brought to the verge of extinction — after Cromwell’s conquest and settlement only some half million Irish survived — yet an Irish nation still existed, separate, numerous, and hostile.

The hostility between England and Ireland, which more than six centuries had failed to extinguish, had its roots first of all in race. After the first invasions, the first conquests, the Irish hated the English with the hatred of the defeated and the dispossessed. Nevertheless, eventually the English and the Irish might have fused as the English and the Scots, the English and the Welsh have for practical purposes fused, had it not been that in the sixteenth century racial animosity was disastrously strengthened by religious enmity.

The report of the Devon Commission stated that the principal cause of Irish misery was the bad relations between landlord and tenant. Ireland was a conquered country, the Irish peasant a dispossessed man, his landlord an alien conqueror. There was no paternalism such as existed in England, no hereditary loyalty or feudal tie.

So… this document was written in 1963. Sixty-two years later, the Welsh and Scots have strong independence movements, terrorism is still normal in Northern Ireland, and the Irish have only made it out of dire poverty by giving tax breaks to the French and Danish. Diversity formed the heart of the British empire and will undo it just like that Late Bronze Age collapse.

Ireland was so third world that the English took over in order to avoid having a weak spot right off their shoreline which would attract invaders who are typically led to nations which cannot self-manage. If England did not invade it, someone else would have, and then had a home base to attack England, so England really had no choice in this matter.

However, instead of sensibly repatriating the Irish to North Africa where the Semitic ancestors of the Irish were from, the English tried to manage them in place, and by doing so, created a eucrisis, or the disaster that occurs when you do everything right. English rule brought stability, and this allowed the Irish to plant potatoes, sing and dance, and reproduce at catastrophic levels:

Between sixty and seventy years before the potato famine, the population of Ireland began and continued to increase at a rate previously unknown in the history of Europe. Why this took place has yet to be fully explained. Demography, the science which deals with the statistics of birth, death, and disease, is a relatively new science, and the waves of population growth which from time to time pass over the world are not yet fully understood. In the case of Ireland, information is lacking; births were not compulsorily registered until 1863, and though the practice of taking a ten-year census began in 1821, the first figures considered reliable are those of 1841.

It is, however, agreed by all authorities that about the year 1780 the population of Ireland began to take an extraordinary upward leap. The increase between 1779 and 1841 has been placed at the almost incredible figure of 172 percent.

By 1841, when a census was taken, the population had reached 8,175,124, and Disraeli declared that Ireland was the most densely populated country in Europe; on arable land, he asserted, the population was denser than that of China.

At this point, the doom of the West was set in motion by the Potato People, or rather by their participation in the economic, political, and social system that guarded England. That country could no longer make decisions for itself, but only for a committee of interests including the foreign third world population off of its coast.

In the same way that ongoing wars with France, which was a superpower until it had its Revolution, created a regular expenditure upon which the rest of the system became dependent, Ireland became a parasite of England because its concerns were now managed by the host culture. Predictably, the Irish opted for resentment instead of self-reliance, and antagonism spread.

Even without that antagonism, and even if the Irish had been a wealthy higher-IQ population, the situation created a committee of nations, which meant that decisions were reversed: instead of making decisions solely to achieve a result, the country had to make decisions based on manipulation, or what it could sell to its constituent parts.

In the case of the Irish, this became an England dependent on not killing off the Irish despite the Irish population skyrocketing. If England sells them food, the English economy becomes dependent on those sales; even a 1% drop in regular sales can wreck a business, since business depends on regular cash infusion and adapts to what it believes it can expect.

Through this mechanism, diversity serves as a form of Crowdism in that it inverts thinking from cause-to-effect to manipulation and rationalization, and at that point, the nation can no longer speak about what it needs, only about what it can achieve within The System.

In the case of the Irish, it became dependent on cheap food sources, which led to those becoming a monoculture, and over time, this system became fragile:

The potato, provided it did not fail, enabled great quantities of food to be produced at a trifling cost from a small plot of ground. Subdivision could never have taken place without the potato; an acre and a hall would provide a family of five or six with food for twelve months, while to grow the equivalent grain required an acreage four to six times as large and some knowledge of tillage as well. Only a spade was needed for the primitive method of potato culture usually practiced in Ireland.

That in turn created a refugee and asylum-seeker wave unlike anything in history, in that within the diversity group, people fled from the poorer areas to the wealthier ones:

The Irish famine emigration is unlike most other emigrations because it was of a less civilized and less skilled people into a more civilized and more skilled community. Other emigrations have been of the independent and the sturdy in search of wider horizons, and such emigrants usually brought with them knowledge and technical accomplishment which the inhabitants of the country in which they settled did not possess. The Irish, from their abysmal poverty, brought nothing, and this poverty had forced them to become habituated to standards of living which the populations among whom they came considered unfit for human beings.

The last line is most relevant: like the immigrants to the West today, the Irish were willing to live cheaper and work cheaper despite lower standards of living. This displaced the existing population, just like Mexicans and Arabs living fifteen to a studio apartment have done in California, with a cheaper labor source.

Cheap labor is not cheap; by definition, it is lower quality. This means it takes longer, has more errors, lasts shorter, and requires more oversight. This expands administrative costs and, because of the chaos introduced by third world living, also requires more police, courts, and social services to manage the disaster.

Through the Irish experience we see how nations die: they expand to include foreign groups, those groups then become dependents, those dependents displace labor, taxes and costs rise, and soon financialization becomes the operating principle of the economy because it must outpace the inflation caused by the rise in taxes and costs.

In a broader sense, any time you set up a committee — of individuals, groups, nations, industries, or religions — this displaces power from pure cause-effect reasoning to manipulation and Control, sending that society toward authoritarianism even if it is founded on the opposite principle, like democracies.

Disorder spreads. Before we blame the Irish for being some kind of cursed population, consider that if England had assimilated Denmark the same would be true. At some point, famine or war would hit one nation, and it would draw the other into the mess, raising costs in its economy and forcing it down the path of decay.

The happiest nations are those which are entirely self-dependent and can avoid foreign interventions. They can handle defensive wars, or repelling enemies at their borders, but once they get involved in foreign ventures, they become dependent on those much like they do on foreign economies because war in part is an economic process.

We see the same in the West today. A new city springs up; it is not “cool.” It establishes an economy and becomes relatively prosperous. Then others arrive. These require expenditures to keep them going, so taxes go up, at which point margins shrink and business seeks low-quality low-cost labor, driving up costs further.

At that point, the society becomes entirely financialized. Any business which does not operate on a fat margin — buy low, sell high, and cut corners to be able to buy lower — will not survive, so the large corporations take over. The political system becomes deadlocked because it cannot abandon popular choices that it can not afford, and has too many members on the committee anyway.

In this way, we see how margins in politics and economics determine the survival of a nation. Like the “miscellaneous drawer” in your kitchen, the many little contributors and dependents are essential; each additional input or output reduces the margin because there is a managerial cost as well as a dependency on the regularity of that inflow or outflow.

Empires fragment through the raised margins caused by miscellany. The more people are on the committee, the less able it is to make any decision, so it opts for manipulative decisions based on emotional issues, as happened in England after the Magna Carta and in the USA after the 14A.

If you want your empire to endure, have one people, one power structure, one economy, and as few wars as you can. Each time you incur a new obligation or seize wealth, it makes your system dependent on that level of wealth, and this raises margins to the point where eventually you import foreigners (like the Irish) to replace you.

Tags: crowdism, diversity, irish, irish genetics, late bronze age collapse, magna carta, mycenae