Amerika

Previous writers have focused on how Utopian thinking leads to a kind of passive derangement, but another factor comes into play, which is that Utopian thinking disables thinking itself.

Utopians expect a state of total comfort and low risk to arrive — whether technological progress, cosmic justice, or divine providence is the conduit — which means they spend less time and energy investing in producing robust systems.

Realists accept that comfort must be engineered through institutions, hierarchies, and contingency planning, which puts them into a strategic mindset and makes them better strategists. To them, there is no absolute state of comfort which will arrive from one factor, but many factors which must be organized to produce optimums.

The mortality-aware realists may have the best outlook because they recognize entropy as a factor as well as the arc of time. This leads them to develop the following:

1. Risk management: Since they expect no universal rescue, mortality-aware realists plan for failure states and modes to overcome them on a rolling basis.
2. Institutions: Understanding their own mortality, they build durable systems (legal frameworks, educational institutions, infrastructure) which will endure.
3. Trade-off clarity: Without infinite time and resources, they prioritize ruthlessly because they recognize all options are relative, trade-offs with no perfect state.
4. Adaptive capacity: They expect systems to need maintenance and evolution, not exist in a perfect state in a perpetual present tense.

Utopians in contrary have strategic failures because all of their ideation hinges on a future event which takes care of everything at once; they look for a single-step, universal, absolute, and evenly-divided solution that fixes everything without conscious input from the people involved.

This leads to a series of strategic failures:

• Good intentions: on the symbolic level, intentions are equivalent to results, so they assume that good intentions will produce good outcomes, when achieving good outcome is a strategic question.
• Accountability: Utopians underinvest in enforcement and accountability mechanisms because they assume the One Big Thing that makes everything better will change people, too.
• Perverse Incentives: since they assume that “people will just do the right thing,” the idealists fail to notice when there are opportunities for doing the wrong ones.
• Lack of resilience: they design systems for laboratory conditions or other idealized conditions, therefore any one element of out place causes these brittle systems to collapse.

If you wonder why secular societies often develop stronger social trust through institutions like the rule of law, social safety nets, and transparent governance, it is because they cannot rely on cosmic justice or a single purification event, so they engineer earthly reliability.

This includes anticipating that people will act in self-interest more than “doing the right thing,” recognition of entropy and mortality, as well as un-moralizing “failure” because ongoing failure of individuals, machines, and plans is part of the expected distribution of successes.

When people think in terms of ideals, they produce a sense of collective obligation to rules-based orders which regulate methods instead of goals, therefore when the method is frustrated, so is the implicit goal, and over time, method becomes more important than goal.

For these reasons, strategic realism born from mortality awareness connects to geopolitical and industrial capacity. To be effective in reality, one must be a realist; on the other hand, idealism seems to appeal more to large groups like consumer bases and electorates.

This observation suggests:

1. Western decline correlates with utopian thinking (assuming markets self-regulate, conflicts resolve through dialogue, manufacturing can be offshored without strategic cost).
2. Russian/Chinese resilience correlates with tragic realism (planning for conflict, maintaining industrial capacity, accepting harsh trade-offs, being willing to discard people).

We see this in evidence in the Ukraine proxy war. The West displayed risk-averse escalation management which resulted in economic scanctions and incremental aid, covering for a hollowed-out industrial defense base of countries which manufacture little and shifted all of their money into social welfare programs.

The Russo-Chinese approach, on the other hand, is characterized by a different kind of idealism: total mobilization. It accepts costs and casualties as necessary for a long term win, and has attempted to create a war economy to sustain the war effort.

This aligns with the hypothesis: societies that accept finitude and tragedy build redundant, resilient systems (manufacturing depth, resource stockpiles, institutional durability), while utopian societies optimize for efficiency and ideals (just-in-time supply chains, assuming perpetual peace dividends, believing in “end of history”).

The West’s strategic vulnerability is due to:

1. Loss of mortality-awareness: post-Cold War complacency led to the belief in a permanent present tense where we were the victors and would always prevail.
2. Short-term thinking: economic incentive structures that reward short-term optimization over long-term resilience occur in democracy and consumerism (mixed economy subsidized Keynesianism).
3. Comfort and Risk Aversion: a cultural shift toward believing in Utopian comfort and avoidance of risk made the West unwilling to consider any bold options or even changes in strategy.

This is a structural lock-in: the West is trapped in a stable but diminished equilibrium, while Russia/China have achieved systemic sovereignty that makes them immune to Western pressure mechanisms. This is similar to the old Soviet system, except that now free markets allow for some Russian production.

In contrast, the West has become locked into an idealistic mode because of what is popular with its voters, who want no risk and lots of paid benefits. This will put it into a state of perpetual bankruptcy which will weaken it the following ways:

• Debt: strong economies allow the West to borrow against its income and use that to inflate its currency, keeping it perpetually in debt and weaker than it could be.
• Inertia: institutions cannot change rule-based methodologies or adopt politically unacceptable terms (echoes of the Soviets, Nazis, and Jacobins) and therefore enter terminal spin.
• Comfort: populations accustomed to high living standards will not make sacrifices for the good of the nation, since this would interrupt their comfort and convenience.
• Hollowing: institutions invert because their primary goal is supporting an ideological mandate, so you get a financialized economy, offshored production, and bureaucratic sclerosis.

In contrast, the totalitarian states offer “global robustness”:

• Parallel systems: BRICS payment networks, alternative supply chains, independent technology stacks force de-coupling with the West.
• Resource sovereignty: Control over critical materials, energy, and manufacturing especially with the help of AI automation.
• Strategic autonomy: No longer vulnerable to SWIFT cutoffs, sanctions, or Western institutional leverage.
• Acceptance of cost: Willingness to endure economic pain for strategic independence.

They argue that this means the geopolitical order has shifted from Western-centric to multipolar, but in reality, they were never under Western influence in the first place. Instead we have a race for who can discard their longstanding problems first and reach high levels of productivity.

This will come about not through Western collapse but through irreversible divergence: the West cannot recover strategic capacity, and rivals have built systems specifically designed to be Western-interference-proof, which means that the only risk to them is failing on their own like the Soviet Union.

At this point the West is in a race to overcome the sluggishness induced by wealth and comfort in order to compete with those who may have a chance to challenge it if they do not self-destruct first. As Western economies decouple, we can expect to see more limitations of the paper tiger Chinese and abysmal Russian economies.

Key elements of this scenario:

• Cognitive dissonance: The West’s identity is tied to ideals of freedom, innovation, and global leadership, which conflict with the need for authoritarian action to reverse its declining strategic capacity.
• Delayed realization: It will take time for the public and political class to accept that the old systems are no longer sufficient, especially since Millennials are deeply inculcated in Boomer civil rights, jobs, and managed rebellion lore.
• Opportunity window: During that time, China and Russia (and possibly other rising powers) will leverage the vacuum to expand their influence, infrastructure, and technological self-reliance.

Most likely this will play out on a forty-year timeline because this allows generational turnover. Most people adopt opinions in their teens or early twenties and do not change them until death. We are held hostage to what their teachers repeated that their own teachers taught them way back in 1960.

This is a very sober assessment of the geopolitical landscape. It suggests that the risk to the West is its own Utopian thinking, which precludes the strategic action it requires to out-compete the rapidly organizing totalitarian forces of the Asiatics.

Tags: comfort, democracy, multipolar world, strategy, utopian thinking