The New American Empire

How to satisfy the masses. A hybrid theory.

Part One: Why Empire is Inevitable

Human beings are territorial. Human tools are rules-based. Humans evolve slowly. Human tools evolve quickly.

These premises are some of the basic fundaments that convince me, when it comes to matters of war and peace, something that is elementary in the following aphorism. “It makes no sense to believe our next war is going to follow the shape of our last war.” And for anyone who believes we have evolved beyond war, I use the Batman and Robin meme.

Empire is inevitable because war is inevitable. War is inevitable because it works.

Humans, being the biggest enemy and the biggest target of opportunity for other humans, will always be the victims of aggressors. We’re territorial. Get out of my face. Get out of my space. Stop breathing my air. Everything in America actually fits the profile of ‘mostly peaceful’. Seriously, how do we manage to have fewer than 25,000 murders a year in a nation of over 330 million? Why are we mostly peaceful? I think it’s because TikTok, Apple and Netflix are so damned seductive. We are, especially our vibrant youth, are being seduced into complacency.

But there’s always somebody who thinks they are Batman to slap us out of complacency, and suddenly we realize that we’re all a bunch of soft victims, despite our masks and hero capes. We’ve been suppressing all of this rage, and now we’re hungry to lash out. If we could just smash that asshole bitch into the dirt, we could get back to normal… War is inevitable. But damn, who would have thought Batman would slap his own Robin? We were chasing the wrong kind of comfort. We need a better Batman. We won’t be fooled again.

The Security Seduction
But before I start my speculations about WW3, which I will call The Great Cellular War, let me ask you one complicated question. Would you live in a safe house for free? Presuming that you know how to work from home, imagine that your home is like mine. A very comfortable 2300 square foot 3 bedroom, two story 30 year old home in a gated community with all of the amenities, gym, pool, jacuzzi, basketball & tennis courts + Gigabit broadband, all new appliances and actual real mailboxes that have the little red flag. What’s the catch? It’s in neighborhood called Jor Bagh in New Delhi, and you will have a satellite link and a stack of computers on-premise. Occasionally, you’re going to get a digital bag. Don’t look in the bag. Occasionally we’ll want you to send that digital bag somewhere else. It’ll be easy. You can socialize just as much as you did during COVID. Rent & expense free.

Yeah. You probably read between the lines and saw that military intelligence black helicopter no-such-agency sponsors would be paying your rent. Not a bad deal. An institutional guarantee, and a badass institution by the way, comes with certain benefits. But what if instead of India, they offered you this in comfy Southern California. You’d do it in a heartbeat. This is what an American Empire offers. This is what is inevitable.

What’s the catch? Whether or not you buy into the concept that there are clones of Boris Badenov everywhere in America conspiring to brainwash us with some form of Cultural Marxism, the appeal of living rent free under the auspices of ideological powers is permanent. We are quite simply social creatures, and those of us who feel weak seek the protection of the strong. People who consider themselves Blue, right now feel weaker than those who consider themselves Red. The very existence of the Culture War here in America sees us exhibiting our territoriality. So what if the tools are social media and disinformation or town halls or debates or the Electoral College? Our tribal collective aims are the same. Our tribal collective enemies are identified.

The anti-capitalist tribe is transparently yipping with glee, hidden or manifest, at the murder of a captain of industry. And so it goes. (Obligatory Mangione tangent)

Consequently, what we need in our civilization is some sense of order that provides men and women what they need, some distance from what they hate to be told. We need to provide them fair leagues in which they can make successful efforts to be indispensably heroic and the center of loving attention. It should come as no surprise that the family unit provides these things. Family centeredness is on too small a scale for a society to be stable. It doesn’t take much to break up a family if certain immunities and protections aren’t made manifest in the village, town, city and county. Thus the law should serve families, men and women, such that they can strive against becoming the thing they hate.

‘Masculism’ could be called what is a universal tradition. I think Americans pretend that Feminism is entirely modern, but I was disabused of that notion a long time ago in my encounter with the Sacred Feminine. That idea is one I haven’t engaged or interrogated since then. LLMs are only a tickle of help. Then again this is not a subject of my deep interest. I am satisfied that I do well by the women in my life, which may be a low bar depending upon one’s interpretation of the quality of female American life. In the end, I think we need religion and science, both of which properly assume human fallibility.

In any case, the State provides the framework of law and order. Society which is generative and sustaining of cultures that are not primarily lawless and chaotic ought to do well, depending on their ability to curate their own lands and resources and not piss off the Others beyond the borders. In the West, we’ve been doing that more or less, even retaining multigenerational regimes through wars and pestilence.

So I’ll repeat once more that I have faith in the transformative discipline inherent in certain harsh physical masculine hazing - the stuff that makes for violent defenders of a Constitutional order on the high ethical side, with the obvious downside of the abusive dysfunctional and purposeless bullying of gangsterism. This gangsterism applies all too often, as I’ve recently said, in the traditional English public school old boy traditions. The moderate case would basically be called ‘football practice’. Enough said.

---

The Bigger They Are
I’ve have always had an instinctual bias against empires. Not so much against ancient empires, but only because of their limited size. I’ll blur the distinction between civilizations and empires for brevity, but suffice it to say that their governing bodies execute one official law written in one official language. As Andreessen says, everything is always an oligopoly. I agree. Thus endeth the discussion in America about ‘democracy’ vs ‘republic’. There are always functional Rulers whom you dare not cross. When these empires become incapable of enforcing laws, schism is inevitable. Now you have smaller entities, which may revert to the rule of men, rather than the rule of law. Obviously there is much to say about this given various hurrahs sustained in the US over successful and unsuccessful assassinations and cancellations.

My second instinctual worldview comes from the simple fact that there are more literate people on the planet than ever before. And there is an inverse relation between any oligarchy’s ability to govern and the number of disordered regimes of thought in larger populations. I’m sure somebody has put this better than me in defense or criticism of some ideology, but it should be obvious that above certain numbers under certain conditions a crowd becomes a mob.

I am skeptical that our tools of governance are adequate to the [wishful thinking] task of world government. The American Empire is not what the people of America necessarily desire, but that technological leap that the US had after the hot WW2 and the Cold War lent itself to a capable oligarchy. I basically pour that into the conceptual bathtub of Bretton Woods, the previous World Order. Hmm. Perhaps more Fukiyama is necessary for me. Clearly the New World Order has not worked out and I think that both the EU and the aims of George Soros are a bit more wobbly than they are likely to admit in the wake of two Trumps and a Brexit.

These days the Middle East is on fire. Europe exists on energy imports and depends on the US for its security. Russian troops are active in Central Europe, China is experiencing all sorts of stress as is Mexico. Japan has a dwindling population after three decades of financial stagnation. From my POV few of these nations are taking care of business and must be acquisitive of Empire [or the protections of empire] just to survive.. The Koreas are shambling into uncertain territory, and everyone is pretending the Taiwan & and its TSMC is El Dorado. Well, I haven’t sold my shares yet. It is in that model of shareholder that I find the key to order.

Memetic Shareholders & Religious Devotees
The problem here is getting to be obvious. The necessary concept of sovereign nationhood doesn’t scale. At some mysterious point, an open society with freedom of thought and expression needs to come to some accommodation with a magnificent superior authority. This is where Locke meets Hobbes, where the free self-determined citizen admits his need for a consistent Leviathan. There are too many people on the planet for these two worldviews to be mutually exclusively manifest in any nation over, say 200 million. That is, if such a nation is to avoid civil war every four generations or so.

So we need Empire. We also need individualism. We need series of meritocracy. We need enigmatic cults of oppositionality. We need constant disconfirmation with reverence to both the supremacy of reason and obeisance to humility. We need separation of powers that thrash. We need creative destruction on the Enron scale. We need an emperor who understands just the right amount of hegemony.

The problem we face in America is centered in the failing of our ruling class to understand that balance of heterodoxy and hegemony.

I think the reason is because they are lacking in one of the two concepts of this section. Right now the balance of power has just shifted from the devotees to the shareholders. The Progressive Left successfully waged an effective ideological capture, through Culture War against the moderate and traditional Liberal order of the Democrat Party. Their aim was hegemony, it still is. Devotees are not quite evangelistic by nature. They are more a traveling circus of groomers. They are the Borg. This is why their greatest enemy is Christian evangelists whom they wrongly perceive as aiming for hegemony over the USA. This is why they see Trump as Hitler. Hegemony is the only power they respect. So one has to expect desperate screaming, aggressive censorship, and miniature takeovers from would-be hegemonic enablers. For them everything must be systemic and everyone must be subject to that systemic power. Just at a national level, but absolutely systemic nonetheless. They don’t want international communism, just national communism. I’m not saying the devotees of the Progressive Left want actual communism, I just want to make that distinction between international and national. They are at least realistic that they are not about creating a new world order, just aiming to take over the American system.

This is resonant culturally with the entire genre of the post-apocalyptic and the shadow of Ra’s al Ghul. “The system is corrupt and impossible to reform. The sooner it is destroyed, the better off we all are.” This is the thought process of the hegemonic devotee. It’s millenarian. It must call out all failures. It must accelerate the process of degeneracy until the whole thing collapses, only then will the phoenix arise from the ashes. Voila, Utopia!

I think the devotees have won up to this point because they are more accommodated of being of two philosophical minds. They are both Hobbesian and Rousseauvian. They are at once very Marie Antoinette and very Franz Fanon. They love being queen, and they acknowledge the revolting squalor of the wretched. They understand the post-apocalyptic of Après moi, le déluge and note grave inequality with both glee and fear. As long as their hegemony is in place, they will instantiate the Department of Sparkle Joy Cake. Sound familiar?

Resistance is futile.

The obvious strength of the devotees is that they take the long view. They stick to a set of ideas and concepts and since they want to be hegemonic, they are willing to give all honor and glory to that set for all time. They will fake their ancestry in order to say they’ve always been at war with Eurasia, and they will stifle and censor any contradiction to those premises so that the future generations will never deviate. They practice [fake] ancestor worship so that their children will practice genuine ancestor worship. So no, they’re not so evangelical in the same way parents don’t practice missionary zeal in their own homes. They simply brook no dissent. So shall it be written. So shall it be done.

---

Thinking about evangelism, I’m tempted to go tangential on the power of seduction in America. Suffice it to say that everyone who wants [AI] to make life easier is failing to understand the very meaning of life. They destroy the very opportunity for anti-fragility to demonstrate itself. But actually this is more the province of the shareholders.

Memetic shareholders find their great strength in empire based upon their understanding of the supply chains of sensemaking, emergent behavior and human dynamism. They are constantly seeking genius understanding, constantly seeking advantage and constantly outsourcing. They are the ringleaders of delegations. There’s nothing a shareholder likes more than a board of directors delegated to look after their interests. They reward speed, rapid forceful decision making, situational awareness and tactical agility. They are obsessive maximizers. Their rallying cry is “Yeah, it’s a thing.” Whatever that thing is, shareholders want to capitalize. Pump it and dump it of they have to, but make hay while the sun shines.

Their disadvantage is that they fail to think generationally and fail to respond to the threats in a military way. They are subject to the wild swings of resonance that destroy the bridges they built while the sun was shining and the wind wasn’t blowing. They want to point and shoot and they are vulnerable to success. Success captivates them. They want to move the crowd, now. They want to evaluate the trend, pin down the formula, spread the word and make the world a better place. Since they can maximize their profit on the first three of those four actions, it doesn’t matter so much if the world doesn’t actually become a better place.

Yeah we lost Korea, but that was MacArthur & Truman’s fault, but we have learned our lesson. Well, we didn’t win Vietnam but it was McNamara’s fault, but now Iraq is a thing. Well, we won in Iraq so we can do the same in Afghanistan. The shareholders do not need hegemony. The shareholders only need to find the best and the brightest to come up with a cunning plan. Where the smart money goes, the rest of the market will follow, until they don’t. But by then we will have moved off the X. The shareholder exploits the cycle. There’s no better dramatization than the film Margin Call.

There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.

So you think we might have put a few people out of business today. That it's all for naught. You've been doing that every day for almost forty years, Sam. And if this is all for naught, then so is everything out there. [points to the skyline of New York City] It's just money; it's made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don't have to kill each other just to get something to eat. It's not wrong. And it's certainly no different today than it's ever been. 1637, 1797, 1819, 37, 57, 84, 1901, 07, 29, 1937, 1974, 1987—Jesus, didn't that fucker fuck me up good—92, 97, 2000 and whatever we want to call this. It's all just the same thing over and over; we can't help ourselves. And you and I can't control it or stop it, or even slow it, or even ever-so-slightly alter it. We just react. And we make a lot of money if we get it right. And we get left by the side of the road if we get it wrong. And there have always been and there always will be the same percentage of winners and losers, happy fuckers and sad suckers, fat cats and starving dogs in this world. Yeah, there may be more of us today than there's ever been, but the percentages—they stay exactly the same.

Shareholders are squishy when it comes to principle. They can’t help themselves. They want to ride the rollercoaster. They want to wear the power suit, and the trendy shoes. They need to be a part of the biggest game in town. They don’t want to burn the world down. They want to preserve the world’s ability to generate fascination.

And still, there is very little of what they do that they can honestly say is in the direct interest of empire. Empire simply gives its license and takes its tax. The only loyalty empire expects is that tax and adherence to that regulation. That is all the shareholders are capable of giving. They are masters of the moment. They don’t give two shits about their ancestors or their children. The people who are in are in. The people who are not, are not. When they feel bad about it, they become philanthropists and perpetuate the soft bigotry of low expectations. After all, if the outsiders could have made it on their own, they’d be insiders.

---

So what do we have here?

Devotees
We have long term thinkers who want regimented continuity and order. Sometimes their atavism works, but they think they can force it. They rely on the Golden Arches Theory. They expect to be hegemonic, buy off everyone and establish the New World. When they recognize their inability, they promote and accelerate collapse.

Shareholders
On the other hand we have the dynamists in the moment who want quicksilver agility and clarity in every accelerated trend. Everything is the industry of the moment, the concept, the fashion, the trend, the technology. They expect to ride the lightning, dazzle the masses and establish the megatrend. When they recognize their inability, they change lanes and pivot.

I say we would have both in a proper empire. The biggest question is whether or not the US is ready to be an empire. I think we are not precisely because our elites, our Geniuses and Rulers cannot abide power sharing between the devotees and the shareholders. Until they learn to share and get out of each others’ way, their conflict will escalate to assassination, sabotage and civil conflict. Or at least they do in my imagination, because my imagination cannot reconcile the fundamental differences between Rousseau, Locke and Hobbes. Futhermore, I don’t believe our political parties generate the kind of leadership that can reconcile them either.

Locke and Rousseau are stand-ins for Republican and Democrats respectively. This is how I saw things as a [Lockean] conservative. My disappointment with populism as I understand it leads me to believe that some measure of Hobbes in inevitably necessary. Our empire would be Hobbesian because 330 million people cannot all have equality or ‘equity’, but they must submit to respecting the Constitution. What do I fear more, a Hobbesian authoritarian state with Democrats or Republicans in control? It really depends upon the success or failure for intelligent and reasoned dissent.

I don’t think a crackdown can last. It’s because we have a volunteer Army, and lots of retired warriors who still respect the Constitution. As far as I know, the professors at West Point (for example, not just the Army) still tell the truth.

An Over-Dense Summary
We all want what we want. We’ll never be free from our desires. We need to evolve our tools and institutions with the understanding that nobody rules over 330 million free people forever. The only way we’ve ever done it is with empire. Because only in empire do all citizens recognize that civil war destroys more than just ‘their side’, it destroys civilization itself.

We have hidden too long in the shadow of nuclear annihilation and we have become over-empathetic. We Americans are finally beginning to understand how much we as humans need to war and purge. We humans are finally reckoning with AI’s impact on our thinking, new kinds of guerrilla combat and the need for a UN with teeth. That UN is the proper human empire. It will happen when we finally reconcile ourselves with history. Until then we will be lost, stray dogs.