Will Oceania (Imperial USA) accept its assigned role in 'spheres of Influence?

The weekend was way too busy, in a dozen ways, to post a blog.  Finished the first draft of my own great big book on AI, for example. (Coming soon, I hope.) Still, let's try for a short, pungent one mid-week.

Nathan Gardels offers an interesting essay, in Noema Magazine, on a coming era of world  "spheres of influence."  Of course, that model of the world has long been desired by some as a replacement for the 80 year, generally benign American Pax, which has - despite its many mistakes and flaws - been inarguably the very best time for humanity in the history of our species. Compared to any other. Compared to all others. All others, combined.

 Note that, despite horrific exceptions:

Easily 90% of living humans have never witnessed war with their own eyes. Ponder that, in light of history.

I'd estimate 95% of world children have never starved and are in school. And immunized. Ponder that, too.

The percentage with drinkable water and sanitation keeps climbing.

... as did the fraction with general human rights. And so on... That was the trend, till recently.

Hence, what is the central goal of tyrants and those who desire a return to 6000 years of nescient feudalism? The American Pax is too strong to be attacked and too popular to be toppled by world rebellion. But as we've found, it can be suborned from within...

...not to be destroyed. America is far two strong for that. The professional classes are too mighty and the subornation - while spectacularly successful right now - won't last.  But if the bipolar ailment of one of our ruling parties**-- oscillating from imperialism to isolationism and back again - can be exploited, getting us to retract into a localized 'sphere of influence,' that could give the international arrays of hierarchs what they want.

What is the goal? Gardels edges up to it but never quite arrives. Elsewhere - just last month - I posted about “The Technate of North America,” illustrated in this dredged up map from a similarly fevered era, the 1920s and 30s. Part of a range of bizarre political ideas that have flourished in times of stress. 

A notion now pushed by the Yarvin-Thiel-Miller 'dark enlightenment" twits roaming the White House right now. (I've known Yarvin a long time.)

George Orwell portrayed where 'spheres of influence' go... a nightmare pattern of endless simmer-war among Eastasia, Eurasia and our own Oceania.  

In a stunningly creepy pareidolia, Oceania would look an awful lot like the “Technate” map. Though with Britain ("Airstrip One")  thrown in as plot setting for Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Which perhaps inspired Orwell in the first place! 

I riff further on this here.

 

      == Pause and reconsider the 'spheres.' ==

Before you give these dopes too much credence, please consider that Putin is not winning his 'sphere' in Ukraine. Europeans do not want any part of his influence sphere and - while they are rearming fast, in light of the USA's unreliability - they know that their only successful asymptote is Putin's end. Preferably at the hands of fed-up Russian troops and veterans. The 1917 Soldiers Revolt option that Putin himself mentions frequently, in frantically repeated denial.  Hence "Eurasia" doesn't look so good a bet, right now. 

Especially since China's top goal (shall we whisper it?) is Siberia.

As for 'Eastasia', well, China is ascendant, yes. But anyone who believes - after Ukraine - that they still think slow, noisy troop ships can cross the Taiwan Straits is a dummy. Can Beijing blockade or hurt Taiwan? Sure, they can do that. But never boots on the ground. Any boots that try will 'hit' sea bottom.

Sorry. 'Spheres of Influence' is their dream. And that of a complicit Republican Party whose core foreign policy syndrome has always been a BIPOLAR ailment that I first diagnosed back in the last century, but most-recently wrote about here, in 2017. 

        The way that GOP administrations - and indeed all of their political leaders - tend to gyrate between two states…

…either manic imperialism or depressive isolationism.

Bush era neocons manifested the former, openly raving “We are now an empire!”... a phrase that now blares from the Trump White House -- on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and alternate weekends.  After just weeks earlier proclaiming an isolationist “America First!” policy to end all wars of intervention or nation-building and even our world network of alliances that kept the peace (mostly) for the last 80 years.

These bipolar and extreme mood swings are predictable, hypocritical and dangerous!

**Are Democratic administrations guiltless, or more-sane? Well, yes, comparatively so. Certainly, less blatantly and compulsively cyclical between extremes. And in most cases – except Somalia – at least listening to professional advice.

A final note. 

Do not ignore the incredible contrast in COMPETENCE displayed between Russia's many years in Ukraine and and the US military's dazzling three hours in Caracas. A level of incredible competence going back to the initial and proper surgical actions in Iraq and Afghanistan (both of them ruined by insane Bushites plunging us into subsequent quagmires.. Western weapons and training and those using them are spectacularly effective and - in stark contrast - the entire network of those who bought Russian military hardware or doctrines now deeply regret it.  As I just said, the only battlefield where the U.S. military experiences competency regret is a quagmire. And hence, getting us stuck in one is a central enemy goal.

The contrast could not be more blatant, in comparison to "War Secretary" Pete Filthy Fingers *** Hegseth - just 6 weeks earlier - berating 500 Generals,Admirals and top Sergeants, calling them "too fat and woke to fight!" Oh, like a famous lush and walking petri dish should talk.

No wonder they fired or transferred most of the military JAGs who can advise officers when an order is illegal. And just weeks after taking charge they closed the FBI office charged with tracking 'foreign influence programs."

Above all, they must end the Marshallian ethos of the United States Military Officer Corps... as they are apparently succeeding doing with the FBI and intel agencies. 

That will be a tough nut. But if you fire enough of the good ones, you can work your way down to the General Jack T. Ripper types.  At which point we could be screwed., all the way down to purity of essence.

========

And the Boss tells it. 

========

*** Hegseth repeatedly told his Fox Weekend co-hosts that he doesn't believe in germs and "I haven't washed my hands in a decade." 

​

This class war has no memory – and that could kill us

Nathan Gardels – editor of Noema magazine – offers in an issue a glimpse of the latest philosopher with a theory of history, or historiography. One that I'll briefly critique soon, as it relates much to today's topic. But first...

In a previous issue, Gardels offered valuable and wise insights about America’s rising cultural divide, leading to what seems to be a rancorous illiberal democracy.  

Any glance at the recent electoral stats shows that while race & gender remain important issues, they did not affect outcomes as much as a deepening polar divide between America’s social castes, especially the less-educated vs. more-educated. 

Although he does not refer directly to Marx, he is talking about a schism that my parents understood... between advanced proletariate and ignorant lumpen-proletariate.

Hey, this is not another of my finger-wagging lectures, urging you all to at least understand some basic patterns that the WWII generation knew very well, when they designed the modern world. 

Still, you could start with Nathan's essay...

...though alas, in focusing on that divide, I'm afraid Nathan accepts an insidious premise. Recall that there is a third party to this neo-Marxian class struggle, that so many describe as simply polar. 

 

== Start by stepping way back == 

There’s a big context, rooted in basic biology. Nearly all species have their social patterns warped by male reproductive strategies, mostly by males applying power against competing males.  

(Regretable? Sure. Then let's over-rule Nature by becoming better. But that starts by looking at and understanding the hand that evolution dealt us.)

Among humans, this manifested for much more than 6000 years as feudal dominance by local gangs, then aristocracies, and then kings intent upon one central goal -- to ensure that their sons would inherit power.

Looking across all that time, till the near-present, I invite you to find any exceptions among societies with agriculture. That is, other than Periclean Athens and (maybe) da Vinci's Florence. This pattern - dominating nearly all continents and 99% of cultures across those 60 centuries is a dismal litany of malgovernance called 'history'. (And now it dominates the myths conveyed by Hollywood.)

Alas, large-scale history is never (and I mean never) discussed these days, even though variants of feudalism make up the entire backdrop -- the default human condition -- against which our recent Enlightenment has been a miraculous - but always threatened - experimental alternative. 

The secret sauce of the Enlightenment, described by Adam Smith and established (at first crudely) by the U.S. Founders, consists of flattening the caste-order. Breaking up power into rival elites -- siccing them against each other in fair competition, and basing success far less on inheritance than other traits. 

That, plus the empowerment of new players... an educated meritocracy in science, commerce, civil service and even the military. And gradually helping the children of the poor and former slaves to participate.

This achievement did augment with each generation – way too slowly, but incrementally – till the World War II Greatest Generation’s GI Bill and massive universities and then desegregation took it skyward, making America truly the titan of all ages and eras.

Karl Marx - whose past-oriented appraisals of class conflict were brilliant - proved to be a bitter, unimaginative dope when it came to projecting forward the rise of an educated middle class... 

…which was the great innovation of the Roosevelteans, inviting the working classes into a growing and thriving middle class..

... an unexpected move that consigned Marx to the dustbin for 80 years... 

... till his recent resurrection all around the globe, for reasons given below.

== There are three classes tussling here, not two ==

Which brings us to where Nathan Gardels’s missive is just plain wrong, alas. Accepting a line of propaganda that is now universally pervasive – he asserts that two – and only two – social classes are involved in a vast – socially antagonistic and polar struggle.

Are the lower middle classes (lumpenproletariat) currently at war against 'snooty fact elites'?  Sure, they are!  But so many post-mortems of the recent U.S. election blame the fact-professionals themselves, for behaving in patronizing ways toward working stiffs. 

Meanwhile, such commentaries leave out entirely any mention of a 3rd set of players...

... the oligarchs, hedge lords, inheritance brats, sheiks and “ex”-commissars who have united in common cause. Those who stand most to benefit from dissonance within the bourgeoisie! 

Elites who have been the chief beneficiaries of the last 40 years of 'supply side' and other tax grifts. Whose wealth disparities long ago surpassed those preceding the French Revolution. Many of whom are building lavish ‘prepper bunkers.' And who now see just one power center blocking their path to complete restoration of the default human system – feudal rule by inherited privilege. 

(I portrayed this - in detail - in Existence.)

That obstacle to feudal restoration? The fact professionals, whose use of science, plus rule-of-law and universities – plus uplift of poor children - keeps the social flatness prescription of Adam Smith alive. 

And hence, those elites lavishly subsidize a world campaign to rile up lumpenprol resentment against science, law, medicine, civil servants... and yes, now the FBI and Intel and military officer corps. 

A campaign that's been so successful that the core fact of this recent election – the way all of the adults in the first Trump Administration denounced him – is portrayed as a feature by today’s Republicans, rather than a fault. And yes, that is why none of the new Trump Appointees will ever, ever be adults-in-the-room.

== The ultimate, ironic revival of Marx, by those who should fear him most ==

Seriously. You can't see this incitement campaign in every evening's tirades, on Fox? Or spuming across social media, where ‘drinking the tears of know-it-alls’ is the common MAGA victory howl? 

A hate campaign against snobby professionals that is vastly more intensive than any snide references to race or gender? 

I beg you to control your gorge and actually watch Fox etc. Try actually counting the minutes spent exploiting the natural American SoA reflex (Suspicion of Authority) that I discuss in Vivid Tomorrows.  A reflex which could become dangerous to oligarchs, if ever it turned on them! 

And hence it must be diverted into rage and all-out war vs. all fact-using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror.

To be clear, there are some professionals who have behaved stupidly, looking down their noses at the lower middle class.

Just as there are poor folks who appreciate their own university-educated kids, instead of resenting them. 

And yes, there are scions of inherited wealth or billionaires (we know more than a few!) who are smart and decent enough to side with an Enlightenment that's been very good to them.

Alas, the agitprop campaign that I described here has been brilliantly successful, including massively popular cultural works extolling feudalism as the natural human forms of governance. (e.g. Tolkien, Dune, Star Wars, Game of Thrones... and do you seriously need more examples in order to realize that it's deliberate?)

They aren’t wrong! Feudalism is the ‘natural’ form of human governance. 

In fact, its near universality may be a top theory to explain the Fermi Paradox! 

… A trap/filter that prevents any race from rising to the stars.

== Would I rather not have been right? ==

One of you pointed out "Paul Krugman's post today echoes Dr B's warnings about  MAGA vs Science.":

"But why do our new rulers want to destroy science in America? Sadly, the answer is obvious: Science has a tendency to tell you things you may not want to hear. ....
And one thing we know about MAGA types is that they are determined to hold on to their prejudices. If science conflicts with those prejudices, they don’t want to know, and they don’t want anyone else to know either."

Krugman is the smartest current acolyte of Hari Seldon. Except maybe for Robert Reich. And still, they don't see the big picture.

== Stop giving the first-estate a free pass ==

And so, I conclude. 

Whenever you find yourself discussing class war between the lower proletariats and snooty bourgeoisie, remember that the nomenclature – so strange and archaic-sounding, today – was quite familiar to our parents and grandparents.  

Moreover, it included a third caste! The almost perpetual winners, across 600 decades. The bane on fair competition that was diagnosed by both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. And one that's deeply suicidal, as today's moguls - masturbating to the chants of flatterers - seem determined to repeat every mistake that led their predecessors to tumbrels and guillotines.

With some exceptions – those few who are truly noble of mind and heart – they are right now busily resurrecting every Marxian scenario from the grave… 

 … or from torpor where they had been cast by the Roosevelteans. 

And the rich fools are doing so by fomenting longstanding cultural grudges for – or against – modernity. 

      The same modernity that gave them everything they have and that laid all of their golden eggs.

If anything proves the inherent stupidity of that caste – (most of them) - it is their ill-education about Marx! And what he will mean to new generations, if the Enlightenment cannot be recharged and restored enough to put old Karl back to sleep.

What Democrats did wrong... Three categories of rationalizing - while ignoring why they hate us.

At the end I'll cite some book and SF news, including some fun! Like part two of my comedy, The Ancient Ones.

Only now we'll return to the topic on everyone’s mind… WTF just happened?  And what should we do now?

We'll start with Nathan Gardels – editor & publisher of the excellent Noēma Magazine - who always offers interesting observations. Though, he often triggers my infamously ornery “Yes… but…” reflex and a too-long response. (Several posts here originated in rémise to Nathan.)

In a recent missive - "How to Soul-Search as a Losing Party" - appraising What Democrats did wrong, Gardels points out many valid things… while reaching a conclusion that I deem spectacularly mistaken. Taking note of how so many Black and Hispanic males abandoned the old, Rooseveltean Coalition, he joins with so many others out there, urging a campaign of gentle conciliation.

Nathan cites a raft of earnest intellectuals, as well as deliberative ‘citizens panels’ that have – in Europe – shown some success at getting participants to bridge the dogmatic gaps that divided them. Indeed, such experiments have been terrific! It is the mature approach. And it works… 

...with those who are already drawn far enough into the process to leave behind their familiarly comfortable, polemical echo chambers. Forsaking today’s media Nuremberg rallies, in order to participate. 

“(O)nce informed and empathetically exposed to the concerns of others, participants move from previously held dispositions toward a consensus.“

Indeed, that participation can be widespread! As in the Truth and Reconciliation process led by Nelson Mandela, in South Africa, and similar endeavors in Argentina and Chile, wherein vast swathes of the public – on all sides – realized they must do this… or risk losing everything.

As for it happening in today’s USA? Well, I can think of one actual, real world example. 

         

All across the nation, grand juries are selected from randomly-chosen voters and vetted for general reasonableness. In a majority of American counties, the resulting panels consist largely of fairly typical white retirees. And yet, it has been exactly those red county white retirees who – after exposure to arguments and copious evidence – have indicted so many Republican politicians and associates of a vast range of crimes.

    I’d argue that is a kind of fact-based consensus-building, even if it leads to some well-deserved pain by the fomenters of one side.

That is the first of many reasons why the masters of that side will have no interest in allowing wider versions of consensus building.

I do not see any hope of such a thing happening in today’s America, at any kind of scale.

…with one barely plausible exception.

Whatever comes next (WCN)... and our global future.

Okay, last posting was a science update. And politics is in hiatus to see what drops in Chicago.... So how about we turn to issues on a global perspective? Starting near term:

Now that India has surpassed China in population, Beijing is issuing dire directives.

'As China's population has begun to decline and fears rise of a looming demographic crisis, China's leaders are putting pressure on women to curtail their career and educational ambitions and return to traditional roles in the home. 

President Xi says: "Doing a good job in women's work is not only related to women's own development, but also related to the harmony of families and society, as well as national development and progress." '

In its early decades, the Chinese Communist Party bolstered its revolutionary credentials by emphasizing women's equality both inside and outside the home. But the CCP's own top ranks have long been male-dominated.  Well, well. I've been saving up a posting about the goals and aspirations... and mistakes... of the Central Kingdom. 

Only now let's focus on a question of the longer term. What if we succeed in winning this wretched phase 8 of the US Civil War... and strengthening the 80 year 'pax' that gave humanity by far its best era of (relative, per capita) peace and progress?

Does this mean that the American Pax will last forever? 

Of course not. But then... what?

==  Whatever Comes Next? ==

I’ve long asked a difficult question about the future. One that can be disturbing to some USA citizens, especially that wing who might be called American Imperialists (e.g. the Bushite neocons, now a nearly extinct species, since the oligarchs betrayed and flushed them all away, to be replaced by MAGA isolationism). 

The question: “So how long do you envision a world with the USA calling all shots?…

Decades? A century? A thousand years? A million?” 

I’m used to peering across those time ranges via sci fi. And in SF there’s a clear trend for dealing with this extrapolation. Go beyond 100 years or so… even half a dozen decades… and the governing entity coping with Earthly dilemmas, or the solar system, or aliens, or even the galaxy, is always some kind of Earth Gov or Earth Union or… some federated something. 

Except for the movie Aliens, of course, with its 23^rd Century warp drive troopship of U.S. Marines! (Ain’t Cameron a hoot? LOVE that flick!;-)  

Indeed, I think this is one reason that some of our neighbors here in USA desperately pray for the gruesome reification of that nasty, sadistic culmination-trip, the Book of Revelation… so they won’t have to envision even one generation ahead, or do anything to build a healthy posterity.

Not you, though? 

You are one of those far-looking sci-fi folks? All right, then. So, what’s your notion of WCN?  Whatever Comes Next?

Let’s be clear, I regularly defend the last 80 years of the “American Pax.” Since 1945, guided by several principles cast by the person of the 20th Century - George Marshall -- we've experienced, by any metric, the best era of general peace and progress and increasing justice ever. Especially after 6000 years of wretched (and world ubiquitous) macho feudalism. Despite some nasty acts and mistakes and even bloody crimes, no other nation that was ever tempted by great power ever handled it so… um… less-terribly. (Go on. name an exception, in comments. I'd love to be shown a past empire or kingdom or 'pax' that you think did much better.)

Yeah, sure it’s been a tense and immature ride – sometimes a hellhole, compared to what oughta-be!  Pax Americana was so very far from perfect and often hideous!  Merely vastly better than any other era … or all other human eras, combined. 

Across the last eight decades, poverty plummeted worldwide. Today, 95% of kids on this planet have never starved and are in school. Sure, the ongoing chain of wretched violent wars is horrifying! (Especially lately.)  But step back a minute and realize a historically amazing fact -- that over 90% of living adults have never witnessed war with their own eyes. Something that’d be deemed a freaking miracle, by any of our ancestors. 

So yeah, our standards are rising. As they must! But pause now and then for perspective. I go into this elsewhere. And before you stalk off in rage, consider your own reaction! 

Your very concept of how things oughta-be would have been deemed utterly dreamy, even psychotically delusional by those ancestors. Especially, your reflex to question authority - your own society and its tribal elders. Find me another example - across all cultures and eras – of an empire that taught Suspicion of Authority as a central moral reflex to generations of its youth. And yes, it was relentless Hollywood memes that taught you those reflexes.

 In pointing that out, I am not dissing you or those memes!  Dig it: I was raised by them, too! They are part of the secret of our success! As I show thoroughly in Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood.

Still, one has to ask – returning to the core question of this posting - what’s your notion of a Whatever Comes Next to govern this fractious globe and nearby worlds? 

What’s your recommended replacement for the lumbering, sometimes crazed, if generally good-natured Pax Americana?  

The United Nations? Are you freaking kidding me?

== Is an end-to-nations possible ==

Which bring us to the reason that I raise this topic. In this Noema essay, Nathan Gardels made a strong argument that the European Union (EU) is a much better model for gradually evolving sovereignty. 

Ponder: The UN grew out of those infamous Westphalian notions, establishing that separated national sovereignties must be viewed as the sacred thing. A notion that only got reinforced by the prickly 80 new nations that emerged from colonialism.  

The EU, in contrast, is about layering of negotiated sub-national, national, and supra national responsibilities, all of them (so far imperfectly) accountable to the ultimate authority of citizens. An approach necessitating calm reasonableness and negotiation at levels that – again – those fractious ancestors would have found boggling.

I recommend giving Nathan’s missive about this a look. 

BTW… it’s a general notion I’ve dealt with before. In Earth, for example, I speak of the “EU” several times, allowing readers to assume that it means “European Union”… until the book reveals that in the year 2038 “EU” now stands for Earth Union. A nascent but not-yet world government that still relies on the old pax to keep things together, while it matures.

Care to entertain a standing wager across the next two decades? Assuming we get past the current crises, incited by an attempted worldwide putsch of cabals of powerful but unsapient oligarchs, united in shared desperation to end the Enlightenment Experiment and re-impose 6000 years of utterly imbecilic feudalism… supposing we get past all that… 

… in which case, what is to prevent say the Maldives, or Costa Rica, or Ghana from some fine day sending an envelope to Brussels, containing their accession application to join the EU? 

Are you telling me those Brussels factotums would refuse even to consider it, because of a defined word?

Play it out in your head. Then consider how confident you are that “It’ll never happen!” 

Okay then. Are you so confident that you’ll give me odds?

Comments welcome.

== And some important miscellany ==

A while back I posted outrage over the Trump Administration’s fire sale of the US national helium reserves to cronies at well under market prices, allowing them to jack-up and corner the market for this element that’s rare on Earth and essential for many (including medical) uses. Ah, but Adam Smith comes to the rescue!  Wildcats drilling in Minnesota appear to have found a new trove of this vital resource! Maybe this will help keep helium prices down. Although that will depend on who owns it and how big it is. 

"Important"?  Well, I think so. Because indicates the right path to neutralize villains. By creatively leaving all their schemes behind us in a soft cloud of our progress that even benefits them, galling them terribly! It is certainly how to best deal with the mad/idiotic 'prepper' lords in their zillion dollar bunkers, salivating over an "Event" that would not go as well as they think.

And more...  ‘With little fanfare, researchers from Apple and Columbia University released an open source multimodal LLM, called Ferret, in October 2023.’  

Well…. In 1989 - in my novel Earth - I showed software geniuses releasing 'ferrets' into the (then largely theoretical) Web.

So is the Great Big AI Crisis of 23-24 starting to fade? Not a bit of it. Even today's primitive versions will likely wreak great harm via political misinformation and manipulation. (More on that soon.) But it’s also swamping its way into science too. 

“It is not always so easy to spot the use of AI. But one clue is that ChatGPT tends to favor certain words… such as meticulous, intricate or commendable.” But all such detection cues are temporary. 

Only one thing will even possibly work - either in politics or science or anywhere else that unaccountable AI is used to cheat. That approach is the same one that allowed us to get some constraints on all kinds of human cheaters... and that approach is to sic AI programs onto each other, competitively, with incentives to tattle on misinformation...

...as I describe here.

And more vividly detailed? My Keynote at the huge, May 2024 RSA Conference in San Francisco – is now available online.   “Anticipation, Resilience and Reliability: Three ways that AI will change us… if we do it right.”