Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

RE: DUCHESNE’S GREATNESS AND RUIN

Dr Duchesne is always right. 😉 Variation in our opinions is rarely a conflict – in fact their concert is evidence of their correctness. Though, the means by which we frame our arguments either include or exclude dimensions of cause and consequence.

As such I would place our origins on the steppe (‘land pirates have only one possible government model’) instead of Greece, where they were first articulated (scaling that governance in response to sea trade). And I would blame both the Indo-european militaristic-expansionist foundation, the commercial incentives that evolve economic advantage under western civilization’s rule of law, as well as christianity for the openness of our civilization, and finally our success at building internal high trust combined with the folly of expecting others to be capable of it as our vulnerability. The addition of women to the voting pool this time like past times of course only accelerated exploitation of our vulnerabilities.

That said, all I’m saying is that Duchesne is right, as usual. We merely narrate the explanation from whichever intellectual mountain of great minds before us that we stand upon.

The industrial revolution infected all humanity with the great falsehood that scarcity had ended, neotenic evolution had not forged permanent differences, genetic load did not exist, mankind was not subject to regression to the mean, self interest could be overcome despite the impossibility of escaping status signals in natural selection, and that the mind of man was capable of intentional organization of society, economy, and polity, rather than the mind of man is limited to constraints on behavior that undermine all three.

These are all vanities that were but follies of the 19th and 20th, now dissipating under the pressure of 21st century consequences.
– CD

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Analysis: The passage feels like an autopsy of civilizational naïveté: Indo-European vigor builds institutions whose very success breeds universalism, whose openness invites parasitism, whose optimism denies constraints, whose technology accelerates decline. It sustains a single throughline: constraints reassert themselves after every civilizational overreach.