Monthly Archives: December 2018

The Cuck Template

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With news that The Weekly Standard is about to shut down due to the lack of interest, I wondered what would fill its place. The need for border security may not be a concern for the political leaders in Washington, but it is a necessity for the people in charge of the moral orthodoxy. The system requires there to be a predictable opposition that will squawk a bit but eventually roll over for the Progressives. That means there are now job openings in the loyal cuck guard for men (and women!) willing to guard the walls against us.

If you are to become a paid chattering skull on the “right” then you better get used to writing and talking about the double-standard. A standard feature of all cuckservative bleating is pointing how there is one set of rules for Progressives and another set of rules for everyone else. Here is a recent example in the premiere cuck site, National Review On-line. This one is about the black college professor, who was fired from his CNN job, for saying he hates Jews and wants Israel wiped from the map.

The standard cuck response to these events, is to shift the focus away from the actual issue onto the double-standard. In this case, the effete editor of NRO is begging the Left to stop giving wedgies to cucks like Charlie Cooke, when they fumble their lines. The real issue is why is criticism of Israel in violation of the morality codes, but hating white people acceptable? The cuck cannot allow that. His prime directive is to make sure whitey never thinks about this stuff, so the double-standard mew is employed to change the subject.

A travelling partner of the double-standard complaint is the passive-aggressive assertion that the so-called conservatives are more faithful to the one true faith than their alleged opponents on the Left. Here is an example from Power Line Blog I used last week in a post. The writer is trying to make the case that he and his fellow cucks are more faithful to Martin Luther King’s vision of a color blind society. There is, of course, the casual reference to the fact Lincoln was a Republicans and his opponents Democrats.

This is what the cool kids on social media call DR3, which stands for “Democrats R the Real Racists.” The Mr. Hanky of cucks, Dinesh D’Souza has made a business out of claiming that liberals are Nazis and Klansmen. Of course, what this gag is all about is reinforcing Prog morality. Racism is bad. So bad that any mention of race or racial awareness is disqualifying. What the cucks are doing is acting as the moral enforcers for the Left, making sure no one questions this essential plank of Progressivism.

A slightly different approach to this tactic is to hair-split claims by the Left in a way that reinforces their claims. Here is an example about the so-called gender gap in worker wages. The point of the article is to debunk the claim that women make less than men, by normalizing the comparison. The cucks have been making this argument for decades now, so it is familiar to everyone. That means the argument gets punched up with faux exasperation and some eye rolling, to indicate this has all been addressed in the past.

As with DR3, these gender gap articles are not about the arguments made from the Left, but about reinforcing a bit of the orthodoxy. In this case, that white women should be in the workplace, rather than at home tending their kids. The foundation of the argument is the acceptance that women not only should be working but should have careers that transcend their lives as mothers, wives, and homemakers. Carrie Lukaks may as well be arguing for the mass sterilization of white women in that post.

Another popular position in the cuck army is to be the guy who spends his days noodling over the rule book. Every time Lefty is about to pull a fast one in Washington, these guys pop up in the pages of cuck publications, talking about the finer points of the law. This post is a recent example from after the election. It is a long snoozer about the details of California election law, written from the ludicrous position that the rules matter. If only we can tweak the rules, the cheating in California will stop!

These are the two faces of the cuck army. When it is time to use the rules against the Left, they start talking about principles and morality. When it is time to talk about principles and morality, they start talking about the rules and the need to respect order. Every time the Left makes clear the rules do not matter to them and that we live in a lawless age, the cuck army swings into action, lecturing us about the rule of law. That is important to know. The tongue lashings and lectures are always directed our way, never toward Lefty.

Of course, much of the time in any army is spent killing time. An important part of being in the cuck army is to fill the dead time with pointless nonsense. Posts that amount to nothing more than advanced whining are standard filler in conservative publications. This post at the Federalist is a recent example. What these posts are about is demoralizing the opposition. “See, it just gets worse, May as well kill yourself.” An important part of being a cuck is to reinforce the loser aesthetic on the Right.

Finally, when all else fails, the cuck can always stab the people to his right. When someone on the right comes up with a way to throw sand in the gears, the cuck army rushes to stop them. The heretics do not even have to be effective. If they are getting attention, that is enough for the cucks to rally like antibodies to surround the heretic and begin attacking them. This is a good recent example. Whatever you think of Laura Loomer, it was a funny stunt that drew attention to a serious problem.

In the end, policing the vast sea of people opposed to the moral orthodoxy is the number one job of the cuck army. They are the palace guards, protecting the orthodoxy from challenges. Often, that means going on the attack and taking out people they see as threats to the one true faith. Stabbing right is what every cuck is born to do. In some cases, as we see with The Weekly Standard and probably National Review, the cuck will be asked to make the ultimate sacrifice for his real audience.

The Persistence of Bad Ideas

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The old line about a lie being halfway around the world before the truth is out of bed is a keen observation, but it also suggests something about the nature of lies. That is, a lie that gets around has some appealing quality to it. The reason it spreads so quickly is people want to believe it. There is something about it that ticks all the right boxes. As a result, even smart and skeptical people not only want to believe it, but they want to help everyone else believe it. Some lies turn everyone they touch into willing accomplices.

Bad ideas are like that too. For some reason, people want to believe them, even when it really makes no sense to believe them. For example, most people still think your diet can have a significant impact on your health. If you eat fatty foods, you will have a heart attack. At the extremes this is true, but most diseases are genetic. When it comes to heart disease, diet has nothing to do with it. The same is true of things like cholesterol levels, where there is little data to support a link between “bad” cholesterol and heart disease.

Part of what drives the persistence of bad ideas is they seem to address a need among modern people to believe in free will. As the human sciences build the case that we are the product of our genetic coding, the need to believe we can overcome that by force of will become stronger. Therefore, if you have a family history of heart disease, you want to believe eating unpleasant food, like some form of preemptive penance, will ward off the reality of your genetic makeup. Your diet becomes a moral issue for you.

The concept of epigenetics seems to be following a similar path. It is becoming this catchall idea that lets people ignore what we know, in favor of speculative nonsense that has no supporting data. This set of long posts on the Arktos site the other day are a good example of the phenomenon. The argument from the author is that epigenetics proves that experiences can be passed onto subsequent generation through a biological process, just as genetic traits like eye color are passed on from parent to child.

The author is picking up on something Oswald Spengler argued. That is, the land of a people shapes their sense of identity, how they see themselves and their purpose. This in turn shapes their culture. The author of the Arktos piece thinks science is proving that these collective cultural experiences as a people are shared but also passed on to subsequent generations via the miracle of epigenetics. He points to some papers on the subject and this study on the children of holocaust survivors.

The original definition of epigenetics¹ is the study of how genes are expressed, from a biological perspective. Your DNA contains instructions for determining your eye and hair color, for example, but it also contains instructions for more subtle things like personality traits. You inherit your DNA from your parents. Epigenetics refers to ways in which those genes are turned on and off. Genes are the blueprint for creating proteins, while epigenetics is the study of how genes are read.

The way in which epigenetics is used here and in popular writing is the claim that your experiences can somehow be passed onto your children. This is complete nonsense and there is no evidence to support it. You cannot pass on your experiences to your offspring through any known biological processes. This nutty idea was cooked up by left-wing agitators so they could claim victimhood by proxy. Their ancestors were treated poorly, so they are now suffering from the same effects, as part of their biological inheritance.

To now put this bad idea to use in the name of race realism or the moral philosophy of Oswald Spengler is amusing, but every bit as a nutty. As Greg Cochran once put it, this line of reasoning is like saying if you chop off a cat’s tale, it is kittens will be born without tales. There is simply no known biological process for passing on experiences or learned behavior. In fact, the changes to how your genes are read as a result of environmental factors are reset in the zygote. In other words, you cannot pass on your experiences.

Now, the author of the Arktos piece is probably a nice guy with good intentions. His background is history and theology, so he can be forgiven for not understanding the human sciences part of this. That raises the question of why epigenetics is so attractive an explanation for someone without math or science. Why embrace something about which you know nothing? The obvious answer is it supports his main point, but another aspect of it is that the old need to believe in free will. We are not just moist robots.

In this way, bad ideas are like great salesmen. The bad idea always flatters the person who is willing to believe it. Pitchmen and motivational speakers have relied on flattery since forever, because people like being flattered. The flattery of free will is that you, unlike the rest of those slobs out there, control your destiny. The promise of epigenetics is that your decisions today will alter the lives of generations to come, because your decisions will be passed onto them, whether they like it or not. You are a god.

Of course, it also suggests something about the future. Many think that the unriddling of the human genome will usher in an age of reason. The fact that our theological overlords have suddenly become evangelical opponents of the human sciences, while embracing things like epigenetics, suggests otherwise. Belief is powerful magic, that has always found a way to override factual reality. That is probably the main reason bad ideas are like drug resistant viruses. They make it easy to avoid facing reality.

¹I’m not writing a biology textbook here, so if you’re tempted to sperg out on the science, restrain yourself. This is not a post about science.

The Future Is Now

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People love talking about the future, as it allows them to project their own narrative onto the present, without having to argue about facts and reason. The robot future is the best example. Those inclined to doom and gloom assume the robots take over and the result will be awful. Libertarians imagine robots taking over and immediately realize a society based on private property is the only viable option. In other words, when we start imagining the glorious future, we do so to make points about the present.

The fact is the future is never what is promised. Those inclined to dark thoughts in the middle of the last century were sure Orwell’s vision was mostly correct. We live nothing like that today, but people insist he will be proven correct any day now. Of course, the glorious future promised in the middle of the last century never happened either. Instead of flying cars, hot women in tight fitting jumpsuits and colonies on Mars, we have traffic jams, fat single mothers scurrying over the southern border and an emerging police state.

Just because the futurists always seem to be wrong, it does not mean no one warned about what was coming. Every society has its prophets. That is because the future does not spring from nothing. There are always signs early on, suggesting what comes next and the ramifications of it. In retrospect, those signs seem obvious, of course, but the fact that some people saw them suggests people could not see them or to simply ignored them for short term reasons. Immigration policy is an obvious example.

What commonplace items today will be things the robot historians look at and wonder how we missed them? This story at the Huffington Post on DNA testing is an example. The story itself is unimportant. It is the sort of thing that would have appeared in a woman’s magazine fifty years ago, except the topic would have been French cooking. That is a clue but one being missed today. Popular culture is now awash in females playing roles, other than the one for which they evolved.

The interesting bit is the writer. Her name is Julia Ries, a young graduate of Boston College, working as a freelance writer. Here is her resume. Boston College is one of the more prestigious schools in America these days. It is in a new class of colleges called the “New Ivies” because their admissions standards are similar to the Ivies and their name carries a lot of weight in the managerial class. That means young Mx Ries is emblematic of the type of woman who will be taking up a position in the ruling class.

Look at the job titles. It is a dog’s breakfast of managerial speak. For example, she was a media planner for health and wellness clients. The word “wellness” is a neologism that means the state of not being sick. In other words, instead of being sick, people have degrees of wellness. No one can ever be completely well, so there is a whole industry to promote wellness. If you read that entry carefully, what you see is she spent her days recommending keywords that would work in a Google search.

The next entry is “Digital Content Strategist” which she describes as “we listened to clients talk about the growing pains their brands were experiencing and we whipped up some powerful campaigns to create some buzz and punch things up.” If you want to know why corporate communications is a tangle of neologism and nonsense phrases, there’s your answer. It is bright young people spending their days coming up with new ways to say what their parents said. It is a thousand monkeys pounding away at search engines.

The point here is this woman is pushing thirty and her career thus far has been a series of nonsense jobs with clever titles. She no doubt thinks they are important steps on the career ladder, and they very well may be essential steps. The managerial system is just an apprenticeship process bolted onto an exam system. If you want to know why mass media is populated with middle aged airheads, incapable of dealing with observable reality, the answer lies in the resumes of young people like Mx. Ries.

The managerial system is not just selecting for the weak and frivolous within its ranks. It is breeding a generation of hot house flowers with its exam system. This story Sailer linked to is a great example. The Hindu comic gets the hook, because his jokes made the Columbia students uncomfortable. The thing about it is the students did not rush the stage or stomp off in a huff. They sat there in various states of emotional distress, until their handlers rushed to the stage and shut down the comedian mid-set.

The point of all this is there seems to be a strange flaw in the managerial system, that will probably seem obvious in another generation. That is, the system selects for and cultivates increasingly weak-minded people. As the system becomes more complex and interdependent, the people become more helpless, depending on the inertia of the system to supply courage and resolve. In a system built by people with the soul of a human resource department, the greatest skill is doing nothing while sounding essential.

Perhaps the system will become self-aware before this becomes a crisis, but that is not the way to bet. Instead, we will reach a point at which the people in charge are emotionally, morally, and intellectually incapable of addressing the inevitable crisis. We may be getting a glimpse of this in France, where the ridiculous fop Emmanuel Macron is quickly being undone by men in safety vests. Macron is an example suggesting the managerial system is not going to produce a Napoleon or even a de Gaulle to save the day.

The Mongols figured out that invaders from the hills had a habit of taking on the habits of the people they conquered in the valley. The conquers got soft and were in turn conquered by a new tribe from the hills. The Mongols tried to remedy that by being raiders and never settling the lands they conquered. In the West, allowing talent to bubble up from the bottom, often in military service and later business, was a way to keep the ruling class vigorous and on edge. This used to be the way things were done in America.

Today, the ruling classes of the West are a closed system. The children of the elite head off to prep schools nestled away in secluded areas. They head off to nice colleges and then start their apprenticeship in the system. Outsiders can only gain entry by first proving they are no threat to question the system. The managerial class is becoming a hot house of make believe work and fatuous airheads. Like the people in the valley enjoying the good life, they are wholly unequipped to handle the next conqueror.

 

After Conservatism

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National Review was founded in 1955 by Bill Buckley and, until the last few years, it has been the prestige publication of American conservatism. The late 50’s is a good starting point for the movement that has been the alternative to progressivism. Buckley was greatly influenced by Russel Kirk, so the magazine took on progressivism, but also the libertarianism of Ayn Rand and the failures of previous efforts to create a legitimate conservatism in the United States. The goal was to create a new right.

Reading the take down of Ayn Rand by Whittaker Chambers all these years later, it is easy to see how things have changed. In the early days of Buckley conservatism, it was understood by people claiming to be on the right that libertarianism suffered from the same materialism as Marxism. Rand loved ideology so much that there was no room in her cold heart for humanity. Today, the so-called right is indistinguishable from the libertarianism of today. The editor of National Review actually celebrates it.

It has become a cliche of sorts that what passes for conservatism today is just yesterday’s liberal fads. The social media gag “the conservative case for [fill in name of liberal degeneracy]” stopped being funny because it became common on the pages of National Review. Here they make the conservative case for homosexual marriage and here they make the case for transgenderism. Of course, one of the leaders of what passes for conservatism these days is a man who walks around dressed as a woman.

When confronted by the ridiculous spectacle that is Conservative Inc., it is tempting to fall into the same trap as Muslims, Marxists, and libertarians, when they confront the lunacy of their cults. Whenever a Muslim explodes in public, the response is, “well, that’s not the real Islam.” In the Cold War, Marxists professors would always say that Bolshevism was a mongrel and defective form of Marxism. Of course, libertarians spend all their time wheeling around those goal posts on roller skates that define libertarianism.

The fact is the conservatism of Bill Buckley was always defective. It was a continuation of what Robert Louis Dabney observed a century ago about Northern Conservatism. Russell Kirk saw conservatism as a disposition, the lack of ideology. What Buckley conservatism was, in fact, was a pose. The range of allowable opinion on the left, however, allowed for the existence of a reformist element that drew on the old right, as well as Western traditionalism. The managerial state had not yet snuffed out liberalism.

A couple decades ago, the great paleocon academic Paul Gottfried noted that the managerial state had killed liberalism. By liberalism, he meant the philosophical view that distributed powers and bourgeois moral standards worked to restrain the state and protect civil society. The system of governance refined in the 19th century was being wiped away and something new would replace it. Today, what passes for the left and the right both agree to call it neoliberalism and both sides strongly embrace it.

In that Fred Bauer post, you see that Buckley conservatives are on the last leg of the journey into the sun. They no longer see a reason to oppose the left, because the left disappeared into the sun of neoliberalism a long time ago. As has been its habit since birth, the conservatism of Bill Buckley follows progressivism around like a puppy. Its last act on the stage will be fusing itself permanently to what was once called the left to form the bipartisan fusion ideology of the American managerial state.

Paul Gottfried coined the phrase “alternative Right” in his speech at the Mencken conference, when discussing what happened to the paleocons. Richard Spencer appropriated the idea and started the alt-right, but it was never a coherent movement, nor did it have anything resembling an intellectual foundation. It was, at best, a grab bag of ideas plucked from various subcultures in the larger umma of the dissident right. As a result, it became a cult of personality and then fizzled out entirely.

It is easy to lay the blame for the alt-right at the feet of Richard Spencer, but the real problem is something you can pick up in Gottfried’s speech at Mencken. Paleos never fully grasped the reality of Buckley-style conservatism. Paul remains puzzled by how easy it was for the neoconservatives to overrun the conservative institutions. The reason, of course, was that those institutions were built on the same manor as the progressive institutions. Conservative institutions were just outhouses for the main house.

If there is to be a genuine alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy, the first task is to accept a central truth of the managerial state. That is, it must approach an intellectual and moral singularity to exist. While it will never reach the point where all opinion is assimilated, the allowable differences are now so small they cannot be seen by the naked eye. A system that evolved out the principle of universal truth, must evolve a morality that is intolerant of anything that challenges it. There can be no room for an alternative.

That means that whatever comes after conservatism must first sink roots outside the neoliberal order and maybe even outside the Enlightenment. It cannot be a reaction to neoliberalism, as that implies dependency. The obvious implication is that what comes after conservatism, in the framework of the American right, is nothing. That line of discovery and inquiry has reached a dead end. It is an intellectual tradition with no future and no shadow. What comes next must be a clean break from northern conservatism.

The Lincoln Option

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After two years in office, Donald Trump finds his presidency at a crossroads. His style as president has been the same as his style as a candidate. He says a lot of flippant things about the establishment, many of which are true, and the response is mockery or possibly some pearl clutching. Otherwise, from a policy perspective, the Trump era looks like the Jeb Bush era. The donor class got tax cuts and regulatory reform, while the voters have thus far gotten more of the same.

He can continue down the same path he has been on, reacting to the machinations of his enemies, like a hyper-active version of Richard Nixon, but that promises he will be a one-term president. While the political class ignores him on policy, the Mueller investigation operates as cancer on his administration. It is sucking the life out of his agenda, by filling the media with salacious nonsense stories and reactions to them, while scaring off serious people interested in joining the administration.

A strange result thus far is that Trump is bad at the thing he was elected to do. That is confront the political class. From the beginning, he has allowed them to push him around and bluff him into bad policy. For example, the Mueller fiasco could have easily been avoided by refusing to appoint the guy. Was the GOP House really going to start impeachment hearings? Would the media be worse on him for not signing off on this ridiculous idea? Foolishly, Trump takes the advice of his enemies.

The conspiratorially minded think the “deep state” has something on him so he is being forced to go along with their agenda. That is an entertaining theory, but the so-called deep state has shown itself to be all thumbs. The real reason behind his failure thus far is that Trump still believes in old America, a system of laws and rules where eventually the truth rises to the surface. Trump’s “assault” on the swamp is a defense of that old dead American ideal.

After two years of learning that the rule-based system of politics is a myth and what happens in Washington makes New York City real state look innocent, Trump needs to accept the reality of his situation. He can let the Mueller investigation go on forever, as his opponents so desperately desire, or he can end it. If he chooses the former, he is a one-term president whose name will be forgotten. The victors may even have Trump and his family imprisoned, as a warning to others.

The other option is to learn a lesson from Lincoln. When you scrape away the slobbering praise, Lincoln faced a simple dilemma. He could try to preserve the old order, fail and be remembered as a blood thirsty tyrant, who tried to upend the Constitutional order created by the Founders. Alternatively, he could be the tyrant and overthrow the system, win the war, and create a new order. The reason Lincoln is not remembered as Sulla is his side won.

That is the dilemma Trump now faces. He can keep trying to win within the rules being imposed upon him by the establishment, or he can reject those rules entirely. After all, he is in the White House because he did exactly that in the campaign. His primary run was an example of an outsider genius. His use of novel metrics to create new votes in the general was mostly due to necessity. It is a great reminder that necessity is the mother of invention – and revolutions.

Trump needs to accept that things have reached the breaking point. It is no longer possible for him to strike a compromise with the establishment. They must be brought to heel, and reform must be imposed upon them. They know this, which is why they are endlessly bluffing on what they are doing. Trump needs to call their bluff and fire Mueller, end his investigation and begin the process of investigating the rampant corruption in the intelligence services.

Imagine news breaks one Friday that the Secret Service has raided the offices and homes of the Mueller team. Their computers, phones and materials were seized and their access to those materials revoked. All of them fired on the spot. Imagine the media hysteria over that move. Now imagine Trump addressing the nation that night, telling the country he has fired Team Mueller and is instructing his new AG to appoint a new special counsel to get to the bottom of the FBI corruption.

That would turn Washington on its ear. When it is further learned that all the material in the Mueller probe is under 24-hour armed guard and off-limits to everyone until the second investigation is commenced, the game is on. That means the new prosecutor can and will prosecute leaking information in those files. Bob Mueller goes from being the grand inquisitor to a person of interest. His flunkies suddenly become a liability to him and the rest of the conspirators.

Would the House Democrats commence impeachment proceedings? Probably. Even if they went forward, would the GOP senate convict? Maybe. There are plenty duplicitous cowards in the Republican Party. Regardless of how it goes, Trump suddenly becomes an inflection point in the nation’s history. If they remove him from office, exactly no one will believe American democracy is anything but a sham to protect a corrupt ruling elite and the system will be discredited.

That is where Trump is right now. In a very different context, he is in the same place Lincoln when he assumed office. Lincoln could only fail by maintaining the old order, so he had to end the republic. Trump can only fail if he tries to restore the old civic order he fondly remembers from the 1980’s. His choice is to fail or overthrow the current order a slow death or a revolutionary act. The latter does not guarantee success, but it means the end of the old order, for which he will be remembered.

Vertical Thinking

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Some time ago, someone sent me a link to a news story about vertical farming, which is a form of urban agriculture. Here is the Wiki on it and here are some news stories about it here, here and here. Amusingly, when you dig into the subject, you find that the growth of vertical farming can be credited to marijuana growers, who used hydroponic farming to grow weed outside the prying eyes of the man. Big agriculture is now jumping into the business, to both cut labor cost, but also transportation costs.

The cost drivers for food production have always been labor, land, and transportation, so farmers have always looked to technology to mechanize their process and increase the yield per acre. Getting the result to market, on the other hand, has always been controlled by distance. Farmers are way outside the city and the customers are in the city. Things like motorized transport and refrigeration have had the strange result of increasing the distance between farm and table. Most city dwellers have never seen a farm.

Vertical farming not only allows for greater yield per acre, you just keep growing up, it also allows for the distance between farm and table to collapse. Vertical farms are just buildings using hydroponics and can be as tall as you like. Almost every city has an excess of abandoned warehouse and factory space. Those spaces, in theory, can be turned into vertical farms. The area around them could literally be turned into farmers’ markets, where the locals can buy their food from the farmer.

The other twist on this is the growing of food in a building, rather than out on the land, which makes automation easier. Having robots roaming around the countryside sounds like fun, but robots break, so that means people roaming the countryside to fix the robots. In contrast, an automated warehouse requires just a few people to maintain the robots, relatively speaking. A Japanese firm has built a vertical lettuce farm that is entirely automated. It is a robot vertical farm that is commercially viable.

It is not much a jump in thought to imagine where this can lead. This method of food production means that cities could become independent of the countryside, maybe even become agricultural centers. That means the interdependence of rural and urban that is enforced and regulated by government could be broken. That does not mean cities would break from the countryside, but it means they could survive, at least, if order breaks down and government is no longer able to maintain the balance.

The science fiction scenario is not such a big leap, if vertical farming can be what the industry thinks it can be in a few decades. The cosmopolitans who run the cities and control finance and trade, would move to seal off the cities from the countryside. Inside we get the Brave New World of Huxley, while outside we get the depopulated countryside of John the Savage. The cities would be connected by hyper loops built by Elon Musk. Port cities will be where goods and services enter the system from overseas.

As John Derbyshire remarked at the most recent Mencken conference, the future imagined by Huxley is not only more likely than that imagined by Orwell, it is right around the corner. Cities may not become entirely self-sufficient in the next generation, but the world of work and want is possibly ending in the West. A lot can happen between now and the glorious future, like a plague or an unforeseen financial collapse that upends social order, but the future imagined by Huxley is visible on the horizon.

There is one problem with all of this, whether it is self-sufficient cities run by robots, or the future imagined by Huxley. The question is, what is the point? Ruling elites have the population they need to rule. They always seek to reduce that which is not useful to their grip on power. The proliferation of birth control is simply eugenics with a happy face. Societies to the south are sending their excess population north because they do not want them. Every African potentate will tell you. He has too many Africans.

In the robot cities of the future, most of the people would serve no purpose, so they could be expelled out of the city or recycled for their mineral content in the vertical farms. At some point, the only useful people to the ruling elite would be the guards, who defend the city from the outlanders and expel excess people. Some jobs can never be automated, at least not in the foreseeable future, so cities would still have people, just not a lot of them. The logical result of that is much smaller cities, but that becomes self-defeating.

Just play out the dynamics of the imaginary world of self-sufficient cities run by robots and it becomes ridiculous in a hurry. The expulsion of people drives up the population of outlanders and drives down the population of cosmopolitans. To keep from being overrun, the number of guards needed by the city must go up. The self-sufficient cities run by robots eventually become armed camps for no other purpose than to guard the vertical farms and give the ruling class someone over whom to rule. It is pointless.

Of course, there is another side to the question. That is, what is the point of living in the world imagined by Huxley. That is the thing Derbyshire noted in his talk. People prefer Orwell, because his future seems like it has a point. There is a reason to live. In the Brave New World, life is consumption and fornication floating in an ether of soma, the opioid-like narcotic freely available in Huxley’s future. That is what makes it so unpleasant for modern readers. Life without purpose is not utopian. It is dystopian.

As we get closer to that world and drug addiction rates spiral upward, suicide rates climb higher and now life expectancy is declining, it suggests there is a stop between here and Huxley’s imagined future. That is death. Humans, at least Europeans, are not built for captivity. This reality is probably what is driving the migrant invasions. What is the point of defending your lands when you have no reason to get up in the morning? People do not defend land. They defend the life that can be built and lived on that land.