For every marginal unit
of information ingested
You lose a marginal unit
of agency
Simply because your mind can
either receive free information
Or act upon the world
to gather new information
Every minute you spend on this site,
you lose capacity to act upon the world
Among the para-religious belief of leftist intellectuals an unshakeable one is the conviction that Fascism was a revelation of the deepest nature of the "right" whereas Leninism (and then Stalinism) was an unfortunate "authoritarian" deviation in the history of the "left."
Classical Liberals don’t have a strong answer to the clear game theoretic advantage of ethnic collectivist bloc action, because once enough bloc players exist to set the incentives, neutrality becomes unilateral disarmament and everyone must mobilize or lose. That is the whole problem in one line and that is what we're seeing now.
This is not a smooth trend, and it has a tipping point.
As long as an individualist public is the clear majority, liberal rules can function as the operating system. Rights, neutrality, and constraint remain binding in practice, because most players are still playing the same game.
Then the center of gravity shifts. Large scale demographic change, plus the import of more collectivist coordination norms, increases the share of the electorate that treats politics as group bargaining. Dense networks, internal discipline, and social enforcement make bloc behavior easy and reliable. Collective action is already solved.
At some threshold, the unit of politics flips. The individualist majority thins into a plurality, then a minority. Blocs become numerous enough that neutrality becomes unilateral disarmament. If you keep acting like atomized individuals while others act like coordinated teams, you lose leverage, access, and eventually protection in practice. So the system selects for bloc formation. Even the remaining individualists get forced into counter bloc behavior just to stay competitive.
Sports makes the whole game-theoretic point simple and obvious. A coordinated team beats better athletes who cannot play together. This is just a plain fact. Once the league rewards set plays and disciplined teamwork, anyone insisting on pickup ball gets crushed. Not because the other team is magical. Because coordination multiplies power. This is game-theoretic advantage. You see it elsewhere, like in the military. This is a simple point and it is super common.
Past the tipping point, the liberal order hollows out. The state starts treating blocs as the basic unit. Access, carve outs, enforcement priorities, and legitimacy flow to the organized. Constraints become partisan terrain. Courts become weapons. Administration becomes spoils. Rights become conditional.
You can keep the founding texts and the slogans. But the operating system changes underneath. Liberalism survives only if the winners stay bound by the rules when the rules block what they want. Bloc competition trains winners to treat the creed as civic poetry and treat group advantage as reality.
God spoke and light obeyed. spoke and water split itself in half to listen. spoke and stars burned themselves alive just to exist in his voice. but you. you he touched. shaped with fingers. the architect of black holes played in the mud for you. pressed his mouth to your clay lungs and gave you his air. his breath is still in you. the thing that made leviathan got its hands dirty for you. could have spoken. didn't. chose the slow way. chose the intimate way. chose to touch. remember this when the dark says you're nothing. the dark was spoken. you were sculpted.
matthew 18:3 "truly i tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." the wiser the sage, the more child-like is his face. the more advanced his spirit, the simpler is his soul. the deeper his understanding, the lighter are his undertakings. think of the wisest sage you ever saw; i guarantee “rational grown-ups” see him as backward, silly, stupid, unrefined, “regressed.” don’t blame them. they might have grown up yes, but they never grew “down.” and thus it’s they who truly are “stunted.” and that’s a tragedy. if you are not staring at all phenomena around you with endless curiosity and mind-bending awe as you age, you are not playing this game right.
The latest tranche of Cormac McCarthy papers acquired by the Wittliff contains the following note in Cormac’s hand:
“The moral clarity of the English speaking people has been a thousand year perfecting. It is a pointless task to imagine such a strength taking markedly less time than this in some other culture. The notion that we are all as one is nonsense.”
@OldHollowTree Ik part of the point is that they're hidden in plain sight. But if anyone is interested in putting together a tierlist of positions sorted by impact so we have a concrete goal, dm me