20 Hard Truths
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“Ideas” and “beliefs” are not freely chosen in any meaningful sense; your moral and aesthetic sensibilities are largely downstream of A) neurotype (itself a function of genetic / epigenetic / early childhood factors beyond your control—see Dmitry’s biofoundationalism); B) material circumstance (usually a tincture of sex, race, generation, and social class); and C) copium / self-flattery / status jockeying laundered through a normative register because it’s adaptive for you to believe your spooks are real. But even normative nihilists have amygdalae, so functionally speaking we’re all bound to teloi handed down to us from Nature or Nature’s God.
The existence of hallucination / mirage / dreams and tremendous variance observed across the animal kingdom (and even just humanity) in the fidelity of all five senses (plus the fact that each successive paradigm in physics demands an increasingly formidable intellect to grok in toto) indicates that map and territory are two completely different things and all discussions pursuant to the map are properly understood as intersubjective language games adjudicated functionally and in accordance with either mutual utility or coercive writ. Platonic forms don’t exist in any “objective” sense, and neither do categories or aggregative heuristics or even contiguous objects as such; in the language of materialism (which is to say the *scientific map* with the greatest explanatory / predictive power and not that of everyday lived experience) the cosmos is basically just a frothing orgy of quarks and gluons and strings, and everything higher order only exists because we say it does, which means that “chairs” and “democracy” and “Emma Watson” and “race” are all social constructs in precisely the same way.
Race is a useful category. The underlying clinal distributions are not arbitrary and correspond to predictably patterned variance in appearance, physical capabilities, intellectual capabilities, and temperament. “More variance within than between” is a platitude you often hear that experts pretty famously call Lewontin’s Fallacy, because it’s an enormous red herring. The data overwhelmingly breaks in favor of racial realism / hereditarianism, but even aprioristically if you believe in evolution by natural selection then Tabula Rasa pretty clearly ought not be your default assumption, since if you accept that tropical climes select for more melanin and individuals vary by intellect and temperament the most parsimonious assumption (especially given obvious variance in physical ability e.g. West Africans being the best sprinters and East Africans the best endurance runners) is that SOME kind of cognitive variance will exist, and that should be our null hypothesis.
In practice Tabula Rasa serves as the null hypothesis with an insane evidentiary standard mostly on account of an analytically arbitrary if socially understandable Straussian impulse to keep racial variance in IQ and temperament illegible to the hoi polloi because if the white-black gap in income and violent crime especially is attributable mostly to genetics then the principles of Enlightenment Liberalism wouldn’t really make sense in America. You could still speak of “moral equality,” sure, but that’s just a spook at the end of the day, and if true procedural equality is resulting in fantastically asymmetric outcomes no one will still hold to those principles in their teeth. Functionally if Tabula Rasa collapses it implicitly reifies a hard caste system that most white people as it stands prefer to ignore behind shrugged shoulders and the mythopoetic just-so stories of Sowell or Kendi.
The white-black gap in IQ is mostly genetic. There’s no way to ethically confirm this in a manner that eliminates all doubt, but twin / adoption studies break in favor of hereditarianism and there’s also no dearth of suggestive evidence that blacks are predisposed towards higher time preference and aggression—e.g. FBI crime stats, which show a huge gap between whites and blacks that doesn’t exist for any other race (Latinos are a bit more criminal simply by dint of being younger but when you control for age the gap mostly disappears), and no you can’t explain that away with slavery narratives because the Irish / Jews / Chinese were all oppressed for decades and are now all wealthier than the median white American. If anything the persistence of ADOS poverty and criminality suggests a qualitative difference between Bantus and other subspecies, which I’d hypothesize is the result of being earth’s only pureblooded humans sans Neanderthal admixture, but whatever its genesis the intractability of white-black outcome gaps has imbued America with a toxic racial dialectic wherein White Americans cycle perennially between hating and pitying and worshipping blacks, which in practice makes multiculturalism seem a lot less tenable than it actually is.
There exists a stark phenomenological and epistemic gap between men and women heavily mediated / stratified by status and neurotype (though in such a thoroughly and essentially sexed way any honest model treats sex as a load-bearing variable), which fatally impedes communicative fidelity and makes conflict between the sexes inevitable—see my General Theory For The Gender War for the deets.
Low status men are essentially and intractably a Girardian Scapegoat Class, and it’s more or less impossible for institutions and individuals not to dehumanize them; they aren’t afforded a crumb of epistemic standing or narrative dignity, and are aggressively moralized against for pursuing their interests. This is wholly eugenic and will never be reversed because midstatus men will always and everywhere be rewarded sexually / socially for presenting as high status and ideally internalizing that self-concept—a dynamic that creates a functionally inescapable collective action problem and makes any male self-advocacy tautologically self-detonating.
High status men are a Schmittian Sovereign Class, and in practice enjoy tremendous leeway for cruelty and perfidy. The vast majority of people (women and low status men especially) unconsciously rewrite their entire ontology around everything a high status man does being Good, and the most agreeable female neurotypes also lose the ability to meaningfully consent to sex when behind closed doors with such fellows, even when happily partnered.
More broadly speaking most women (as well as very low status and feminine men) do not have “agency” in the bounded diachronic masculine sense because of A) the relational and affective nature of feminine phenomenology, which makes women drift towards consensus by default; B) feminine risk aversion + lower variance in g + significantly lower preponderance of Dark Triad tendencies, which combine to make it far more stressful / cognitively onerous for girls to pursue unconventional or asymmetric life strategies; C) female reputational permeability, which ensures that even when maximally high status women have no choice but to maintain a deeply internalized strategic opacity and clean moral slate lest they grow despised and distrusted even by other women a la Hillary Clinton. Women are enslaved to affect and fashion and vibes, and a high status man conversant in such domains will usually find it trivial to manipulate them or constrain their freedom of action.
“Civilization” is at its core a compact between midstatus and high status men, in which the latter sacrifice some of their material / sexual surplus for security and legitimacy. Their surplus gets locked in / moralized / obfuscated via institutions and in exchange midstatus men are extended property rights and law and a vastly higher floor for sexual dignity than they’d ever get in a Dunbar-sized tribal band—primarily at the expense of low status men, who are now severely limited in their ability to secure their position / legacy through theft and rape and raiding, and as such are liable to become a major civilizational threat if not properly expunged in war / seafaring or gaslit with religion / egalitarian bromides or pacified with porn / video games. Women are functionally a resource and not really agents.
The relative proportion of men who are Low / Mid / High status is not at all fixed and fluctuates constantly (particularly between Low and Mid) in accordance with ecology, technology, and social convention. The paleolithic default is for 60% of men to be low status nonprocreative incels, and you see the same sort of ratio in societies with rampant polygamy, which of course explains why in agricultural and early industrial societies normative monogamy is such a hugely adaptive social technology—it turns the better sort of low status men midstatus, securing their labor and manpower for higher order civilizational goals while slashing the incel rate down to only 15-30% (and in midcentury America even lower than that). Meanwhile late industrial societies naturally experience a reversion to paleolithic bifurcation as a consequence of algorithmically stratified sexual markets / shifts toward a frictionless hypermodern oral culture / safe and ubiquitous birth control / porn and widespread endocrinological damage suppressing youth sex drives—all of which are profoundly robust developments given the aforementioned collective action problem disincentivizing midstatus male coordination and in some sense precluding the phenomenon’s basic legibility in respectable circles, hence Gen Z’s rapidly skyrocketing incel rate (currently 30-40%, up from ~20% in recent decades)
In an ultra-safe (and nearly post-scarcity) ecology without frequent bloody wars as a low status male release valve—in which God died generations ago and postwar Straussianism has long been rendered untenable by digital blackpill merchants—the only solution to the Incel Question is buying them off with porn and weed and video games in a way that locks a significant chunk of men into a lifestyle of unproductive parasitism (already a visible trend in Gen Z, where as a rule women are wildly outperforming men). In practice this will cause more and more women to embrace lesbianism / asexual biddyhood / polygynous concubinage, shredding the TFR and precipitating an inexorable demographic collapse in all populations that aren’t overtly prioritizing fertility. Meanwhile young men will be drawn increasingly to civic disengagement / malicious compliance / stochastic terrorism.
More authoritarian neurotypes will prove most resistant to this phenomenon and are likely to procreate at a disproportionately high rate. This in conjunction with the most fundamental contradiction of civilization—to wit, that Enlightenment principles yield far and away the highest ratio of midstatus / low status men in the short term, which makes said values game theoretically optimal and thus globally inevitable in a mid-industrial textual culture even though they clearly run counter to our unshakeable tendency to afford narrative / epistemic dignity primarily on the basis of status and ingroup vs. outgroup identity (and almost totalistically so in an oral culture without any meaningful danger or want)—and aforementioned collective action problems foreclosing the possibility of internal reform make the eventual collapse of liberal democracy in our lifetime a virtual inevitability.
This collapse almost certainly can’t be prevented—but it can be forestalled and its worst externalities hugely mitigated if we manage to address the country’s three most salient yet still solvable issues: dopamine traps, gerontocracy, and racial strife.
Dopamine traps are already being taken care of naturally by upper class parents curbing screen time etc., but in practice this will just make Gen Alpha’s agency / executive functioning even more asymmetrically distributed than Gen Z’s and create a society of Eloi and Morlocks we probably want to avoid. Short form video apps should therefore be banned as part of a public health crusade, and ideally you’d also extend this to porn, but stochastic terrorism will quintuple if you take that road without also incinerating Tinder and that clearly isn’t going to happen, so for now just go after TikTok and be content with marginal improvement.
Gerontocracy is almost impossible to combat directly on account of elderly voter propensity, but to my mind the key thing is for us Millennials to prevent Gen X from sticking around in the same way Boomers did. They almost certainly won’t on account of their paltry numbers and anti-institutional ethos, but either way it’s essential we stop thinking of gerontocracy purely in terms of octogenarians. In Classical Rome it was widely understood that a man’s overall competence peaks in his 40s, and it’s only because of credentialism and regulatory capture (plus widely accessible amphetamines / TRT) that it’s drifted so high in the modern era. And most of that system will be pretty hard to dismantle, but the modern credentialing regime is far and away the easiest target so I suggest we start by hammering that.
The racial issue is mythopoetic—you need to end the white-black grievance cycle, and the only way to do that is by obliterating white guilt once and for all with a Reparations “Poison Pill” extended provisionally and in exchange for a significant expansion of the carceral state / totalistic dismantling of affirmative action. Get the luminaries of Black America to sign it in a nationally televised ceremony and let it remain a fiscal hairshirt on the national budget for a decade or two, and when they come back asking for more eventually just watch how flinty those squishy suburban women are suddenly—which is when we push for devolution.
Low skilled immigration is good; flood the country with more Uber drivers and smexy castizas. High skilled immigration is fine in slack labor markets but you really don’t want any of it at all in an epoch where AI is shredding entry level tech jobs—especially when they basically all come from the same country, which in practice just creates racially nepotistic cartels in key industries and precipitates both the rise of a counter-elite and far more destructive forms of ethnic animus; today the Brahmin Question is exactly what the Jewish Question was 50 years ago.
Speaking of Jews—in the twentieth century they had a tendency to be paranoid and nepotistic and often deployed the Holocaust Card in a dishonorable way, but a combination of neocon overreach / shiksappeal miscegenation / October 7th has eroded their power such that at this point they actually kind of just are a put upon minority again, and fully aware they can no longer act unilaterally and depend on the increasingly precarious goodwill of flyover chuds to keep Israel viable… which ofc means their skills / resources / cute attractive women are up for grabs now, and remaining antisemitic in that situation kind of just makes you Hiroo Onoda tbh.
The primary goal of American foreign policy needs to be maintaining the dollar as international reserve currency so we can export inflation to our vassal states in Europe / Asia / Latin America. And we need to be utterly ruthless about that, but basically everything else is a huge waste of treasure (though a war over Taiwan just as an incel release valve might actually be the one solitary thing that can save liberal democracy long term). Other than that annexing Canada / Australia / NZ should for sure be a long term goal; it will be quite a lot easier than people think.
The Tom Swift Academy is devoted to implementing Point 15. Even while wider society slides into Paleolithic oblivion, I do believe it is both feasible and worthwhile to reverse these trends at a local scale, preferably within those flyover states where the cost of living is still bearable. Creating alternatives to the degenerate oral monoculture will be a necessity if a high level of technological development is to be maintained. It is unlikely that artificial intelligence will replace the more physical aspects of technical careers, as it tends to perform poorly when confronted directly with the caprice and variety of real world environments. Therefore, in order to build a corpus of engineers necessary to colonize other planets, or even to develop fusion power, it will be of paramount importance to promote a positive technical culture within the middle ranks of men .
https://swiftenterprises.substack.com/p/tom-swift-academy
I would disagree with Point 18, as low skilled immigration tends to disincentivize automation, as well as promote agricultural consolidation. As is demonstrated in the history of medieval Europe and the American North, labor shortages are one of the most potent drivers of technological development. This issue will be explored further in an essay regarding the still-birth of Greco-Roman industrial technology. In the Nebraskan context, low-skilled migration has led to the expansion of modern-day latifundae in the form of agribusinesses at the expense of small, independent farmers. This has led to most Nebraskans moving to the suburbs and becoming button-clicking drones, abandoning their traditional way of life.
This whole post could have been written in one word: nihilism. The rest is just pseudo-intellectual bloviating.