the fall of rome 2.0

life in the ruins of a civilization

when rome receded, europe saw a long period of people living in the ruins of a more advanced civilization.

bridges fell and no one knew how to fix them. stone homes were repaired with thatch. medicine and technology were lost. crop yields fell. sanitation became once more vile. social and cultural cohesion disintegrated. the dark ages decended.

"that could never happen again" seems a popular view, but is it true?

to be sure, in modern times, outside knowledge like "how to make a cell phone" will be preserved by global communication and markets, but if we're going to be seriously honest, the tech is probably already lost in the euro zone.

do you think the whole continent together still has the capability to design and manufacture a remotely competitive (much less innovative) modern smartphone and the software to run it?

is there any company in the euro zone still able to design a cutting-edge 3nm cell phone processor or write the software? (you could make an argument for ARM, but that's UK and owned by softbank)

outside of automotive and a small smattering of pharma, what does the euro zone innovate in anymore? their aggregate per capita real GDP stopped growing 18 years ago and has been propped up by a few standouts like germany, austria, and tax havens ireland and switzerland and much of ireland is just “amazon and google run revenue through here to avoid taxes” rather than any actual local growth.

a fair bit of europe, especially the south, has been in meaningful decline for decades. per capita GDP is shrinking.

here’s aggregate growth since pre-crash 2008.

(for comparison, real per capita GDP in the us is up ~25% in this period)

while western europe stagnates, you can see the east exploding in growth. to be sure, some of this is because the base was so low after the ravages of soviet rule, but in many such places the output is rising to rich-world levels.

poland is about to overtake japan. (so is lithuania)

and there is a serious and poignant lesson here.

once the EU was the cradle of the enlightenment and the industrial revolution.

today, western europe punches massively below its weight in most intellectual, scientific, and technological disciplines.

they have missed ALL the big inventions of the last 20 years from smartphones to internet and networking to social media to AI. their "tech champions" have all fallen to the wayside. name 3 globally relevant internet companies from europe besides spotify (which was and remains a "me too" product with little to no innovation involved).

europe is a lovely continent with many pleasant places to live and visit. in many regions, quality of life remains good. but for how long?

many would argue (and i would be hard-pressed to disagree) that most of europe are doing their best to undermine this as well through the large-scale import of low-trust high-violence unassimilatable gimmie-grants pillaging their over-generous social welfare systems and cultures alike.

this is a savage stressor to pile atop an already failing economic system.

crime surges, culture falls, trust is lost, and civilizations get trapped in their own social safety nets and drowned by them.

the data on this is stark

the lack of employment starker still

(for perspective, this figure is about 55% of overall population (all americans) in the US)

and the crime data starkest of all (and rapidly getting worse)

nothing about this is sustainable.

in the end, ideas like “replacement migration as a solution to declining and aging populations” will crush the EU like a bug because this is not “replacement,” it’s effacement, a wholesale destruction of a culture already once subjugated and now being subjugated again.

the simple fact is this: western high-trust structures and golden rule begotten golden ages are not, as many who have long lived under them have come to presume, the norm or some base state of the world. they are tiny, outlandish experiments in human flourishing that have been successfully practiced by a vanishingly few people in only a small number of places and times. poverty is the base state of man, escape takes systems and efforts, and even many who succeed then succumb to the poverty trap of large-scale welfare statism as they forget the virtues that in the first place elevated them.

the “cannot pass the marshmallow test” low-trust cultures do not want to be “just like us” if given a chance.

they think people who think so are stupid and weak, easy prey for the taking of treasure and power.

they perceive generosity as fear, an invitation to further depredations.

this is the state of nature outside the western social contract.

the lion does not appease the hyena and convince him to go away and be nice by sharing a bit of the antelope.

he just attracts more hyaenidae.

they do not want to be lions, they just want what the lions have.

in a great many global cultures historically and even today, truly vile (by western standards) crimes like rape are just seen as normal. this is more standard than not globally.

you seriously think these are the new doctors and lawyers and engineers come to prop up the engines of progress?

the evidence seems to argue otherwise.

so what's the future here?

what are the lessons?

eastern europe and the baltics seem to be thriving, but the euro zone looks like stagnation and decline. the bitter harvest of high tax, low-dynamism over-regulated social democracy playgroup has come to full flower and erased the possibility of innovation or even sustaining what has come before.

trans-nationalism and globalism have become a civilizational suicide pact with the UN, EU, and EC handing out kool-aid.

it’s neither subtle nor accidental; it’s black letter enumerated program.

the barbarians came to the gate, and the cities let them in and gave them they keys the granary.

it’s worth remembering that the term “vandalism” comes from the vandal tribe that overran rome.

it’s coming again in serious force across the continent.

a fact fascinating to me is that basically everyone agrees with this formulation:

and yet when it comes to “doing something about it,” so many stand idle and even offended by even the idea of “strong men” (and women) much less the deeds they must perform in order to create the good times that everyone craves.

i suspect this is at once both causal and predictive.

here is polish MEP dominik tarczyński. you can imagine how this goes over in brussels, but the simple fact is that he’s expressing a sentiment about which basically any pre 1960’s westerner would have said “well yes, that’s obvious” and that today elicits something between “the vapors” and howls of other-identification justified by shrieks of “racist!” and “literally worse than hitler!” for the common-sense desire to defend a valuable and thriving high-trust culture from invasion.

watch it for yourself. see how you react.

to my mind, if this seems offensive to you, perhaps the real question is “are you sure you know which cohort of the cycle above you inhabit?” because maybe you are fooling yourself.

based on growth rates, it’s pretty clear which side of the cycle the east and west of europe respectively inhabit. the east is strong people making good times. the west are weaklings giving the game away for another season of getting to be in power.

like it or lament it, the scoreboard is the scoreboard.

it is in the nature of weak men (and, again, women) to make up justifications to vilify strong men (and women). there is always a song and dance, a pretext to claim that weakness is strength and submission freedom.

and they are always in denial about this fact.

that’s where hard times come from.

people may not enjoy admitting it, but history is as clear as it is unforgiving upon this topic, and “reality denial” is not a strategy.

in the face of assault, either internal or external, a society must either come to accpet such ideas and to rise and defend itself or it’s going to get conquered.

the EU was already conquered once by european transnational government and nanny-state social democracy metastasizing into incentive-sapping cancer. the regulatory and tax burden is more than can be borne even with massive subsidy from the US on both defense and healthcare technology and drugs and dependence upon the rest of the world to innovate.

this has left it ill-equipped to defend itself from its own governments (upon which so many depend) and those they are importing wholesale to replace and ravage the locals so that the folks currently in power may continue their rule. they have lost the ability to convince and now seek to compel. importing captive voters who will act as both loyal base and shock troops to keep everyone busy is all part of the game.

they are done talking. now comes the fist.

they would rather rule over authoritarian ashes than give up control.

western european leaders are doubling down on censorship and suppression of speech and freedom, banning political parties and leaders, and making dissent a crime.

no prison for rape but jail time for making memes about how unjust this is is an astonishing outcome and should really be causing alarm bells about into preciely what maw the weak leaders are about to feed the populace.

there are an awful lot of folks seeking to stand up to this, but the state is arrayed against them in full panoply and power.

nastiness is brewing.

i struggle to see any real path forward here that does not pass through either outright revolution or a dark age of collapse.

so much of the EU is just paint over rust.

i honestly do not know if it has the structural integrity to survive this.

has rome 2.0 in fact already fallen?

will the last consul out please turn out the lights?

“cattus malefactorus maximus”