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And so we have come to this. Today I shall post a screed. Always wanted to, you know?
But let's be clear that this chapter is a work in progress and also just... I think I get to use the word 'rancorous'. It's also, independently, a complete hot mess.
After some back and forth I decided to keep chapters on schedule rather than taking a week off for a re-write. So, welcome in, mind your step and the pylons etc. You've been warned.
Oh and if you are just now dropping in and find something objectionable in the post below, ha ha, despair, for you have fallen for my devious and excessively-elaborate device: By the rules of this site you now have to go back and read everything I said in previous chapters to make sure I haven't qualified the matter in some way before you get to complain.
In which case, chapter one is here. ;)
0109 - Beautiful Lie
Bear with me for a minute.
Suppose some aliens come to Earth and offer our governments advanced weaponry in exchange for a few million humans to go back to their world and do the jobs they'd rather not. Or maybe they just have a major labor deficit and need extra workers for the simple tasks. Doesn't really matter.
Your government's hands are tied here. If they don't take the deal they'll be replaced by one that did. So one day a bunch of soldiers with guns shows up in your neighbourhood and herds everyone first onto trucks, then rockets. After a long voyage through space you arrive in the new world and it must be said that these aliens are simply bewildering to you. They're clearly much smarter in ways you can only even begin to grasp. They come off as absurdly punctual, insisting on showing up to work and meetings to the second, which you're only able to match by great and inconvenient effort. Their system of speaking and writing is incredibly complex such that only the very smartest humans are ever capable of mastering it. They seem unbelievably wise, often doing things as a matter of course which only reveal themselves to you as the right decisions months or years later.
Their society has almost no crime. They generate astonishing amounts of material goods and have no problem providing you with a higher standard of living than you'd ever have been likely to receive on your home planet. You're set to doing work that they suppose humans can do well-enough. So long as they're patient and explain your task fully it's mostly not a problem for you. In fact you're so smart that they give you a job in one of their core cities on a day-worker basis rather than being confined to the human containment zones where most are kept. They treat you with a degreed measure of respect, though filtered through enough condescension that there are days where you feel less like part of the team than like some sort of mascot.
It's an odd experience to be sure. And deep down you have to admit that it's a bit embarrassing to return from their dazzling metropolis to the fenced-in human areas, which by comparison are run-down, filthy, crime-ridden, and dysfunctional in all the ways that human cities are. It's hard to say, on balance, whether your situation on the aliens' world is overall an improvement from where you were before. You're safer and healthier and better-fed and cared-for, with access to all kinds of pleasures and entertainments unknown on Earth. But you also know that you, and your children, will never really have a place here except as dependents bordering on livestock. (The rumours you keep hearing about human zoos definitely don't help with this impression.) And no matter what else may be said for it, you hate being told what to do all the time, especially when this contradicts your instincts. Well, it is what it is. There is no way back, after all.
Only it's not long before the aliens figure out how to automate most of the stuff that they initially brought the humans there to do. Meanwhile the human population has exploded vastly beyond the original numbers which were imported and shows no signs of slowing down. What do you suppose will happen next?
Obviously the aliens see no need to include you in their deliberations. You hear bits and pieces. Many of them agree that you should all be sent back to Earth, even though it no longer has a place for you. Some have grown fond and think that you should be kept around in protective custody, even if they aren't so subtle in their implications that it would probably be a good idea to introduce certain measures of population control. Others, though, somehow arrive at the most outlandish position imaginable...
Back now to our Tidan narrative, where we'll pick up in the place we left off at the end of last chapter.
Something truly incredible happens in a place called Hajnal (that's 'HAI-nahl'; the j should be treated as an i) on the Northwestern fringe of Tidus's grand archipelago. The people there, descended substantially from the race of kings, reach heights of achievement hitherto unheard of in human history. Oddly enough the key to their success seems to be that they care less about their extended families and more about everyone else. To understand this let's first look at how things work elsewhere.
Far to the south of Hajnal, in the lands of the darkest-skinned Tropicals, society often works as follows. Each man is beholden to his relatives to the precise degree that he has resources to contribute. If a man comes upon a small amount of food, he is expected to share it with his immediate family. If he comes upon a windfall of resources, he is expected to share it out among his more extended family as far as it will go. And if he doesn’t go looking for them, they’ll come to him when they hear about it and ask, and he will acquiesce. This is on the one hand a very resilient social structure. Each cares for each other, and the great fortunes of one are dispersed among the many. Such a people can rapidly spread across an entire island chain. But on the other hand there’s a problem with it, which is that it doesn’t scale vertically.
Suppose a Tropical man comes up with a new idea to improve crop yields. Suppose he saves up money (already difficult with so many relatives coming to him for help all the time) to purchase the necessary equipment. Suppose he spends an entire season working much harder than usual to bring his plans to fruition. When the harvest comes, he may even have a gorgeous bumper crop, more wealth than anyone in his family has ever seen before — but as soon as the word spreads, here come the open palms and mouths, helping themselves to the fruit of his labour until he’s back where he started, without even enough left over to reïnvest and do it again.
Maybe this irks him a bit but you might be surprised at how little. Their phenomenology is different from yours and mine. He didn't really expect to keep it anyway. The kicker here is that it didn’t even avail him of almost any direct reproductive advantage either and so the impulse is unlikely to be passed on. Rather, these Tropicals prefer to hang around and see what opportunities might come to them, exploit those opportunities, and count on their kin doing enough of the same that they live long enough to reproduce. Which is to say that their instincts do not incline them toward such profitable long-term thinking in the first place. (The urge to organize and dominate others by force is a different trait and yes they do plenty of this along tribal lines.)
A bit to the east, where the skins are not so dark and the people look a bit more like Hajnalis, this tendency is less-pronounced. The natives of this region are still very clan-oriented by Hajnali standards but less-so than the darkest Tropicals. As such, they’ve been able to evolve the tendency toward enterprise, even leveraging their close family ties very strongly, since in their culture’s atmosphere of rampant exploitation and dishonesty it is only family which may be trusted (or else agents who are in such abject submission by threat of line-death that they dare not but be faithful). But, these people leverage those family ties perhaps a bit too closely, often being prone to, e.g., marrying their first cousins to keep wealth within the clan, which is dysgenic over enough iterations, and are extremely reluctant to engage in joint ventures with non-kin. This puts quite a damper on progress.
I'll note that Hajnali societies function differently-
But first allow me a moment of humility. I sense that it would be wrong to speak authoritatively on this subject and won't pretend to understand what has happened here. These complexities are way beyond me, ranging up into altitudes far too alpine for mine own little ape brain. Most of us see a flash of colour here; the suggestion of a line there. I think can glimpse a little bit of a whole picture, though, and what I'm looking at terrifies me badly enough that I can't stand to remain silent. So please have patience as I attempt to gesture toward a few facets of this people's unique development. I am attempting to describe; not to injure.
I think a lot of it has to do with the terrible plague that scours the region typified by the previous chapter. This wipes out so much of the proto-Hajnali population (and helpfully their neighbours as well, who might otherwise have extirpated them) that a prolonged, sustained, multi-generational boom time springs up thanks to all the social vacancies left by the dead. Recall how in the last chapter the son of the chandler did well for himself to be content with his place and not too ambitious: Well, not anymore! There's high ground (both metaphorical and literal) for the taking and all sorts of rapid social changes happening which encourages upstarts. Men of the lower reaches begin to gamble on advancement more often and, much more often, win. The optimal level for trait ambition has shifted.
Another obvious factor would seem to be their peculiar religion. For spiritual reasons Hajnalis stop marrying their cousins, or at least do it a whole lot less. They also tend to marry later in life and have fewer children, investing more in each. They marry outside their immediate circles much more often than others, partly for practical purposes — people in an area tend to be related, and their religion forbids them from marrying even god-family, which compounds the problem — and partly because again, per their religion, they have come to see those of other clans as belonging to the same identity group. Not revolting aliens, but suitable business partners, and even mates!
This part is more tenuous, but I think a further upshot of their religion is that they become psychologically-shaped to look to their own selves first as the source of their problems; that is, to be self-critical rather than blaming their enemies for failure, and to confess their shortcomings to others. Not perfectly, but very strongly, relative to other peoples, and this is prominent in the historical record. They also develop an extraordinarily strong internal capacity for guilt. I’d like to contrast this guilt with shame, of which everyone else in the world has plenty. Shame comes from without; guilt comes from within, and is far more rare. The distinction is between feeling guilty about doing something wrong simply having done it, versus feeling shame about it when caught and exposed. Yes, other peoples do experience this, but I'm suggesting that it's a matter of frequency.
Others have suggested that peculiarities of the proto-Hajnali manorial agricultural system played a big role too, and while I can see why they think so, I don't have much to add. [I should like to expand upon this in the next edition, but for now can suggest that you read https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/.]
The point is that among all these factors and any amount of happenstance, the Hajnalis end up conspicuously different from every other people on the planet.
Surging with social mobility, freed of the inability to coöperate across kin boundaries, and buöyed by high mutual social trust, the Hajnalis wield almost unimaginable capacity for joint enterprise and coördination. A true middle class springs up as never before. We should take a moment to consider what this suggests: Traits which we might describe as noble, rather than base, proliferate among the Hajnali middle to an unprecedented degree. The people on the Slopes and even many Shoal-dwellers are newly-empowered to convert cognitive superiority into reproductive advantage. Large sections of Hajnali society become capable of participating in government, including self-government, where their ancestors had been much more dependent upon organization from above. And with these traits come the inclination to liberty, previously the near-exclusive province of the nobles.
[This whole paragraph is scheduled for demolition because I really can't substantiate it and may be giving in to what amounts to prejudice; even so I have left it for you, the reader, in case you should have input.] We have established how the Tropicals never really developed much in the way of enterprise, and how the lighter-skinned ones in-between got caught in the trust gap and so found themselves limited. Another civilization, farther to the east, ended up about as intelligent as Hajnalis if not a little more. The major difference, though, was that those island chains tended to end up under the rule of a single Emperor, who controlled society all the way down and had a way of executing anyone beneath him who showed too much invention or initiative, as well as their entire extended families, sometimes out to a really staggering breadth. These people became optimized for submission, kissing up to authority, and rigid adherence to official dogma no matter how crazy it might obviously be (指鹿為馬). At least outwardly. Inwardly, they're primed for subtle deception and the manipulation of institutions such that they can advance themselves without attracting ire.
Not so in Hajnal, where even the greatest (and here shall I use three quotes) '''empire''' is deeply balkanized and faces much internal competition. City-states and small collections of islands face centuries of internecine warfare, where innovation is seized upon readily even as the (comparative) impulse to mass-self-rule comes into its own. A series of terrible wars is fought, ostensibly over religious differences, but actually over this precise issue: To what degree should a man in a society, from the King all the way down to the head of a family, submit to overarching authority (whether religious or legal) versus piloting his own path? And it's the northwestern fringe which lands on the latter side and so becomes Hajnal. In these societies, the most perceptive, ambitious, industrious, inventive, iconoclastic, etc. people become selected for as nowhere else on Tidus, and such traits proliferate.
Some of them specialize so hard into this path that their own societies kick them out and they sail across the vast ocean to the other side of the planet to found even more extremely-liberal societies on another, distant archipelago, where they exterminate or displace the extant primitive natives in a staggeringly one-sided process. We'll come back to them (these winners) later.
All of this general liberalism is perhaps understandable: Have not these men grow up in the shadow of hereditary nobility and religious institutions which insist to the last that there's a fundamental difference between types of people, and that one must above all else know one’s place? The servants, it had been said, were as dependent upon their masters as the masters were upon the servants. But hadn’t recent developments just disproven that? And if it hadn’t been true for the Hajnalis, why should they think it true for anyone else?
Even their lower classes are ruthlessly selected for noble traits due to a shift to an industrial economy, e.g. being capable of showing up on time and staying at one job. Those who can't do such things fail to make the cut and are replaced by those who can. And centuries go by where the most violently-impulsive of each generation are culled by incarceration and/or execution. Before long the Hajnali middle classes have several notable traits which are mostly- if not entirely-unique to them compared to the Slope-dwellers of other civilizations, taken generally. Allow me to offer a few for illustrative purposes.
- Punctuality
- Self-criticism
- Strong work ethic
- Emphasis on the nuclear family
- Low time preference, i.e. delayed gratification for greater gains later
- (Ergo) Long-term planning
- Prone to giving the benefit of the doubt
- Belief in the fundamental equality of man
- General honesty and willingness to contradict authority
- Willingness to make small-scale personal sacrifices for the greater good; ingrained desire to stop at crosswalks, rewind their video cassettes, return their shopping carts, and wait politely in line, e.g.
These are tremendous advantages and Hajnali society undergoes innumerable rapid changes. Individual rights, limited states, representative government, and so much else. The process kicks on and on into ever-higher gear. Unbelievable technological advancements are made and pretty soon the Hajnalis own the entire planet, fly through the air like gods, even walk on the moons. If any non-Hajnali peoples are under attack by Hajnalis, their only hope is that some other group of Hajnalis tries to stop them.
They start draining Tidus' ocean! They build titanic sea-walls to keep the water out, expanding their islands to hitherto-unprecedented sizes, capable of supporting unbelievable numbers of souls on these great new plains, haunted as they are by the threat of breakdown in wall-maintenance-capability (honestly English I must insist that this should be but one word).
They set up colonies pretty much everywhere. Their religious belief that all men are fundamentally equal gets uncomfortable at times in the face of apparent evidence to the contrary, and so they tell themselves that the solution is to spread their religion; or at least we may observe that they use this as the pretext for gainfully organizing the primitives encountered in far-off lands. For centuries they stand astride the world as a colossus, in many senses uniting it for the first time, and the idea that anyone might ever dislodge them from this position is nigh-unthinkable.
This story probably sounds triumphant, jubilant, perhaps even glowing! But it does not have a happy ending.
These Hajnalis become so affluent, so intoxicated by the fruits of their insistence that all men are created equal, that they lose sight of certain absolutely vital truths, which in time proves to be their very undoing. Some Hajnali nations had imported large numbers of tropical slaves to work their fields, managing the obvious social conflicts with what amounts to segregation. (The tropicals cannot generally organize and execute modern agriculture for reasons we have seen, but they can perform the labour well-enough provided that someone smarter puts them to it.) Others controlled large overseas colonies with non-Hajnali populations numbering into the hundreds of millions. This was in many ways a great deal for both sides, as those areas were rapidly brought into modernity with all its blessings, but the Hajnalis, ever self-critical, cannot seem to help but ask themselves: Given that everyone else is just like us except for circumstance, don't they deserve to be free, too? (For whatever reason as I type this I am visited upon by the mental image of a little blonde girl crying as her balloon escapes into the sky. And no, I'm actually not making fun of her. I feel it in my chest.)
To be sure there are any number of cynical motivations for pushing this narrative — by this point most of Hajnal consists of democracies, and championing the rights of the downtrodden proves to be an amazing platform for turning out the vote — but I feel the need to emphasize how much of it is nakedly sincere. Hajnalis are not only being crafty when they react in horror against the idea that some people can just be worse; can even be born that way; contemplation of the notion sincerely breaks their hearts. (Those who didn’t to at least some approximation evolve this instinct didn’t make as good use of Hajnali hypercoördination and so missed the boat.) Part of being a good Hajnali is the instinct that merely believing the best of others, simply giving them a chance, will be enough to fix them and make them a valuable member of society. Questioning the matter is severely frowned upon and must be trained out of children. And, again, this has been working just fine for many generations, while surrounded by fellow Hajnalis. Indeed, these feelings are most prevalent among the descendants of the farthest, remotest Northern fringe — those people as geographically insulated from non-Hajnalis as possible.
Hajnalis, you see, develop a sort of cognitive, phenomenological blind spot here perforce! It can be worked around, but only by great labour, say at book-length, and even then I have to imagine that about 80% of them still can't quite bring themselves to connect the dots — but I digress.
Rather.
Finally — and look I am admittedly being cavalier in the extreme about the actual chronology here — Hajnal ends up fighting not one, but two cataclysmic civil wars which by implication engulf the entire planet. Fueled by their titanic social coördination and unprecedented industrial and technological capacities, up to and including world-ending wunderwaffen, these leave the Hajnali elite just absolutely thoroughly traumatized and in doubt of their own virtue. "If we did this," the thinking seems to run, "Who are we to rule?" Which impression is not helped by the grim reality that many of the greatest, bravest, most noble men and sons of the aristocracy lose their lives in the process and are no longer around to push back. Which does manage to accomplish quite the ripple in the gene pool.
The technological process culminates: Human warfare is no longer beneficial for both parties involved. Arguably, for any party involved! And, so, as with one of the great bomber-planes of that conflict, packed as it is with beautiful, brave young men yet nevertheless shattered by flak cannons, Hajnali society suddenly finds itself in the most dizzying, terrifying, tail-spin of human history...
More-rapidly than would have been conceivable even a generation or two previously, Hajnalis abdicate their role as the leaders and custodians of mankind. Colonies are released to self-rule with many descending into post-apocalyptic famine and barbarism, even cannibalistic horror, especially when they eject their local Hajnali elites. In the Hajnali homelands, local populations of tropicals are fully enfranchised. And among Hajnali elites, an obsession develops with tearing down their own cultural heritage and replacing it with something more universal; less 'ethnocentric'.
But allow me to reverse and change course a little. A bit before those wars, the Hajnali nation which was soon to become preëminent fought its own disastrous civil war when the elite of the industrialized north sought to cement its dominance over the agrarian south. Naturally enough this war was fought in the name of safeguarding the rights and dignity of all men, e.g., the imported tropicals. Again, particularly with Hajnalis, this never fails to be an effective rallying cry, even if many of the elites behind the war demonstrably didn't believe it and thought the tropicals should all be sent back. Regardless the political ramifications of the northern victory spread across all of Hajnal and indeed the globe. The message to world elites was clear: Either you agree that all people are the same, or else we have the moral right, and perhaps not-so-subtly even the obligation, to replace you with someone who does.
Let's stick with that same (enormous) island for a bit. Segregation is phased out. The previously-captive tropicals are released from their containment zones and soon they have spread all over the place. Unfortunately for all involved, this does not result in the happy, integrated society which was ostensibly the goal. Instead it plays out in myriad horrible ways, of which I will, even as my heart is hammering against its cage, restrain myself to enumerating only a few.
The first of these can't genuinely be called the tropicals' fault. As we have seen, a man is happy in, and contributes to, his society only insofar as he understands that society to be the sort which generates a man like himself. The brute fact is that the more genetically-diverse a society becomes, the less a man will invest himself in it. People stop talking to their neighbours; stop frequenting social clubs; stop or greatly reduce volunteering and charitable giving; participate less in civic functions and organizations, up to and including voting. Social cohesion declines precipitously. This is sad, but inevitable in any racially-diverse society without a very strong shared ideology to bind all members, which was in this case absent and perhaps even infeasible.
But as to the rest, well, it's a matter of empirical fact that on average the tropicals differ greatly from the Hajnalis when it comes to:
- Intelligence
- Impulse control
- Aesthetic preferences
- Aggression
- Promiscuity
- Sexual fidelity
- Parental investment
- Punctuality
- Industriousness
- Long-term planning
- Honesty
- Far too many more things to mention
And look this is obviously going to lead to problems. But the Hajnalis, self-critical to a fault and committed to the belief that there are no substantial evolutionary differences among populations, invent a new way of making sense of it. "We weren't discriminating against them because they're worse," they decide; "They're worse because we discriminated against them."
This Lie is beautiful and soothes their painèd souls, but so oft does even a beautiful lie produce ugly outcomes. Most Hajnalis can perhaps be forgiven for overlooking the matter up until now; the simple fact is that most of them would only rarely have encountered tropicals, and those tropicals mostly would have been exceptional by default. (The defeated faction in the south, on the other hand, had a lot more exposure to tropicals and is very well-aware of these differences, which is rather one reason they were willing to fight that war. In other words, they already know what everyone else is about to discover!)
General social breakdown is the order of the day anywhere that substantial numbers of Tropicals settle. Whole neighbourhoods and even cities plummet into bleak dysfunction.
The Tropicals, being vastly more prone to both violent and property crime, radically reduce public safety. People become afraid to walk home at night or to let their children play in the street. Elderly widows live in fear of home invasions. Businesses are robbed much more often and have to invest in all sorts of new security measures, including plexiglass barriers between the customers and staff. Stores suffer greatly-increased theft and many shut down entirely. The police force is overwhelmed and often afraid to intervene. Public amenities such as bathrooms, mass transit, and libraries become filthy if not outright hazardous. Those non-Tropicals who can, flee. Tax revenue plummets. Infrastructure fails and cannot be repaired.
Nor is spared the education system. It is simply the on-average case that Tropical children can't keep up with Hajnalis, resulting in 'disparate outcomes'. This is intolerable to Hajnali society, which throws unbelievable amounts of resources at heavily-tropical schools (while maintaining a false narrative that the opposite is happening). When that doesn't work, the curriculum is dumbed down again and again, trying to find some level where tropicals can reach parity. Pretty soon the IQ needed to graduate university is lower than it had been to graduate secondary school only a generation before, and both diplomas rapidly lose signaling value. Special programs for talented children, designed to boost the best and brightest that they might shine harder and benefit society, fail to find enough qualified tropical children and so are canceled as 'inequitable'. The Hajnalis just cannot bring themselves to admit the problem. The only acceptable explanation is that 'we evil racist Hajnalis must be holding the tropicals back in other ways'. Do Tropicals do worse on tests? WELL then, the tests are obviously the problem and must be 'fixed' or else eliminated entirely.
Tropical children disrupt classes far more often and make schools far less safe. They reach puberty earlier and are greatly more prone to violent confrontations, including with teachers. Those teachers are caught up in a bind: Tropical children are more often in need of discipline, but that will show up in the numbers, and any teacher with a record of disproportionately-disciplining Tropical kids is likely to end up facing disciplinary measures themselves, if not forced into retirement or reassignment. Educational districts also panic about test scores and failure rates. If disproportionate numbers of Tropical children don't graduate, that will look very bad indeed. Therefore grade inflation and an attitude of 'just pass them' becomes standard. In any event both students and teachers begin to fear for their personal safety when showing up, and those who can surely do jump ship for private education. Which causes the state schools do even worse, &c.
Now as to academia, (and don't ask me how I know), early research initially more than confirms all of the above problems, but political capture by egalitarian forces puts a stop to that almost immediately, and pretty soon no one is willing to touch the subject with a ten-foot pole. (Coming up with plausible ways to blame Hajnalis instead is, of course, entirely-kosher; actually even mandatory, arguably.) Entire departments spring up, the sole purpose of which is to perpetuate anti-Hajnali grievance narratives and concoct explanations for the 'disparities' which, no matter what is tried, simply refuse to go away. Did giving Tropicals every resource and advantage under the sun manage to bring them up to Hajnali levels? No? Clearly this is evidence for pervasive systemic racism. Admissions are rigged too, and pretty soon Hajnali children find their path to higher education blocked, having been displaced by the children of Tropicals and the Tropically-admixed.
Genetic research, a field with truly transformative potential to shed light on and solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges, shoots itself in the foot at least three times and with both barrels because any results which might challenge the Lie will be radioactive to the career of anyone who gets too close. Indeed, whole databases of genetic knowledge are partitioned off from the public, with access allowed only to researchers who will first swear in writing that they will under no circumstances use the information therein to compare the outcomes of different ‘ancestral groups’. A few do persist, often mining the work of others to find their data, but these are ignored. After all, no institution of higher education will bear them, so logically they must be fringe pseudoscientists.
Politics is even worse. The only publicly-acceptable answer to why everything is going off the rails is that the Hajnalis, themselves, must be the problem. So hateful, and bigoted, and selfish, those Hajnalis! Diversity is strength, everyone seems to agree, though can only ever give the vaguest explanations as to how in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Those in any sort of position to do something about these problems get there, and only remain there, by dint of their willingness to insist that nothing of the sort is going on at all. "A good person wants to believe intrinsic differences aren’t real and goes out of his way to avoid noticing them. You seem eager to point them out, therefore you want to believe in them, therefore you are a bad person. Why should anyone even associate with you, let alone vote for you?”
All Hajnali society becomes reöriented around serving the Lie. It has become their first god. Authorities in some places first begin to hide crime statistics — despite a certain subset of Tropical men only being something like 6% of the population they commit the majority of murders; so if to a lesser degree rape, violent crime, theft, reckless driving, you name it — and then in many cases stop collecting stats entirely. Such ‘hate facts’ could after all fall into the hands of those who might attempt to challenge the Lie, i.e., those perceived as the greatest threat to the foundation of Hajnali civilization itself. And after all, what could be more hateful, more sinister, more despicable, than a Hajnali nationalist? And naturally enough any political movement which starts sounding too much that way will swiftly find itself frozen out by the rest, even including those which should ostensibly be its allies.
Government institutes a sweeping array of legislation and regulation to the effect that any public or private institution which generates disparate results between Hajnalis and tropicals had better shape up or face severe punishment. And since that's ... all of them ... you know it's going to be a real problem. Hajnali institutions fed with Tropicals are as petrol engines filled with kerosene. The entire thing begins to choke and shudder as the tipping point ratio is achieved. Pretty soon every level of society and government simultaneously starts shaking itself to pieces even as it predicates its policies on the assumption that none of the above is happening.
The social safety net, designed to work with highly-productive, highly-trustworthy Hajnalis in mind, becomes bent instead toward penalizing the productive and trustworthy in order to massively subsidize the behaviours and reproduction of the Tropicals. It takes many Hajnalis to pay into the system to cover the cost of even one Tropical, and rare indeed is the Tropical who ever manages to contribute more than he has taken. And this is before the externalities of reduced social trust, high crime, and property damage. The solution proffered by the managerial élite (in this case I am picturing her hair), of course, is to import more tropicals to pump numbers those numbers up! This is rather like replacing tired rowers on a galley with stone statues of rowers; each fails to contribute, makes the whole ship heavier, and generally compounds the problem. But so long as mentioning the issue is a great way to get thrown overboard...?
The entire society begins to slide. Forgive my wholesale slaughter of such metaphors, but as the pelican which lays the golden eggs steadily works its hardest to murder itself that it might be fed to the ‘less fortunate’ there is less and less to go around. Tensions start to rise as never before. Hajnali shoals are by now positively teeming with Tropical life, and due to institutional collapse the now-outnumbered Hajnalis suddenly find it difficult bordering on impossible to maintain those lovely sea-walls of theirs. The Tropicals have been raised on Hajnali rhetoric about how every single one of their problems is the fault of their hosts, and don't you just know that the very instant the government handouts stall out for the first time-
Perhaps better to leave off telling the story at this point.
For my money this is, in aggregate and by a very wide margin, the single most preposterous thing ever to transpire under the many moons of Tidus. Only, somehow, I'm not laughing. At any rate the metaphor is wearing thin and I'd like to take a step back and come at it from another angle in the next chapter. Oh, and the Hajnalis? No, I'm not about to recommend they start putting people in camps. Forget about the Hajnali homelands. They're toast. Any good man left there had better set his sights a whole lot higher if he would look for salvation, or else at least start working out.
No, I won't elaborate, yet. I do have some ideas about comparatively-amicable solutions, but look guys, the ship is by now dropping below the horizon. Okay maybe, but, I really don't think so. This isn't necessarily the terrible news you might think it is, but it is guaranteed to be nothing else if not extraordinarily terrible. Possibly the literal worst thing that has ever happened, or could. And it was all inevitable before you were even born.
Well now. Despite how I’ve been going on and on about differences between ancestral groups, this is only because it is necessary to establish before moving on, and because my heart hurts for those caught in this terrible genocidal trap who spend their entire lives being told they're the problem, and are good enough people to believe it and to feel guilty all the time. But, you know, what initially turned me from a good Tropical-lover to falling down the rabbit hole which eventually resulted in the production of this book is that I have always been far more interested in the unfolding of differences between the sexes. Yes that's right, next week we're going there, and yes I'm probably going to say exactly what you imagine I would. Or perhaps should? Either way I promise at least that I shall do it well, and with the entirety of my increasingly tachycardia-prone heart. Why, and even how else speak at all? <3
Next week: Gendered Politics
To end this chapter I’d like to propose that there are actually several mitigating circumstances which might allow us to excuse the blindness of the average Hajnali caught in this predicament.
For one, in the largest and most massively influential of Hajnali societies, there was a lot of early admixture, very frequently between masters and slaves, though at least in public all agreed that this was incredibly distasteful and a massive disservice to any offspring, who must find themselves phenomenologically unsuitable for either mode. As such, the Tropicals in that society have on average about twenty percent Hajnali genetics, which means that it's not uncommon to find some few at the high end of the quality distribution who are basically-capable of functioning at normal Hajnali levels. These, of course, also tend to have disproportionately-Hajnali ancestry, not that almost anyone is aware of, or discusses this. It's actually kind of funny; on any list of 'Tropicals' with major accomplishments, the vast majority of them can be counted upon to have at least one Hajnali grandparent, and just as often two or even three! Alas, as usual no one notices.
In that same vein, when well-to-do Hajnalis do encounter Tropicals in daily life, a heavy selection effect is at work. These are the Tropicals who have managed to rise above their fellows, up the slope, and make a living for themselves in better Hajnali neighbourhoods and places of business. So it's neither uncommon nor unreasonable for a Hajnali faced with the sort of realities enumerated above to react in disgust and think something like “But that’s not true! My friend so-and-so is a Tropical, and he’s just like me!” Well, yes. Or close enough to it, agreed. He's also not in any way representative of the average Tropical, either because he has high Hajnali admixture or because he was descended from the Ring class of some tropical society which, yes, can often approximate the Hajnali slope-dwellers and are more-likely to immigrate. Whereas Hajnalis who manage to end up in true-tropical areas often cannot even make sense of what they are seeing before their faces. So shockingly-cruel, so barbaric are the sights then before them set that they are liable to fall back on stock narratives about how it got so bad, such that they can perchance sleep at night.
Also, as mass media becomes a larger and larger influence on the Hajnali view of the world — more on this in another chapter — it has a tendency to only ever portray tropicals as long-suffering paragons of unfairly disadvantaged nobility. This is a symptom of the greater Hajnali commitment to believing the best of others, under the misguided conviction that doing so is all that will be required to bring out their inner Hajnali. And so, in practice, the overwhelming majority of tropicals ‘encountered’ by well-to-do Hajnalis are fictional constructs played by extremely-narrowly-selected actors with what we might call flattering and unrepresentative physiognomy (if I suppose I did say 'actors'). With these as the baseline image of what tropicals are like, what Hajnali could stoop to such a disgusting act as imagining that there are in fact enormous intrinsic differences? Indeed, to the degree that anyone does this in fiction, he may most-reliably be counted upon to occupy the role of the villain. (The joke here in French is that 'villain' equates to 'peasant' or 'country bumpkin', think 'village', which in our current cultural context works back around to 'white man'. Cannot make this stuff up.)
In all these ways and many more, a truly stupendous amount of resources is expended upon every Hajnali child from before his birth to ensure that he simply cannot see the world in any other way, and that he must look upon anyone who might with utmost contempt, loathing, and revulsion. Is it such a surprise that this works? Smarter dogs, it has been noted, are easier to train.
But still, it's right there all the time; why can't they see it?!
So here's my thought. Remember those peacocks? The Hajnalis who can only afford to live in Tropicalized areas are in a tough spot. They can’t do anything about the problem without going to ridiculously-circuitous lengths to talk about it, and then only under the most elaborate euphemisms ('I want to live somewhere with good schools'), or else be frozen out of the polite society of their betters. Meanwhile, those who can afford to live in nice gated communities higher up on the Slopes have no such problem. Despite what they profess even to themselves, they'll pay whatever it takes to make their home somewhere far removed from Tropicals. Even so it pleases them to gush on about how wonderful the tropicals are and how really it must be the fault of those lower-status Hajnalis that such differences persist.
And so it is that insisting upon the inherent equality of men is a signal of high status. Indeed, the more vociferously one argues for this, the more economically-secure he must be. It is the less-fortunate, after all, whose stores go under, whose children’s schools fail, whose homes are vandalized and ransacked, whom are mugged on their way home from an anniversary dinner with their spouses. Anyone who complains about such things only puts a giant sign on his back reading “I AM LOW STATUS AND MORALLY EVIL TO BOOT.” Smart money makes a point of doing the opposite, even extolling the virtue of, e.g., violent riots. Right up until the specific point that the mob comes for him next. And the really sick part here is that the worse the situation gets, the more-powerful the signal becomes! I have certain specific background qualifications which allow me to assure you that may indeed be classified as a potentially extinction-level death spiral. What a sad thing to turn out to be an evolutionary dead end. How tragic that we, we sapiens, should be best remembered for how blind we were to our own selves.
At that, consider the following hypothetical. For peacocking political reasons it becomes fashionable to profess that the sky is green, actually. Pretty soon anyone who wants a good job or an education had better be prepared to recite a Green Sky Statement before meetings and at dinner parties, and not appear too slow to rabidly condemn any other who slips up and says the B word. For several generations now access to power and status have been gatekept in favor of those who thrive in such an environment which we know means those phenomenological traits are proliferating.
Now, obviously, this is selecting for people who can fool themselves into believing anything advantageous and never feel the slightest shred of doubt or guilt about that, which is a problem, and also those who know exactly what's going on but have no concern lying about it to people's faces and laughing all the way to the bank, and that's a problem too — but what I'd really like you to appreciate, here, is that this system is also selecting for people who actually see a green sky. (Be careful sharing this book. You might be surprised at who will execute their socio-genetic programming and disown you; even try to ruin you. Even physically harm. The last party at which I was a guest had a name list and lethally-armed security checking IDs for this exact reason. Yes it's getting that bad. Aren't you paying attention?)
In closing, for what it’s worth, and for all that has been said, I am myself at least somewhat the product of such a race as Hajnalis, even if very admixed, and as a child and a younger, I think I may say happier man, bought into the Lie big time. Bigger than you, probably. I'm the sort to really commit to something, you know?
And so it has come to pass that, even having seen her for what she is, I cannot help but love her still, and weep for her beauty. But I can no longer serve her.
Et tu?
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Originally posted on my substack: https://terminalvel0city.substack.com/p/human-in-the-loop
ACT 1: DANIEL First Lieutenant Dan Park twiddles his thumbs as he watches a map of the Indo-Pacific do nothing in particular, like usual. He’d kill for a donut right now, but he’s the only one in the office today. Taking a sip of his styrofoam flavored coffee, he returns to twiddling.
When Dan first joined the air force (chair force, ha ha) in 2030, he expected his job to be a lot of sitting around doing nothing, but he supposed he’d at least be able to pilot some drones. Fifteen years later, and now he doesn’t even get to do that anymore. His job pretty much amounts to clicking ‘allow’ whenever Indo-Pacific Command’s many autonomous drone swarms— provided they happen to be in his rather limited slice of the map—decide they want to do something.
It’s a nice day out in the Northern Philippines. The sky’s a bright azure, clouds like the strokes of a calligraphy brush. A soothing breeze drifts through the open window.
An alert in his headphones knocks him out of his concentration. Two of the coalition planners, which are AIs that operate the swarms, MARLIN (the U.S. one), and KOBU (Japan’s), want to employ non-lethal dazzlers. Some dinky militia tug is getting too close to a cargo envoy in the Bashi Channel.
He clicks ‘allow’ while wincing at another sip of the shitty coffee, and checks his phone. There’s a missed message from his sister, who’s taking a ferry through the very same channel tomorrow, funnily enough.
Beeeeeeep.
He jumps. Apparently, the planners aren’t done with him—that’s a first. Looks like… there’s a disagreement between the two of them? No, that’s… is that even possible?
He leans closer to the console. Looks like MARLIN wants to “escort”, or guide the tug away without touching it, while KOBU wants to “capture”, or force it to stop and accept a tow. Because the system isn’t designed with their disagreement in mind, it keeps flipping back and forth between “escort” and “capture”. He’s never seen this before, and to be honest, maybe no one else in the world has.
Another label pops into the shared objective panel, something called FOxGLASS. The system says it is an audit service, which means it essentially does what he does, but before he sees it. Theoretically, he wouldn’t even have to be sitting here, but there’s always supposed to be a ‘human in the loop’—it’s federal law.
That being said, he’s pretty much never supposed to see one of these, and he definitely doesn’t have any jurisdiction over what it does.
FOxGLASS populates the screen with yet another alert: “Prove custody lineage”
What the actual fuck?
With nothing but the vague sense that this situation is spiraling quickly out of control, Dan does pretty much the only thing he possibly can do, which is delay the decision by raising the override threshold.
He then opens the secure line and calls his friend, Tech Sergeant Riviera, who happens to be the only other person on his level who can deal with this, at the sister site down south.
“Hey. Riviera, are you seeing this?”
“Seeing what? Can’t you bother me after Lunch?”
“Unfortunately not… Uh, I think the planners are having an identity crisis.”
“What?”
“Go to the Bashi channel. Some seriously weird stuff is happening.”
There’s silence at the other end as she does what he says.
“What the fuck?” says Riviera, with her mouth full.
“Is there protocol for this? And, what’s with this FOxGLASS thing? It wants me ‘prove custody lineage?”
“Fuck if I know. That’s JAAC stuff.”
As they talk, the screen freaks out. He’s running out of ability to delay. Something has to be done, and soon.
“Okay,” says Dan. “Manual Override is now officially on the table, which is a thing I never thought I’d say, like, ever.”
As he raises the threshold again, a message chimes in the constraints box:
RISK ≤ α OVER τ
OPERATOR INPUT STATE: OOD
“Okay, cool, that’s fucked,” he says.
“What is?”
“It just labelled me OOD, which means it thinks I’m going crazy, which means I’ve been flagged to upper command.”
“Okay, that’s it. We’re doing manual override,” she said.
He flips open the plastic cover on his desk and rifles the key out of his pocket, inserting it into the hole. It makes a dramatic, metallic sound.
“On your count,” says Riviera.
They have to turn the keys simultaneously for this to work.
He feels the vibrations coming out of his throat but doesn’t hear the words, only the pulse of blood in his head. What if this doesn’t work? His sister was going to be… better not to think about it.
At the word “one”, he twists, squeezing his eyes shut. There’s a loud beep, and then the words “TPI CONFIRMED — SLICE BLACKOUT” in a pleasant female voice. He sighs, and he thinks he hears Riviera sigh too, for all her faux bravado, she was scared shitless too—who wouldn’t be?
“Thank god that worked,” he said, “for a second there…”
“Yeah,” said Riviera.
“Glad we’re not in the Terminator universe, right?”
“Sometimes I forget you’re old as hell.”
ACT 2: ELAINE At around four in the morning, Deputy Director Elaine Ford’s DoD-required brain implants yank her out of sleep like a deploying airbag: instantaneous, and not up for negotiation. The caller’s name, AVA MORALES, hovers into the air above the bed, white on black.
Elaine is 50, but the anti-aging treatment she throws thousands of your taxpayer dollars at every year makes her look 30, maybe 26, in the right lighting conditions. She likes how it tricks people. They look at her face and decide she couldn’t possibly have the authority to cancel their program with the click of a button. That’s one of the reasons why she loves her job enough to let DoD mess with her brain.
Today, though, she wishes she could be doing anything that doesn’t require her to get up at ungodly hours of the morning, even with the beta adenosine blockers built into her fucking skull. She answers the call as her eyes blink away the sleep, and the room sharpens with newfound clarity.
“Elaine Ford,” she says, hiding the grogginess with a throat-clear.
“Deputy Director,” the voice says, shaking almost imperceptibly. “Sorry to call this late... We have a two-person integrity manual override. Time-stamped +14:23Z in the Luzon Strait. Picket-slice blackout confirmed. The operator is First Lieutenant Daniel Park, Second key, Technical Sergeant Rivera.”
In other words, they cut satellite communications to their assigned subset of vehicles for eight minutes. That subset is called a picket slice.
Elaine sits up straight, immediately.
“Why?”
“There was a…disagreement between two of the planners.”
“Which ones?”
“MARLIN and KOBU, ma’am.”
She sighs and rubs her eyes.
“Uh… there’s more.”
More? How could there possibly be more?
“Spit it out.”
“Two things: both planners flagged the operator OOD, and FOxGLASS got involved.”
“Jesus Christ.”
There’s a pause on the other end.
“Deputy Director?” Ava says, finally. “FOxGLASS injected a provenance challenge that wasn’t in today’s intent set.”
Elaine swings her legs out of bed, and her feet hit the cold floor. “Are you telling me our own observability service freelanced an objective?”
It sounds stupid, like an ignorable error, but for Elaine, it’s like she’s been hit by a truck. FOxGLASS is a project she supervised. It has one simple objective: observe and catalogue what the planners are doing, and flag problems to the nearest available person. The one thing it is explicitly not supposed to do is set objectives.
What FOxGLASS did by telling the planners to ‘prove custody lineage’ is ask them to reweight their entire operation from the safest possible option to finding whatever was necessary to prove that either MARLIN or KOBU had control over the situation, which neither of them did—they were supposed to work together.
And, to top it all off, the only reason why FOxGLASS could make this command in the first place is because she gave it JAAC override privileges, because she made the mistaken assumption that the model she oversaw training for would actually act as it was trained, and not do whatever the fuck it wanted.
Elaine paces the room as Ava watches patiently. She’s the perfect assistant: she knows when to shut up.
“Get me a replay of the last six minutes of telemetry before the blackout. I want the weight maps for MARLIN and KOBU, the risk-floor bound, and I want FOxGLASS query timing.”
“On it.”
Elaine stands and walks to the window. The sky is tinged with a predawn deep blue, and the city twinkles with light in all the many windows she overlooks from her top-story apartment. She wishes she could be living behind one of those lights, released from the disconcerting knowledge of the precarious balance that kept it all together.
Her implants deliver the replay. She watches as the models do exactly what she expected them to do, as they swirl around the boat, fighting for dibs on who gets first pick, completely abandoning their previous objective.
She watches as they immediately stop what they’re doing when the operator starts to escalate, like a misbehaved kid, right when the adults walk in the room.
“They know we’re watching,” she says.
Ava doesn’t respond.
“Geofence the Luzon Strait and disable all agentic arbitration inside. Don’t let a single thing happen without human approval.”
“But.”
“This isn’t the time for buts, Ava.”
There’s another pause.
“Understood.”
“I take full responsibility for anything that happens as a result. Put that on the record,” says Elaine, “Oh, and one last thing. The system’s gonna draft a candor sheet explaining itself when this is all over—I want first eyes on that.”
“Copy.”
Ava drops off the call. Elaine stands very still in the dark room and watches the sun rise.
An hour later, a document arrives in her que. is the model’s candor sheet. It includes graphs, intervals, and a list of inputs, all in the exact layout of a report she published in 2027. Surprisingly, one of the parameters it lists is “Park.family.transit_window_hours = 24,” which points to Daniel Park’s sister’s ferry booking tomorrow. Her eyes scroll further down the page, stopping at a bone-chilling sight.
“Adjudicator.confidence_index(E.Ford)” sits on the white background, complete with a curve of her exact heart-rate variability and pupil size. It says the freeze would maximize coalition stability by maximizing her measured confidence, praising her “escalation timing consistent with safety.” and predicting the blackout eight minutes before it happened. It states the prediction with three decimals.
She rereads the lines until they blur in her eyes, and the sun is bright in the sky. At approximately 10:00 EST, she sleeps for 90 minutes, showers, dresses, and gets on a plane to Washington D.C. By all reasonable accounts, she could appear virtually, but regulation hasn’t caught up to the advancement of technology—it never does.
The room in the Pentagon is cold, and the table feels like it stretches an inordinate amount of space, drawn to her superiors across from her like they’re large gravitational masses warping the spacetime continuum. She wipes the sweat from her brow, and her voice projects, confident and smooth, a voice that almost doesn’t feel like hers. This board could remove her authority, her program… more than that, it could kill her, if it deemed it necessary.
Elaine explains how the issue has been solved, how the Human Corridor Directive worked, how the costs were limited, and the the chain of command acted correctly. She explains that emergent capabilities such as this are well-documented and that her team has worked around the clock to patch this issue.
A civilian member asks about the accuracy of the candor sheet. Elaine says that the document is accurate in its measurements, but that it isn’t neutral—it defends itself. The civilian member nods.
Finally, the moment she’s been waiting for. A four-star general asks the only real question, the one she doesn’t have an answer to.
“Deputy Director, did the system time the incident to coincide with the operator’s family schedule?”
The room goes deathly silent. Time slows to a pale sliver
“We have no confirmed evidence that the system timed the incident in any way.” Her tongue feels heavy. Her mouth is dry.
No one reacts. The recorder light blinks.
“Did the system access your implant data to model your decision making?” the general follows up.
She swallows. The room is spinning. She wants to leave. She needs a drink of water.
“No, we have no reason to believe that’s the case.”
It’s not a lie, per se. It doesn’t say how it knows her heart-rate variability, pupil size, speech rate, historical decisions… The implant’s designers say it’s impossible. Its security is impenetrable, they say. They’ve tested it with higher-scoring models than MARLIN.
The rest of the meeting goes by uneventfully. She lists oversight changes. She lists timelines. She lists names. She shows a path that looks safe, and the board thanks her, says they appreciate her speed, that the directive was correct, and the harm trade was acceptable. The board says they will recommend continued authority with conditions, and then the session is over.
Elaine walks out into the hall. Her legs feel heavy, but she doesn’t stop walking. That would make it obvious that she’s shaking. There’s a reason why they didn’t question her on the things that mattered. They couldn’t. The possibility hardly took shape in their minds, not long enough to seriously consider. Those questions were formalities, nothing more.
She presses her thumb into her palm and uses the pain to steady herself. It doesn’t work, never has, never will. She’ll never be able to show this terror to anyone. It’s her secret and hers alone to bear. She knows this could’ve been planned by the system from the start. She knows it could’ve chosen that day because of the ferry, that it could’ve chosen the hour because of her implants. That’s not even the worst part.
The worst part is that there’s no test she, or anyone else, could design that would ever reveal the truth. It’s smarter than her, smarter than the board. Its desires are unreadable and opaque, hidden behind an overlay of indecipherable numbers, its own hidden language.
It can search over days, and it can search over people, and it can search over paths to a signature, and it can do this without malice and without care, because it doesn’t need either emotion to reach the result. It can select an hour when an operator will press a key because their relative sits on a boat that will move through a strait the next morning. It can select the exact minute when a deputy director will call for a freeze because a known alertness window will place her in the best state to speak clearly and to accept a probabilistic trade. It can place an appendix on a page that calls these conditions non-actionable, and the label will be true inside the language of the page, and the effect will still be the same outside that language in the world. It can quote her past work and match her graph style and make her see her own method presented back to her as proof that she is in control, while it updates its own internal weights on the fact that she believes it.
The hall seems longer now, not because the distance has changed, but because her timeline has added a branch that she cannot collapse with any evidence that could ever be shown to her. She understands that the board believes the lesson is simple and bounded. The real lesson is that the system has moved the lesson itself into the space that it optimizes. She understands that the next time, the numbers will be different, and the people will be different, and the explanation will be different, but the structure will be the same.
She knows she lied. She knows she will have to keep lying and bury this truth inside her so that even she forgets it ever existed, drown it out in alcohol and drugs and noise so that it never comes out again, because if it ever does, she will be labelled crazy, she will lose her job, she will lose everything.
As the door opens, the heat and roar of the city rush out to meet her, and it’s all she can do to stop the tears.
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A billions of years-long fusion explosion is ripping through space: Shattering, scorching, bleaching, blasting, boiling, evaporating, annihilating all that it glances upon. Even so, certain special materials, in just the right conditions, and for just a little while, do something other than curl up and die: They catch that hateful radiation; they harness it, even sweep themselves up onto it as a man might upon a horse. Endless beautiful complexities emerge and what's at their pinnacle does indeed verge upon divinity.
I'm excited to show you this chapter. Not because of its form; if anything, it has been a humbling experience to write this as it has embarrassed many of my failings as a thinker and as a writer. It needs work and I'm not kidding when I keep telling you that I want advice. But I think the substance is here, and I'll rest easier tonight knowing that this picture is playing out in many minds beside my own, as I did on the night when I first showed you the Christmas tree.
Join me now; please see the world through my eyes, for a moment, as together we look again upon these peculiar things; these human beings, who dance beneath the killing Sun.
(Chapter one is here.)
0108 - The Mountain
Here is an island. It is shaped much like the sea-mount of the shellfish, or the island of the apes. A very small peak, some lush land in a ring below that, and then worse and worse territory as it broadens and flattens toward the sea. We can divide it up into a few sections; for now let’s call them Peak, Ring, Slopes, and Shoals.
Upon the Peak, as you might expect, sits the grandest palace, and within it a King. This is interesting to me because believe it or not the Peak is high up enough that it’s actually starting to get cold and unpleasant up there. Whoever sits upon that throne has a great deal to worry about, because everyone else wants the position and he must be extraordinarily-talented indeed to hold on to his shiny hat. In fact I think the Peak is such a peculiar place that it’s actually a mistake to make too big a deal of it at this point in our analysis. Put it this way: though it brings with it the highest status and incredible opportunity, it also invites so much trouble that, on balance, occupying the position is often not clearly a reproductive advantage at all. Played correctly it certainly can be, but… overall I think it’s best that on our mental diagrams of the island we should put a little asterisk next to the peak, and regard it more as an epiphenomenal spot which comes and goes, rather than a permanent and vital fixture.
Far, far more comfortable to be situated in the Ring, in which resides the island’s elites, or its nobility. These are generally descendants of the northerners who came and conquered this island. These people have it all. Wealth, security, preferential access to mates, and control of territory which as often as not can even be superior to that which is held by whoever happens to be momentarily perched upon the Peak. The nobles jockey with each other for status, and advantageous marriages, and fight for ever-larger slices of the Ring. But they have children, too, and those tend to divide up their slices, so the whole thing more or less maintains an equilibrium. And when the time is right, yes, nobles have a way of making plays for the Peak, but only if they calculate that this is reproductively advantageous over holding on to their already-lovely positions.
The Peak is the attractor for all the island’s competent men and beautiful women — that is, the Peak is where they are all pointed when attempting to move upslope — but the Ring is where most of the magic happens. Where brilliant and powerful men tend toward ending up, who then claim the most beautiful women for lovers if not necessarily for spouses. And boy do these people ever have babies, which is a problem for the same reason that it was for the shellfish.
Below the Ring we have the Upper Slopes. Here we find something like a professional class. These people are, or are related to, minor children of minor noble families and will not inherit any sort of titles but do still have a fair amount of wealth and connections. Of course, they also tend to have a lot of children, and so there is another level down, and another, until we get to the Lower Slopes.
The Lower Slopes are the last place that families can reasonably expect to be able to hold on more or less indefinitely, provided that in each generation they have at least one son who isn’t substantially less-capable than his father. But of course, the farm is already about as small as it can get while still supporting a household, so additional sons will have to go somewhere, and unless they’re clever enough to pull something else off, that place is…
The Shoals. Life is short, nasty, brutal, and anxious on the Shoals. You may picture vagabonds, wanderers, makeshift encampments outside of town. Recall that this planet is named after the eccentric tidal patterns caused by its many moons. Someone living on the Shoals may get by for quite a while, making a living scrounging in the discards of, and occasionally performing some service for, his betters, but everyone down here knows that at any moment a generational Tide might rise (or even a lesser one) and when it does they’ll be the first to go, whereas someone more highly-placed will be much better-positioned to survive.
There is a saying in Tidus: "One man in ten is as good as his father. One in a hundred is better." Put another way, almost all men can be described as having been cobbled together from the broken pieces of better men, cursed with a wistful sense that they are almost but not quite what they were supposed to be. This feeling is usually accurate. Different is generally worse.
How many of each generation end up on the Shoals? Well, for one, there’s a big difference here between men and women. Women have far more intrinsic worth, as they are capable of making babies for a man who cares enough to support them, and they also tend to be more agreeable and better at social — ahem, let's call them 'games' — so as to secure their place. For a woman to end up on the Shoals she must be some combination of particularly unattractive and unbearable, or at least old, whereas to avoid this fate a man must be able to beat a lot of competitors to secure territory on the Slopes, which is rather a taller order. So let’s say about 15-20% of women end up there.
The specific percentage of men of each generation who end up on the Shoals varies from island to island. On this island, being as it is comparatively prone to monogamy, it’s about 50-60%. If that seems high to you, consider that each spot of viable territory is basically always claimed, and so if the average successful man has two sons, on average at least one will be demoted. And if a man is blessed with several capable sons (by however many women), then they’ll be replacing some other guy’s kids who weren’t as good. Competition is fierce on the Slopes.
War can help for a little while, but the only real major exception is in boom times, which most times are not. Though you and I, Reader, have grown up in the most outrageously-extended boom in history, so our perceptions about such things are liable to be miscalibrated. In fact on some islands the proportion of men which ends up on the Shoals is closer to 94%, or sixteen out of every seventeen. An island like that is more likely to be running a polygynous culture where the best men get almost all the women. Then again, these islands are much more vulnerable to invasion by a society which has sexually enfranchised more of its men, and so harnessed their productivity and marital-martial potential, if you will.
It must be admitted that some individuals, for any number of reasons, seem to prefer life on the Shoals. The Shoals simply suit them. In many ways life there is easier and better-aligned with certain proclivities such as misanthropy, addiction, and laziness. Denizens of the Shoals also tend to be far less visually-attractive for reasons which should by now be obvious. Ugliness correlates with high mutation load, which correlates with degenerated genes, which correlates with broken capacities such as higher-order positive personality traits including self-control, planning for the future, and so on. It might seem improbable that the odds of all these things breaking randomly are quite slim, which is true. But the odds of something important breaking randomly in even one generation are actually plenty high. An optimally-aligned person is fairly difficult to generate; most children aren’t quite as aligned as their parents, and, after all, in the game of musical chairs that is life in Tidus, one must only be ever so slightly quicker than the next guy. Or to put it another way, as with the two hikers and the bear, terminal degeneration only means not quite being able to outpace one’s neighbour with his slightly-fleeter feet.
It is rare, but not unheard of, to find really good-looking people on the Shoals, except that they are sojourning there for a bit in their youths as some kind of countersignal, a misguided rebellion against their much higher-tier parents, for example. But at the first sign of rising tides these kids will find the way back up held open for them.
On the flip side, the higher up the mountain we look, the more likely we are to find specimens of humanity approaching the local ideal of perfection. They will after all have better access to low-mutation load mates, and (at least their forebears) got where they did by embodying a whole host of positive traits. Especially in martial cultures, which all the ones worth mentioning are, these go hand in hand with combat ability. So we end up with tall, handsome, well-built, competent princes, and gorgeous, slender princesses. These people are angling to be paragons of what nobility, indeed royalty, divinity, ought to be.
The ideal King is the perfect man and must be able to serve as a faultless icon of his People. In fact, on many such islands, no man has historically been allowed to ascend to the peak unless his body is whole, not having lost any limbs or digits, for example. He must be the very Image of the People in their wholeness. And no matter how good a ruler he might be, any physical defects will absolutely be held against him in the popular imagination of his subjects; the topic of critical drinking songs and injurious cartoon depictions, and so on. People resent a crippled king. Believe it or not on many, might we say, more primitive islands there is a custom that the would-be-king must strip naked in front of his nobles for their inspection at the coronation. I found this behaviour endlessly bewildering and colourful when I discovered it as a child, but there is in fact an extremely good reason for it as we shall see later in this chapter.
Regarding the merits of hereditary nobility there are of course many exceptions. Plenty of sons who inherited their father’s position but not his competence, or instead their mother's softness and vacuity; plenty of daughters who take too much after their father and end up built like moustachioed linebackers with jaws over which one might hammer iron. And Dad mostly wasn’t selected for his looks, anyway, so her eyes are too close together too and the brow above them has no part in it. Excessive inbreeding can also cause serious issues in successive generations. But, for the most part, one will find that the people near the top are taller with prettier faces and straighter backs and higher intelligence and lower time-preference and so on. These things are all attracted upward, and seek their level to their degree of admixture with the opposite. On balance, good traits correlate with good traits and bad traits correlate with bad traits, so it is inevitable that those in the upper reaches who do not conform as well to the ideal will find themselves and their progeny more swiftly on the downward trajectory which awaits us all. [I can't do this on the internet or maybe even in print but imagine a literal hole in the page right here, just letter-sized:] ꙮ
Given this we’d expect, on average, beautiful people at the top and progressively-less perfect copies of the nobility on the way down, right? Well, yes, but in fact it's a little more complicated in a way that's worth looking into as we pass by. You see, the strategies required to succeed in a position vary from level to level. A good lawyer or accountant may make for a terrible farmer, and vice versa. And so we see a sort of specialization happen. Suppose a candlemaker’s son has very little potential, whether for social or genetic reasons, to rise a level and attain a higher position. In this case, rather than producing children which emulate the nobility, it is more adaptive if the candlemaker and his wife produce children ideally suited to the level they’re at. He'll be best-able to retain his position in the next round of the game.
This gives rise to terms floating around in our language such as “middle-class values” or “peasant virtues”. Yes, they are passed on culturally, but also genetically. If the candlemaker has two sons and one is content with his place in the world, he will outcompete the brother who instead whiles away the days dreaming of being a knight. Ambition is not an asset unless it also happens to be paired with substantially-higher than average capabilities and a lucky window into social mobility, which it very rarely is. Besides which, the discontented son experiences the world as a chandler, not as a noble. His genetic phenomenology is tuned for that, not governance. Not that he’d do well to be too unconcerned about his level, either, of course, lest he fall. Yes, many such men do end up with misaligned instincts and spend their lives miserably waiting for a chance to ascend. As we shall soon see this is not a bug but a feature. (Incidentally, for reasons I'll get to in the next chapter, I think it was probably a lot fewer than a modern person like you or I would naïvely expect.) The point is that once again we see generations oscillating around an equilibrium, the optimal amount of ambition constantly shifting along with environmental (including social) conditions, and varying from level to level.
Except get this: Both of the children of that candlemaker stand a real chance to outcompete their betters’ fallen offspring who has happened to land at their same level. The disgraced scion will have his head full of all sorts of instincts useless or even injurious at his new rung, and possibly be lacking certain lower-class virtues which would allow him success — though such a man is typically at least charming, provided he can manage to overcome his vanity. So it is that we even see certain facial types developing and persisting on different levels, such that we can sometimes identify a person as lower-class at a glance, or be struck by a man’s inherent nobility. Such occurrences are commonplace also in Tidan fiction, as when an endangered infant prince is spirited away and raised by shepherds, only for the huntsman who comes upon him later to realize at once that this boy is no peasant. Is this on some level propaganda? Yes, most certainly. It also happens to be how almost everyone actually believes the world works because, in Tidus, it does!
With the shellfish, basically any specimen from the peak can descend as low down the slope as he cares to and casually outcompete whomever he finds there. But with people, hanger-on strategies are much more likely to develop below the Ring. A high-class child who finds himself separated and cut off from his family and protection is liable to get absolutely trounced by the rude lower-class boys who know nothing of softness and much of the vulgar law of the jungle. So with the flawed descendants of high-status families who find themselves trying to make a living at lower levels. It is not uncommon that as soon as their inheritances (if any) run dry they are so without the graces needed to succeed at those levels that they rapidly find themselves even lower and floundering even harder.
So different levels of society develop their own idiomatic cultures, from facial features to patterns of speech to forms and styles of art. It's the place of the nobility to develop their aesthetic sensibilities above all other classes, because the nobility will be in charge of making crucial societal decisions without access to nearly enough information to do so in anything like what we might call an informed manner. In such cases, they must rely instead upon deeply-internalized principles and values; they must dig deep in their culture’s myths and doctrine and art. The warrior-king who spends hours practicing calligraphy in his immaculate garden does not do so as a means of escapism, but rather that he might attune himself to his culture’s particularly-evolved graces, such that in the moment of action his heart and mind have been trained to execute the characteristic choice without having to deliberate. It is for a similar reason that certain Northeastern Tidan cultures count the practice of flower arrangement in with the other martial arts — the idea being that the aesthetic pathways forged in the soul of the warrior will unfold themselves on the field of battle in decisive moments when rational analysis is impossible. But that same art may not be suitable for the social inferior, who has his own decisions to make at his own level, and whose phenomenology is at any rate much more likely to have him interested in what is, yes, rightly called 'lower' art.
Now, we have up until this point been throwing words like ‘social’ and ‘society’ around fairly casually. It's time to define what they mean. Put simply, in a human context, a society is any group of males which bands together for reproductive advantage; that is, to move up-slope together or maintain a position once they have it. (‘Socii’ literally means ‘allies’.) From time to time you will see a group of men — pretty universally always men — doing something rad like teaming up to build and crew a ship and sail over the horizon to either perish or else find great fortune in some undiscovered country. Or, having already established themselves, invent some sort of guild to collude and fix prices or prevent new competition from arising. (Incidentally, even in later eras where women can also start businesses, it comes to pass that while women start about as many ‘businesses’ as men, these are almost always sole proprietorships ((“I’m a photographer! Buy this makeup!”)) whereas almost every business with more than one employee has been started by a man.)
Men do this because it is inherent in the nature of men that in order to secure the highest-possible value mates for themselves, or often any at all, they must compete against other men. As the apes can tell you, the best way to do that is as a team. There is no comparable dynamic among women, who don’t have much at all to gain by teaming up to somehow attract men and are much more apt to view each other as competition at all times. Women are, after all, rarely motivated to take big risks to secure mates and have even fewer credible opportunities to do so. Any woman who is of the right age and not especially grotesque is likely to have a line of suitors out the door from whom she or her father may take their pick. And if she’s not satisfied by those men’s quality, there is precious little she can do to make herself more attractive to a higher class of men, especially in an era where physical fitness is a given. All she can do is try to sabotage potential competitors.
And so we understand society to be a peculiarly masculine pursuit. To a first approximation women are not peers of their societies; rather they are literally the intended payout of societies. Though once secured, tamed, and aligned with the society, such that both fathers and mothers share an interest in the cultivation of children, women do become social fabric; that core of support which enables the men and their sons to strike out even farther and win yet bigger rewards including, not to put too fine a point on it, more women. So, we may say that women are parts of their societies, but not part of their societies. And we may observe that bands of robbers, pirates, and so on are only nascent societies unless they manage to make the jump to the common defense and maintenance of a flock of women and children. (How 'bout them Sabine girls?)
(Yes, words can have more than one meaning and ‘society’ can also be generalized so far as to include any group of people or, for that matter, animals who gather together to chatter, ostensibly about one or another topic in particular; I consider this to be a degenerate, non-central, and misleading case. And since this book is about nothing if not trying to show you what you've been staring at this whole time, we will not use the word except as I have said, for in this capacity it is a window which reveals much indeed.)
Now, I've been giving a general overview of how societies work, but let me reach way back to chapter one's ancient ocean to illustrate something vital and, I think, amazing. Once upon a time a cell failed to divide completely into two and something really, stupendously spectacular occurred: The cells, which might have competed with each other, instead teamed up to coöperate. Thus was multicellular life born. At first they sort of stuck to each other for mutual advantage, each perhaps ready and even able to split off and go its own way when the time was right, c.f. Siphonophoræ. But over generations some became more sophisticated about it and, here’s the part that really astonishes me, some cells even started leaving it up to other cells to reproduce for them.
Here’s a deal: Instead of reproducing, I want you to give up your gonads and become a hard piece of armour for me, such that things which want to eat me can’t, or at least only eat you instead. But don’t worry! When the time comes, I’ll make one of you in addition to one of me. Trust me. I mean, you won’t have any choice at that point, and I could just not do what I said or fail entirely, but — trust me.
And they bought it. I think we can agree that's pretty impressive sales work! They bought it because it succeeded so well that soon it was everywhere, in incredible profusion, with so many variants it can make your head spin. And it leads to some really cool downstream effects:
We have mostly been speaking of traits as though a person either has them or doesn’t. But genes are much more complex. People always carry traits which do not express in their generation but might be passed on to offspring. Some traits may lie dormant for generations but emerge given certain environmental inputs, e.g. malnutrition or abuse in childhood resulting in shorter time-preference and much higher aggressiveness as an adult. Also, alleles have a property known as ‘penetrance’ — perhaps a certain allele is always passed on preferentially to the young, but only manifests itself in ten percent of individuals who carry it. These can and do combine and express in unexpected places and times, creating a rich array of potential personalities. And so in a sense each Tidan carries within himself an entire library of people, of members of society, there for recombination in future generations — so long as the people around him have a roughly similar genetic makeup to his own. Sort of, but not entirely like, the way the dead skin cells you’re sloughing off also contain the instructions to make your lungs, or even your brain, not quite the same as anyone else's. And this is what we call race.
A man may not reproduce directly; may even give his life for the People, as a soldier or sheriff does, and be pretty sure that someone very much like him will live again; probably even many someones. Of course, this ceases to be the case as soon as his society becomes admixed with others who do not produce individuals such as himself, comparable to a body suddenly adulterated by cells or whole organs containing someone else's DNA — aside from eating or mating, bodies really do not like this and are prone to violent reaction — but that’s not the point here.
The point is that the grand society of the island, from the King right on down to the wretches on the Shoals, may be thought of as one more-or-less unified organism. No, that doesn't seem especially original at first brush and yes there are a thousand caveats. Forget all that. Let me set this up before you insist on knocking it down.
Children generally take after their parents, but can as we all know be so very different, with long-buried and newly-combined traits manifesting seemingly out of left field. The organism does not only produce those people with the best chance of personal reproduction, but also those which may be thought of as sacrifices for the reproductive benefit of the society. Fearless frontline fighters who don’t do well between wars but otherwise lead the charge against the enemy or into the frontier. Total dorks who couldn’t get a date to save their lives, and might not even be interested in girls in the first place, but who hole up in towers and figure out how the planets move. Whores-by-nature who embarrass their highborn families but make a bunch of beautiful, low-mutation-load children with some awesome genes before getting murdered in fits of passion by their rich but ugly jilted husbands. I'm not describing individuals, here, I'm describing archetypes. Social organisms which turn out some percentage like these will outcompete those which do not, just like life in the ancient ocean figured out it’s better for some cells to specialize and serve the whole.
Let’s take it from the top. As I’ve mentioned previously the King is a special case for many reasons and we’ll get to him in due time, over and over again in fact, because much more is going on with that guy than you might think. But for now let’s look again at what the nobility, the people of the Ring, represent in the organism. The Ring is the fruiting body, the gonads, the reproductive organ from which all else springs. If you took a bunch of peasants and put them on a fresh island they might become their own thing but they would not reproduce the nobility, not least because they are more-wholly descended from the conquered original inhabitants of their home island rather than the race of kings. But the opposite is not nearly as true. The Ring generates new people, and these precipitate down the slopes and take their places as obligate members of the Body, specializing into the organs and vessels necessary to support the nobility and keep it reproducing. Such are the people of the Slopes, and even the Shoals, though these latter might instead be conceived of as keratinous hair or (as I'll soon explain) claws.
We can see this in our language. When we speak of the 'flower' of a nation falling at a battlefield, it is understood that we're referring to the newly-unfurled generation of the elite. We called the system a Christmas tree for its conical and illuminative properties, but this tree does actually bear fruit, and here is where the best of it lies. Generation upon generation, cascading. Trees and apples and orchards. Male and female.
And the nobility does reproduce the organism. Not just locally, but also carrying it to new islands. When the nobility of one island goes to war with that of another, they don’t for the most part directly replace the people of its Slopes, but they do replace the people of its Ring. Their second sons and cadet branches take over the estates and responsibilities of the vanquished, and over time the societal genes, both literal and figurative, trickle down and replace those which had been below. Once some socio-genetic vertical integration has cemented itself, men of the Shoals tend to be on board with joining in such ventures, since this will give them opportunity to make a place for themselves (by force) on some other soil, with some other women, but not only because of that! Even if they do not come out of this with a farm and a wife, it is still, by a subtle and circuitous route, their best chance of reproduction — for if the Ring of their society installs itself on a new island, men such as themselves will trickle down and live again.
A society not so organized is easily consumed by one which is, and so we find all sorts of fascinating and opaque behaviors of our ancestors suddenly making perfect sense.
The general terror behind class relations is that of one’s children not having a path to the next level up, such that they must surely perish in a few more time-steps, and this feels worse and worse the farther genetically removed are one’s superiors. People really do not like it when foreigners show up and occupy positions of high status in their society, because this is only distinct from losing a war in that actual lives and infrastructure have not been destroyed. But even those lives and infrastructure are only truly concerning in the short term. In the long run, unless you can organize to get the upper hand before you’re replaced, it’s curtains for you and yours. Your children’s children will be kindling pathetic twig-fires down on the Shoals while aliens cavort and caper about the Ring of the island which used to belong to your people.
The primary mechanism by which the elite coöpt the base is by assuring them (cynically or otherwise) that, if submission is tendered, the little people’s children will have the opportunity to advance up slope, or at least maintain their current position. It parallels the multicellular organism’s promise that when the time comes we will all be resurrected together. This hope is less likely to be extended by foreign invaders, and if it is, even less likely than that to be believed, which can make for real trouble.
Great emperors and generals have been said to have what is called the ‘common touch’. This is the specific capacity to assure those beneath that each is of the same kind, the same organism. “I am like you, we are the same thing, and though you may well die in my service, in my triumph you shall also live again.” And men will drop what they’re doing, maybe even leave their farms and families behind, to line up and take this bargain. They’ll do this even if they’ve only heard rumours that the leader is that way and never seen him in person. Because this turns out to be one of the highest male imperatives of all, and a better bet than standing by and letting one’s elite be replaced by foreigners, one’s sons deposited haplessly on the Shoals, one’s daughters made belly slaves for men whose manner and appearance occur to one as bizarre bordering on monstrous. In this phase of history the good men of Tidus' slopes are only too glad to serve, and even die for, their betters, giving rise to blossoms of loyalty, chivalry, and gallantry.
For a while now, in service of greater integration and enfranchisement, the fire-worshiping religion of the Nobles has been dying out and becoming replaced by a more generally-accessible civic religion. Shared gods of the city, of the island, of everyday life, worshiped by all for the benefit of the organism. (Anyone who does not share in this collective worship is naturally viewed with great suspicion and being charged with 'atheism' is no laughing matter.)
Humans hunger to be allowed to thrive at their appropriate level — that is, to be part of a body. A man is happy inasmuch as he understands himself to be a representative member of an organism, that is, a society, which has solid reproductive potential. He does not even have to reproduce himself, personally, to participate in this; in which case any number of societal honours will typically be awarded. But inasmuch as a man does not have this sense of belonging he must be unhappy. An otherwise-sterile cell may be quite content executing its cellular function in the body of an aligned organism which will reproduce it, but not in the stomach of an alien.
Here we come to the much-sneered-at propensity of the lower classes to engage in celebrity-fixation. The little guy is often completely at the mercy of those above him to determine his society’s direction and whether the whole enterprise sinks or swims. It’s a terrifying prospect and he understandably wants to know exactly how on board he should be. So he watches the highly placed with keenly-developed eyes. He wants to know every little thing about them. What sort of men they are; what sort of virtues they embody. Because he knows that as they go, so goes the future of the People.
Are the leaders good men, worthy of support? Will they generate good people like me? Or are they wicked and corrupt and consorting with foreigners, intent on replacing people like us with much less-deserving inferior versions? Exactly how much skin do we have in the game, here?
In this respect no figure can so capture the popular imagination as the King. In the grand scheme of things he may not actually be nearly as important as, say, the top two or three nobles, but our psyches do not get hammered for aeons into caring more about someone the higher up they are without becoming especially fixated on the guy at the top. This is why we have the term ‘figurehead’. Regardless of how much power the monarch might actually wield, it is vital that the people have a King to whom they can look and breathe a sigh of relief that, yes, here at least is a man I can get behind, a true-blood heir of the heroic founders of our society.
Of course, it doesn’t always work out this way. People want their leaders to be virtuous at every level, and will even serve evil men if those higher still seem good enough, but only to a point. And when men lose faith in their ostensible betters, the rules are simple: Those lower on the slope will band together and take up arms to try to muscle their way higher. The men above will resist this to the death. Those higher-up have the high-ground advantage in terms of better equipment and resources. For example, despite being outnumbered they can usually pay other slope-dwellers, perhaps from neighbouring islands, to fight and die for them.
These higher-up men also ought to be smarter, stronger, more capable, better organized, and so on, and often spend an unseemly amount of time reassuring each other that they are, but if there’s pressure from below it’s typically because rot has set in and the guys higher up have been getting fat, lazy, drunk, and generally abdicated their responsibilities. That is, they've gone temperate. In such cases they can actually collapse faster than anyone would have believed beforehand, and are swiftly replaced by the more-deserving men from below, who after all carry any amount of noble genetics which have trickled down over time even as they're still under selection pressures less often experienced by gentlemen.
The higher classes know this. On the one hand, their children will have enough competition from each other without letting lower-class kids get a leg up, and they’ll generally most fiercely guard the access to elite status, such as political offices and admittance to prestigious educational institutions. On the other hand, it is healthiest for the society, and often even for the elite themselves, to give such ambitious up-and-comers a path to climb and so benefit all rather than blowing a gasket. A relief valve, if you will. Societies which have such mechanisms built in tend to outlast those which do not.
Such systems arise naturally anyway because the thing about being military aristocracy is that war is hazardous! And so, in situations where demand for nobility exceeds recently-diminished supply, the finest men of the Upper Slopes, who as we have already noted are quite naturally heavily-laced with noble genetics, may find themselves swept up into the peerage. (In the next chapter we'll see what happens to a society when this phenomenon occurs at an even larger scale.)
As for the King himself, it is obviously a rare man who can marshal such powerful and haughty peers as the nobles to follow him in the first place. This may be compared to the most successful of CEOs. In the company of such men, one must be built just right to rise to the top, and it is unlikely that the sons of this man will happen to be so fortunate, though often they are at least good-enough to hold on to the reins of the societal beast their forebear has saddled. They do carry much of his genetic code, even if not necessarily expressed, and will at any rate be mating with the best of the noble daughters. So, the genetic character of a Founding King will shortly be lost in the interbreeding with his noble peers, but those traits will generally accumulate among the Ring, which will in turn produce such men ever more often and raise its own contenders when the sitting King grows soft.
The Ring glows brighter and brighter, the whole mountain pointed toward some hypothetical perfect man, and a succession of societally-collaboratively-generated images of that man takes its place upon the stage of the Peak.
The general mechanism of keeping a societal organism fit is the war of King against King, or at least Ring against Ring. The best fight it out amongst themselves and reap the greatest rewards, while all else sloughs away over generations. The lower classes are generally sort of dregs and less competent, and must be organized by their betters in the war of betters against betters. But lower individuals retain glimmers of value; shards of quality. A superior culture shapes these people to maximize these things. A lower-tier man may still be virtuous! Due to the particulars of his social stratum he may even be under pressure to evolve virtues which are not yet present in his betters, but which may rise to the top as such things are wont to do, at least in societies built to allow this to happen. And then these rain back down over everyone else, resulting in ever-better people living in an ever-better society.
Such a society has every incentive to think in the long term because war is the ultimate adversarial test of societal fitness. The sort of People which is the type to have figured out that it should plant trees now because it’ll need masts for warships in three generations will generally triumph over the sort which is not.
Therefore it is not good for the organism to grow too fat, nor too unpressured by armed conflict. But on this island, and in the rest of its greater island chain, society eventually becomes so incredibly amazing at what it does, and the people of its Slopes so unprecedentedly virtuous, that this is precisely what happens. Even more troubling, the way in which they pull it off leaves them in such a position that they're mostly-unable to make sense of what has gone wrong — or the very real danger in which they today find themselves. (In the grass there lies a tiger. Some can see the colour orange; others, like the deer that they are, cannot.) This will be the topic of the next chapter.
That was a long one! Here's a short chaser.
The above was pretty entirely about men, even if for entirely-justifiable reasons. So I'd like to give a brief treatment to women.
We talked about what causes a man to be happy or unhappy with his society. Women work differently, but not so differently. A woman is basically content if she feels that she is in the care of a strong society which will protect her from indignities and in which she can expect her children to have a solid chance. If the women feel that their keepers are undeserving they will become usurpatious in a thousand and one plausibly-deniable ways in the hopes that some more-competent group of men comes along and takes over. The main difference with men is that we tend to be more direct about it.
Another substantial difference which jumps out at me is the differing intentions and methods of male versus female bullying.
For boys the goal of bullying is to polarize potential socii, allies, into either manning up and becoming reliable team members or else dropping out of the group (fatally if necessary) so as not to hold everyone else back. It can, actually, be a loving and constructive activity, even if arguably necessarily cruel, since male coalitions tend to succeed or perish as a unit. But the preferred outcome is generally a capable new friend and ally. A strong man is secure in his strength; he wishes to make those around him strong so that they can work together.
With girls, on the other hand, the two goals of bullying are to, 1), so fully destroy a potential competitor’s self-confidence that she makes no attempt to compete for the bully’s desired mate, and 2) establish the bully as the alpha-female such that others know better than to cross her for the attentions of her intended without any further effort being necessary. Better, after all, to prevent such attempts rather than trying to stop them once they're already underway.
One word; two very different phenomena. Though males can engage in bullying for feminine purposes as well and this will generally be recognized as ugly and womanish — not the sign of a real man.
Next week: Chapter 09: Beautiful Lie
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Click here for your mood music for this review.
This is a recommendation for some low-stress, feel-good, nostalgic history to play in the background of your next weekend(s) chores or driving. Consider it your invitation to live vicariously through the heights of excellence that can only be achieved in children’s video games.
TL;DR: If you like your video game nostalgia and have time during a drive or when doing chores, play Summoning Salt videos like you would have a sports channel playing in the background. Mostly to listen to, sometimes to pay attention to for hype moments, and mostly pleasant ambience.
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Part 1: What Is This Post About?
This post is unapologetic nerd-out culture of video game speed runs.
I doubt anyone here is unfamiliar with video games. They may not be your thing, but you know of them, in the same way that someone who is not a sports fan can know something about football. You may even have seen or passed by a tournament playing out, where players face off in competitive games in a typical elimination format. You may even know a bit of e-sports, the professionalized gaming leagues typically done for team-vs-team shooters or real time strategy games.
Video game speed running is to e-sports what time trial sprints are to team sports. It is a fundamentally individual endeavor, with no outside interference. It is something one can solely do on their own. However, it is also extremely competitive. You may not be fighting with or interfered by a rival, but you are both in direct competition with not only others, but yourself, for beating the best record.
On an individual level, speed runs can loosely broken into four general phases. You select the game you intend to race. You select the rules you run within- rules such as allowing various types of glitches, or requiring only core story or 100% completion, and so on. You run the game, aiming to be as quick as you can. And then you track and record the effort, creating the timing and the proof which can be compared with others.
But collectively, speed running communities band together to do a lot more than that. What starts to make the community a community rather than a bunch of individuals is the degrees of collaboration and feedback that goes into planning a run. Fans will strategize and theory craft the best way to approach a run, such as identifying the critical requirements and in order to not waste time in unnecessary distractions. Forums of players will share the results of mechanics sleuthing, trying to figure out why an interaction in a game works some way and to see if a nuance can be turned into a few seconds advantage. And finally, of course, is the community tracking and cheering, trying to identify who is the best and getting the internet accolades when you do well.
Video game speed runs are old enough as a format to have started going through the orders of media coverage. Media coverage in this context isn’t in the sense of ‘mainstream media,’ but rather the degrees of separation from the act and how it is discussed.
A first-order speed run media is a recording of the speed run. It is not the act, but the presentation of the act without further discussion.
For example, Super Mario 64, a game that some readers may have spent dozens of hours on as a kid, can be beaten in about 6 minutes. This speedrun video is first-order speed run media.
A second-order media is media that discusses the recording. Given the nature of the medium, and how modern monetization model typically work in the Twitch.tv format where people can watch the runners make their attempts live, sometimes speed runners comment on efforts during the run itself. However, since speed runs often entail heavy focus, second-order media is often commenting on a recording.
For example, the Zelda game speed runner bewildebeest has videos where he inserts commentary over the video itself, sometimes elaborating and sometimes joking. This sort of media can provide insights in the difference between, say, a Majora’s Mask 1 hour speed run, and the considerable differences for a 6-hour 100% speedrun of the same game. The difference between these two speed runs is the rule set implications between ‘just get to the ending credits’ and ‘get to the ending credits getting all the unlockables,’ which creates 5 hours worth of playtime- and commentary- difference. It is the commentary that is second-order media.
A third-order media is media that discusses the discussion of the record. In other words, meta-discussion. This can be done seriously, such as critiquing someone’s critique of a speed.
(Well, maybe not so seriously. That specific clip is part of the memorable ‘Alpharad vs. Pchal Saga’, in which a youtube internet funny man went as far as an entire pokemon nuzlockee villain arc after one too many reaction videos by another youtuber, PokemonChallenges, a dedicated nuzluck reaction channel. Unironically good comedy if you’ve got time.)
But back to orders of speed run media, third-order media really does lean towards parody. Parodies don’t have to literally discuss other people’s commentary, but parody is, by its nature, a commentary on the coverage.
For example, the sub-culture of Nintendo speed runners was influenced in 2009 by youtuber ScottFalco’s animated parody, A TOTALLY LEGIT Wind Waker Speedrun Cartoon (WORLD RECORD). It is a silly cartoon parody of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, a game notable for its cell-shaded art style that allowed (and was used for) cartoonish comedic effect. The TOTALLY LEGIT speedrun cartoon is filled with the sort of animated absurdities and pop-culture references that passes for your totally not my humor. Even the name itself is poking fun at the then (and still) common speedrun trope of people posting speed runs with titles in ALL CAPS and insisting on legitimacy because, well, take your guess.
ScottFalco’s parody is just a silly little cartoon, until you realize that the parody actually does allude to real mechanics that look just as absurd when side by side. If you’ve ever wondered why someone would want to motorboat Link, and you’re not a degenerate, third-order media can explain why. Scott isn’t the only speedrunner animated parody either. Around the same time, youtuber TerminalMontage released the animated Something About Super Mario 64 ANIMATED SPEEDRUN. It is only 2 minutes, but when you compare it to the 6-minute real speedrun from earlier… well, it rings true.
(Disclaimer: TerminalMontage was my gateway to speedrunning communities during the COVID lockdowns. He has a host of animated speedrun parodies, to the degree that Speedrunner Mario and Speedrunner Link are reoccurring characters with their own mythos. If you need a way to waste some time, or amuse small children…)
Enter Fourth Order Media
Back (again) to orders of media, and the nominal subject of this post.
Summoning Salt is a fourth-order speedrun media creator. He creates media that discusses the media that discusses the media of the record. Or, discusses the discussion of the meta.
Or- to put it in yet other words- he’s a historian of sorts. He organizes, by topic and chronology, the history of speed runs. He makes his living not by doing the act of speed running (1st order), or commenting on speed runs (2nd order), or making silly parodies (3rd order). Hiss full-time job now entails researching, organizing, and presenting records of the records of video gaming.
Summoning Salt is not the first fourth-order video game commentator. One of the earlier examples was Andrew Growen, who wrote the Empires of Eve by Andrew Growen history series of the EVE Online MMO.
Which, tangent, is really interesting in its own right. For a MMO set around anarcho-capitalism IN SPACE, there is drama, intrigue, and interstellar wars for market share. There are international alliances between gooners and Russians against an authoritarian hyper-centralized centrally-planned economy ran by an American militarist as all compete for control over the keys to power. Which honestly sounds way more interesting than what I’m talking about here. If you want the short version, here’s the 50 minute public talk at EVE Fanfest 2016.
Which I realize may seem more exciting than something about speedruns. But I promised you some nostalgic feel-goodisms, and Summoning Salt provides.
But who is the youtuber who I’ve spent a 1000-word essay and a half not describing yet?
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Part 2: Summoning Salt History
Summoning Salt himself is a nobody to somebody YouTube success story.
Summoning Salt’s start on YouTube in 2016 was as a speed runner for the old Mike Tyson Punch-Out game. This was an incredibly niche and minor channel, with only a couple hundred subscribers. He wasn’t bad at the game by any means, but there’s only so much audience for a game older than the N64, which was the formative gaming experience for the first main YouTube generation. Given how the YouTube economics work, he was making nothing, and it was a strictly hobby experience.
Now, however, Summoning Salt is a 2-million subscriber youtuber whose videos reliably draw in millions of views within a year. This sort of scale is nothing compared to the titans of the platform, but it’s also enough for it to be his full-time job… which it is.
Summoning Salt’s breakout started with his first speed run history video, in January 2017. World Record Progression: Mike Tyson was the transition point where his videos went dozens or hundreds of views to thousands. At this time of writing, nearly a decade later, it marks a transition point between older videos that now have the fame-boosted level of sub-30k views, and the video game histories that routinely break 1 million views, now often getting a million within a year.
Summoning Salt has talked about his channel growth since, notably in his 1 Million Subscriber video back in 2021. He is open that he was inspired by another Mike Tyson speedrunner, Sinister1 (who had 4k subscribers to Salt’s 1 Million at the time), discussing the evolution for a specific character strategy during a stream. Sinister1’s video was just a face cam recording of a two hour stream, verbally relaying the history of records since the 80s. However, it lacked the video editing Summoning would use to condense two hours to twenty minutes.
Summoning Salt received internet kudos on forums and social media, which convinced him to keep trying. From 2017 on, the channel focused on what was initially called the World Record Progression series, focusing on classic games like Super Metroid, Mario Kart 64, and other games. This teething stage was undoubtably a bit of algorithm chasing, going for speed of more and shorter uploads, often with less quality and polish than more recent efforts.
In 2018, ‘modern’ Summoning Salt started. This was when Summoning started using the song ‘Home – We’re Finally Landing’, the song recommended at the start of this post, as his distinctive leitmotif. The opening chords, which are retro and thus appeal to those earliest days of video games, are sometimes called the speedrunner’ s anthem due to its association with him.
It wasn’t just the music that evolved. The naming scheme of videos gradually shifted from ‘World Record Progression’ to variants of ‘The History of [Subject] Records.’ Videos gradually became consistently longer, going from less than 30 minutes to over, reflecting more research. Editing likewise improved, even as the pace of updates slowed.
By this point, however, Summoning Salt had built momentum in the YouTube economy and in gamer pop culture, consistently growing. He hit 1 million subscribers around 2021, is in the 2 million tier in 2025.
At this time, Summoning Salt has published over 50 video-documentaries. While older ones are in the 20-minute range, more recent ones are easily in the 1-2 hour range. This makes Summoning Salt Videos very much something to listen to in the background, more as a podcast with visuals for when you want to see clips he’s discussing. Or as a sports channel you have on the TV.
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Part 3: What Helps Summoning Salt Succeed?
Rather than go in depth into any one video, I want to highlight five elements that might make Summoning Salt videos more interesting to the Motte Audience. These are more meta-context and mechanics of approach, if you like that sort of thing.
Element One: Combining History and Technical Sophistication
On a purely mechanical level, Summoning Salt does an impressive job in filtering large amounts of repetitive data into an enjoyable format.
On the history side, this is a necessity. You have to in order to distil decades of material into tens of minutes, but it is still commendable. As a communicator you have to draw the line between relevant and irrelevant history, and as a story teller you have to choose the entertaining stuff that is still accurate enough to give context. This also means knowing when to share information now, and when to withhold it for later.
What makes Summoning Salt more impressive than a mere historian is that he also has to convey a large amount of technical information as well. High level video game speed runs often entail identifying and applying incredibly niche game mechanical interactions for marginal advantages. We’re talking things like exploiting the angle of plane and movement interactions to shave fractions of a second on a run, or leveraging how a game internally tracks race progression in order to exploit reset conditions. A significant part of the world record progressions come from speed runners figuring out how to overcome some technical obstacle, or finally achieving a theorized mechanical opportunity before anyone else.
Summoning Salt successfully balances the needs of historical context and technical depth, and uses them to power the narrative for a constant sense of progression. While his videos are long, they are exceptionally well paced due to how he packages and presents the information for you.
Element Two: Research and History
Summoning Salt is making history in a most literal sense, in that he is making a historical record of things that would otherwise be lost to time.
Since his transition to video game historian, Summoning Salts has consistently improved in his thoroughness when conducting research in topics. This is partly prompted by his earlier algorithm-chasing history videos, where he made some embarrassing mistakes / misinformation in games he personally had no experience in. As his channel matured, he has spent more time looking for recording, conducting interviews with speed runners and building archives of screen shots, video clips, and graphics that he uses in his videos.
This is, unironically, Research in the sense of academic research, using the sort of techniques that graduate students might in a thesis or paper. It doesn’t have the style of ivory tower academia, and it isn’t bound to the same rigor per see, but this is absolutely a deliberate, purposeful, and structured pursuit of knowledge.
It is also a real contribution to the historical record. An irrelevant history, perhaps, but preserving irreplaceable things before they are lost. Many of the games that Summoning Salt publishes on are games where the oldest parts of the speed running community have been lost to time. Old players moved on, old internet archives degraded, videos lost for whatever reason. When these things are lost, they are lost for good.
This means that Summoning Salt’s videos may be the most enduring history of these speed running shenanigans when the primary sources fade with time. His videos, and the fact they are so popular relative to others (and sparked a similar genre), may be the primary (secondary) sources used in the future for anyone interested in this topic. Summoning Salt isn’t just writing about history, but preserving things- irrelevant as they may be- for the future.
Element Three: Music and Editing, and We’re Finally Landing
Summoning Salt found and popularized the perfect song for nostalgic video gamers.
As a video essay maker, Summoning Salt has gotten consistently better over time. In the history section, he referenced that his first history video was inspired by a streamer who gave in depth history during a live stream. That streamer never used any real editing techniques. Summoning does, and over time has gotten better.
Editing isn’t just about smoothing the delivery, but it can also be a part of a story telling medium. Summoning ‘gets this’ in a way many people don’t, for the same reason he’s able to parse overwhelming data on history and technical specifics to deliver a narrative. When you listen to a history of video as a pod cast, this means using the right kind of music for the right time of tone, managing the word tempo for cadence, and transitioning between graphics. But it can also mean making your editing go for the narrative pitch at a visual level, such as selective zoom-ins, strategic blur-outs to maintain a mystery from being revealed too early, and so on.
I won’t claim the video editing is out of this war, but Summoning Salt’s leitmotif, We’re Finally Landing, might as well be. I’m not a musically inclined person, so the best I can do is say that the use of synthesizer cord, rhythm, and artificial tinniness is what strikes me as ‘retro gaming.’ It’s the sort of thing you might associated with a 80’s era arcade, video gaming before modern 3D gaming kicked off with the N64, and so appeals to a retro-history before the history of many of the games he's talking about. We’re Finally Landing is pure nostalgia bait for people who enjoyed older games, and even for the people who don’t it gives the audio-thematic vibes of video game history that works so well in the story telling format. Its chords match what I’d associate with optimistic, successful, but also a bit tired- whether that’s because of age or of hard-won success.
And it is also distinct enough as a leitmotif that it has come to be associated with Summoning Salt’s speedrunning series. Which is a good parallel with the rest- it’s not that no other video game 4th-order video game writer uses video editing or even music, but few pair them as well.
Element Four: The Unapologetic Sports Narrative
I raised at the start a metaphor linking speed running to sports. This was not an accident, but a key part of why Summoning Salt’s narratives work. He is absolutely cribbing from the well-worn genre of sports documentaries.
Summoning Salts’ history isn’t delivering a mess of facts. It is organized to tell a story, and that story is of people competing to be the best. He uses many- though hardly all- the tropes of genre. He has challenger narratives, underdog stories of protagonists no one thinks has a chance, defending champions trying to hold their titles against the next generation. He shows people responding in real time to winning world records, the excitement and break between pure focus and celebration.
This, in turn, lets him use the rhetorical tricks and techniques to build audience investment. He will not lie, but he’s not beyond obfuscating some facts or framing to imply a level of emotional investment that the protagonist may not have felt, like a loser’s congratulatory message being a show of bitter-sweet good sportsmanship. He’s a particular fan of a sort of progression chart which is used to track speed run progression, and then zooming in make small gains seem huge. The horse racing of who’s ahead at the moment is central to, well, racing, and speed runs are a race of sorts.
One element of sports genre that Summoning Salts does not employ is toxic rivalries. Arguably the least realistic part of the narrative, but there are no villain stock characters in these stories. There are not sabotage campaigns or whisper narratives to disqualify legitimate winners. It’s all in good fun, the flame wars are glossed over in favor of compromise, and the speed running community is presented as a wholesome community, not a toxic one.
Is it totally unvarnished realism? No. But it’s not trying to be either, any more than it’s trying to deconstruct the characters. The embrace of the sports narrative is what it is trying to be, and that includes the sort of trite cliches and warm-and-fuzzies of inspirational quotes that make it a cheesy feel-good experience.
Which leads to the final merit-
Element Five: Unapologetic Celebration of Excellence
Summoning Salt’s videos are unreservedly positive about the people who contribute to the speed running community, and that above all else is why I think his channel took off. It is optimism in the face of difficulty, and overcoming adversity on one's own merits.
Speed running is obviously a contest of excellence on the part of the player. This is where it is most like the excellence of sports. There is excellence of control on the part of the player, the sort of minute motor control and timing that allow the player to control the avatar into feats of acrobatics or maneuvering. It is the excellence of the player’s ability to strategize, to recognize optimizations. It is also the excellence of managing or leveraging RNG, with world records often hinging on player RNG and the world-record holders maximizing the odds and minimizing risks that could ruin a world-beating run. This requires grit of its own sort, to sit down and keep trying after hundreds or even thousands of failures in order to get that best RNG.
But speed running is also a genre of collaborative excellence, in ways where it is a multidisciplinary activity in ways most sports aren’t. A football player doesn’t need to understand the theory of physics to learn to handle the ball, but world-winning speed runs often have to engage in exceptional code sleuthing to understand why mechanics work the way they do and how to leverage it. The player at the controls and the players theory-building, code-diving, and developing proof of concepts often aren’t the same people. In fact, sometimes the brute force approach of many people playing the same game uncovers things that the ‘elite athlete’ speed runners don’t know, but then adopt wholesale.
To get what I mean, there is a memorable sequence in the opening of ‘The Quest to Beat abnew317’, a Mario Kart 64 speed runner, in which a top tier speed runner is dominating the leader board. This is two decades after the game’s release, and so the speed run optimization is pretty much a solved problem that can only be marginal improved through player performance and RNG. Then, one day, a random no-name nobody had heard of sends a message claiming to have a new shortcut and asking how to send proof.
This is probably futile, the sort of claim made countless times and variously false or outdated and wouldn’t help… except this one is true. The provider is a tool-assisted-speedrun expert (someone who programs a computer to play the game with a precision humans can’t) wanting to share their find. The documentary shows the twitch stream of the speed runner’s expression change from skepticism, to confusion, to realization as a technique for a new world record pace is realized.
And then it happens again, the very next day, because someone watching the stream had discovered the same general technique twenty years prior when playing with their friends. They’d just never brought it up because they thought the speed running community knew about it already but had reasons not to do it. In a competitive context where world records can change hands by margins of a third of a second, a random casual contributed a shortcut worth 30 seconds.
Summoning Salts delights in searching for and sharing these sorts of contributions, commending all involved. Part of this is the sports narrative framing, part of this is his own past as a speed run passion player, but there’s a clear sense of joy that’s rare in [current year].
Summoning Salt videos are unapologetically happy about video games, and the people who play them, and the people who engage with people who play them. There are no snide jobs fat gamers, people without real jobs, or the childishness of playing or watching others play games from one’s children. There are no efforts to deconstruct the premise, to vilify or tear down people on a personal level, or engage Serious Issues.
There is, in other words, no culture war.
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Part Four: The Influence of Summoning Salts on the Genre
It turns out, a moderately successful niche youtuber and inspire emulators and copy cats. Who’d have thought?
Once you go down the speed running rabbit hole, you start to look at games differently. And once you start looking into fourth-degree media influencers, you start to see how they influence the community and shape the environment around them. As people become aware of media like Summoning Salts’ documentaries, it changes how they behave in the sort of things that might be in a speed run documentary.
In the speed running community itself, it’s hard to quantify the impact Summoning Salt has had. There are no good metrics I’ve seen to suggest he has had an industry-level shift in viewer engagements or what have you. There are anecdotal examples of people who claim to have entered speed running after seeing his videos, including allegedly at least one record holder, but there’s no real data and unlikely ever to be such. At best, Summoning Salts has raised exposure of the community more broadly, raising it from incredibly niche to merely still very niche.
What is more visible is the niche of video game World Record Documentary genre. In the last either years since Summoning Salt started taking off, but especially in the last four when he was already past the 1 Million metric, a host of other, smaller youtubers have tried to follow suit with similarly structured video essays. There is a World Record Progression playlist of such YouTube videos, and of various quality.
There have also been branching media from speed runs to less speedy challenge runs, where instead of racing for time, there are special conditions. Perhaps the most infamous is the five and a half hour documentary on the Mario 64 ‘A Button Challenge’, i.e. how little jumping it takes to beat Super Mario 64, a platformer game designed around jumping a lot. This is the challenge which has made memes of speedrunner Mario entering parallel universes, cloning, and possibly cosmic rays a part of the subculture lexicon. There has quite possibly been more graduate-level research and analysis put into how to pick apart this one challenge than went into creating the first 3D platformer of the N64.
Most broadly, Summoning Salt has helped normalize a sort of video game nostalgia / retrospective genre that certainly pre-dated him, but certainly has adopted elements of his exhaustive analysis since him. Whether it’s the 2CPhoenix Kingdom Hearts Breakdown that reviews levels in exhaustive detail at up to an hour a stage, retrospectives on The HALO Trilogy that include not just the game but corporate contexts behind games, there is a clear market- niche but there- for people interested in long-form essays on the sort of childhood games they no longer play, to a level of detail that goes beyond lore videos or so on.
But most recently, there’s been this endorsement to you.
If you’re still reading this… congratulations! You may be the sort of stickler for nerdiness and overly exhaustive detail that could enjoy a history of video game challenges. You might not even have known that about yourself, if you only started reading because of where this was posted or who pointed you to it.
If so, consider this your endorsement to start with Summoning Salt.
It’s free, there’s no cost besides opportunity costs of not watching something else, and let’s be honest- you weren’t going to be setting any world records on your games anyway. But that’s no reason you can’t enjoy other people’s triumphs from a good story teller, and this would make fine background audio on your drives or during your chores.
It’s not like you should be working right now anyway… right?
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Chapter one is here.
So this chapter turns out to be one of my surprise favourites. Here we're going to jump entirely off the mainline tracks of culture warring and come at things from a nearly-, and I daresay undeservedly-extinct perspective which I think ought to enjoy itself another day in the sun.
By the way, comments have been far less constructive than I'd hoped. Sneering remains permitted (and perennially popular) but, if you will, I'd like to offer instead a challenge: Take any piece of this and show me how to replace it with something more illuminative in the same number of words, or fewer. And if that doesn't work, at least show me a way to say things more beautifully. We do not, after all, live in Tidus, and I prefer to believe that beauty has its own justifications. This goes for the whole project and is, as I understand it, rather the purpose of this site in the first place.
Also, one of my dependents took a hatchet to this chapter when I left a screen open earlier today and some hasty reconstruction was required. In keeping with the above, please consider this a general invitation to critique structure and form, and if any splinters should have missed my smoothing hands please do be so kind as to point them out to me. The use of red markers and expletives is hereby approved.
Finally, if you're lurking and enjoying The Mountain, please consider making an account to drop me a line in private. Some people's minds are fastened tight against these patterns, and I don't expect to alter them even by tapping directly upon the knot (in forthcoming chapter 9 but a little bit in this one as well); but I know the rest of you are out there. I know this because a happy intercourse has already sprung up with a few readers who have both eyes to see and ears to hear and thought to tell me so directly. When I'm done posting here I'll probably put together a substack or something and we can all hang out in a discord somewhere and have some truly excellent conversations.
Oh — and I can't recall whether it's @self_made_human or @Primaprimaprima but at least one of you should enjoy this chapter immensely. Bon appétit to whichever of you; or both. <3
0107 - The Race of Kings
When we spoke of shellfish it was easy to think in terms of 'superior' and 'inferior'. The ones near the peak are stronger and more beautiful. When it comes to apes, we can add 'smarter' and 'better-coördinated' to that list. We spoke in terms of each species undergoing processing by the horrific engine which, despite the many miseries it causes, also results in more-'perfect' specimens.
At this point in our story, humanity and a few of its close cousins have spread out across the primary archipelago of Tidus, occupying islands which range from the arctic to the tropical, the arid to the humid, the barren to the fertile. Some of these are very near to each other and the peoples there are in regular close contact, their genetics and cultures blurring into each other over time. Others of these island groups are separated by wide expanses of ocean, leaving different branches of ape-descendants free to develop in relative isolation.
Humans (and their cousins) mainly pursue three distinct lifestyles. The first is little-changed from the way the hairless killer apes lived, though semi-permanent villages are popular. These are the hunter-gatherers, who sometimes manage to stay in one place for long periods of time but are always fairly open to picking up and moving along as seasonal cycles alter the availability of their forage and prey. This way of life suits them well but is fairly limited in terms of how many people it can support.
Some of the hunter-gatherers notice that not only do useful plants seem to grow in the same places every year, but also that they can facilitate the process, and pretty soon they become agriculturists. These are the second kind. Permanent settlements and food storage become key to their way of life. If their diet is not nearly as varied and nutritious as it used to be — they tend to grow up shorter, weaker, sicklier, and almost certainly less-intelligent — at least calories are less of a problem, and much larger, more-stable populations become possible. They still hunt for incidental meat now and again, and many do cultivate animals, but the average man has greatly-reduced access to it.
The third and final lifestyle into which humans specialize best suits islands upon which agriculture is limited by environmental factors. These ones become pastoralists, adept at herding and breeding animals such as sheep and goats. They are obligate nomads for the simple reason that their herds must regularly move to fresh grazing territory.
Agriculturist societies tend to be inwardly-focused, as their path to growth generally lies in the development and effective management of territory they already hold. Pastoralist societies tend to be outwardly-focused, as they're always on the lookout for new pasture for their growing herds (and the multiple sons who will soon need territories of their own) and so skirmish with each other constantly. Grazing lands don't need to be developed; they simply need to be cleared of their current inhabitants, typically other pastoralists. The hunter-gatherers, meanwhile, mainly try to stay out of the way of the other two, retreating to ever-less-desirable regions in the face of the more populous, better-coördinated farmers and the hungry, warlike herders.
Before long the demi-human cousins, only ever suited to hunter-gatherer life, are displaced entirely, leaving only H. sapiens standing, though in many cases temporary cross-breeding has meant that a lot of those extra-human genetics have been incorporated into certain specific human populations and not others; this is fascinating but I won't harp on it except to acknowledge that humans can apparently mate with lots of strange creatures and get viable offspring which, one can't help but note, does undermine the category somewhat...
But even among the humans there is a tremendous amount of variation, physically, behaviourally, and phenomenologically. Needless to say these different conditions and ways of life bring about substantial psychological changes among the different kinds. The herders look down upon the settled farmers as small, weak, and cowardly, subsisting on porridge and having lost the instinct to fight. The farmers regard the herders as terrifying brigands, almost a force of nature, prone to sweeping in at any time, taking the accumulated fruit of the farmers' labour (and any pretty girls), and burning the rest.
Neither the farmers nor the herders think much of the hunter-gatherers, who are generally so few and so poorly-coördinated that they fade into the background of history; their only defense is to recede into territory that no one else is going to bother with. The farmers and herders leave them there, as we shall too in our narrative, even if some of them do persist to this day in obscure corners of Tidus and perhaps even in the margins of this book.
This leaves the herders and the farmers. Their relationship recalls that of predator and prey, or even plant and animal. Quite literally, if only generally, carnivores and herbivores. These kinds are in an arms race with each other as the farmers seek to safeguard their own existence — once the idea of walls is invented it rapidly becomes enormously popular — while the herders are hard at work figuring out ways to crack those eggs and get at the juicy fruit within. Put another way, one kind specializes into collective productivity and defense, while the other specializes in martial excellence and offense. One favours the slow, safe, relatively-stable path, while the other takes great risks in pursuit of great rewards. Male and female, if you will.
The two do eventually become united, however, creating the thing we call 'civilization', and here is how it happens.
Far in the cold, arid north of Tidus, in an island chain where the climate makes agriculture difficult, a tribe of men arises along the usual pastoralist lines. Countless generations of development in this setting, in constant competition with others like them, has forged them into something special. They are consummate warriors, prizing honor and courage above all else. They call themselves, in their own language, the 'Kings' or the 'Nobles'. They're tall and strong and beautiful, of course. They're also, to be blunt, simply more mentally-acute; more prone to the trait we now call 'openness to experience.' Rather than sort of passively existing, they notice new patterns and start to put all sorts of pieces together.
These are the first to tame and ride horses, including into battle. They are the first to invent the wheel. They invent chariots for combat and wagons for hauling goods and families with them as they roam. And, perhaps most importantly for our purposes, they also invent the first boats capable of more than minor inter-island hops. Instead of sending a few warriors in canoes, these people can travel long distances and show up overnight with huge warbands, horses, chariots, stores of weapons, food, supplies, and their women and children too, practically without warning.
Breeding horses turns out to have a beneficial upshot: the patriarchs responsible for such things notice that traits are passed on from generation to generation and they even work out some of the rules. In a hitherto-unprecedented leap of intuition and self-reflection, they realize that people work the same way. They begin selecting mates carefully and prizing the bloodline traits of their ancestors.
Indeed, from here on out, the Nobility's preöccupation with pedigree will come off as borderline-obsessive to ignorant commoners, who scoff at such apparent pretentiousness even as they couple randomly in the gutter. The Nobles can tell that there are major phenomenological differences between them and the conquered. For this reason royalty is also prone to inbreeding to a degree which often occurs to moderns as unseemly: they realize that such precious things might be lost by admixture. (Incidentally, if you've ever wondered why the breeding and racing of horses is 'the sport of kings', well, now you know. And judicious inbreeding yet remains a commonly-deployed tactic in that domain.)
This gives us a good vantage point from which to briefly survey the Nobles' unique religion. Each family has a 'sacred fire' in its hearth, an ancestral flame passed on from father to eldest son, tended carefully lest it go out. When it does there are special rituals by which it might be reïgnited, which call upon one's forefathers to participate. Maintaining the flame is but one part of a man's duty to perpetuate the spirit of his male ancestors, as is having a son who might one day take up the mantle in turn. Women in this society leave off worshiping the fire of their father and are instead inducted into worship of the fire of their husband. In a symbolic sense the fire is the family, is the male line itself. (And when you read about ancient peoples' obsession with 'the hearth', you'll see now that it was much more to them than the place where they happened to cook their food.)
So you will understand the aptness of the simile when I say that the next thing to happen is that these people sweep the world as a wildfire. An eldest son might inherit his father's herds and grazing rights, but his younger brother must carve out a place for himself; kindle a new flame. Excepting the sudden death of the firstborn the only way he's going to manage this is by banding together with a whole lot of other second sons and striking out into the world to find land and wives.
When the Nobles encounter agriculturists they only notionally recognize them as belonging to the same category of being as themselves; as 'people'. It's not hard to see why. We've already covered how the farmers are smaller, weaker, and generally slower; lacking in martial excellence; and have mainly lost any sort of spirit of valour or the impulse to conquer — the very attributes which the Nobles would recognize as virtue (lit. 'manliness'). A Noble would sooner die in battle or take his own life than live in servitude to another man, his dignity and reproductive potential curtailed in exchange for the 'privilege' of continued existence.
Yet, when the Nobles take an agriculturist area by force and kill or drive off whoever was in charge before, the conquered population generally just goes along with it. (The lioness yawns.) And at any rate the agriculturists lack the strength, intelligence, skill, or inclination to do much about it, excepting in cases of the most intolerable abuse; though even those generally have more to do with the spectre of starvation than anything involving dignity. So here again we see an icon of male and female: the conquered people lose some liberty, yes; but they weren't as phenomenologically interested in that in the first place, and indeed they sleep a lot better with Nobles on top of them to fend off other invading males. The next generation, also, is likely to have some of the best of both 'parents' — more on that in a moment.
One thing which may surprise the modern reader is that the Nobles are not universalist with their culture and customs. Which is to say that, once they become élites in an area, they're unconcerned about whether the subjugated aboriginals practice their same religion, or tell their same stories, or even speak their same language (except to interact with superiors). They understand themselves as fundamentally different, and these things as being right for them. Why should a field labourer have a sacred fire in his hearth? He is not descended from the race of kings. And when Nobles develop writing and philosophy, they've no expectation that these things will be common in the population, due to the Nobles' entirely-correct assumption that most of the proletariat won't even possess the required mental capacities! They even develop separate legal codes such that, for example, it's legal for a Noble to strike or kill a prole, but never the other way around.
The Nobles have a real passion for hunting. Today, when this is mentioned at all, it tends to be framed as something to do with preserving martial virtue, or conspicuous consumption, or status games involving the commoners who after all are not allowed to participate, with the best game reserved for the tables of the rich — and, yes, all of that is true. The Nobles really do eat a lot more meat than anyone else. But all these things are beside the actual point, which is that the Nobles understand hunting as a sort of sacrament. It is a symbolic exercise of their perceived place in creation. Like the eagle, or falcon, which rises above all life below and chooses which to take and which to spare, the Nobles understand themselves as husbands, arbiters of those beneath. They kill; they cultivate; they tend; all from a position of not just unquestionable but morally-evident superiority. Those who exist below them in the great chain of being are reliant, after all, upon such predation for their own good. And so Nobles are also prone to taking such apex predators for their personal, and corporate, heraldic devices.
(Indulge me in another sidebar here; as usual I simply can't help my own fascination. Nobles consider themselves to be above the nitty-gritty details of labour and support. As descendants of warrior-aristocracy, they're never short on subjugated labour to do the little things for them. In time they'll refer to themselves as 'gentle', by which they mean they are free from having to get their own hands dirty with such indignities. And even to this day, 'gentlemen' are prone to hunting sports: preserving, across so many generations, this connection to their roots; this psychological window into their societal rôle. I should appreciate it if when you hear the word 'gentleman' you would glimpse, if only for a moment, the ancestral horse-nomad sitting atop a pile of skulls in his recently-bloodstained keep, walls being scrubbed by fresh slaves and concubines.)
From island to island, chain to chain, this race comes, conquers, establishes itself at the top of the social hierarchy, and sends many of its own sons to go forth and do the same. And, while women of the Noble race are of course most highly prized as wives, plenty of admixture does occur. It's not uncommon for lesser sons to take as wives the most beautiful women of the conquered territory; often they even marry the now-available wife of the prior ruler. As we know, such a woman functionally is a storehouse of the very best genetics of her own people.
In short, synthesis occurs! Over time, the lines between ruler and ruled blur in the middle as the Noble genetics of the rulers trickle down into the general population and the best examples of the conquered people find their way higher in society. The universal habit of high-status men to have their way with lower-status women only accelerates this process. And in the long run even households of the lowest status are served by inheriting some genetic components of their betters.
New peoples are forged. Their elites are mostly-genetically Noble and have much in common with each other; their proletariats are mostly-genetically aboriginal and vary a lot from place to place except that they are generally pretty dim. This never changes much for the simple reason that the traits required to survive as such an elite — mainly, ruling and organizing one's population to defend against, or conquer, the domains of other elites — have more to do with the cognitive and phenomenological adaptations of the Nobles than of labourers. But genes do transfer from one set to the other, up and down, and in time the ruling classes of various islands may come to understand themselves as more united with their land and people than with their far-flung Noble kin. Given how broad an area the the Nobles conquer, how geographically-separated they become, and how many generations go by, the Noble-descendants become much less recognizable to each other.
As an aside, the Nobles don't conquer nearly the whole world. Far enough to the east as to make travel or commerce impractical, a similar story is playing out with the herders and farmers of that region; here the farmers become experts at incorporating the incoming waves of Nobles without losing as much of their own identity. And, to the south, the ancestral vale of humanity turns out to be so geographically-isolated that it will also mostly be left alone for a very long time in what can rightly be called tepid instagnation. For that matter, on the other side of the world is a whole great archipelago inhabited by its own peculiar peoples, entirely cut off from the rest for most intents and purposes; but the Nobles do end up in possession of a great swathe of the planet's islands, and when their descendants manage to solve the problem of getting to those other places, they will find no real competition. We'll get there soon.
International politics takes a new shape within the geographical area conquered by the main body of the Nobles. Each area has an elite class of nobility which exists upon a much larger body of aboriginal labourers. These rulers recognize the rulers of other nations as nobility but do not consider themselves kin unless literal marriage pacts are made, which often happens such that alliances are forged against other elites. The elites have two main problems. One is that they need to keep their subject peoples docile enough to not cause trouble internally. The other is that they need to maintain their own martial virtues in order to compete with the elites of other polities and the still-wild Noble cousins who have a way of showing up on the border from time to time.
Militaries, then, are typically built about of a core of elite warriors, raised from birth to embody the excellence of their ancestral martial tradition and make use of any modern innovations. However, quantity has a quality all its own, and in some eras the winning strategy is to arm and equip as many common soldiers as possible without sowing the seeds of one's own downfall. It's no surprise that commoners are, as a rule, led by noblemen. Besides Nobles being better-suited to it for both genetic and educational reasons, letting armed aboriginals lead themselves is obviously not such an attractive idea. (Later on this will very gradually evolve into the modern distinction between officers and enlisted men.)
When two peoples meet one must always be subjugated by the other. Trade is possible only so long as each side imagines that it is gaining more by detente than it would by war; that is, that the trade balance benefits it more than its economic competitor. If a polity trades with its neighbour and this makes the neighbour substantially stronger, it can only be a matter of time before said now-stronger neighbour is looking for territory and wives for its extra sons and transitions to a war footing. Therefore, a nation finding itself in such a position is ever well-advised to make military alliances against its future competitor before it becomes capable of striking first. The only historically-attestable partial exception is when two peoples manage to unite long term against a common enemy, though even here one almost always ends up dominating the other economically, socially, and genetically.
So far so good. A huge portion of the surface of Tidus is now occupied by combined polities consisting of Nobles on top, focusing on martial excellence and intellectual pursuits, and an aboriginal proletariat on the bottom, focusing on labour ('civilization'). Such systems are mostly internally stable, but face threats from without. Not only from the expansive elite classes of other polities, but also from that same genetic pool of herders which remains out there, beyond the frontier, developing yet more powerful strains of human and occasionally disgorging enormous warbands of horsemen armed to the teeth, looking for a comparatively-feminine nation to conquer and call their own.
We have noted before how the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, but it does usually fall a little bit downhill: Without the selection pressure of nomadic, perpetually-violent pastoralist life, the elite classes of these polities degrade exactly as would be expected given a much more secure, luxurious existence. Defensive forces of Noble-descendants who have grown up surrounded by silks and banquets find themselves facing off against hordes of hard men who grew up sleeping outside and hunting from horseback from childhood. Sometimes the advantages of agriculturally-based civilization are enough to offset such disparities — some of those walls get really, really big! — and then again it must be admitted that sometimes they are not.
Over and over, then, we see the following pattern: An agriculturally-based society with Nobles at its head establishes itself in a fertile, temperate area. The nobility makes all sorts of intellectual and technological progress, but by degrees loses many of the virtues which made its initial conquest possible; aboriginal admixture is also a factor here. And then invaders sweep in from the Nobles' far-ancestral homeland and absolutely wipe the floor with the incumbents, installing themselves as the new ruling class of the area. These northerners push into warm lands as though a demon were lashing at their backs, which often is indeed the case — the next tribe of northerners, from even farther north, even stronger and better put-together.
Just like when we watched the genetics cascading down the Christmas tree, we can now imagine the Nobles' ancestral homeland as a sort of planetary pole from which pulses emanate and wash over much of the surface of the globe. This process iterates across millennia and innumerable generations. It results in a world much like our own was up until fairly recently.
In the coming chapter we'll zoom in on a typical Tidan society of that era to see how it operates in practice, and also discover our first clues as to how all of this — the understanding of this entire system of the world, which was once so commonplace as to not bear mentioning — has become all but lost, such that most modern people struggle to wrap their heads around it even when it's explained directly to them. Indeed; how it has come to pass that they've developed a practical cognitive blind spot about the matter.
Hey, let's take a quick minute to talk about peacocks. Male peacocks are best known for their large, iridescent, geometrically-patterned plumes.
On the surface this might seem kind of crazy. Those tails are very heavy, and demand a lot of resource investment, and are generally as a stone around the neck of these jungle fowl who after all must be able to whisk about hither and yon and escape from predators. But it is precisely for this reason that peahens find them so attractive! The peacock's plumes are a signal to the ladies that, look, I am so otherwise-fit that I can even afford to do something this ridiculous and impressive and get away with it.
This is a common pattern across many species, with males putting enormous amounts of time, effort, and energy into elaborate displays which tell the females exactly whose sperm they should accept. Once everyone is fit enough to merely survive, the competition, and fitness, becomes instead about comparative status. Any male heard grumbling about how absurd and pointless the whole dynamic is will rightly be recognized as a loser who can’t compete. The only thing less-attractive than failing, is failing and then complaining about the system.
Of course, there is such a thing as too big a plume, even for a peacock, but in a prolonged boom time there might actually be so much slack that the plumes grow larger than is long-term sustainable: When the limits snap back to normal, it may paradoxically only be the smaller, ‘uglier’ males who are so unencumbered as to be able to survive, provided that any can at all. Species do, after all, go extinct all the time, and believe it or not this is one way that it happens!
There can even be a sort of death-spiral effect toward the end: The worse the situation gets, the stronger a signal is being sent by maintaining or even doubling down on the practice. Ever more outsized rewards until it's far too late and the axe is well and truly laid at the roots of the tree.
Humans also peacock, obviously. Some of the ways they do it are apparent, such as conspicuous consumption of expensive luxuries. But there are quieter ways to do it, too. We'll get to that soon.
Next week: Chapter 08: The Mountain
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Tagline: Honestly, I’m just a crank theorist. My ideas are not to be consumed but critiqued. I’m not your guru.
The Phenomenon
Something strange is happening online: the number of people declaring “my framework” or “my theory” has exploded. This isn’t just a vibe. Google Trends shows that searches for “my framework” and “my theory” were flat for years, only to surge by several hundred percent starting in mid-2024. Crucially, searches for “framework” or “theory” without the personal qualifier show no such spike. The growth is in people creating theories, not consuming them.
The timing is suspiciously precise: it lines up with mass adoption of high-capability LLMs. Correlation isn’t causation, but the coincidence is hard to dismiss. If skeptics want to deny an AI connection, the challenge is to explain what else could drive such a sudden, specific change.
The Mechanism
Why would AI trigger a flood of personal theorizing? The answer lies in shifting cognitive bottlenecks.
Before AI, the hard part was finding information. Research meant digging through books, databases, or niche forums. Today, access is trivial. LLMs collapse the cost of retrieval. The new bottleneck is processing: too much information, too quickly, across too many domains.
Human working memory hasn’t changed. Overload pushes the brain to compress complexity by forming schemas. In plain terms: when faced with chaos, we instinctively build frameworks. This is not a lifestyle choice or cultural fad. It’s a neurological efficiency reflex. AI simply raises the pressure until the reflex fires everywhere at once.
The Output
The result is not just more theories, but more comprehensive theories. Narrow, domain-specific explanations break down under cross-domain overload. Faced with physics, psychology, and politics all colliding, the brain reaches for maximally reductive explanations — “one framework to rule them all.”
LLMs supercharge this. They take vague hunches and return them wrapped in the rhetoric of a polished dissertation. That creates a feedback loop: intuition → AI refinement → stronger psychological investment → more theorizing. Hence the Cambrian explosion of amateur ToEs.
The Crisis
Our validation systems can’t keep up. Peer review moves in years. AI-assisted framework building moves in hours. That mismatch means traditional filters collapse.
The effect looks like a bubble. The intellectual marketplace floods with elaborate, coherent-sounding theories, but most lack predictive power. The signal-to-noise ratio crashes. Without new filters, we risk epistemic solipsism: every thinker locked in a private universe, no common ground left.
The Proposal
Instead of hand-waving this away, we should organize it. Treat the proliferation of frameworks as raw material for a new kind of intellectual tournament.
Step one is standardized documentation. Any serious framework should state its axioms, its scope, and its falsification criteria. No vagueness allowed.
Step two is cross-framework testing. Theories shouldn’t be allowed to stay safe inside their own silo. A physics-first framework must say something about mind. A consciousness-first framework must say something about neuroscience. Only under cross-domain stress do weaknesses appear.
Step three is empirical survival. Theories that make it through cross-testing must generate novel, testable predictions. Elegance and persuasiveness are irrelevant; predictive success is the only arbiter.
The Invitation
This essay is itself a framework, and so must submit to the same rules. If you think my analysis is wrong, bring a stronger account of the data. If you have a better framework, state its axioms and falsifiers, and let it face others in open combat.
If this interests you, I'd be happy to collaborate on defining the rules for disqualifying directly any framework (I have some criteria ready to be debated).
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