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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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