In January, @BowTiedDolphin very kindly gifted me a copy of The Chad Salesman Course by the esteemed @BowTiedSalesGuy (BTSG). As a condition of my receipt of the course in gratis, he requested me to write up an honest reflection of my thoughts on Day 90.
Before commencing, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to this cartoon dolphin on the Internet for selecting me as the worthy recipient of a BTSG education. BTSG's course & the knowledge he provides on his timeline (alongside the general wisdom BowTiedBull provides on his Substack, which I highly encourage you all to subscribe to), have helped take me from a financially strained nobody to someone who is comfortably on course to earn more money than I've ever seen in my life. In a matter of months.
I really credit BTSG's concept of 'frames' as the underlying magic to this turnaround, which we'll delve into in this review. The concept is simple, yet powerful, something I encourage you all to consider spending time & money on understanding.
Summary
The Chad Salesman course is a 4 parter which runs participants across the following:
Frames
Leveraging Psychology
Chad Salesmen
Success in Sales
I had never taken a sales course before this, so admittedly I have little benchmark to compare it to other than courses I've taken online on Money Twitter. I found the course to be comprehensive in the material concerning softer aspects of sales (psychology) and hard aspects of what you'll really be doing in a sales role (emailing, calling). I encountered very little fluff & BTSG is to the point & direct.
This said, I do not know what I am missing out on. I believe BTSG provides a relevant sales education & I largely trust the scope of the material covered because it seems to have covered everything I do in my career & business & is making me better at both.
Hence as regards coverage, I rate BTSG's course well based on personal experience in the B2B market.
Duration
The course is not long. This may lead one to question a $500 price tag on something which can be completed in a brief duration.
Remember however that the key metric is quality not quantity.
On this, BTSG's course demands you to make use of far more hours than it seems on the tin, as you need to proactively read, reflect on & apply his teachings & techniques on people IRL, pause & rewatch videos & scribble a ton of notes on paper. All in all, I would at minimum 2x the amount of time you need to spend on the course from the baseline hours taken to watch the videos and add in a healthy dose of reading & absorbing BTSG's Twitter feed, which is an absolute must to gain holistic value out of the course.
Let me repeat this point. Please take this course & read & imbibe BTSG's feed simultaneously. They are complementary components – his feed will give you tips, wisdom & tricks which you can use to make your life better, but you need the underlying foundations of the course to weave clarifying threads through all of BTSG's content.
To hit the point yet again, you will not become a Chad Salesman by watching the course alone. You need to do the course, which requires spending time by yourself actioning everything.
If you are not ready to invest time & money in yourself, please close this review now & do not buy the course.
If you are, you will gain way, way more value from the course as compared with someone who won't spend extra time going through the material repeatedly.
I would also strongly advise taking the course over a period of 1-3 months to allow the knowledge to sink in & shape your behaviour. Cramming this is a failing strategy because it's deceptively long if you do it properly.
Regarding length, again I rate this highly with the caveat that in learning, repeated exposure to material is the only real way for your newly acquired knowledge to stick & slowly change your mental heuristics overtime. So be prepared to make an effort.
Audience
Practically speaking, this course is extremely useful for sales roles, especially since BTSG maps elements of the softer side of sales onto the harder, actual ground game of selling in the form of a sales role in Part 4. If you're in any of the following (not exclusive) this course is directly, 100% applicable to what you are doing every day & will not only make you better at your role, but spot precisely where your company is messing up on sales processes:
Sales Development Representative
Business Development Representative/Manager
Account Executive/Manager
Partnerships Manager
Sales Leadership
Additionally, if you're an entrepreneur doing anything requiring B2B sales (whether agency or VC funded startup) this course is 100% relevant, given selling to customers or raising funds is such an essential part of what you do.
Sales is not something everyone will work in, but if you're a regular follower of types like Naval or BowTiedBull on Twitter, you'll also know that persuasion is at the very least one of the key skills which the smart people online tell you that you need to know, period.
Beyond sales roles, the course is a general education in applied psychology. By this I don't mean the Freudian psychoanalysis which college undergrads waste hundreds of hours reading articles on until 2am, training themselves to become overthinkers & poor executors.
By this I mean you will learn how to shape other people's behaviour & control your own in a way that helps you achieve whichever goals you're looking to, whether hitting quota, getting a chick's underwear off or convincing a stubborn bureaucrat to break procedure. Not in a Machiavellian 48 Laws of Power way, which helps you read other people's behaviour & build complex strategies around them. This is a course which will help you sit across the room with someone & learn how to use applied psychology to disarm & persuade them, through simple principles.
Concluding this section, The Chad Salesman course is 100% relevant for anyone professionally in sales. For those outside the profession, it is still helpful. I'd commence with BTSG's feed & if you think you're gaining a lot of value, take the course insofar as it cements & will at minimum 2x the knowledge you get from BTSG's feed.
Utility
Your garbage company training or marketing department's precanned outreach techniques will actively harm your quota & make your life unnecessarily harder. You need techniques which bypass or overcome the crap they are making you output.
Your edge will be a superior knowledge of frame.
There's a scene from Harry Potter where Voldemort & Harry are casting beams of magic at one another, and the beams are pushing closer to hit one or the other person & only one can emerge victorious. Imagine some kind of ethereal force between you & the prospect & the one dominating the frame has the stronger force.
This is frame.
Frame represents a subtle psychological relationship between 2 parties in an interaction. You will be faced with the prospect's shitty or adversarial frame & your responsibility is to ensure yours is the one which holds fort:
Remember, the prospect:
Lacks a real understanding of their & your market
Has an infantile need for guidance through the uncertainties of business & life
Has an ego which prevents them from understanding the limitations of their understanding
Sincerely needs help as they are overwhelmed or not competent
Needs someone with a complementary set of skills to make up for their weaknesses
Etcetera
Your responsibility is to diagnose these like a doctor & provide the solution if you or your company can. This is where I believe grandmaster salesmen cite sales as requiring very little persuasion or learning a bank of objection handling techniques. Done properly, people persuade themselves & objections melt in the face of a superior frame.
After the BTSG course & listening to BowTiedBull, I am actually convinced marketing is more of a 'dark arts' profession than sales. People have a guard up against 'sales-y' people or techniques when they really should have their guard up against powerful marketers, or people exploiting their need for ego, money, or beauty with words & art.
I digress, BTSG tells us how superior knowledge of your product or service, combined with a healthy level of competence & confidence, supplemented with a general knowledge of applied human psychology will all help you capture the frame of a conversation & achieve your goals.
Your company won't teach you any of this.
Tangible Results
I completely credit BTSG's course with the following:
Closing X figures in revenue through understanding how to control the frame of a conversation & show prospects I know 100x more than them, without being an asshole. Couldn't do this before.
Create employment for people thanks to more revenue in side biz.
Helped me realise I'm working for the wrong company. Cannot use 75% of his more extreme tactics because they aren't in line with brand image, even though they are clearly working overwhelmingly well for me in my side biz.
Understanding how sales & email marketing are done badly & why & how to do them better (skyrocket response rates).
Concluding Remarks
I can highly recommend The Chad Salesman course to any salesperson, aspiring salesperson or anyone who is looking to up their persuasion game. Equipped with BTSG's wisdom, you'll change your approach to sales, romance & life more broadly as you begin to detect frame dynamics in all your social interactions.
I have little comparison to make since BTSG is the only sales 'guru' whose content I've studied in depth, however the added autism on his content helps make it clear & actionable rather than sales-y & conventional like other gurus I've read or heard.
As BTB repeatedly says, career options to pursue for long term wealth are M&A, Tech & Sales along with a business of your choosing. If you in any way are in the early stages of sales or planning to go into it (or doing a business which requires you to sell B2B) do yourself a favour, get this course & watch yourself outperform everyone else.
Once again, my thanks to BowTiedDolphin for providing me with this course. Thanks to BTSG for such a great learning experience. And to BowTiedBull for bringing all the pieces together.
Edit: My thanks to Balaji Srinivasan for awarding this post with $100 in BTC. The essay has been transferred here from a previous domain.
Prompted by Balaji Srinivasan's article, here are some extended thoughts on how we can chart a pathway toward escaping decaying political regimes & their bastardised currencies.
This essay will be in 7 parts:
Introduction
An Important Note
Imitatio Singapura
Bureaucracy
The Machine Starts
The Sovereignty Stack
Conclusion: Guerrilla Warfare from the Dark Forests
If you have a chance, I highly recommend watching at least some of this interview between Balaji & Tim Ferriss. It'll contextualise a few of the expressions used in this essay.
The essay will assume some knowledge of things like Bitcoin and modern political culture. For anything unclear, please feel free to ask.
Introduction
The argument for building anew is clear. We who reject Woke Capital, Communist Capital and admire Crypto Capital want to find one another, work with one another, and build side by side with one another. This is not specific to those of us who reject the modern status quo. We all want to live in societies representing our held values. We want regulation and culture which promotes things we value, rather than things we disdain.
In the Western hemisphere, we're increasingly subject to the shifting sands of censorship. Woke Capital, in her well intentioned though misanthropic indignation, has spawned a 'cancel culture' which reminds us of the 'Damnatio Memoriae' policies used throughout history, whether by Ancient Rome or by Stalin. More insidiously, cancel culture seeks to erase our record from the present, not only the past.
The problem with Woke censorship lies in her schizophrenia. That which is appropriate one day is cancellable the next. What is politically indefensible seems to change so quickly, that keeping up is impossible. Not knowing where the Overton Window's boundaries clearly lie, those of us who wish to propel humanity forward with novel arguments, concepts and solutions, see our worldview as orthogonal to the 'Free Western World' and are no longer comfortable speaking openly and exchanging ideas, for fear of electronic retribution. And Communist capital fares no better, for her creative talent base either goes to Woke Capital, is compelled into silence, or copies the West.
Surely there must be an alternative for creative, mission driven people determined to build the future?
We also want to harness the pool of global 'Dark Talent', exceptional people whom for whatever reason lack the ability to come to a global skills hub or College or are now trapped in silence in the Western world, for the sake of advancing humanity and propelling science and technology forward. These are humanity's diamonds and diamonds are certainly lying in the rough.
We who wish to bequeath our children and descendants an optimistic vision of the future, cannot rely on building startups alone. Companies don't last for generations in the way countries do. We need to build out startup societies with positive cultures to replicate the beliefs we see fit across generations. Building a good startup in a bad culture is a house on sandy foundations, as we saw with the humbling of Jack Ma.
'Companies don't last for generations in the way countries do.'
We now have an opportunity to lay the foundations for 'The Network State'. Few grasp the power of the associated technologies we have at our disposal, in their ability to shape the political architectures of the near future. We have an opportunity to escape politically decaying and repressive regimes and cultures & the chance to rebuild our societies anew with sound money.
We must ensure we get this right. As Peter Thiel says, a 'startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed'. One can only imagine the ramifications of a country messed up at its foundation. And unlike startups, countries cannot pivot.
An Important Note
As Balaji says, the cost of building ex nihilo is far lower than the cost of demolishing then rebuilding. Starting from scratch means we can choose to build without the constraining legacy of the past. Starting afresh allows us to choose positive foundations on which to build the future of governance, rather than being stuck with bureaucratic institutions paralysed by administrative inertia.
Nonetheless, we must be careful to avoid any hint of 'Year 0'. This refers to the political doctrine employed by the Communist Party of Kampuchea, similar to 'Year One' following the French Revolution.
'The idea behind Year Zero was that all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded, and a new revolutionary culture must replace it, starting from scratch. All of the history of a nation or people before Year Zero would be largely deemed irrelevant, because it would ideally be purged and replaced from the ground up.'
Without any culture, legacy or traditions constraining them, human beings psychologically destabilise or begin worshipping something banal. Human beings always worship something, whether coin, bottle, country, God, science or the "Revolution". Whatever we build must have some foundations in something familiar, psychologically stabilising and optimistic. We must approach the exercise in nationbuilding with an open mind and more importantly, an open heart. Political design is challenging, and we may make mistakes along the way. It's crucial we find the right people when building polities anew.
This is a nontrivial problem. Without learning from the body of that which has worked in the past, we risk starting entirely from scratch and messing this up, like the Totalitarians of the 20th Century did, to catastrophic effect. In politics, unlike commerce, we are always experimenting with people's lives and livelihoods, so we need to be de facto cautious in our political protocol designs.
Imitatio Singapura
Some time ago, I moved to Singapore to try and understand why it was so successful and how other societies could learn to build an equivalent political culture from scratch. I'd like to briefly discuss the country as there're some essential lessons to learn from Lee Kuan Yew's experience. To learn more, read From Third World to First.
Here are some lessons I learned:
Diversity and Inclusion:
Singapore is a country with 3 major ethnic groupings, Indians, Chinese and Malays, with adherents of Islam, Taoism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism and Buddhism (& more) across each of the ethnicities. Early in her history, Singapore faced serious race riots, as tensions bubbled over into violence and unrest. Lee Kuan Yew recognised that cultural tension is a facet of human nature and that giving healthy expression to subnational identities under the umbrella of an overarching belief architecture, is essential.
Unlike modern Wokeopaths, Singapore mastered Diversity and Inclusion before Diversity & Inclusion even existed in the West. Singapore is far from being Woke, but Singapore is also far from some MAGA anti-PC culture worldview, maintaining a peaceful balance between different groups by recognising their explicit, irreconcilable differences.
Children learn their 'Mother Tongue' alongside English in school & are encouraged to preserve and celebrate their own culture and faith constantly. Malay, Mandarin and Tamil are all given equal standing and where translations from English are required, translations are done into all 3 languages, signifying no language or culture is superior to the other (in theory). Food stalls seek to segregate into halal and non-halal, respecting minority food preferences. These are just a few anecdotal, but significant examples in which culture is enshrined.
Alongside this however, all men are required to undertake compulsory National Service in the Singapore Armed Forces or elsewhere. This certainly strengthens the bonds between people under the auspices of a cohesive Singaporean identity. Singapore strikes a unique balance between uniting people and acknowledging & giving fair expression to their differences.
Lee Kuan Yew recognised the value in people expressing their culture and heritage, with the need to build something workable and cohesive from scratch, the same tension one could imagine emerging when building countries from scratch, whether cultural, ethnic, ideological or simply personal.
East and West
Lee Kuan Yew studied in the West, but also explicitly chose to go back to his roots and learn Mandarin to bond with his constituents. Like the Japanese a century earlier, he knew Singapore was a backwater which needed to adopt the best practices of the Western world. This is partly why Singaporean students still flood good Business & STEM Schools in the US & UK.
But he also knew people mostly value familiar culture and that Asian values held a plethora of advantages over Western ones, in things like respect for elders, real academic success and grit etcetera. He knew adopting positive lessons from the West didn't mean watering down or eroding the essence of Asian identity and that this wasn't the end goal. Instead, he built upon Singapore's legacy as a real entrepôt of commingling identities.
When architecting a Cloud Nation from inception, it's important we too do this with an open mind. We will likely be a mission driven project. We may well have Bitcoin maximalists on board. It's important we remain open minded to learning from and drawing the best from Fiat, & legacy institutions like Wall Street, regardless of whether we disdain these things with a burning and justified passion.
Corpo Authoritarianism
Let's use an analogy. If China were a parent, they'd monitor all aspects of their children's lives 24/7. If the West were a parent, they'd allow their children to do anything and then unpredictably scream at them for behaving badly, without realising it's their own parenting style preventing the child from learning appropriate lessons. If Singapore were a parent, they'd be disciplinarians, allowing their children to fail and learn but guiding them firmly and fairly.
Singapore practices something like this politically and economically in authoritarian capitalism. Her model has been a tremendous success, taking Singapore from a backwater to a glimmering metropolis. Singapore demonstrates how orderly enterprise is an optimal solution and that Western democracy was perhaps only a (poor) local optimum.
To be clear, when I say Corpo Authoritarianism I don't mean a soulless country run by Big 4 Auditors, or even a Cyberpunkesque Arasaka Yakuza-empire. I mean Singapore is the equivalent of a mission driven later stage company built to serve her own people, with a highly efficient public sector run like a startup. Singapore also doesn't exercise extreme control over all aspects of her economy, but practices balance, with market appropriate solutions to healthcare, housing, and education, to stop these from becoming pathologically unaffordable for locals and unsustainable for the Government.
It's likely our Cloud Nations will want to learn from Silicon Valley and build startup style countries which still serve their populations with good services and a live and let live attitude. But we may need a mental shift, to recognise that there is no individual without the community in which they live. In the West, we've increasingly rejected responsibility toward others, and this has left a hole for intersectional politics to fill. We need to build a culture with healthy respect for our neighbours, whether we build a Libertarian Enclave or a Technophilic Paradise.
Government
Government in the West is turning into an employer of last resort for risk averse college students and people who can't get into, or want to drop out of stressful, competitive careers in consulting or banking, because they're looking for 'meaning'. Alternatively, people who are extremely progressive and or justice oriented & can't work in the legal sphere typically flood Government offices in droves.
There are plenty of bright sparks in Western Governments, but they're drowned out by the morass of bureaucrats and wokeopaths. Singapore recognised how important Government is, that Government is a company for which every citizen is a customer. The best talent needs to work in Government, solving problems affecting everyone in society. Singapore cracked this by making Government a prestigious and competitive employer, paying deservedly high salaries and sponsoring Singaporeans' education at home and abroad in exchange for 'bonding' them into Government employment for a tenure.
'Government is a company for which every citizen is a customer.'
Singapore created a system in which raw ambition merges with social responsibility. When we design our system, we need to ensure something similar. The West rejects the collective and disdains mutual responsibility for our neighbours. The East perhaps overplays this. Can we learn and adopt the best from both?
Sectional Concluding Remarks
Singapore is an example of a country which had to build itself virtually ex nihilo, but amidst a series of preexisting traditions and cultural preferences, to which we ourselves will also be subject to when building new polities. Though I certainly haven't considered every facet of Singapore's successes and glossed over her failings, the purpose of this exercise is not the political analysis of an Oriental state.
I drew upon the Singapore case to give an example of some essential lessons we must learn when nationbuilding in modernity. It's important we approach this process with an open mind, not a fundamentalist's zeal. We are all products of our pasts whether we recognise this or not and we will inevitably have differences with those we are building alongside.
Next, let's explore an original sin we'll need to correct for if any hypothetical sovereign territory is to succeed.
Bureaucracy
There is a real malaise deep in the heart of modern political functioning. Western Civil Services are the backbones of their societies. Commonly known by critics as the Administrative State, bureaucracy and administration is the slow process of Government service distribution which wastes $mns and achieves things extremely slowly. The 'Government Industry' is one which VCs and startup founders avoid like the plague, owing to the unreliability of Government customers, the exceptionally slow pace of dealing with bureaucrats and abstruse procuring requirements. Anyone dealing with Government offices in the West will know these challenges all too well. Bureaucrats are highly risk averse and prefer rewarding existing relationships, leading to the persistence of a legacy military industrial complex with vast sums spent on massively unproductive contracts which nobody really audits properly. Bureaucracy rewards for length of service and existing relationships, with tenures lasting decades and decades and Government contractors the same as those from aeons ago.
If you're a billionaire like Elon, Palmer Luckey or Joe Lonsdale, you might have a shot at cracking Government markets (Anduril, SpaceX & Palantir) by virtue of money, clout and contacts. And there are entrepreneurs trying to reinvigorate Government ground up, like Steve Blank with his education driven Hacking4Defense model. By and large however, Government is completely orthogonal to startups in the type of people who go and work there (risk averse, slow moving, inefficient, work-life balance preference, stability, nontechnical, unambitious) – bureaucrats are the antithesis of startup founders. There's only one real contiguous aspect, which is in the mission driven orientation of Government work, which mirrors the mission driven element of startup building. Though even then one must ask whether one wishes to build or fight for countries whose values are so waylaid, or whether modern bureaucrats are like the mission driven apparatchiks battling the USSR during the Cold War. Can you really imagine today's Department of Defense creating something as spectacular as the Internet?
We who wish to escape from the tyranny of bureaucracy which leads to gargantuan sums of $ wasted, would redesign Governments so the best and most efficient people work there. This is because we need smart, creative thinkers and doers to solve extremely complex policy problems which we're largely assigning to office drones. This is a tough nut to crack though. Bureaucracy has plenty of uncreative, repetitive back-office work which someone needs to do. We want the exceptional people to do the creative, decisionmaking but the drudgery element and dreg culture is certainly offputting. Contracting out Government work seems to be the compromise reached, though this causes incentive misalignments, as those working on Government problems are no longer mission driven and have incentives to score massive, wasteful contracts. DARPA is an exception, but this is also because it's small. Government by design, because of the multiplicity of services it offers, has to function like a larger corporation.
Because exceptional people can earn far more and enjoy a freedom away from bureaucracy in startups, venture capital, private equity, consulting, banking and other careers and rewriting Government offices from scratch seems like a Herculean task verging on impossible owing to its complexity, this might seem totally unfathomable. Moreover, there's a Catch 22. Countries with good political systems promoting healthy commerce which increases GDP for all overtime, will gradually lose their exceptional talent to private enterprise. As more and more opportunities emerge, smart and ambitious people will move to domains where they are rewarded handsomely, which Government will struggle to compete with. Inevitably, this leaves policymaking to the less talented and an inevitable erosion into bureaucracy.
How can we make Government's culture more effective? How should we design our Government operating systems to make sure things get done, don't waste money and attract smart people willing to work on challenging problems? Perhaps you don't actually see this as a problem, and I wouldn't be surprised if you have no idea what I'm talking about. Bureaucracy by design is something shrouded, ephemeral and mysterious. Most people have no clue about the demented levels of wastage Government engages in with their own tax dollars.
Thanks to modern technology however, we have an opportunity to finally and decisively crack the talent driven malaise cycle once and for all. Let's explore how.
The Machine Starts
Much of a bureaucrat's job is to do the same inane thing over and over again with little creative impulse and innovation. Reader, which advanced technology is excellent at executing dull repetitive tasks on an automated basis in a domain specific environment?
Artificial Intelligence isn't really considered a part of the technology stack for emerging polities, relegated to second fiddle behind Cryptogovernance Protocols, Seasteading and Charter Cities. But it might decisively produce exactly the solutions we need.
As back offices in corporations are automated to save $ and time, so too I believe we can literally automate the entire process of service provision by Governments. Government is almost entirely one giant, gluttonous back office and technology is the solution to her malaise, a malaise which by extension gets spewed all over society thanks to Government's wide reach.
I estimate around 80-90% of Government bureaucrats' work could be wholly automated now or in near future. So much of Defense, Housing, Healthcare, Agriculture, Education, Media, Transport and Commerce work is simply overglorified paper shuffling with signoff, requiring almost no creativity from people. Almost nobody talks about this because nobody really knows the procedures behind institutional Government decisionmaking, thanks to (often pointless and self-aggrandising) clearance processes.
As a rule, I'm going to propose the following: any role which can be successfully automated in a Cloud Nation within Government should be automated to as full an extent as possible, from inception. There will be errors, mistakes, and discrimination on the part of the AI, but this is something we should simply grit, bear and improve on iteratively. Creating an administrative bureaucracy with career officers will inevitably cause the gradual death spiral of Government into organisational malaise. Government administration is too important to allow bureaucrats to hijack it.
What we want is IF_THEN_ELSE Government Services, trained using Deep Learning and hashed on Merkle Trees for transparency and immutability of record, so everyone can publicly audit what the Government is doing, where decisions come from and understand mistakes without coverups. We want barebones policy documents written by AI, we want Excel spreadsheets of population level data to be quickly parsed through by AI. We want complaints lodged and resolved end to end by AI, with humans in the loop if necessary, as customer support. We want policymakers' decisions to have a direct channel to their constituents where possible. Where the system cannot handle requests, we should have AI Engineers & Software Engineers employed to retune and rebuild services once we discover a policymaker's decision cannot directly reach their constituents. We want Engineers to replace Bureaucrats in Governments. Those arguing this massively increases the digital attack surface on Government fail to acknowledge the fact that bureaucrats are already compromise-able with relatively little difficulty through social engineering, incompetence, and a concerted espionage effort by hostile states.
Moreover, we speak today about greedy corporations eliminating workers' jobs through automation, but I argue there is an absolute moral imperative to eliminate as much Government administrative work as is humanely possible, to stop the disgusting levels of wastage bureaucrats engage in with other people's money. Architecting a polity from scratch would give us the opportunity to initiate this process correctly.
Others argue Government should be inefficient by design to prevent tyranny. Yet this is an argument for the elected, strategic decisionmaking processes of Government to be inefficient by design, namely that which is done through Executives, Judiciaries and Houses/Senates/Parliaments. Government Civil Services should be highly efficient by design, so they execute the decisions of policymakers quickly, once the lengthy period of hand wringing and decisionmaking is completed (assuming you believe in Democracy). If they do not, this is a threat to Democracy through the creation of a defacto bureaucratic oligarchy with unelected and unappointed power. If you want autocratic rule, then you'll want an efficient bureaucracy even more, so interfering bureaucrats don't use their own willpower to thwart decisionmaking!
Concluding this section, we need the overwhelming volume of Government bureaucracy to be done by Machine Intelligence. Creative and strategic work requires the most talented people in society, though all the routine, bureaucratic and administrative work, which has spiralled out of control in the Western world, needs to be decisively eliminated. With the emergence of Cloud Nations, we have an opportunity to avoid an Original Sin and build our startup societies from scratch with near wholly automated bureaucracies.
The Sovereignty Stack
Some of you thought the Revolt Against the Modern World would be fought with sticks, stones, and pitchforks. Others believed it'd start by storming the Capitol or short squeezing an overleveraged hedge fund. The reality is the new world will be built afresh with 0xcFD53557a09Af262C1beB15c5f65f9DFf119d8Cc and Urbit as the gasoline behind the TTPs we use to move beyond the old world.
We'll build unique Metaverse planets where people live and transact over their unique digital houses. We'll make agreements on programmable smart contracts executed by machines, avoiding hefty legal fees from lawyers. We'll have sovereign systems on Urbit, where we'll use our own servers without being attention harvested by AI powered advertisers on Facebook. In fact, we'll no longer be bound by Facebook, because Cryptoeconomics and protocols will lay the substrate for healthy competition between services, rather than digital centralisation. And we'll be able to plug our social identities from BlueSky into Decentraland, engaging with our friend's Chirps one minute and visiting their virtual lava planet the next, seamlessly and using one tokenised, Self Sovereign Identity.
Despite me riffing into Woke Capital, the beauty of this process is that anyone can build or spawn the political culture they choose to. Those who decry us as quasifascistic heralds of a Neocameralist philosophy fail to recognise that the technologies highlighted above actually give them an equal opportunity to build the territories they want. You can build a Wokeistan atop the fraying remnants of San Francisco, New York, and London's cultures and maybe you'll use Tether as the currency, in homage to the Keynesian legacy of the past, or a Diversitycoin, distributed equally to all.
Maybe some will want to carve away a 1950s American Renaissance, America 2.0 with $USDFoundingFathers'Vision as their currency. Perhaps some future MAGA cult will build in the spirit of their patron saint @realdonaldtrump and create an @REALAmerica, where the smart contract law stipulates everyone must walk around with a gun and nobody can go into another person's backyard, for the sake of social peace.
Others can build an NRx Technophilic NeoCalifornia ruled by a Council of Elders, Thiel, Balaji, Andreessen et al. with Curtis Yarvin as 'Speaker of the House of Uncommons'. This country might choose Bitcoin, or some quantum resistant future equivalent as her hard currency.
Amidst these endless possibilities, what Patri Friedman sees as a 'Cambrian Explosion of Governance', we envisage a world in which we can select and architect our choice of province. Those of us allergic to bureaucracy can avert our gaze from it. Those of us who despise inequality can build a polity where this is outlawed. Each Cryptoasset with her Cryptoeconomic incentives can spawn a unique Cryptogovernance System.
Conclusion: Guerrilla Warfare from the Dark Forests
How can we begin taking practical steps toward such a world? Funds like Pronomos Capital are a great push in this direction. We need more like this, as well as more GovTech funds to encourage the building of a technology stack alongside this, but getting here is challenging because most VCs think on a 10Y horizon as opposed to a civilisational, epochal one. Starting new or Charter Cities is great. Nonetheless, this is still an analogue solution which raises barriers to exceptional people geolocated elsewhere and requires vast sums of upfront capital, as well as consent from a host state which could be switched off at any time.
"Imagine a dark forest at night. It's deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course, it's not. The dark forest is full of life. It's quiet because night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent.
…
This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.
In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we're retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream."
Something we've learned however, is that global, pseudonymous coordination in circumstances with low trust is possible. We have DAO VCs popping up. $GME showed us too, that you can wage coordinated guerrilla warfare in the information age from the Dark Forests of the Internet. Bitcoin is a technical solution to low trust between transacting entities. Those of us fleeing Woke Capital and Woke culture's spiteful wrath have taken shelter online and are dispersed globally, preferring to keep to ourselves knowing fully well unorthodox, heretical beliefs without financial sovereignty will lead to our swift undoing from public and professional life.
It's time to leverage this Dark Matter of talent and skills to build out the basis for Cloud Nations.
We should first ensure anyone working on political Cloud Nation projects is a high calibre, high integrity person. Standards for entering policymaking should be extremely challenging and the vocation should be as prestigious in the 2020s & 2030s as working for a16z is today. Nonetheless, we need a way to work with pseudonymous talent. There are extremely bright, capable people who think outside the box on Twitter & Reddit, far more so than in Business & Public Policy Schools. We need to draw upon the calibre and content of people's writing, product and engineering skills, as opposed to the pedigree of their certificates. We need more pseudonymous Fellowships and funding, as well as verification mechanisms for Dark Talent. Pseudonymous financing will be an enabling technology to allow the smartest people on the planet to build Cloud Nations from their shelters in the Dark Forest.
Moreover, as we build and design our Cloud Nations, we must also design automated services simultaneously and iterate upon these, so that our Cloud Nation is a nation for her people by design from inception and not a nation prone to being hijacked subsequently by her bureaucrats. I'm a great believer that the best people to tackle this are from the Startup/VC world. Startups are already Governance mechanisms, smaller scale autocratic units where Founders rule absolutely, with guidance from their elders in the form of boards. The CEO/CTO structure with this board emulates Sparta's Diarchy. And there's also a further synergy between Oriental political cultures and technologists already. Singapore is run by a Computer Scientist. China is run by an Engineer. This confers an advantage on both societies in the age of technology's acceleration, especially when the West is run by Jurists, Journalists and Careerist Politicians who don't quite understand tech or where the world is headed. We need to learn from this.
Ultimately however, whatever we build must be built quietly. Decaying regimes with bastardised currencies have no reason to wish the ushering in of competitor territories vying for taxation dollars and talent. There is every reason to, like Singapore at her inception, presume incumbents will be threatened by extremely successful digital polities, whether Cloud Based, Metaverse or Seastead. Announcing this would be like prey running out into the open in the Dark Forest, knowing fully well predators are everywhere.
While such territories have little initial hope of defending themselves, they must lie in wait till they are ready to show themselves to the world. In the Dao of Capital, Mark Spitznagel presents a strategy of life and investing, grounded in the idea of gradually achieving an intermediate state of advantage as the ideal solution to achieving a successful end. We too, must pursue a highly robust intermediary strategy as the pathway toward building successful polities. We will have to do this gradually, over time. There will be setbacks and attempts to stop us. People will decry our attempts as futile, as with Bitcoin many a time. But like Bitcoin, our success will emerge like a tidal wave.
In the spirit of Amerigo Vespucci, that noble explorer from whose name is derived the brand of modern America, we are on the cusp of exploring and building entirely new governance systems from scratch. We are finally on the cusp of liberating ourselves from the tyranny of malaise, bureaucracy and woke censorship.
So begins our Guerrilla War from the Dark Forests.
I recently left my job. It just wasn't for me. But I'm really glad I did it. It was the best mistake I've ever made. Permit me a moment of your time to explain why I think we should all do a job we're unsuited to for a while.
The Best Mistake I've Ever Made
Last year, I took a position working on a major, pressing geopolitical event. Naïve idealism, purpose and an imminent sense of political momentum led me to throw my hat into working on a challenging problem. Working at the heart of a world changing event was indeed enticing.
In earnest, this is the story I tell myself.
Actually, I half heartedly applied for a job a year before commencing, completed an application while sick and hesitated intensely before sleepwalking into it with undeliberate intent, urged on by people suggesting it might 'look decent' (if even one of these emerge during your preselection exercise for a vocation, think twice!) After two months I realised it really wasn't for me and managed to hold fast for a while before quitting.
Why Leave? The Mission Driven Approach
There's a plethora of reasons anyone may feel compelled to quit outright and start afresh elsewhere. Perhaps the workload is too much or too little, work emotionally soul crushing or overwhelming. Maybe you lack work life balance, or perhaps you're being held back from achieving your potential. Culture isn't quite right, people aren't on the same page. Maybe you're not being paid enough. Perhaps you're being paid too much and this is distracting you from following your passion.
Among peers however, something I've found very often is that people quit because it didn't cohere with their sense of mission (broadly defined). In some ways, formal labour is a conundrum. Work both is and isn't a defining aspect of one's life simultaneously, and this is a dichotomy one has to come to terms with. What do I mean by this?
Most of us spend more time at work than with our own families. And when we meet someone new, following the hi, hello and name exchange, we always seek awareness of what they do. Yet formal labour is only a fraction of a multifaceted telos. I'd actually argue it's disconnected to one's personal sense of Mission, though the two may align. Take a moment to ask yourself what you'd be doing in an ideal world, if money, status and time were no object. I'd be willing to bet many a reader would find a dissonance between their imagined vision and what they're actually doing now. I believe this represents the logical distinction between formal labour and a mission. Congratulations if they overlap! Perhaps you're doing what you should be. I'm sure this wasn't always the case, though.
Pivots and Pushing Yourself
Something Millennials are renowned for is that we're prone to taking career jumps with more frequency than Boomers or Gen Xers. Iterative decision making seems so baked into our generation's culture, in a way completely foreign to those from a different epoch. What I'd like to propose is that one of your iterations or pivots should be something you're unsuited to. Precisely because you won't enjoy it and won't be doing what you're fundamentally good at.
I heard a great piece of advice a while ago from someone on the internet (so it must be true!). Anything you find difficult, or have an aversion to (small details, seeing a bigger picture, filtering through complex spreadsheets etcetera) is just some area of cognitive underdevelopment. Taken as a general heuristic and not absolutely literally, I believe this to be accurate. Please indulge a personal example.
I have always been fascinated by technology. For years I've tried to understand code. Aged 16 I bought some Python books, spent hours typing and retyping print("Hello World!"), though every time I tried to move further I had a mental block, concluding I'm just not deeply technical enough.
My previous role required me to play with technical details in spreadsheets and edit legal texts, in which single words can change the whole architecture of an outcome. I didn't enjoy it much. I prefer dealing in strategic outcomes, analysis and understanding the effects of human beings and technology on one another. But one day I realised there must be a way to speed up the workflow. And from there I forced myself to learn some code. I can now write (very basic!) SQL queries and Python scripts with pleasure. I'm convinced doing what I was unsuited to actually helped fertilise my mind (or bequeath the confidence therein) to grapple with code, in a way I wouldn't have been able to, had I just pursued what I was good at outright.
But there's more. Forcing yourself to go through an unpleasant experience isn't just a lesson in perseverance, but the longer you force yourself, I venture, the more insights you unlock about your own mind. We often think of ourselves as rational. We think we know all there is to know of ourselves. Yet if we truly did, we wouldn't end up taking jobs we dislike, or being with the wrong people romantically. I think we have to learn by making controlled mistakes and leveraging these to maximise acceleration in the correct direction. I call this taking a slap in the face with such force, that the slap pushes you on course.
In some sense, you're eradicating bad options and a misaligned purpose by experiencing exactly what your misalignment is. It's learning Via Negativa, a concept I heard from Nassim Taleb drawn from Apophatic Theology, whereby God is understood as what God isn't. Likewise, I believe we learn more about ourselves by first learning what we aren't.
I unwittingly accelerated my learning in life by doing a job I was unsuited to for a while. Can you do the same?
The concept of the 'Collective Unconscious' coined by Carl Jung, refers to certain unconsciously held instinctual and archetypal frames, shared among various peoples or groups. These shared understandings of particular frames or ideas can manifest in political understandings or a specific zeitgeist, with a form of emergent egregore, typically difficult to divine during and easier to conceptualise as a student of history. For example, "The Enlightenment" only became understood as "The Enlightenment" era about a century after.
I wish to provide some thoughts accounting for the overlap between political and psychological in a hyperdigital, networked age. An attempt to define the zeitgeist as we live it.
Modern politics provides meaning to anyone locked in a 9–5, the cognitively exhausted and broadly anyone who cannot dedicate time, energy or capacity to derive independent meaning.
Hold on. I'm not saying you're lazy if you're political. I'm saying you may not have enough time.
Time and space are essential to defining our own meaning. Many dream their best ideas, or divine them during a period of solace and retreat in nature, meditation, alone time etcetera. Especially those of an introverted bent, away from the pressures of modern life. Perhaps the more extroverted may elect to find meaning from other sources, especially the people they choose to spend time with and trust. Perhaps we find meaning from a combination of these things. Crucially, the underlying axiom is consistent. We choose to spend time our own way to derive meaning. Yet just as time is essential to deriving meaning, we surrender most of our time to earn a wage, maximise growth or achieve an incessant return to capital for someone else. We sacrifice ownership of our own time to survive. You can't meet your friends, be in solitude, or go to Church as much as you want to because you don't have time.
Modern politics gives an expedient solution. It allows you to outsource meaning to someone who makes crafting meaning their dayjob.
Everyone in a modern, developed country has on demand access through Twitter, Facebook and app based media to instant, digestible summaries of events optimised for readership. The fact that information is endless creates a recursion loop between your wetware and content. You are offered worldviews and seek out a worldview. This is especially addictive to a generation which grew upon on instamedia. One must study the political supply chain closely.
It also drains the freetime you have leftover from your dayjob.
Modern politics prepackages expedient memes around which people can congregate. Politics is a coordination and distribution problem.
Anyone trying to increase political participation or representation is trying to increase participation or representation for their own side.
People will tell you 'it's important' or 'current events' are something everyone should know about. People will also explain some injustice(s) around which their worldview forms as virtually undisagreeable, neglected etcetera. #Campaigns which spread awareness are an Infinite Game.
Remember: Most headlines in mainstream news sources affect most people personally very little.
Politics provides coordinating institutions which encourage the achievement of targeted goals among distributed populations. Politics being buy in, buy out however, is not necessarily a bad thing. Decreasing political engagement is an attempt by people to escape other people's anger. Selective political engagement is healthier.
Modern politics is fundamentally grounded in shared outrage.
Pundits explaining Donald Trump's election in 2016 as fuelled by repressed anger provide a very simple exemplar of this process. Applies to both liberal and conservative. When someone possesses strong views or feels passionately about any issue, they are always angry. Strong views is a byword for unadulterated anger toward the world.
For any Jungians, I'm increasingly drawn to believing politicos are mostly Extraverted Judging (Je) types, whether dominant or auxiliary. This is an intuitive observation of patterns from a sample of interactions and requires deeper consideration.
Likewise, people with Extraverted Feeling (Fe) can be very politically convincing. Their zealous passion and articulated persistence is often quite impressive.
Contention: Monarchism, dictatorship and autocracy obliterate the opportunity for politics to provide exclusive meaning to the individual.
By reducing optionality, they forcibly compel the individual to search for nonpolitical meaning. Political optionality gives people more ideational options to gravitate toward. Autocracies polarise political identities into a zerosum game with restricted tribes, into for or against the autocrat. Restrictions on information feed these tendencies. Divergence is stymied.
Democratisation made politics an identity by fragmenting unity. Cf. Memetic Tribes. Freedom is fragmenting. More tailored identities for people's diverse experiences.
On Call-Out Culture
Older readers may be unfamiliar with this very millennial of tendencies. Call-Out culture or Cancellation culture refers to a tendency which emerges on social media, when a celebrity or otherwise famous person gives an unpopular or supposedly controversial opinion on some subject. The outraged and aggrieved will proceed to 'call out' or 'cancel' the offender by unfollowing them and condemning the act of supposedly heinous aggression. This is a damaging form of boycotting in the attention economy, which may impact upon a person's revenue streams and livelihood.
Stalin did this to Yezhov, his NKVD head, after Yezhov's fall from favour.
Mass unfollow campaigns are an attempt to expunge someone's existence from the attention economy, a punishment for betraying some belief system.
This is the purest example of a totalitarian motive (silencing) resting upon a democratic vessel (mass participation).
Modern Politics has morphed into low self-awareness philosophy, masquerading as changemaking, actually a downstream function of a cultural-Memetic War.
'Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.' — Rumi
Despite the above, I still believe it is better to hold political views than not. I suspect the optimum to be holding views loosely enough so one's life is not consumed, yet present so one may effortlessly gain access to a tribe of peers.
Originally published in 'Masculinity in the 21st Century' – Murray, Lis et al. under the pseudonym Remy Baudin.
Though this is a book on 'Masculinity in the 21st Century', I will not bore you with my own regurgitation of what I believe this pertains to. I leave this to the more qualified, wise and astute. I concur with their fears and share their dreams for renewal. Where I seek to provide utility is on understanding a phenomenon many of us have or will at some stage face down in our respective lives. It comes as follows:
There is a creeping concept, insidiously pervading all forms of corporate and collegiate environment alike, which has grown into a nebulous, all-encompassing doctrine. This pernicious idea has become so commonplace and mainstream, deemed so necessary by establishment do gooders, that entire job offerings, companies, funds and organizations have spawned to serve this manufactured demand. I believe this is of great concern to Men in the 21st Century, and henceforth will focus on the topic of 'Diversity and Inclusion'.
This is something many of you have likely come across, particularly at the hands of overzealous HR administrators and highly perturbed college politicos. [1] Where once upon a day, the Military-Industrial complex was castigated as the hellish doyen of a noble establishment corrupted, so too has the same become of the Diversity-Inclusion complex. I unashamedly view this concept as a negative, harmful one and am hostile to a concept which in contemporaneous progressive thinking, has morphed into a perniciously cultish devotion to an idea with seemingly noble goals, and strictly damnable ends. A concept once previously unknown, non-extant and in total absentia from public and private discourse has underhandedly emerged to breed a slavish mass obsession, pervading the zeitgeist with terms from 'Person of Colour (POC)', 'Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME)' to 'Woke'. The concept has caused some problems, some examples as follows:
Diversocrats have gone so far in Britain's Labour Party as to charge ethnic Anglo-Saxons a higher wage of entry into an event than their 'BAME' counterparts. [2]
Job opportunities and internship schemes are allotted by ethnicity, regardless of whether the applicant is a wealthier ethnic minority candidate. In some instances, males are instructed not to apply altogether or immediately disadvantaged.
Preventing access for white students at Berkeley
A no-Whites on campus day at Evergreen State
Granting women in Oxford an extra hour than Men to complete an examination
Among many others.
I raise this topic now in particular, accounting for the political climate we find ourselves in. Heralded as the nouveau darling spearheading the fight for the Diversity-Inclusion complex, is the it girl of the Instagram Democratic base in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a woman of colour (WOC). She's fiery, charismatic, a brilliant marketeer. Those who disdain her political stance would do best to understand, acknowledge and try to sense make of the agenda and worldview under which her, her kith and kin operate, rather than dismiss her. It's this which leads me to pen this Essay, from fascination of the other side, of human nature and behaviour. Of something which I believe is of sheer importance for men in the 21st Century to come to understand and engage with.
I will offer my own theory to be scrutinized by yourself, the reader, in the hopes of stimulating some critical thought on the problem and persistence of the Diversity-Inclusion complex, and some ideas surrounding the challenges which it brings forth.
On Diversity and Inclusion
Conceptualizing Diversity and Inclusion is straightforward. Diversity broadly pertains to the differences between human beings, and Inclusion to the capacity for (in some form) entertaining these differences. As core, fundamental principles these are uncontentious. One cannot but embrace at the wondrous differences between human beings, of maestro programmers, savant strategists, virtuoso artistes, coming together as teams to design mind blowing products and systems which only a short while ago, were the exclusive purview of Sci-Fi books and films. Likewise, nobody likes to be left out. Everybody wants to belong, in some way, shape or form, to a community, tribe, organization, group, network etcetera. Dunbar's Number suggests the mean group size to which we are optimally adapted is around 150 people. I believe the concept of Inclusion hence has some value in providing human beings with a tribe of peers, followers and mentors, something deeply embedded in our psychology which we need. And where once racial disharmony and subjugation pervaded social consciousness, it is indeed a sincere pleasure to witness (for the most part) the peaceful coming together of different ethnicities.
Let me be clear therefore, in saying I welcome collaboration between the unlike-minded and the ethnically diverse. Purism is not something I stand for. Which is why I am so hostile to Diversity and Inclusion. I take Heather MacDonald's definition of what "Diversity" has become as the grounds for my hostility: "socially engineered proportionality" (Mac Donald, 2018). Diversity, alongside Inclusion have metamorphosed into the active gerrymandering of society to correct what proponents claim is a deeply rooted injustice. Diversocrats maintain that, affirmative action and the like are justified solutions to the problems of natural inequality. Likewise, they propose tactics to 'exclude' certain human beings so as to ensure those supposedly excluded in past are now included. The ideologues of this movement however, very frequently shun any sense of diversity in thought, and are often responsible for shutting down events involving speakers with whom they disagree with on campuses across the Anglosphere. Let us examine this problem further.
The Problem with Diversocrats
Underrepresentation of X group in Y field is the most mind numbingly simplistic and banal argument which these Diversocrats pursue.
We need more Women in Technology!
We need more People of Colour in Politics!
Substitute any category of non-white middle-class male human being into the former term in each sentence, and any vocation or academic discipline into the latter and you have the bog-standard argument used by Diversocrats. Yet this is a woefully inadequate position to take.
Firstly, in offering a "band-aid" solution to the problem of inequality, Diversocrats assume systemic readjustment will inevitably occur and lead to a just outcome. They claim to be correcting a wrong by committing a wrong – giving a discriminatory, systematic advantage by claiming to be fighting the oppression of the system. By asserting the insidiousness of the stewards of this system, they seek to perpetuate an active harm against those whose most horrendous crime is existence. Shaky moral foundations at most.
Secondly, the position assumes the inexistence of cognitive inequalities and human differences. As such, it mistakenly assumes equality of outcome is some inevitability. I'll go a step further. Diversity and Inclusion is a schizophrenic ideology which claims celebration of people's differences, whilst assuming away these differences in the case of people's actual traits and capabilities. You might be a great artist, brilliant writer or engineering maven. Your sister might be the centre of attention, the life of the party, whilst you're the deep, introspective, thoughtful one. The hard-working philosopher. Perhaps you're the painter, the architect, the fearless startup founder, the marketing genius or maybe you're following in your family footsteps in the Marines, or Engineering Corps. These are traits and skills which we inherit, or cultivate, careers we build and most importantly – which others don't have or do.
What makes us unique is in scarcity.
Scarcity creates value as we contribute something which others cannot. Diversity and Inclusion is an ideology of hypocrisy because it adopts the 'Unconstrained' vision of human behaviour, where the very existence of 'Diversity' is an argument in favour of the 'Constrained' one. Coined by Thomas Sowell, and the former regards human nature as infinitely malleable, the latter bound by certain constraints. The core working assumption of the Diversity-Inclusion complex is that, with enough effort (or institutional realignment) anybody can do anything. Yet this wholly negates the concept of 'Diversity' itself because it claims people can be anything! The concept fails to acknowledge fundamental, actual differences between human beings through reducing individuals to surfaced components like ethnicity and gender. It proposes the ultimate dichotomy of damnation to be the white male against the oppressed other, ignoring the nature of human beings as complex, with multifaceted identities and beliefs.
In fact, Diversity and Inclusion muddles up the oppression hierarchy completely. Within the United States, those of Western European heritage do not actually dominate as the wealthiest sub-demographics:
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2016 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates.
This simple story of the dominant White over the oppressed ethnic isn't borne out of facts, but feelings, the wish myth-plex of perpetual discrimination in America and the West more broadly. An artificial construct creating victimhood, so D&I can persist. Reality however, is far more nuanced and complicated. Let's look at Britain. Asian households in Britain are on aggregate wealthier than their White counterparts, with anywhere from 30-38% of these households earning £1000+/week, with only 25% of White Britons earning the same amount. (Family Resource Survey, 2018). Surely no Diversocrat can logically hold that the wealthier are oppressed by the poorer within a free market system?
Yet this is precisely what they claim.
Let's take a closer look at gender. Nobody advocates for increasing representation of women in careers like logging or fishing workers nor does anyone express concerns about the disproportionate level of Male workplace deaths, a staggering 92.5% of all workplace fatalities (see Table 1 below).
Table 1: Most Dangerous US occupations, arranged by fatality percentage (2016). Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Why no Diversity in any of these occupations?
How about increased representation of Republicans in academic or professorial positions in higher education. Surely we need equal representation? (See Table 2 below)
Table 2: Ratio of Democrats to Republicans in Liberal Arts Colleges. Source: National Association of Scholars (2018).
Yet this is not the case. Diversocrats do not wish to amend imbalances which do not pertain to their own side or ideological biases. This hypermodern Kafkaesque Cultural Revolution will stop at nothing to obliterate anything perceived as the old structures of power, which are typically regarded as exclusively White and or Masculine. Hypocrisy or none.
A Diversocrat will manufacture a problem and offer the solution as 'increased representation', even if Women, or whatever demographic concerned isn't drawn to that particular field due to trait differences and preferences or any factor other than discrimination (even free choice). Let us try and evaluate why.
The Gender of Civilization
I believe this entire escapade of 'Diversity & Inclusion' is most grounded upon the game changing evolution in the relationship between the sexes, resulting from the advancement of technological progress. For the bulk of human history, men have provided a protective, caring and leadership role as the figurehead of familial and tribal units across the globe. Women have been the Yang to Men's Yin, providing a nurturing, emotionally warming support structure, inspiring our feats of strength and giving succour to our children (on overwhelming aggregate. Exceptions always exist, yet do not define the norm). Our minds are accordingly adapted to this. However, major social changes have occurred over the 20th Century:
Women's labour force participation over the 20th Century.
Women's labour force participation has evolved so dramatically unlike any other period in history. However, traditional explanations which source this as a victory for Women's movements, or the steady abolition in retrograde ideology are (I believe) logically inadequate. I wish to take a contrarian approach.
Nothing has affected women's role in society more than the overwhelming progress in, and distribution of Reproductive Technologies.
Reproductive technology is the essential mechanism behind the evolution and adaptation of gender, sexuality and all affiliated issues. 'Diversity and Inclusion' as a system of belief and action, is the latest culmination of ideas emerging from technical progress. Albanesi and Olivetti (2007) raise this fascinating proposition with a series of incisive points:
Until the early decades of the 20th century, women spent more than 60% of their prime-age years either pregnant or nursing.
In total, the average women would be pregnant for 34% of the time during her fertile years.
A typical woman in the 1920s had a life expectancy of 55 years at age 10. She married at age 21 and had on average more than 3 children, with her first birth at age 23 and her last at 33.
Women would be nursing for 33% of the time between age 23 and 33. Since time taken to breastfeed one child ranges between 14 and 17 hours per week for the first 12 months, this means that 35% to 43% of women's working time was devoted to nursing for a 40 hour workweek.
What this information suggests is this: 'biological demands' have placed a different burden upon women than men across history. These have resulted in difficulties for most women in advancing in a career due to overwhelming time spent pregnant, or nurturing, and much of women's cognitive energy and effort spent on the protection and nurturing of their children. As such, this placed upon men the responsibility to provide and protect during female incapacitation through pregnancy and the nursing of the child. Likewise, our minds have evolved and adapted to this role. Modernity is the exception to the great story of human reproductive difficulties.
This was no patriarchal conspiracy, or the product of human beings locked within a backward schema of ideas. Nor the exclusive desire by those in power to preserve their control at all costs. Feminism did not exist till the 20th Century because women did not have the time nor the energy for feminism.
It is no surprise therefore, that the facilitation of the childbirth process through medical advancements, has had such a breakthrough impact on unlocking women's involvement in the labour force. These include the following (from Albanesi and Olivetti, 2007):
Improvement in maternal health, and a decline in time cost associated with pregnancy, childbirth and recovery. These include improvements in bacteriology and introduction of sulphate drugs and antibiotics which dramatically reduced mortality chances from sepsis, blood banking which decreased risk from haemorrhages and improvements in obstetric interventions, bringing trauma during labour to an all time low. Same advancements also led to a fall in stillbirths and miscarriages, hence a decline in number of attempted pregnancies for live births.
Development and commercialization of infant formula. An effective breast milk substitute, reducing further time cost and effort associating with nursing.
One can add the introduction of the condom and the pill as further ingredients in the mixture. If politics is the product of cultural factors, and (as Lunacy Now argues) culture is downstream from technology, political ideologies hold some recursive link to the evolution of technology (can one imagine Karl Marx without the Industrial Revolution?). Hence I believe feminism and women's involvement in society at large to be a product of depriving women from the most difficult aspects of childbirth.
The link herein to Diversity and Inclusion is simple. I believe Diversocrats completely misunderstand the nature of human beings, and the ways in which society evolves and is ordered. They have eschewed the reality of different times experiencing different problems and struggles, with the simplistic, ultra-progressive notion of history being a linear progress of ideas, from oppression to liberation. I raise this topic as a counterargument to their assumptions in favour of these such arguments, in the hopes we will recognize that modernity is the exception, rather than the norm.
"The results of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and development cannot be radically re-engineered by some scheme." (Robert Greene)
The struggle and challenge between the sexes lies herein: reconciling our deeply rooted psychological differences, and preferences for different behaviours as men and women, with the dramatic change in the role of women. We are not dealing with outdated gender norms, but preferences which cannot disappear anytime soon. Our minds are maladapted to the modern world. We have completely forgotten why men and women are different.
Some Conclusions: On Politics and Gentlemen
This is certainly not a new idea by any means, however I hope I have in some way re-emphasized the importance of the process of reproduction in being of crucial importance for dictating the socio-cultural zeitgeist of male-female relations more than anything.
[1] Human Resources.
[2] Allow me to caveat. I am of ethnic minority heritage living in the West. So when I speak of such topics as BAME and POC nobody dare 'slander' me with that tremendously heinous of crimes: to be unqualified as a white male.
Bibliography
Albanesi, S. & Olivetti, C. (2007). (2005). Gender roles and technological progress. National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER Working Paper No. 13179.
Family Resource Survey. (2018). Family resources survey 2016/17. The United Kingdom Statistics Authority, Department for Work & Pensions.
Mac Donald, H. (2018). The diversity delusion: how race and gender pandering corrupt the university and undermine our culture. St. Martin's Press. New York City. New York, US.
Sowell, T. (1996). The vision of the anointed: self-congratulation as a basis for social policy. Basic Books. New York City. New York, US.
Perhaps an unusual answer to the question. Love is indescribably complex. Hundreds upon thousands of poets, writers, thinkers, lovers, dreamers, hopefuls and haters have tried, in their own ways, to define this most human of experiences. Valentine's Day passed last month and sacralises the experience of love in a cathartic annual ritual, dedicated to the one thing more or less everybody deeply desires as a macro life goal.
Love is perhaps one of the most important things we will all experience. It's also something we seem to have an inbuilt misunderstanding of from our youngest days onward. It's why the divorce rate (though currently lower than it's been for a long time) remains high. It's why we often iterate with a few partners before we make a final decision on our specific partner. It's perhaps why cultures or societies in which young men and women are expected to practice abstinence, rely so heavily upon their parents to thoroughly vet and agree a prospective partner and their family.
We're designed to love and procreate. So, coming to some workable understanding of the process and mechanism is vital. Even if actually understanding it as a complex phenomenon is difficult.
In the culmination of my experiences in University (or College for my most valuable American friends) I found interactions with the opposite sex to sometimes be fraught with an unusual tension, unnecessary stress, misunderstanding and politics. This was a shame. And not uncommon, per my friends both male and female. Perhaps the times we're in have changed expectations, mutual understanding and the ability to relate to one another. Hence I've been thinking about this for a while. And about the different ways in which we can understand love.
NetLogo: Visualizing Networks
I recently completed a class entitled "Network Dynamics of Social Behaviour" online. Some good ideas, interesting models visualized on NetLogo. NetLogo is a handy piece of software which allows the user to observe diffusion processes occurring across networks. One such model of a diffusion process which was taught, was the complex contagion. Complex contagions are contagions which only spread to a node (a single unit in a network), when a threshold number of adjacent nodes are also infected. Simply, this means a virus will only spread to a node, when for instance, 50%+ of neighbouring nodes are also infected. That 50% threshold for spreading isn't fixed. The actual threshold for infection will vary depending on the issue. I'm just using 50% to help illustrate the situation.
For example, perhaps you hear about a great book from 1 friend, but you're not yet convinced if it's worth your time. However, if about 50% of your friends, or best friends, or some other subsection suggest it then you become infected with the desire to purchase this book. For convenience, I've provided a basic visual explainer as follows. The nodes are the round things, the lines are the ties between them representing relationships (you can skip this part if you're already familiar with complex contagions):
A Complex Contagion with a 50% Infection Threshold
I hope this clarifies the mechanism behind the spread of a complex contagion. This is just one such process of the spread of social and other phenomena. I have also provided a link to the NetLogo model accessible here if you'd like to try an interactive visualization of the process, or need more clarity. Just click Setup Network then Go to visualize the contagion spreading.
What is Love?
Now why am I talking about Network Theory on an essay about love? Love isn't something you can break down into a technical process, surely? Granted, trying to technically explicate the process of love in any form which isn't experiential, is bound to be met with scepticism of the author's proclivity for overthinking or hyperrationalizing a nonrational process. In other words, stop trying to be a machine, is a valid critique.
Nonetheless, I think there's some similarity in the mechanism of complex contagions spreading and the process of falling in and sustaining love. Allow me to therefore explain with the caveat that this is purely a little experiment of mine, a form of idea mashing to see if this is a model of the world which has any cohesive meaning.
I think love can be understood as a complex contagion with a variable threshold for infection. The threshold for infection corresponds to the tipping point at which point one feels an embracing sense of romantic love for another human being. This isn't a clear cut tipping point, more a heuristic to suggest that with some components, one is more likely to feel and sustain romantic love than in the absence of those components.
This diagram visualizes the current state of Person A's relationship to their partner. I've noted a range of components which might matter to Person A's ability to feel love for a prospective partner and how they affect other factors. This is by no means exhaustive, nor comprehensive. It's a crude model and there are definitely more links (for example, 'Keep in touch regularly' may also affect 'Trust'). This is a completely hypothetical list of the things which matter to Person A's ability to feel romantic love.
Person A's Love Network (1)
Iteration 1: Initial Specific Observations
Refer back to the images as you read the points – they should make everything much clearer!
A is not yet in love with their partner, demonstrated in the unfilled LOVE node.
60% of nodes surrounding LOVE are shaded in. However, this has not hit Person A's threshold for falling in love with their partner. This means the threshold for Person A's ability to fall in love is above 60% of the things which matter most to them.
As you can see here, for Person A, 'shared hobbies' is quite important in directly determining whether they feel love for their partner. Hence there is a direct connection to LOVE.
This may seem a little unusual however I've modelled it in this way to demonstrate how different people value different things to different levels.
'Emotional compatibility' has been achieved by the combination of 'intellectual compatibility', 'sex' and 'similar cultural background', despite the absence of 'shared hobbies'.
'Sex' for Person A is fulfilled by physical attraction. This is effectively Boolean (true or false).
As you can see from this model, 'Physical attraction' directly leads to 'Sex' being activated, which in turn directly affects 'LOVE'.
Hence though there isn't a direct connection, 'Physical attraction' matters to Person A's ability to feel love quite a lot, more so than say, a 'Similar cultural background', as 'Emotional compatibility' can still be activated despite the absence of 'Similar cultural background' (whereas 'Sex' is totally dependent on 'Physical attraction').
Trust is of interest to us here. Let 'Trust' be true if 'Trust' has a 66% threshold exceeded. In this case, 'Trust' has three ties, so 'Trust' would be achieved if Person A fell in LOVE, or if they 'overcame a crisis together' with their partner.
Further General Notes (Iteration 1)
For the purposes of this exercise, I've weighted things in different and overlapping ways, to demonstrate the complexity of this phenomenon.
Proximity to the centre broadly corresponds to how much Person A values each thing. For example, 'Intellectual compatibility' has less of a bearing for Person A's ability to fall in love than 'Emotional compatibility', though the former still affects the latter.
Furthermore, 'LOVE' is also a node which affects the other nodes reciprocally. For example, you might feel romantic love before your hobbies and activities synchronise.
Though 'LOVE' is not present for the initial infection of affection to spread, it will certainly be important in maintenance of affection and the overall relationship.
Let's try another iteration. Now Person A has fallen in love with their partner:
Person A's Love Network (2)
Iteration 2: I'm in Love!
A is now in love with their partner, demonstrated in the filled LOVE node. 80% of nodes surrounding LOVE are shaded in. This has now hit Person A's threshold for falling in love with their partner.
This happened because Person A and his partner 'Overcame a crisis together' which built trust between them.
Hence Person A has gradually fallen in love over a period of time.
Further General Notes (Iteration 2)
Some parameters are sticky, others will wax and wane. Some matter more on the way up, others matter more on the way down.
For example, 'Overcame a crisis together' matters on the way up and will not fade as it's a one-time event.
Let's see what happens next:
Person A's Love Network (3)
Iteration 3: It's Over
Some things changed over time. Let's say Person A and their partner became quite busy at work or moved apart for a while to pursue their ambitions. This meant they no longer 'Keep in touch regularly'.
'Communication is good' is linked to three other nodes. Perhaps LOVE improves communication through mutual understanding leading you to 'Keep in touch regularly' with your partner.
However, 'Keep in touch regularly' might be affected by other factors. In this case, this was due to work pressures (which could be added as another node).
They didn't share any hobbies throughout.
They no longer feel able to 'rely on each other in a crisis' because of the distance. This impacted 'Trust'.
Perhaps there's a further connection to be made now between 'Keep in touch regularly' and 'Can rely on each other in a crisis'.
Further General Notes (Iteration 3)
The above point on a further connection to be made leads to another important observation. Renetworking: New ties or relationships can form or adapt and evolve as this process continues. It's a complex, dynamic process.
I've written in some further lines to demonstrate these new connections (in red). Some are undefined to suggest how they can be connected to any other undefined extrinsic factors. Perhaps one's individual network further changes or evolves as one matures, learns more about themselves, or completes further successful or unsuccessful encounters.
Hence the components and nodes shift, change connections and evolve over time.
Furthermore, when love breaks the model suggests it likely won't break instantly, even if the formal relationship does. Essentially, the infection density of the whole model will gradually reduce.
Even if a major incident happens and the LOVE infection sharply drops, your threshold for maintaining LOVE may also have fallen for this person.
This leads to another important point. It's possible to fall out of love even if everything seems great, because one or two things might be sticking or impediments, or unresolved issues which are enough to have a knock-on effect on the entire network.
For example, you might stop feeling physical attraction, so you stop having sex. This affects LOVE, however the threshold for LOVE on the way down might also have changed as you're willing to tolerate a lot more from the other person.
Perhaps it takes breaking 'Trust' and 'Communication' before LOVE is finally lost, even if 'emotional compatibility' still exists.
Concluding Thoughts
The Complex Contagion model demonstrates how some phenomena only spread through repeated reinforcement. In this case, repeated reinforcement of multiple, interacting components causes LOVE to be triggered or activated, which in turn may help to sustain the other components.
If I can venture one overarching thought derived from the Love Network model, it's as follows: love is a holistic process which necessitates these multiple, interacting components to be maintained and consistently reinforced. Though I certainly don't think a few diagrams do justice to the complexity and difficulties encountered within the experience of love, I think Network Theory may help us visualize, hence better understand and organize this process, which as mentioned, I don't think we're very good at doing.
A meeting with colleagues began unremarkably, the Organizer recalling updates since the last gathering.
Now normally I zone out in these interactions until I need to contribute something. They're pretty boring and anything useful is always sent as an email afterward. And it's usually more interesting to people watch.
Today however was different. We had a VIP coming. According to Mister Organizer, the supposed VIP had a major update to share. So this time I plugged in. What was the major update and why did Mister Organizer seem so on edge?
15 minutes late our VIP strolled in. She had some news from the higher ups, an update about some major organizational reshuffles planned for next month.
All good, nothing out of the ordinary so far.
"We received the IOP from Rax and now we're looking to do up-answer on minimum time locale"*
Huh?
"… We're looking to take forward the ATCP to diff the latest moment."
What the hell was she saying?
I kept trying to work out what this meant, but it wouldn't make any sense. The more I thought about it, the more I missed the next thing she said, which would be some variation on the comments above. As a result, the less and less I would understand as she kept speaking.
Usually if I don't get an acronym or some insider phrase I ask. And this resolves it. But this time sentence after sentence just didn't cohere. Nothing made any sense. I decided to clarify with colleagues after. Though it turned out I wasn't the only one clueless about Madame VIP's acronym doused monologue.
Because Madame was speaking a micro dialect.
What's a micro dialect? A form of linguistic verbiage, which emerges in organizations mired in bureaucratic technicality.
Let me elaborate.
The more complex and bureaucratic an organization becomes, the more a micro dialect forms as a means to speed up information transmission within the system. Think insider language to jump through hoops. Because the system is so complicated, explaining things properly is too tiresome.
Now we're all prone to taking little shortcuts when doing things, making decisions or speaking. Because it saves time. It takes less cognitive energy. That's something we try and do through heuristics (simplifying tools allowing us to understand things quicker).
But there's a big downside.
For starters, it can cause severe miscommunication, as in my encounter above.
Moreover, these shortcuts frequently become an excuse to avoid simplifying a complicated system, reducing bureaucracy and explaining and understanding technical issues. They represent a growing problem of complexity, to which the solution isn't taking shortcuts (reflected by language), but solving the actual problem.
I'll defer now to Elon Musk, who faced this challenge at SpaceX:**
"There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important. Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don't want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees."
Remember: the purpose of language is communication. If you're saying something and it isn't understood, then you're not communicating.
"The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication."***
Now I'm not saying to stop using acronyms or specific language altogether. Sometimes these clean up text, or make things flow better. If you've known someone for a while, share a sense of humour, have compatible personalities etcetera, using acronyms and insider language is fine, probably fun, and the foundation for 'inside jokes' which help us bond with and relate to others.
Sometimes you need to use acronyms, for example in medicine or the military, when life may depend on the rapid, concise transmission of information between two parties.
What I'm saying is to ensure that communication is a two way process. If that necessitates explaining things fully (and life isn't at stake) just explain them.
People don't always have the confidence to speak up (for whatever reason) and it's as much a loss to them as it is to you if they aren't understanding the point.
So I propose a rule of thumb:
If you are sitting in a room with somebody you do not know, do not assume their level of insider knowledge. Communicate the point in full.
Other steps worth taking:
Give a forewarning of high complexity material to follow
Tell people not to hesitate to ask questions
If you insist on using an acronym or some insider term, give a brief explanation. This way you don't seem dumb for not using the buzzword, or condescending for overexplaining things.
You'd be surprised how much of an impact these simple steps can have.
And how easy they are.
For example:
VIP
"the higher ups"
I threw these out above without explaining. Now it's very likely you know what they mean. Just in case you don't:
VIP: Very Important Person
"the higher ups": Denotes people with greater responsibility. Termed as such to refer to decision makers who typically sit on a floor or hold a position higher than oneself.
It took three words to explain VIP. 2 sentences to explain "the higher ups". Not too difficult at all!
Finally, some words from the wise:
"If you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it." Richard Feynman
And
"If you can't explain something to a 6 year old, you don't understand it yourself." Albert Einstein
If these Nobel winning giants of theoretical physics, despite dealing in complexities far greater than most of us do in any working day, still insisted on explaining things as simply as possible …
… then you have no excuses not to use a few extra words to explain something.
* Adapted
** Elon Musk: How The Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Is Shaping Our Future by Ashlee Vance, p 239.
