Civilizational Looting
If I were starting a new political philosophy, I would call it "Pooritarianism"
Much of this post is intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek. While I don’t actually advocate starting a new political party based on a call to intentionally make and keep ourselves poor to avoid attracting looters, the argument stated below is based on something true. In the larger context, I realize we could not plan our society to be poor any better than we can plan it to be wealthy. But there is something to be learned here, nonetheless.
Much of the dissident Right’s discontent today essentially boils down to seeing a once rich civilization looted. We see a West which has built more than anything else in history in terms of economic, social, intellectual, and religious achievements, and we know these things required a delicate complexity to be built and preserved over the centuries. Yet, we now see that very same complexity, responsible for upholding all those good things, as a weakness being exploited by various forms of looters, leaving it in shambles, perhaps irreversibly. We sense the prospect of permanent disconnection from a great civilizational tradition, the only one to which we could have belonged.
This feels to us like the theft of a great potential our society once held. But if the thing that made it great, its complex social fabric, was also the weakness that opened it to the looters who are destroying it, perhaps it never could have lasted long anyway. Does this mean its collapse was inevitable, or could this have been avoided if a balance could have been found between advancement and complexity?
The looters
There are many kinds of looters in our system, but notorious examples include corrupt politicians who raid the treasuries while creating squalor, entertainment media who profit from exploiting taboos while normalizing the breaking of them and the degeneracy that follows, insincere migrants who benefit from the social stability of their host while bringing the social instability of their home, and criminals who exploit the trust of their neighbors while contributing to distrust among all.
Each of these are just examples of areas in which the great prosperity of the West has been an attractor. However, it’s wealth, security, and stability attract not only the good who want to contribute to what made it so great, but also the bad who only want to benefit from its excesses without a care for what they leave behind them after taking what they want. The “looters” are all those of the latter category.
This kind of “looting” is natural, and that makes it a pernicious problem. In many cases, you can’t even call what some of the looters are doing specifically immoral. But this also requires us to consider whether the period of civilizational growth in which social complexity grew, and with it the natural incentive to loot, was an aberration of history. How did our predecessors create such a perilous social structure that lasted as long as it did without the looting incentive dominating sooner? This perhaps hints at my answer a bit early in this essay, but my hypothesis is that, until relatively recently, the size of the West’s wealth and the extent of its complexity were below some threshold at which the temptation to loot did not yet exceed the difficulty of looting for more than very few. But more on that later.
For the politician, the incentive to loot is twofold. For one, the vast abundance that falls into his view and within his power to take is nearly irresistible. He sits often at the crossroads of insider information and access to privilege. He can wring millions out of the economy and all he has to do is degrade our institutions by selling offices to the most willing to pay. Second, he has been selected by his peers through a vote, the most sacred of our society’s rites of elderhood. He occupies an office of respect and responsibility, and he deserves to be compensated accordingly.
For the entertainment industry, the looting process is less obvious, as the thing looted isn’t material. That there is a great store of wealth to be extracted in the West is obvious, and there is no shame in noticing that Westerners have a great deal of disposable income they might want to exchange for diversion. However, as a species we like satisfying our basest instincts: to laugh at fools, to wallow in voyeurism, or to pound our chests at senseless violence. These are instincts that took our ancestors generations to tamp down and create layers of social stigma to control. And we have been the beneficiaries of those control systems with our, until recently, strong sense of community and shame that kept our neighbors from flippantly violating social taboos. Yet, the fact that they are stigmatized makes them like a forbidden fruit, they become that much more tempting to us. And each time we scratch our voyeuristic itch for these forbidden things, and pay our entertainment industries for the privilege, the taboos that discourage them become weaker and weaker. The centuries of complexity built into our social control systems are ground down a little further. Entertainers receive our money, and we receive a temporary thrill and a degraded culture.
Migration follows a straightforward path to looting. It is not merely the immigrants themselves who loot in this situation, and it could be argued they are not even the prime looters, but that the NGOs and so-called nonprofits who make billions in the immigration trade are. The immigrant himself has every natural incentive to come to a Western country to benefit from all the things that make it advanced, yet in the modern West he has little incentive to behave differently from the norms of the home that he left. He is unaware that the wealth he now benefits from only exists because generations of people managed to behave in a way that makes them seem alien to him. He sees a land of plenty but has no context for why it is so rich. He can only assume the people there are like the people of his home: tribal, advantage-seeking, and skewed toward short-term gain. The land they sit on must simply produce wealth as water is produced from a spring. He can only assume that our movies, depicting Westerners as greedy and willing to cheat to get ahead, are accurate portrayals of Western society rather than dramatized extremes written to peak moviegoers’ emotional responses. He must take from us because, given the chance, we would take from him first. If he came from a land with no social safety net, the presence of one would seem like a legitimate source of support, not something to be preserved for the truly needy.
Finally, criminals are the literal looters. For this category, there is both a baseline level of criminality we would expect to see in any society, as well as what we might call the “system amplified looting.” The latter is the additional criminal looting we see in the West over normal levels of criminality we would expect to see absent the extra incentive our system creates for it. This extra incentive is largely due to the lost sense of condemnation Western society once held for such behavior. Criminality was once controlled by perhaps the simplest social structure the West had: shame. Criminal actions once placed an offender so outside of polite society that to be ostracized could be more painful than imprisonment. The jailer, bound by laws and oaths of office, could hardly be as cruel as children set loose on a man bound in stocks in the town square or exposure to the forces of nature wherever it was he was banished to. If your survival depends on the cooperation of your neighbors, then simply being ignored by them could be fatal. The West’s sense of forgiveness and opportunity for restoration, combined with our commitment to universal treatment under the law in an increasingly impersonal legal system, led to our modern corrections system. Communities no longer dole out punishment for offenses against them, an anonymous prison system does. Once a criminal does his time, he comes back to the community with a few restraints, but likely far fewer than if his community had been the one to deal with him in the first place. So, now his community has to deal with him in the second place. Having hardened in prison through contact with professional criminals, rather than feeling contrition for his crimes, he feels the power of being part of a gang of outlaws. Instead of groveling to prove his reformation, he finds he only has an increased ability to profit from crime.
In the end, what the criminal has really looted is his community’s sense of trust. Each criminal act vandalizes the trust one community member has for another. The social cost of mistrust is more than the need to buy locks and gates, but it extends to the general uncharitableness and isolation that grows within the community as a result.
All of this looting shares a common theme. Each is an example of a complex feature of Western society that once enriched it but now offers a means of exploitation for those unhindered by a sense of loyalty to the community from which they take. Those complex institutions allowed the West to build more wealth, trust, intellectualism, religiosity, and security than could have been built on a less complex system. Without complicated social feedback loops and sensibilities developed over generations to be sensitive to overstepping those feedback loops, our predecessors would not have had the opportunity to create the wealth that is now a feature of the West.
Wealth as long-term weakness
My thesis here is that both wealth and the cultural complexity required for a society to build wealth are ultimately weaknesses for the long term stability of a community.
Complex societies are like a fishing village built on a pier. The further out into the ocean they build, the better fishing, and thus more wealth, they can enjoy. But they do so at the cost of having to maintain the pier, which becomes more costly the further they build. They can keep the nets full of fish coming in so long as they can take enough men off of the fishing and dedicate them to the constant task of pier maintenance. Everyone in society must play a part in the process of generating wealth, rather than straightforwardly pursue it on their own. Their greater wealth comes at the cost of greater social complexity.
So, the pier also represents a weakness. It is difficult to maintain, and a sudden calamity could bring everything back to the stone age. No more feasts by sending one or two men out to cast nets in the deep water for a few hours. Now, every man must fish from the shore all day long just to get enough for his own family to eat.
And it is more than just a weakness, the pier is also a temptation to marauders. It sits out there, a difficult-to-defend pile of precut and pretreated lumber for any neighboring village to easily take pieces from to build their own piers. They don’t know how to fell trees or cut planks or make nails, but why do any of that when a source of finished materials is sitting out in the open just down the beach? And as they hastily put together their own piers from pilfered wood, they lack the knowledge to build a strong or long-lasting pier. They need to take more pieces of timber all the time.
At the same time, the first village begins to lose its complexity, manifesting in the form of a smaller and smaller pier. When the village accessed the deeper sea, and fish were most abundant, arts had sprung up because fewer men were needed to operate the fishing nets. But now, to replace the continually looted planks, more and more men must be diverted from the arts and set to work felling more trees, cutting new planks, making more nails, and so on. When they couldn’t keep up with the looting, the pier had to be shortened to reduce the workload. The fishing became poorer, so more men were needed to operate the nets again, further reducing the number working in the arts.
The reason this fictional village suffered was also the reason for its initial success. The complexity required to build a high performing society is also its weak point. According to Joseph Tainter’s, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” this complexity for Rome was the growing organizational and military requirements for the ever-expanding range of its empire. For the Maya, it was in part the increasingly elaborate needs of its growing agricultural and administrative systems to keep up.
For these civilizations, much like ours, much of their success lied in venturing out beyond what could actually be sustained. We need no further evidence of this in our own system than of the massive amounts of debt our governments incur every year. The Mayans, by enjoying great wealth in their early years, depleted the soil for future years. The Romans, by building an administrative complex around the wealth extracted from their profitable early conquests, made themselves dependent on future, less profitable conquests to maintain the same standards in a growing administrative scheme. In each case, the inner empire grew temporarily wealthier than could be sustained in the long-term. Thus, they were not as wealthy as they thought they were, they were just living high on a temporary windfall. In the Mayan example, they extracted more nutrients from the soil each year than were put back into it, thus their wealth at any given time was accomplished by taking from the wealth of future years. In the Roman and modern examples, this overspending principle is more obscured, as it isn’t immediately obvious how I could have extracted my car, house, and big-screen television from some ephemeral store of future wealth. Although the size and complexity of our economic system obscures it, our year-after-year spending deficit as a nation all but mathematically proves this principle to be the case.
The looters of our modern system thrive on the complexity of it. In fact, the vast majority of graft in our system is probably technically legitimate. A contract to build weapons is especially lucrative when your government wages a new war every time the season changes. If people who look like you promise to vote a certain way, you can get forgivable business loans or have your existing student loans forgiven. If you keep the right people in power, they’ll make sure to pass laws preventing your landlord from raising your rent. If you donate enough to the right campaign, they’ll place a tariff on your foreign competitors and ensure you a steady stream of cheap, under-the-table migrant labor. None of this is technically illegal under our current system. The complexity in our system is thus an easy target for people in the right positions. The rest of us don’t complain because we think we enjoy the crumbs of wealth our overextended system leaves behind.
The recent example that illustrates the role of complexity in this is the PPP loans of the Covid era. By 2020, the U.S. had reached a level of complexity which was already consuming itself. Our complexity had passed from the stage of natural social practices which reinforced trust and mutual reliance to a stage of artificial managerial societal programming. Traditional social structures that had evolved over centuries to leverage deep human impulses to behave in expected ways were replaced with wishful social engineering policies thought up by isolated humanities professors. When Covid set in (itself the apparent byproduct of the managerial state’s attempts to improve society through research), Western society had become unable to weather the event by natural means; it had become dependent on top down direction from its governments and their experts. Individuals on the ground found themselves unable to adequately understand their own world when a novel virus was discovered, and one-size-fits all solutions were declared from above, universal lockdowns being a major component of them. As a knock-on-effect of the mass lockdowns, mass financial aid was required to prevent mortgage defaults, starvation, and basically full blown economic collapse.
The solution, mirroring the complexity of the situation that caused it, was the implementation of a byzantine assistance program, by which the federal government would give nearly a trillion dollars in “loans” to employers to keep their payrolls intact despite having to close their doors. But, because their economic situation was the result of government mandates, the loans would be forgiven if they were used for certain purposes, which ultimately meant virtually every dollar of the PPP loans were forgiven. This became a heyday for con artists collecting hundreds of thousands in PPP loans on fictitious businesses. It also represented too strong a temptation for legitimate businesses who took the money whether they needed it or not. Times were uncertain, nobody knew whether things would worsen, and the free money wouldn’t last forever. Nobody could be villainized too harshly for getting while the getting was good.
This social safety-net system might be touted as the benefit of living in a complex, advanced society. If one actually needed assistance in a real pandemic, such temporary benefits would be an indicator of a society’s strength. But this is only gained in exchange for the tradeoff of added social complexity.
This tradeoff means that the complexity necessary to sustain such a safety-net system makes it an overwhelmingly easy target to exploit. We had the technical ability to establish a PPP loan program and print up the money it required, but who could have competently vetted the thousands of claims that had to be processed in a matter of weeks? Who could have detected which applications linked to fraudulent shell companies? Who could have engaged in the forensic accounting necessary to determine which businesses didn’t really need the money or just used it to buy BMWs for their CEOs? And to have done it to the tune of millions of applications? What the PPP episode represented was an attempt to create a society which could afford to stop working in order to control an illness, but the complexity required to sustain that kind of society became an easily exploited weakness for looting.
Uncomfortable truths
This all raises a difficult prospect. If we are all living grander lifestyles than our true productivity actually affords us, lifestyles that require more complexity than can be defended from looters, then we are facing down an inevitable return to mean. Worse, probably, as much of what enriches us now came at the expense of our future selves and our children, and will have to be repaid in one form or another.
Yet, I anticipate very little motivation to change course. Our parents prospered from this system and nothing bad came to them, so it should be for us. We see the degeneracy around us, but we don’t see that the early prosperity caused the late degeneracy. We can’t easily see that someone has a financial incentive to feed us degenerate entertainment to slop up. Or that the hard-working migrant family we know down the street stands for ten young male migrants we don’t see who came because they were promised government handouts by an NGO who receives a grant for every new “refugee” they scrape up. Or that the politician who promises to fight for the working class would just as soon see their healthcare costs increase by granting privileges to the medical industry in exchange for a well-timed stock tip.
We enjoy the trappings of an advanced society, but extending our heads ostentatiously only attracts more looters to our exposed necks. The more lavish we become, the more looting will follow and the more vulnerable to those looters we will be. The solution is simple, but laughable. The only way not to be looted is to have very little to loot from, both to disincentivize the looters and to enable greater protection of what you do have because less complexity is required to sustain that smaller pot of loot.
Thus, a reasonable right-wing position would be to advocate for a less wealthy society. A political party could logically argue for policies pursuing reduced social complexity at the expense of reduced aggregate wealth. If placed in charge of government, they would promise to oversee a gradual, but steady removal of vulnerabilities to looting, arguing that a less-wealthy, yet still comfortable, society could emerge in which the good things about Western culture could
It is a laughable solution because a society like ours cannot simply re-organize itself into a modest, temperate, and austere one by noticing that looters are attracted to their wealth. Rolling back the advances of your civilization to disincentivize looting, will make you poorer. Given the option of purposely making himself poor, most will find it pays more to join the looters. Each individual would be stupid to choose the path of less wealth knowing everyone else will not. He will still be looted, he will just start off poorer before the looters come.
Lessons and suggestions
Thus, the shift away from a complex, advanced society that is wealthy but exposed to looters could only work in a transformed culture. The incentives placed on the individual in our current culture simply will not allow for such a change if it is imposed from above.
Neither can this shift be achieved by individual intellectual understanding about the weaknesses of complex societies. It must be done at the level of the internal values of each member of the society. Intellectual assent to the existence of the problem only encourages the individual to “jump ship” while it is still afloat. Once he realizes that the society in which he is a passenger is destined to sink, he will also realize that he is sunk as well unless he can take a big enough piece of the ship with him to stay afloat on his own. Realization of this truth absent an actual, wide-spread shift in the society’s underlying values will only accelerate the looting and resulting collapse.
First, what transformation must occur, or which values must change? These are tricky waters to navigate because mass human motivation is an unpredictable thing. The smallest factor, for example the outsized offense caused by insulting words in honor cultures, can have disproportionate effect on societies. At the same time, the underlying values in a culture will never stray too far from the human constant of desire for more status, power, and wealth. There is only so much movement away from this baseline human instinct that can be achieved. What would be both possible and effective may fall within a very small range.
So, I suggest a somewhat modest transformation. I suggest merely adding to society a renewed value of devotion to prayer. A small thing that wouldn’t depend on radically eliminating or deemphasizing the other values men naturally have. At least not directly, though the point would be that prayer would indirectly change those other values on its own. If a way could be found to shift men’s desires toward spending, say, fifteen minutes per day earnestly searching their own souls for iniquity, carrying their families and communities in petition to a higher power (we would want non-Christians to participate), and considering their small place in the universe, they may naturally begin to find the things that make their homes easy targets for looters less important.
To increase the average American’s valuation of prayer would require no small feat, but I suggest it is not insurmountable. For those who already pray, it only requires a reformation of their existing lackluster devotion to prayer, and reconnection with its purpose. For those who do not believe, this is admittedly a challenge, although a strong societal change does not require that all members incorporate the change equally, or at all, just that the new value be seen widely as a good thing. Perhaps for them it is enough that they come to recognize the good prayer does for those who do believe, and that they develop a respect for the practice even if they do not participate in it.
This won’t seem like a big change, and that’s the point. It would be foolish to suggest a plan of action for society that depended on men suddenly developing higher ideals or improved characters. But a small change, embodied not in a wishful alteration of the condition of the human heart, but in the addition of a short daily routine, is at least possible.