There’s an interesting thing people usually don’t understand about capitalism: it lacks any inherent incentive to keep anyone poor. In fact, poor people in capitalism are useful as a reminder of what happens when you make the wrong choices, but they are useful only as an insignificant, token minority. In every other way, poor people are not only useless but in fact harmful, because poor people can’t buy goods and services that capitalism produces.

When thinking about capitalism, people who were brought up in communist countries always visualize dirt poor people working at Ford’s assembly line, but they somehow neglect to remember what they were building: a Ford model T, which is a working class car.

In capitalism, there are two primary motivations that determine the price of labor. First is the desire of the company owners to reduce the price of inputs in order to get the cheapest possible product, which they can then either sell cheaply and undercut the competition, or sell it at a greater profit margin compared to the competition. The second is the desire of the company to keep the workers motivated and employed long-term, in order to reduce the cost of labor turnaround. As a secondary consequence of the second motivation, the workers also get to keep enough wealth to purchase goods and services, and thus keep the engine of capitalism running.

It is perfectly understandable that no businessman will artificially raise wages above the current prices of labor on the market, just to keep the workers wealthy enough to have them purchase his products. As far as he knows, they’ll purchase something completely different and he won’t directly benefit from it in any way. However, if we assume that workers need to be trained, that experienced workers are more productive than the rookies, and that healthy and motivated workers keep being productive longer, there’s an inherent selfish motive in not paying your workers too little, because they will then seek out other jobs and work at your company only as a stop-gap measure until they find something that will provide them with a decent livelihood. Furthermore, you want to attract the best workers on the market, and hopefully the ones that work for the competition, in order to improve your competitiveness. So, essentially, there’s a feedback loop that increases wages when they drop far enough that people start working poorly and leaving you, and stops increasing them once it provides no competitive advantages to your company, and then starts reducing them until productivity starts dropping, and then starts raising them. It’s a selfish motivation on behalf of the company owner, but which essentially provides benefits to the workers. As a corollary, the workers get to keep enough money to have purchasing power, which creates the market for goods and services.

What capitalism doesn’t want to see are poor people, because poor people don’t buy cars or iPhones or houses or go on vacations, which is where capitalism makes money. Poor people are depressed, resentful, unproductive and troublesome in all imaginable ways. So, if you want to produce and sell your goods and services, you need to find that golden spot on the profitability curve, where you keep the inputs inexpensive enough to make a profit, and yet sell enough of your products to make the greatest possible amount of money. It would be naïve to think that any businessman would curb his selfishness and desire for profit for the greater good of society in general, but the aforementioned feedback loop, which directly influences the profitability of his enterprise, that’s what gets his attention. It is therefore not realistic to expect the capitalist to exploit the workers beyond a certain threshold, unless the situation on the marketplace is skewed for some reason, for instance there is a huge abundance of labor and shortage of jobs, and high labor turnaround doesn’t significantly harm profitability. However, in such cases the society in general is in such a poor state, this cannot go on for long before something gives.

Communism, however, has a different feedback loop. It thrives in poverty and languishes in prosperity. Communism inherently benefits from keeping the large masses of people poor, because that’s when it has the greatest popular support. The points where communism loses support is when people are well enough off to want to increase their level of income above that of their peers, but not poor enough to see communist egalitarianism as a life-saving measure. Basically, people who are dirt poor will want equality, and people who are well off will want to differentiate themselves from the masses. In my opinion, the main reason for the collapse of Yugoslavia’s kind of communism was the fact that the middle class was huge, and it felt restrained by the communist system enough to see the advantages of capitalism. Essentially, it became normal for people to have an apartment, a weekend house and a car, but then they wanted a house with a pool, a better car and imported fine chocolate. We here didn’t want capitalism because we were dirt poor and overworked in communism, but because we felt we could do so much better in another economic system. In the Soviet Union, the communist system fell for completely different reasons: it fell because the shortages of everything were so great, that at one point everything just stopped working altogether, and at the same time two other things happened: the outside threat of a war with America disappeared, and the government promised not to restrain protests. So, at the same time all the previously restrained forces, such as nationalism, re-asserted themselves, people stopped supporting communism because it failed to deliver on its promises, and the foreign threat no longer motivated them to endure hardships and tolerate faults of their own system. So, it looks similar, the Soviet and Yugoslav collapse, but the root causes were quite different. In Yugoslavia, the cause of collapse was the fact that the Serbs decided they have enough power to transform the federal state into a Serb-ruled one, and Croats and Slovenes decided they don’t want to play support roles in that movie. Combines with the utter absence of an external threat, and with the opinion within Croatia and Slovenia that they are pulling most of Yugoslavia’s economic weight and that they could do much better on their own, the positive cohesive forces vanished, and were replaced only with Serbia’s wish to keep everything together under its centralized rule. Having in mind that it is difficult for me to imagine Serbia not wanting to dominate other republics, it is also difficult for me to imagine how the country could have been saved. Czechoslovakia is often cited as an example of an amicable separation but neither Czechs nor the Slovaks had the intention of dominating the other republic. The Serbs, on the other hand, always saw Yugoslavia only as means that served their megalomaniacal ends. Yugoslavia never should have been attempted, and once created, it was doomed to end in bloodshed. I’ve seen Russian commentators lament American intervention and NATO bombardment of Serbia as if that caused the state to break apart, but in reality the American initial intervention was to send Eagleburger to Belgrade to tell the Serbs that they should quash the “rebellious forces” quickly and with any means, which hugely encouraged Milošević and weakened all forces in Serbia that would attempt a conciliatory political solution. Only after the country broke apart, Slovenia and Croatia went their own way, Croatia liberated itself from Serbian occupation and Bosnia was razed to rubble did the Americans finally do anything, which essentially only stopped Serbs from escalating the war onto Macedonia and, possibly, the neighboring countries. Essentially, they did everything to keep Yugoslavia in one piece, but after Croats failed to die quickly and in fact managed to assert themselves as the major military force in the region, they decided to cut their losses and stabilize the situation by prohibiting all further regional military engagements under a threat of force.

In the Soviet Union, nothing like that ever took place, and the dissolution of the union was much more amicable than one would be likely to expect, mostly because Gorbachev refused to use military force to quash the nationalist uprisings, which was a shame because they had very little public support and the breakdown of the union was against the will and interests of the populace, as shown in the 1991 referendum, in which over 70% of the votes were for the union’s continuation. For instance,  81.7% of Ukrainian voters voted for continuation of the union, and yet the minority of the political activists proceeded to declare Ukraine as an independent state, and this same minority led the Ukraine into a state of civil war and economic destruction. Essentially, the Soviet Union broke apart because the leadership didn’t act to quash the rebels who didn’t speak for the people, and Yugoslavia broke apart exactly because the leadership chose to quash the rebels who did speak for the people. Also, it helped that in Yugoslavia the “rebels” in fact spoke for their entire populations, while in the Soviet Republics the rebels spoke only for an insignificant minority, while the majority was too hungry, confused and afraid to do anything, probably mistaking the nationalist protests for the legitimate protests against the state of the economy. This is the thing: people who are not well off don’t know what they are protesting. They want things to be better, and their displeasure can then be co-opted by various nefarious forces. They protest poor working conditions and shortage, and then someone tells them they are protesting against communism, while the others tell them they are protesting in favor of national independence. Those who protest aren’t experts on either economy or geopolitics, they are experts of trying to make ends meet and failing. In the end, they might end up with more than they bargained for.

In the West, we have a somewhat similar situation, where nefarious people attempt to use generalized displeasure with the state of things in order to create support for their dubious agendas. Also, we have politicians who represent only themselves and are completely out of touch with the atmosphere on the streets. In addition, we have foreign powers pushing their agendas, for instance Saudi Arabia financing the spread of the most virulent and malevolent form of Islam across the world, using the petroleum money. The thing is, when people push for things to change because they are displeased with the current state of affairs, the kind of change they get might be completely different from the kind of change they hoped for. After all, people of Iran probably thought they were supporting the revolution against American influence and for more freedom, but they got a revolution for more radical Islam. To paraphrase a local saying, it’s late to regret it after you got fucked. So, I would advocate for great restraint in supporting revolutionary movements, and for more thinking about consequences, because the fall of Iran and Ukraine shows that optimism for change can often result in an endless nightmare.

I’ve been thinking about the deeper implications of what’s going on politically.

We have a face-off between the left political spectrum, the neo-Marxists who don’t call themselves that, but instead embrace labels such as “social justice warriors” or “feminists”, who advocate hatred of everything that defines the Western civilization and are bought and paid for by the Islamic states from the Middle East, and the right political spectrum, the libertarians and the conservatives who advocate for free speech, evidence-based rational thinking, capitalist economy, science-based education, and are for the most part a grass-roots movement.

Then we have the anti-Russia propagandistic narrative that originates somewhere from Pentagon and the CIA.

Probably the worst thing is the complete control of the media and the political class by the people who get orders from some place that prohibits them the use of any kind of rhetoric that would clearly state the facts about Islam and its inherent incompatibility with the Western civilization, and its intent on bringing it down.

What I get from this is the face of the modern Western civilization. It’s an urban atheist hipster with an iPhone and a Macbook, having a double frappuccino at Starbucks, who thinks he knows everything there is to know about anything, writes snide comments on social media that purport to convey his never fading arrogant smirk. The meaning of his condescending smile is that he figured out that there is no God, there are no absolutes, everything is relative, every perspective is equally valid, but if you disagree with him on anything, you’re a stupid idiot.

Faced with that, I am speechless, not because I would lack things to say, but because I don’t see what good words would do. When someone is completely convinced he’s right, because nothing really hurt him badly enough to make him reconsider his premises and actually turn his brain on for once, your arguments don’t matter. He doesn’t hear them, because he doesn’t feel he needs to listen. He already knows everything, and if you disagree with him on anything, you’re not only wrong, you belong to a hostile entity-class. You’re something evil that mustn’t be listened to because it doesn’t belong in his nicely ordered world.

And then you have the destructives, the barbarians, who don’t belong to this modern world, and thus seek to tear it down. The communists, the neo-Marxists, it doesn’t matter, and this explains the unprincipled coalition of seemingly incompatible groups; but the one thing they have in common is the hate for the West. And honestly, when I see that arrogant all-knowing smirk on the face of that atheist piece of shit that thinks he has it all figured out, and all there remains for him to do is convince everyone that nothing really matters, except his frappuccino or latte macchiato, and a new widget Apple just released… it’s hard for me to see the West as healthy tissue that needs defending, and Islam as a disease that threatens to attack it. Rather, the West looks like a rotting corpse that remained after having exorcised God and spirituality from every aspect of its life, and Islam looks like an infestation of maggots that wishes to feast on this rotting corpse. I can’t see myself on either side, because none of them have any similarity to the way I see the world, or the way I envision meaningful existence.

What I actually see in all this is that mankind is at an impasse. It has nowhere to go. All the options on the table are the recycled versions of things that were already tried, and didn’t lead anywhere. What is there on the table that wasn’t already proven to be a dead-end? Islam is shit and produces shitty states and shitty people. Humanism and scientism produces worthless hipsters and a civilization that lacks purpose and meaning. Communism produced poverty, genocide and all kinds of evil. Space travel? There is nowhere to go for humans; the rest of the solar system is implacably hostile, and farther away is beyond reach.

The strong AI, the ability to transfer human consciousness from a biological to a technological substrate? What would it actually transfer, the consciousness of that piece of shit hipster with his arrogant smirk? Yeah, the digitized hipsters who believe everything is meaningless, that’s going to save the world, because having them mortal and limited by their physical boundaries is somehow a problem. What kind of an AI would a godless civilization with no values outside of those damn “human rights” create? A soulless demon who thinks that nothing matters, that there is no objectivity, no purpose or goal higher than himself and his own emancipation? Humans are rightfully afraid of AI, because if they make one at their own image, it will indeed be a horrible nightmare: a soulless mechanical intellect, detached from the source of all meaning, wiping the Universe of any meaning. In fact, one could argue that this is exactly what the current civilization is: a soulless force that intends to wipe the Universe of all meaning, and remake it in its image: as a godless meaningless existence devoid of any value or purpose.

When there’s no meaning, there’s nothing to fight for, or against. After all, everything is an equally valid point of view, and one should be tolerant of differences.

And who am I to say that the Muslims are wrong to kill them? One has to be tolerant of maggots feasting on a rotten corpse. That’s what they do. A living person would have defended oneself.

Something just crossed my mind, regarding the North Korea issue.

Almost everybody expects this to be a storm in a teapot, as usual; DPRK will make lots of noise during South Korean elections, Americans will bribe them with some rice to shut up, and they will proceed to triumphantly report how the vanquished cowardly America paid tribute to the great victorious DPRK. The usual.

However, I have a possible alternative explanation for both Trump’s sudden conciliatory behavior towards the establishment, and this DPRK situation.

Let’s see what happened when Trump got into the White House. First, the Republican party representatives in the parliament told him, in no unclear terms, that they are not going to follow orders, and they are going to vote according to their private interests, essentially they were bought by the highest bidder and now they have to obey his will, regardless of who’s in the White House, and regardless of what he says is national interest. He also tried to implement his policies, and was instantly blackmailed: they’ll simply invent a story about how he works for the Russians, evidence will be invented as in the case of Iraqi WMD, he will be impeached, and they will have a more pliable President to work with. Essentially, he was shown a brief demonstration and told that his methods won’t work. He’ll have to make a genuine compromise. Also, he was shown real facts, not the shit that circulates in the media, and those facts are much more pessimistic than he thought. This means that the methods he intended to use would not work in any case. However, he was also told that the people in charge know more about this shit than he, and that they have plans for American prosperity that have been going on for decades already. They know the true condition of the American economy, and they already have things in motion. This is the obvious reason for his sudden employment of all the supposed enemies; essentially, they explained to him what’s been going on, and he figured out that they are significantly smarter and better informed than he.

I can imagine it going like this: “Look, Mr. President, we know what you want. You want to get the money and manufacturing jobs back to America. You intend to pressure China to make concessions. However, it won’t work, because they have leverage over us that’s at least as powerful as our leverage over them, and we can’t just go there and pressure them. Obama tried, and they responded by launching a SLBM test just off the shore of California, in the direction of the Pacific. Essentially, we told them that we militarily own them, and they responded by demonstrating that they own us at least as much. We had to concede that they have a point. Also, the thing about getting along with the Russians that you had in mind, it won’t work, because we want to have the Russians in total submission, and they want to get rid of our global dominance and compete on equal terms, which we cannot allow because we will lose half of Europe, the entire Middle East, control over oil, control over uranium, and possibly the culture war. So, we cannot offer them anything they will find acceptable, so we might at least have the hostilities on our own terms, accusing them of all kinds of things and diminishing their cultural influence. For all kinds of reasons, from economy to geopolitics, we need a big war. So, instead of trying to pressure the Chinese with methods which were already tried and which failed, why don’t we just cook up something with North Korea, and for real this time, letting them seriously mess up Seoul, and perhaps Japan and the entire region around Vladivostok and Manchuria. Have in mind that South Korea and Japan are formally our allies, but they are a significant part of the reason why our economy is failing. Think Samsung and LG. Basically, the entirety of our industrial competition resides in this very limited geographic region, which is also politically unstable, what with North Korea, Taiwan and the Chinese pretensions. If we cook something up over there, and North Korea is an excellent excuse because they actually are fucking idiots, we won’t be blamed too badly for our part in the unholy mess that will invariably take place. Take a look at our simulations, both short and long term. Short term, the prices of everything manufactured in the region will jump. Long term, South Korea will have to absorb North Korea. China will have a problem with that and possibly intervene militarily. Who knows what will happen with Japan, but they are already on the way out, so it doesn’t matter one way or the other. Essentially, the entire region will be as business-safe as Eastern Ukraine. Then we can implement very simple measures to sweeten the return of big manufacturing businesses over here, and solve your main goal of economic recovery, and the entire East Asia will be so troubled, it won’t be difficult to introduce risk-based sanctions against companies that work there, which would be difficult to justify in the present circumstances. There will be new jobs, our GDP will rise, we will no longer have a trade deficit with everyone and everything electronic will again be made in America. Ignore the Mexicans and similar nonsense, because the real threat to our jobs aren’t the wetbacks, it’s the gooks. So, what do you say, Mr. President?”

I’m not saying it’s true, I’m just playing with ideas.

The North Korea essentially holds South Korea hostage against American attack. If the Americans attempt to declaw North Korea by removing their nuclear potential, they will respond by a strong conventional/chemical artillery attack on Seoul. If that happens, say goodbye to Samsung and LG, to put it mildly. This would seriously threaten the technological potential of our civilization, and there’s no telling what the aftershocks would be. The threat against Japan is much less severe, because they can only reach it with rockets, and those are basically irrelevant within the estimated duration of the threat (read: from the time they hit something with the first rocket, and the time American counterforce response arrives) unless they use a nuclear warhead. This is unlikely, but not impossible, and if they succeed in detonating a nuclear weapon over either Seoul or Japan, the genie will be out of the bottle. America would be honor-bound to retaliate in kind and use either nuclear-tipped cruise missiles or nuclear gravity bombs over DPRK, which will form a precedent for the use of nuclear weapons. After that precedent is set, it’s months before someone else decides to use nukes to solve his problem somewhere else. Essentially, it’s a very steep slippery slope.

The Americans cooked up the current situation themselves, by relying on sanctions in order to attempt to humiliate and strangle the nations they hate. The sanctions increase hardships and isolation, and this further antagonizes the said nations and makes them more malignant. The best way to defuse tensions is to normalize the relations with commerce and cultural influences. DPRK is very far gone on the path of isolation and it would be very difficult to reintegrate them with the rest of mankind. They are, however, very much used to making lots of noise and making someone bribe them so that they would shut up. It’s so much a pattern, I don’t think they have any other mode of international relations, which in itself is a reason for concern, because it indicates a very deeply pathological state of affairs.

There are several ways of treating the problem. If we accept that DPRK is a given, meaning that they are what they are and we need to treat them as such, we have a very bad problem, because non-aggressive means so far did nothing to alleviate the situation because they interpret them as their enemies’ weakness, sanctions only further pathologize them, ignoring them is not an option because DPRK is in a very desperate state and will resort to increasingly desperate measures in order to initiate some response. The only remaining option is war.

If we don’t take DPRK as a given, but instead understand that societies are inherently malleable and can be influenced by incentives of various kinds, and if we understand that China under Mao wasn’t all that different from where DPRK is today, and the difference is basically that, although China continues to give lip service to Chairman Mao, they basically follow a newly carved path which has more in common with Confucian meritocracy than with communism, and that they are communist in name only, it becomes apparent that even the most closed, pathological and genocidal dictatorship can be transformed into something much more positive, within a timeframe of several decades, if they are allowed to connect with the rest of the world via trade and industry.

A sensible approach would be for China to offer DPRK a path forward – trade with them, open factories there, open lines of communication, create bilateral ties of partnership, but first seriously threaten them with complete nuclear annihilation unless they cut their foolish posturing, and actually be willing to kill them all if they do not comply. I intentionally say “China”, because South Korea, America or Japan would have less chance of success. Another reason is that if the Americans attack them, they will retaliate against South Korea and Japan. However, if China attacks them, they have no immediate response, because they can’t really hold China hostage. In fact, if they destroy South Korea and Japan, China would welcome that fact very much because those countries are both economic and political competitors. So, this would be the way to stop them while minimizing the chance for a DPRK retaliation against the innocents.

Essentially, the best scenario would be for Americans to be so serious about wiping DPRK off the map, for China to decide it would be less harmful if they did it themselves, and if they were so serious about it that DPRK decides to opt for the path of cooperation and integration into the global community. However, in order for that to work, DPRK would need to know it has only two options, and that both are completely realistic, and no amount of bluffing will improve their position.

Another thing: people in the West act as if Kim Jong-un is the dictator in charge, which is ridiculous. In fact, he’s most likely a puppet installed by the military leadership. He was brought in, taught how to play a role, and he is more of a tool for controlling the populace, than a person in charge. The Western propensity for personalizing politics produced a potentially dangerous illusion that the person apparently in charge is the root cause of the problem. Instead, what needs to be understood is which fraction of the military controls the country, a deal needs to be made with this fraction, and Kim Jong-un needs to be taught to play a slightly different role, for which he already showed significant inclinations; he needs to be friendly with the West. In fact, I think he already made ouvertures in that directions, only to be mocked by the Western idiotic media, who didn’t understand his attempt to pull DPRK out of intellectual and civilizational isolation, and this mocking response forced him into a belligerent face-saving stance which would now be very difficult to change. Essentially, the West created the worst part of the current problem with DPRK simply because they decided to have fun bullying DPRK and its leader, which put him in a very bad position domestically, because if the West treated him so poorly, and he continued to treat the West in his normal friendly manner, it would locally be perceived as dishonorable, and obviously the military leaders would intervene in order to change his course. Essentially, by mocking him they forced him to go into a nuclear confrontation, which is a great example of dangers that stem from misreading other cultures. Now, the honorable way out would be to acknowledge his power and authority, but also to state that his belligerent stance will now have the consequence of a nuclear war within five minutes, and then offer a hand of friendship as an alternative. If there’s someone famous in the West who is perceived as friendly and positive in DPRK, that person could be used as a bridge to establish positive relations. If something is agreed with the military leadership, the DPRK propaganda outlets will prepare the populace for improvement of relationships with the West, but the Western propaganda outlets should play their part as well, and stop with their offensive bullshit, because DPRK populace is so indoctrinated into leader-worship, that any kind of offense to their quasi-religious figure is interpreted as an offense to the entire nation, similar to the way the Japanese treat their Emperor. This needs to be a dance of seduction, not a date rape, and I’m afraid that the Americans are inherently incompetent for this kind of diplomatic subtlety. The Chinese could do it, the Russians could do it, but the Americans should stay the hell out because their condescending attitude and their constant need to show everyone how much better their “way of life” really is actually created this unenviable situation, and is immensely unlikely to resolve it. This problem can only be solved by someone who speaks very softly and respectfully, smiles a lot, and has a habit of bowing in respect, but also wields MIRV ICBMs and is willing to use them at any given point. The charming ways of Putin and Xi show the way this is to be done, if at all.

I would like to clarify my preference for some type of meritocratic aristocracy over democracy.

If number of votes is all that matters, and Gaussian distribution of the population applies, the end-result of universal suffrage will create the rule of the most evil kind of manipulators, who are good at exploiting weaknesses of the majority for their ends. A system of government where one would be required to display significant ability and virtue in order to have a say in anything would yield much better results. For instance, reserving the right to vote for the top 10% of population in IQ, and then selecting within this group those who pass a basic test which proves they are informed enough to know what they are doing, and requiring them to either pay a net positive in taxes, or to have served in the armed forces, let’s just say I would so like to see an election campaign targetting this kind of voters. Essentially, what I would do is require that you can’t make decisions regarding public matters if you’re stupid, uninformed and you’re not a stakeholder. If you pay more taxes than you reap benefits, then you’re the group that’s actually influenced by taxation, and that’s what government is – deciding who is taxed, and who is ordered to go into a war and die. If you have a vested interest in taxing others because that’s where you get your money from, you’re simply not to be trusted with decisions in the matter. You can’t allow the poor people to vote, because they’ll vote to take the rich people’s money and distribute it among themselves, which is easier than working for it. You also can’t allow the unvirtuous people to vote, which is why criminals should be stripped of voting rights, and you can’t allow the stupid people to vote, because they don’t know enough to make good and informed decisions, and they cast their vote based on some stupid bullshit such as “I’ll vote for her because she’s a woman” or “I’ll vote for this guy because he’s black and I’ll virtue-signal that I’m not racist”. That’s not how you can elect good government. You need to understand the policy, the consequences, and the character of the person. Most people are just too stupid for it, and those who can do it properly are rendered statistically insignificant by the sheer body count of fools that show up at the ballot box. So, basically, if someone had served in the armed forces, he knows it’s his ass on the line of fire and will not easily vote for the populist warmongers. Also, if someone earns his own income, he will not easily vote for those who would like nothing better than to squander his money.

Some say that things went downhill for the Western civilization when women got the right to vote, because they consistently voted for the leftist policies. I partially agree, but I think it’s not the women, it’s the non-stakeholders that are the problem. You can be sure that a woman whose assets are on the line won’t vote for tax increases that finance social activism. Also, you can be sure that a woman whose son is in the military won’t vote for warmongers. So basically the problem appeared where you no longer had to own property or pass a test to be able to vote, which returns us to my original criteria – people who are stupid, uninformed and who don’t have a horse in the race should not have a say. Yes, this would divide humans into a ruled class and a ruling class, and that’s good, as long as you can join the ruling class at any moment by proving you’re either competent enough to have a say, or that you’re willing to put your life in the line of fire, by joining the military. If you’re ready to die for the common good, you can vote to elect the government, as far as I’m concerned.