The other day, Michael Anissimov at More Right wrote about adaptive advantages to authoritarian government:

In a certain sense, democracies are like cattle; slow, pondering, systematic, gregarious, perpetually hungry, and with a short attention span. They are adaptive in circumstances where there is an all-powerful titanic nuclear hegemon (the United States) that subsidizes and protects their sheltered existence. In an unstable multipolar world, however (which is where we are headed), it is not necessarily the most adaptive social or governmental strategy.

We can see this in the way that Middle East “democracies” have the unfortunate habit of evolving into authoritarian states. Middle East states don’t have much of a choice of being a democracy or authoritarian state so much as they have a choice of being a secular authoritarian state or an Islamic authoritarian state. This is because authoritarianism is an adaptive solution for states in that part of the world with that particular geopolitical ecology.

As the ideological and cultural unity of the West fades away in favor of multiculturalism and relativism, the adaptive utility of authoritarian governments here is likely to rise. The question is, will this be something forced on us by abrupt, bloody events, or something we deliberately choose and engineer in advance? I prefer the latter over the former.

Democracies have short attention-spans in part because of electoral turnover. The other reason is that they are beholden to the shifting consensus of the electorate. As the electorate changes its composition and opinions continually, the character of the state must also change substantially with it.

When you add in substantial immigration, this further adds to the instability, shifting attention, and continually changing priorities of the democratic state. To further add to the difficulty, foreign states must change their diplomatic approaches as each democracy changes based on its changing electorate.

As we see with the United States’ role in foreign policy, this also encourages the dominant power to meddle frequently in elections, both directly and indirectly, managing public opinion and values even in countries that it has no formal sovereignty over, even despite international treaties forbidding the practice.

Rather than a system of stable states, with stable rulers, stable characters, and stable peoples, we have a jumble of states that are continually shifting in an unpredictable way.

In 20th century America, four major trends drove real estate development. To simplify, they are:

• Fiat mortgage credit
• Interstate highways and other government infrastructure like electricity
• Civil Rights-related ethnic migration
• The occult reaction against Civil Rights (‘Drug War’ / ‘Giuliani Time’) that re-settled formerly chaotic cities.

All of these trends are unraveling, and even reversing, as I write this. You can read more about the infrastructure issue in the review of a book on that topic that I wrote earlier last year.

As the reaction against Civil Rights crumbles due to financial, moral, and political issues, there must be someone to rush in to the vacuum.

It is not so much that society will collapse because of a lack of means to hold itself together, but rather that it will crumble owing to a lack of courage (both physical and intellectual) to prevent that from happening.

The country at large will continue to lose its economic vitality and social stability in an inexorable fashion. Economics involves free exchange, rather than exchange under compulsion, and as exchange under compulsion crowds out free exchange, the economy must shrink, and property must become less secure overall.

It would not surprise me if we were to see a return to the security norm, which is islands of order surrounded by vast areas in which bandits can attack travelers with impunity. While it will take some time for this reversion to happen, it seems to me to be a likely speculation, an easy bet to make and to win on.

Providing security will require some mixture of obligatory militia and private (as opposed to nation-state) professional security. The value of the real estate under protection will grow to the extent that it is better-protected at a lower price than the alternatives.

We have already seen, overseas, that the Federal government is more than willing to cede its monopoly on logistics and high-value security operations to mercenaries and other firms that can do the job better at a lower price. There is more pragmatism at the Pentagon than most are willing to give it credit for.

The reason is less intellectual and more, perhaps, based on some mixture of cowardice and bean-counting. Elites know that the public security forces are unreliable. When they have a choice, they hire mercenaries. Given that this is the case, it will be harder to prevent the lower social orders (the remnants of the middle class, non-elite corporations) from doing the same to protect themselves and their holdings.

The enormous prison systems created in a vain hope to ‘reform’ the bastards of the world will crumble and fade, because they have grown far past the ability of the host society to maintain. On a global scale, the West can’t afford to bear the burdens of the Rest while reproducing itself.

Something must give, and it will.