Because it’s not possible for the government to meet its entitlement obligations to the Baby Boomers, in part because previous generations pursued a strategy that increased the expenses of raising children to the point to which the government had to pursue mass immigration to fill the gaps in population growth, the baby boomers counting on government checks to handle their medical expenses and pensions are certain to be disappointed.

No one will tell them this, because to do so outside of a crisis situation would be to provoke an enormous political backlash for all the people involved. It will not be possible to pass a ‘responsible’ budget, because a responsible budget stiffs a large portion of the country out of what they’re owed.

The left-wing solution, which would be to seize the assets of corporations and high net worth individuals, would only provoke a capital flight of such stunning swiftness that it would be truly shocking. Unlike previous eras, in which most wealth was tied up in physical goods and inventory, now most wealth is expressed in terms of ownership rights, in terms of access to information and talent, and other intangible goods that can be transferred across borders within hours or days.

Tearing the fabric of the entitlement state would destroy the keystone of the nation-state, namely the social security and medical care programs that have been affirmed repeatedly as the only method by which an abstract governmental entity can ensure that everyone has some skin in the game with the federalizing institutions.

It’s not something that can be simply cut to balance a budget without provoking a political crisis in the way that burning buildings and lynched government officers constitute a political crisis. While it may be possible to make it balance on the spreadsheet, it’s not possible to make that balance with the capricious mob which is both emotionally and legally entitled to money which is not there.

The only ‘responsible’ move, which would be to raise taxes and lower entitlement spending, is not feasible, because lowering entitlement spending is what would provoke crises. Introducing means testing to these entitlement programs would have similar negative effects — the entire program is less important because of the actual money involved, but because it gives everyone in the society a stake in the survival of the federal institutions. If you remove that stake, you remove some important symbols of egalitarian citizenship, along with the incentive structure that makes it all work.

The honest, responsible solution would be to devolve the Federal state into a collection of smaller, regional states with governments more appropriate to the differing characters of the residents. The responsible way to handle it is to address the insolvency of the state before crisis forces a resolution.

Elections in the United States are much less popular than they once were. In 2012, the presidential election only earned a 55% turnout nationwide. That’s the most popular election in the country. Many other elections earn minimal turnouts and even less attention.

Why do people participate in elections? In Moldbug’s terms, elections are to power what pornography is to sex. People enjoy elections because it’s a simulation of having power over other citizens. The reality is that participating in an election is always a waste of time at the individual level, and only useful for the people actually driving the electioneering activity.

It’s not going to be possible to get everyone to abandon their addiction to pseudo-power. But whenever you want to replace a behavior in someone, you have to offer an alternative that meets a similar desire.

In short, you have to go after the issues that politicians use to get people to turn out to vote, and then help people either solve them for themselves or do it collectively. Instead of giving them a simulacrum of power through the democratic political process, you have to help them to take responsibility for solving their own problems.

The two typical responses to tough problems are either to petition the government to solve them or to throw up one’s hands and complain that the government blocks the solutions. Instead, better to route around whatever blocks there are and get it done, and damn the consequences.

It’s under-appreciated how state terror envelops society as both a bottom-up organic process as well as being a top-down, state-induced state of chaos. You can especially get this sense by reading Solzhenitsyn.

If you impose terror too quickly, you run the risk of having people escape with their resources, and can possibly interrupt economic activity that you could otherwise collect rents on. Revolutionary governments tend to be money-starved governments, and the ones that survive for longer tend to be better at maintaining a sense of normalcy within the productive class for as long as possible.

Everything is simplified during a real war from which no one can escape, so we won’t consider that instance in this case.

The most basic human instrument of terror is the thug. The thug rarely works, unless it’s as a pimp, a smuggler, or a general-purpose wiseguy. Turned into a political instrument, the thug has an explicit party membership. He may collect a stipend and hold a title, which he can augment with his sidelines and his position of legal authority. Part of what makes the thug useful is that he is disposable if he causes problems.

Thugs can have official status given or retracted as it suits the needs of the party in a particular region. To the extent that the thugs are not officially part of the party, they can be used as pressure to push productive people into joining the party for protection from the chaos that always surrounds the thug’s activities.

A second critical character to the care and feeding of the terror is the informant. Informants are often women or children, but they can be men as well. Informants are usually motivated by either envy or spite, but they may also turn in their friends for counter-revolutionary activity because they are themselves under pressure. Professional informants may also be used, but people can train themselves to spot them, whereas everyone has neighbors, and in cities, it’s not possible to restrict who those neighbors are.

Why do they do what they do? Because thought criminals are legitimately dangerous to the people around them. They instinctively perceive them as threatening, because tolerating their presence is dangerous. And most people have the courage of a mouse.

Finally, there’s the commissar, who will often start as a pure believer in the revolution. The commissar provides the verve, the faith, that the other instruments of terror lack. A thug will torture someone for pleasure, but a commissar will do it because he believes that it’s just.

The thug is useful at all stages of the terror. In the beginning, he is the most deniable tool. Crime can be portrayed as almost a force of nature. If the judge is sympathetic, he may only put lenient sentences on the thug for his actions, if he receives any sentence at all.

As the terror escalates, the thug gains opportunities to wrap himself in the righteous cause. The more that he is able to wrap himself in the colors of the revolution, the more he is able to indulge his sadism and greed with impunity.

Whereas the party may start out condemning the thug’s crimes as crimes, as the revolution accelerates, his crimes shift from regrettable, to understandable, to necessary actions.

A commissar may start out as a thug — even many of the bright names in the Soviet leadership were bank robbers — but he often possesses intelligence, charisma, and an unstoppable work ethic. In ordinary times, a commissar would go from being a bright, passionate student into becoming a dull if scrupulous clerk. Political repression can help him preserve his romantic sense of himself for much longer than would be possible otherwise. The badge to him means everything. When he kills someone, even a woman, he rarely feels regret or pity, even for a moment. The notion of guilt is foreign to his temperament.

While a priest might doubt himself, a commissar does not, at least until the revolution burns out.

Informants are typically ordinary people, who in more moral times would simply be an annoying co-worker or a nosy aunt. The revolution gives them a sense of new-found purpose. Whereas in better times, their vigilance might be put to use reporting a dangerous looking vagrant lurking near a park, during the revolution, they perk up their ears for politically incorrect jokes and other indications of reactionary tendencies.

The universal moral corrosion common to totalitarian regimes is what dissidents and historians usually remark on. It becomes almost as if everyone who stays within the totalitarian society is incapable of being good. There may be occasional good acts performed by bad people under totalitarianism, but part of what makes it so sinister is that the idea of goodness dies within the common people as well as the elites, except for perhaps within some of the surviving elderly people.

Denied the outward performance of goodness, the inner light tends to die as well. That is what makes it so intolerable.

In America, we are still at a relatively early time in the development of the terror, in part because it’s mostly only been possible to move slowly. When a thug performs a crime, the commoners see a criminal. But the revolutionaries and the temporary elites who know that they must appease them see a soldier, or a martyr. The two groups can see the same images, know the same facts, and yet hold a different narrative about the meaning of those images and facts within their minds.

Once the terror begins, it must intensify through a ratcheting process, as elites rely more heavily on the revolution to retain access to resources and control, and the revolution needs to accelerate to avoid decaying into nothing. When the current elites cease to be useful, the revolution eats them, and takes their place in the shell where government was previously.

As the revolution fails to produce the perfection of the idea of the revolution, it must intensify every trend, must make greater use of its instruments, and destroy not just all good things, but attack the idea of goodness itself in the common mind. Thugs being quite literal, they do this by battering the brains of good people until blood and organs stain the walls and ruin the carpets. Hammers, knives, spikes, household objects, guns, machetes, gasoline — complicated tools are not necessary for this sort of mass moral restructuring.

Goodness being redefined as evil, the commissars seek out everyone who is good, to torture them until they stop being good, or cease being. With competing sources of Goodness gone, the revolution looks taller by comparison relative to the crowd of nihilists that it leaves behind.