… But Sailer’s right about Klosterman’s ability to grasp the obvious about Gen X. For instance:
The concept of “selling out” — and the degree to which that notion altered the meaning and perception of almost everything — is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties. The complexity, nuance, and application of the term sellout was both ubiquitous and impossible to grasp. Nothing was more inadvertently detrimental to the Gen X psyche.
Or, as I like to put it, we were so obsessed with “authenticity” that we took as our guru an exquisitely sensitive longhaired goof who fronted a band named after spooge. […] But Klosterman does have genuine insights sometimes:
The detail always noted in remembrances of the Bronco chase is the throngs of bystanders cheering for Simpson as the car rolled down the freeway, congregating on overpasses and holding makeshift cardboard signs proclaiming, “The Juice Is Loose”. It seemed perverse then and still seems perverse now. Yet this can also be understood as the primordial impulse of what would eventually drive the mechanism of social media: the desire of uninformed people to be involved with the news, broadcasting their support for a homicidal maniac not because they liked him, but because it was exhilarating to participate in an experience all of society was experiencing at once.
Sailer thinks that’s clever and perceptive, and I agree. Too bad you have to read some masturbatory bullshit about Zima to get to it.
Sadly, he doesn’t take that out a step (or, at least, he doesn’t get quoted doing so in Sailer’s review). Here’s Klosterman’s verdict on why Gen X, for all its faults, wasn’t so bad:
The enforced ennui and alienation of Gen X had one social upside: Self-righteous outrage was not considered cool, in an era when coolness counted for almost everything. Solipsism was preferable to narcissism. The idea of policing morality or blaming strangers for the condition of one’s own existence was perceived as overbearing and uncouth. If you weren’t happy, the preferred stance was to simply shrug and accept that you were unhappy.
True enough, but look: Of all the things that made the Boomers so fucking insufferable, right near the top was their utter inability to let go of their youth. Instead of seeing Forrest Gump as a metaphor so unsubtle, an anvil to the head seems sneakier, they thought it was a lighthearted celebration of a simpler, more innocent time. We knew better. Since they couldn’t let go of their youth, we made “being old and jaded long before our time” into our signature thing.
But where, my fellow alterna-dudes, is that attitude now, when it matters? We’re in the same position in 2022 as our parents were in 1992: Staring down the barrel of middle age, teeing off on life’s back nine, pick your metaphor. It’s time to put away childish things. Grow the fuck up already, the way we wish our parents would’ve done for us back in 1992. Instead, we’re letting our lunatic children smear their pathologies all over what’s left of America, because … ?
I know why Klosterman does it: That’s what they pay him for. What’s our excuse?
Severian, “A Meta-Review”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.
September 7, 2025
September 1, 2025
QotD: The Ivy League
The Ivies are now what they’ve pretty much always been — the equivalent of those Higher Party Academies in Moscow. They’re finishing schools for the Apparat. Oh sure, you can probably find a graduate of Ohio State or some such place at Quantico or Foggy Bottom … but I promise you, he hears about it every single day of his life. If they don’t actually teach classes called “How to be a Toady in the DOJ” and “Catching a Senator’s Farts” at Dartmouth, they might as well.
Take your Basic College Girl, make her unisex, crank her up way past eleven on meth and steroids, and that’s the typical Ivy League grad. And they all go directly into Government. Just in case you still cherished some vague hope we could vote our way out of this, remember that guys like Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy were the absolute best the Ivy League has produced in the modern era. The Democratic People’s Republic of Vietnam says hi!
Severian, “First Mailbag of the New Year”, Founding Questions, 2022-01-07.
Update, 2 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
August 26, 2025
QotD: Problem-solving in large organizations
… except no, now Accounting chimes in, that looks like it might be a violation of some codicil to some sub-paragraph of an addendum to a regulation, better check with Compliance. But before you can do that, the Division Managers get into it, because hotshot has called his Department Supervisor over and said look, Dave, I brought in seventy gorillion dollars last fiscal year, you owe me this one …
… and so forth. Everybody with me? No one is corrupt in this scenario. Nobody’s trying to pull a fast one on anybody else. Indeed, everybody’s on the same page, and everybody has every incentive to find a solution, because all our Christmas bonuses are going to look a little nicer if the firm lands this fat client. All we’re trying to do is add one task to the existing Customer Service workflow, but it’s going to take at least a Division Manager-level meeting, if not the direct input of the Big Boss himself, to get it hammered out. It’s an exponential increase in energy expenditure.
And of course it ramifies, and of course that’s true no matter what solution you come up with. Make an exception to the workflow for this one client, and pretty soon you’re going to be making exceptions for every client — every wannabe-hotshot up in Sales is going to demand the works for every little podunk potential client. Same deal if you designate one guy from Customer Service as the dedicated exception-handler. Same deal if you create a whole new sub-unit inside Customer Service (but a lot faster). And so forth.
I’m sure everyone has had that experience, too: Watching your company lose out on a potential big client because the various Departments couldn’t get on the same page for whatever reason.
And that’s just around the office! Meaning: yeah, it’d be nice if we could land that big client, maybe see an extra hundred bucks on our Christmas bonus, but nobody’s losing any sleep over it. Well, ok, Hotshot up in Sales probably is, but even the best salesman loses far more often than he wins. He’ll get over it in a day or two, or he won’t be a salesman much longer.
But the same thing happens when it comes to stuff that matters, which is why complex societies collapse.
Severian, “Collapse II”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-09.
August 20, 2025
QotD: Most “mass movements” really do need that “vanguard” to start moving
And yet, as Orwell knows better than anyone, the proles can’t do it on their own. You really do need a vanguard of the proletariat. As Orwell himself notes, Hitler was backed by the big industrialists, and if you really want to needle the eggheads in your life, point out how quickly and thoroughly the German professors knuckled under […] They couldn’t wait to lick his jackboots, any more than his British and American colleagues could wait to kiss Stalin’s ass. They called themselves a “workers’ party”, but in the early days [German fascists] were almost exclusively found among the dueling fraternities – and professors! — of the German university system.
In other words, maybe the proles don’t need nothin’ but a good time, like the old song says, but though the proles are the “mass” of “mass movement”, the “movement” part gets started considerably higher up the social ladder … that is, with guys like Orwell. Guys who know, deep in their bones, that there’s more to life than hygiene, short working hours, birth control, etc. Because he’s one of the great prose stylists, it’s not as apparent in Orwell, but in lesser hands than his you can smell the contempt dripping off every sentence an egghead writes about the proles …
It’s not that the proles want hygiene, birth control, etc. It’s what they need. What they deserve, when you come right down to it, because that’s what you do with livestock — keep ’em clean and well fed, and of course control their breeding. You could take the most purple passage of “animal rights” eco-lunacy and set it side by side with the Webbs’ Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, and see no difference at all. Sure, every aspect of our lives is managed for us by Our Betters, but at least we’re free range!
Severian, “Bonfire of the Vanities II”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-29.
August 14, 2025
QotD: It’s not hypocrisy when progressives do it …
Severian, “Fade to Black”, Founding Questions, 2022-01-23.
August 8, 2025
QotD: Accelerating back towards bicamerality
This hypothesis seems to explain a few huge, otherwise perplexing facts of Leftist behavior. First: The further Left a person is, the more desperate xzhey are to put everyone else into one, and only one, category. Starting, of course, with themselves — I often joke that they’re trying to get their own bespoke “sexuality” so refined that no one else in the world could possibly share it. That would relieve them from the burden of ever actually having to be intimate — sexually or otherwise — with anyone. They can sit in the dark in their masks, eating bugs and watching Netflix, totally alone, forever.
I’m joking, but I’m not kidding. They really do seem to want that. And bicamerality explains it. I’ve also frequently likened them to the “zooanthrops” from The Book of the New Sun, from whence my stupid nom de blog comes. In that book, the literal end of the world was just around the corner — the sun, long expanded into a cool red giant, was about to go out, possibly within the current generation’s lifetime. Because of that, some people decided to “lay the burden of consciousness down” — they had themselves lobotomized and dumped in the woods.
Again, I’m joking, but I’m not kidding: Doesn’t that seem to be what so many on the Left really want? To be relieved of the burden of thought?
It applies even more so when they’re forced to interact with the world. We’ve all seen how desperate they are to shove people into one, and only one, box. Actually “desperate” is too mild a word — nothing frightens them more than the fact that a person can look one way, but actually be another way. It’s why they’re such slaves to fashion — literal fashion, not just fads trending on Twitter. Even before Der Hamsterkauf you could tell a Leftist just by looking at them, pretty much 100% of the time. Afterwards … well, we’ve all advanced a lot of explanations for why they’re so bizarrely insistent on the mask, especially for children: It’s their new purity ritual. They’re all chicks, and that’s the ultimate chick herd behavior. They’re just sadists. And so on.
But what if it’s as simple as The Mask relieves them, as nothing else can, from a significant source of interpersonal stress? “Interpersonal” again is too mild a word. They don’t want to “get to know you”. They don’t even want to talk to you. Hell, they don’t even want to share the same air with you, and do you see what I mean? Their “lives” would be so much better if we all had to wear colored patches on our jumpsuits, Dachau-style, telling everyone exactly what we are (exactly and only). Barring that, they’d love to reimpose some of the old medieval sumptuary laws — again, you will eat the bugs, because that’s what you deserve, peasant! But it’s not just that. It’s also a huge stress relief for them, to be able to tell a person’s social status at a glance.
Consider further (just briefly) how much a non-victim Victim fries their circuits. A gay conservative, say, or a pro-life woman, or a black “acting White” (your average liberal makes your average rapper look like a paragon of tolerance when it comes to that particular sin, though of course the liberal dresses it up in a thousand syllables of fugly jargon). Even though “the sex you’re attracted to” has no possible relationship to “your stance on the tax code”, the Left has made it so — first as a cynical political maneuver, but now because it minimizes their “interpersonal” (again, for lack of a better word) stress.
The tl;dr here is that your typical Leftist seems to spend all xzheir time in xzheir own head — always labeling, cataloging, frantically shoving everyone and everything into its own little box. But they do this, I think, because they know subconsciously that once they’ve got everything shoved into one and only box, forever, they’ll never have to think again … and that’s what they really want. A life of perfect unconscious bliss, where any “decision” that needs to get made comes from the blinking box.
Severian, “Striving Towards Bicamerality”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-20.
August 2, 2025
QotD: The path to salvation
The following is not a theological argument, it’s an observation about human nature: Both faith and works are necessary, because by their fruits ye shall know them. If one has faith, then the works will follow — naturally, as it were. But works without faith are mere mumbo-jumbo, no different than the crudest magic spell. The kind of guy who does what David French does — performs the works solely to be seen performing the works — is what Jesus called a “whited sepulcher”, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.
Again, you don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to observe that Jesus commanded what the parlance our times calls “tough love”. Just as you can’t save a sinner by taking away all his opportunities to sin — we are ALL guilty; we are ALL fallen; that alone is sufficient to damn us — so you can’t “save” a drunk, or an illegal alien, or a criminal, or whatever by enabling his lifestyle. The reason I’m not in church today is because the church is exactly like that gaggle of Karens in Starbucks — they talk a good game about renouncing the wiles of this world, but they bend over backwards to enable every possible social dysfunction.
No, Jesus did NOT command us to patch up the gutter addict every time he OD’s, so that he can go out and OD again. He did NOT command us to provide all kinds of food and shelter and medical care to every Squatemalan who broke the very first American law he had the opportunity to break by coming here. No, He did NOT command us to tolerate deviance — there are two clauses in “love the sinner, hate the sin”, and we must obey both.
The only route to salvation starts by admitting that everyone is fallen. You can take that in whatever sense you like, because it’s not theology, it’s just an obvious fact about human nature. Alas, it’s one you have to learn by age 12, or you’ll never learn it at all. That’s the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled.
Severian, “On Being Bad”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-12.
July 26, 2025
QotD: The accumulated friction of bureaucratic growth
[…] In the early Republic, raising a legion was as simple as a patrician calling his clients to service, or the Senate issuing a conscription decree. One task: the summoning of free men, with their own equipment, and there you go — Legio I Hypothetica.
By the late Empire, though, all those freeholds had been turned into slave-worked Latifundia, so the effort of raising a legion increased enormously. Now the bureaucracy had to go out and hire freemen (if it could even find them), equip them at State expense, train them (again at State expense), and so on. In itself, the number of tasks isn’t that large — we’ve identified three — and they only increase at the rate of n+1.
But the effort each task requires increases to the power of n, such that if you could somehow express the effort expended in physical terms — joules or kilowatts or whatever — you’d see that the creation of Legio I Hypothetica under Scipio Africanus took 10 kilowatts, while raising the same legion under Diocletian took 10,000,000.
This isn’t (just) corruption. Sure, everyone at every level of the Imperial Bureaucracy was getting his beak wet, that goes without saying, but it’s the nature of bureaucracy itself that’s most to blame.
Severian, “Collapse II”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-09.
July 20, 2025
QotD: Above all else, helicopter parents hate … helicopter parenting
If the kid gets anything less than an A-triple-plus in Zoom School, Karen is immediately on the horn to the teacher … and since all schools these days, even the rare physical ones, are all wired up with “classroom management software”, they can bombard their kids’ teachers with emails and text messages 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Helmets, knee pads … kids these days wear more safety gear than a mountain climber just to ride their bikes, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them kitted out like hockey goalies if recess ever becomes a thing again. Can the day be far off when every kid is trailed by xzheyr own personal injury lawyer, and parents are forced to sign waivers to let their kids use the bathroom?
Everyone knows how bad this is for childhood development, but if I told some kid with a scraped knee to rub some dirt on it, you’ll be fine, I’d probably get hauled up on child endangerment charges.
How can kids advance past age twelve, mentally and emotionally, if they’re never allowed to get hurt? To fail? To suffer the consequences of their own bad decisions?
I’m no developmental psychologist, but it seems obvious that such learning is time-limited. If you haven’t learned that X brings pain — and WHY — by the time you hit twelve years old, then on some fundamental level you’re never going to learn it.
Severian, “On Being Bad”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-12.
July 14, 2025
QotD: The inevitable endgame of power-for-power’s-sake
I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.
Or, if you prefer it in slightly more modern English:
Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power … Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?
That’s the bedrock of human existence, right there: Power. Everything that isn’t Power is nothing, until Power requires it; when it’s no longer useful to Power, it becomes nothing again. Nietzsche would’ve understood O’Brien perfectly.
But please note: Human existence.
Human — animals aren’t like that. They can’t be. They’re not mere automata, as Descartes would have it, but they’re obviously not self-conscious, either. All that Green hooey about animals living in harmony with their environment is, nonetheless, true. They can’t do any other, because they’re animals. Only humans can see that extra step ahead, all the potential dangers that will never let him rest content with the power he has.
And existence – not life, existence. The world Hobbes and O’Brien describe with such terrifying eloquence isn’t life, it’s mere existence. O’Brien couldn’t see where his philosophy led, but Hobbes could:
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of War, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
This is the end of power-for-power’s-sake. O’Brien was wrong about that boot stomping on a human face, forever. The “state of nature” doesn’t actually exist IN nature, but Big Brother’s Party created it artificially.
But for such a creation to continue, as O’Brien shows, it must be completely static … and that’s impossible. The opposite of Power is Entropy, and Entropy always wins in the end.
Severian, “Salute the Hat”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-07.
July 8, 2025
QotD: Sixty years of intelligence service operations going sideways
There’s also another version of the Historian’s Fallacy in play with Intelligence work:
The historian’s fallacy is an informal fallacy that occurs when one assumes that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and having the same information as those subsequently analyzing the decision. It is not to be confused with presentism, a similar but distinct mode of historical analysis in which present-day ideas (such as moral standards) are projected into the past. The idea was first articulated by British literary critic Matthew Arnold in 1880 and later named and defined by American historian David Hackett Fischer in 1970.
Things that seem obvious in retrospect weren’t at the time. That’s the “formal” Historian’s Fallacy, if you like. But there’s another one, that we could call the “Narrative Fallacy” or the “Assumed Rationality Fallacy” or something (I stink at titles). Historians are, or at least should be, acutely sensitive to the danger of seeing patterns that aren’t really there (in a very real sense, “conspiracy theorists” e.g. McGowan are just Historians manqué. Coincidences are coincidental, and without training and practice and — crucially — an experienced hand to smack you upside the head for going farther than the available sources allow, it’s easy to run wild with them. So-and-So knew Joe Blow … yes, but that does not automatically mean that So-and-So conspired with Joe Blow).
Compounding it further: It’s indeed rational to assume rationality on your enemies’ part, so some catastrophic intelligence “failures” have come because analysts were unwilling to acknowledge that the enemy was, in fact, making a mistake. It’s a bit pricey, but I highly recommend James Wirtz’s The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War (here’s a preview page of a review at JSTOR, which points to a trade journal, American Intelligence Journal. Wirtz is a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School; I bet his book rattled a lot of cages that needed rattling). Breaking it out a bit further, and these categories are mine, not Wirtz’s:
In the case of Tet, there was top-level structural “failure” that hardly deserves the term “failure” — the NVA’s intelligence boys were no fools; they were bright guys doing their damnedest to put one over on the American intelligence crew, and they had some success at it. That’s only “failure” in the sense that in binary system, a win for them is a loss for you — you “failed” to win the game against a highly skilled, highly motivated opponent. The Americans didn’t fail to recognize that The Enemy Gets a Vote; they just didn’t realize how he’d voted.
But there was what I’ll call “Narrative” failure, and that’s all on the Americans. They seem to have decided that the North Vietnamese were not only losing the war, but knew themselves to be losing the war. So what the North Vietnamese saw as merely “the next phase of the plan”, the Americans saw as “increasing desperation”. Which led to other Narrative Failures. I might be misremembering the details, so check me on this, but I believe that the Americans were correct despite themselves about the attack on the big Marine base at Khe Sanh — it was indeed a diversion. But the Americans somehow concluded that it was a diversionary attack, specifically a “spoiling attack”, on something the NVA shouldn’t have known about in the first place — a top secret operation called “Muscle Shoals” (in Wiki under Operation Igloo White).
In reality, the Khe Sanh attack was a diversion against the main Tet operation, and it worked so well that it took a week or more, IIRC, for Westmoreland to come around. He insisted on interpreting the Tet “uprising” as yet a further diversion — a diversion in support of what he assumed was the main NVA operation, the attack on Khe Sanh!
Those are Narrative Failures. Twitter didn’t exist then, but we could nowadays profitably call them “Twitter Failures”. Whatcha gonna believe, your own lying eyes or the blue checkmarks in the Pocket Moloch?
All of which was aided and abetted by the third kind of failure, that “Assumed Rationality” failure. One CIA analyst, Joseph Hovey, not only predicted the Tet Offensive, but got large parts of it exactly right. But Hovey had a hard time believing his own analysis, because its central assumption was that the North Vietnamese were, in fact, making a mistake. The North Vietnamese did not, in fact, have the forces in place to do what they wanted to do. They were suffering a catastrophic Narrative Failure of their own, one endemic (it seems reasonable to say) to Communist regimes — since political officers are highly encouraged to submit exaggerated reports of unit strength and morale (and often lethally discouraged from reporting the opposite), the NVA thought they had far more, and far better prepared, forces than they actually did.
In an Alanis-level irony, US military intelligence had a better idea of the NVA’s strength than the boys in Hanoi did. (They confirmed this, in fact, when they nabbed a high-level NVA defector, who only “rallied” because the formation he was sent south to lead didn’t actually exist!). When faced with the possible conclusion that the Enemy is about to make a big mistake, it’s only rational to assume that something else is going on. Hovey knew that, of course, and that’s one of the main reasons his analysis went nowhere — being a conscientious professional, he noted at the outset that his analysis was premised on the NVA setting up to make a big mistake, which seemed extremely unlikely.
Given all that, if I had to guess, I’d bet that the KGB had a similar record, if the truth is ever known, because they had similar problems. They had a different, more systematic kind of Narrative Failure, I’d imagine — “Marxism-Leninism” vs. “bow-tied Ivy Leaguers running around cosplaying Lawrence of Indochina” — but it probably all washed out in the end. It’d be extremely interesting to hear about the Vietnam War from the KGB’s side …
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2023-04-15.
July 2, 2025
QotD: The bane of socialism — boredom
Most “bad” dogs aren’t actually bad. They’re not misbehaving because they’re willful, or mean, or whatever. They’re just bored out of their fucking skulls, because the kind of bugman who gets a dog these days has no idea that you actually have to play with it, and pet it, and interact with it, in much the same way you have to interact with a young human. Given a dog’s limited intellect, the only thing it can think of to do to alleviate its boredom is chew on things, or dig in the yard, or piss on the rug, or, if all else fails, chew its own fur off.
Being slightly more complex critters, humans have more options, but bore a human enough — overfill his material needs, so that he’s stuffed to somnolence, but take his sense of purpose away — and you’ll see the exact same dog behaviors. Why do you think they shove all that metal shit in their faces? And no, I am absolutely not joking. Why all the huge, gaudy, gross tattoos? The constant changes of hair color and style?
Have you ever asked them?
Again, I’m 100% not joking. I know most of y’all avoid SJWs like the plague, and that’s a smart move, can’t blame you for it, but if you do, you’ll just have to trust me: I was in academia for a long time, so I was around not just SJWs, but bleeding-edge lunatic SJWs, and I asked them about it. One must be discreet about this, of course — hey, I’m thinking of getting a roll of toilet paper tattooed on my bicep, to remind me that We’re In This Together, what do you think? — but it’s fairly easy to do. And every time, they’d spin me some elaborate tale of how deep and meaningful it all is.
No, really. By some mental process I can’t begin to reproduce, getting Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s face tattooed on your calf is, to them, striking a blow at ambient civilization. That is the literal truth of their motivation. It’s the same reason the dog digs in the backyard, or pisses on the rug, or chews its own fur off: That’s the only agency it has, the only purpose it can find.
Severian, “Purpose”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-06.
June 26, 2025
QotD: Credentialism versus meritocracy
Harvard’s motto is “Veritas” — truth — but it ought to be “ludificationes pertinet“, which the internet informs me is how you say “delusions of competence” in Latin. I meant it when I said that the “Ministry of Talent”, as these jerkoffs unironically called themselves, actually had some serious brainpower and real accomplishments … but the Peter Principle is also true, and though they had some real brains and actual accomplishments, neither their brains nor their accomplishments at Harvard translated to anything out in the real world, any more than some Late Republic social climber’s “experience” as curule aedile translated to anything real in their world.
Just as the Roman Senate had no idea how to deal with a Julius Caesar, then, despite it all, so no American “leader” had any idea how to deal with a guy like Ho Chi Minh, even though he, like Caesar, had always been perfectly open and forthright about what he was doing and why. It never occurred to “the best and brightest” to even ask the question “What does Ho Chi Minh want?”, because after all, Ho Chi Minh wasn’t a Harvard man.
And all this was 60 years ago. These days, the AINO cursus honorum is so widespread that every kid who manages to fill out a college app has a resume that would give McGeorge Bundy an erection lasting more than four hours. You’ll have to trust me on this, I guess, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Flyover State — which is respectable but rinky-dink; the kind of outfit where you see their team losing a late December bowl game and you think “Gosh, I guess that state has a third college in it” — had several hundred student organizations …
… all of which seem to exist for no other reason than to have “officers”, to which these little social climbers can be “elected”, the better to pad their law, med, and grad school apps. By the end of my career, probably 3/4 of the students who ever sent me an email had an auto-signature on it, and that auto-signature was longer than my entire CV. President of this, Vice-Treasurer of that, Assistant Grand Poobah (junior grade) of the other thing. Grandpa Simpson was a piker compared to these kids:
I’m an Elk, a Mason, a Communist. I’m the president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance for some reason. Ah, here it is. The Stonecutters!
Instead of giving potential movers and shakers some practical experience, our modern cursus honorum casts the widest possible net for sociopathy. McGeorge Bundy is your absolute best case scenario. He wasn’t actively evil; he was just a goofy egghead who thought he was way smarter and more accomplished than he actually was, because he’d never been in a position to find out otherwise. (An anecdote that tells you everything you need to know, courtesy of Wikipedia: “When applying to Yale, Bundy wrote on the entrance exam ‘This question is silly. If I were giving the test, this is the question I would ask, and this is my answer.’ Despite this, he was still admitted to Yale as he was awarded a perfect score on his entrance exam”).
Think about that the next time you go to the doctor. Even if your MD — or, much more likely these days, PA — isn’t a prize graduate of Bollywood Upstairs Medical College, xzhey most likely spent xzheyr college years as an Elk, a Mason, a Communist …
Your worst case scenario is, of course, another Caesar. A fake and gay one, it goes without saying — this being Clown World — but a fake and gay Caesar can still do tremendous damage, because they’re the worst of both worlds: Bundy-level goofs, and angry ethnic sociopaths with huge chips on their shoulders. These are the kids who have been “team leads” doing “original research” since about age 12. Not only have they never failed, they’ve never been exposed to the merest hint of the possibility of failure. All their “success” is theirs by right. They have Caesar’s vaulting ambition, his utter disregard for tradition, his absolute cutthroat ruthlessness … and none of his experience, to say nothing of his competence.
Severian, “Cursus Honorum”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-27.
June 20, 2025
QotD: The innate appeal of socialism
And the material side of Socialism is technically feasible. Obviously so, and indeed it was obvious by 1865. Consider what the Union Army had to do to keep one million men in the field, simultaneously, spread over hundreds of thousands of square miles. This was not without its problems, of course — soldiers finally receiving their back pay spurred a minor economic boom in 1865-6 — but it was not just possible, but an everyday occurrence, for hundreds of thousands of men, dispersed over a huge geographic area, to receive their entire subsistence from the government. Clothes, shoes, food — the stuff Riis’s “street Arabs” would’ve killed for — all at public expense, delivered with clockwork efficiency.
If Socialism were just that, then indeed we could’ve “built Socialism”, as the Bolsheviks would have it, by the end of the 19th century. And cheaply, too — by the late 1880s, the US Treasury’s massive surplus was a major campaign issue for both parties. The “Yankee Leviathan“, as political historian Richard Bensel put it, was as close to actual Fascism as has ever been put into practice (alas, the term hadn’t been invented yet), and it was just aces at delivering the material goods. (It’s Alanis-level ironic that the Confederacy was even more actual capital-F Fascistic than the Union, given the whole “states’ rights” thing, but that’s what happens in totaler Krieg — win first, sort the theory out later).
Severian, “Purpose”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-06.
June 14, 2025
QotD: University students or NPCs?
A few semesters on, and that no longer applied. Sure, sure, they were still teenagers, and still pulled typical teenager capers … but a new set of behaviors crept in. I can’t describe them exactly, in detail, but the overall impression was: here’s someone doing a pretty good impersonation of a teenager. Most every kid goes through the faux-sophisticate stage, usually somewhere around age 12, and this kinda looked like that — young kids pretending to be a lot older — but it also looked a lot like the opposite end of the spectrum. Not quite “hello, fellow teens!” — not yet — but there was something like that going on, too. It was weird, but I figured it was mostly in my head — I’ve always been a grouchy old man, but now I was actually chronologically old enough to let my freak flag fly, so I assumed that’s what I was doing. They’re not changing, I am …
Fast forward a few more semesters, and nope, it’s definitely them. The kids at the tail end of my career still looked like bargain basement Rich Littles, doing impersonations of teenagers, but their act was terrible. Remember a few years back, when Facebook or Twitter or whoever tried to make an AI chat bot, and it immediately turned super racist? Not that these kids were racists — they were the furthest thing from that — but they all seemed to have a small stock of crowdsourced responses. And that’s ALL they had, so no matter what the situation, they’d shoehorn it in to one of their canned affects, because that’s all they had.
By the very end, interacting with them was like playing one of those old text-adventure games from the very dawn of the personal computer, like Zork. They’d respond to commands, but only the right commands, in the exact word order. No deviations allowed, and of course their responses were equally programmed.
Severian, “Terminators”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-04.
