I try to intelligently analyze White Empire as best I can, but something irks me. What if there is no plan? What if they're just stupid? What if the simplest answer is that they're just simpletons? What if they're just cutting coke with Occam's Razor, and licking the blade with wild abandon? At this time, a Great Man Theory (GMT) of history won't do, we need a Great Idiot Theory (GIT).

Theory

Great Man Theory comes from a series of lectures by Thomas Carlyle from 1840, called On Heroes. It's an erudite, expansive work, covering everyone from the Prophet Muhammad to Shakespeare to Napoleon Bonaparte. Most people reduce Carlyle to out of context quotes (in the context of reduced attention spans), and I'm afraid I'm no exception. For our purposes, Carlyle said, “Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.” I would amend just one word. Great Men might mark the top of history, but the bottom is just morons.

Carlyle addresses this. In his section on kings and kingslayers, Carlyle posited a difference between the ‘Ablest Man’ and the ‘Unablest Man’, each emerging cyclically throughout history. As the modern airport novel wisdom goes, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” Carlyle seems to talk about the American Devolution today, when he talks about the French Revolution of yore,

This is the history of all rebellions, French Revolutions, social explosions in ancient or modern times. You have put the too Unable Man at the head of affairs! The too ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man. You have forgotten that there is any rule, or natural necessity whatever, of putting the Able Man there. Brick must lie on brick as it may and can. Unable Simulacrum of Ability, quack, in a word, must adjust himself with quack, in all manner of administration of human things;—which accordingly lie unadministered, fermenting into unmeasured masses of failure, of indigent misery: in the outward, and in the inward or spiritual, miserable millions stretch out the hand for their due supply, and it is not there.

The ‘ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man,’ an administration of quacks, ‘fermenting into unmeasured masses of failure.’ Does this not describe the current situation in parallax? Trump is a revolutionary in the sense of turning things over, and French in the sense that nothing good comes of it. There's an English saying, cometh the hour, cometh the man, but at this late hour, who's answering the call but morons and charlatans? As Yeats said, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” There's also a Chinese saying, 时势造英雄, “the times create their heroes,” but what does this mean in a time of decline? The times also create their zeroes, who drive the ‘miserable millions’ down accordingly.

Critique Of GMT

One critique of GMT comes from Karl Marx, who said, “how absurd is the conception of history held hitherto, which neglects the real relationships and confines itself to high-sounding dramas of princes and states.” Marx describes his alternative, historical materialism, saying,

History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity. This can be speculatively distorted so that later history is made the goal of earlier history, e.g. the goal ascribed to the discovery of America is to further the eruption of the French Revolution. Thereby history receives its own special aims and becomes “a person rating with other persons” (to wit: “Self-Consciousness, Criticism, the Unique,” etc.), while what is designated with the words “destiny,” “goal,” “germ,” or “idea” of earlier history is nothing more than an abstraction formed from later history, from the active influence which earlier history exercises on later history.

History is thus a palimpsest (a manuscript rubbed out and rewritten), and the medium is the message (as McLuhan said). Personally I have noticed this as America being evil now (something I only recently noticed) reveals that America was always evil (to my shame). I can feel the palimpsest being scrubbed out and overwritten in my brain, though I still can't spell the word for the life of me. It's yet such a delightful and descriptive word that I can't refrain.

Describing historical materialism, Marx says, “It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.” But then, aren't we back where we started? Cometh the man, cometh the hour, only reversing the order. Greater (or lesser) men will always rise (or fall) to the occasion, their personalities providing a violent volatility around the general arc of history. History creates a certain probability for change, but only personality tells us what shape it will take.

Marx views history through production changes and class struggle. Thus feudal production systems produced barons, just as capitalist production produces robber barons. That is, a certain production system leads to the reproduction of certain morons, leading to high drama of princes and states, or CEOs and corporations. In both cases, once you gather enough grain or GDP to sustain an insane inbred population, they do insane inebriated things.

Practice

Pre-industrial European history was largely a bunch of inbred morons doing inane things, culminating Queen Victoria's grandchildren fighting over their toys (World War I) and smashing everything. There were very few, very incestuous, people making very stupid decisions and chaos ensued. Sound familiar?

Production based on land reproduced landed nobility. In the same way, production based on capital reproduces capitalists. Trump, for example, is a second generation capitalist. He inherited $40 million from his father and could have been just as rich passively investing it. Today, most billionaires are produced this way, through inheritance rather than entrepreneurship. This new class of inherited capitalist holds the same investments, goes to the same schools, wears the same watches, and rapes the same children. A production system of widespread machines has turned into a reproduction system of insular morons.

Today the 50 richest Americans hold nearly as much wealth as the bottom 50%. Just a few families control America, and they all know each other. Given that wealth is legally speech in America these people can buy both sides of the 2% spread that divides elections and continue the party, whatever the party. Duopoly is even better than monopoly because it gives you plausible deniability. As Julius Nyerere said, “The United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”

Just as bankers and the merchant class displaced European nobility, cash is king in America. American politicians are not public but private servants, they're answerable to the ‘donor class’, because America has legalized bribery. Western politicians are just hired hands, accountable to rich shareholders, not poor voters. Very few people behind the scenes actually run the White Empire, and they're hardly people. Marx called them “capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will.” This private jet-set is the new unlanded ignobility.

In this way material conditions lead us to the “high-sounding dramas of princes and states” all over again. The reproduction and concentration of capital leads to the reproduction and concentration of capitalists, becoming successively more moronic over degenerating generations. Thus we end up back in the age of mad kings doing mad tings, only under different production systems.

Thus the question is not really what Trump produces but what produces a Trump. What system would elevate such an “ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man” to power? What leads to “forgetting that there is any rule, or natural necessity whatever, of putting the Able Man there”? It is, in fact, an unable system that calls out for an unable man, to represent it. As Aimé Césaire said, “a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.”

Evil Is Stupid In The Long Run

Even more pointless than looking for intelligence in this stupidity is looking for morality, but let's do it, because I think evil and stupid are the same thing, just with a timing difference. If you look at any moral advice it is really just good advice, in the long run. Evil is stupid in the long run, especially if you consider the hereafter (though in the meantime it can be fun). If you cheat in business, you're less likely to be trusted, you make your own life harder. If you cheat on your wife, you have a more stressful life, you wreck your own home. Of course, people ‘get away’ with cheating all the time, but how far do they get, and how often do they fall? Doing evil is simply more risky in the long-run, AKA stupid, especially considering the hereafter, as you should.

In this way, colonialism was always stupid in the long run, a global minority trying to cheat and steal from the global majority was always going to go Global South at some point. There's simply more of us, and technology moves around. While they did get away with colonialism for centuries, that was just a blink of the historical eye, and that eye is opening. Climate collapse, Palestinian liberation, Chinese independence, these are all part of the same reckoning. When Trump responds to this with traditional western racism, it appears stupid, but remember that everything Trump is doing was once conventional wisdom.

As Ernest Renan from the no-good French said (via Césaire), “The regeneration of the inferior or degenerate races by the superior races is part of the providential order of things for humanity... Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor; govern them with justice, levying from them, in return for the blessing of such a government, an ample allowance for the conquering race, and they will be satisfied.” Trump is called a moron for trying to extort the Chinese today, but it was (and is) common continental sentiment to treat the this way.

Césaire introduced this Renan saying, “Who is speaking? I am ashamed to say it: it is the Western humanist, the “idealist” philosopher... “Hitler? Rosenberg? No, Renan.” White people blame racism on their ignorant poors, but this ideology was written by their elites long before. Modern racists are simply regurgitating the blood meal of past centuries. People say Trump can't do this, but no less than Immanuel Kant says that he should. Kant said, “the race of the whites contains all talents and motives in itself” (so tariff everybody else into oblivion).

Even though Trump's ghostwriter Tony Schwartz said, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life,” Trump nonetheless channels the id of imperialist thought unconsciously. As John Maynard Keynes said, “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” In this way, Trump is simply distilling the jist of western thought, which is that the west is the best and everybody else can eat shit. Trump's frenzy really expresses the whole of western philosophy, which claims the whole category of philosophy, and deports everything else to departments on the periphery.

But Trump comes too late to avert his fate. While fate might lead the willing (re: Seneca) it drags the unwilling, and Trump is dragging America to the fate it deserves more rapidly than intended. This is one of those moments when a Great Idiot takes the reins of a probable decline and yanks it downwards into a certainty. As Césaire said. “At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.” You can sense that America is eager to outlive its day, having voted for the man twice. And so they go out in the traditional American white man way, murder-suicide of the whole family.

Trump is the heir to an inheritance that's already been spent. He's the hair combed over a baldness that's already apparent. He's the last furious attempt to simply eat the palimpsest of history before it's overwritten by present rebellions. White Empire was always evil but only now does it appear stupid, as it's ending. Evil is just stupid in the long run and this is the long run. As Frank Sinatra sang, send in the clowns, don't bother, they're here.