Expansionism is the Fundamental Threat to the West

A video going around on facebook shows Steve Bannon asserting that the clash between the West and Islam is going to be the 4th great crisis or "turning point" in American history. This is intended by liberals to show Bannon is irrational or a war monger or Islamophobic or whatever insults they can conjure up. Their reactions remind me of the description given by another blogger that SJWs don't read or listen for the point of accumulating information, but they merely scan for something to be enraged by. In this case the video went viral because it feels like some form of hate speech to them, although conceptually there's plenty there for rational adults to analyze.

The question in general is does Islam pose an existential threat to Western society? and if so, is it the greatest threat? I'm taking this a step further than Bannon, who invokes Judeo-Christian values or western society, but his examples pertain particularly to the US. The American revolution and civil war didn't pose some existential threat to the entirety of Western civilization.

I agree with Bannon that Islam is a threat to the West. Despite what liberals would have us believe Islam is not a race, and I would argue that it is not a religion. It is, but it is also a culture, and even more importantly, a political ideology, much being incompatible with the Western tradition. This is not to say of course that individual Muslims can't prosper in the West or contribute to it, but they cannot in large numbers without changing what the West fundamentally is. We could not replace the native population of America with Muslims and expect it to look, behave, or function anything like the West.

Islam is a threat in the way that pneumonia is a threat. Yes, if enough pneumonia gets into the body it will kill the host. But that doesn't typically happen. Pneumonia only gets an advantage when the body is weakened. So which is the true cause of death: the pathogen, or the underlying weakness? If someone battling AIDS finally succumbs to pneumonia, we generally say they died of AIDS.

I propose that the greatest threats to the West boil down to a single concept: expansionism, which I will describe in the following sections. Now I don't pretend this is the only threat to the West. There are others, greed, hysteria, a lack of rational discourse being high on the list. I suspect though we might be able to provide a context where those vices are downstream from the expansionism.

Territorial Expansionism

Anyone who has read history or played a good strategy game like Civilization or Risk knows that, even in games where expansion is the goal, over-expansion leaves one vulnerable to counter-attack. Let's explore some scenarios where over-expansion has led to problems for the West and ethnically European people.

Rome

In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies Joseph Tainter lays out the cycle of empirical expansion and collapse, with Rome serving as the canonical example. In those days the primary energy source was grain. A country's energy input was roughly equivalent to the grain they produced or purchased. However an expanding nation could plunder the accumulated wealth of the conquered. As long as plunder was inbound, the nation enjoyed an artificially high level of wealth / energy. The downside was that with each conquest they accumulated responsibility for administering the new lands and putting down insurrections. As the size of administered lands grew, and the plunder shrank, the balance sheets became untenable.

The Romans were not able to adapt to their new reality. In fact their policies tended to drive farmers off the land; in the late empire a surprising amount of arable land went to seed. Clearly the Romans did not grasp the long-term costs of expansion, nor how to maintain power without large inflows of wealth. Ultimately the Romans were put to the mercy of the invading Goths.

Nazi Germany

Probably the quintessential example of the perils of manic militant expansionism. Not content to dominate north central Europe, Hitler pushing his Wehrmacht halfway to Asia, choosing to fight nearly everyone at once, and ending in the total destruction of the German state. While we are reminded frequently of the Jewish dead, usually stated at 6 million although the real number may be under 3 million, what is rarely mentioned is the number of dead Germans. Roughly, four and a half million killed in the military. Another half million killed by bombing and other affects of war, and then another half million or so killed after the war, bringing the total to something like 6 million.

Even if you were a dyed-in-the-wool Aryan supremacist, the excessive expansionism was disastrous. If you were just a normal German caught up in the mess it was even more disastrous, or if you were one of the millions that lied in the path of Wehrmacht, or who died helping to fight it. The end result was grief for nearly everyone.

United States

The United States as we know it was born out of Manifest Destiny, or expansionism sanctioned by God. The 13 English colonies became 50 spread from one side of the continent to the other, with two halfway to Asia. Such an aggressive land grab might have made sense in the context of early America. Western European populations were surging as a result of the technological advances of the industrial revolution. There was also limited competition for the land. The stone-age native inhabitants were scant in number, with estimates at just over a million over the whole land that would become the United States (and just 20 million spread over the 2 continents of America). There was little competition from the advanced powers as well, with the French and Spanish being checked and ultimately ejected from the western hemisphere.

From 1607, the founding of Jamestown, to 1965, a span of 358 years, the population surged from a million or so Indians to almost 200 million total, with about 90% European, yielding an average growth rate of a little over half a million a year. By modern standards 200 million people over an area the size of the US was still a fairly low-density country, but at this point the expansion policy seemed to be successful with good long-term prospects. [Note, for the analysis I'm using white population as something of a proxy for western society. We're talking about large-scale ethnic and cultural trends here. I understand that trends don't apply to every individual, and yet current attitudes make these sorts of disclaimers a necessity when discussing demographics.]

Around 1965 two events greatly altered the demographic trajectory of the US.

1. Slowed growth rate. Over the course of the 1960s the birth rate dropped by over a third.
2. Non-white immigration. Until 1965 immigration primarily came from Europe. However in that year the Democrat-run Congress passed a law the shifted immigration priorities towards non-white and non-western sources.

The effects have been immense; it doesn't seem most Americans truly understand the demographic swing undergone in a generation or two. In 1965 the population was nearly 200 million souls and 90% were white. In 2010 the white population was a bit under 200 million. That's very small growth, just a few million in about 50 years, a far drop from half a million a year. 

However the overall population soared to 310 million officially, with the real number probably closer to 330 million. In the same era that white population grow maybe 5 or 6 percent, non-white growth was [...does math, takes 130 million divided by 20 million.....] 650%, with an expansion rate of over 2 million per year. Since 1965 the growth rate of non-whites has been 100 times that of whites!! In 50 years the founding race's population percentage has dropped nearly a third. I would challenge you to find any example of such a demographic scenario in all history that was not caused by armed invasion, natural disaster, or the willful emigration of the founding tribe to a more desirable locale. This seems to be historically unprecedented.

Now the normal rebuttal you'll hear to all this is that none of these demographics matter because America was founded on an idea. [Well really that assumes you're opponent is rational. The more likely rebuttal I hear from liberals is I'm just upset because I'm white with insinuations that white people aren't allowed to have certain opinions. But remember, they aren't racist, right?] But is America really founded on an idea or is that more like American mythology? Certainly the founding fathers themselves didn't think America was an idea where all concerns for demographics could be brushed aside as petty xenophobia. Benjamin Franklin questioned the practicality of permitting even Germans from settling in Pennsylvania, as they would tend to isolate into their own cultural bubbles. And in fact he was correct, with many such enclaves persisting until our wars with Germany made such cultural affiliations a social liability.

The question isn't so much deciding what is right or wrong, but what will happen regardless of our beliefs. It might be morally superior to allow entry too all those who wish to partake in our welfare state (it's not, but let's just go with that). Regardless of opinion, the result is likely to be both a degradation of the cultural values that made America great to begin with and, more concretely, the fracturing of the country along ethnic and cultural boundaries. It's already happening. The four states with white population percentage less than 50% are California, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Texas. What do those states have in common? Not a lot, but they all have active secessionist movements. They aren't the only such movements, as they are also seen in Alaska, Cascadia, and New Hampshire/Vermont, but there is an undeniable correlation between the demographic situation and separatist desires. 

If you investigate the separatist movements, you'll find mostly the countering arguments are economic. You'll find much less allusions to the American "idea" as cause to stay united. New Mexico's movement stays small because ultimately they receive more from the federal government than they receive. And this should be generally true, on average, since the federal government is running enormous deficits. They're able to spend more than they're collecting from the states' citizens. But that can't last forever. What happens when the economy tanks and the government piggy bank is emptied out?

Whether you support multiculturalism or not, there is simply no precedent for a stable multi-cultural society. Even the Old Testament warned against such ventures. I predict that as multiculturalism progresses in the country we will see increasing segmentation in the country, leading to outright schisms once the economy falters.

Israel

Even tiny Israel pays the price for expansionism. In 1971 the Arabs offered peace to Israel, in exchange for ceding back the lands it had gained in the 1967 war, particularly the Sinai lands it annexed from Egypt. Israel chose to hold out for more, and since that time has engaged in widescale expansion of Israel settlements into the West Bank and the Golan Heights. The cost has been intense hostility with the Arab world and almost universal condemnation of Israel from the UN. Even the US abandoned Israel, a parting f-you from the outgoing Obama administration. Because of their expansionist desires, the long-term tenability of the world's only Jewish state remain uncertain.

Economic Expansion

Nations these days tend not to compete militarily as much as economically. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War because it could not keep up economically. Much as military expansion drove the empires of yore, economic expansion drives the US hegemony today. But even in the economic realm expansion is prone to the same side effects and risk of collapse. The American empire is a realm of aggressive global capitalism and mercantilism. The fiercest wars are waged for access to markets, to resources, to cheap labor, and ultimately to higher profits.

But these venture come at a cost to the nation. The free flow of capital to outside investment means less investment domestically. The free flow of capital drives the free flow of people, and the drive to undercut wages causes the mass import of foreigners and the instability that comes with a multi-ethnic state.

The destructive forces of unrestrained capitalism were laid out two centuries ago by Marx and Engels. While the prescription (communism) was bunk, the diagnosis was illuminating. Liberals today tend to blame all social ills on capitalism. Conservatives in turn blame it all on the liberal agenda. The reactionary should be careful to understand that unrestrained capitalism and liberalism are both wrought with destructive potential, and we should take the time to tease out which societal ills are being caused the two orthodoxies and their associated expansionist tendencies.

State Expansion

While the state is just one portion of the nation, it too is subject to the same tendency to over-expand and collapse. A massive and monolithic governing apparatus is stifling to a country for reasons too numerous to get into here without reciting half of the conservative doctine. But let's look at an example that allows us to witness some concrete aspects of state expansionism.

Europe does not suffer from territorial over-expansion. Her empires have long since collapsed. However the state sector has expanded enormously, so that the bulk of western European countries are welfare states. And not just welfare states, but they are something of a Ponzi scheme, where the state requires a forever growing productive population base to fund the social liabilities. This need provides the major rationale for letting immigrants pour in: the social programs need warm bodies. So they permit a massive demographics shift with all the risks I mentioned earlier. The great irony in this is that the immigrants are generally not very productive and cause an even greater strain on the very social programs they are fighting desperately to maintain.

Adversarial Expansion

Most readily apparent as a threat to a civilization is the expansion of a competing neighbor. Even a perfectly balanced society is at risk of being overrun. Let's look at a couple threats that the US has faced on the global scale.

Communism

People today don't have the perspective to realize just what a threat global communism was following World War II. The Soviet Union was a collosus and had the intention of imposing global communism. It had gobbled up Eastern Europe and posed an immediate threat to western Europe. Communism also took hold in China, and Korea was only saved (halfway) through direct US intervention. Similarly Southeast Asia became an orgy of communist and anti-communist bloodshed. Latin American countries were also falling to communist yearnings, many averted only through covert and typically brutal intervention by the US military and CIA.

Even more alarming was the level to which the US was infiltrated by communists, considered to be the most heavily infiltrated modern government ever. I highly recommend everyone to take the 3.5 hours (don't need to all at once) to watch Stefan Molyneux's breakdown of the communist threat that drove Joseph McCarthy to make his infamous purges of communists from the government and media.

While history always seems like a foregone conclusion, just imagine where we'd be if communism had completed it's sweep of Europe and Asia. Clearly communism did at one point pose a very direct threat to the Western way of life.

Islam

Islam is inherently expansionist. Upon it's introduction in backwards Arabia it's adherents sprung immediately into prominence, quickly occupying great swathes of the Middle East, north Africa, and southern Europe, and the growth and spread of Islam has continued to this day. In fact Islam is projected to become the world's largest religion by 2070, despite Christianity having a 800-year headstart and being spread by the great colonial powers (including Rome itself).

Islam is designed for expansion. Of interest to western nations should be the concept of Taqqiya, which allows Muslims to downplay and even outright deny their religion if there is social pressure to do so. However as the percentage of Islam grows so do their religious demands on the society, as has been outlined by Peter Hammond.

Note this graphic is out of date as France is at 10% now, and faces frequent riots and restlessness. The official numbers put Sweden and Germany at 5%, but those were from before the great Merkel open-door's policy. No doubt they are close to 10%, and the Netherlands as well. They fool themselves into believing the Muslim immigrants will happily adopt to the superior Western ideals. They would do well to open a history book. The expansion of Islam will either have to be repelled, or those countries will turn increasingly Islamic, eroding the western tradition. What do people really think will happen once Muslims have 51% of the electorate in a western democracy?

Conclusion

Here I have shown 3 ways in which a nation's own over-expansion can lead it to ruin: territorial, economic, and political. Over-expansion implies many things. Lack of patience. Lack of planning. Lack of sobriety. Lack of proportion. Lack of humility. Generally a lack of balance and a lack of virtue. When pondering some social ill, ask yourself in what domain could expansionism have been the cause. To do so immediately drives one to consider the big picture of the issue within the context of the continuous power cycles that occur between and within nations.

Energy Regression: the Looming Apocalypse

At the end of my post on Energy-Backed Currency I mentioned that I viewed energy regression to be the fundamental existential threat to western civilization. It is worth spending time on that subject, as it is key to understanding the second problem that EBC solves. The first problem is in having a currency backed by a valuable asset that grows linearly with the economy. The second problem is in re-orienting society so that it is inherently focused on the energy situation at all times.

I regard energy regression to be the fundamental existential threat to our world. Even more than nuclear holocaust, and that is always a real danger. Even more than civil discord, and I do believe we're on a path to a clash of civilizations within the west like has never been seen. Even more than climate change or economic stagnation or disease epidemics. Because all those problems, whether they occur or not, whether they are easily solved or not, don't change the fact that energy regression is something we will face, no matter what. There is no avoiding it. It is a constant looming threat to every civilization.

Energy regression has happened repeatedly through world history. Until modern times, energy input was in food, and to some extent firewood. Societies collapsed because they deforested their environment. Societies collapsed because crops failed for a multitude of reasons: disease, drought, flood, climate change, soil exhaustion, poor management. Many of the most successful empires in history were fueled by plundering the stored reserves of those they conquered. Once they ran out of new resources to steal, they tended to collapse under their own weight.

I think most Americans, or many at least, have an overly casual relationship with energy. They view it as just another aspect of modern life, right there with having running water and paved roads and classic rock stations on the local radio. We see this taken to an extreme lately with really the entire mainstream left protesting about oil pipelines, as if they were some unnecessary evil. They are depicted as ticking times bombs that might at any time destroy the environment and livelihoods of poor and oppressed people, with the only benefit being to enrich greedy oil corporations. These people then go fill up their gas tanks without a second thought about it. Such an outlook can only be had by someone who has never lived in society without abundant and cheap energy supplies. (And yes that is basically all of us).

This is the viewpoint that having abundant energy is just the natural state of affairs in the world. Oil is greedy, why can't society just use friendlier energy like wind and solar? An abundance of energy is simply assumed. The fact that our entire civilization depends on its energy supplies is easy to lose track of. The fact that most civilizations have collapsed for that reason is not something widely understood. And the fact that we don't really have anything to replace high-density fossil fuels is often ignored.

You have to wonder where we would be if there was no such thing as fossil fuels. If coal and oil and gas weren't, by extreme luck, available to us in great quantities. Would our economy just be fueled by some other source, like solar or nuclear power instead? No, if we never had fossil fuels, it is questionable if we would have ever advanced beyond horse-drawn transportation. No modern agriculture means no modern society, means limited technological development. I harbor the somewhat spiritual notion that fossil fuels were a gift granted to us, just enough to get us boosted to the next technological level. We should use them, but use them wisely. We are not using them wisely now, and a troubling number of people are advocating that we don't use them at all.

Here is the scariest thought exercise I know of, from a civilizational viewpoint. Imagine society suffers some catastrophic setback. Economies fail, war breaks out, maybe nuclear. The power grid stops operating. Imagine a vast calamity. That's bad enough in itself, of course, but not as scary as what comes next. You're one of the survivors. The economy includes subsistence farming and scavenging from the old infrastructure. You and your tribe decide the only thing to do is to begin rebuilding society back to where it was. You know that you have to remodernize agriculture. What do you need? Machinery. You need equipment, but even more you need to fuel it.

The problem is in acquiring oil. The first time we discovered oil it was quite simple. In places like Pennsylvania it was so accessible it could sometimes be found right at the surface. (Which is why we see oil brands such as Pennzoil and Quaker State). As we used the oil to power society we were able to develop increasingly sophisticated techniques to get the less accessible oil. Now we're fracking and running deep-sea oil rigs. There is no way a primitive society can get to that oil. And there's no way a primitive society can build solar panels or nuclear plants. If society fails now, it fails forever. The next big energy regression might well be permanent.

Do you have a Collapse Insurance Policy?

Note: this one is a bit gloom-and-doom, with a survivalist bent

Alan Greenspan has raised the alarm about impending economic doom, and has even called for a return to the gold standard. Now your first thought might be, "didn't that guy kinda prove himself to be chronically wrong when forecasting the economy?" And you'd be right, because he did. Hailed as a genius, if you could go back in time through his tenure as Fed Chairman, closely follow his predictions, and then assume they were 100% wrong, you could make a killing. If ever there was a person who should be jailed for acting smarter than he is, it is Alan Greenspan.

On the other hand, for someone in his position to raise such claims merits attention. It's like if the former CEO of McDonald's said we should all stop eating out, but with more desperation. And really, who has a better feel for our economy crashing than the man with the most experience at wrecking it himself?

So I'm going to move forward with his warning, because it highlights my own predictions on the matter (tie goes to the confirmation bias). I hope to influence the reader to understand the dynamics at play here, and solidify their own circumstances, as well as to put myself on the record in the matter (people never believe that you successfully predicted something unless you can prove it).

I believe, like Greenspan, that economic and political calamity is inevitable, and I don't think most people are ready for such an event, physically or psychologically. Prompting Greenspan's comments were questions about Brexit's expected effect on the economy. The prognosis doesn't seem to be good. On the face of it, Brexit should not greatly change the global economic situation. I don't believe London will enact policies vastly different than those imposed on it by Brussels (although there will be some improvements). But what Brexit does is, it starts the run on the bank. No one wants to be the last loser in Europe holding the EU debt, and housing all the unproductive migrants. Brexit is not the problem, any more than the nervous depositor removing his investment is the problem. The problem with a run on the bank is that the bank was insolvent to begin with.

On our side, we know the US is not solvent. We know the $20 trillion national debt will never be paid. We know the demographics and entitlements schedules are a ticking time bomb. We know the government is only growing, while productivity is decreasing. We know that medical care is becoming unfeasible in its cost and that college and student loans are a big bubble waiting to burst.

It is easy to be lulled into complacency. We look around and everything is fine. Everyone is still going to work. Everyone is driving nice cars. Everything is okay. I would really urge people to consider that it is not okay. That the critiques of our situation aren't some academic wrangling, but an impending crash that we cannot avoid, and will probably be worse the longer it takes to arrive.

Let's think of of the whole thing as a matter of resources. Our society is flush with resources. There is a lot of money, a lot of food, a lot of oil. Humans have never had so much. Not only does our society have a lot of resources, but if operates on the assumption that there will always be more. We put our retirement into stocks knowing they will grow with the economy. We get mortgages for our homes knowing their values and our own incomes can only increase. When we invest, we are not taking ownership of something tangible, like industrial capital. To some extent we are, but what we are really doing is betting on the future economy. If I have $1000, I can purchase resources, say food, or perhaps a plot of land to grow food, or I can do what most people do (if they even have any extra money) and invest it. That $1000 I give to the stock market yields me no resources, but I have the promise that I will one day convert that investment into more resources than I could have originally extracted.

So what we know as wealth does not equate to resources. For most people, their wealth is not substantiated by resources, but by the promise of future resources. And as long as there is reason to believe there will always be more resources, always economic growth, then everything is fine. But what if economic growth doesn't happen? What happens just if people believe that economic growth will not happen? When that time arrives, people will do the logical thing. They will take their investments (their bets on economic growth), and they will convert them back to tangible resources. As investments are cashed out, the remaining investments lose their value, as result of demand economics, and even more people will be prompted to remove their investments. This is a classic run on the bank type of scenario. If most of your wealth is tied up in financial products looking for the greatest return, you are at risk of this type of scenario. When it happens, if you end up on your ass, you will have only yourself to blame.

We no longer live in magical growth land. The chance of a run on investments is real, and if you are not insured against calamity, you are just as at risk as the guy who lives next to a river with no flood insurance. You are simply irresponsible at this point if you don't take out a 3-step economic crisis insurance plan, as follows.

1. You should have tangible resources available to you. I can't tell you what to have available (gold, guns, and food is standard among the collapse minded), so you need to ask yourself one question: if all my investments disappeared overnight, could I survive with what I have on hand? If you aren't sure the answer is yes, you have work to do.
2. If a run on investments occurs, you need to recognize it, and convert your investments to resources before none are left. Just by reading this post, you have a much greater ability to beat the pack than most people. But most people will get nothing at all.
3. You must know how you'll generate and defend resources. This is about education and psychological preparation as much as anything. Many people will lose their minds if they lose their wealth. They will become entirely paralyzed when faced with true physical hardship, let alone risk to survival. Don't be one of them. If you've have time to accept that bad times are possible, even inevitable, you will be so much further ahead than those suddenly having their little bubbles popped.

There are two extreme types of reactions to collapse. On the one hand you have the crazed survivalist, who is ready to head to the woods at a moment's notice, whose whole life is centered on the coming collapse. On the other hand, you have the delusional city-dwelling investor who aggressively maximizes returns and doesn't understand the risks of doing so. Be in the middle. Think of it as taking out an insurance policy. Yes, it will cost you some, but you reduce your risk exposure to the coming and inevitable collapse. Cheers.