The YouTube algorithm recently recommended me this blackpilled doomer bucks take by the YouTuber BritMonkey about how BRITAIN IS A DUMP!!!!!!!!!!!!! – it’s doomed, it’s so over, and all you can do is vote and enjoy the managed decline of a once-great nation based on the economic statistics, general mood, and priorities. Things such as putting a hundred chess boards in parks nationwide, or cops arresting kids for calling them lesbian and then being ordered to apologize are used to lampoon Monkey’s own home. These negative examples are just the appetizer for the big one – HS2 – Britain’s long-delayed high speed rail backbone, which BritMonkey uses late in the video as a bellwether. Scheduled to be delivered in 2045, he bemoans the endless delays that he lays at the feet of community consultations, endless reviews and worries for every kilometer of rail to be laid, all emblematic of an inability for the country to pull off necessary projects. BritMonkey lays the blame at the foot of a petty bureaucracy born of a gerontocracy that forms the voting base of the Tory party, which in turn defends their interests. I can’t do his claims justice, but for those of you without the time to watch an hour-and-a-half long video, let’s have a short example from an early section:
The United Kingdom today is a penny-pinching nanny state bound by a large corpus of old and contradictory compromise laws that do not allow the government to take a side in any debate. This has turned it into a nation of nothing – no businesses, no government services, and no future.
As an example, take housing and construction policy.
In the 1930’s and before, construction and industry in the United Kingdom was going gangbusters, since there was very little regulation or zoning, and everything was up to the individual property owners.
It was later decided by Labor that councils and local governments should have a say over what gets built, leading to the Town and Country Act of 1947, giving government the ability to oversee and grant itself planning permissions.
In 1980, the Thatcher government slashed the budget for public housing and expected the private sector to pick up the slack, which they would if they were allowed by local councils. Said councils can veto important policies based on popular sentiment.
This means that even if the private sector wanted to pick up the slack, local governments can drown the private companies in regulation to the point that a generally beneficial project becomes uneconomical.
The video follows this general narrative – the principle of subsidiarity has over time a parochial, disjointed, petty bureaucratic kingdom mentality among the citizens of the United Kingdom, making it an incredibly inflexible system that keeps life in the country in a managed decline. The older people that dominate these councils, he claims, seem to be making policy for the Britain that was, presiding over a managed decline by refusing to shell out and build anything new. You can practically hear him begging for someone strong to take charge, cut through the red tape, and just fix things.
While he really lays into the Conservatives because they’ve had control of the government for the last 14 years, BritMonkey believes that they have only been the most recent in the failed stewards of the nation. The rot is in the system itself, thanks to older people thinking of preserving what was rather than adapting to what is, and voting that way. Thanks to their voting patterns of shooting down infrastructure and blocking progress, Britain has lost its future, simply by refusing to seize it.
The YouTube algorithm decided to show me how much stock they put in the past, too.
Country Homes, Take me Road
Of course, having just taken a big bloody blackpill in the form of the Britain is a Dump video, I needed a good cheering up, which YouTube was happy to provide in the form of Country House Rescue (wiki). The show’s premise involves a savvy restaurant and hospitality entrepreneur host arriving and speaking to the heirs of troubled estates. The heirs, in over their head and crushed under the maintenance of their estate, are forced to confront their noble upbringing and bad habits in the face of a hard-nosed entrepreneur, their generational wealth often insulating them from the monetary concerns of us normal folk. By the end of the episode, however, most of them have worked through their issues and are on the path to a sustainable estate, whether through renting it out for events, starting a garden and café, or some other venture based on the grounds of their ancient manor.
Everything about this premise brings BritMonkey’s ideas into stark relief. Houses and estates, held by the same family for double-digit generations and with family ownership measured in centuries, are shown in a decrepit and indebted state. The roofs have fallen in, the ceilings are gone, the wood is rotted through, and there is nothing to be done. The generational wealth that collected centuries-old antiques for the family is often gone, leaving only the massive halls and buildings as echoes of former glory. It takes the hard-nosed businesspeople Ruth and Simon to point out the value of these ancient homes at the center of sprawling estates – sometimes thousands of acres overseen by mansions with tens of bedrooms, space for a veritable army of servants, and which would have been sustained by an entire town – all of which is gone now, leaving only 17th century buildings with 18th century furniture and a 19th century book collection. The businesspeople kick the heirs into high gear, providing them the connections needed to turn these places into flourishing events spaces, hotels, restaurants, spas – involving the local community in turning the old manor homes into attractions. Only through a merchant advisor, Herculean effort and an abandonment of an easy, cushy life of noble privilege were these estates brought back from the dead.
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This show aired from 2008 to 2012, but it feels surprisingly current. Is it because of old glories that need to get with the times? Heirs that don’t take up the mantle of their dear old relatives? The stifling and rules-bound culture of old nobility that filters out everyone that doesn’t belong? It could also just be that a mansion was a good idea when people and families were rooted to the land on which they lived, kept apart by scarce energy and expensive travel, both of which are relatively abundant today.
I would, however, like to advance my pet theory, using an example from the opposite end of society. The anonymous Internet hellhole known as 4chan.
Shopping Cart Theory (SCT)
This famous screen capture details the shopping cart theory – the idea that whether a person returns their shopping cart or not is a good litmus test for their ability to self-govern and function in society. The thesis is simple. Carts are collected by store employees, meaning that whether you return them or not, they will return to the store. If you return the cart, you do good even in insignificant things when nobody is watching, meaning you can be trusted to self-govern. If you do not return the cart, you let self-interest or laziness get in the way of what you know should be done, meaning you cannot be trusted to self-govern.
Shopping cart theory, despite these origins, is surprisingly popular and mainstream. It’s on Medium, it’s on LinkedIn, it’s on Reddit, it’s in studies. Most of all, it’s the driving force behind a 500k+ subscriber YouTube channel, Cart Narcs, which follows a man who reminds people to return their carts and films the result.
None of this, except maybe the study, makes the theory more valid. But one thing’s for sure, it’s evocative. Whatever you think about SCT’s worth as a theory, it’s made its mark in the collective psyche, and anything that can do that must have some truth to it – what that is, is up to you.
I think it’s all about personal responsibility.
Civilizational Abdication
I’ve been writing about this for a while without knowing it, really, so I will just quote myself a few times.
First, from Vampire Society:
Despite their seeming freedom of action, both the vampire and the ruthless go-getter are in chains – not chains of law or means, as the rest of us wear, but the primordial chains of power, whose first imperative is the cultivation and maintenance of belief in power. In order to do this, there are two subsidiary rules. First, power should be used minimally, in order to avoid inviting the question of whether it is believable. Second, once used, power should be deployed maximally, crushing opposition as completely and convincingly as possible.
Then, The Middle-System:
That reduction of variance naturally includes the reduction of the agency and judgment required to produce process variances. By standardizing the processes we use in real life, we are being trained to follow what we’re told to do, rather than equipped to learn and fail on our own. The Middle-System has taken over, telling us what, when, how, and why things need to be done, rather than allowing us to decide for ourselves.
You Own Nothing and Might Be Happy:
While in theory, you could diversify your work, you only have so many hours in a day, while assets let you use other people for you. When you deposit at the bank, you loan the money to the bank, and they work to earn the interest they pay you. When you lease out real estate, you trade the high time commitment of earning a salary for the lower time commitment of charging a portion of someone else’s.
Everything is time and money. If you’ve got no money, you have to put in the time. If you’ve got no time, you have to put in the money.
Global Paradox 1994 requires independent persons that make decisions based on local knowledge and context, adapting best practices and outside methods to local circumstances. In contrast, we see people deferring to what is called common knowledge or the “right” opinion, provided to us by experts. The modern emphasis on technical expertise, the rising cost of acquiring this expertise, and the ever-increasing demands of work, all come together to paralyze the individual, threatening the promises of Global Paradox 1994. To summarize, I propose an amendment, Global Paradox 2023, below:
The chaotic communication of today is so overwhelming to the mind that more individuals than ever before have neither the brainpower nor the organizing principles to understand them. Individuals react by simply repeating common knowledge provided to them by authorities and experts. This converts communication from the all-to-all network of GP1994 into a small proportion of genuine communicators signal-boosted by a vast majority of followers. Some would call this Mass Formation - an abdication by the individual of their agency and independent thought.
Put simply, Global Paradox 1994 was killed by Communication Overhead, on a global scale.
Clearly, I am somewhat obsessed with the idea of the ties of power and responsibility that bind us, how they have been weakened, and how they have been lost. So it will be no surprise when my theory of the declines seen is abdicated responsibility – we have given our agency away to rules, principles, and ideas, trading away our freedom to act for our security. In my own words from The Totalitarian Organizing Principle:
Their Organizing Principle is adherence to Organizing Principles. Academia, religion, “best practices”, technique, procedure – these are all their own Organizing Principles. There are only “best practices” and “rationalizations”. No change can occur without the constant updates of e-mails, memoranda, and meetings to establish communication and build consensus. Context, by contrast, is a conman’s game - a myth, a legend, a story told of to frighten young bureaucrats at night. One can think of the bureaucracy as the connective tissue and nervous system of the organization, and therefore, of the world as a whole. As I covered in Communication Overhead, large corporations, governments – any sufficiently large organization, really – will take on elements of a bureaucracy, if not become a bureaucracy in its entirety.
This abdication of responsibility to laws, procedures, and data by way of requiring data-driven conclusions, is at the heart of things. The world has become so complex that we must work with abstract rules rather than concrete realities, to the point that even this is too much responsibility for us and we want to give it away to artificial intelligence, begging for the Singularity to take this cup away from us – thy will be done.
Alright, self-shilling over. Point is, I think an abdication of personal responsibility in the name of an ever-growing human enterprise - the constant shrinking of individual shares in the part of the whole, is generally not a good thing. While it lets us build more comfortable lives, people are built for the fight and the struggle, and they just don’t have that anymore. You see this in increasing regulation and bureaucracy in the sphere of policy, increasing asset concentration in economics, and the downward trend in political activism and involvement. We can all see now just how small a part we play in things, and that knowledge paralyzes many.
Conclusion
You probably don’t agree with my reasons as presented, but I think the idea is clear. For some reason or another, we have been on a trend of falling responsibility to one another, unmooring us from the tapestry of humanity that kept us grounded. We are all lost and looking for somewhere to belong – whether that’s to a movement like wokism, a community like the local world, or a social stratum like the business community. The large number of empty spaces in town centers and shopping malls, viscerally represented by decaying mansions and shuttered stores, represents responsibilities not taken, causes not fought for, and ideas left to rot.
This abdication of responsibility naturally leads to powers ungoverned, and as they say, power hates a vacuum. The current geopolitical chaos, in my mind, is just everyone jockeying for the throne.
There’s only one thing for us to do, and that’s step up, before it all gets washed away.
Your part may be small, infinitesimally so, even, but it is yours. Do it with pride.
Howdy, "now we're cooking with gas." As the American saying goes.
Great piece. Thanks for thinking out loud.
ORION