The Devourer of Nations
Gorge Upon my Lineage, O Liberalism
Nick Land blessed humanity with the concept of the IQ Shredder.
For those unfamiliar, the argument goes that cities function like magnets for motivated, capable people who in pre-modern times would likely have lived and died more or less where they were born. However, in the modern day these talented individuals cluster in cities as they seek career advancement, networking opportunities, and higher salaries. A natural incentive for a society’s elite thinkers.
However, Land notes that not only does this deprive more rural areas of the intelligent people who would have in pre-modern times bestowed the fruits of their higher intellectual capacity upon their local areas, but by virtue of the fact that people living in higher density cities have considerably fewer children than their rural counterparts, Land notes that the concentration of high-IQ individuals in such conditions will, over time, eliminate this intelligence from the gene pool, depriving everyone of their gifts.
In other words, Land accepts that intelligence is a highly heritable trait, and if the people with those high-IQ genetics go on to have fewer and fewer children by virtue of the conditions they are incentivized to live in, then the net consequence of the modern city is that the best and brightest of a society will be gradually constrained in their ability to produce progeny to pass on that highly heritable intelligence.
Thus cities become a kind of long term destructive force for intelligence. Hence, cities are the IQ Shredder.
But in the modern world it is not merely cities that drive down the reproductive rate. Rather, sub-replacement level fertility would appear to be endemic across the entire Western Liberal world. It is actually a problem even in developed, illiberal nations, but the Liberal Democracies of the West universally suffer from this issue at catastrophically low replacement rates. Replacement rates that the beancounters behind the Systems that uphold our modernity think can be resolved with a steady influx of foreign blood to make up the shortfall left behind by the declining host populations.
But is any of this sane? Is this not merely an escalation of the IQ Shredder? The Nation Shredder. A Systemic Organism that engages in predatory behavior as it devours the future of all who would come to embody it. A demon offering a Faustian Bargain. “Come and enjoy decadent abundance. The price of admission? Your lineage.”
A Tale of Two Koreas
Which Korea is “Best Korea?”
Internet edgelords aside, we know that the true answer to this question is meant to be South Korea. Who would want to live in the North? One of, if not the single most brutal totalitarian dictatorships on the planet today. Contrast that with the South and its modern amenities, Liberal Democracy, economy, freedom, etc. and the choice is obvious. South Korea is definitely a much more pleasant place to live. There’s a reason very few defectors seem to flow South to North compared to North to South. For you personally as an individual, South Korea seems to be the clear winner in virtually every metric.
But is South Korea actually “Best Korea?”
Because while North Korea has some issues with its birth rate, currently sitting at below-replacement levels of 1.78 births per woman, South Korea has the dubious honor of having the lowest birth rate of any nation on Earth at a measly 0.72. An AI generated projection of the actual implications of this, barring any kind of radical intervention, is displayed below. This sees the people of South Korea diminished substantially over the next century.
For reference, despite also having a negative birth rate and starting with a population about half the size of South Korea, North Korea will overtake South Korea’s population within the century if absolutely nothing changes.
And in these numbers there is a seemingly paradoxical truth. While South Korea is no doubt the more comfortable of the two states to live in, there is a strong case to be made that actually, North Korea is, in fact, “Best Korea.”
For the path that South Korea is presently heading down is one of extinction. Something about life under the South Korean system is so hostile to the actual humans who live under it that they more than anywhere else on Earth fail to reproduce. They fail to secure their own future. The South Koreans are being consumed by the very system they live under.
In this regard, the North Korean regime, for all its brutality and oppression, is actually doing a better job of safeguarding the continuity of the Korean people than the seemingly more pleasant regime to the South. Assuming no change in these trajectories, to the extent that Koreans exist at all in the next century, it will be increasingly because the North Korean state, and not the South Korean state, secured a future for the Korean people. To the extent there is a “Korean Way,” it will increasingly be defined by the norms of the North Koreans because the South Koreans will not be able to pass on their norms having simply ceased to even be.
Feed Me Immigrants, Seymour
But of course, the Liberal Democracies of the West, which all suffer from varying degrees of the same problem facing South Korea, are not content to simply accept population decline and all the issues that might arise from it. In the infinite wisdom of post-WW2 Liberal Universalism, it matters not whether we actually secure the continuity of our nations (for the nation itself is so passé), but rather all that matters is whether we can sustain “our way of life.” In other words, the emphasis is removed from securing the continuity of the people in whose name and interests the state ostensibly exists, and instead the emphasis is placed upon securing the continuity of the Systems themselves.
I have written previously about how the Systemic Organism has already replaced us as the dominant life form on Earth, and how on its current trajectory it is poised to meaningfully separate from us entirely, achieving true autonomy. However, the point I made there is emphasized very clearly here.
Even though a state is a human system created to solve collective decision making problems for a specific nation, who represent the very genesis of the state system in question, as the Systemic Organism becomes the dominant entity that our society is structured around, increasingly the bureaucratic administrators of the state have come to view not the state as a System to act in the interests of a people, but rather views people as resources to be consumed by the state System.
Under this perspective it is easy to see how the bureaucrat falls into the line of thinking that if declining populations are a problem, it can be remedied by simply importing people from abroad to make up the shortfall. There is no concern for the well-being or continuity of the people in whose interests the System nominally functions. That life under this system is demonstrably unsustainable does not signal a need to reform the system and the way of life it produces. Rather, the preservation of the system, despite its naked unsustainability, becomes the raison d’être of the bureaucrat. And so long as the unsustainable System can be fed more fuel from the outside, well, what’s the problem?
And so it goes that the signal which should tell us that there is something profoundly wrong with the way we are living is ignored in favor of simply feeding the System more people. If the people it produces internally are insufficient, you just redefine membership to the nation to be someone who feeds the system, disregard that the nation in whose interests the state was created are literally evaporating out of existence under the System, and import more people so that the System can be sustained.
But this poses an interesting dilemma for the would-be immigrants. For we know that within a few generations the birth rate of newcomers drops to non-replacement level as well. It is not simply the people who created the System that are dying off. Rather, for anyone who comes to live under this System, life under the System becomes crushing such that the newcomers too find themselves incapable of reproducing at the replication rate.
The implication of this is that anyone of any background who comes to live under this System will, like the original host population that birthed this unsustainable lifestyle, have their lineage slowly wither and die. To voluntarily immigrate to this system thus represents a kind of Faustian Bargain. One will receive all the spoils of development and modernity for a luxurious life so comfortable it would be the envy of history’s royalty, but at the cost of the extinction of one’s lineage. There is no future under the Liberal Democratic system, or perhaps merely the comforts of Modernity. Not for the host population, not for the immigrants, not for anyone. The demographic destiny of everyone who subjects themselves to these Systems and their associated lifestyles trends towards annihilation.
If the modern city is the IQ Shredder, then the modern Liberal Democracy is the Nation Devourer.
The Devourer of Nations
It is always the correct approach to understand a System teleologically. A system is what a system does, no matter what it says it does. And what the Systems of modernity appear to do is render life itself unsustainable. I do not believe I can point to any one specific aspect of life under these Systems that makes this so. It is likely a combination of many different factors all enabled by modern technologies and managerial techniques that have enlarged the sophistication of our modern systems to their current devastating levels. Feminism, or at least elements of it, are likely major contributors. But the end consequence is the same. In every developed Liberal Democracy, the people trend towards self-annihilation, just at varying speeds.
I’ve described the Systemic Organism is previous texts as having the characteristics of a Pagan God or a Demon. But it would appear to me that the modern state is perhaps the worst demon of all. It is brought into reality by the host population for whom it swiftly creates the conditions that bring about terminal population decline. In other words, it consumes the energy afforded to it by the host population until that population is exhausted, at which point the System seeks not to revitalize the host population by reforming itself, but simply replaces the host population with new peoples, who themselves will be devoured within a few generations.
The end result is a System that is categorically incapable of producing sufficient individuals to actually sustain itself. Instead, it must be fed a steady stream of newcomers to provide the necessary vitality to keep the System alive, only to deliver those newcomers the same extinction under the anti-human design of the System.
This is not even metaphorical but literal consumption. The System devours not merely people but entire nations of people. The South Korean System is devouring the Korean people such that without the deliberate destruction of the System as it exists today, the Koreans will have to look to North Korea like a kind of twisted Noah’s Ark, as it alone will actually safeguard their people into the future. Similarly the primary story of the West today is the story of mass migration and all the problems it brings about, which are tolerated by the state administrators despite the protests of the people because the administrators act in the interest of the continuity of the System, and the System needs new blood to devour.
How can we understand this System then as anything other than evil? No one save the System itself has a future under it on a sufficiently long time scale. Left unabated those who exist under the system have naught to look forward to except the slow diminishment of their lineage as their lineage dwindles generation after generation after generation until finally the last childless person of their line dies off, representing the final breakdown and digestion of entire legacies within the body of the System. The System consumes the entire future of whole nations to sustain its own life another day.
A System that cannot produce an above replacement rate birthrate should thus be understood for what it is. It is a Demon demanding your firstborn. For what is the Demon demanding your firstborn actually demanding if not your future, your legacy? So too does the Devourer of Nations, which is any System under which replacement birthrates cannot be sustained.
It should therefore be understood that any System, no matter how much comfort it affords us, is actually an evil to be slain if it cannot sustain the people who created it. For if it does not achieve at least that, it is not only unfit for purpose but antithetical to it. For rather than being a steward of the people who created it (and who created it for precisely that purpose of stewardship), it becomes their doom. The perpetuator of conditions that will trend toward extinction, all for the selfish motive of sustaining itself at our expense.
Such a System is thus enemy in the truest sense. A threat, though born from us, explicitly lethal to us. Whatever exists within the System, no matter how nice it sounds, or well-intentioned it was, if it produces this unsustainability it is something to be eradicated and destroyed. For there is no alternative. Failure to identify the point of failure and eliminate it is to guarantee the extinction of nations. Even if that point of failure is a politically untouchable sacred cow.
The question then becomes, are we courageous enough to slay the sacred cows that ensure the Systems we live under do not serve us, but rather consume us?