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Feb. 4, 2025 - Davis Aurini
20:49
What, then, to the vanquished?

Some speculations on the nature of war throughout history. Is it social reproduction? And what about Project Paperclip?

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War as societal reproduction is a concept that I first heard explicitly from a YouTuber known as the Feral Historian.
It's a concept that I've brushed up against before.
Discussions of how, prior to Christianity's contact with Islam, we had no concept of holy war.
But the way he puts it so explicitly, war as societal procreation, reproduction.
The idea that the act of going to war itself is on a civilizational scale the act of reproduction.
Because whatever comes out the other side of the war is something new made up of both sides.
Now this got me thinking about the question, what happens to the defeated?
Particularly in light of Ken Wilbur's integral theory, which has been popularized by the YouTuber Homath.
And so I'd like to briefly sketch out integral theory in case you haven't been following either of those guys.
And the way integral theory works, it's conceptually built off of developmental psychology, and it's to what degree we think about thinking.
There's nine levels of it.
The first seven are all that concern us for this video.
And they are level one is base instinct.
It's being hungry, being cold, being angry, and acting in accordance with that sensation.
Level two is when you are aware that you have sensations.
And so you can plan in advance.
You can say, I'm going to be hungry later, so I better store up some food.
This would be the standard animal level of experience.
Level three is where you start to recognize that others also have instincts.
And so you can watch another being and study how it's moving to try and outmaneuver it.
This is the basic level of intelligent species.
So you can see a little bit of it with predator species.
It's the first time you start playing chess, or at least checkers.
Level four is where you start to thinking about society as a whole.
And so this is where you get the level of thinking that the traditionalist level of thinking.
The baker should bake bread and you should show up to work on time and a husband is supposed to do this, a wife is supposed to do that, etc.
What's your role?
How do you fulfill your role?
Level five is where you start thinking about which role is optimal.
You try and start maximizing things.
You start appreciating the roles that others play.
It's the striver level of thinking.
It's the empire building level of thinking.
Level six is where you start thinking about why other people think the way they do, and you realize that everybody comes to their personal viewpoint because of the way they were raised.
And so aren't we all just equal?
And level seven is where you start to think about all the progress you have made throughout your life going from one stage of awareness to the next and trying to integrate those into a healthy, ecologically happy collective.
It's where you recognize that, yeah, it's like all opinions are valid, but some clusters of opinions work really well together, and others act like invasive species.
Now, why am I talking about this and history and war?
Well, I've been thinking about what war meant at different points in history.
So let's go back to the Bronze Age.
Back in the Bronze Age, the majority of the population was maybe at level three or level four.
Right?
So level three, that's kind of your criminal mindset out for yourself, not thinking about the long term, not thinking about how you might change your opinions in the long term.
You know, you just see this girl and you're going to work to get that girl.
Without really thinking, is this the girl that I'm going to want in five years' time?
Or is this somebody else's girl?
Is it worth the fight?
Etc.
So Bronze Age, you probably had the Bronze Age city-states of Mesopotamia.
You probably had about half of the general population was at level three, just acting like animals, which is why you have such violent punishments, because that's the only thing these idiots can figure out.
Whereas the really mature members of society, the professionals, the upper middle class, these people would be thinking at level four.
They'd be thinking, I'm a butcher.
I'm going to take pride in my work.
I'm going to show up on time.
I'm going to follow the rules.
I'm going to do it right.
And I hate those people that don't do things right.
They deserve to be flayed in public.
But then, up at the top, up at the top, you have the priest-kings and priestesses who manifest the nature of the gods and goddesses themselves.
You have these people that are probably operating at level five.
They're thinking societally, strategically.
And so in the Mesopotamian Wars, what you get is you get two city-states.
One worships one god, the other worships another.
They'd go to war, and whoever won would take the statue of the other city's god and drag it back to theirs.
They now owned that god, and that god was lower in the hierarchy.
So whatever conceptually these gods meant.
And I dare say at the time, the leaders, very few of them at least, would have been aware that these gods we talk about, Mars, Venus, Saturn, Sol, Luna, Jupiter, they wouldn't have been aware of these as complex bundles, aggregores, of coherent behaviors.
Mars of war and competition, Venus, of love and seduction, Jupiter, pomp and ceremony, Saturn, riches, the harvest, and death.
They wouldn't have been aware of these as clusters of mimetics.
They were just names.
And these wars would sort out what it meant to be a human.
And so what do you do?
You are a level five thinker.
You're the sort of guy that wants to have a McMansion that's ruling over all these people, half of whom are thinking like criminals, the other half who are just really hardcore traditionalists and can't get any more complex than that.
What do you do when you conquer the next city over?
You enslave its population.
What else are you going to do with these people?
What else are you going to do with these sergeants that you have under you who are angry at them for worshiping the wrong god?
Well, all you can do is turn them into slaves, but in the process, their god gets ranked lower on the hierarchy, but it's now part of your hierarchy.
You're incorporating that god as a lower member of things.
Now let's go to the Iron Age.
By the time the Iron Age rolls around, you have the bulk of the people now operating at a level 4 stage.
The only people that aren't at level 4 are the slaves and the criminals.
Anybody with any sway knows that you're supposed to do what you're supposed to do.
Radical traditionalism is everywhere.
You pay your respects to the gods.
You start to have a substantial number of people up at level five, where they can see that if I'm smart about things, I can maximize profits on this.
And right at the very top, right at the very top, you've got one or two guys like Julius Caesar who understand that's all relative.
It's all relative to your point of view and where you come from.
So you get these legions marching out across Europe.
And everywhere they go, there's these strange barbarians speaking a guttural tongue and worshiping unknown gods.
Then Caesar comes along and says, these aren't unknown gods.
These are the same gods as ours.
We just need to explain to these people that Zeus and Jupiter and Tyr actually, but you know, Odin, whatever.
Same guy.
We're going to conquer you, and then you're going to become Romans.
We're not going to enslave you.
We're not going to destroy your culture.
We're going to incorporate your culture.
And so these people, these Caesars, are amazingly insightful.
It's like they can read their enemies' minds.
To your common soldier, or even your common officer, who's thinking strategically, but can't understand the enemy.
These level six thinkers are, it's like they're psychic.
And so rather than just raising Gaul and stealing their opelisks, they incorporate Gaul.
And Gaul becomes Roman.
and rome becomes gaulish for a counter-example counter-example This isn't just a pat little narrative, because there's exceptions.
Not every part of the world developed at the same rate.
And one of the really interesting phenomenons that happened was the Mongol horde.
The Mongolians of the time were mostly at level three.
They were largely in pastoralist, hunter-gatherer type tribes.
They didn't have advanced societies.
They didn't have complex city-states.
They were herders and marauders.
And then Genghis Khan comes to power, probably level five.
So you've got right here the same sort of thing going on in the old Mesopotamian city-states.
And so what do they do when they take over a city?
Do they incorporate its pantheon, its upper elite?
Do they incorporate them into the broader Mongolian civilization?
No.
They just murder everybody, rape everybody, and take all the gold.
They create a slave state, just like Mesopotamia, 2,000 years later.
And like Mesopotamia, it fails to outlast one generation.
And then we get to the modern era, where the majority of people are at level 4, 5, or 6.
So the level 4 are the good old-fashioned salt of the earth, simple, honest Christians, make up the bulk of society.
Then we've got a substantial number that are thinking strategically, that are thinking more, okay, how do I maximize crop yield?
How do I make sure my kids are doing as well as they can, etc.
We've got a huge and dangerous portion, which is operating at level 6 and thinks all cultures are equal.
And then at the top, the top players are operating at level 7.
How do we integrate all this stuff?
And so, to integrate, we have free porn to satisfy the people at the bottom.
We have an endless culture war where the red team and the blue team at level 4 can go and smash into each other and think they're doing something important.
We've got the ability to surf on top of that foam.
Be one of the level fives or sixes that's making insightful commentary about what's going on in the world.
And then at the very top, you've got the level sevens that can make all these different integrated games for people to play.
Whatever level you're at, there's an opinion politically that you can have about things.
But what about when it comes to war?
What about when it comes to war?
See, the reason that the Mesopotamians had to enslave everybody, it's partly because the rulers didn't have a greater vision.
The rulers knew they were smarter than everybody else.
They were the god-kings compared to these stupid peasants.
But they couldn't really get the peasant.
They just knew they were smarter than the peasant.
And so they were subject to what their sergeants, what their soldiers, these guys full of piss and vinegar, oh, they just want to murder all the men and enslave all the women.
Well, that's what's going to happen when that's all that you got.
Later on, empire building.
You exert your dominion over everybody and make everybody kiss the coin of Caesar.
But once they kiss that coin, all right, I guess they're Romans now, even if they do like painting their dicks blue.
Let's see, if you had just finished a war against a militarized Germany.
Oh wait a minute here.
Like most of those guys weren't Nazis.
In fact the Nazis weren't even Nazis.
Right?
There's a lot of weird stuff going on in 1930s Germany, let alone 1940s Germany.
A lot of weird stuff going on here in Canada too, as I seem to recall.
But we won the war.
So we gotta create this mythology.
We gotta take the real enemy and demonize the parts that were just spandrels and cover up the parts that we're now going to import into America.
So at the end of the Second World War, they took two dozen German leaders, put them on a mock trial for real war crimes that actually our side had been doing pretty much the same thing.
Maybe not as bad, but we'd been doing the same thing.
I mean, I only murdered three people.
Why am I in jail?
So they put them on trial, executed 24 German military officers, and then imported 1,600 of them under Project Paperclip because those German ideas were so fantastic we needed them over here.
So at our stage of social development, with level sevens at the top, the question is how do we integrate the enemy?
How do we, after defeating the enemy, bring them over into our civilization and put them in the highest rungs of power?
Well, all but at the very top.
Much like the Mesopotamian gods, they're going to be second string to our major god, but they're still going to be part of the godhead.
And so you get this really interesting thing that's happening in so many American movies, American comic books, etc.
You get this phenomenon where the villain is this caricature of the Nazis.
The Galactic Empire from Star Wars is the most example, the best example of that, where they're just over-the-top Nazis with all the terrible things about Nazis, Most of which are a little bit cartoonish and kind of ahistorical.
Whereas all the other things the Nazis did.
Let me put it like this.
It's bad enough that the Nazis did all these horrific experiments on the Jews, whom they hated.
That's pretty bad.
That's a bad thing to do.
But you know what's even worse?
Did the same damn experiments on their own people if they could label their people as inconvenient.
And so you see the Nazis on the silver screen and the Nazis are screaming about the Jews.
Meanwhile, the American government is experimenting on its own citizens.
So we defeated the Nazis and we became the Nazis.
And we throw up this phantasmagorical image of jack boots and swastikas as our shadow.
While at the same time, the worse atrocities of experimenting on our own citizens, of lying and manipulating our own citizens, we do that all over the place.
After the recent election, what was that about?
Wasn't that the war with the globalists?
This war that I was saying was going to start around 2018?
It's what, seven years later now?
That's about how long a world war lasts.
And I dare say that Trump was victorious over the globalists.
I wonder what he's going to do with all those very smart people working in Davos.
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