#+title: The End of Equality and The Technocratic Imperative #+author: Preston Pan #+date: [2025-01-01] #+subtitle: By {{{author}}}, 2025 #+description: A system built on illusions will always decay. #+html_head: #+html_head: #+html_head: #+html_head: #+html_head: #+html_head: #+html_head: #+html_head: #+language: en #+OPTIONS: broken-links:t * Introduction Our current economic and political system isn't totally failing right now, but it's pretty close. Everyone agrees that our current system isn't working as well as it once did. Our world leaders are not the best among us. We live in an era of great technological progress, while at the same time many of our institutions are /rotting/ -- where most of our progress is driven by corporate America and Chinese manufacturing. It is rotting so badly that /Donald Trump/ and /Elon Musk/ are taking over in a semi-coup. This phenomenon isn't just a failure of governance -- it is a failure of culture. For decades, we've been taught that culture moves in one, forward direction, towards progression. But this is a lie. In our worship of ideology, we fail to replace and examine our incompetent structures /before/ they fail, and institutional protections are eroded. The world is collapsing not because of economic cycles or partisanship, but because we built our institutions on a myth—equality as a moral good. This myth has led to governments that do not select for competence, and as a result, our systems are breaking down. We need to abandon equality-based governance and replace it with a technocratic, results-driven system that rewards competence above all else. It's exactly what we need, but keep in mind that Elon Musk is /not/ going to do this. He recognizes the problem that we all see, but he may not have the solution. We do not suffer from: - a left versus right problem. - a rich versus poor problem. We suffer from a competence versus incompetence problem. And we have failed to replace our institutions before they had a chance to fail on us. So what do our "best institutions" think of us -- and what should we think of /them/? * Inside Harvard Ivy League schools are some of the best of the best. They promote the best ideas and they /punish/ bad ones. They punish bad ideas because everyone in Harvard is /smart/. And these central intellectual powerhouses will power our future. But is this true? Enter the mainstream academic thought complex and one of its core values, which led to revolutions all over the globe: our focus on equality, and the communist movement which originated in academia (many famous American physicists were affiliated with CPUSA; the Russian Communist revolutions started on the back of an intellectual class in Russia; Chomsky, Deleuze and Guattari; Einstein was a socialist, the list goes on and on). Let's look at their track record, one of their most prized ideas, and /let's see how they play out in practice/. ** China Chinese communism received copious support from Chinese intellectuals. There were intellectuals in China protesting for a simpler writing system before Mao implemented the simplified writing system, for example. However, the movement quickly turned away from any semblance of intellectual input. The foremost major failure of Mao's regime during this period was the great leap forward. During this time, grain was planted densely because the idea was that grain wouldn't compete against others of the same kind. This reduced grain harvests, and my friend has a personal story about this. His grandmother witnessed a farmer telling a commune that they were stupid for planting grain so thickly, "you could lie down on it!", they said. They got their tongue cut off for spreading "false information" about the regime. *Millions starved.* Other policies included "communal furnaces", where people were told that they could make high quality metals communally without economies of scale. The truth is that in order to manufacture high quality steel instead of pig iron, you need industrial scale furnaces because "communal furnaces" /can't reach heat capacity/. Despite this obvious failure waiting to happen and the academics warning Mao of this possibility, the plan continued. The result? High quality metal, turned into pig iron. My grandmother starved and her entire village almost died of malnutrition. They starved because of bad farming policies, and a complete inability to automate or move up the abstraction hierarchy. Mao ordered sparrows to be killed because they were pests that ate crops. The result? *The locusts that sparrows preyed on grew enormously in population, and they ate all the produce. Everyone starved.* But it doesn't matter anyways, because communism is cool. Because an ideology that created generational trauma for two generations is /fashionable/. People who have never experienced direct or indirect influence from this communist regime still have the audacity to believe this set of failures was caused by the CIA. After China reverted its socialist policies, it became an economic powerhouse. The modern day CCP lifted almost a billion people out of poverty, which is the greatest quality of life improvement in human history. It is my opinion that the USA attempted to destabilize China during the Tienanmen Square protests, but this didn't fundamentally alter China's ability to become capitalistic. *In spite of possible CIA involvement in destabilizing China, China's new economic policy reflected unforeseen progress*. What changed in Deng's period? It turns out that /foreign investment/ and /private equity/ doesn't destabilize nations, and capitalism isn't always a CIA plot. But hey, maybe it's not real socialism. Maybe the idea is still good and that was just one /really bad/ implementation. ** Cambodia The Khmer Rouge was one of the deadliest regimes within its lifespan in human history. They smashed babies' heads in en masse, and they broke up families on the basis that people should value their /nation/ more than their families. Within three years, they orchestrated the deaths of /two million/, making it one of the deadliest three years in history, reducing the Cambodian population by 25%. Cities were emptied, and anyone that resisted the regime was executed. It was almost a /fifth/ of the Nazi regime's total death count, and ran for one /fourth/ of the time. After Pol Pot's death, none of the leaders were formally tried for their crimes. The leaders' remaining lives were spent comfortably in their home country, while American academics such as Chomsky, one of the most cited public intellectuals in linguistics, /denied the genocide occured/. The /Nazi/ regime was /de-nazified/ and all their collective fiction was turned into /pulp/. The Khmer Rouge regime's leaders were at large until they /died of natural causes/, and their Western defenders faced no consequences. But hey, maybe... that's just another unlucky instance? ** North Korea What started as a proxy war in Korea turned into one of the most brutal modern day regimes. Their propaganda today is a genuine preservation of cold-war era mentality. So let's look into their modern day regime, and maybe we can reconstruct what it was like living in all of these countries. Their prisons are torture camps, where prisoners catch mice and snakes to eat because they have /nothing/. Nobody can leave their country. North Korea's biggest money makers today are in fraud and in extortion. The people are desperately poor, and the bureaucratic class are living it large. And let's not forget that there's a natural experiment that played out in Korea. There's the other side of the DMZ, where, despite its problems, people have economic freedom and are happier, despite living in a /dystopian, cyberpunk/ state. Let's not forget that there's always the other side of the wall. Speaking of which... ** Russia, the Berlin Wall The first and foremost thing one can look at for quality of life is people voting with their feet. The Berlin wall wasn't built to prevent people from getting in; it was to prevent people from escaping. The West side and East side were split by this wall. On one side, consumers had all the choice in the world, enormous wealth for the middle class and even the poor. On the other side, almost /everyone/ was poor. ** Other Regimes It isn't just in Europe and in Asia that Communism has proven to be a failed system. It failed in many rogue militant regimes in Africa. It has failed in south America in Venezuela. Venezuela /should have/ been rich like the OPEC countries. Instead they nationalized their oil industry and now they are desperately poor. It failed in Laos. It failed in Vietnam. It has failed in almost every continent. One of these failures alone was almost as bad as the Nazi regime. When failures happen like this, we usually scrap the idea, not just the practical implementation. Most intellectuals think that it's only a bad idea in practice, without considering that it might just be based on /bad principles/. If communism isn't about centralization and brutal dictatorship, how come it plays out in the same predictable way, /every time/? ** Economic Calculation And we know that all these ideas are bad in practice, but what about in theory? We know, according to modern day neoclassical economics and public choice theory that Communism as an ideology is /broken/. The labor theory of value doesn't hold up inasmuch as it doesn't describe the /subjective/ value placed on goods by individuals, which is the basis of the original Marxist scientific socialism. We know that private individuals allocate capital more efficiently than governments do on average, and nobody denies this simple fact. Communism is built on a foundation of collective ownership, but also it is a rejection of the idea that hierarchies in capitalism are justified. The core tenet of the idea is that /equality/ in economy ownership is of utmost importance because of dirty capitalist exploitation. So we see the reason: academia is in a civil war with the capital owning class, and although they aren't communist anymore, they share the same principles (/"it's bad in practice but good in theory"/) -- what if the theory should be scrapped? And how are academics, who are the smartest people in the world, so /wrong/? What does it say about these people that the /smartest people/ in the world cling onto this failed theory? And what does it say that our entire urban society is built on a milquetoast version of these ideas, after the ideas outright didn't work? Communist arguments usually involve pointing out both the exploitation of the working class by the managerial class, and arguments based on universal access to public goods. When liberal democracies presuppose the universal access to goods, they are making the exact same arguments. The end result is similar. Instead of centrally planning the production of wheat, you are subsidizing wheat production in order to guarantee universal access. But this model has the same failure mode: it just happens in 100 years instead of 10. * The Stark Reality Harvard is just as deluded, and our public consciousness is just as deluded about these ideas as neo-nazis and white nationalists are to their previous regimes. But at least Nazism only /failed once/. That was enough for us to learn from our mistakes. What if the smartest people never learn from their mistakes? What if the ideology that equality is a universal good -- is actually wrong? Our society directly /forks/ the same ethical opinions of communists -- while discarding the /theory and application/ of communism in everyday life. But in my view, the /worst idea in history/ shouldn't be discarded solely on the practical and the theoretical basis. Imagine if we lived in a society where everyone thought that /Nazism/ was a good idea in theory, or that it had ethical ideals. Some attribute this imbalance to the fact that communism was about equality which is a lot less offensive than explicitly espousing a genocidal view. However, it's not true on first principles that we /should/ have a more positive view of equality and a less positive view of nationalism. Nazis sold their ideas to the nation by using slogans like "living space" and "restoring our strong nation". The truth is, *you can make any ideology sound good if you have a good enough salesman*, but we don't have to make communism sound good. We were just trained to. And too often, communism (or its ideas such as equality) don't sound morally repulsive in the first place because /people don't sell it that way/. So why do we sell communism as a noble cause gone wrong, when we sell Nazism as the worst idea in history -- something that isn't remotely true in comparison to Communism? In my view, academia, and by extension communism, may not have won the cold war, but it has won the culture war. It won the culture war because although we may not adopt their application or even Marxist theory, we adopt their ethical framing of equality as a moral good. We adopt their framing because we have uncritically looked to these institutions for guidance historically. We have given them unchecked cultural power. These people set trends -- and what's in fashion 20 years from now isn't decided in elections. It's decided in a Harvard thesis today. But this begs the question: if they're so wrong about communism, what else could they be so wrong about? If we can't trust them on the worst idea in history, why must we trust them on anything at all? Though, even in our society, we have a sector of unrivaled economic productivity, making products for people that allow them to live better lives. But this sector doesn't care about equality. It doesn't care about anything. Or in other terms, it does care about people -- as economic units. It cares not who you are, only /what you can do/. And yet, it treats its subjects better than empathy can treat its subjects. When /individual/ incentives are aligned with /collective good/, you can be an /angel/, and a ruthless /investor/. Here, international criminals thrive. International criminals create international cooperation. Here, governance is a part of the system, not adversarial -- we accept a couple of "lobbies" here and there, but let's just call it a public-private partnership instead! It isn't a utopia -- but it's /real/. * The New System Elon Musk and Donald Trump are capitalizing on the rot of the United States. What if, instead of propping up this fragile rot in the first place, we actually designed governance like a systems engineering problem? Democracy can be optimized -- but as a systems engineering professional, you know that optimizing something is no use if it can be /deleted/. Here, we don't value peoples' opinions equally -- we have a city-state model where /almost every city/ is a SEZ. We optimize everything in governance, following neoclassical economic principles and using public choice economics to tell us when we're micromanaging (when we would cause a government failure). There are no zoning laws, except in tourist attraction hubs, and the only taxes are land value taxes, as well as sin taxes and carbon taxes. All wealth redistribution is done with a negative income tax. Regulations that do not constantly justify themselves get /removed/. Courts /manufacture truth/, rather than adhering to preconceived notions of "fairness" (professional jurors? Betting markets? A system where voting on the jury means you put up money, so if you're wrong you have something to lose?). Our police are here to enforce /laws/. Remove all laws from the books that aren't enforced. Enforce every law on the books equally and with /zero tolerance/. Riots and violent social upsets are not tolerated here. Crime and gang violence is treated as domestic terrorism. Harming public infrastructure development and private capital is strictly forbidden. Climate activists blocking pipeline development would simply not be required -- our economists and climate researchers have already priced that in with a carbon tax. Sorry, but if you're going to keep blocking this pipeline, we're going to remove you. /Forcibly/. Freedom of speech doesn't give you a mandate to destroy taxpayer-funded infrastructure. In this new regime, the old regime's staff can be reused -- if they can prove their worth. They get rehired in central bank positions, and in governmental planning positions, but they get paid in call options of a standard basket of local companies, meaning they get performance pay. In this new regime, we replace ideas of democracy and equality (including democratic voting, in say, courts) with ideas that /work/. If a philosophy is truly shown to work, we optimize it to its logical conclusion. ** The Efficiency Doctrine The world isn’t held together by sentiment. It’s held together by incentives. Governments, corporations, and institutions can preach about fairness, justice, and equality all they want, but at the end of the day, none of these ideas survive unless they align with reality. And reality is governed by efficiency. Every major human rights movement that succeeded -- whether it was civil rights, women’s suffrage, or LGBTQ rights -- didn’t win because it was morally right in some abstract sense. It won because it became economically impossible to ignore. The same businesses that once refused service to black customers now fight for diversity. The same corporations that once wouldn’t hire women now push for gender parity. The same industries that once ignored LGBTQ rights now celebrate Pride Month with corporate sponsorships. Not because they cared, but because it made sense. You can moralize all you want about what’s right, but the world runs on what works. And when something works, you don’t need to force it. It wins on its own. Progressives spend so much time trying to manufacture empathy that they fail to ask whether their solutions are actually efficient. Do LGBTQ rights need to be forced onto businesses, or do they emerge naturally because an inclusive workforce is more productive? Does it make sense to give away land to Indigenous groups based on historical guilt, or does it make more sense to integrate them into the economy with productive incentives? A system that forces people to care is a system that doesn’t trust efficiency to do its job. If your worldview depends on mandating compassion, then maybe it was never that compassionate to begin with. The truth is, the most compassionate thing you can do in such a situation is to tell them the truth -- that you don't care about them at all. The great irony is that when efficiency is maximized, humanism emerges as a side effect. A prosperous, innovative society needs people who are educated, mentally stable, and free to explore their talents. It needs diversity -- not because of some ideological quota, but because different backgrounds provide different solutions. It needs to reduce discrimination -- not because of sentimental morality, but because a workforce that hires the best talent regardless of gender, race, or identity is simply better at producing results. If we get rid of the false god of “equality” and replace it with a system that selects for results, we don’t become less human. We become more human -- because caring for people is no longer a top-down directive. It becomes the inevitable consequence of doing things right. The best part? Most humans want to be compassionate anyways, when they're not constantly forced to. They'll give every excuse to themselves to be compassionate to you, if they like you, even if they're convinced they're doing it for self interest. At the end of the day, every efficient system is comprised of feeling human beings. And at the end of the day, what's the more compassionate system? The one that tells you it doesn't care about you when it does, or the one that tells you that it cares about you -- and then doesn't? ** The Road Forward A future built on competence won't come from Elon or Trump. It doesn't start with hostile takeovers of the current government. It first starts with a collective disillusionment with the current cultural narratives around equality by spreading awareness, paired with a /new/ belief -- the belief in a deep /Deng style/ practicality. And it starts from the ground level -- treating people as individuals instead of as ideological symbols in a cultural battleground, and a deep commitment towards enriching those around you. Activism in its modern form often replaces real solutions with performative change. Instead of walking into this progressive trap, we should aim to create a culture where our best business leaders, workers, and investors are recognized and rewarded for their contributions to greater economic and technological progress. * Conclusion of the Technocratic Manifesto The death of our modern day system is a result of /rot/ -- it is the result of a system that is predicated on the myth of equality. Elon Musk and Trump are profiteers, they are not builders. They profit more off of /gutting/ the current system than from accelerating the efficiency and progress of the private sector. What if we got rid of this myth of equality -- and started over again, without replacing the old, taking our understanding from our past failures -- and finally, as humanity, acknowledge the great losses and tragedy of these Communist regimes whose leaders /never/ faced consequences?