The steppe origins of the continental component of the Japanese people and culture: The uniquely shared Mongolian and Japanese land-creation myth

In the last comments section, I detailed many ways in which Japan looks like a horse-riding culture from the eastern Eurasian steppe. I will compile and condense those ways in a later post, and add a few crucial new ones in standalone posts, beginning with this one. But in order to provide some big-picture historical structure to this view, I should contrast it with a highly popular and sometimes controversial theory of Japanese origins, within the Japanese scholarly community and Japanese pop culture itself.

That is the so-called "horse-rider theory" of the origins of the Yamato state and its culture, proposed by Namio Egami in 1948 and elaborated / refined / altered throughout the following decades. Here is the Japanese Wikipedia entry, which you can put into Google Translate's "websites" section, to get the fuller details.

Although it sounds similar to the story I was developing in the previous comments section, it's actually quite different. Egami argued for the arrival of eastern steppe horse-riders in the 4th to 5th centuries AD, as part of the broader migrations and conquests of horse-riding nomadic pastoralists from the eastern steppe during the Eurasian Dark Ages (Huns, Bulgars, Turks, Uyghurs, Mongols, etc.). In his view, this invasion of horse-riders radically changed the previous culture of the Yayoi period -- 1st millennium BC to 300 AD -- which reflected the arrival of rice farmers into the lands of mostly hunter / gatherer / fishermen (and adzuki bean harvesters) of the earlier Jomon period (back to 10,000 or so BC).

I'm arguing that the people who arrived during the Yayoi period, who brought rice agriculture and other things along with them, were an eastern steppe people. So I'm saying the steppe origins of the Japanese people and their culture goes much deeper than Egami's theory proposes.

But wait -- isn't the steppe famous for its nomadic pastoralists who ride horses? The continental Asians who arrived in the Japanese archipelago during the Yayoi period did not practice this subsistence mode -- they brought sedentary agriculture with them, mainly rice.

Well, cultures can change their subsistence mode over time, they aren't entirely defined by it. And that includes the very region of interest, the eastern steppe. The most famous example of a people from there who spoke a language in the Altaic family (in the Tungusic sub-family), who were not nomadic pastoralists but agriculturalists -- including rice -- were the Manchus, who founded and led the Qing Empire of China in the 17th C. Their ancestors, the Jurchens, led the Jin dynasty of China, which included northern China in addition to Manchuria, mainly during the 12th C. They were also agriculturalists, not nomadic pastoralists. And their ancestors, the Mohe, were also mainly agricultralists, not nomadic pastoralists. None of these groups were small hunter-gatherer communities from northeastern Siberia.

Once upon a time, there was no rice agriculture in Manchuria -- it was "invented" in the Yellow River region, by the people who became the Han majority ethnic group in China, who spoke a Sinitic language. Because the Mohe, Jurchens, and Manchus were not small-scale hunter-gatherers, presumably they *were* nomadic pastoralists at some point before they settled down and adopted agriculture -- what other subsistence mode is there in Manchuria? So, their subsistence mode changed, from pastoralism to sedentary agriculture, under the influence of China.

The Jurchens also based their writing system on the Chinese system, despite their language being from a totally unrelated family. In fact, they maintained their Tungusic linguistic identity through much of the Qing era, albeit becoming bilingual in Chinese as well as they integrated further into the society they led. By now, most of their young people are monolingual Chinese speakers who live in China. When the Qing Empire collapsed in the 1910s, the Manchus didn't leave back to Manchuria, and they didn't ditch the Chinese language. They are heavily Sinicized by now.

The same goes for their shamanistic religion, which was maintained at least among themselves during the Qing era (they did not try to impose it on the Han majority). As with other domains of their culture, they have largely left it behind and Sinicized by now.

I can't believe that the Mohe / Jurchens / Manchus were the only cultural lineage like this in that region. Although the steppe grasslands favor nomadic pastoralism and horse-riding, that niche can get crowded -- when everybody is doing it, it pays to do something different. Maybe you have to leave for greener pastures, as it were.

And during the 1st millennium BC, that niche was already starting to feel a little full, represented by the vast confederation of tribes united by the Xiongnu, who plagued the sedentary agriculturalists of China, serving as the meta-ethnic nemesis for the incipient Han ethnogenesis. As the Han united into an empire under the threat of the Xiongnu, they eventually turned the tables and broke up the nomadic confederation.

But that was only temporary, as the Xianbei confederation would emerge to fill the steppe empire vacuum left by the broken-up Xiongnu confederation, roughly 300 BC to 300 AD, as rivals to the agricultural and Chinese-speaking Han to their south.

My hunch is that the continental Asians who migrated into the Korean peninsula and from there the Japanese archipelago, during the 1st millennium BC and early centuries AD, were an earlier example of the Mohe / Jurchen / Manchu strategy. Maybe they felt the nomadic pastoralist niche was too saturated, with too much competition, so they decided to try their hand at rice farming instead. Or maybe their tribe was kicked out of one of those many steppe confederations, and sent into exile -- so they couldn't just stay in the region, they moved all the way over into the Korean peninsula and then the Japanese islands.

Whatever the reason was, it had to have been big, since they are the only large-scale migration from Asia into the Japanese islands. Northeastern Siberia, Manchuria, Mongolia, northern China, southern China, the Ural and Altai mountains, the steppe as a whole -- various peoples have come and gone, many times over, throughout human existence. But other than the small-scale migration of primitive hunter-gatherers into the Japanese islands during prehistoric times, the arrival of the Yayoi people are the only large-scale migration into Japan ever.

Even just migrating into the Korean peninsula was a huge move -- that peninsula has not seen wave after wave of migrations either. There were some Jomon-like people in the southern region, then the Yayoi-like people arrived, and after them, the Koreans. There's a small handful of Tungusic toponyms and loanwords in Korea, and some Nivkh as well -- but really the only large-scale migrations into Korea were the Yayoi and then the Koreans who assimilated them.

Especially for nomadic pastoralists from the steppe, accustomed to wide-ranging spaces and grass as far as the eye could see, moving into the cramped and rocky terrain of Korea and Japan would have been quite the downgrade. But if they decided to give up nomadic pastoralism and adapt to their newfound environments, maybe it wouldn't be so inhospitable and uncomfortable after all. They seem to have already decided to adopt rice agriculture before they entered Korea -- as long as they could find a patch of fertile soil for growing rice, that would be enough. It would not be as romantic as the wide-open grasslands where they originally came from, but that was apparently no longer a viable option -- they had some kind of powerful motive to leave the Asian mainland behind, since they were the only group to do so.

* * *

When they met the Jomon-like people, first in southern Korea and then like crazy in the Japanese islands, the Yayoi-like people were a steppe culture, but who practiced agriculture instead of horse-based pastoralism. They spoke a language from the Altaic group -- not a Japonic language, which did not exist yet, but something from Turkic, Mongolic, or Tungusic.

As they absorbed large numbers of L2 learners from the Jomon-like people, who spoke languages related to present-day Ainu, that acted as a filter that fundamentally altered the original Altaic language, since the Ainu-like language speakers could not pronounce its sounds, and the Altaic speakers could not pronounce some of the Ainu-like sounds, their word-forming processes were different, and so on.

The resulting compromise language for the newly fused cultures was Japonic -- that is why there are no Japonic toponyms in mainland Asia aside from the southern half of the Korean peninsula. It originated in southern Korea, and it was not dropped there by a linguistic stork, nor does it go back to time immemorial -- it attended the arrival of Yayoi-like people during the 1st millennium BC. But the reason it is not a straightforward example of an Altaic language is that Ainu-like languages are sufficiently different from Altaic languages, that the pidgin / creole / synthesis / lingua franca compromise was only half-recognizable as Altaic, and half-not-Altaic.

Likewise, when the Koreans later arrived and assimilated the earlier Yayoi people, and/or the remaining Jomon people, in the Korean peninsula, they inherited the same problem. They arrived in Korea speaking an Altaic language, but they had to absorb large numbers of speakers who spoke an Ainu-like language (unassimilated Jomon), or speakers of a new language that was itself heavily filtered by the traits of Ainu-like languages -- i.e., Japonic (Yayoi and assimilated Jomon).

That is why Japonic and Koreanic are partly included in the Altaic family and partly excluded. The core languages are Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. The only others that anyone entertains including are Japonic and Koreanic, but they are only somewhat entertained because they're sufficiently different -- due to the changes incurred by absorbing large numbers of Ainu-like speakers, who were present in southern Korea and Japan, but who were not present elsewhere on mainland Asia.

The same process must have affected the other domains of their culture. The Yayoi brought a largely steppe culture with them, but it was filtered through Ainu-like culture, and the resulting hybrid / synthesis / compromise / joint-collaboration for something new, was not a carbon-copy of Turkic, Mongolic, or Tungusic culture. Nor was it a carbon-copy of Ainu-like culture. There are elements from both sides, as well as entirely new elements created after the initial fusion of Yayoi and Jomon peoples.

* * *

And yet, there are telltale signs of the Yayoi's steppe origins, aside from their language. I detailed many in the previous comments section, and will list those briefly in a later post. For now, though, I'll return to the domain of mythology to uncover specifically Altaic-related cultural origins for the very earliest and most foundational forms of Japanese myths.

First, the Japanese creation myth -- hard to find a more important myth than that! Many creation myths around the world tell of the sky being separate from the watery chaos of the oceans. Both sky and water are so uniform, or rather formless, that they are more primordial than land -- land has particular shapes, arranged in particular configurations, with particular landscape features running over them, with particular plant and animal species thriving on them, and later on, particular peoples and cultures or even civilizations thriving on them.

Creating the vast expanse of sky? Bla bla bla. Creating the vast expanse of ocean? Yadda yadda yadda. Get to the good part -- how were the landmasses formed? That's where the story gets good.

Turns out, Japan has a very distinct creation myth. It is unlike the "earth diver" family of myths from Eurasia and the New World, where the creator god orders an animal (like a bird) to dive into the depths of the ocean, scoop up some earth from the very bottom, and return to the surface where it will be placed on top of the water, or on top of a large animal that floats on the water.

It is unlike the family of "giant body parts" myths, where a primordial giant's body is broken into pieces, and these form into landmasses.

Rather, the creator god, Izanagi (along with his sister-wife Izanami) dips a metal-headed spear into the primordial ocean, stirs and churns the water with it, and when he removes it from the ocean, the salty brine-y froth that drips off of the tip and lands back onto the ocean surface, becomes landmasses (specifically, those of the Japanese islands).

Although highly unique among the world's creation myths, it is not *totally* unique -- it is shared with a Mongolian creation myth, recorded by the Russian scholar / adventurer Potanin during his trek through Siberia in the 1870s, and published in his Essays on Northwest Mongolia in the early 1880s. His work was referenced in English in the 1927 mega-compendium, The Mythology of All Races, in the chapter on Finno-Ugric and Siberian myths by Holmberg, which I'm quoting from (p. 328).

In the beginning, when there was yet no earth, but water covered everything, a Lama came down from Heaven, and began to stir the water with an iron rod. By the influence of the wind and fire thus brought about, the water on the surface in the middle of the ocean thickened and coagulated into land.

The Lama element is obviously a later addition from their adoption of Tibetan Buddhism, but otherwise it is largely the same as the Japanese example. The creator god uses a tool (as opposed to his own body, an animal messenger, etc.) to stir the ocean, and the brine-y froth that results on the surface coagulates into solid land. No earth, mud, or other solid is retrieved from the depths of the ocean, no existing solid is re-cycled for solid land (like a giant's body parts). Stirring the ocean creates a brine-y froth, which hardens into landmasses.

A related myth from the times of creation, although not creating the landmasses themselves (p. 419, and still referencing Potanin).

The Altaic peoples speak of a time when there was no sun and no moon. They say that people, who then flew in the air, gave out light and warmed their surroundings themselves, so that they did not even miss the heat of the sun. But when one of them fell ill God sent a spirit to help these people. This spirit commenced by stirring the primeval ocean with a pole 10,000 fathoms long, when suddenly two goddesses flew into the sky. He also found two metal mirrors (toli), which he placed in the sky. Since then there has been light on the earth.

This is about the creation of the sun and moon in the sky, rather than landmasses on top of the ocean, and the agent is a spirit commanded by the creator god rather than the creator himself. And because the bodies formed are not lying on top of the ocean, there's no mention of the brine-y froth that results from stirring the ocean. And yet, the creation of the sun and moon somehow results from the stirring of the primordial ocean with a mythologically big pole.

This motif appears nowhere else in the mythologies of the world. It is found only in Mongolia -- and Glorious Nippon.

I haven't read the original Potanin work, so I'm not sure if the people he collected these stories from are Mongolic, Turkic, or Tungusic. Or, if they used to be Tungusic but then had switched their language to Mongolic by the time he met them. However, they're spoken about as Altaic, and in Mongolia, so they're from one of the core eastern steppe cultures that (at least by the 19th C) spoke an Altaic language. That's all that matters here -- that Japan's creation myth is very clearly genetically related to one from Mongolia.

Could one of the two sides "loaned" their creation myth to the other? No, that's ridiculous. You don't just toss out your traditional creation myth and "borrow" a new one, it's such a core part of your mythology. Only if one culture was such a huge influence on another.

But northwest Mongolia and Japan have not had any cultural contact throughout their histories. The Mongols tried to invade Japan, but their fleet was sunk by a divine wind (kamikaze). And the Japanese invaded Korea at various times, but never crossed over the mountains into Manchuria, Mongolia, and the rest of the steppe.

Plus, the Japanese myth is present in the earliest written works in Japanese -- the Nihon Shoki and the Kojiki, from the early 8th C. AD. There was no prolonged contact between them and various Altaic groups before then -- except for the Yayoi people's origins, before they entered Korea and Japan, which therefore must have been from the eastern steppe, and specifically from an Altaic-speaking culture. They descend from a common ancestor.

The Japanese love to emphasize their uniqueness, and this was no different for the 8th-century authors of the Nihon Shoki and Kojiki. If they wanted to imitate China so badly, they could have borrowed the Chinese creation myth. But they didn't. They may even have asked around -- "Psst psst, does anyone near us tell the same story of the creation of land? Anyone? Not the Mohe? Not the Nivkh? Not the Emishi? Not the Turks? Great, we get to emphasize our special uniqueness!"

Little did they know, there was a sub-region of Mongolia where they *did* tell the same unique creation myth, heheh. And thankfully, somebody uncovered this detail before a lot of that region began assimilating toward Chinese and Russian cultures.

As a final aside for this section, I note the difficulty with which these crucial facts reach present-day residents of the American Empire. Learning about Japan is easy, since we've been fascinated by them, and they have been fascinated by us, since the 19th C, and then occupied them outright after WWII. But much of the fieldwork on Siberian, steppe and far NE Asian / Arctic cultures was and still is done by Russians, who became America's geopolitical enemies during the Cold War and sadly through the present.

There was little taboo surrounding Russian scholarship or culture in 1927 (other than remnants of the first Red Scare), when that mega-compendium was published in English in America. But by the Cold War, reading Russian scholarship or being aware of their culture at all became taboo. There was only one further semi-cited reference to the Mongolian creation myth -- the 1979 popular book Primal Myths by Sproul. I haven't read it, so I'm not sure if she even cites Potanin, or just read it via the Holmberg chapter in the 1927 mega-compendium and included it in her survey of creation myths from around the world. In any case, that's the last published reference to it that still circulates on Wikipedia, Reddit, and so on, all of which are ignorant of the source material being Potanin from the 1880s.

The Holmberg chapter notes the striking similarity to the Japanese creation myth in the following sentence. Not like it's a hard comparison to make -- they're practically identical -- but it does require the knowledge of both cultures' creation myths. And these days, only the Japanese one is easy to come by -- the Mongolian one has faded into obscurity, since it was originally recorded by a Russian. In 1927, it was easy for an English-speaking scholar to come by the Russian source, since they were not taboo -- they were not Western, but there was no broad shadowban on their culture, including science and scholarship, at that point.

It was also not controversial to refer to Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic as "Altaic" back in 1927, or to liken Japanese and Korean to them (to a lesser degree). Much of that work was done by Russians, since they're the empire expanding into Siberia and the eastern steppe. Once Russia became rivals of America during the Cold War, suddenly the entire concept of "Altaic" cultures or languages was slandered in the American imperial sphere of influence.

Maybe Holmberg didn't think it was worth saying explicitly -- like, "Yeah, of course the Japanese creation myth is identical to the Mongolian one, where else do you think the Continental Asian part of the Japanese comes from -- Beringia? China? Malaysia? Their languages are not even remotely like Japanese. No, it comes from a fellow Altaic culture, where the Yayoi must have originated from." At any rate, it is worth saying so explicitly now, as cOnTrOvErSiAl as it may be in 21st-century America.

Rather than add further examples in the comments section as usual, I'm going to try going back to writing a series of standalone posts. The comments section this time will be for less important stuff, open thread, etc. I'd like these to be easier to find by search engines, and they can't see into the comments section.

Programming note: series on coziness in architecture, from the room scale to the city plan scale, with cross-cultural and cross-temporal studies

It's back to architecture for a little while, and the next series of posts will all be on the same overarching theme -- coziness. It will start from the small scale and work up progressively toward an entire city plan.

We'll be visited yet again by some of our favorite recurring characters here -- America and Japan exhibiting the cultural traits of the Dark Ages in Eurasia, re-examining the Dark Ages in Eurasia itself with a mind toward how they cycle with Humanist / Enlightenment cultures over the course of a 2000-year cycle, the place of architecture in American ethnogenesis (and how we invented so-called Modernism), specifically Frank Lloyd Wright pioneering just about every family of building style that makes us us (and most of it coming from ground zero of American ethnogenesis -- Chicago), the utter cluelessness of most architectural and other critics when they try to figure out American culture, and so on and so forth.

Along the way we'll explore an aspect of architecture that has received shockingly little critical attention, including in books that are devoted to formal spatial / geometric analysis. E.g., The Dynamics of Architectural Form by Rudolf Arnheim (1977), a formal critical book that I happen to have a handy copy of -- but I figure there's little discussion elsewhere, or else he would've included it in his citations and footnotes.

And that aspect is... CONCAVITY, as opposed to the far more common convexity. There is a very tiny amount about this aspect regarding interior spaces or individual elements like a column or vault, but we'll be taking a far larger view of the entire building and its grounds, and of entire neighborhood and city plans.

Everyone just assumes that when you talk about "shapes" of buildings, they have to have a convex perimeter -- where every vertex of an angle joining two walls, is pushed outward from inside the building. For example, a rectangle or pentagon or hexagon or octagon or in the limit a circle / ellipse.

We're going to see just how concave you can make a building's exterior -- where some of those corners between two walls have been pulled inward toward the center of the building. For example, a U shape, a "spokes stemming from a hub" shape, etc.

But we can't cover that topic until we start with a smaller scale, and examine how cozy Americans prefer their buildings to be, how Dark Age and defensive and fortress-like we like them, how we assume the central state is weak and nomads / bandits / feuding factions are unchecked, etc. Only then will it make sense why America pioneered concave building shapes, and how early we invented them.

And then the usual corollary -- that the Euros were at least a generation behind us (sometimes longer), copying us, and just slapping a different Bauhaus-y branding on top of our popular styles that almost always trace back to Frank Lloyd Wright.

It cannot be otherwise -- he was born in 1867 and was churning out pioneering works in the 1890s. Walter Gropius, the earliest Euro modernist, was born in 1883, and was not churning out his distinctive works until the 1920s -- a full generation delayed from the grandfather of American -- and therefore Modern -- architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright himself.

But we will give the Euros their due -- their Dark Age due, that is. And the Saharo-Arabians of the Dark Ages as well. I haven't looked too far into East Asian examples, other than to confirm that Japan is on a different timeline and is currently Dark Age like we are.

If you're sick and tired of cathedrals and chateaus, and want to see CASTLES for a change...

If you'll just puke seeing another grid layout for a city's streets, and want to see eccentric arterial meanderings and cul-de-sacs everywhere...

If you'd rather not set foot in the city to begin with, but retreat to pastoral hamlets...

We're going to see just how fucking awesome Eurasia used to be -- during the Dark Ages.

Mainly, though, the focus will be on American ethnogenesis, and the model is one of convergent evolution -- similar environments selecting for similar adaptations, not like we consciously revived the Dark Age castle complex in America. They just turned out similarly due to America having a weak central state, just like Eurasian societies did back then.

I'll put together the first post as soon as I can, but in the meantime, let this programming note cleanse your brain of whatever dIsCouRsE-sludge has been flung against it lately, and get it re-acquainted with some of the major recurring themes here, before we take off on the journey. ^_^

The truce in the battle of the sexes during peaks of social harmony, 1940s and 1990s, halfway between peaks of social chaos circa 1920, 1970, and 2020

A topic I've been exploring lately relates to the 50-year cycle that Peter Turchin uncovered in social chaos and civil breakdown in American history, with eruptions circa 1970, 1920, 1870, missing one in 1820, and 1770. On that basis he predicted another eruption circa 2020 -- boy, was he right on the money.

He does mention the opposite values of these chaotic eruptions -- low-points for civil breakdown, or in other words, peaks of social harmony. The Era of Good Feelings in the 1820s was halfway between the breakdowns of the 1770s and 1870s. The Gay Nineties were halfway between the breakdowns of the 1870s and circa 1920.

It's misleadingly called the WWII era, since it began well before the war did (certainly before America's involvement in it), but the '30s and first half of the '40s, even the late '20s, were another such period. Woody Allen dubbed the period Radio Days. Also the period in which A Christmas Story is set. Or the contempo setting of It's a Wonderful Life. Whatever we call it, it was halfway between the breakdowns of circa 1920 and 1970.

Well, we just went through another breakdown circa 2020, which leaves the halfway point between it and the previous one before that, 1970, circa 1995. And really, harmony had been on the upswing by the late '70s, lasting throughout the '80s, and peaking in the first half of the '90s.

Chaos, breakdown, disorder, riots, etc. -- far more attention-grabbing for historians. The phases of greater harmony, stability, order, and calm, tend to go unnoticed.

Because this cycle pertains to such a foundational aspect of society -- order vs. disorder -- it affects so many domains of societal life. Riots vs. calmness is an obvious one. I'm interested in surveying how broadly this cycle touches our lives.

A perennial topic of discourse is the battle of the sexes, which has reached a fever pitch in the last 5, 10, 15 years. I think we're past the worst part of it, but it's still raging.

And before focusing on the harmonious phase, it does help to start with the chaotic phase, since its symptoms are so much more intense and easy to discern.

During the most recent chaotic phase, circa the late '90s through the early 2020s, and exploding during the woketard 2010s, there are too many symptoms to list briefly. #MeToo, Slutwalk, toxic masculinity, incels, gay BFFs / fag hags, fujoshi fanfic (girl imagining herself as a male in a homoerotic male-male fantasy), redpill, Game / pickup artists, porn based on degradation or humiliation (for either sex), and on and on down the line. Guys and girls could not have inhabited more separate, and more mutually hostile social environments.

In terms of waves of feminism, this is associated with the Fourth Wave.

During the previous eruption of chaos in the late '60s and early '70s, there was the Second Wave of feminism. Mostly focused on abortion, but also women's liberation in general, free love, bra-burning, equal pay for equal work, divorce, and the birth of what's called radical feminism i.e. the bitter man-hating abolish all gender roles type. That included the SCUM Manifesto, i.e. the Society for Cutting Up Men, by the whackjob who shot Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas -- this was before feminazis sanctified gay men as their protective cockblocking eunuchs against the forces of toxic heterosexual masculinity.

During the previous eruption of chaos before that, was the breakdown of the late 1910s and early '20s. That coincided with the First Wave of feminism, specifically the Suffragette movement. Along with the chaotic social mood generally, this movement of feminism had been growing since the turn of the 20th century, it just hit its peak circa 1920 (when the US granted women the right to vote).

You may have noticed a skipped-over wave of feminism -- the Third Wave. That term applies to the '90s and the early 2000s, during a period of relative social calm rather than upheaval, as opposed to the other three waves coinciding with civil breakdowns.

Well, Third Wave feminism doesn't really exist, and feminists admit it -- its hallmark was its lack of cohesion politically, and lack of coherence conceptually. It's more of a placeholder term for "whatever feminists were up to in the '90s". And it's premised upon women of the '80s and '90s having won so many things during the previous two waves, so what was left for the '90s?

One of the major books of the Third Wave, Susan Faludi's Backlash ('91), is more about the past than the present -- the backlash against the Second Wave after the peak of social chaos had been reached, by the late '70s and throughout the '80s and into the early '90s.

The other major book, which *was* more about the present than a backlash against the previous wave, was The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (also '91). Like the Third Wave in general, its premise is how many material, legal, and other gains have already been won due to the First and Second Waves. Now with women seemingly having it all, they find themselves searching for that last little bit of perfection that cannot be allocated to them by laws or corporate policies -- beauty, namely cosmetic surgery, fashion victimhood, eating disorders, and the like. The idea was, let's try to liberate ourselves from that self-imposed / mass-mediated oppression, and focus more on our worth as people who are not paragons of beauty.

OK, if that's feminism, then there was a Third Wave of it in the '90s. But it's not a movement, not political, and not seeking to up-end society like the other three waves did. Crucially, it was not man-hating or man-blaming or seeking a redress of grievances from the offending male sex. All feminists are at least somewhat man-hating and man-blaming, but the Third Wavers were pretty tame and calm, relative to the radicals of the Second and Fourth waves on either side of them.

The most you could point to in the '90s was in its second half, after the peak of social harmony had been reached, and the pendulum began to swing once again toward chaos and breakdown -- but had only just begun to shift. These developments were the embryonic forms of Fourth Wave feminism that would rear their ugly heads for real during the woketard 2010s.

Things like The Vagina Monologues ('96) and the associated V-Day ('98) which warped Valentine's Day into a day of raising awareness about violence against women, and even the whole Girl Power phenomenon ("chicks before dicks", to counter "bros before hoes"), associated with the Spice Girls and their Millennial audience.

Also the rise of gay BFFs, gay eunuchs, fag hags, and fujoshi fanfic -- Will & Grace, Sex and the City, and by the early 2000s, the first gay kiss in primetime in an episode of Dawson's Creek (2000), and in the music video for "Beautiful" by Christina Aguilera (2002), and the bitter emo girl + messy gay BFF duo in Mean Girls (2004).

Suddenly, boys and girls were beginning to split apart, although this rift would not reach its yawning maximum until circa 2020. But it was quite a gear-shift or phase-change compared to the first half of the '90s, the '80s, and the late '70s.

So, one of the hallmarks of that harmonious phase was the relative absence of a feminist movement, especially of the man-hating and man-blaming and man-lobbying type that we usually require for something to be a true feminist movement.

The last time there was such a relative absence of feminism was the second half of the '20s (after women's suffrage was fait accompli, as well as discredited by their lobbying for the 18th Amendment to ban alcohol, which got repealed by the 21st Amendment in '33), all of the '30s, and at least the first half of the '40s.

You know the WWII era was barren of feminism when all they can point to, desperately, is the Rosie the Riveter ad campaign, or the fact that women joined the military as WACs and WAVES in their cute wool nurse's capes, to support the men in the war effort, in their typical female capacity. This was not man-hating, man-blaming, or man-lobbying for societal upheaval. So women could join the emergency war effort -- big deal, that's not radical at all, and tellingly it was not won by protests, violence, or other forms of coordinated confrontation against the power structure.

Much like the second half of the '90s, the second half of the '40s saw the very embryonic forms that would eventually become Second Wave feminism, like the 1949 publication of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, followed some time later in '63 by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.

I will go into greater detail on other cultural correlates of these harmonious phases, when the battle of the sexes ground to a halt. But for now, just to get the ball rolling, this brief overview of the timeline of various waves of feminism should give you the overall picture.

I promise those details will be more exciting and relatable than the history of feminism! But we have to start somewhere uncontroversial, like organized man-hating, man-blaming, and man-lobbying. And of course, the pair movement of womanizing, woman-hating, woman-blaming, and woman-hectoring. But the male version is not an organized or academic affair, so it doesn't leave as rich of a paper trail as the female version.

And in any case, females are the choosy sex in human beings, so generally speaking, what they say goes, regarding how close or distant the sexes will be with each other. The fine-detailed surveys will also focus more on how women change or cycle over time, although I will note how men change or cycle over time in the same ways.

Ancient aliens: America's divine intervention genesis myth about civilization and life itself

Having looked at the distinctly American genesis myth of our prehistory -- inhabiting the same land as dinosaurs and missing links, threatened by a volcanic rather than a diluvian apocalypse -- let's look at the other distinctly American genesis myth about our even deeper history. How did life itself ever come to be on Earth? It's actually the same myth regarding the birth of terrestrial civilizations, at a far later stage of our species' history -- being seeded by aliens!

In contrast to the creation myths of most cultures throughout the world and over time, ours does not dwell on the creation of the Earth itself, the stars, sky, oceans, and so on and so forth. You can believe in the Abrahamic universe-creation myth of the Old World, the Big Bang, or whatever else. Those inanimate things are taken for granted. What we really want to know is, how did life begin and get to where we human beings are today? And for us compared to other animals, how did civilized societies begin and get to where they are today?

The myth is not interested in evolution as much as the initial birth from apparent nothingness. Notice that the "cavemen and dinosaurs" myth doesn't say where primates came from -- they're just there, in media res of their drama. And the myth about the origins of life itself doesn't concern itself with any particular species that is present far later on, human or otherwise. Evolution is boring, while creation from nothing is interesting.

This is another stark contrast with the Old World creation myths, where human beings are created in their more-or-less current form (e.g., Adam and Eve). Sometime in the distant past, a creation of some kind occurred -- whether it was creating life where there was none before, or primates where there were only non-primate animals before, or hominids where there were only apes before, or human-like cavemen where there were only missing links before.

Somehow -- it doesn't matter how -- that initial creation led to us here today. We did evolve from earlier forms, but how that happened is irrelevant. How far back does the creation process go? And who if anyone was in charge of the initial creation?

Notice that this creation myth accommodates the 19th-century debates on the evolution of human beings. Not being an Old World culture, we never felt very threatened by the idea that homo sapiens evolved from earlier primate forms, rather than being created as we are now, back in the Garden of Eden, according to Abrahamic myth which took root in Europe during the Middle Ages via Christianization.

We have never had a national church, de jure or de facto (although during the mid-20th C., the United Methodist Church came the closest). Nor, therefore, any hierarchy of national church officials who could enculturate Americans in the Genesis creation myth. And no, contrary to clever-sillies, nothing is a "church" outside of Christianity. Academia is not a church, and the two most popular creation myths held by the general public -- Genesis for Christians, ancient aliens for non-Christians -- have taken deep root *in spite of* constant pressure by the hierarchical officials in the schooling sector to kill them off.

Nor is civic philosophy and dogma a "religion", let alone a "church". Church refers to a Christian institution, in contrast to mosques for Muslims, temples for Buddhists, etc. And all stripes of American civic philosophy and dogma are entirely silent about creation -- of the Earth, of life, of homo sapiens, etc. There's no primeval narrative of how things began, let alone one bringing supernatural or at least more-than-human actors and supervisors into the cast of characters.

And so, because we're not committed to where contemporary human beings came from, we can avoid the whole controversy arising from Darwin, who only says how things evolve once life-forms have existed, not whether or not there is a first created form of life and how that came into being. That controversy vexed all Old World religions, but not ours -- we're so new, we could just build in an agnostic stance regarding evolution at the beginning!

The Mormons -- America's global religion -- are also famously equivocating on evolution, with high officials officially saying don't ask, don't tell, it doesn't matter. What matters is the creation of life, the creation of god-like beings, the creation of civilizations in the New World, the appearance of Jesus in the New World, and so on and so forth. Don't worry about whether or how today's human beings descended from earlier primates.

Our creation myth also avoided the controversy about the Big Bang vs. static universe from the early 20th C., right as our myth was starting to take shape. Ours is not about cosmogenesis, unlike many other major religions and folk cultures, including Christianity. We could already sense that controversy as it was developing, so we built in an agnosticism about it from the outset. Only focus on the creation of life, humans, civilizations -- not the universe itself, stars, planets, and all that other inanimate and non-societal stuff.

* * *

The ancient aliens myth only began -- when else? -- during the 1890s, after our integrative civil war was wrapped up, and our ethnogenesis could get going for real, as in the lifespan of every empire. And where else could it have been born but out West? -- Flagstaff, Arizona, to be exact. Although hailing from a Boston Brahmin family, Percival Lowell used his wealth to build a world-class observatory in Arizona, where viewing conditions would be superior than back East -- but also because it would be more Romantically American to explore the next frontier of outer space, from our defining meta-ethnic frontier out West (against the Indians and later Mexicans).

Although later famous as the site that discovered the ninth planet Pluto, whose existence was predicted by Lowell, it was initially dedicated to the study of Mars -- specifically, what Lowell thought to be its canals. The overview of his vision of Mars can be skimmed in the Conclusion section of his book Mars (1895).

The canal structures suggested that not only was there water on Mars, there was life, it was intelligent, and it was advanced enough technologically, and organized in a socially complex way, as to complete irrigation projects.

If anything, he thought they were more advanced than anything on Earth -- inventing and using technology far beyond our own, and rising above petty partisan politics, to undertake such a planetwide project. He says that human beings are not even the highest of the mammals, putting us in our lower place relative to Martians. And he says Martians and their civilizations are far older than ours, Mars being an older and dying planet. These elements of the narrative are all necessary for the next step, where they intervene in Earthly matters.

He does explicitly state that life on Mars will likely have evolved into different forms from life on Earth, owing to the different environments they're adapting to. But that doesn't contradict a belief that they could have visited us in the past, seeded our civilizations, or even seeded life itself on Earth. It only requires them to have a somewhat different superficial form, and that we were not made entirely in their own image -- rather, at the abstract level of "life-form" or "intelligent life-form" or "civilizational being".

Although Lowell didn't go that far in his non-fiction work, a contemporary of his -- also a popularizing astronomer -- did in an early work of science-fiction, Garrett Serviss' novel Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898). Here, Martians are hostile to Earth, engaged in a War of the Worlds kind of battle with it. During one of their missions to capture slaves from Earth, 9000 years ago, they built the Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Egypt (the Sphinx being made in the image of their leader).

While the Earth-battling Martians hardly resemble the benevolent steward / supervisor gods of later versions of the myth, this is still the beginning of the myth of ancient aliens directly intervening in the course of events on Earth, seeding a major civilization.

And true to our Europe-obscuring identity, Serviss located the ancient alien intervention in Egypt, not even an Indo-European culture like the Greeks, Romans, Celts, etc. That would have been too much of a Euro-LARP, so if it has to be set in the Old World, it must be within the Saharo-Arabian sphere (Egypt, Israel, Mesopotamia, etc.). This was decades before the Egyptian craze of the 1920s -- it's simply the most obvious solution to "Old World civilizational ancestor of America that is not related to Europe". The only others would be from the Far East, and that's too much of a stretch of the imagination, compared to the Fertile Crescent.

If you're an American, and want to learn a dead language to study our civilizational ancestors in the Old World, you want to learn hieroglyphics, cuneiform, or maybe Biblical Hebrew / Aramaic -- not Greek and Latin (back-East Euro-LARP). I'm sure the Saharo-Arabians find this imagined heritage of ours comical -- "you Faranji people come from Europe!" But we are American, and Americans are fundamentally not European, so no, we do not come from Europe. Where else could we have derived from in the civilized Old World? -- China? C'mon, the Fertile Crescent is far more believable than China...

* * *

After the European empires, aside from Russia, bit the dust after WWI, and became occupied by America after WWII, the American myth of ancient aliens began to take root in Europe as well. This process reached maturity by the late '60s, when Erich von Daeniken wrote Chariots of the Gods? It was soon made into a feature-length documentary movie, whose English dub you can watch on YouTube here.

This is far and away the best audio-visual telling of the narrative, with amazing photography, ethnographic portraits, voiceover, and conveying the sublime nature of the archaeological record. It's superior to the more plodding, meandering, and less artistic renditions associated with Rod Serling from the same time period (In Search of Ancient Astronauts, In Search of Ancient Mysteries, and The Outer Space Connection, all available on YouTube as well, but you can stick to the last one, which incorporates the first two).

I think von Daeniken being Swiss was important, since he was not part of a collapsed empire, and was not subject to the hangover effect that had wiped out native cultural innovation in the collapsed Euro empires. Similar to Le Corbusier in architecture, who was a footnote to the American pioneer Frank Lloyd Wright of many decades earlier, yet still more original and influential than the Bauhaus people from Germany and Austria (like Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer).

You can tell how well the Europeans had incorporated the American framework by their avoidance of their own European ancestors. The focus is on ancient Egypt, Israel, Mesopotamia, and New World cultures like the Maya, Tiwanaku, Easter Islanders, and so on. Nothing about China, nothing about Greece or Rome. The book, but not the movie, does include Stonehenge among its examples. Indeed, in the movie there's only a single passing mention of any Indo-European culture -- purported descriptions of ancient astronauts in the Ramayana of the Indo-Aryans.

From the ancient aliens narrative, you'd hardly know that there were people and civilizations in Europe during ancient and Medieval times! But that's unsurprising given its American origin.

Some local adaptations did work in their own history, such as the British movie Quatermass and the Pit (1967), in which contemporary people discover a Martian spaceship in the London Underground from millions of years ago, along with skeletons of primate ancestors just as old, the preserved remains of the insectoid Martians, and the revelation of Martian intervention in the evolution of the hominid lineage on Earth. That could be totally American, but the story also uses this Martian spaceship's effects to explain historical accounts of the devil, spectral phenomena, and other witchy goings-on -- within England, during the Medieval and Early Modern periods.

* * *

How about further back, to the creation of life itself on Earth? This view, strangely titled "directed panspermia", goes back to an American and Soviet collaboration (as in many other areas of 20th-C. culture, the only two empires left standing coincided, both sharing outsider status vis-a-vis the Early Modern Euro empires that defined high culture up until then). Namely, the astronomers Carl Sagan and Iosif Shklovsky, whose 1966 book Intelligent Life in the Universe raised the possibility that extraterrestrial life-forms could have purposefully delivered life to Earth.

Where *those* life-forms are supposed to come from, who knows? And who cares? The genesis myth is only meant to account for the ancestry of us, the story-tellers, and perhaps our fellow animals. Just as we are not interested in cosmogenesis, we aren't interested in whether the alien race that seeded life on Earth was itself seeded by a third alien race, and if there was a prime mover alien race, and so on and so forth.

Likewise, American culture is not really concerned with the other direction of panspermia, whereby we would seed life on other planets. That is about our future, whereas this concept is really to account for our distant past.

For my money, the best telling of this myth is the 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Chase" (from the amazing season 6). It's not just a high-concept "what if?" story, but brings to life the excitement of high-stakes archaeological fieldwork, collecting clues, solving puzzles, and trying to stay one step ahead of your competitors in the race to the finish. This version is about the spread of humanoid life, not life in general, but that is to keep the focus on the ultimate subject of narrative interest -- us, not plants or viruses or whatever. If aliens could seed humanoid life, certainly they could send mold spores to other planets as well.

* * *

Redditards, Wiki-brains, and other midwits love to deride the ancient aliens creation myth -- creation of life itself, of humanoids, or of civilization -- as a "pseudoscientific hypothesis" or "conspiracy theory," terms that they never use for Adam & Eve, Noah / the Flood, the World Tree, Persephone and the harvesting cycle, and so on. By now, so many Americans believe, or are at least open to the possibility, of the ancient aliens story, that it cannot be a hypothesis -- common people don't know what a hypothesis is, how to test it, how to analyze results, weigh in on counter-arguments, etc. It's a story that you believe or don't, and science has nothing to do with it.

None of the most popular entries in the genre present the concepts in the manner of a scientific method, experiment, etc. On the surface level, they're trying to make sense of seemingly unbelievable phenomena, while on a deeper level they're trying to connect us with our distant ancestors through narrative, myth, and storytelling. And as such, there's little that "science" can do to push or pull anyone.

Very few people have "beliefs," let alone a system of beliefs. It's not about belief, in the sense of a theory. It's about whether the story gives meaning to that person, not individually, but as part of something larger than themselves -- to their distant ancestors, the chain of transmission up to the present, and the universe beyond our own world. It's more about emotional and social and cultural satisfaction, which nerdy arguments, "data", etc. cannot move one way or the other.

Exactly like Adam & Eve, Noah and the Flood, and other such myths from the Old World. It's just that, as with most clueless back-East academics and media-ites, they deny that America is a different culture from anything in the Old World. But just cuz we're a young civilization, doesn't mean we aren't distinctive, and these various origin myths -- Cavemen and Dinosaurs and Volcanos, Ancient Aliens, and the Book of Mormon -- are all a testament to that. They're as American as burgers and blocky buildings.

The rAtiOnAL SkEPtiCs who think they're smart or insightful for trying to deboonk origin stories involving aliens, are the same who labor fruitlessly to convince Americans that cavemen and dinosaurs never lived at the same time (somebody's never watched the Flintstones), that there was not a worldwide flood that destroyed all life except for Noah's Ark, etc.

The haters' arguments require no math, problem-solving, pattern recognition, specialized knowledge, breadth of knowledge, or anything like that. Any idiot can make them -- and plenty of total numbskulls and ignoramuses do.

What they are is autistic, not able to empathize with normal human beings, who have a deep need for the social / cultural / emotional satisfaction of belonging to something beyond their individual personal private self, across both time and space. Autists have a broken social lobe in their brain, and being incapable of empathy, they project their broken social lobe onto everyone else as well.

"Why would anyone want to feel connected to others across space and time? Nah, they must be making scientific-method claims subject to experimental testing..."

There's a heavy overlap between know-nothing rational skeptics and libertarians, both highly autistic and clueless. Libertarian morality is only about "avoiding harm and fraud", excluding matters of purity, sanctity, and taboo (Jonathan Haidt, The Moral Mind). So when they see a sacred narrative, they don't mind pissing all over it -- not as a vindication for their side of a debate, since there is no debate. They're cluelessly assuming the other side is involved in scientific claim-making, rather than cultural bonding through narrative and myth.

This is why no one regards them as smartypants or intellectuals, who happen to use their big brains for sacrilegious purposes -- they're just clueless midwits or dum-dums. It takes no IQ to piss on something sacred, it's entirely a matter of attitude.

And like typical self-centered semi-children, they pat themselves on the back for how clever they are, when it's only a matter of their attitude, not brainpower or knowledge, which are middling and spoonfed from some online midwit clearinghouse / group chat like Reddit, Wikipedia, etc.

Normal-brained Americans will keep alive the stories of "When dinosaurs towered over cavemen," "When Martians visited ancient Egypt," and the like.

The Tooth Fairy and American ethnogenesis

The first reference to the Tooth Fairy is from a Chicago area newspaper (from the Old Northwest, site of intense Indian wars across a meta-ethnic frontier), after the Civil War & Reconstruction period (1908).

There was no precedent for this practice in European or other world history. Superstitions relating to children's teeth are too vague -- the Tooth Fairy is specifically a diminutive fantastical creature that visits children when they're asleep, leaving a gift for the baby tooth that the child has already left under / near their pillow.

Grown Viking real-life men paying children, while the children are awake and away from their bed, to wear their baby teeth in a good luck necklace lacks all of these elements except the transactional exchange, so that is clearly not related.

The only correlate is a single short story for children by Spanish writer Luis Coloma, "Raton Perez", which has all the elements (only the fantastical small creature is a mouse, rather than a fairy). It was first published in a collection of stories in 1902 (Nuevas Lecturas), then in standalone form, with illustrations, in 1911.

Only the standalone version has a preface explaining the supposed origin as him being commissioned by the Queen to write a story to memorialize her royal son losing a baby tooth in 1894. Just-so embellishment later on, or true story? Either way, the story came out around the turn of the century.

Coloma's story also has far more narrative action, dialog, and a richer cast of characters than the simple Tooth Fairy folklore.

If we believe that ordinary Americans at the grassroots level somehow were influenced by Coloma's story, it had to have been almost instantaneous, across a major language barrier (few Spanish speakers in America, esp. the Midwest, at that time), and other cultural barriers (we were barely influenced by Spain).

Also, it would require that we not only altered the small detail of the creature being a rat or a fairy, but stripping out all the other richness of the narrative. Coloma's is a proper fairy tale, not just a simple folkloric practice. If American parents were in the mood of telling their children legends or tales, why wouldn't they keep the narrative, at least in part? There's no narrative to the Tooth Fairy, unlike Raton Perez.

So we did not get the Tooth Fairy from Spain. Another possibility is that Coloma independently came up with all the elements of the Tooth Fairy legend, at roughly the same time, and exerted his creative will to come up with this narrative because he was commissioned by the Queen, whose son was losing a tooth at the time.

The stark similarity and close timing rules out an independent origin. If he was commissioned, that would explain his greater narrative detail -- he wasn't just passing on an old wives' tale, but creating a work for his royal patron, deserving greater aesthetic detail.

Another possibility is they share a common ancestor. But there are no other children of this hypothetical ancestor -- only the American Tooth Fairy, and Raton Perez, both born circa 1900. Since Spain and America had been culturally closed off to each other at that point -- not sharing a greater sphere of cultural influence -- then the ancestor would have to go much further back, like Indo-European or something.

But then, it would have produced children in at least some of the other Indo-European cultures that still exist. And yet, no Tooth Fairy in any of them.

By 1900, the Spanish Empire had already been in the collapse stage of its lifespan for nearly a century, whereas the American Empire was ascendant -- both politically, as well as culturally.

As for the ease of acquiring the relevant information, it would be far easier for a single erudite scholar with royal patronage in Europe to learn about American folk customs, than for entire masses of ordinary Americans in the Midwest to learn of one specific recently published story embedded within a larger collection whose title does not indicate anything about it being children's stories, fairy tales, tooth fairy legends, etc.

Therefore, it's far more likely that -- through whatever links of transmission -- the arrow went from America to Spain, not the other way around.

And so, the Tooth Fairy is, like Santa, a uniquely American cultural creation, whose influence has spread around much of the world as the American Empire eclipsed all others, aside from Russia, over the course of the 20th C.

Age of Empires is over in Europe, until long-term mass invasion (no WWI, Huns, Tsar, etc., and no more renaissances)

After Russia has begun to reclaim the Ukrainian lands of its former territory, and with news that Germany may begin to re-arm itself, hot-take-havers on both sides have begun to fantasize about the return of the Age of Empires in Europe. Russia is going to fill out its former Tsarist / Soviet borders, Germany will become the neo-Prussians threatening all of Europe, perhaps coming to another clash over Eastern Europe, and so on and so forth.

This is all total fantasy, stemming from the media -- including social media -- being primarily based on emotional tribalistic reactions, emotional management (soothing a loss, or hyping up the team for a win), and other group activities divorced from factual analysis, historical knowledge, and the like.

What follows is a whole bunch of posts in one place. Should last awhile, but if anything else occurs to me, I'll add more posts in the comments section.

* * *

The blogosphere ecosystem was host to both forms of online discourse, but it turns out most of it -- both the suppliers and the demanders -- was proto-social-media. Once Twitter et al became viable platforms, 90% of the blogosphere creators and commenters abandoned their academic or analytical "brethren," and the results are plain to see. Utterly clueless fantasies spun by all sides, for the emotional management of their team within a broader societal battle. At worst, see-through propaganda; at best, info-tainment for LARP-ers.

The reason I keep driving home the model of ethnogenesis and imperiogenesis, as popularized by Peter Turchin in War and Peace and War, is that it helps clarify not only some piece of the past that was not already covered by the model, but the present situation as well. Without a proper long-term perspective, you are helpless to make sense of what's going on now and is likely to unfold in the near-to-medium future.

So, will the current situation in Ukraine lead to the formation of new expansionist states -- empires? Well, what causes a people to cohere so powerfully that they not only fend off invaders, but begin and sustain expansions of their own? It is finding themselves at the meta-ethnic frontier between themselves and a highly different Other, one that is an expanding state in its own right. If they are quickly taken over, due to lying close to the core of the expanding state, that doesn't allow them enough time to feel the effects of the frontier. They are rapidly made into subjects, and adapt accordingly. However, if they are pressed up against for a long time, that forces them to view themselves in strong Us vs. Them terms, and to have the time and resources to organize themselves accordingly, without becoming quickly dominated by the expanding Other.

When this external pressure eases up, the response from the newly cohesive society does not immediately go away. There is hysteresis, where the response lasts for a long time after the initial catalyst has gone away. The logic is that the catalyst could re-assert itself after a lull or temporary setback -- so, best to keep your response active, even if idling, until the catalyst has been absent for a very long time.

Still, at some point the initial reason for your large-scale cohesion and expansion has gone away for a long time, and the empire finds itself losing cohesion, unable to expand further, and then outright contracting and falling apart. This also shows long-term effects, where they cannot immediately form a new expanding empire even if some new group of invaders poses a new meta-ethnic frontier for them. Rather, they will simply be over-run by the new invaders during imperial decline.

This model contradicts the progressive view of history, where everything goes in a new direction with no possible cycles to unwind the progress. It also contradicts the spergy models of cycles, where responses are rapid and frictionless and not prone to long-term momentum, allowing for efficiency, optimization, and other sorts of Homo Economicus behavior. Nevertheless, that's how history works. It is not "irrational" or "sub-optimal" -- it simply is doing the best it can do, and if it produces bad side-effects or falls short of some utopian ideal, then so be it. Real life is marked by uncertainty and variance at large orders of magnitude, and that is why processes with hysteresis are adaptive -- they keep you the individual, or the society, from being caught off-guard by a temporary lull or fluke, and instead keep things going for a long while just to be certain.

* * *

What is the invading force that has thrown a long-term meta-ethnic frontier upon Western Europe any time recently? The answer is: none. The US empire helped to defeat one moribund empire in Europe -- Germany -- but the other moribund empires were on their way out the door as well. America simply swept up what was falling apart: the empires of Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Ottoman, and Spanish (and the unified Italy, which was still not an empire). The only empire to escape incorporation into the expanding American empire was Russia, which like the US was still expanding or about to reach its maximum extent during the mid-20th C.

If the Russian empire had been losing its territorial gains throughout the 19th C., as were the Spanish and Ottoman empires, or had already maxed out its gains and would begin losing them to, e.g., decolonization after WWI -- as was the case for the British, French, German, and Austrian empires -- then it, too, would have been in a wobbly state after WWII, and almost surely would have been folded up into the American empire as well. But Russian expansion didn't hit the wall until several decades later, beginning with their invasion of Afghanistan circa the 1980s, when their state was already starting to come apart, and would ultimately break down entirely during the '90s.

Luckily for the Russians, however, the American empire could not scoop up the collapsing Russian / Soviet empire, because America's expansion had already hit its own wall, beginning right after WWII. The Philippines -- won by defeating Spain in 1898 -- declared independence with zero pushback from America. Our invasion of northern Korea failed to place it under our control. Cuba (the other big prize from 1898) declared independence in the late '50s, and we have never recovered it despite massive pushback from Washington. Then there were the string of failed Asian land wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. All our Latin American proxies were defeated by nationalists by the late '80s and afterwards. Iran overthrew the American puppet and has never been under our sphere of influence since the '80s. Nor has Iraq, despite decades of pressure. Afghanistan was never under US control, and the Taliban recently kicked us out altogether. Ditto for our attempts to control Libya, Syria, Venezuela, and other former and future members of an Axis of Evil.

If we couldn't even scoop up a minor Central American country like Nicaragua, in our own backyard, what chance did we have of scooping up the former Russian empire, on the other side of the world?

Our failure to expand by force is not contradicted by the growth of NATO after WWII. After all, most of the core were added right away. The additions that would actually pose a threat to Russia -- in Eastern Europe -- were not added until 1999 and later. We did not conquer the new NATO members by force, as we had Germany during WWII. Both parties voluntarily agreed to an alliance, which is not territorial expansion by force. It's more accurate to call these new NATO members "tributary states" or something, not proper members of the American empire like Britain, France, and Germany.

And sure enough, America is not about to lift a finger to militarily defend Eastern Europe, nor will it allow its tributary states of the former Warsaw Pact use their own militaries to enter a war against Russia. Rather than being an all-powerful unified front, NATO has revealed itself to be weak, unwilling to counter Russian expansion, and barely held together. This is not a demand for it to magically will itself into an all-powerful status, just an objective assessment of its impotence, lack of cohesion, and absence of enthusiasm to fulfill its stated purpose. It could not have turned out any other way, since it is the vehicle in Europe of the American empire, which has been stagnant or outright declining as an empire since its peak during WWII.

Maybe if the Soviets had invaded and occupied England by surprise in 1950, we and NATO would have gone to war over it. But Russia invading Ukraine in 2022? No shot, bucko.

So much for the idea that America's NATO presence would present a meta-ethnic frontier in Europe, to force some of them into newly expanding states to counter America. Then there's the matter of the duration of time -- NATO has only been around for 70-odd years, and in Eastern Europe for scarcely 20. That's not enough time to produce imperiogenetic effects, and its duration is not going to last much longer anyway. With the failure to unite and counter Russia in 2022, it is de facto over as a threat to any nation in Europe, whether Eastern or Western.

* * *

That only leaves Russia as the potential source for causing imperiogenesis in other nations in Europe. But the Russian empire has been contracting since circa 1990, and is not anywhere near clawing back its losses in the Central Asian Turkic lands, let alone the former possessions of the Lithuanian empire (in its Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth incarnation), or of the Austrian empire (except for Lvov in Western Ukraine, as seems likely). Russia taking back Ukrainian land is merely recovering parts of Russia that broke off during imperial disintegration. It's no different than if Texas breaks off during American imperial decline, and some American strongman eventually recovers it for America, while failing to re-take more recent and far-flung possessions like South Korea and Japan after they eventually break off from our empire. See the previous post about Ukraine being integral to Russian ethnogenesis.

And no, contra some fantasies within the right-wing info-tainment sector, the large-scale influx of non-Europeans will not force any European nation to cohere more strongly, to repel them and begin expanding again. These immigrants are 99% slaves from nations conquered by Europe or America, and 1% brain-drain status-strivers, brought in by the will of the ruling Euro elites in both cases. Although they are highly different culturally, they are not unified amongst themselves, even remotely, as though they were a confederation of tribes choosing a single shared leader and advancing on targets in Europe.

In a few hundred years -- or maybe sooner -- they and their descendants will not be in Western Europe at all, just as the Eastern Mediterranean DNA signature in the Italian peninsula disappeared after Rome went through its Crisis of the Third Century, which ended it as an imperial power and attraction for slaves and status-strivers. Local elites will be even less unified than they are today, making the organization of a multi-national slave ring impossible. If you cannot organize your own local institutions effectively, you will be unable to organize more difficult enterprises, like multi-national ones. That means the end of Europeans conquering others through war, but also the end of Europeans importing slaves by the millions.

Slave importation is not a simple, unorganized "open the floodgates" operation -- it is a highly coordinated and networked enterprise, with multiple layers of administrative and bureaucratic structure. When the glue that holds these structures together starts to lose its strength, the institutions come undone, especially at the periphery of the empire where contraction begins, such as trafficking slaves from distant lands.

To take a more modern example, Constantinople had a massive non-Turkish population during the Ottoman era, especially drawing from Greeks and Armenians and Saharo-Arabian Muslims (and a smaller number of Bulgarians and Jews). These days, 100 years after the Ottoman empire collapsed, those groups are more or less absent compared to Turks. Istanbul has lost the attractive power of Constantinople under the Ottomans, as well as the administrative ability to incorporate a double-digit percentage of multi-national foreigners. (Only one longstanding non-Turkish group remains, the Kurds, and mostly in the rural east, far from the core of Istanbul.) That will not change, no matter how much anyone in Turkey may pine for the bygone days of their capital's ethnic heterogeneity. Cosmopolitan opulence, endless cheap labor, exotic sex slaves, and vibrant foreign cuisine -- crave it all you want, it's not coming back after your imperial heyday is over.

* * *

To wrap-up things up, let's take a clear-headed look at Europe on the eve of WWI, the period that is currently tickling the fantasies of the info-tainment sector. In case you guys forgot what you learned in high school history class (everything), remember the acronym "MANIA"? The causes leading to WWI -- Militarism, Alliances, Nationalism, Imperialism, Assassination.

The key one is imperialism, i.e. these were not mere countries or nations, but expanding empires, all pressing against each other, vying for the high-risk / high-reward game of war as an empire. If you're a little podunk nation of no consequence, you can't win that much in war, and you'll likely lose anyway. So why bother with a WWI-level war? Incursions, clan feuds, whatever. But not a continent-wide cataclysm like WWI.

The reason that war, and its aftershock of WWII, was so unique in European history is that Europe had never had so many expanding empires all jockeying for territory at the same time. There were no rival empires to the Romans when they were expanding in Europe (only to the east, like the Persians). Most of the Middle Ages saw only one empire in the West -- France. There was also a Muslim empire in Iberia, which however did not threaten anyone other than France. And in the east, there was the Avar khaganate, the Byzantine empire, the Bulgarian empire, and the Kievan Rus, by the close of the 1st millennium. None of which were threatening Western Europe. The various Turkic and Mongol empires never threatened Western Europe either. Nor did the Lithuanian empire (Grand Duchy) that arose during the late Middle Ages.

The empires of WWI all had Early Modern origins (Britain, France after the Hundred Years War, Prussia / Germany, Austria, and Russia), or perhaps the end of the Late Middle Ages (Spain and the Ottomans). These largely Early Modern empires arose as reactions to the expanding empires of the Middle Ages -- Spain against the Muslim empire, the Ottomans against the Byzantines, Russia against the Mongols and the Lithuanians, etc.

Since all of those Early Modern empires blew each other up during WWI and WWII, with Russia staggering through Midcentury, there are no more European empires jockeying for territory these days. And to reiterate the original point, there are no replacements for the forces that gave birth to those Early Modern empires -- no new Bulgarians, Mongols, Lithuanians, Carolingians, Capetians, or Emirate / Caliphate of Cordoba.

Empires do not "assume new, less military / territorial forms" -- they simply contract and collapse, unable to control other societies by force. German banks exploiting Greek workers through the EU system does not make Germany an empire, nor does the international vogue for French, Italian, and Spanish cuisine make them empires either. Their former expansions have been contracting ever since WWI or before, and that will not reverse for many centuries at the earliest (assuming a new threat appears long-term on their borders, after they have already hit rock bottom internally).

Let's consider the two specific cases that the info-tainers are obsessing over -- the Russians and the Germans.

Russian ethnogenesis and imperiogenesis are rooted primarily in the invasion of Turko-Mongol empires, all of whom have been pacified by the Russians (and the Chinese) for centuries. The Ottoman pressure to their south has been absent for a century. And the Lithuanian threat to their west has been a void as well. If anything, the American expansion into Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, has been an attempt to stimulate Russian expansion all over again, by reincarnating the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth threat to Russia's wide-open western border. But the reality of NATO impotence in Eastern Europe is already rapidly becoming clear -- they're no Grand Duchy of Lithuania -- and the duration of the threat has only been around for 20 years, unlikely to last even a century. So, no, Russia will not reconquer Eastern Europe as they did under the Tsars.

German imperial origins are even shallower, beginning only during the 1600s (vs. the late 1400s for Muscovite / Russian expansion over their invaders). Most of the Germanic lands were a fragmented black hole of cooperation, left in the wake of the collapse of the Frankish empire during the Middle Ages, whether of the Carolingian apogee, or of the later Ottonian eastern rump kingdom. Both of those were finished by the late Middle Ages, and by that time the Holy Roman Empire was not expanding, and was not a centrally governed state.

Rather, German imperiogenesis came from the east, among the Prussians, who expanded westward to unify Germany. Sidebar: the Prussians were never a threat to Eastern Europe, which from the Early Modern period onward has always been under Russian control. And before that, it was the province of the Lithuanians, Bulgarians, Kievan Rus, and various Turkic and Mongol invaders. Viewing the Germans and Russians as some sort of eternal enemies is ignorance, owing mostly to the American fixation on WWII-themed info-tainment, one of the few times the two nations were locked in deadly battle.

In any case, the Prussians only began expanding during the 17th C., first by unifying with Brandenburg in eastern Germany, and then liberating themselves from being a fiefdom of Poland, culminating in the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701. Their formative experience was the expansion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on their borders, and there has been a void in that region ever since the contraction of the Russian / Soviet empire. So there will be no new Prussians. And since there is no new Britain or France on the western side of Germany, it's not as though the Rhinelanders are going to turn Germany into a new expansionist empire either.

Reality check: the only long-term source of empires in Western Europe has been France, whether the Gauls, the Franks, the Capetians, or the Bourbons. Ditto for the renaissances that coincide with imperial expansion -- not caused by the military expansion itself, but owing to a common source, namely the high degree of cohesion and cooperation, whereby the elites patronize unprofitable cultural production and culture-makers devote themselves to such unprofitable endeavors that may not even be realized within their own lifetimes, for the greater good of the whole people and nation.

So, the only nation to keep an eye on for the return to the Age of Empires in Europe is France. And just like the other former empires of the WWI era, they are dead and buried as an expanding force. There may be nationalist sentiment brewing, which will eventually allow them to recover their sovereignty from the American empire / NATO / EU, but that is not the same as intense solidarity coming from lying at a meta-ethnic frontier for centuries. Although breaking free from their American overlords, they would not become a newly expanding state against their neighbors.

Rather, the situation would look more like the Balkans, where in the wake of Ottoman and Austrian imperial collapse, none of the member nations can cohere strongly enough to expand against the others, notwithstanding a long-term regional power -- Serbia -- enjoying greater sovereignty than the others (who became vassals of the American empire). France will become the Serbia of Western Europe when the American empire collapses.

The political / military Balkanization of Western Europe will be accompanied by a new cultural Dark Age in Europe (and obviously in the imperial core of America). The original Dark Age spared France, which enjoyed the Carolingian Renaissance, and the later peak of Capetian culture under Louis IX. But that was back when France was an expanding empire, birthed by its status on the frontier with the Roman empire. No more Romans, no more Carolingians or Capetians. This time around, France too will fall under the Dark Age.

Westerners derisively ask what the Arabs have created, invented, or discovered since the late Middle Ages. Already, we can begin to ask that about ourselves, and the joke will only sound more mordant as time goes on and the reality becomes obvious.

The silver lining, though, is no more WWI or WWII-level cataclysms. We're going to adapt to sub-imperial status, where nobody cooperates on a massive scale, whether for militaristic expansion or for transcendent cultural production.

The centrality of Ukrainian lands in Russian ethnogenesis

Kiev has not been under local rule ever since it was destroyed by the Mongol Empire during the mid-13th C. In the mid-14th C., it was incorporated into the Lithuanian Empire (the Grand Duchy), which later merged with Poland (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). By the mid-17th C., it was won from them by the Russian Empire, where it stayed for centuries, right up through the Soviet era.

So, in the present context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is more of a restoration of their historical territory, rather than taking over a polity with a long-standing history. That goes for the rest of Ukrainian territory, except for Lvov in the far west, which was only added to Russia in 1939, and was historically a part of the Polish kingdom / Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth back to the mid-14th C., before getting taken by the Habsburg Empire in the late 18th C. when Poland was partitioned among the major empires.

This post is not a normative justification for any side in the war, but a descriptive analysis of the deep historical dynamics that have led to the current state of affairs. Crucially, this war cannot be analyzed as though it were the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or the American invasion of Iraq, since neither of those were restoring long-held territory of the invaders, and the invaders saw the target population as a wholly different Other, whereas Russians view Ukrainians as brothers, having grown up together in the same place with the same history and subject to the same formative experiences.

What distinguishes the West from the East, in this context? It is not a snapshot of their traits right now, but rather their long-term historical roots, not just in some static genetic sense, but more so how they were shaped into a cohesive people or ethnos over the centuries.

Following Peter Turchin's popularization in War and Peace and War, the main force that binds a bunch of people together, to think of themselves as Us against Them, and to form a common defense and polity for the purpose of preserving Us against Them, is being encroached upon by an expanding empire -- especially if it is across a meta-ethnic frontier, where there are totally different languages, religions, subsistence modes, etc., on either side.

The nations and empires of "the West" all grew up in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire. In fact, they were brought into being by the encroachment of the expanding Romans out of the Italian peninsula. This was most powerful in northwestern Europe, namely today's France, beginning with the Merovingian period of the mid-late first millennium. They were not Mediterraneans by culture, did not speak Italic languages, were more nomadic / less sedentary, and practiced a different religion from Rome (although they were similar from having descended from a common Indo-European source).

Some modern members of the West owe their existence to a second-order effect of Roman expansion, i.e. the expansion of first-order cases like France. Most obviously, Britain, who were occupied by the Romans, but not for long, and not so intensely. British identity was instead forged by the expansion of France, especially during the Hundred Years War -- much longer, and much more intense of a pressure than Rome ever was to the British Isles.

None of the Slavic peoples were even around for the Roman Empire, let alone its collapse. Their migration period was the second half of the 1st millennium, long after Rome had bitten the dust. And their migrations took them far away from the old Roman borders, namely toward northeastern Europe, so they had minimal contact with the first-order effects of Rome like France, and could not become second-order effects of Roman expansion like Britain did.

Only some southern Slavs felt the second-order effects of Rome, namely from the expansion of the Byzantine Empire (a first-order effect of Roman expansion). And much as an expanding Britain arose due to an expanding France, an expanding Bulgarian Empire arose due to an expanding Byzantine Empire. Still, Slavic people on the whole do not share the deep historical forces that shaped the West.

Rather, the peoples of Eastern Europe were forged together by an entirely different group of expanding empires -- the Turko-Mongol nomads from the Central Asian steppes, whether they were Khazars, Mongols, Tatars, or whoever else. As far as Indo-European speaking farmers who adopted Christianity were concerned, all of those Turko-Mongol speaking nomadic pastoralists practicing Tengrism or Islam were equal to each other, and equally alien to Us. This forging of identity took place during a separate time period as well, from the late 1st millennium to the early 2nd millennium.

Those European nations that sprung up in the wake of the Romans, were not subject to these later pressures left by the Turko-Mongols. So there is little in common to the particular historical forces that birthed the Western nations, and those that birthed the Eastern nations.

There is a portion of the eastern Mediterranean that was subject to both Roman and Turko-Mongol pressures, especially Anatolia, which is why it has both Western and Eastern characteristics. But the Aegean region is not what we usually mean by "the East" when discussing Russia vs. Western Europe. And in the Balkans, the largely Slavic population there today was not there during Roman times, so they did not grow up on the Roman frontier, only on the Turko-Mongol frontier, which is why the Balkan Slavs are more solidly Eastern.

* * *

Getting back to Ukraine, the first major polity in the region was the so-called Kievan Rus, known back then as simply the Rus, from whom both Belarus and Russia derive their names. From what I gather in a hotly contested theoretical debate, the early ruling elite were likely Germanic / Scandinavian foreigners who quickly adopted local Slavic culture.

However, none of the Germanic migrations have left a genetic signature in today's genepools around Europe, whether Spain, Italy, or Eastern Europe (no Visigothic, Langobard, or Varangian blood in those places). [1] Generally, the elites out-reproduced the commoners in the pre-Industrial age, so if the Germanics remained in the places where they migrated to, especially as a foreign ruling elite, they ought to have left a sizable genetic contribution to the present-day populations of those places. And yet they have not. So, either they inter-married with the local majority as quickly as they adopted their culture, or they simply went somewhere else after awhile, perhaps dying out sometime afterward.

In either case, the Germanic / Norse / Scandinavian influence on the Kievan Rus must have been fairly minimal. They culturally adapted to the local Slavs, and genetically mixed themselves in (as a small foreign minority, not affecting things much), or took a hike before too long.

But this whole business about the Norse migration into Balto-Slavic Eastern Europe is ignoring the ethnogenetic cultural factor that makes all these disparate peoples form into a cohesive Us -- namely, a wholly different Them encroaching on Our turf. In the case of the Rus, this was the Khazar Empire (Khaganate) from the east. Centuries later, the Rus were brought down by the expanding Mongol Empire. During that entire time, everyone in the territory of the Rus -- whether Germanic or Slavic or Baltic just a few centuries earlier -- suddenly, right here and right now, felt the pressure from expanding Turko-Mongol groups originating in Central Asia. Germanics and Balts and Slavs would have instantly put aside their minor differences, against the Turko-Mongol menace, to forge a new single collective identity -- the Rus.

The next empire to rule over Kiev, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, arose on the frontier of the expanding Kievan Rus, and largely took its place. From their origin near the Baltic Sea, they were also being hounded at the time by their fellow Balts during the crusades to Christianize them -- Lithuanians were the last in Europe to adopt Christianity. But then the Rus were also Christians rather than pagans, and their Slavic language and other culture was more strange to Lithuanians than that of their fellow Balts, the Livonian crusaders. The Lithuanian Empire was no less subject to pressure from Turko-Mongol invaders than other Eastern empires, at that time mainly the Golden Horde (the northwestern section of the Mongol Empire), from whom they won control over Kiev in 1362.

The primary pressure that forced modern Russia into existence was also the Turko-Mongol invasions under various incarnations. As they were closer to the Turko-Mongol action than the Lithuanians were, the Russians developed a far more intense cohesion that has kept them as the leaders of the Eastern European sphere ever since. In fact, once the Turko-Mongols were taken care of, expanding Russia turned its attention to the Lithuanian Empire on its other, western border, not to mention the fleeting threat of an expanding Sweden during the 17th C. Russia's capital was moved north from Moscow to St. Petersburg for two centuries, reflecting this shift in regional priorities.

Eventually Russia conquered the lands of the former Grand Duchy and much of Poland from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, including today's nations of Belarus and Ukraine. This unfolded gradually over the second half of the second millennium (see here for maps and timelines).

Later threats came from the expanding Ottoman Empire to their south, centering around the northern shores of the Black Sea. The Ottomans were Mediterranean, Muslim, and Anatolian mixed with a Turkic-descended ruling elite -- very different from the Russians or other Eastern Europeans.

So, during its entire history of ethnogenesis, Russia has shared the same fate as the lands of today's Ukraine -- pressured by Turko-Mongol empires from the east, the Lithuanian empire to the west, and the Ottomans to the south. As far as Russian ethnogenesis is concerned, "Ukraine" is simply one part of Russia -- and a very central part, at that. It's not way up in the north where the Turko-Mongol and Ottoman pressures were weaker. Ukraine includes much of the steppe-forest transition lands where the Slavic farmers were right up against the Turko-Mongol nomads.

Imagining Russia without Ukraine is like imagining America without Texas and the Southwest, on the border not only with Mexico but with the Indians (Navajo, Comanche, Apache, etc.), who served as the main cause of American ethnogenesis. Not surprisingly both have a history of fiercely independent horse-riding frontiersmen -- the Cossacks and the Cowboys. Sure, some parts of America look down on Texas, just as some parts of Russia surely look down on Ukraine -- and yet, America isn't America without Texas, and Russia isn't Russia without Ukraine.

* * *

To conclude, here is a helpful post from Turchin's blog, while the Donbass "separatists" ("join-Russia-ists") were staging their protests back in 2014. He links to other articles of his about why Russia is not Russia without Crimea, as seen by the place of Sevastopol among the Hero Cities of the Soviet Union. A city with such sacred significance is hard to let go of for Russia. He argued at the time that Russia would not waste resources annexing eastern Ukraine because there were no sacred cities there.

However, those Hero Cities also include Odessa and Kiev, in addition to the Crimean peninsula, drawing a boundary around much of Ukraine's territory. They include other cities conquered from the Lithuanian Empire, lying in today's Belarus and Ukraine and Russia, such as Smolensk, Minsk, and Brest (and of course, Kiev itself). And another that was central to Russian expansion in that direction, St. Petersburg.

These Hero Cities were chosen for their role during WWII, but you can see that the list is mostly a rationalization of the earlier expansion of the Russian Empire.

Thus, Ukrainian lands are sacredly central to Russian ethnogenesis not only because of their role in the Turko-Mongol struggle, but also against the Ottomans, and the Lithuanians. And just as Russia is incredibly close with Belarus, being in a state union since the post-Soviet 1990s, Ukraine will inevitably be incorporated into Russia as well. State union, annexation, puppet government, whatever other mechanism may enact it -- it will happen.

Russia is simply not Russia without the Ukrainian lands. You can like that fact, you can hate that fact, and whatever stems from that fact. But it's a fact, and there's no point in denying it or remaining ignorant about it, when our government is so centrally involved in trying to break Ukraine away from Russia and into the US-controlled NATO / EU empire.

[1] See the discussion and citation in this old post on the greater genetic similarity in Eastern Europe, due to the Slavic migrations having taken place most recently, and in lands that were sparsely settled before then. I postulated the greater genetic similarity as a second factor, after the cultural / ethnogenetic factor, for why Eastern Europe shows so little separatism compared to Western Europe.

That continues right through the present situation, which I noted in the Ukrainian context back then, since "separatists" in eastern Ukraine want to join Russia, rather than split off into their own little autonomous nation, a la Ireland declaring independence from Britain. This is more of a reconfiguration of polities, rather than fragmentation like you find in the West (e.g., where Basques, Catalans, and whoever else, all want their own separate nations after breaking from Spain).

To combat the Dark Age, own and read fix-it books rather than YouTube tutorials or WikiHow articles

On the topic of the disintegration of our collective knowledge during the new Dark Age, consider how often people just let their material stuff rot into disrepair. The less that stuff gets repaired, the less demand there is for the knowledge and skills to do the repairing, and therefore the lower in supply that knowledge and those skills will become. At a certain point, it's a niche thing or forgotten altogether.

And yes, if it becomes a niche thing, it is a sign of a Dark Age, compared to when it was commonplace. If literacy goes from 99% to 10%, that is a Dark Age, despite the knowledge and skills "still existing" and "not having disappeared". Only the most rationalizing Panglossian would point to the remaining 10% as refuting the claim of there being a Dark Age.

For those who do want to keep the knowledge and skills alive, though, there's a meta-problem — not just preserving them in your own mind, and if possible transmitting them to others person-to-person, but preserving them in an archive or library, to be consulted by those who you cannot interact with face-to-face.

For now, the main solution seems to be YouTube videos — making one yourself, consulting one yourself, or sharing one with another person / audience. But if there's anything that Dark Age people should appreciate, it's how fragile it is to migrate collective knowledge to an online repository.

What if YouTube de facto stops existing, like MySpace or Flickr, and inactive content and accounts get deleted? What if the site is retired altogether? What if your topic, which formerly was considered mundane, becomes politicized and banned? Don't think that couldn't happen to content that could be construed as "prepping" or "nationalist" or "MAGA". Oh, so this guy wants to preserve his well-made American tech? Sounds like an apocalyptic prepper waiting to show down against the US Army, plus being xenophobic against Vietnamese-made tech, and wanting to restore or RETVRN to a bygone Golden Age of material culture. Probably voted for Trump. Better delete the whole fucking channel, just to be safe.

Online information is the most fragilized type in existence, because there are so few redundancies. "Just save it on multiple servers" or whatever, is not going to matter, since a few mega-sites are the portals to almost all content, for the vast majority of internet users. Again, if something "still exists" but is driven to the absolute margins, it is a Dark Age.

Physical media, on the other hand, are redundant. Books, for example, are so widely distributed that it would be impossible to ban or delete or destroy even half of the copies of a commonplace title. And for repairing, DIY, etc., there are tons of copies of highly useful books, some of which are decades old but are still in top shape because they were made before the Dark Age (high-quality paper, ink, hardcover material, and binding).

I've found the Reader's Digest books to be informative, helpful, and widely available (at thrift stores, used bookstores, anywhere really, and for cheap). They're called either the Do-It-Yourself Manual (general home maintenance), or Fix-It-Yourself Manual (more about devices and appliances of all types). They were published throughout the decades in several updates, which helps if your house, tech, etc., is from the Midcentury or before, as well as if it's from the '80s or '90s. There are clear diagrams, concise prose, and intuitive steps through the process. And all put together by pros. You just do not get that with WikiHow articles, YouTube videos, or Q&A posts on specialized forums.

More importantly, you don't have to sift through dozens of sources as you do online — these books are authoritative and comprehensive, for their intended audience and purpose. When too many sources exist, you've got a whole 'nother project on your hands — coming up with an algorithm, however crude, to choose which ones to trust more than the others. Page views? Rank in a Google search? Likes on a video? Too much work before you've even consulted the content itself.

This is also why it's easier to buy a handful of cookbooks to tell you how to make any meal you want, rather than doing a Google search for every single meal and having to algorithmically sort through the dozens of results for each meal. Another plus for physical media — no fucking ads, no trackers, no retarded comments section, and no bloated personal stories that do not inform but only exist to slap personal website branding onto a fundamentally impersonal recipe. The photography is more professional as well.

Part of our status-striving era of over-produced aspiring elites is that everyone now regards themselves as a potential technocrat or expert on anything they choose to apply their midwit brain to, with earth-shaking consequences depending on their decisions. As though you could successfully open and operate your own restaurant, or as though you're going to be the chef for royalty, or as though anyone other than you yourself is going to be eating the vast majority of the meals that you prepare.

That's why they freak out about cookbooks, with their sole recipe for a given meal, and why they're gripped by a futile drive to consult as many second, third, and fourth opinions to get a diverse range of options. Get as many bids as you can when contracting out work, right? In the end, most of those culinary or home repair options are minor variations on the same solution, and wading through all of them only serves to slow down and even paralyze the process of getting the right outcome.

Your everyday meals, and your around-the-home repairs and maintenance, are not on the scale of importance as multi-million-dollar contracts, and "consulting all the experts" is a classic tragic case of over-optimizing, just to inflate your own undeserved sense of status. Just open the Reader's Digest book and follow the process like a normal common person.

Aside from the over-optimizing mistake of consulting dozens of sources when one will do, online info also leans heavily toward the lifestyle and persona striver value, rather than the sheer utilitarian value of getting the job done right and simply. This may be due more to the time period in which it was made — the 2010s and after — rather than the medium, but still, you can't consult online content from the 1970s.

What does this entail? Presenting options that skew toward the extreme, in-your-face, and "do you even lift, brah?" This is because online people have little to show organically in their real lives for masculinity, productivity, etc., so they need their consumption habits to make up for it. "Don't drink caffeine like a pussy — drink this type, and it'll put hair on your chest and get you chicks" (spoiler: no it won't, dork).

A brief example: occasionally the drain in my bathtub slows down and backs the water up into the tub during a shower. At first I put a little Drano down, and that was that. But it's not good long-term because those chemicals eat away at the pipes. So when it happened again this summer, I decided to try something else. Almost all of the online info, from articles to videos, was about using a drain snake, the most serious and involved way to fix the problem. OK, I did happen to pick up a made-in-USA drain snake at a thrift store awhile back, so maybe it was finally time to put it to use.

Then, out of habit, I conferred with the Reader's Digest manuals (and a Time Life DIY manual) — and they all said try plunging it first. And goddamn if it didn't work just that easily! Much lower tech — only a standard plunger that everyone has seen in cartoons from decades ago, a wet rag to stuff into the overflow plate, and water from the faucet. I knew it would get boring and distracting to keep track of the time while doing it, so I put on a CD and stopped after one song. But once it was over, BOOM, like magic it cleared whatever soap-and-hair clog was there, and sucked the water right down the drain like new again.

If you're a woman, you may need to get one of the men in your life with the upper body strength and stamina to keep at it forcefully for a solid 3-5 minutes. Other than elbow grease, nothing more high-tech than a plunger and rag was required.

The persona-striver solution of Tim the Toolman Taylor's not-so-manly target audience — MOARRR POWERRR — would have taken longer, potentially damaged the pipes (the end of the snake can scrape and scratch them), and required more complicated steps to navigate the thing around corners.

In general, you should only use technology to supplement what you cannot do with your own body and mind. Oddly enough, then, the extreme in-yer-face-bitch solutions wind up making you weaker, because the tech does so much of the work, and not you yourself. One of the fastest ways I ever got ripped was a few years ago, clearing and restoring a neglected trail with only hand tools, my body, and the environment. That also produces a more natural look, since you're not isolating one muscle with one machine at a time. You're using them holistically for the activities they were intended for by human evolution.

To conclude, I think online is counter-productive for a related reason — if you get sucked into persona-striving, then social media is going to get you addicted and stuck on that treadmill. Hobbyist forums were one thing, but social media is designed for joyless grinding and maxing stats in a competition against other strivers, with metrics for all to see. When you're reading a book and getting a job done without posting it to social media, you're a normal real human being.

I don't buy the idea that social media posting is going to motivate others to take up the struggle against the Dark Age. It'll primarily appeal to the super-strivers, and most of them will burn out or get bored of that domain of striving after a few months or years, move on to some other arena of striving, and will not have preserved the knowledge and skills medium to long-term.

I think general advice and sources are the best to provide, maybe with a personal anecdote here or there. More broad in its appeal, less intense emotional investment, therefore more sustainable, and more of a bulwark against cultural disintegration.