Venkatesh Rao

And predictably, the great worldwide Hobbesian A/B test delivered exactly the result us cynics would expect: people of all races/types are equally good at rising to the top of such games. Just look at the rogues gallery of high-level billion-dollar scammers around the world.

The losers everywhere have been the *protected* mediocrities with cultural-majority affiliations everywhere, who had gotten complacent in their sense of institutionally validated (and undeservedly rewarded) sense of being "better" as a member of a "state-chosen" people.

So the idea that "when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression", read it as "institutionally advantaged looting/spoils privileges", not lip-service narrative spotlight. For "equality" read "equality of looting/expropriation opportunity" not institutional access.

If you think about it, in a grand narrative sense, the pissed off seething-ressentiment ethnomajoritarian masses were never forgotten. They had continuous claim on being "real" Americans. It just got hollowed out, with real rewards being deregulated for democratic looting.

This ~40 year trajectory is why I'm ultimately not worried about the "SJW" bogeyperson (heh!) threat. They're merely trying to recode old, shrinking spoils system in their favor. What good is control of universities or academic publishing if action has left the building?

Public funding for "impersonal" institutions everywhere is shrinking, and being replaced with equivalent neoliberal equal-opportunity expropriation institution. SJWs are fighting over shrinking old pie. Ethnonationalists are mad about not getting first slice of growing new pie.

SJWs are fighting over the dead carcass of the old world. The amount of damage they can do is fundamentally limited. The ethnonationalist right though, is threatening the living, growing thing. The amount of damage they can do is basically infinite. They might kill golden goose.

Can we do better than neoliberalism? Yeah, sure, We can and we must, since big new challenges like climate change seem out of reach for its institutions (it is *powered* by tragedy of the commons in the worst case). More critically, it is based on nation states.