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Salient lesson beyond military/geopolitics today. Applies to tech, climate etc. Most of the insanity arises from failure to realize the world is FAR bigger than your circle of concern 7.5 billion people is a VERY big number. It’s a mistake to treat the majority as NPCs.
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The real lesson of the Wehrmacht being generally better at tactical initiative is that it won’t matter in the long run if your strategy is insane
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Your weltanschauung almost certainly treats 90% of them as NPCs. This has repeatedly been the reason I’ve found subcultures terminally stupid and left them. Inability to model and treat most of the world as exercising meaningful agency is the fatal error that kills ideologies.
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Most ideologies model the world like so: 0.0001% (8k) as discoverable ingroup 0.1% (8m) as notional global ingroup of “good” people (including those modeled as allied inferiors) ~0.9% evil outgroup with agency 9% as vaguely modeled NPCs 90% not even modeled NPCs
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I mean Russia failed to correctly model a close cousin culture whose entire recent civilizational DNA is Russian-derived. They assumed most of them were NPCs who didn’t matter Exhibit #324431 of this kind of failure from the last couple of decades
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This sorta works in small groups, like a herd of sheep, a city, or a corp when your social model can be relatively complete. There’s you, there’s people you like, there’s people you hate. What’s left is a rounding error. But in a 7.5b world, your conceits are the rounding error.
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If you’re obsessed with the object of your derangement syndrome, you’re almost certainly not paying enough attention to 90% of the people who matter and have the ability to shape the situation and perhaps even seize the initiative
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