As the world sinks deeper into panic over the coronavirus outbreak, I’ll remind you again to have a look at Curtis Yarvin’s paean to global decoupling, published last month at The American Mind. (I’ll drop a link also to a far briefer item of my own, from 2018.)
Not long ago — in my own lifetime — an eruption of disease in central China would have caused not a ripple in American life; likely almost none of us would even have known about it. Today everyplace on Earth is in immediate and intimate contact with everyplace else, and every malign influence arising in any squalid corner of the globe can spread through all the world’s nations like a venereal disease through a Wild West mining settlement.
What have we got in return for shrinking the world in this way? Cheap manufactured goods, mostly, and a couple of new aisles at the supermarket. What price have we paid? Gutting of domestic production; titanic trade deficits with nations that despise us; intellectual-property theft on a hitherto unimaginable scale; a brittle global economy in which problems anywhere instantly become a problem everywhere; accelerating demographic replacement everywhere in the West; an extinction catastrophe among the world’s smallest and most fragile cultures and languages; organic local communities giving way everywhere to an atomizing, superficial, consumerist monoculture that is the death of all real diversity — and now this bloody virus.
A bad deal, if you ask me — and if there is any upside to this crisis, it may be that thoughtful people will look at this unholy new world we’ve bought, and start feeling a little buyer’s remorse.
One Comment
I’ll admit Malcolm when I first read the Moldbug essay, it appeared arrogant and melodramatic. Not anymore, needless to say. I’m genuinely frightened right now, contemplating the dangers for instance of catching the virus and subsequently passing it on to my mom and stepfather, who being older are likely more vulnerable.