Being susceptible to Power and influence from others is a thing that we all must grow out of. It starts naturally with parents and teachers. No big deal, but hopefully we don't thrash around too much about it. The networked society grows, but is that really OUR society. When studying ancient communities, Robin Dunbar came up with 150, about the maximum number of people you could have a relationship with. After that, you can't hold it all together. Well, in animal groupings too, depending on their brain size. Sure, nowadays you may have more than 150 "subscribers", but how deep can those relationships be?
Selected by Ambition
There's a way how to select who is allowed to manage; (then you list a few by force), but still, some people have the urge to rise to leadership and some don't. To find a way to be "selected", credentials are how they find their way in. This includes our professed modern ideals; we're not even sure, just trying on the different costumes. Or our mentors and role models might point us in one direction. One’s ancestry and origins are turned into credentials in the "old world". With the novo-rich, money is enough.
We all curate our life story, and especially to ourselves. Ambition is good, but not if it is ambition through any means, by climbing over others.
You mention the "gatekeepers", that is a wonderment?
The victim mentality and self-flagellating you see in public speech can be a disguise. Or it gets votes from other victims. But more dangerously, we may believe our own words if we say them often enough, and then we denigrate ourselves for real. In our own mind we become disempowered.
The last part: what is security for the future? Even the Jet-Set goes bankrupt. The more you have, the more you consume, or place your bets, and speculate. Speculation means ride on the back of the trends. Is there really the impartial force of the "market", and neutral investor confidence? Or is it just the manipulation of the hedge funds. Can the trends move sharply?
If you have developed a broad outlook and built up your own agency, you'll probably be ready for anything. Well, that's the goal. If your bank goes under and locks its doors, what will you do? I don't say plan for that, but work with personal empowerment, and build confidence with a chain of successes. Small or large, doesn't matter.
I want to home in on ambition being "good" - I don't think it is good, but it is necessary. Fundamentally, society is a motivating force - a way to motivate people to contribute to the pot, which is then paid out in terms of position and privilege. One can therefore conceive of society as a purchaser of ambition and a seller of prestige. Lacking prestige causes a lack of ambition. Lacking ambition results in society's dissolution and death for its members. Therefore, everyone becomes selected for ambition.
Everything else follows from there. On the whole, even if I don't like credentialism and constant striving and endless accumulation and constant pandering, there must be reasons for it (whatever my opinions on those reasons may be). Leaving those things unexplored would be a grave omission on my part.
Also, because telling one's own story is fucking fun. What are we all on the stack for, if not that?
Reading this and your other essay, I think your focus is on preparing credentials and planning your entry into a rewarding career, (a focus for young people).
I just read this snarky article on the Asia Times, that is focused on Chinese Anglophiles, wanting to study abroad. China went through a long period of wanting to bring up the status of its universities. All the college rating institutes counted international peer reviewed publishing as the main classification for the best world universities.
To get into that club you had to study and write in English. That is a major denial of your own culture, to which China obliged. What about other Asian and world-wide educational institutions? Let's all speak English and adopt their "rules-based-order. To hell with international law.
Admissions into HYPSM Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT.
So what can you do? You’ve already maxed out the SATs, signed up for every AP class, play the oboe, do bogus charity work and took up a ridiculous sport like fencing. At this point, it’s just one giant crap shoot. It's the humiliating dog and pony show of applying to HYPSM.
Will the admissions officer like your essay on teaching inner-city kids at math camp (but they really taught you)? Does Yale need another oboist? Will your history teacher write a flashy enough recommendation?
And even if you do get into HYPSM (or its sorry near peers), you will be surrounded by a sea of people who like you, maxed out on the SATs, took every AP class, play an instrument, did bogus charity work and took up a ridiculous sport like water polo. If it is true that you learn the most from your peers, then HYPSM will likely prove less educational than your high school. There is a lot of truth to the cliche that modern China is a closed society with an open mind, while America is an open society with a closed mind.
In HYPSM, you will join the tiresome Westoid elite with their anxious entitlement and risible pretensions. It’s a nauseating melange of sanctimony, condescension, virtue signaling, victim larping and look-at-me posturing. The only people you might learn something from are the international students who mostly keep to themselves after discovering how loud, deranged and solipsistic their American classmates are.
You will while away four years, slowly socialized into Westoid elitism with its arcane rules of self-censorship and approved aspirations, until your life path is narrowed down to finance, consulting or tech. This is made tolerable by drunken debauchery and meaningless hookups (that’s what the kids tell me anyway) that passes for a social life.
All of this is to deliver an indoctrinated end product to Wall Street and Silicon Valley which has accomplished the miracle of hijacking both progressivism and capitalism while impoverishing the rest of America. Evidently, there are progressive non-solutions to every problem.
Somewhere in the back of your mind, you know it’s all a giant farce. The system broke down decades ago. Really, what are the chances you go to a “regular” high school, and expect the meritocracy to pick you out from the haystack? No, your parents scrimped and saved, fought tooth and nail, to buy that house in Tenafly, New Jersey or Mountain View, California.
College admissions was your religion since birth. Sunday afternoon is for test prep classes, (Saturday mornings are for language school; then to fork over a pretty penny for a college counselor, if not the white glove $ million S-Class level.
“Why isn’t this possible in China? Because China has invested considerable efforts – and continues to do so – to ensure that wealth couldn’t ‘game’ the education system.” And famously, China, in one fell swoop, scrapped the entire for-profit tutoring industry.
This all raises the bigger question of the reproduction of elites. In the long run, which society is more sustainable and fares better: the one that does little to avoid the reproduction of elites like the US (which – contrary to the “American dream” narrative – is one of the high-income economies with the lowest rates of relative upward mobility), or the one that actively fights it, to enforce, (to the extent possible), a meritocracy?
An arbitrage opportunity of historic proportions has opened up. Forget about HYPSM. There is nothing for you to learn there. It was already done and dusted 20 years ago. Remember this acronym: TPSFZUN. That’s Tsinghua, Peking, Shanghai Jiao Tong, Fudan, Zhejiang, USTC and Nanjing. Yeah, it’s a mouthful, but it’s not like HYPSM was so obvious either. And we are not talking study abroad. We are talking the full four-year degree shebang - in China!
In 2024, Tsinghua ranked 12th in the world and 1st in Asia (with arch-nemesis Peking University at 14th). Both ranked higher than the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and Brown.
Seven of the top 10 research universities in the Nature Index are now in China – University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Nanjing University, Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University and Fudan University.
Let’s first get one jaw-dropper out of the way. It is an important consideration for many families, especially if yours stretched themselves sending you to private school. Four years of tuition as an international student at Tsinghua will set mom and dad back about $17,000 (room and board are extra). You are free to do your own calculations for HYPSM.
Actually, if you look at my companion essay on The Professional Amateur, I am not applying to anything (even though I have been pushed towards it and told I could afford it pretty often).
People I know, though, are, and hired me to help write their essays. :D
I'm fortunate enough to be able to work for the family business while my clients are at Imperial College/hoping to get into Harvard or Stanford, post-graduate. Costs a lot less, and comes with a pretty big chunk of property that probably would have been sold without me.
Hello Argo, I really like your posts. They get right to the point. I publish books on my site, and the two major categories are ancient history, and something called ethnogenesis. Ethnogenesis is the study of the rise and fall of world civilizations. (Really, it is one author that I have been mostly concentrating on, Lev Gumilev, a Soviet.) He was born a few years before the communist revolution, and died the year after the USSR was broken apart, but he never studied Marxism. His work was all about the ancients.
He identifies, maybe 24 civilizations, all lasting 1,000 years or more. They were all born, (out of what?), rose up, all had their period in the sun, and then went into burnout, decline, then most often a long period of inertia, followed by periods of dissolution and fracture, and obscuration, and finally a memorial phase, (if it was not first absorbed by another ethnos).
What causes the process of Ethnogenesis?
You have to conclude that it is a mass cultural stereotype of AMBITION.
It doesn't have to be universal, but social pressure is enough to make everyone conform. (You can refer to a cross-posted file from Erik Hoel, that I just made on my Library site). He called that social pressure "the Gossip Trap".
In Gumilev's writings, he calls ambition "PASSION", and it is his theory of Passionarity.
Were does that passion come from? He's saying it must be a mutation in the gene pool?? How can you explain it? Again, not in everyone, but in enough, and in a growing number. So a new ethnic group emerges and coalesces over a few hundred years.
More and more passion, and it rises in power and influence, dominating those around it. Finally the surroundings are all dominated, but the passion is still rising, so it turns-in on itself. It goes into burnout.
If you look at different periods in Europe, the Crusades were used to siphon off many of these passionate crazies, and with more peace at home, there could be some nation building. Same during the colonial periods, the wild adventurers went to the colonies to seek their fortune, (we say to seek freedom), Yeah the persecuted Pilgrims. But you have to say they had a lot of energy, to take all these risks. And all the others stayed home, until stories of free land and riches crossed their shore.
At home excess passionaries end up killing each other, (and many others also). Gradually they are jailed, and society begins to live by inertia, and to start building a culture. This is the Cycle.
The inertia period is what the western world has been in. That includes other countries that trade and work with the west, they share that same inertia. The newer ethnoses are still in high passion, (which we condemn as the axis of evil). As passionarity dries up, gradually destructive people "come out of the woodwork", meaning they appear more often. They were probably always there, but being suppressed by the higher energy.
Where are we now? Your statement that ambition is "not good" but maybe necessary, suggests that we are strongly into inertia, and frown on excess energy. (Just take it easy, and go with the flow). Also I think we can all see more and more destructive tendencies. My god, now there are three wars with huge masses of killing. Destructive doesn't mean the dregs of society (them too), but our leaders are systematically destroying world order.
There is more to ambition than prestige. Billionaires are moving toward being Trillionaires. Give them 10 more years.
I don't say that the theory of passionarity is gospel. But it is certainly worth considering, and studying. Has social media changed the whole format, or has it just quickened it? There are a lot of questions to be asked. (That will keep us plenty busy on Substack.)
I'll zoom in on the point where ambition is more than prestige - it's my pet theory that money is the societal version of a decentralized trust token, so I consider money to be a form of prestige. I have an old, rough-around-the-edges article about that which I will link, that I plan on redoing one day.
I'mof the opinion that social media has only accelerated and formats rather than quickening it. It is only natural that as the total number of people increases, variation increases, barring the constant mixing that characterizes the most globalized of us (jet setters, the expats of multinational corporations, and so on).
On ambition being not good but necessary - simply look at politicians, or mega corporations. Undeniably among the most ambitious of us, and the opinion on them often boils down to: "can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em".
I'll also reiterate my point on the enthnogenesis theory. The theory points out that all the energy levels in the rise and fall of an ethnic power center are happening right now, with some different group, and somewhere on the planet. But if we are judging only from our own level of calmer inertia, we are condemning the rest of the world. (You don't have to accept this theory.) Maybe there is no such thing as an "inertia stage".
Or we are trying to force them into our inertia state. Please remember, "inertia" doesn't mean nothing is happening. Perhaps everything is happening, with the more ordered society. But trying to force others to "jump" to our stage, not only is wrong-headed, but absolutely Impossible. The more we push, the more they will go in the opposite direction. It is only a spectacular blow-up.
(This observable tendency to react in the opposite direction tends to verify the theory.) Well, I have immersed myself in studying it.
Therefore if our objective is a stable world and to get along with others, (which is very doubtful at this point), then in some way we have to accommodate all stages of passion. If the west is merely trying to create this world blow-up, you're doing a good job, keep it up. It's all about the objectives. I question if you are inadvertently coming from "the west is the best", or it is the only standard?
It is my opinion that ambition, and the power that comes from it, has a totalizing tendency - if someone does it, you will lose what you have if you do not match or deter them from it, therefore you must either accept the loss or push back, which likely entails using similar methods. Under this framework, stability and getting along with others are created through mutual agreement (ie, we agree not to do X or Y because it's worse for both of us - think peace or free trade treaties), or through simply accepting the consequences (willingly accepting a lower standard of living or subordinating yourself to someone else with more ambition). On the point of attempting to force others into your level of ambition - I agree. One cannot avoid living in the totalizing world of power, much in the same way that one cannot live in society without clothes, a modern existence without money, or sign up for an account without an e-mail address. However, this does not preclude someone from seeking other goals, as long as they pay at least some lip service to the system. To be in the world, but not of it, is a matter of degree.
This is likely an excessively simplistic and reductive model, but it is evocative - which is what is most important for writing in the end.
As for ethnogenesis - if I am correct in taking ethnogenesis as "a group of people have a shared ambition, egg each other on until they end up conquering as far as they can go, and then, because they've learned to be ambitious, go so far as to start infighting", I think it is quite plausible.
Let's say that everything in the world is done through somebody's ambition, and/or somebody else's lack of ambition. (It is not only a lack of desire, but it's also a self-definition of my limited abilities). Ambition doesn't mean only to advance my own personal wealth or position. It just means "go-power". Everything that is done happens through the will-to-do, it's some form of motivation.
I have come to classify every action in the world as simple as possible. It is either CONSTRUCTIVE of something, (not necessarily meaning for everyone's good), or it is DESTRUCTIVE. Other words are the "system" and the "anti-system". Christians call it the "anti-Christ", meaning what goes against their God. We could argue over what is defined as destructive, but it can be sorted out.
Snatching wealth from, or preying upon the other, even if through changing the law to make it in some sense legal, would be anti-system. For instance, insisting on large tax bailouts is stealing from everyone.
Now we come to what you called "totalizing tendency", which I would define as "forced reflection" of methodology. To reflect, I would have to demand a large "personal bailout" from these same corporations. During Covid all Americans did get $1,000. (more really, but again from tax and not from the corporations).
I claim we have to consider what to reflect back, and only to reflect the system values and not the anti-system values. We can make an agreement with anti-system people, "not to do this", but they will surely do it through a paid proxy. They really need to be restrained, but their power is such, that they are restraining all the rest.
Then we get into the stages of ethnogenesis. This is where the theory seems to prove out well. Younger societies are in a higher passionate state, and are surely going to reflect back. For instance the Middle East is full of fire. The Russian ethnos is 500 years old, but the European ethnos is over 1,000 years old. Europeans at this stage (inertia), don't want to reflect anything if they can help it. Or they will do it half-heartedly, and without a unifying consensus. (This is where word-choice is important. Europeans have do ambition, but not passion.) Besides Russia is not directly interfering with Europe. They just say no-more-NATO encroachment, and that, it is existential. Europe claims it is no-big-deal. just let us have a military base there. It is more than that actually. NATO naively thought they could take Russia's only warm-water port, and deny it access to the Black Sea. That is existential. (America is in this same European ethnos.)
Actually nobody can force another to their level of ambition, but they can force them to allow it in the ambitions person. Ambition is actually a "sanitized word" which I would not use here, with connotations like drive, enterprise, initiative, enthusiasm, desire, motivation.
When really what we want to convey with "passionate anti-system" IS GANGSTERISM.
Denying what is is the best (self-)manipulation tool. Once you believe in what you deny, the way back is almost like impossible. To make sure that the return is guaranteed impossible, one has to deny what is real, ever-present and part of the natural being.
Like the body. Denying the body is easiest because it is visible all the time, everybody has it, and everybody’s body is exactly the same as one’s own. Once this denial - in stark opposition to the perceived objective reality - succeeds, the soul is trapped.
Or the mind. Denying the mind is easiest because it is invisible and actually does not exist. And everybody’s mind is different. Objectifying it and developing complex theories about it - despite its non-existence - is a great way to trap the soul in a different way.
A few thoughts.
Being susceptible to Power and influence from others is a thing that we all must grow out of. It starts naturally with parents and teachers. No big deal, but hopefully we don't thrash around too much about it. The networked society grows, but is that really OUR society. When studying ancient communities, Robin Dunbar came up with 150, about the maximum number of people you could have a relationship with. After that, you can't hold it all together. Well, in animal groupings too, depending on their brain size. Sure, nowadays you may have more than 150 "subscribers", but how deep can those relationships be?
Selected by Ambition
There's a way how to select who is allowed to manage; (then you list a few by force), but still, some people have the urge to rise to leadership and some don't. To find a way to be "selected", credentials are how they find their way in. This includes our professed modern ideals; we're not even sure, just trying on the different costumes. Or our mentors and role models might point us in one direction. One’s ancestry and origins are turned into credentials in the "old world". With the novo-rich, money is enough.
We all curate our life story, and especially to ourselves. Ambition is good, but not if it is ambition through any means, by climbing over others.
You mention the "gatekeepers", that is a wonderment?
The victim mentality and self-flagellating you see in public speech can be a disguise. Or it gets votes from other victims. But more dangerously, we may believe our own words if we say them often enough, and then we denigrate ourselves for real. In our own mind we become disempowered.
The last part: what is security for the future? Even the Jet-Set goes bankrupt. The more you have, the more you consume, or place your bets, and speculate. Speculation means ride on the back of the trends. Is there really the impartial force of the "market", and neutral investor confidence? Or is it just the manipulation of the hedge funds. Can the trends move sharply?
If you have developed a broad outlook and built up your own agency, you'll probably be ready for anything. Well, that's the goal. If your bank goes under and locks its doors, what will you do? I don't say plan for that, but work with personal empowerment, and build confidence with a chain of successes. Small or large, doesn't matter.
.
I want to home in on ambition being "good" - I don't think it is good, but it is necessary. Fundamentally, society is a motivating force - a way to motivate people to contribute to the pot, which is then paid out in terms of position and privilege. One can therefore conceive of society as a purchaser of ambition and a seller of prestige. Lacking prestige causes a lack of ambition. Lacking ambition results in society's dissolution and death for its members. Therefore, everyone becomes selected for ambition.
Everything else follows from there. On the whole, even if I don't like credentialism and constant striving and endless accumulation and constant pandering, there must be reasons for it (whatever my opinions on those reasons may be). Leaving those things unexplored would be a grave omission on my part.
Also, because telling one's own story is fucking fun. What are we all on the stack for, if not that?
Reading this and your other essay, I think your focus is on preparing credentials and planning your entry into a rewarding career, (a focus for young people).
I just read this snarky article on the Asia Times, that is focused on Chinese Anglophiles, wanting to study abroad. China went through a long period of wanting to bring up the status of its universities. All the college rating institutes counted international peer reviewed publishing as the main classification for the best world universities.
To get into that club you had to study and write in English. That is a major denial of your own culture, to which China obliged. What about other Asian and world-wide educational institutions? Let's all speak English and adopt their "rules-based-order. To hell with international law.
https://asiatimes.com/2024/01/open-letter-to-chinese-american-high-school-students/
by Han Feizi January 16, 2024
Admissions into HYPSM Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT.
So what can you do? You’ve already maxed out the SATs, signed up for every AP class, play the oboe, do bogus charity work and took up a ridiculous sport like fencing. At this point, it’s just one giant crap shoot. It's the humiliating dog and pony show of applying to HYPSM.
Will the admissions officer like your essay on teaching inner-city kids at math camp (but they really taught you)? Does Yale need another oboist? Will your history teacher write a flashy enough recommendation?
And even if you do get into HYPSM (or its sorry near peers), you will be surrounded by a sea of people who like you, maxed out on the SATs, took every AP class, play an instrument, did bogus charity work and took up a ridiculous sport like water polo. If it is true that you learn the most from your peers, then HYPSM will likely prove less educational than your high school. There is a lot of truth to the cliche that modern China is a closed society with an open mind, while America is an open society with a closed mind.
In HYPSM, you will join the tiresome Westoid elite with their anxious entitlement and risible pretensions. It’s a nauseating melange of sanctimony, condescension, virtue signaling, victim larping and look-at-me posturing. The only people you might learn something from are the international students who mostly keep to themselves after discovering how loud, deranged and solipsistic their American classmates are.
You will while away four years, slowly socialized into Westoid elitism with its arcane rules of self-censorship and approved aspirations, until your life path is narrowed down to finance, consulting or tech. This is made tolerable by drunken debauchery and meaningless hookups (that’s what the kids tell me anyway) that passes for a social life.
All of this is to deliver an indoctrinated end product to Wall Street and Silicon Valley which has accomplished the miracle of hijacking both progressivism and capitalism while impoverishing the rest of America. Evidently, there are progressive non-solutions to every problem.
Somewhere in the back of your mind, you know it’s all a giant farce. The system broke down decades ago. Really, what are the chances you go to a “regular” high school, and expect the meritocracy to pick you out from the haystack? No, your parents scrimped and saved, fought tooth and nail, to buy that house in Tenafly, New Jersey or Mountain View, California.
College admissions was your religion since birth. Sunday afternoon is for test prep classes, (Saturday mornings are for language school; then to fork over a pretty penny for a college counselor, if not the white glove $ million S-Class level.
“Why isn’t this possible in China? Because China has invested considerable efforts – and continues to do so – to ensure that wealth couldn’t ‘game’ the education system.” And famously, China, in one fell swoop, scrapped the entire for-profit tutoring industry.
This all raises the bigger question of the reproduction of elites. In the long run, which society is more sustainable and fares better: the one that does little to avoid the reproduction of elites like the US (which – contrary to the “American dream” narrative – is one of the high-income economies with the lowest rates of relative upward mobility), or the one that actively fights it, to enforce, (to the extent possible), a meritocracy?
An arbitrage opportunity of historic proportions has opened up. Forget about HYPSM. There is nothing for you to learn there. It was already done and dusted 20 years ago. Remember this acronym: TPSFZUN. That’s Tsinghua, Peking, Shanghai Jiao Tong, Fudan, Zhejiang, USTC and Nanjing. Yeah, it’s a mouthful, but it’s not like HYPSM was so obvious either. And we are not talking study abroad. We are talking the full four-year degree shebang - in China!
In 2024, Tsinghua ranked 12th in the world and 1st in Asia (with arch-nemesis Peking University at 14th). Both ranked higher than the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and Brown.
Seven of the top 10 research universities in the Nature Index are now in China – University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Nanjing University, Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University and Fudan University.
Let’s first get one jaw-dropper out of the way. It is an important consideration for many families, especially if yours stretched themselves sending you to private school. Four years of tuition as an international student at Tsinghua will set mom and dad back about $17,000 (room and board are extra). You are free to do your own calculations for HYPSM.
It is a fun article.
.
Actually, if you look at my companion essay on The Professional Amateur, I am not applying to anything (even though I have been pushed towards it and told I could afford it pretty often).
People I know, though, are, and hired me to help write their essays. :D
I'm fortunate enough to be able to work for the family business while my clients are at Imperial College/hoping to get into Harvard or Stanford, post-graduate. Costs a lot less, and comes with a pretty big chunk of property that probably would have been sold without me.
Hello Argo, I really like your posts. They get right to the point. I publish books on my site, and the two major categories are ancient history, and something called ethnogenesis. Ethnogenesis is the study of the rise and fall of world civilizations. (Really, it is one author that I have been mostly concentrating on, Lev Gumilev, a Soviet.) He was born a few years before the communist revolution, and died the year after the USSR was broken apart, but he never studied Marxism. His work was all about the ancients.
He identifies, maybe 24 civilizations, all lasting 1,000 years or more. They were all born, (out of what?), rose up, all had their period in the sun, and then went into burnout, decline, then most often a long period of inertia, followed by periods of dissolution and fracture, and obscuration, and finally a memorial phase, (if it was not first absorbed by another ethnos).
What causes the process of Ethnogenesis?
You have to conclude that it is a mass cultural stereotype of AMBITION.
It doesn't have to be universal, but social pressure is enough to make everyone conform. (You can refer to a cross-posted file from Erik Hoel, that I just made on my Library site). He called that social pressure "the Gossip Trap".
In Gumilev's writings, he calls ambition "PASSION", and it is his theory of Passionarity.
Were does that passion come from? He's saying it must be a mutation in the gene pool?? How can you explain it? Again, not in everyone, but in enough, and in a growing number. So a new ethnic group emerges and coalesces over a few hundred years.
More and more passion, and it rises in power and influence, dominating those around it. Finally the surroundings are all dominated, but the passion is still rising, so it turns-in on itself. It goes into burnout.
If you look at different periods in Europe, the Crusades were used to siphon off many of these passionate crazies, and with more peace at home, there could be some nation building. Same during the colonial periods, the wild adventurers went to the colonies to seek their fortune, (we say to seek freedom), Yeah the persecuted Pilgrims. But you have to say they had a lot of energy, to take all these risks. And all the others stayed home, until stories of free land and riches crossed their shore.
At home excess passionaries end up killing each other, (and many others also). Gradually they are jailed, and society begins to live by inertia, and to start building a culture. This is the Cycle.
The inertia period is what the western world has been in. That includes other countries that trade and work with the west, they share that same inertia. The newer ethnoses are still in high passion, (which we condemn as the axis of evil). As passionarity dries up, gradually destructive people "come out of the woodwork", meaning they appear more often. They were probably always there, but being suppressed by the higher energy.
Where are we now? Your statement that ambition is "not good" but maybe necessary, suggests that we are strongly into inertia, and frown on excess energy. (Just take it easy, and go with the flow). Also I think we can all see more and more destructive tendencies. My god, now there are three wars with huge masses of killing. Destructive doesn't mean the dregs of society (them too), but our leaders are systematically destroying world order.
There is more to ambition than prestige. Billionaires are moving toward being Trillionaires. Give them 10 more years.
I don't say that the theory of passionarity is gospel. But it is certainly worth considering, and studying. Has social media changed the whole format, or has it just quickened it? There are a lot of questions to be asked. (That will keep us plenty busy on Substack.)
Cheers
.
I'll zoom in on the point where ambition is more than prestige - it's my pet theory that money is the societal version of a decentralized trust token, so I consider money to be a form of prestige. I have an old, rough-around-the-edges article about that which I will link, that I plan on redoing one day.
https://open.substack.com/pub/argomend/p/the-true-nature-of-money?r=28g8km&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I'mof the opinion that social media has only accelerated and formats rather than quickening it. It is only natural that as the total number of people increases, variation increases, barring the constant mixing that characterizes the most globalized of us (jet setters, the expats of multinational corporations, and so on).
On ambition being not good but necessary - simply look at politicians, or mega corporations. Undeniably among the most ambitious of us, and the opinion on them often boils down to: "can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em".
I'll also reiterate my point on the enthnogenesis theory. The theory points out that all the energy levels in the rise and fall of an ethnic power center are happening right now, with some different group, and somewhere on the planet. But if we are judging only from our own level of calmer inertia, we are condemning the rest of the world. (You don't have to accept this theory.) Maybe there is no such thing as an "inertia stage".
Or we are trying to force them into our inertia state. Please remember, "inertia" doesn't mean nothing is happening. Perhaps everything is happening, with the more ordered society. But trying to force others to "jump" to our stage, not only is wrong-headed, but absolutely Impossible. The more we push, the more they will go in the opposite direction. It is only a spectacular blow-up.
(This observable tendency to react in the opposite direction tends to verify the theory.) Well, I have immersed myself in studying it.
Therefore if our objective is a stable world and to get along with others, (which is very doubtful at this point), then in some way we have to accommodate all stages of passion. If the west is merely trying to create this world blow-up, you're doing a good job, keep it up. It's all about the objectives. I question if you are inadvertently coming from "the west is the best", or it is the only standard?
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It is my opinion that ambition, and the power that comes from it, has a totalizing tendency - if someone does it, you will lose what you have if you do not match or deter them from it, therefore you must either accept the loss or push back, which likely entails using similar methods. Under this framework, stability and getting along with others are created through mutual agreement (ie, we agree not to do X or Y because it's worse for both of us - think peace or free trade treaties), or through simply accepting the consequences (willingly accepting a lower standard of living or subordinating yourself to someone else with more ambition). On the point of attempting to force others into your level of ambition - I agree. One cannot avoid living in the totalizing world of power, much in the same way that one cannot live in society without clothes, a modern existence without money, or sign up for an account without an e-mail address. However, this does not preclude someone from seeking other goals, as long as they pay at least some lip service to the system. To be in the world, but not of it, is a matter of degree.
This is likely an excessively simplistic and reductive model, but it is evocative - which is what is most important for writing in the end.
As for ethnogenesis - if I am correct in taking ethnogenesis as "a group of people have a shared ambition, egg each other on until they end up conquering as far as they can go, and then, because they've learned to be ambitious, go so far as to start infighting", I think it is quite plausible.
Let's say that everything in the world is done through somebody's ambition, and/or somebody else's lack of ambition. (It is not only a lack of desire, but it's also a self-definition of my limited abilities). Ambition doesn't mean only to advance my own personal wealth or position. It just means "go-power". Everything that is done happens through the will-to-do, it's some form of motivation.
I have come to classify every action in the world as simple as possible. It is either CONSTRUCTIVE of something, (not necessarily meaning for everyone's good), or it is DESTRUCTIVE. Other words are the "system" and the "anti-system". Christians call it the "anti-Christ", meaning what goes against their God. We could argue over what is defined as destructive, but it can be sorted out.
Snatching wealth from, or preying upon the other, even if through changing the law to make it in some sense legal, would be anti-system. For instance, insisting on large tax bailouts is stealing from everyone.
Now we come to what you called "totalizing tendency", which I would define as "forced reflection" of methodology. To reflect, I would have to demand a large "personal bailout" from these same corporations. During Covid all Americans did get $1,000. (more really, but again from tax and not from the corporations).
I claim we have to consider what to reflect back, and only to reflect the system values and not the anti-system values. We can make an agreement with anti-system people, "not to do this", but they will surely do it through a paid proxy. They really need to be restrained, but their power is such, that they are restraining all the rest.
Then we get into the stages of ethnogenesis. This is where the theory seems to prove out well. Younger societies are in a higher passionate state, and are surely going to reflect back. For instance the Middle East is full of fire. The Russian ethnos is 500 years old, but the European ethnos is over 1,000 years old. Europeans at this stage (inertia), don't want to reflect anything if they can help it. Or they will do it half-heartedly, and without a unifying consensus. (This is where word-choice is important. Europeans have do ambition, but not passion.) Besides Russia is not directly interfering with Europe. They just say no-more-NATO encroachment, and that, it is existential. Europe claims it is no-big-deal. just let us have a military base there. It is more than that actually. NATO naively thought they could take Russia's only warm-water port, and deny it access to the Black Sea. That is existential. (America is in this same European ethnos.)
Actually nobody can force another to their level of ambition, but they can force them to allow it in the ambitions person. Ambition is actually a "sanitized word" which I would not use here, with connotations like drive, enterprise, initiative, enthusiasm, desire, motivation.
When really what we want to convey with "passionate anti-system" IS GANGSTERISM.
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Denying what is is the best (self-)manipulation tool. Once you believe in what you deny, the way back is almost like impossible. To make sure that the return is guaranteed impossible, one has to deny what is real, ever-present and part of the natural being.
Like the body. Denying the body is easiest because it is visible all the time, everybody has it, and everybody’s body is exactly the same as one’s own. Once this denial - in stark opposition to the perceived objective reality - succeeds, the soul is trapped.
Or the mind. Denying the mind is easiest because it is invisible and actually does not exist. And everybody’s mind is different. Objectifying it and developing complex theories about it - despite its non-existence - is a great way to trap the soul in a different way.