Sexbots?

     Normally, when I write about sex, I’m hoping to inspire and exhort the two and a half readers who deign to pay my emissions (so to speak) any attention. This piece and this one are typical cases. I hope they did someone some good, as I remember them as rather difficult to write.

     Not today. Today we get serious. Really serious. For today, The Writer in Black deposeth and sayeth:

     Sexbots are going to be big: Invest now.

     Used to be when I said that I was joking. Nowadays I’m mostly not. Mostly.

     We are rapidly reaching the point where there’s nothing a woman can do for a man in the bedroom that justifies the risk of what she can do to him in the courtroom later.

     Please read it all, including the embedded tweet-captures and the text in the pictures, and take it seriously. If WiB is correct, he’s forecast the end of Mankind. Yes, I mean that literally. And I will tell you why.

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     I’m near to releasing Innocents, my twelfth full-length novel and the most difficult story I’ve ever tried to write. I’m not complaining about that, mind you; the creation of fiction should be difficult, and not just so millions of illiterate wannabes with word processors won’t get in on the racket. To create fiction one must create people, and give them intriguing problems the solutions of which are not trivial. In my particular lines of effort, fantasy and science fiction, those problems are expected to be presented in an original setting, and to be original themselves; otherwise you’re just echoing others’ works. Creating life in a test tube is child’s play by comparison.

     Here’s a brief swatch from the Afterword to Innocents, which, pace Tom Kratman, is a large part of the reason I wrote the book:

     Scientific knowledge is inherently morally neutral. So are the technologies it spawns. Atomic power plants can make cheap electricity that improves the lives of many millions. Nuclear fission and fusion can make explosives of unprecedented power, capable of ending millions of lives at a stroke. There’s no way to preclude its destructive possibilities without also losing its constructive ones.

     Once we learn how to do something, those with low motives will have the same access to it as those with high ones. So it is with both bioengineered technology and artificial intelligence. Since destruction is far easier than creation, it takes a huge majority of good people to outweigh the damage a far smaller number of bad people can and will do.

     But what harm could there be in lifelike robots who can bring sexual pleasure to a man unable to persuade a woman to grant him the same? By themselves, perhaps none. But cultural currents will play a part, too. The ones WiB has fingered are only the most obvious.

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     Just yesterday, I asked the C.S.O., a fairly typical woman of our time...well, except for having bound herself to me, an error in judgment whose full horror she hasn’t yet grasped...“What reasons are there for Americans to have children today, other than wanting them for their own sake?” Between us, we couldn’t come up with any good ones. (The bad ones are easy enough to enumerate, but I wasn’t interested in them at that moment.)

     Children, you may recall, are a product of sex. And not just any kind of sex: sex between a potent, fertile man and a woman of childbearing years. None of the many popular alternatives to ordinary sexual intercourse will produce children. Ergo, if potent, fertile men stop having ordinary sexual intercourse with women of childbearing years, they’ll stop having children. Which brings us to an overwhelming question: What could cause that?

     It wouldn’t be purely a matter of fear of the legal consequences. The legal consequences are worse than they’ve ever been. That’s the case whether we’re talking about sex between (heterosexual) spouses or the unratified sort that seems to be somewhat more common. Yet men and women still marry. Some couples even have kids, though typical family sizes are historically small.

     Therefore, the fear of possible legal ugliness down the road isn’t yet fearsome enough to put an end to procreation by Americans. It’s being held at bay by other incentives and disincentives. But what are those countervailing influences? What if they should weaken and collapse – and what might bring that about?

     Give it some thought while I fix myself some decaf.

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     I wrote here that:

     The fulfillments of sexual intercourse don't end with physical pleasure. They don't begin there, either. Though the language seems brusque, even a bit savage, the principal fulfillment to the man is that of victory: winning access to the body of his beloved. The principal fulfillment to the woman is that of agreeable surrender: the cession of her body to his, not merely for immediate pleasure but also in hope of a union that eclipses the physical connection. These satisfactions greatly overshadow the pleasures of the body, as does their continuation over time.

     The love of a man for a woman partakes of the wholly non-physical desire that she should grant him that victory. The love of a woman for her man partakes of the exact complement of that desire. Therefore, the most important of the incentives toward ordinary, potentially procreative sex is heterosexual love.

     There’s more, of course. Men are more idealistic than women. One of our ideals is the creation of a legacy: “something to remember me by.” (Note how many mass murderers undertake their horrors from an equal yet opposite motivation.) Throughout history, children have been a principal component of a man’s legacy. Though the economic aspect of such a legacy – i.e., the continuation of a family business – is greatly reduced today, the urge remains. After he and his wife are gone from the world, his children are the most likely to remember them...hopefully, in a positive way.

     Women feel that desire too, albeit in a more immediate, less idealistic sense: not principally as elements in a legacy but as “more to love.” If I may quote from the thought stream of a character in a recent novelette:

     I hope he finds someone worthy of him. Someone to make him a proper home, greet him at the door each evening after work, love him at night and give him children who’ll bear his name. Daughters she’ll teach about propriety and respect, romance and love. Sons he’ll raise to be men like him. He will. I can’t be that girl, but…he will find her. He must.

     That character was inherently unable to bear the children she hoped the man in her thoughts would someday have. (Read the story for details.)

     Therefore, a man’s desire for a legacy, and a woman’s innate desire for children to love and raise, are additional aspects of our urge to procreate.

     The inability to prevent conception, coupled to children’s earlier value as economic assets during one’s working life and security in one’s old age, have disappeared as considerations. Therefore, I maintain that should marital (and quasi-marital) love and the desire for children as extensions of oneself and one’s love weaken, so also would our inclination to procreate.

     I also posit that such a weakening is in progress, and is being encouraged by the darkest of the forces that work among us.

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     Pleasure is not enough. I wrote here that:

     Maximizing pleasurable sexual sensation, as transient as such sensations are, has become the sole aim of many. In pursuit thereof, they eschew normal intercourse – with or without contraception – for cunnilingus, fellatio, anal intercourse, vibrators, electric stimulators, and other sorts of machine-produced thrills, specifically because the physical sensations are stronger than those available through ordinary coitus. This is “living for the moment” to an extent even I didn’t foresee in the earlier essay: a concentration upon sexual pleasure so complete as to forgo all other pleasures and satisfactions, including others of the body: Genital Nerve Endings Uber Alles!

     Advances in sexually oriented technology have only intensified my point. The desire for the physical pleasures available from sex will not be sufficient, in the face of the counter-inducements being made technologically available and the legal and social disincentives that synergize with them, to keep us having procreative sex. If love and the desire for children for their own sake should fail us – and there are plenty of “reasons” why that might happen – we will stop having generative intercourse in favor of the inherently non-procreative alternatives.

     That’s what makes the advent of sex surrogate robots, endlessly accommodating and capable of providing thrills beyond those of intercourse, so threatening.

     It’s a hard thing to feel sincere fear for a future one doesn’t expect to see...but it’s not impossible.

From The Biter Bit Files

     From the reactions accumulating on various social media organs, it appears that the Left never imagined that the identity politics it has championed – i.e., voting as a racial, sexual, gender, or ethnic bloc – could possibly be turned against it. Needless to say (though, in classic Curmudgeon Emeritus fashion, I’ll say it anyway), that sword has always had two edges. Rod Dreher put it about as well as anyone:

     I do not like identity politics. I believe it is dangerous, especially in a pluralistic democracy like ours. But look, if that’s how the left is going to rig the system, then it should not be surprised when white people get tired of it, and decide to play by the same hardball rules.

     By implication, Dreher is ready to believe that “white Americans” – i.e., Americans of the Caucasian race and non-Hispanic ethnicity – are the reason for the triumph of Donald Trump. It’s a common belief at this time, at least on the Left. There’s just one fly in the ointment: the evidence does not support it.

     Fewer white Americans turned out to vote in this election than in 2008 and 2012. Trump got a smaller percentage of their votes than McCain or Romney, as well. What appears to have made the difference was the sharp reduction of the “minority” vote on which the Democrats counted: Negroes and Hispanics.

     There were a couple of mild surprises in the mix. For example, approximately 53% of white women voted for Trump. That demographic was expected to “vote vagina.” That it spurned its opportunity to elect “the first woman president” suggests that abortion rights, “sexual harassment,” “glass ceilings” in the workplace, and other “women’s issues” the Left has cherished are of less importance to American women than they once were.

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     Little attention has gone to age-related voting patterns. According to CNN’s exit-poll statistics, the probability that a voter supported Trump varied directly with his age. But who has bothered to note the applicability of age to political orientation? Who has looked for an explanation to Winston Churchill’s aphorism that “If you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart, but if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no brain” -- ?

     Of course, age is as partial a factor as the others. Not all of Trump’s support came from white Americans over forty, nor did he capture all of that demographic’s votes. However, the associations with age are important ones:

• Age correlates with experience in the labor market.
• It also correlates with having received a more traditional upbringing and education.
• The “youth” demographic has heaped mountains of scorn on its elders, engendering great resentment.
• Recent developments in federal law have worked powerfully against the interests of white Americans over forty.

     Given all the above, that a preponderance of American voters over forty deemed their interests to be better represented by Donald Trump than by Hillary Clinton comes as no surprise. The Left didn’t contrive the outcome deliberately, though it might as well have done so.

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     All that having been said, remember that, as I observed yesterday, Hillary Clinton had a slight edge in the popular vote. It did her little good, as her support was concentrated in the coastal fleshpots, while the design of the Electoral College gives the less populous states a per capita over-representation. That’s at the heart of the Left’s demand that the Electoral College be scrapped and the presidency determined solely by popular vote.

     However, once again the Left can only blame itself. Its identity-group politics and social-fascist policies are wholly responsible for its disadvantage in this regard. They’ve driven its pet demographics – government employees, academics, educrats, entertainers, journalists, other “symbolic” workers, and clients of the welfare state – into the large cities where their interests are prioritized. Thus, its huge margins in California and New York were essentially wasted in the presidential contest.

     The irony of the Left’s relentless pressure to increase federal executive power, when its self-inflicted demographic wounds have caused presidential contests to lean Rightward, should not be lost on the observer. It leaves me wondering whether, had the GOP nominated a better candidate than John McCain in 2008, we would have suffered the Obama Interregnum now coming to a close.

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     Political strategists will study the 2016 presidential campaign for a long time to come. It has more lessons to teach than the ones mentioned above, though those will do for a Thursday morning essay from a narrow-gauge Web pundit. But for most Americans, the relief at having the damned thing over and done with is the most important part of it all.

     Of course, for many, defeat is too bitter a pill to swallow. We’ve already seen “protests” – riots, really – in several of our large cities. The entertainment industry is replete with celebrities who’ve vowed to leave the country over the results. California is beset by angry hordes chattering about “secession,” though to any objective observer it’s plain that the Golden State could never survive as an independent republic.

     If I may put a phrase millions of us have come to despise to a constructive purpose at long last, the time has come to move on. How many will do so? How many will give the incoming Trump Administration a fair chance to govern? How many will do everything possible to obstruct and impede it?

     As always, we shall see.

The vote heard 'round the world

First "Brexit," then Trump. If both our nations pushed back against the Globalists in the same year, that'd be some Hope & Change I could actually believe in!

A Curious Convergence

     A convergence of seemingly unrelated cultural, social, and political currents is under way. The consequences are likely to be positive, but the convergence itself is what really tickles me. You wouldn’t think, a priori, that those currents would have a great deal in common...yet they do.

     The cultural current of note is attached to what we might call “traditional American entertainment:” stories, movies, television, and video games that feature clear clashes of good versus evil, and that celebrate the virtues traditionally associated with masculinity. Entertainment of that sort is becoming uncommon today – hey, I’m doing my best, but I can only write so fast – and those who prize it are being subjected to campaigns of vilification and marginalization in those fora dedicated to cultural things.

     The social current pertains to varieties of public conduct and their correlations with particular races and ethnicities. While sensible Americans will remind themselves when necessary that correlation is not the same as causation, patterns in public behavior cannot help but impress themselves on one’s mind and influence one’s subsequent behavior. This is partly responsible for the demographic redistribution from the coastal states to the American interior currently under way, though there are also other drivers for that phenomenon.

     The political current, while not perfectly coherent in all ways, is a reaction to the steadily broadening and intensifying governmental intrusions on the lives of peaceable Americans. Persons who would have called themselves apolitical or “open-minded” a few decades ago are becoming increasingly vocal, and thanks to the Internet are finding that they’re not alone, the screechings of various activist groups notwithstanding.

     These currents are finding one another to be like-minded allies in many things.

     What brings this to mind this fine Sunday morning is this thread of conversation from a nominally preparationist forum. Timebomb2000’s FAQ describes the site as “an Internet forum for discussion of world events and personal disaster preparation,” which I find to be accurate. Yet the membership took an interest in this piece on the Sad Puppies contretemps, which makes it clear that the members aren’t monochromatic in their interests.

     Those who are repelled by these folks call them “everything but white:” e.g., racist, sexist, nativist, ageist, lookist, ableist, Christianist, and so forth. The epithets hardly matter. The rising power of these currents, now that they’re starting to find one another and make common cause, is what counts.

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     It’s not easy to hold one’s head high under current conditions. The news reports could make anyone fear that a swelling, all-encompassing disaster will soon overcome him and all that he loves. In many parts of this country, an hour or two in a public place, or behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, would reinforce that conviction near to impermeability. The effect on me has been frightening, such that I rarely leave home these days...and when I do, I go armed. I doubt that I’m unique in that regard.

     Yet to a large extent, our fears derive from the sense that “it’s me against the world.” It’s easy to acquire that premise, and hard to dispel it. But awareness of persons near and far who agree with you on virtue in entertainment, on standards of public conduct, and on the limits proper to government, even if the other person’s primary interest isn’t identical to yours, will help mightily to restore your confidence and resilience. Indeed, it’s essential to the process.

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     There are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about the near future. This isn’t the nation it once was, and we certainly aren’t the men our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were. Even so, to detect a trend like this, in which persons who don’t share one another’s main focus come together for mutual support and encouragement, is a heartening thing.

     The great secret, the one our adversaries have always feared we would learn, is that we’re not alone. There are many of us, probably many more than are ranged against us. Our adversaries are more active, more vocal, and without moral or ethical inhibitions; that’s a large part of their disproportionate influence over the media. But as we find one another and realize our numbers, our influence is rising to match them. The powers that be, who’ve kowtowed to the noisy, disruptive minorities for years, are waking up to this fact right along with us.

     There remain reasons to hope. We are more than we knew – and if you’re a regular reader of Liberty’s Torch, so are you. I had to remind myself of that this morning, for reasons I’d rather not discuss. And it makes it possible for me to carry on.

     I hope it does the same for you.

An Idea That Might Prove...Fertile

I’ve decided that today will be put mainly to fiction, but I’ve hatched an idea that I find so fascinating that I thought I might expose it here for general reflection and commentary.

The nation has gone “recycling crazy,” with mandatory programs for the recycling of bottles, cans, and newspaper in nearly every town in America (despite the provable fact that such programs are totally unnecessary). The underlying ideas are that dump space is precious and must be conserved, and that if we fail to recycle certain things, we’ll run out of the materials they’re made from. The first of those propositions is hard to argue with, but the second one is easily refuted. However, the recycling concept isn’t inherently bad, when the economics of the matter are suitable (Cf. Thomas T. Thomas, First Citizen).

Very few writers ever apply basic economic principles to political power.

Political power is a variety of interpersonal relationship; it’s power wielded by some men over others. Note the implied requirement: to have power, there must be “others” over whom one can wield it. That makes those “others” – the rulers’ subjects – a scarce resource over which competing groups of rulers will contend.

This has more import than one might suppose at first blush. For example, among the topics of contention during the peace talks after World War I was the question of how to redraw the map of Europe so that the losing nations would lose rather than gain population. The totalitarian states of our time all practice strict border control to deter their subjects from even thinking of escape. During the Nineteenth Century, the western land frontier was a considerable impediment to the statist designs of eastern American politicians. To be a ruler, one must have people to rule.

Traditional concepts of war involve, in a simplistic sense, the clash of the armed forces of two warring nations. In such a view, the civil societies of those nations are important principally as economic engines to power their armies. Which army prevails will determine which government can impose its will on the other. But this is a short-term view of warfare, which according to Clausewitz is merely the continuation of politics by violent means.

In truth, nations don’t fight wars; governments do. The reason for every war ever fought, and for every war that ever will be, is that one or both of the combatant governments wants more power, or wants to retain what power it has.

Add that observation to this one: a government’s actual power is directly proportional to the number of its subjects.

What are they really fighting over?

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Among the truly important books of recent years, I place Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It high on the list. Steyn’s focus on demography, with particular emphasis on the decline in birth rates in First World nations, was a revelation to many persons who had no idea that any such trend was in progress. Yet that trend stands behind a huge percentage of recent political decisions, including the most pernicious of them: the ones that have largely surrendered Europe to invading hordes of savages from Islamic hellholes.

Steyn is not the first writer to notice that the First World is “underproducing people.” Ben Wattenberg noticed our decelerating willingness to breed in the late Eighties. When he tried to draw public attention to it, he was shrugged aside. At that time, the demographic fluxes that produced the current European calamity were just getting into gear; few foresaw the crisis they would eventually produce.

The correlation between prosperity and fertility is strong and negative. As people become wealthy, they sharply reduce their childbearing. Today the only First World nation with a “replacement level” birth rate is the United States; the native populations of all the other First World nations are steadily dwindling, with some below the “point of no return” level that guarantees their eventual extinction. To the typical Westerner, this is a non-problem. No progeny to give the nation a new generation? So what? We’re doing fine right here in the present; now shut up so we can enjoy Real Housewives of Dubuque. As I’ve written before, it’s tough to get people to concern themselves about descendants they simply don’t intend to have.

But to one whose drive is getting, increasing, and keeping power – i.e., a ruler or an aspiring ruler – it’s the biggest problem he can imagine.

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Here’s a possible future for you: a future in which every nation is at war with every other nation over the one thing that matters to any and every government.

The “use it or lose it” principle has finally reared its head in the most significant way: the human race is slowly losing the ability to reproduce. Birth rates are declining and censuses are dwindling all over the world. Former economic powerhouses have gone into steep, personnel-bound declines. Even Third World nations with traditionally high birth rates are no longer able to replace their populations through reproduction. Yet the international competition continues, whether overtly or covertly. Rulers simply must rule.

Artificial intelligence has proved to be a phantasm. Robots are useless for everything but fully repetitive, programmable tasks. Anything requiring reasoning ability must be “manned,” rather than “roboted.” In consequence, when someone outside the law is captured, his personality is electrochemically destroyed and replaced with a stored personality from a dead citizen of great value.

Alloplastic medicine has evolved to the heights, such that any part of the body other than nerve tissue can be replaced by an artificial organ. Thus, lifespans have skyrocketed...but the extension of bodily life has its limits, for the brain cannot be kept from wearing down, entering a period of terminal weariness, and shutting itself off permanently.

Farming is in crisis. It’s a task at which robots have proved ineffective. Food stocks can only be maintained by men and man-guided machines (e.g., harvesters, plows, etc.). Automation is applicable only to purely rote tasks and only in good weather.

Under such conditions, each government’s aims would necessarily be:

• To retain and conserve its own population;
• To encourage reproduction as far as medically possible;
• To seduce or kidnap the citizens of other nations and add them to its own populace.

Citizens who prove to be unusually fertile are also highly valued. However, they are restricted in nearly every way, as the nation cannot afford to risk them or allow them to risk themselves.

National borders are tightly controlled. Even the oceans are demarcated, and no citizen of country X ever ventures onto the waters without being electronically constrained to stay within X’s “national” waters.

Weapons of mass destruction would be regarded as Doomsday Devices. Even nations committed to total war against one another would quail at the thought of their use. A form of the “Tuareg truce” (cf. Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War) protects those in the all-important agricultural field...except that efforts to kidnap and forcibly expatriate such persons are licit and ongoing.

Even in times of “peace,” every government is quietly at war with every other over the one thing that’s ever mattered to a ruler: subjects to rule. Barring a wholly unexpected resurgence of human fertility, it’s a war that will go on until Kingdom Come.

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Scared yet? The above vision might strike you as unlikely –for many years we’ve been hectored about “too many people for the poor overburdened Earth to sustain” – but given demographic trends, it strikes me as more likely than a true overpopulation crisis. Indeed, it might be the likeliest of all futures, especially given the nature of power-lust and the moral-ethical vacuum in the mind of the typical ruler.

But I did say it was just an idea for a story, didn’t I? It’s just that the more I think about it, the more it seems as if it might come true...indeed, that it might be coming true right now, as you read this, before our very eyes.

Think it’s time to go jump the wife?

By the way: Happy Pi Day!

The Microcosm Part 2: Scailures

No proposition produced by human thought is context-independent. Every idea about cause and effect, however ingenious, pertains to a specific domain of applicability, outside which it will fail. Therefore, it is vital to understand both successes and failures in context.

Failure to acknowledge this truth is at the root of most failures in public policy. It's most devastating when an idea that works well in the small is unthinkingly scaled up and fails disastrously.

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Let's look at a few contexts for "social systems" and review their differences:

1. Nuclear family
2. Compact neighborhood
3. Village or small town
4. Large town / small city
5. Large city or state
6. The United States in toto

The nuclear family is almost always an autocracy. The breadwinner is the ultimate authority; his decisions are absolute and unreviewable by some higher power. He might not exercise totalitarian control of the rest of the family, but disputes they cannot solve -- especially disputes about finances -- will usually find their way to him. This works because the others are his dependents, and (teenaged children occasionally excepted) they acknowledge it. More, there can be little doubt that the breadwinner has the well-being of all the others as a very high priority. Otherwise he wouldn't stick around, would he?

A compact neighborhood, within which the residents are adequately acquainted with one another, tends to be demographically near to homogeneous. Though there is usually a substantial degree of good will among the residents, such that they will rally to one another's aid in times of crisis, under normal circumstances the individual households are expected to be self-supporting. Such a neighborhood recognizes a few "leader figures." Those persons don't have coercive authority; theirs is the influence that comes from general respect for their intelligence, knowledge, industry, humility, generosity, and other characterological factors. But respect of that sort and degree is harder to gather when one's radius increases to the size of a village or small town.

At the town or small city level, we begin to see the use of impersonal processes to select authorities. The population of a town of several thousand persons can't be intimate enough for neighborhood-style influence and trust factors to suffice for that purpose. More, at the town level demographic distinctions become possible that tend not to apply in a compact neighborhood of a few dozen families. This gives rise to competing attitudes, interests, and priorities that cannot be dealt with merely by the exercise of personal influence and general good will.

A large city magnifies the demographic diversity of the town / small city still further. More, if it is geographically compact relative to its population, there will be practical pressures to collectivize various facilities that in a more dispersed environment would be left to individual choice and effort. Political processes become ever more important, for no one will be disposed to trust decisions over the allocation of collectivized resources to anyone's personal decision making. The political problems of a state will be similar, despite the greater degree of geographical dispersion of its residents.

Note that as the aggregate populations under discussion become larger and (potentially) more demographically diverse, the degree of contention over what the system forces into the political orbit becomes greater and more quarrelsome. Mechanical processes such as elections contain no ingredient capable of damping the animosity that arises over "they got they wanted, but we didn't" outcomes. Worse, the larger the population, the more likely it is to "balkanize" into interest groups with mutually incompatible agendas, which will create a great cacophony (and no small amount of disorder) as they struggle with one another. Still worse, the larger the domain over which authorities, however selected, get to exercise their powers, the greater the draw of power-lust, which pulls in ever more venal, ever less "public spirited" contenders for such powers.

The United States of America, that fabled home of 150 million knuckle-dragging, gun-toting, beer-drinking, flag-waving Neanderthals and approximately an equal number of supercilious twits who dream of "re-educating" the Neanderthals by force, is the largest quasi-coherent social system Americans experience -- and its various mechanisms for making law, enforcing the law, allocating collectivized resources (e.g., national defense), and dealing with unforeseen developments operate in failure mode overwhelmingly more often than not. The number of things the federal system attempts to control is simply beyond the power of any central authority to manage or control. Special interests routinely dominate decision making. Perhaps 98% of Washington's demesne should be delegated to smaller systems -- the original point of a federal system. But at the top of that system we routinely find men who almost literally worship power. Whatever lip service they render to "serving the people," their true agenda is to stay where they are or ascend further in the hierarchy.

The troubles experienced at each level derive in large measure from the common, uncritical assumption that what works at smaller scales can be made to work at larger ones.

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Scaling-up failures arise most frequently from the failure to appreciate the emergence of demographic diversity, with all its varieties of traditions, customs, tastes, priorities, and time preferences. These things almost always account for the failure of successful small "pilot programs" to replicate their successes at the national level. However, the last thing any federal officeholder wants to admit is that we're not all alike. They'd much rather claim that "we need more money" or that "the wrong people were in control."

Sometimes the laws of nature come into play. A few homeowners with a few hours to spare each week can effectively protect a neighborhood. However, the thing comes apart when "neighborhood watch" techniques are applied to the protection of the national border. The geometry is simply against them. But even in a case such as border enforcement, there are demographic factors, including the diversity of the populations on both sides of the border, that can render the matter disproportionately more difficult than keeping watch over a compact neighborhood.

The implication for the citizen's proper attitude toward larger polities' tendency to suck power, authority, and resources away from smaller ones -- in particular toward Washington's tendency to suck power, authority, and resources out of the states -- should be clear. To the extent that politicization is allowed at all, decisions over the politicized issues must be forced downward to the smallest organizational unit capable of handling them, such that local assets, especially that of demographic homogeneity, can be kept in play. The demands of power-wielders and aspirants to power will nearly always be opposed to that attitude: a clear indication of the degree of trust any decent American should extend to them.