Mass Migration as Thermodynamic Equilibration

Protected Classes, Mass Migration, & the Beneficiaries of The Race Taboo

Beneficiaries of the Taboo of Race

If the read of our evolutionary history and present day tensions I have been presenting so far is directionally accurate, how come it’s repressed, made taboo, and represented as a fallacy? In human cognition, accuracy is orthogonal to survival (this is what I call the Truth-Fitness Divergence). Significant, coordinated power in human society is derived from the obfuscation of perfectly understandable realities. This is ongoing selection pressure for people to distort their models of both themselves and of the world in ways that benefit them. We come to see that when people don’t understand something, it is often not because it is too complex or hidden, but because seeing clearly reduces an exploitable energy gradient. So-called “consensus” reality is always optimized for the aggregate metabolic needs of the group. A strict mandate for tracking what is actually true only becomes a goal when ignoring it is perceived as immediately survival relevant. This is why well known or short-term survival risks will enter the calculation, but long term or unclear survival risks frequently will not. When the chain of causation is too complex or too distal, risk is often discounted right out of behavior. The Maximum Power Principle demands this. Short-term survival and reproductive advantage goes to those who keep their foot on the gas, regardless of what’s true. So-called “consensus” reality may overlap with truth, but that overlap is secondary to fitness. People who would attack the realities I present by labeling them as “fallacies” either: (1) don’t know or understand the data (they are merely echoing views they have internalized without careful evaluation from first principles); (2) they know it but can’t stand to say so out loud; (3) they know it but honestly believe acknowledging these realities causes more harm than maintaining preferred fictions (this is the “noble lie”); or (4) they are benefitting from the status quo and benefit metabolically by not seeing reality clearly. Notice that none of these reasons has anything to do with whether or not the arguments are false. When someone’s self image, social status, or model of the world depends on not understanding, you can be sure they will continue not understanding. The result is that, often, when facts are presented too clearly, people will experience a form of dissociation. This protects their identity and model of reality by blocking the offending, accurate information with a psychological firewall.

So who are the primary beneficiaries of models of reality that do not track truth? The short answer is: anyone who cannot compete under accurate accounting. The primary beneficiaries of blank slate ideology and unfalsifiable assertions of marginalization are people whose lower average performance gets attributed to discrimination rather than capability. Any group that cannot compete directly, collectivizes and attempts to win by attacking the epistemic commons. Which is to say, they attack our ability to understand reality itself. Instead of using measurable evaluations, they make moral assertions that have no bottom and cannot be strictly evaluated. They extract energy and status by claiming moral high ground through victimization and underdog narratives and similar. These strategies are used to justify energy extraction through preferential treatment, affirmative action, set-asides, preferences, reparations, and other schemes for the theft of resources. The move is an attempt to establish a caste system that is disconnected, and in some cases, directly inverse of actual capability. This caste system of the incompetent offers lower capability populations an excuse for their relative failures. Individual underperformance can be blamed on “systemic” rather than personal failures. They gain coalition power through a unified group identity around shared grievances and blanket protection from strict accountability. Now criticisms can be dismissed as racist, sexist, ableist, and similar. The result is a status inversion technology, so-called historical “oppression” is transformed into present-day, unearned privilege. So many people benefit from this that the prediction is that this process will persist until it is stopped by force through external pressure.

Consider the cost these beneficiaries would need to pay in order to begin to see reality clearly. They would need to acknowledge population-level capability differences. This would necessitate the loss of: moral authority, preferential treatment, coalition status, energy extraction mechanisms, and excuses for poor outcomes simultaneously. On the other side, staying in the fiction allows them to keep all of their current advantages, maintain status, avoid accountability, preserve coalition unity and pride, and continue extraction in whatever ways they possibly can with no cognitive dissonance or moral compunction. Of course they defend their status inversion ideology ferociously. For both women and people of color, this is the most valuable fiction that they have.

Even if institutional leadership privately knows what is going on they face legal liability and regulatory pressure for toeing the party line. Leaders must maintain coalition acceptance and moral high ground at all times or face employee revolt or political upheaval. Younger demographics have been especially indoctrinated with this ideology — this caste system of the weak. So even when CEOs, directors, politicians, and managers privately understand what’s going on, they cannot say so without destroying their position in the status hierarchy. Consensus reality reflects the combined metabolic needs of whoever is crafting the narrative. When there is energy to extract from deception, and costs are long term, there is insufficient selection pressure to overcome the metabolic cost of truth. The implication is clear: to overcome this, deception must be made more costly than truth.

Taboos act something like a low-pass filter in society. A system that relies on high-capacity coordination requires objective, high-fidelity information in order to function optimally — for example, meritocracy, competence-based hierarchies, and systems that demand rigorous verification. A taboo acts as a filter that suppresses high-fidelity information that would otherwise threaten a lower-capacity equilibrium. By making certain truths unspeakable, the system prevents the work of critical analysis and rational sorting based on actual competence. This protects lower-capacity participants from the pressures of a high-efficiency system, effectively shielding them from the reality of their own comparative lack of output. This shifts a proportion of the cost for carrying lower capacity (or simply extractive) populations onto the rest of society. It is a move to protect the average from the optimal. In a high-potential system, the optimal performers are the drivers of the conversion of raw materials into surplus organization and structure. However, if the majority of the population (what I am calling the “average”) lacks the capacity to reach those optimal outputs, they perceive high-capacity actors as a threat to their stability. Meritocracy is threatening precisely because it makes low effort look bad. So taboos around careful inspection of so-called “protected classes” serves to artificially flatten the gradient. Protected or “marginalized” status suppresses our ability to observe, track, and respond to real capability differences. The system, since it is ultimately politically driven, must cater to low capability populations, since they are the overwhelming majority. So, the preferential hiring and treatment of higher capacity individuals is made illegal. Pattern recognition about which groups tend to out-perform is cast as morally reprehensible. Directly sorting people by their observed capability and performance is penalized. This result is a collective operating under a banner of “equality,” that is physically incoherent. So we see that taboos are actually psychological mechanisms to prevent anyone from paying verification costs across protected domains. By refusing certain investigations as immoral and off-limits, the collective protects the aggregate human biomass, at the expense of both fitness and capability. The revealed optimization target of the human collective is scale — not sustainability, not capability, not honesty, and not strength or quality of life. This is the Maximum Power Principle. The society that outcompetes is the one that dissipates the most energy, not the one that is most adaptable, most agile, or most functional. Taboos that protect the low capacity from inspection are a form of systemic rot. It is the collective insulating itself from verifying its own health.

Once this is seen clearly, the list of classes with protected status is revealed for what it actually is: groups that cannot compete on their own merits. The very existence of protected status proves this. If these groups were competitive, no protected status would be required.

“Protected status” is itself a confession of competitive inferiority.

Anyone group that depends on legal and enforced preferential treatment is signaling to the rest of the world that they are not peers. This is the source of the intense status anxiety we observe among women and many ethnic groups. People naturally measure each other’s capabilities and the outcome of this measurement is also natural: the preferential treatment of higher capacity and higher fitness individuals. This automatic process of verification against reality is precisely what all systems of affirmative action and preferential treatment for protected groups seek to prevent: the simple, natural, and adaptive sorting that occurs along genetic and performance-based lines. By establishing taboos, legal structures, and moral claims that prevent measuring, comparing, and discussing capacity differences that are plainly visible between populations, lower-capacity groups have effectively made verification by measurement illegal. If you can’t talk about it, you can’t track it. By making noticing reality itself immoral, they have neutralized the very mechanism that would make a high-capability system functional. The parasite disables the immune response of the host. And it is worth noticing again, that this is only possible because of the temporary abundance of fossil fuels. The only reason we can even momentarily afford incompetence is the fleeting energy abundance that the world currently enjoys.

By branding the markers of high-capacity as moral failings, lower-capacity populations manufacture a protective buffer around themselves. They turn the system’s own moral framework against its highest-performing members. The taboos around protected classes reframe “excellence” as “inequality.” This is civilizational senescence. It is a transition from a system optimized for output and growth in the form of wealth, innovation, aggressive territorial acquisition, and new structure into a system that is optimized for status quo maintenance, social cohesion, and safety for all members, regardless of their contributions. This is the moral trap.

This trap is not limited to human sociology, however. In other biological systems, organisms that occupy a lower-resource niche often rely on “concealment” and “mimicry” to avoid being outcompeted, deleted by an immune response, or consumed by more aggressive, high-metabolism organisms. Taboos provide cover for parasitic strategies. They allow lower-capacity populations to survive within a high-potential system by hiding the capacity gap behind a veil of moral, political, and social rules. The culture war is, in part, a war over which taboos and moral claims will control the epistemic commons. In other words, how we make sense of reality. At bottom, the culture war is a war between the producers of society and the parasitic classes, that are entirely a byproduct of abundant energy-driven complexity. The ultimate, short-term beneficiary of this reality is not only the protected classes themselves — but the government. The government is the ultimate backstop for, and direct beneficiary of, the maintenance of a larger, more dependent, docile, and lower-capacity population. The reality we observe is the inevitable result of the pursuit of maximum energy dissipation.

Mass Migration is Thermodynamic Equilibration

The current phenomena of mass migration that is going on globally is a process of thermodynamic equilibration, not policy as such. Once disadvantaged populations in lower capacity and lower income countries realized they could simply migrate to take advantage of the relative abundance and status of higher income countries, this created thermodynamic pressure seeking equilibrium. So long as immigration is physically possible, we can predict it will continue until any gradient between countries is flattened. This is exactly the same physics as having two tanks of water connected by a pipe. If the water is allowed to flow freely between the two containers, the water levels will balance, finding equilibrium. Or, you can think of this in the context of gas. Imagine two propane tanks, like those you bring camping for your stove. If you connect the two tanks with a tube, the pressure of the gas in each tank equilibrates. This is exactly what is going on with immigration. Individuals from lower-capacity societies migrate to higher capacity ones, because the perceived benefits outweigh the transition costs. Or better, imagine there are two rooms filled with people. One room is comfortable. The other room is crowded. If the two rooms were unlocked, people would be predicted to move between them until a rough balance was achieved. But now, let’s sharpen the analogy further, to more closely mirror what’s going on with immigration. Imagine that the two rooms didn’t just differ in terms of population density, but that one room also had a free lunch buffet. You can imagine which room would become more popular. However, as the room with the buffet increases in popularity, it becomes difficult and then impossible to maintain either the comfortable population density or the free buffet that made it the preferred room in the first place.

So we see that when people are against immigration, they aren’t being racist or xenophobic per se. Instead, they are accurately perceiving that their relative advantage is disappearing in real time as the energy equilibrates between two thermodynamic gradients. While on the other side, when people are for immigration, this is because they are correctly perceiving an increase in positional advantage to their group or adjacent groups. There are also secondary reasons people are pro-immigration. These come in the form of internalized guilt narratives and naive beliefs about equal abundance for all. “Equal abundance for all” is a nice idea, but it is entirely incoherent in physical reality. To understand why, we need to step back and reflect on why different populations created different forms of government and divergent cultures in the first place. We do not have to wonder whether human populations are different from each other, in either capability or coordination strategies, because the proof is all around us. The existence of vastly different cultures, spread across different parts of the globe, that evolved under distinct selection pressures that selected for different strategies, capabilities, and social norms is incontrovertible evidence that people are different and that those cognitive and behavioral differences create very divergent results. India is different from America because the two countries have different thermodynamic histories that produced different types of people. The current state of any individual country is an aggregate readout of its collective intelligence, thermodynamic history, and organizational capacity. So when countries accept mass migration, the expectation is that the delta between the countries will flatten. And this is, indeed, the outcome we observe. The gradient between first-world and developing nations flattens. This is why, while we may wish the best for everyone, the reality is that we are equalizing a pressure differential that was itself the source of our relative advantage. The higher capacity nation experiences a net loss of energy. Understanding this dynamic is separate from deciding what to do with the information. But seeing this clearly is the first step to making policy that makes any sense. The higher potential nation loses energy by accepting the citizens from a lower capacity nation. Lower capacity nations are composed of lower capacity citizens and social structures. They are starting from a different position — that’s what history is. That is why the aggregate is lower capacity. We may not like hearing this, but it is nonetheless an accurate assessment of a trivially observable reality. The taboo protects the lower capacity and prevent us from squaring off with uncomfortable realities.

Rehabilitating MLK’s “Dream”

The original civil rights movement sought to remove barriers and enable individual competition. What emerged instead was a permanent grievance industry requiring continuous energy input in order to attempt an aspirational form of equality that is impossible to instantiate in physical reality. At present, this apparatus extracts billions annually through various government programs, DEI initiatives, implicit bias training, diversity consulting, asylum programs, and disparate impact litigation. The extraction requires maintaining several energetically expensive fictions: (1) that population capability distributions are identical, (2) that outcome differences prove discrimination, and (3) that continuous intervention can eventually produce so-called “equitable” results. The system must resolve these unfalsifiabilities through fragmentation, authoritarianism, or finally, the acknowledgment of actual reality. The choice isn’t whether to accept differences; differences between people and outcomes are inescapable facts of physical reality. Reality is literally a fixed structure of self-consistent asymmetries. The only choice is whether we waste our remaining civilizational capacity fighting thermodynamics or to align both policy and discourse with the constraints of physical reality. It is my hope that we make the most of what time and energy we have available.

The only way to rehabilitate the fair treatment and integration dream of the 1960s would be to move from moral discussions to practical ones. Not, “What should we do?” but “What actually happens when we do XYZ?” Not, “Is this fair?” but “Does this work?” Not “Does this align with my values?” but “Does this align with objective reality, according to physics?” Careful analysis leads to alignment with the observable universe. And that is the only platform for quality engineering.

So, while the civil rights movement of the 1960s sought to remove barriers and enable individual competition — it attempted to achieve this result by doing the exact opposite. It successfully established legal barriers against the free and natural sorting of populations based on people’s actual preferences and capacity by establishing doctrines of so-called “equal” treatment under law. The aspirational ideals had wide appeal. People had a real optimism that merit-based competition would arise from these new legal restrictions and barriers placed on hiring and education. The hope was that these restrictions would allow otherwise gatekept, but capable individuals to rise, regardless of race or sex. Initially, through the 1970s and 1980s, this seemed to be observably working — the black middle class grew, educational attainment increased, explicit discrimination declined, and integration felt increasingly natural and unforced. However, instead of declaring victory and removing the legal restrictions that forced unequal treatment of “protected” classes, and moving towards a truly integrated merit-based society, the same apparatus that was built to “address” the natural in-group preferences that had been relabeled as “discrimination” converted itself into a permanent industry of parasitic extraction under a cloak of virtue. The legal and moral apparatus had already been erected. The goal shifted from “equal opportunity” to “equity” (meaning: equal outcome, irrespective of input and preferential treatment for specific groups). This is a system that could only have come from the incompetent, the dependent, the parasite, and those incapable of free-living, those without an awareness of what surplus production means or the capacity to compete on an even playing field. This completely incoherent pursuit of “equity” requires exponentially increasing energy because it has no cap on extraction since it does not produce anything of value. It requires: affirmative action, disparate impact doctrine, diversity bureaucracies, implicit bias training, preferential treatment and hiring of women and specific ethnic groups, active suppression of talent that comes from the “wrong” demographic, denial of observable realities that contradict preferred moral claims, and so on. The blank slate assumption ossified into dogma where any group differences in outcomes could be explained through discrimination or an unfalsifiable retreat to “marginalization,” creating leverage and moral cover for ongoing extraction. No one stopped to ask if the ability to discriminate actually made sense. As countries become more diverse and more complex, and as energy surplus contracts, the coordination costs of forced integration became increasingly visible — and resented — by previously homogenous populations that are now carrying this parasitic load, imported by governments desperate to maintain their own complexity and structure. How does the parasite solve its insolvency? By importing more parasites. What was supposed to be a temporary bridge towards meritocracy became a permanent, authoritarian management system that demands constant narrative enforcement, speech restriction, and institutional capture. The interventions that were supposed to reduce racial and intersexual friction have instead generated exponentially more, demanding increasingly aggressive and expensive suppression while at the same time the overall energy available to the system is in decline. Both the incentive structures that drove cooperation and the resource base are contracting. The relative equilibrium of the 1980s and 1990s was possible because we had not yet hit either the energy or the complexity ceiling. In writing this piece, I set out to see if I could rehabilitate the beautiful dream of an egalitarian society. After careful inquiry, what I was left with is the recognition that Martin Luther King’s dream was an inspiring, aspirational target. But it was one that happens to require infinite growth in order to sustain.

Predictions

The thermodynamic predictions are straightforward. As civilizational energy contracts and as complexity increases, multiethnic egalitarianism becomes impossible to fund because the required energy to offset the verification and coordination costs will not exist. When resources become scarce and incentives for cooperation become severed, the energy required to suppress natural in-group preferences, and to enforce unearned status advantages, will exceed the available surplus. The system will then resolve this shortfall through fragmentation. The highest complexity scales of organization will degrade first as populations self-segregate in order to reduce coordination costs and more efficiently police coalition boundaries. This will lead to increased authoritarian control, as the state attempts to suppress natural sorting and ethnic competition, or eventual violent conflict when neither peaceful fragmentation nor suppression succeeds. When the energy surplus ends or when systems become too complex to manage their own information channels, reality reasserts itself and forces an immediate reconciliation for our aspirational, imagination-based bookkeeping. Under energy constraint, coerced and aspirational “equality” becomes energetically impossible for the state to maintain. In-group preferences intensify. Multiethnic states will increasingly face the pressure to fragment, or require strict authoritarian control, in order to remain feasible. As energy declines and civilizations begin shedding complexity, hierarchies will increasingly reform to reflect people’s actual capabilities, instead of their preferred ideologies.