Escaping the Permanent Underclass

Morality, Regained

It’s an exciting time to be alive. We are witnessing the birth of a new order to the human world.

Occasionally, people will ask me what common practice will be considered universally barbaric by our descendants. There’s a common but unintelligent answer, which is eating meat. People who answer this way have not thought about the issue or are ignorant of the fact that Rawlsian egalitarianism is already in freefall. Because the moral framework of the world is shifting, all correct answers lie on a different moral framework, not an extension of the old framework.

The obvious answer is our tolerance of crime, which is already considered barbaric in East Asia.

The image of irreparable corruption in the American criminal system is something to celebrate, not to mourn. That image is caused by the rapid ascent¹ in human morality, not a decline in legal practice.

The existence of pro-criminal judges is made out to be a grand conspiracy. It is indeed true that leftist judges release criminals early and allow them to rape, injure, or kill more innocent people. They create innumerable idealisms to defend this practice. Racial justice. Mental health. Criminals’ rights. All are reverse engineered from the judges’ emotion and desired outcomes. So it is no mistake to observe that some American judges are pro-criminal. But it is a mistake to blame this on a conspiracy of elites, say, Soros or Clinton and their subordinates. There may be elites who support criminality, but they are the effect, not the cause.

Uncensored media has triggered a preference cascade so widespread and deeply affecting that those who witness America’s tolerance for crime cannot attribute it to anything other than a devious plot.

American judges are pro-criminal because the American people were pro-criminal. Wide swathes of the American public and politicians of both Democratic and Republican parties supported pro-criminal policies. The terrorist left bombed the public and assassinated political figures during the 1960s and were rewarded with special civil rights. Anti-psychiatry because a cause celebre in the public eye and Reagan released asylum inmates into the public. Activist judges invented new criminal rights from whole cloth and the public celebrated.

Meanwhile, media was highly censored. Violent terrorists were celebrated as civil rights leaders when they should have been the target of airstrikes. All of this can and will be reversed, until the criminal underclass of America is rightly treated as Israel treats Hamas.²

The boomer public, including many Republicans, were part of this atrocious crime and coverup. It was the sentiment of the day, the current thing. Civil rights, criminal rights, and such deranged idealisms could sweep the country with little reporting on the practical consequences of their pro-crime policies. In 2026, everyone knows that being pro-criminal means that criminals commit more crime. Because of uncensored media, more people find out when criminals commit more crime. Americans can see the practical truth in countries like Singapore and El Salvador. Removing criminals from society reduces crime and drastically improves public quality of life. All of this has resulted in a tremendous shift in public opinion, that despite recent improvements, the past and present crime rate in America is intolerably high, and our remaining pro-criminal policies are unacceptable.

It is not the case that American law enforcement has gotten significantly less competent. In some places, the opposite is true. But the positive shift in American anti-criminal morality has outpaced any physical reduction of crime.

The shift has been so rapid that the American public has a tough time imagining how pro-crime their parents and grandparents were. The only way they can envision our current policies coming about is through some grand conspiracy. While the application remains schizophrenic, this is still a moral victory to be celebrated.

We are seeing the spiral of civilization re-emerge, first on the internet, and then in the world.

Escaping the Permanent Underclass

“Escaping the permanent underclass” is an amazing double entendre.

The premise of the original phrase is that AI will automate everyone’s jobs, which is a silly premise for the economically illiterate that deserves to be immediately disregarded.

What makes this phrase genius is that there is a real permanent underclass. And you have to escape their reach to enjoy your life.

By 2040, it likely makes zero sense to hire a human with a substantive criminal record. It may be equally inadvisable to hire any human with a record of suing their employer or leaking to journalists. There’s already a permanent underclass, people who are unhirable due to their tendency to violence, fraud, or other damage to the company. And they’re the permanent underclass you need to escape from. Civil rights law, age discrimination, unions, and other forms of socialism have attempted to make it difficult for man alone to escape from the permanent underclass. But AI, providential as it is, might make it possible for us.

This interpretation transforms “escaping the permanent underclass” from a premise with zero historical precedent to a practical action with plenty of historical precedent. Wartime refugees, fleeing ethnic pogroms, white flight³, and communist dissidents all had to “escape the permanent underclass”.

Escaping the permanent underclass, in the correct sense, is already happening. It’ll keep happening in new and interesting ways. Instead of moving to a new suburb, you might move to a new country.

Schizophrenic Populism

Populists blame a morally outrageous elite to hide their acceptance of a morally outrageous public.

My favorite argument for bombing Iran is “Iran is funding the terrorist left in America”. Which terrorist left co-belligerent will we be bombing? Obviously, we will not be bombing any of the terrorist left, who murder more American civilians in a month than Iran ever has or ever will.

There is a twisted logic to leftist and populist morality. The core thesis of populism is that elites are to blame, not the lower classes. Elites keep secrets, unlike the underclass who do their rapes and murders in public. In a sense, that is because even criminal elites have a better understanding of morality than the criminal underclass, who lack the basic foresight to expect their crimes to be punished.

Populism in practice looks like British cops arresting Prince Andrew on “state secrets” charges while they won’t arrest your block’s grooming gang. It’s not that Epstein shouldn’t have been arrested — it’s that his arrest should be ordinary. Epstein should be one of one hundred thousand shaved heads in an El Savador-style prison.

The ecstatic frenzy of internet populism delays its own victories by poisoning its own moral premises with schizophrenic delusions.

For instance, the Epstein scandal has predictably turned into a weapon of the leftist war on distinction. It is now a cudgel to imply that your average pedophile is an investor or CEO, instead of looking exactly like the rest of the criminal underclass. This has led many populists to swallow the leftist delusion that America’s problems are caused by the top 1%. In reality, 90% of America’s problems are caused by the bottom 1%. Virtually all of America’s problems are caused by the bottom 25%.

Providential Technologies

Make a list of the few legal ways that people are rewarded for good decisions and punished for bad decisions. Stock trading, social media, and prediction markets — basically the top three moral panics of our day. They are pathways for people to face merely financial⁴ consequences for their actions. The dying egalitarian order will try to ban all technologies and institutions which reward good decisions and punish bad decisions. In history, they have largely succeeded.

Social media is one of few things in modern life that rewards good and punishes evil. The most interesting, hardworking, and fun people I’ve ever met have all been through social media. Social media gives you what you want. If you want good, it gives you good. If you want evil, it gives you evil. Instead of reflecting, maturing, or even changing one’s preferences, the leftist and sometimes populist reaction has been to ban social media from schools, ban people under 18 from social media entirely, or to attack civilizational infrastructure such as datacenters. Populists follow all the rules of Shakespearean tragedy, destroying necessary paths to displace boomer morality. The same can be said for prediction markets or AI.

A popular theory of civilizational decline posits we need war and starvation to get truthful feedback. But truth finds a way. Truth has found a way in heavy industry, finance, and posting, until the force of the law bans distinction.

Funeral Parties

John Rawls has been dead for more than 20 years. Paul Ehrlich died this year. Peter Singer is 79; hopefully his clock is running out too. As I have written in long form, civilization requires the distinction between better and worse. All the evil men who have tried to erase or morally devalue this basic civilizational direction are dying. Philosophy is healing, funeral by funeral.

The twenty-first century will be a time of great moral reckoning, in which the plain truth that egalitarian idealisms hide are available to all. So if you believe in hard truths over convenient lies, take hope in the fact that the caskets we bury won’t return for several political eras.

I’ve been settling on a new aesthetic for the changing times ahead.

My old aesthetic was wartime abundance: there are people who want to make America poorer, lazier, and more criminal. They are evil, cannot be reasoned with, and we must destroy them with overwhelming force.

That’s still true, but it’s not an appropriate aesthetic for building new companies, software, and philosophies. So what’s the new aesthetic? It’s providence — bringing a disco ball to Paul Ehrlich’s funeral.

1. more accurately, rediscovery

2. For instance, Hamas killed roughly 1200 people on October 7th, which is roughly 22 days of work for the American criminal underclass.

3. To the very limited extent it differs from fleeing other ethnic pogroms

4. not physical or mortal