When the Western Roman Empire fell in 476 AD, Europe didn’t descend into pitch-black oblivion. Trade persisted in pockets, monasteries preserved scraps of learning, and the Eastern Empire continued on as Byzantium. Yet stagnation gripped the West for centuries. Aqueducts decayed into ruins, literacy withered to a privilege of the few, and once-thriving urban centers shrank into muddy villages. Progress didn’t vanish - it froze. The population dwindled, economies contracted, and the grand ideas of antiquity - reason, engineering, governance - faded into obscurity, waiting centuries for a Renaissance to revive them. Today, as the West grapples with demographic decline, eroding trust, and absurd population growth in the Global South, we might ask: are we teetering on the edge of a new 'dark age'? Not a collapse into literal darkness, but a dimming of the liberal, enlightened systems that dragged us out of the first one - a modern Dark Age with a regressive soul.
On Competence and Trust
A hot topic in the news today is the ongoing 'competency crisis' which is being used to explain declining test scores, lowering average IQ, worsening infrastructure, planes falling out of the sky, and our sudden interest in banana republican Caudillos insistent on dissolving our institutions. Since 2000, U.S students have slid in global and domestic measures, which seems to lend legitimacy to this hypothesis. PISA scores show a 28-point drop in math, science has dipped 10 points, and reading has dipped between 5 - 10 points in addition to ACT scores hitting a 30-year low. I found no longitudinal data for IQ, but proxies (like SAT scores) fell ~20 points, representing an average IQ loss of ~2-3 points which is very significant over a short period, reversing the Flynn effect. The country is rife with anti-intellectualism and distrust in our institutions, government, and professional class dropping to historical lows. In the 1960's ~55%+ said "most people can be trusted". In 2023, Pew trends estimated ~25 - 30% with the same sentiment, a reduction of about half. In 1958, Pew search showed that 73% of people trusted the government. That number is 16% today. Media confidence, congress approval, and trust in our professional class and intellectual institutions are all performing the same or usually worse.
On Population and The Global South
The contemporary West faces another serious problem: its population. In 1950, Europe and North America were 22% of the population. Today, it's about 12% and falling steadily - projected to fall to 8% by 2050. Meanwhile, Africa's share rises from 9% to 25%. This is a substantial fact which will become relevant later.
This massive shift has profound implications for global stability, sustainability, and global power structures. Africa and India already have absurdly large populations and these populations continue to rise exponentially. Many of these countries are sustained directly or indirectly by massive amounts of foreign aid through IMF, the UN, and non profits. ~60% of Indian STEM PhDs studied abroad, pointing to a broader trend of brain drain and a massive dependency on Western institutions (which are evidently in decline). Even with this support coming from increasingly strained Western governments, 600 million in Africa lack electricity, India's cities choke on pollution, and few governments show any interest in long term environmental sustainability goals. These countries are extremely urbanized, with 40% of India's urbanites living in slums and 80% of sewage flowing untreated into rivers like the Ganges, similar trends hold in Africa. Climate change continues to displace millions (143 million projected by 2050).
Few, if any countries in the global south have any interest in the liberal tradition unless it was imposed on them by colonial overlords or IS a conditional imposition on them as a conditional for receiving foreign aid (which we can't assume will be around forever). Many of these nations echo pre-feudal stagnation - 70% of Indians prefer same-caste unions, tribalism and ethnic strife persists in Africa, wildly stratified class problems persist, and corrupt governments (or no government at all) is more common than a pluralist democracy or republic. To make matters worse, these countries align themselves with Eurasian powers like Russia and China, committing themselves to an anti-Western, pro-authoritarian pact.
On the 'Caudillo' and the Dark Age
Finally, there is the threat at home. Social, class, and ethnic strife in the West has given rise to classes of populist politicians like Donald Trump who, despite the common refrain, represents something far closer to a Central or South American Caudillo than someone like Hitler or a European monarch. These populists, in my view, prey on declining social trust, eroding institutions, and class stratification to consolidate wealth and power for the vultures looking to pick the empires carcass clean, much like Ricimer did in his day. Increasingly, we find ostensibly 'nationalist' or 'patriot' groups like MAGA aligning themselves with the Eurasian axis of Russia and China, praising their institutions and leaders while denigrating our own. People - especially the older generations - seem confounded: "how could this happen to my America?".
The answer - to me - is a simple one: the erosion of the WASP consensus and the inability of liberal democracies to act on the Schmittian exception and prevent the rise of populism and 'Caudilloism'. The contemporary West has no consensus culturally, ethnically, or politically. It is a low trust, chaotic, disjointed, ignorance-worshipping mass of angry peasants which is governed by a sclerotic, ineffective, and will-less democracy which has been (in many ways) rightly identified as no longer having the ability to maintain a status quo. The fracturing and atomization of our nation has left us an identity-less mass with no coherent metanarrative to guide our sociopolitical angst, always feeling betrayed and so, so desperate for just a crumb, a small nibble of a solution from our elites. Such an environment is, of course, fertile ground for the ambitious populist.
And so we enter the Dark Age. There is perhaps no better way to predict the future than to look at what the freshest faction of elites are maneuvering toward. There are some we can look to: namely, 'small tech' oligarchs like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. They more or less conclude that there are trends (some of which I've mentioned) which are irreversible and the only thing that will save us (well them, actually) from the impending Dark Age is this 'effective accelerationism' which posits AI and technology will extricate the nobles and aristocracy from the burgeoning slum class and give way to a technocratic neo-feudalism to ride out the Kali Yuga. To be clear - I greatly resent this class of people and I think they represent exactly the elite class you would expect from late stage liberal capitalism, but I do think their premonition about societies future state is prescient, even if their solution is self serving.
In conclusion, I admit some of my blog post here is somewhat hyperbolic, if sincere. I don't think we're heading for some inevitable chaos, but I do think the trends are ominous and I do hold that few, if any, are presenting real solutions to any of these issues. Liberals are too concerned with tact and presentation and conservatives insist on being regressive and anti-intellectual, only expediting the process in many ways.
Sources:
(Edit: Listed them originally, but they blew up my post size. Will happily provide citations if asked for)
On Competence and Trust
A hot topic in the news today is the ongoing 'competency crisis' which is being used to explain declining test scores, lowering average IQ, worsening infrastructure, planes falling out of the sky, and our sudden interest in banana republican Caudillos insistent on dissolving our institutions. Since 2000, U.S students have slid in global and domestic measures, which seems to lend legitimacy to this hypothesis. PISA scores show a 28-point drop in math, science has dipped 10 points, and reading has dipped between 5 - 10 points in addition to ACT scores hitting a 30-year low. I found no longitudinal data for IQ, but proxies (like SAT scores) fell ~20 points, representing an average IQ loss of ~2-3 points which is very significant over a short period, reversing the Flynn effect. The country is rife with anti-intellectualism and distrust in our institutions, government, and professional class dropping to historical lows. In the 1960's ~55%+ said "most people can be trusted". In 2023, Pew trends estimated ~25 - 30% with the same sentiment, a reduction of about half. In 1958, Pew search showed that 73% of people trusted the government. That number is 16% today. Media confidence, congress approval, and trust in our professional class and intellectual institutions are all performing the same or usually worse.
On Population and The Global South
The contemporary West faces another serious problem: its population. In 1950, Europe and North America were 22% of the population. Today, it's about 12% and falling steadily - projected to fall to 8% by 2050. Meanwhile, Africa's share rises from 9% to 25%. This is a substantial fact which will become relevant later.
This massive shift has profound implications for global stability, sustainability, and global power structures. Africa and India already have absurdly large populations and these populations continue to rise exponentially. Many of these countries are sustained directly or indirectly by massive amounts of foreign aid through IMF, the UN, and non profits. ~60% of Indian STEM PhDs studied abroad, pointing to a broader trend of brain drain and a massive dependency on Western institutions (which are evidently in decline). Even with this support coming from increasingly strained Western governments, 600 million in Africa lack electricity, India's cities choke on pollution, and few governments show any interest in long term environmental sustainability goals. These countries are extremely urbanized, with 40% of India's urbanites living in slums and 80% of sewage flowing untreated into rivers like the Ganges, similar trends hold in Africa. Climate change continues to displace millions (143 million projected by 2050).
Few, if any countries in the global south have any interest in the liberal tradition unless it was imposed on them by colonial overlords or IS a conditional imposition on them as a conditional for receiving foreign aid (which we can't assume will be around forever). Many of these nations echo pre-feudal stagnation - 70% of Indians prefer same-caste unions, tribalism and ethnic strife persists in Africa, wildly stratified class problems persist, and corrupt governments (or no government at all) is more common than a pluralist democracy or republic. To make matters worse, these countries align themselves with Eurasian powers like Russia and China, committing themselves to an anti-Western, pro-authoritarian pact.
On the 'Caudillo' and the Dark Age
Finally, there is the threat at home. Social, class, and ethnic strife in the West has given rise to classes of populist politicians like Donald Trump who, despite the common refrain, represents something far closer to a Central or South American Caudillo than someone like Hitler or a European monarch. These populists, in my view, prey on declining social trust, eroding institutions, and class stratification to consolidate wealth and power for the vultures looking to pick the empires carcass clean, much like Ricimer did in his day. Increasingly, we find ostensibly 'nationalist' or 'patriot' groups like MAGA aligning themselves with the Eurasian axis of Russia and China, praising their institutions and leaders while denigrating our own. People - especially the older generations - seem confounded: "how could this happen to my America?".
The answer - to me - is a simple one: the erosion of the WASP consensus and the inability of liberal democracies to act on the Schmittian exception and prevent the rise of populism and 'Caudilloism'. The contemporary West has no consensus culturally, ethnically, or politically. It is a low trust, chaotic, disjointed, ignorance-worshipping mass of angry peasants which is governed by a sclerotic, ineffective, and will-less democracy which has been (in many ways) rightly identified as no longer having the ability to maintain a status quo. The fracturing and atomization of our nation has left us an identity-less mass with no coherent metanarrative to guide our sociopolitical angst, always feeling betrayed and so, so desperate for just a crumb, a small nibble of a solution from our elites. Such an environment is, of course, fertile ground for the ambitious populist.
And so we enter the Dark Age. There is perhaps no better way to predict the future than to look at what the freshest faction of elites are maneuvering toward. There are some we can look to: namely, 'small tech' oligarchs like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. They more or less conclude that there are trends (some of which I've mentioned) which are irreversible and the only thing that will save us (well them, actually) from the impending Dark Age is this 'effective accelerationism' which posits AI and technology will extricate the nobles and aristocracy from the burgeoning slum class and give way to a technocratic neo-feudalism to ride out the Kali Yuga. To be clear - I greatly resent this class of people and I think they represent exactly the elite class you would expect from late stage liberal capitalism, but I do think their premonition about societies future state is prescient, even if their solution is self serving.
In conclusion, I admit some of my blog post here is somewhat hyperbolic, if sincere. I don't think we're heading for some inevitable chaos, but I do think the trends are ominous and I do hold that few, if any, are presenting real solutions to any of these issues. Liberals are too concerned with tact and presentation and conservatives insist on being regressive and anti-intellectual, only expediting the process in many ways.
Sources:
(Edit: Listed them originally, but they blew up my post size. Will happily provide citations if asked for)
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