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Historical Context for Unprecedented Times

As long as I can remember I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell is up with other people. My lived experience of being a human seemed to diverge so greatly from other people’s self-reports, and even more greatly from how people talked about Human Nature, that I couldn’t reconcile the gap. I felt suspicious of others’ universal descriptions of How People Are, normally because they implied that I either didn’t exist, or that I currently didn’t qualify as a “person” to them and at some unknown date in the future I was to be transformed into a “person”, something that would be quite alien and distressing to my current self.

I was equally suspicious when people would attribute various dysfunction in the world around us to The Way Things Are, perhaps sometimes scoped to a particular Label for the way things are like “Capitalism”, “Liberal Democracy”, “Industrial Society”, or simply “Society”. But since I didn’t have any lived experience with other societies, and my reading habits never took me to descriptions of different societies,¹ and no one around me knew much about how we got here nor seemed interested in the topic, the question of “what the hell is up with Right Now, historically?” never became a pursuit of mine. Up until recently, I mostly stuck to trying to have fun, learning skills, and pondering wtf is up with people.

Eventually, investigating wtf is up with people led me to investigating wtf is up with history (how did we get here, what’s similar and very different between now and the past decades, past centuries), and across the years of 2020-2025 I spent a lot of time, sometimes casually and sometimes full-time, Digging Into Things.

This involved (among other things) lots of posting on twitter and riding the lockdown TPOT wave, joining a research discord/group blog with others who were reading widely and getting lots of recommendations for paths to traverse through the Great Citation Web, reading a lot of the blogs in the anti-anti-normativity cluster, reading a lot of the American Pragmatist canon and mid/late 20th century post-modernist stuff, eventually leaving the discord because the founders were serious about Pragmatism, chatting irl a lot with Ben Hoffman and Michael Vassar, stumbling onto the fact that for 100 years in America we’ve been intentionally sabotaging literacy and finding that surprising enough I did a whole research project on the history of the American school system.

It turned out that history was essential for understanding how people are today. As of the year of our Lord 2026, my understanding of these things has finally coalesced into a set of claims and models that are clear enough for me to put down in writing. Most of the history I bring in and the then-vs-now claims I make are scoped specifically to the United States, both because that’s where I’m from and where I live, and because over the course of this research I’ve come to better understand America’s historical uniqueness and prominence in world events.

Domestication Studies

There are two main clusters in my thought here; the first might be called “Psycho-Spiritual Domestication Studies”. It’s about how people can be coerced/conditioned/confused/dominated/psyopped/traumatized/whatever-your-favorite-word-is in ways that plastically deform them into being stupider and having worse moral character than they otherwise would have, ultimately making them more responsive to threats and easier to control with less force than has been historically needed to control our rather unruly species.² ³

The historical side of this topic is a claim that people in the United States today are on average noticeably dumber, less competent, less literate, and have less integrity than they did in much of this country’s past. This change mostly started in the decades after the Civil War, and was enacted via the creation of our mass compulsory school system, something which at the time was historically unique and only had precedence in Prussia.⁴ The change was a slow burn with respect to any given generation, but relatively short in broad historical time. Since its beginnings, our centralized mass schooling system has been characterized by two core moves: 1) claiming credit for people having skills they already had before it existed, while at the same time reducing the rate of those skills,⁵ and 2) demanding more and more right to control and use force on children and parents, all while avoiding the actual responsibilities that such rights would entail and enshrining that unaccountability in law and culture.⁶ This fundamental hypocrisy is the main lesson school hammers into children; other people have control over your time and your body simply because They Are In Charge, the actual conditions in schools can diverge arbitrarily far from the conditions that could theoretically justify such control and that divergence will never result in control being loosened. If people demand you do a lot of fake bullshit, you gotta do a lot of fake bullshit.

School is the first stage in the modern making-people-worse pipeline. It’s the institution that gets you the youngest and has the most control over you physically. It lays the groundwork for stupefaction and domestication, but it’s other institutions, the ones that pressure you into doing things you actively think are wrong, that seem to really fuck people up morally. Moral Injury is a key dimension of trauma that is often ignored. In the military, though the focus of things like PTSD is on the Intense Moments Of Violence, soldiers frequently report that what shatters them is when they are ordered to do things they think are wrong, or when the people in charge of them who they depend on betray their sense of what is right. In the corporate world, the culture of Moral Mazes and the Professionals Dilemma constitute an environment where people are expected to be passively and actively dishonest. In order to succeed in such places, you have to abandon your naive moral intuitions, understand that you are expected to cover up anything that would make your boss look bad, and never be so foolish as to assume your boss could update on surprising information. Staying in such environments for long enough often leads to people developing a persistent sense of shame and cynicism that makes them incapable of operating authentically and with integrity in less perverse environments.

The Dismantling of Republican Liberalism

The second cluster in my thinking could be called “The Dismantling of Republican Liberalism”. The core claim is that a lot of our social/political/legal/economic institutions that existed in the 1800s were basically functional, responsible for our massive wealth, and that the dysfunction which grew across the 1900s was not a result of these institutions Not Being Up To The Task Of Modern Life; it’s that they were intentionally dismantled by people who often wrote books and essays about how they intended to dismantle said institutions.⁷ There really were times that we had something worthy of being called rule of law and not of men, and there really were times when we had things worthy of being called free markets. The dismantling of our institutions happened gradually over the course of several generations, and all the while there’s been a lot of narrative control pushing the idea that things are business as usual, things are how they’ve always been. A lot of the foundational legwork for these changes was done by the end of the 1930s, though hadn’t fully percolated into daily life, the 1970s was when most things exploded and shit hit the fan, though with a lot of confusion about why or what was happening, and 2008 was a big masks-off vibeshift moment when a lot of institutions stopped implicitly agreeing that they should at least still pretend we are a liberal republic, and the public-facing insanity seems to have been in a negative spiral since.

Though many institutions got fucked, it seems like you can get the highest order bits by tracking 3 of them: the school system, the banking/monetary system, and the legal system.

I already talked about the school system as the historical side of domestication studies, and it seems like creating that machine was a key move that made it possible to slowly dismantle everything else.

The banking and monetary side of things I’ve basically taken from Ben Hoffman and his work in The Debtor’s Revolt and The Domestic Product. His main point is that there exists a collective strategy where members of a coalition all tacitly support each other in increasingly implausible More Growth Now, GIGANTIC Yields In Your Area! pyramid-scheme type thinking that ignores basic considerations of solvency. This behavior would make no sense individually and be rapidly self-limiting, but if such a coalition can make sure they’re all making the same kinds of correlated stupid decisions, and they can muscle their way into being in charge of more and more things, then, when the music stops and shit explodes, they all go down together, and now there’s a big angry group that can lobby together for bailouts. And if such a coalition gets control of the United States over the course of the World Wars, wars in whose aftermath basically the entire rest of the world was bankrupt and owed the U.S. money, then there’s no outside credit/monetary systems that can call your bluff, and if you also switch from a hard money system to a money-printers-go-brrrrrr system like we did implicitly when FDR confiscated everyone’s gold in 1933, and explicitly with Nixon’s announcement of ending the gold standard in 1971, then in situations where previously you would have needed to use military force to “requisition more funds” from the public whenever you keep running out of money for your non-productive nonsense, you now can simply sleight of hand the same effect via inflation in a way that is harder for people to notice and decide to fight back against. This rise of the U.S. to global financial and military prominence, and the switch to an unaccountable accounting system (which can still theoretically “work” normally if you maintain printing discipline), and the capture of this whole apparatus by Too-Big-To-Fail DREAM BIG pyramid scheme type thinking is what Ben calls “The Debtor’s Revolt”, and it’s what torpedos a lot of Efficient Market Hypothesis type thinking and allows ridiculous things like systems of bullshit jobs to be possible at their current scale.

The Legal Story

As for the legal side of things, I’ve researched this considerably less than the school or monetary angle; ironically, this means the section will be somewhat longer since I’m less confidently able to make a compressed summary.

Our current situation is one where having to interact with the legal system for any reason is bad news. It’s going to be costly both in terms of time and money and it will be unpredictable, not just in terms of whether you can get platonic Justice but whether past laws and past court decisions will have anything to do with how your case gets decided.

The costs come from multiple directions. Some costs come from the development of professional groups like the American Bar Association, formed in 1878, which by 1921 had killed the previous apprenticeship path to law and made it so that ABA accredited institutions were the only valid path. They created a monopoly on the supply of lawyers, instituted mandatory minimum fees, and generally enforced a professional ethos which declared that competition was unethical, effectively giving them cartel pricing power. Another lever of increasing costs was the creation of “discovery”⁸ via the 1938 Federal Rules of Civil Procedures. It’s generally agreed upon among legal scholars that modern discovery is the main mechanism by which one side’s lawyers can impose near arbitrary costs on the other side (more discovery requests, more billable hours for your lawyers).⁹ This means that people with more resources to waste can pressure smaller opponents with solid cases into bad settlements, simply because the smaller opponents can’t sustain the costs of taking something to trial.

The creation of the ability to impose arbitrary costs on your opponents is one of several factors that’s led to our current state where trials barely ever happen. For Civil Law, the amount of cases that actually go to trial nowadays compared to the early 1900s compared to the early 1800s is ~2%, ~20%, and ~40%. For Criminal Law, in similar time frames it’s ~2%, ~50%, ~80%.¹⁰ A big part of what’s made this shift possible is that over time we have given judges and prosecutors all kinds of discretionary power that lets them threaten parties into pleading or settling. Judges have control over the calendar of a case and can make it drag out, or force more billable hours on each side. They have control over bail and routinely use it as a hammer for non-flight risks, with lots of people pleading just so they can not be detained until a trial, a date which the judge has a lot of leeway to push further and further into the future. Judges have massive discretion over if Discovery was conducted properly and can mess with any side that annoys them. Massive spreads on possible sentencing allows judges to threaten defendants with the biggest possible charges if they insist on a trial, offering much lighter charges if pleas are taken. These are all procedural changes that have granted judges more and more control over how things actually play out, powers that they did not have in much of our past. Alongside these procedural changes there has been a well documented cultural shift in judges and legal professors, one where the ideal of What A Judge Is Supposed To Do has moved from a neutral judge of the law, to a “manager” who’s “moving cases along efficiently”,¹¹ who will readily apply all sorts of pressures to prevent things from leading to an annoying and “inefficient” trial.

Besides the individual negative effects of people with strong cases not getting justice, there’s very corrosive ecosystem level effects to trials disappearing. When cases are dealt with settlements and pleas, any evidence accumulated on the matter typically gets buried and doesn’t become public. Trials are a kind of public good that produce a canonical investigation into What Actually Happened, and there are all sorts of situations where that information is relevant to third parties, irrespective of how it ties into legal punishments that might follow.¹² If a car company is sued for making up fraudulent data to cover up a massive safety issue with one of their models, lots of people might care about if they’re actually guilty regardless of whether the company gets punished, because they want to know how much to trust the vehicles. If a professor you’re considering doing research with gets charged by the government with grant funding fraud, you care about if that actually happened and what the circumstances are because that’s a lot of information about what it will be like to work with them. If it ends in settlement, the giant obvious question “well... Did they do it?” is just left hanging. In a world where trials don’t happen, aren’t desired by the system, and people can be forced to plea and settle irrespective of the merits of the underlying case, any entanglement with the legal system is likely to just create a murky fog that makes it less clear when the guilty are guilty and when the innocent are innocent. While trials themselves are not perfect, and a canonical investigation into what actually happened is not the same as what actually happened, the process of backroom discretionary deals is structurally less accountable and transparent in basically every dimension.

A related ecosystem effect is that the less trials there are, the less it’s clear to anyone which laws “have teeth”. Judges can deem laws unconstitutional, and juries can nullify, these are checks on the legislature getting too out of sync with either the judiciary or the people. When things don’t go to trial there’s no back pressure, and laws can drift further and further adding to the murkiness of figuring out what would happen if you actually went to trial, which is already less important because it’s probably going to be too costly to even try.

Sometimes this “pressure to settle/plea” is described as lamentable, but unavoidable given the sheer size of case loads. But those are not inevitable outside factors! The first time we saw a HUGE surge in both case load and plea bargains was during Prohibition, when liquor cases made up 2/3 to 3/4 of all federal criminal cases (absolute numbers went from 17,000 the year before the prohibition to 92,000 at the peak, and down to 35,000 the year after prohibition was repealed).¹³ Courts were legitimately overwhelmed and they started pressuring people to plea as a way to cope with the deluge, but they were also pressuring people to plea because juries were nullifying the shit out of open and shut prohibition cases. People Really Hated Prohibition. Pressuring people away from trial was a way of suppressing common knowledge about the total lack of popular support in a desperate attempt to preserve the appearance of legitimacy.

Alongside the rise of the Managerial Judge mentality, another destructive philosophical shift came from the adoption of Legal Pragmatism / Legal Realism, pioneered by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Legal Pragmatism is an anti-legal philosophy that claims there simply is no such thing as a good faith interpretation of law and thus a judge’s judgement can never be meaningfully “bound” or “prescribed” by the law, which means any judgment is always just an expression of what a judge wants to happen, and you, as a judge, should just do “whatever works best”.¹⁴ This amounts to the claim that judicial activism is a silly concept because there’s nothing to do but judicial activism. This thinking being mainstream is really bad. For “rule of law and not of man” to be real, judges necessarily have to understand their role to be that of doing their best to authentically and impartially interpret the law. Yes, the Law can’t magically rule without the help of men, but men really can make choices to put the Law above their whims. There are some institutional checks on judicial activism, the main one being that other judges in higher courts can overrule the decisions of lower level judges. Once a judgement gets to the Supreme Court, there’s still avenues other branches of government have to limit the effects, but they’re rarely used. This means that lone-wolf activists can be effectively policed, but if there’s an activist faction within the judiciary it can wield tremendous power. Importantly, this isn’t really a structural deficit in our judicial system, because to have another institution that could strongly prevent such bad behavior would basically be akin to having a whole other judiciary, which would in the relevant sense be the real judiciary, which itself could be controlled by a faction of activist judges. You really just can’t have a legal system unless you have a sufficient number of people who actually believe in the idea of a legal system staffing it. I call Pragmatism an anti-legal notion because it declares that the core thing that’s needed to make a legal system meaningful, the core thing needed to make it an institution than anyone would have ever had any interest in building, isn’t real or desirable. Pragmatism by no means invented the idea of controlling the courts thru activist factions, but it did basically conquer all elite law schools and effectively normalized among the legal elite the idea that there is nothing to do besides factional activist combat.¹⁵

On a final note, another gaping crater in the system we’re left with is the massive amount of discretion afforded to District Attorneys/Prosecutors and the ways this makes them unaccountable. In the mid-1800s, courts still primarily revolved around private prosecution. Over that century public prosecutors were slowly granted more and more power, and eventually, by the early 1900s, in most places private prosecution had been abolished.¹⁶ Most importantly, this means that if DAs aren’t interested in pursuing a case, even if there’s mountains of evidence, there is no legal mechanism anyone else can invoke to make the case happen. This leads to confusing situations where people assume that in a case like the 2008 financial collapse, while what the banks did obviously should have been illegal, it wasn’t technically illegal, or maybe they already burned all the evidence or something. But the canonical investigations that were performed by the United States government concluded that there was ample evidence of criminal fraud!¹⁷ Nothing happened because the DA decided not to do anything. With private prosecution gone, huge power rests in the hands of DAs, and if you can control them you basically can make any crime you want de facto legal.

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These changes in our institutions explain a lot of what’s confusing about our current situation. There’s lots of times you might be looking at the world and go “how the fuck is XYZ legal?” and in many cases, it’s not! There’s lots of times you might be looking at the world and go “how the fuck is XYZ profitable/sustainable?” and in many cases, it’s not! Core systems of accountability have been dismantled and we are living in the wreckage.

“How is this different from [insert other thing]?”

To contextualize some of the “so what?”, here are specific things I think people get wrong when they’re missing different parts of this model.

If you think the Republican Liberalism we used to have was always a fake and gay means of dominating people, you’re in the post-modernist view without even a theoretical possibility for a vision of good things, just the hope of either Getting In On The Scam or maybe making the Scam slightly more humane on the margins.

If you don’t have a specific understanding of specific things in the past that you think are good, just a nebulous imperative to RETVRN, you’re probably using the past as a MacGuffin to oppose the current bad thing and you’re going to pick shitty targets to RETVRN to. For example, the 50s, for white americans, was in fact much better in terms of basic economics and salaries for most jobs in relation to cost of living and home ownership, but even if you’re just keeping score for white people, 0.6% of them were psychiatrically incarcerated at any given time with a 1% lifetime risk of ending up institutionalized, and it was generally understood that if you were weird enough or inconvenient enough your family could just get you locked up.¹⁸ Plus, the good economic times of the 50s already had the time bomb of Debtor’s Revolt economics under its hood ticking away, making the explosion in the 70’s somewhat inevitable at that point. Without an informed understanding of the past any RETVRN is necessarily going to be LARPing media representations of the past and miss the good shit.

If you have a specific and concrete understanding of the merits of our prior system of Republican Liberalism, but you don’t understand that it was actively sabotaged and you don’t understand how far the institutional rot goes, you’ll likely orient to things just as “we need to re-roll on the policy level”, which seems to be what Neoliberalism was.¹⁹ My sense is that on this path your wins will necessarily be ephemeral and shallow. You can see this play out on the micro with the history of literacy pedagogy. Since the start of look-say/whole-language/balanced-literacy/three-cueing type stuff, there have been several waves of public awareness and pushing back. Sometimes people not only rediscovered phonics but made great pedagogical advances in it. But it doesn’t seem like people ever really went after the institutional roots of the problem,²⁰ and in the places where people managed to reinstate phonics, they didn’t manage to impart antibodies with long enough memory to keep the next version of anti-literacy from turning the tables again.

If you think the institutions we had were in fact dope, and take seriously that we can’t simply “re-roll” because something serious failed, but don’t understand they were explicitly dismantled over several generations by people fundamentally opposed to them, you’re going to invent ideas like Moloch and Inadequate Equilibrium to explain the dysfunction you see and infer that what’s needed is to create Super Rationality, or Super Liberalism, or Super Law, something that’s such a detailed and worked out theory of The Good Shit that people can’t help but Do The Good Shit, and you’ll focus on that instead of asking what would be involved in repairing the basic structures of Republican Liberalism, or figuring out how you could disrupt and fight back against the illiberal strategies that try and sabotage it.

If you get that the past had good shit, AND it got dismantled by entryism, but misunderstand trauma studies, then... well I’m actually less sure what happens here. The only people I’ve seen talk about institutional capture have been the New Right talking about how marxist lunatics took over all the major institutions. And that did literally happen, but I think the marxist stuff, and now the woke stuff, is entangled with deeper fuckery. And if you overfocus on the woke/marxist stuff as the source of all evil, you miss the money printers, you miss all the totally bi-partisan fuckery, and 2008. But I’ll admit the detailed version of the perspective here gets a lot of big things right and I should talk to people in this cluster more.²¹

If you don’t understand that the current level of spiritual domination has not always been the case, you might get convinced of the post-modern view, even if you have instincts that more should be possible. If people have always been this fucked up then authentic notions of self-governance like what’s supposed to be at the heart of Republican Liberalism don’t really make any sense. If people are inherently scared of freedom and don’t actually want to deal with the kind of responsibility for their own lives and commitment to action it entails, as big name philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Erich Fromm argue, then self-governance is a laughably incoherent notion that never could have been legitimate. I agree that the scared-of-freedom psychological profile is a real one you can observe in great numbers.²² In a sufficiently traumatized state, people are prone to seek out a predictable role in a hierarchy of domination over freedom. This is frequently observed at the micro, people who have been in abusive relationships habitually ending up in other abusive relationships, but this also plays out at the macro in societal structures. But people have to be beaten into being this way. More people fundamentally cared about and prioritized freedom in our past, which allowed the self-governance ideals of Republican Liberalism to be real and authentic.

Relatedly, understanding that the people who built and ran our Republican Liberalism actually had a real lived experience of people being less fucked up than they currently are helps shed light on how these institutions worked in the first place. Often when I’ve looked at different organization structures or descriptions of past institutions, I felt something like “Ugh, but these rules and structures don’t seem like enough to prevent people from egregiously fucking it over if they felt like it.” And that’s because when I’m imagining people, I’m imagining the people I have lived experience with, who by and large have internalized the notion that in order to fit in enough to survive they need to tolerate huge levels of disingenuous and low-integrity behavior. Take the point I made in the legal section, about how you can’t “structurally” stop Judicial Activism, you need to actually have a critical mass of people who give a shit about implementing the law. If you ignore this, because based on your lived experience it seems utterly unreasonable to expect any large number of people to give a shit about this, then you’re going to be stuck trying to create systems of governance that somehow create good outcomes while allowing arbitrary amounts of bad faith, and you will fail. This is the real blocker to implementing even the most detailed RETVRN type plan: you can’t put domesticated people into a system built for sovereign individuals and expect it to work out. This is why I’m most pessimistic about Large Scale plans that aim at things like “fixing the United States” broadly. Currently no one seems to have large-scale infrastructure for rewilding people, and most people seem pretty damn got, so any group that manages to assemble functional institutions seems like it’s necessarily going to have to be pretty small and grow over generations as opposed to growing by open recruitment.

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In sum: if the individual and institutional dysfunction that most narratives try to assert is normal and natural was really both natural and historically normal, we never could have built the wealth and the world that we are currently living in. This necessarily means that institutions and people have not always been like this, and we can see lots of key shifts, some sharp and some gradual, where institutions and people have been made worse in specific ways. This was by no means inevitable, and understanding the specific ways in which things have been made worse seems like it should be a part of most attempts to make things better.²³

Outro

Though the model I’ve been outlining is quite a Big Picture model, it’s played an active part in my personal process of extracting myself from the ambient psychic sludge, increasing my personal autonomy, and figuring out what kind of life I want to live. I used to not really have a sense for the importance of knowledge for these tasks. Working on building the grounds of one’s material independence from systems that want to control you made sense to me. The “inner-work” side of things, the “free your mind” stuff made sense to me, and was a lot of what I was working on from 2017-2022.²⁴ I personally ignored the knowledge component of liberation until recently. Hopefully I’ve written this in a way where if you have similar blindspots to the ones I had in regards to the knowledge domain, you’ve been convinced that 1) it’s relevant, 2) it’s tractable, and hopefully have a leg up on acquiring some of the relevant knowledge.

I know this post doesn’t have enough detail for this whole theory to be thoroughly object-level convincing, but hopefully I’ve got enough useful points that the intrepid will be able to explore for themselves. The openhistory.education project I did this past year (an annotated and sourced version of John Gatto’s history of schooling) has basically all of the schooling picture, though it’s not really condensed or summarized well. Ben’s work on the Debtor’s Revolt really is quite good and worth reading. In some sense it would be nice to do another Project level dive into the legal side, though it’s honestly unclear to me how much time I should spend on Hammering Out The Global Theory vs Dealing With The Daily Implications Of It All. It’s a big crazy world and there’s much to do.

Stay Strapped, and Stay Lucky

1. Reading Shantaram when I was 14 was probably my first big exposure to a world very different from my own, and I remember being confused and mulling over for weeks how it was possible for a world with so much more adventure to exist, though it didn't really shed any light on structures worth emulating.

2. Many people in the past 300 years have written about their efforts to find ways to rule people that involve less physical coercion and instead rely more on psychological and structural means. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish traces this shift of thinking and practice in Europe. Johann Fichte, an early influence on Prussia post-Napoleonic reforms, wrote about how obviously you can’t get someone to robustly obey orders or learn what you want them to learn via force, so instead you have to brainwash them until they have no will other than what their master wills. American Behaviorism also had this creepy aim. This shift wasn’t just one in methodology, but also one in purpose/aim. In most pre-modern societies ruling aristocrats didn’t really get that involved in managing production, they mostly just cared about taxing peasants and preventing them from revolting. This “sovereign power” medieval lords had over their subjects was in many senses more absolute than today, but it was also disinterested in micro-management and less invasive to the daily subjective experience of a person. The shift away from relying primarily on physical coercion was accompanied by a shift in aim to control people in the micro to manipulate and engineer society in more involved ways that was considered plausible for most of history.

3. Something that’s a bit confusing when talking about people being “more easily controlled“ is it would seem to imply a coherent will or wills that are enacting the control, and I think it’s clear to most people paying any attention that for quite some time the various people in power have not been acting with any particular coherence. It seems more fungus-like than human level intelligence. Historically, the huge oversimplification seems to be that you can see a lot of written records from the late 1800s early 1900s of elites doing long-term strategic thinking about how to control and engineer populations better, and a big part of that plan involved putting dumb-juice in the schools and forcing people to go to them. I think most people would expect that if that was true, obviously the elite would have protected themselves, created walled gardens, perhaps made sure the dumb-juice was only put in public schools and then all hid their kids in private schools. But lots of kids at Ivy Leagues can’t read books! The elites of the early 20th century did not manage to protect their own from the social engineering they enacted. It seems like a lot of real strategic thinking went into the task of reducing the amount of real strategic thinking going on and the elites we ended up with, who in some sense should have had a slam dunk of a time, are also too fucked up and traumatized to coherently capitalize on how cowed and dominated everyone is.

4. As of the mid 1800s there had long been one-room schoolhouses all over America that were fundamentally local in organization. The schools that existed were either built and funded by communities just pitching in, charging very modest tuition which most people could easily afford, or they were built by religious communities that offered free schooling to the poorest of the poor. These were all primary schools that just focused on reading, writing, and arithmetic. This system was slowly replaced, first with the Common School movement led by reformers like Horace Mann which levied state taxes to fund public schools (Pillars of the Republic is a good book on this period). Part of the public reasoning was to increase access to education, though total school-attendance wasn’t really increased, it just shut down the poor schools and put everyone who had been going to school in the Common Schools. Things hadn’t changed too much, but the foothold of state control was in the door. It was across the 1870s-1920s that the battles were fought to consolidate governance and control and create administrative apparatus around the schools and create an educational elite class to run it all. Compulsory school laws started to be enforced more aggressively in the latter portion of that time period. Point being, the one-room school house, where for a modest fee a teacher instructs kids on how to read and do math, is a very lindy pattern that pops up across history (the Abacus schools in Italian city-states were similar though more specialized) and has lots of precedence, though I believe it was the most universal in the early United States. The type of school where it’s paid for and managed by the state with teacher-training pipelines, attendance is mandatory, and it’s extended beyond the early years into high school, that didn’t exist anywhere till Prussia started doing it in the early 1800s and the US was the next to follow suit.

5. “If we didn’t force people to go to school, how would we ensure that everyone has basic literacy?” We already had near universal literacy before compulsory state controlled-schooling was a thing. This post is the shortest pointer I have to evidence on this. I’m working on another post that explores this in more depth because it’s really hard for many people I talk to to wrap their head around, but basically all across history we see that popular literacy grows when it’s useful, permitted, and socially valued, and it does not require compulsory state controlled schooling. In the 18th and 19th century America, England, and the Netherlands all had world-historical popular literacy rates, and America in the 1800’s was the most literate nation in the world. And though literacy was unfairly suppressed in some groups (illegal for blacks in the south, common for white women but less than it was for white men), the things that actually improved the situation there was a rising tide of equal rights under the law, not the fact that schools would jail parents if they didn’t send their kids. It wouldn’t be so bad if compulsory schooling merely stole credit, but it actively made literacy worse. While our numbers for “can you read and write your name?” literacy are better than the past, complex literacy, being able to actually extract meaning from text to a degree that you aren’t a liability in say, the army, has decreased across the board. This is mostly downstream of the spread of anti-functional reading pedagogy (look-say, whole-language, 3-cueing etc), which is the kind of thing that’s only able to spread when you have an institutionalized pedagogical elite that can force it down people’s throats. This thread, this chapter, and this podcast are the best springboards for learning about this hullabaloo. If you take only one thing from this essay, please take away the fact that schools as we know them largely fight against literacy.

6. Since the beginnings of the new system, the newly forged educational elite fought incessantly to remove academic curriculum from schools. By the 1910s the National Education Association was announcing the vibe-shift away from "bookish curricula". This anti-intellectual streak has persisted till today, at times being "about" different things. In the Progressive Era it was "about" not being boring, stodgy and authoritarian with knowledge, and “about” not wasting time teaching Shakespeare to kids who were going to be farmers and factory workers. In the ‘60s it started to become "about" racial justice, and nowadays it's still mostly "about" that, though in the generalized DEI form. But no matter the window dressing on the reasons, the effect has always been to further remove from schools any content that might possibly justify their existence. Various surveys indicate that the educational establishments' ideas about the purpose of school are at odds with most parents' ideas about the purpose of school. Parents across time have overwhelmingly wanted schools to, at a bare minimum, teach their kids how to read and write well. A majority of teachers think that isn't important and that imparting the right set of ideals on the youth is the goal. This abdication of any reasonable notion of responsibility was enshrined in law by courts in the ‘70s when they decided that schools can't be sued for utterly failing to teach kids even basic literacy.

7. A great example is the book “Education and the Social Crisis” by William Kilpatrick from 1932. While John Dewey was the most famous and influential intellectual of the Progressive Education movement, his protege Kilpatrick had a much wider direct influence in terms of teaching the people who would later be superintendents, professors, principals, and teachers. In his book (the final “Summary and Conclusions” chapter of which I’ve reposted here) he explains how America’s cultural and economic systems need to be destroyed and rebuilt, and education is the tool to bring about these changes.

8. Instead of both sides just showing up to the trial with whatever evidence they had, discovery involves mandatory sharing of evidence and allows sides to make demands for certain documents/artifacts from each other.

9. The Use of Discovery In United States District Courts (1951), just 13 years after Discovery’s introduction, noted the kinds of complaints that we see in numbers later on, but concluded that as of 1951 abuse existed but wasn’t systemic. By 1980, Civil Discovery: Lawyers’ Views of Its Effectiveness, Its Principal Problems and Abuses concluded that most big cases have massive discovery battles. Discovery follows the same temporal pattern as some other things, being introduced in the ‘30s, and then having additional changes added in the late ‘70s early ‘80s (loosening the relevance requirements on discovery requests, and switching from them needing to be approved to the other side needing to refute them if they seemed too frivolous) that made it even worse.

10. The Vanishing Trial is the canonically cited source for numbers from the 20th century. I got some older estimates from Plea Bargaining and Its History. I’m playing a little loose with my numbers, the underlying data counts a bunch of different ways for different kinds of courts in different state vs federal levels and I just had Gemini eyeball aggregating numbers from different levels, but it seems like basically every way you look at it there’s the same trend at the same order of magnitude of trials going away, so I don’t think Gemini’s discretion here could have really changed the picture much.

11. Managerial Judges is a great essay from 1982 on this shift.

12. Against Settlement is a great short essay from within the legal community on the negative ecosystem level effects of trials going away, and Sarah Constantin’s three part series (1, 2, 3) on Courts is a great exploration of the problem from an intelligent outsider.

13. Stats are from here and here.

14. Outside of the legal realm, the general move of Pragmatism is to insist there’s no such thing as a belief being true; there is only such a thing as a belief being useful. If that was the main point, you’d expect Pragmatists to then be eager to build a shared understanding and shared standards for what kinds of things are useful, what do we actually care about, what kind of world are we trying to bring about, but in all my convos with self-described Pragmatists this path gets shut down rather quickly. In practice, it seems a lot of Pragmatism’s functional purpose is to avoid having conversations about what your actual epistemology is, and the main reason that could be useful to someone would be if they didn’t want to have to keep commitments or promises to people. This became more clear to me from Michele Reilly’s essay on intellectual bubbles where she described Pragmatisms as a call to conformity and submission to whatever seems to be most representative of power.

15. I think that Oliver Wendell Holmes himself might have advised budding pragmatist judges to not go too crazy on the judicial activism lest it incite backlash, but that’s a contingent consideration, and if backlash can be managed or subverted I’m sure he’d have no problem with more intense activism. John Dewey, at the end of his essay where he argues that teaching kids to read isn’t that important and we should be doing other things in schools, also makes a clear point that the changes he has in mind should begin gradually so as not to raise alarm. It seems like a lot of Progressive Era stuff had a notion of political caution that was thrown to the wind in later cycles of changes we saw in the ‘60s, which makes sense given that the Progressive Era was when the institutional entryism began and was not yet deeply entrenched.

16. Against Prosecutors has some details on the before and after history of private prosecution getting dismantled, though doesn’t seem to cover much of the inbetween.

17. Jed Rakoff, a senior U.S. district judge, has a good series of short articles discussing this.

18. Numbers aggregated by GPT-5.2 in this chat from population census info and institutional data on patients.

19. Mostly going off of this article for Neoliberalism. I’m actually a bit confused here about Hayek’s angle, because in books like The Road to Serfdom he’s describing a lot of the core mechanisms in the Debtor’s Revolt and he’s decently clear that he sees Liberalism getting skinsuited by Progressivism, but also seems to think what’s missing is Liberalism needs to dare to have Utopian dreams? I’m also probably being a bit unfair to NeoLiberalism, it does seem like it did a lot of straightforward good economically and in regards to lowering crime.

20. To give a bit more credit to the various phonics advocates across the last 80 years, it seems like the common pattern was that they first tried to bring the problems they saw up to institutions and got totally stonewalled, and after trying that for a while and being confused they switched to "well I guess I'll try and get this as much media as I can and just spread it as much locally as I can" and often had great success getting media attention, but institutions would just keep stonewalling and it's kinda unclear what to do in that situation, and it also really really seems like "surely if we just made what's going on public knowledge it would sort itself out because why on earth would there be groups persistently working to undermine literacy?" But given that all of Columbia's Teacher's college is aligned on this, and even huge media stinks only manage to pressure them to change the name of their curriculum, it really seems like the only path would be to do something most people consider out-of-bounds extreme, like remove all federal funding to every elite education department in the country and get rid of compulsory schooling laws.

21. Bennett’s Phylactery on substack is the person in this direction whose writing I’ve enjoyed the most recently. Some select blogposts: It’s not a “palace coup” and you do not live in the Soviet Union, The regime can’t unseat a drooling geriatric to save its own ass, and you’re blackpilling?, Civil war, but the other side is a fungus, The money printer is the empire, There is no one to tattle to, Dismantle the postwar ideological consensus with one weird trick.

22. Both when I did uni at CMU and when I was a new grad at Google, a distressing trait present in most of my peers was a prevailing sense of anxiety and desperation to conform. The vibe was "hey, so we know we're supposed to lick boots, but it's not exactly clear who's boot we're supposed to be licking and how exactly it's supposed to be licked and we know we'll be executed if we don't do a good job so if you could please give us clearer guidelines that would be great".

23. It’s really unclear to me at what resolution does any given person need to understand history to stop shooting themselves in the foot. Though I’m still significantly under a PhD amount of hours invested in all this, I’ve put some non-trivial leg work in and part of what’s made that possible is it’s also baseline interesting to me. It does feel like most of my investigation has been necessary for convincing myself of different things, but the actual content could probably be condensed down to “just a book or two” which is well within what’s reasonable to expect others to know. But I think the real bottleneck here isn’t good summaries (though I aim to make some) but bottlenecks around trust and reputation networks or something. An anecdote to explain: a funny experience I had the first several times I was reading through the Debtor’s Revolt was I’d keep seeing Ben mostly matter of factly describing certain historical events and in a way that highlighted certain somewhat obvious consequences. But the way the dots were connected didn’t relate to anything I’d seen people argue before, nor did searching for similar interpretations of the history give good results. But all the facts basically always checked out, and the extra conclusions he was drawing were fairly analytically simple. It took me many iterations of diving into the primary sources, agreeing that the basics were sound and the conclusions made sense before “why tf don’t I hear anyone talking about this?” no longer felt like it put massive backpressure on my ability to integrate historical info. Random example, a thing I’ve seen basically no one talk about, except loosely in Tom Lehrer songs, is that we never really got rid of the Nazi’s after world war two. Both in terms of removing literal card carrying Nazi party members from important political offices in Germany and Austria, and in terms of public opinion in those countries. The second chapter of Postwar is my main source for this. That’s a critically acclaimed award winning book and not a fringe weirdo thing, and it’s very consequential for understanding the postwar dynamics, but it’s just not something that even the highly educated well read people I know are aware of. It seems to me that there’s lots of info that’s hard to integrate until you really get how fucked our information environment is (even before accelerationist online filter bubbles), and most people I know who have a sense for that seem to have also spent a hobbyist+++ amount of time reading history, so idk.

24. Some of my old posts on this: How to Ignore Your Emotions (while also thinking you’re awesome at emotions), Story arcs of the last 4 years, How to absorb a shared success script (while thinking you’re living without one), Internal conflict and non-coercion resources, and I have a lot more stuff scattered throughout my twitter threads.