Geo-Strategy Update #8: Why the West is Doomed

Good morning, YouTube. So I know that you flocked to this channel because I am such a sunny and optimistic person. I bring cheer in a world of. You may face some difficulties in your life, but you know that when you watch my videos, I'm going to tell you how great the world is. Unfortunately, today it's all going to be doom and gloom. I'm going to talk about how the Western world is going to collapse and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Let me start with a concrete example. I live in Canada, and these past few years I've just seen Canadian society get worse and worse.

A lot of the issue is this relentless immigration these past five years. Millions of people have come into this country seeking a better life. Unfortunately, they congregate in only a few cities where there are economic. As a result, housing prices have gone up, inflation has gone up, cost of living has gone up, but wages have been stagnant or depressed because of the surge in cheap labor. In Toronto, if you're not making at least $100,000 a year, it's very hard to get by. And quite frankly, most are not making that kind of money and most are struggling.

So crime has gone up, homelessness has gone up, drug addiction has gone up. It's a very dire situation in Canada. Now, it's easy to blame the immigrants, and I don't think the reason is the immigrants. I myself am an immigrant, so maybe I'm biased, but I will say that we came over in about 1983, and my dad was a high school teacher in a village in Canada. Sorry, my dad was a high school teacher in our village back in China. We were really thankful for the opportunity to come to Canada and we felt really blessed, because life back in China was just terrible.

It's really hard for anyone today to imagine the poverty in China back then during the Cultural Revolution. But let me give you a concrete example. 15 years ago, my dad came to visit me in Beijing when I was working as a high school administrator, and he bought an entire duffel bag, a huge duffel bag, of toilet rolls, 24 toilet rolls. The reason why is toilet paper was considered the ultimate luxury back in our village during the Cultural Revolution. And so maybe he wanted to give these toilet rolls to all his relatives and show everyone that he's made it in Canada.

Well, the problem was that he had a very hard life in Canada, as most recent immigrants do. He was a dishwasher for his entire life. And as a dishwasher working in restaurants and bars, he encountered a lot of racism and humiliation. Let me give you an example. One day my dad and I went to a supermarket to buy some butter. We couldn't find the butter because the supermarket was just huge. So my dad saw a clerk wearing his uniform, his white uniform. And my dad asked him, "Sorry, sir, do you know where the butter is?"

I mean, his English isn't that great, but it was pretty easy to understand what my dad wanted. The store clerk looks at him briefly and says, "Sorry, I don't work here." So that's the sort of humiliation that my dad faced every day as a new immigrant in Canada who didn't have any status and whose English wasn't very good.

We were very poor in Canada. We could have easily qualified for welfare, but we didn't apply for welfare because we didn't know welfare existed.

I remember late at night my dad would sneak out across the street and pick up some sofas or chairs that the neighbors had discarded, and they would become our furniture. My dad cut my hair. Believe it or not, when I was younger my hair was actually worse than it is today. And so the kids made fun of me. I had bad hair, uneven hair. My mom bought me clothes from bargain outlets, so they were crappy clothes. They weren't Nike or Adidas that the other kids were wearing, and I smelled bad.

So, understandably, the other kids teased me. I was very unpopular. So I focused on school. I focused on getting out of poverty. And through hard work I went to Yale University on a full scholarship, and that opened new doors, new vistas for me. And so I really achieved the Canadian dream. If it weren't for Canada, if it weren't for Yale, I wouldn't be able to make YouTube videos. So I'm very thankful for Canada and for Yale. Again, we're really thankful for the opportunity to come, but the reality is there are just too many immigrants coming into this country.

What's really happening is that even though you may have some short-term economic GDP burst, ultimately you're degrading the social capital, trust and cohesion of Canada. The Canadian identity has always been fragile, and all this massive influx of immigrants is making the identity much more fragile, which in the long term is going to affect Canada's capacity to work together, to innovate, to be resilient, to be cohesive as a society.

Right now a quarter, 25%, of Canadians are foreign-born, first generation immigrants like myself. So if there were ever a referendum and Canadians could choose whether or not to join the United States, most of these immigrants would immediately say, "Let's join the United States, because there are more economic." So in the long term, I don't see Canada staying together. I think Canada will ultimately be dismembered by the United States and be absorbed into the American Empire in the next 20, 30 years. I don't think Canada right now can be a sustainable nation.

Now, it's really easy to blame immigrants for all of this, and most Canadians do, in fact, blame immigrants because that's what they encounter every day. They encounter immigrants not being able to speak English, not following the rules, cutting in line. They watch the news and see immigrants committing crimes. They see rich immigrants buying up these expensive properties and making life miserable for everyone. So it's really easy to blame the immigrants, but ultimately we need to understand why this immigration is happening. And it's happening because of the baby boomers.

The baby boomers want three things. They want their pensions to be paid. They want quality free health care. And they want the property prices to go up. Basically, they want the Canadian economy to keep on growing and growing and growing regardless of the. Now, in order for the economy to grow, there are three main mechanisms to accomplish this. The first mechanism is to exploit resources, because Canada really is the wealthiest country in the world. It has abundant, almost infinite resources, especially fresh water, which is what the world is going to need in the next hundred years.

So Canada is an extremely wealthy place and it can choose to exploit and export a lot of these resources. That's the first solution. The second solution, which is much more sustainable, is to unleash the entrepreneurial energy of the Canadian people, to encourage more entrepreneurship, more and more privatization, to reduce the regulatory state, to reduce the red tape. That's the second solution. The third solution is immigration. Let's let in more immigrants. Let's let in the rich immigrants to pour cash into the economy. Let's let in poor immigrants so that they work as slave labor for Canadian corporations.

Of these three solutions, the Canadian government went with the third solution, increased immigration. Now, a lot of people out there believe that this is a conspiracy, that there's this global international conspiracy out there to dilute national identity, to destroy the idea of the nation state, to reduce the white gene pool. This is all a World Economic Forum white replacement theory conspiracy spearheaded by the. And quite honestly, if the people in charge were this smart, were this well organized, the world wouldn't be in the mess that it is today. You'd be surprised by how idiotic, by how incompetent the people in charge are.

So let me explain to you why immigration is increasing not just in Canada, but also throughout the Western world. To understand this we need to understand the framework of the Canadian nation. Why does Canada exist and what does Canada do? Well, Canada has certain unique characteristics. First of all, it's a vast nation with almost infinite wealth, surrounded by two oceans, the Pacific and the Atlantic. And so Canada does not have natural predators as they would in Europe. Canadians grew up in a time of relative peace, safety. The problem, though, is that Canada shares a border with the world's most, with history's greatest empire, America.

And so in order to prevent conflict between Canada and the United States, the last major conflict between Canada and the United States being the War of 1812, to prevent conflict there's almost an implicit agreement between the people of Canada and the people of America. Canadians first and foremost are not ambitious. If Canadians were ambitious then Canada would be at war with America and America would have absorbed Canada into the American empire a long time ago. So the core characteristic of the Canadian identity is lack of ambition in order to maintain peace and stability with America.

And if you're not ambitious, then you're not going to industrialize, which means that you're going to maintain and safeguard the environment. You'll use some of the environment, but you'll make sure it's self-sustaining. So in other words, Canada is almost like a resource bank for the American Empire. When the American Empire needs to, it can always draw on the infinite resources of Canada. And because of its lack of ambition, there are two main drivers of the Canadian economy. The first, as I said, is resource exportation, but sustainable, limited resource exploitation.

But the main driver of the Canadian economy is immigration. Canada allows rich corrupt families to come to Canada to hide their wealth. Canada also welcomes cheap labor, poor immigrants like my father, to come to Canada to do all the work so that Canadians can enjoy their life drinking beer, drinking Molson, a terrible beer by the way, by the cottage. And because of this economic framework, three major religions have developed in Canada to sustain this economic framework. The first religion is environmentalism. Canadians love the environment. They believe it is their duty, their inherent duty, to protect and love trees.

That's the first religion. The second religion is the belief that diversity is good, mainly because white people love ethnic food. When white people think multiculturalism, they think ethnic restaurants, Mexican food, Chinatown. And so they love. But if immigrants become politically ambitious, like the Indians, no, you can't have that. That's why Indians are so derided in Canada, because the Indians are actually politically active and effective. But hey, if they stuck to making samosas every day, Canadians would love them.

So in a multicultural society, what's really important is to be an open society and not have a distinct cultural identity, and this has created a lot of problems in Canada. It'll create further problems in Canada. And the third major religion is bureaucraticism. Because if you don't have your own ethnic identity, if you don't have a core ambition, then you need a regulatory state, a bureaucracy, in order to maintain everything together. You need people to tell you what to do. And Canadians worship authority. Canadians are extremely obedient.

Canadians believe experts know everything. So because of these three religions there are three distinct characteristics about the Canadian individual. What are Canadians really good at? Well, the first thing is Canadians are really good at following the rules from birth. Canadians believe that they must obey the rules. The worst thing that can happen is if they break a. The second thing that Canadians really are good at is being polite to other people, because in a multicultural society you don't want to offend everyone. But I will say that I have noticed in my most recent trip back to Canada, Canadians are no longer so polite.

They're much more passive aggressive than before because of the dire economic situation that Canada is in right now. The third thing that Canadians are really good at, in fact probably the best in the world at, is being mediocre. Canadians absolutely have no ambition. In fact, they hate ambition. I remember in high school, because I was poor and I wanted to go to Yale, I was extremely focused on grades. And so my teachers, the word they used for me is ambitious. I'm an ambitious individual. That's essentially a curse word in Canada.

But I will say this about Canada. I mean, if you can just conceptualize heaven on earth, it would be Canada. Extreme wealth, extremely generous government benefits. No one will go poor, no one will starve in Canada.

No wars, just complete peace. It's almost heaven on earth. And here is an opportunity for people to achieve eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is the Greek term for flourishing. Here is an opportunity for Canadians to contribute intellectually to the development of humanity, because they have the resources, they have the time, they have the security. No one else. And so you would expect this tremendous outpouring of human creativity in Canada these past 50 years. In reality, Canadians have for the past 50 years chosen to shut off their brains. And Canada is an extremely complacent nation.

It's almost like everyone's on Prozac or something. This is Prozac. So Canadians are extremely mediocre. I think that after Canada becomes dismembered and joins the American Empire, maybe a generation afterwards, everyone's going to forget Canada ever existed, because Canada has made absolutely no contribution to the world. Canada doesn't really matter in the world, and Canadians are very happy to not matter in the world. So now we can understand, if your three religions are environmentalism, multiculturalism and bureaucratism, well, then there's only one solution for you, right?

Because you can't exploit resources because of your religion of environmentalism. You can't encourage entrepreneurship because of your religion of bureaucratism. You don't want to reduce the regulatory, you don't want to promote individual. So the only solution available to you is mass immigration. And again, a lot of it is driven by the baby boomers.

So now let me explain to you why baby boomers suck. They suck for three main reasons. The first is that they're the most selfish generation in human history. The second is that they're going to be the longest-living generation in human history.

And the third is that they want to maintain the empire. All right, so let me go through each one by one. Baby boomers are selfish. Everyone knows this. They had the most luxurious life. But the problem is that if you've always lived a life of comfort and security and prosperity, you become a selfish individual because you think you deserve all this. The other thing is that the baby boomers have a religion, and it's an ethos of achievement and accumulation. The more the better. The bigger the better.

The more money I have, the better. The longer I live, the better. I need to accumulate and accumulate and achieve and achieve in order to signify my value, my worth. And their greed, their selfishness, is destroying the environment, it's destroying the economy, and ultimately it's going to kill their children. So that's the first thing. Baby boomers are extremely selfish, and that by itself is not really a problem. The problem is they're not dying.

And I can understand why. Because at home I'm living with my dad, and my dad is in his early 80s, and as I said previously he's had this terrible life.

10 years ago he got diagnosed with Parkinson's. Five years ago he had a bad fall while using the bathroom, and now he's paralyzed. And we really thought 5 years ago, that was it, he had a few months to live, but he's still going. So he has Parkinson's, he's basically paralyzed, and he's living his best life. All his life he's worked slave wages, minimum wage, and now he's collecting a very generous pension from the Canadian government. It's free money for him. He has access to the best health care.

Honestly, if we had to pay for the health care, we couldn't afford it and he would have died five years ago. But now, because it's all being paid by the Canadian government, he spent six months at a really nice hospital with his own room. Every day a physical therapist comes to the house and helps him regain some muscle control and does some cleaning for him. And really it's his best life, in his house. He has his own house, and because of all this immigration he's seeing the property value go up.

He's seeing himself getting wealthier and wealthier. If you're a baby boomer who's been taught that what matters is achievement and accumulation, why would you give up now? As your life gets better and better, why would you give it up now? So even though, you know, he's bedridden all the time, I see him cling to life, and I can understand why, because he's been through so much crap and now he can really begin to enjoy himself. This is really heaven on earth for him. So he doesn't want to die.

But it's not just him. It's the entire generation of baby boomers, millions and millions of them. And in Canada they're a quarter of the population. So they control all the political power. They control all the wealth. And therefore they can dictate government policy.

I have a friend in New York City, a very famous person, extremely wealthy, like tens of millions of dollars, and she's 90 and she has Alzheimer's and she can't walk, most of the time she's sleeping. She's semicomatose basically. And I thought, you know, any day now she could die.

But I've been thinking that for the past 10 years. And one day I asked my cousin, who's a doctor, listen, if you're 90 years old and you're senile, you have Alzheimer's, you can't get out of bed, but you have unlimited wealth, how long can modern medicine keep you going? How long can you survive? She has like four full-time caregivers to make sure that she is taken care of. And my cousin, the doctor, said to me, she can go on for another 20 years at least, another 20 years at least.

So these baby boomers aren't dying. The baby boomers have captured all the wealth of society, and they refuse to share any of it because of their achievement ethos, and they're not dying. But then there's actually a much bigger problem, which is that baby boomers are wedded to the idea of empire.

Last year I was in Brooklyn visiting some friends. I got invited to a party, and this party was full of China experts. Apparently every China expert in the world is from Brooklyn.

After COVID, when they were forced out of China, they all returned to Brooklyn. So I met all of them at this party, and I was talking to one lady, very, very wealthy, comes from a very powerful family, and she was a baby boomer. We were talking individually, one-on-one. I said to her privately my fears about the American political system. I said my fear is that given the trajectory of American foreign policy, which is like extremely non-existent, I said there's a danger that America could be fighting wars on three major fronts.

America could be fighting simultaneously Russia, Iran and China. And then she looked at me and said, "That's fine. We're America. We're the indispensable nation. We can do this. We can take on all three and defeat all three. Does not matter." That's the arrogance of empire.

All right, so let me give you an image of what empire is. For this image, I'm going to draw on the play The Bacchae by Euripides. If you have not read Euripides, you must read Euripides, one of the greatest playwrights in human history.

He wrote the play The Bacchae about the year 400 BCE. This is after the Peloponnesian War, when Athens, the Athenian Empire, which had become basically a mafia state, basically decided to go to war against the entire world, and thousands and thousands of the young people died in these wars of empire. And so Euripides wrote The Bacchae almost as a critique of empire. The ending of The Bacchae goes like this. There's a religious festival in the mountains and these women are all drugged out. They're hallucinating, and as part of the religious festival they sacrifice a man who's the king of Thebes, Pentheus.

What they do is they capture him. They rip him apart. They physically rip him apart. They rip off the limbs. They rip off the legs. They dismember him. And the person who rips off his head is actually his mother, Agave. After she does this, she becomes ecstatic. She takes the head and she runs back to the city of Thebes, and she proclaims to the citizens, "Look at what I've done." She's holding the head of her son Pentheus in her right hand, and she's saying to everyone, "This is a lion's head." You see how brave, you see how powerful, you see how virtuous I am for fighting a lion and ripping his head off.

And then everyone looks at her, aghast. They don't believe that she can't see the. And so finally her father, Cadmus, has to tell her, "That's not a lion's head. That's the head of your son."

So that's what an empire is. If you want to know what an empire is, remember the image of a mother holding the head of her son and proclaiming to the world, look how brave, powerful and virtuous I am. An empire is a system where the old sacrifice the young for their glory.

That's what an empire is, and that's what the baby boomers want. They grew up in a time of the Pax Americana. They don't want to see it die in their lifetimes. They'd rather burn down the entire empire. They'd rather sacrifice their own children and their grandchildren than lose the idea of empire while they're alive. So that's why the baby boomers basically told the American government to launch these wars around the world to save the Pax Americana, because that's the system they grew up in. That's the system they want to die in, the Pax Americana.

The Anglo-American Empire. They want to feel virtuous, powerful and strong. And they don't care if they have to burn down the world in order to do so. So the question then is, what can we do? Well, you think about it, there's nothing we can do because, as I said, the baby boomers are the most dominant political group in the Western world. They control the political system. They control the financial system. They control the cultural system. And they're our parents. They're the people we love and honor and cherish.

I'm not going to say to my father, "Hey, Dad, you're paralyzed, your life doesn't have any meaning, and maybe it's time for you to rest in peace so that the rest of the world, the young, can have their place."

One metaphor that I think best describes the world we live in is Rat Utopia. Rat Utopia was a series of experiments conducted by James B. Calhoun in the 60s and 70s, and this was a time of growing abundance in the world, and this is the first time in human history when we escaped scarcity, the promise of scarcity.

So they wanted to look at what would happen if we lived in a world of abundance. They created these experiments, these colonies where rats were allowed to live in a world of abundance. There were no predators. There was unlimited water and food. And what happened each time he did this experiment, no matter how he tweaked the experiment, the result was the same. What happened was the social structure that governed the rat colony collapsed, and Calhoun calls this the behavioral sink, and very quickly the rats start to cannibalize each other.

They start to engage in all sorts of brutal activities, and as a result everyone died out. So no matter how James B. Calhoun constructed this experiment, ultimately it led to the collapse of the rat colony and the extermination of all the rats. He struggled with this all his life and he could never really find the answer as to why this was happening. The only thing that he could hypothesize is maybe water can be infinite. Maybe food, luxury, maybe all can be provided infinitely.

But one thing that is not infinite, one thing that is a zero-sum game, is the idea of status. We are ingrained, or sorry, the desire for status is inherent to us. We strive for status. So normally in the state of nature, rats will fight each other for status, and the rats who lose, they'll run off somewhere else and they'll build their own colony, or they get killed by natural predators. But in an enclosed environment where the rats can't run off somewhere else, they're forced to constantly fight each other over and over again for status.

Peter Turchin, the social scientist, has a concept for this. It's called elite overproduction. Societies collapse over time because too much elite is being produced, and ultimately they will fight each other for the limited positions of power. And so we're living in Rat Utopia. And quite honestly, this is why young people now refuse to have children. It's not just because the economic opportunities for young people are very limited. Young people are very pessimistic, and the real reason is the baby boomers refuse to give up their status. Think about the politicians in Washington DC.

I mean, many of them their brains aren't even functioning and they're still there. And so we live in a time of Rat Utopia. But again, these people are the ones who gave us birth. They're the ones who nurtured us, the ones who we must honor and cherish. So we can never ever blame the baby boomers for what's going on. We blame the immigrants, or we blame the Jews, or we blame the deep state, or we blame Trump, or we blame Justin Trudeau, but we never blame the real culprits, who are the baby boomers.

So the question then is, what can we do? And I think the only thing we can do is tell the truth. We owe it to ourselves. We owe it to our children to let them know the truth. It was not the immigrants who destroyed the West. It was not Putin or Trump or Trudeau who destroyed the West. It was not the Jews. It was us, because we became selfish, lazy and corrupt. That's the real reason why the West is dying and the real reason why no one can do anything about it.

Because we refuse to admit the truth to ourselves. But the least we can do is tell the truth to our children, and that's why I do what I do. So again, apologies for today. I'm sorry it's such doom and gloom. Next week we go back to the regular programming of just cheer. No, I'm not going to ever be optimistic about the world, because there's no reason to be optimistic about the world. Next week I'm going to preview the next academic year of classes I'll be teaching.

I'll be teaching three new classes: the secret history of the world, so I'll be going into the nexus of finance, intelligence and religion. It's going to be a really interesting class, and I'm really looking forward to teaching it. I'm really looking forward to sharing with you. I'll also be teaching the great books. I'll also be teaching game theory. So in my next video next week, I'll be previewing these three classes. If you like what I do, please support my work by supporting me on Buy Me a Coffee, the link is below.

If you want to be part of my community, the Predictive History community, please join my Discord server. This week I've started a Substack, and if you want to join my Substack, the link is below as well. In my Substack I'll be going into solutions for how we can rebuild a better world, how we can work together to build a better world after the world collapses. And that's it for today. I'll see you guys next week. Thank you so much for today and I look forward to next week.