The prime minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez, has announced that the country will legalize 500,000 migrants, creating a massive political and demographic shake-up inside the country. Spain fought the Reconquista for hundreds of years to recapture its lands from North African Muslims. In the 20th century, the country fought a civil war and was ruled by Francisco Franco for decades to ward off communism. Despite all these efforts, Spain is ultimately racing toward the progressive open-borders suicide that so many other Western nations have pursued.
So the question everyone is left asking is: If liberalism ultimately makes nations fragile, how did it come to dominate the most powerful countries in the Western world?
Most people are lazy, selfish, and impulsive. Successful civilizations are created by accumulating low-time-preference behaviors that collectively enable them to overcome the negative aspects of human nature. Those lessons are costly to relearn with each generation, so these prosocial behaviors are encoded in the traditions, folkways, and institutions of civilization. The systems that allow society to function work their way into language, religion, literature, song, and art until they are almost invisible to the people who live inside them. The people could not imagine living any other way.
This thick network of embedded folkways and traditions does a great job of cultivating virtue in the citizenry and perpetuating the society that gave birth to them, but it makes cooperation with other nations difficult. In many cases, even the inhabitants of the society cannot really articulate what the behaviors are or what makes them work because they have become second nature. The very thing that makes them work for the host nation makes them very difficult to explain or implement in other cultural contexts.
As civilizations shifted their priorities, they started to lose the traditions, folkways, and even religions that defined them.
A small, tight-knit society is great for a time, but eventually it gets outcompeted by larger civilizations. The advantages of scale are too great, and to compete, the small, successful nation must learn to expand through cooperation. The civilization with more troops, more crops, more trading partners, and more allies will eventually crush smaller societies, no matter how virtuous those societies might be. This is where liberalism enters the equation.
Liberalism, in the classical sense, not the modern Democratic Party, was a project that allowed civilizations to scale. Specifics of religion, custom, tradition, and even financial transactions had been too deeply territorialized in particular civilizations to allow cooperation or commerce between different peoples. In many cases, the differences were so severe as to spark wars. To enable cooperation and scale, the scaffolding that allowed cooperation at the local level needed to be removed from these divisive, conflicting cultural contexts and reterritorialized into a neutral space where different peoples could access it.
By identifying and extracting the behaviors that enabled social cooperation from their cultural contexts, liberalism created a framework that enabled different nations to engage in commerce and other forms of exchange. A minimum viable morality was reached among nations, allowing them to sign business contracts, diplomatic treaties, and trade agreements that each side understood and could adhere to. Rather than go to war, people with very different ways of life could buy, sell, and even ally with each other productively. Capitalism was born, and with it came vast gains in wealth and standard of living.
The benefits of this explosion in cooperation are obvious, but in life, there are no solutions — only trade-offs. Eventually, the costs of liberalism began to rear their heads. As nations began to liberalize and scale, they still maintained deeply rooted cultural identities and ways of life while experiencing an influx of wealth. The ruling class would need to manage these new relationships of trade and diplomacy, so they increasingly interacted with the ruling classes of other nations within the new liberal framework rather than through their own native cultural networks.
The ability to operate in the liberal global framework brought wealth and status, and soon societies were selecting for this ability rather than focusing on the territorialized traditions and virtues that had previously defined them. The incentives in these societies began to shift away from maintaining their own cultures and toward profitably engaging with the liberal world order.
As civilizations shifted their priorities, they started to lose the traditions, folkways, and even religions that defined them. They were vastly superior, both militarily and economically, to nations that had not learned to cooperate at this scale, but they were trading away something crucial with this advantage. The minimum viable morality may have been sufficient to trade tea or silk, but it was not sufficient for maintaining the social cohesion of particular societies. It turns out that the bare-bones morality extracted from their cultural and religious contexts is not enough for humans to survive in the long term.
This loss of identity and social duty started to have serious consequences. Ruling elites no longer saw the citizens of their country as family to which a duty is owed but as interchangeable economic units that could be rearranged to maximize productivity and profit. One warm body that generated labor and consumed goods was just as valuable as the next and could be swapped out at will. That is why Spain and many other Western nations have adopted this suicidal policy toward immigration — no human is Spanish; they all exist under the same liberal globalist moral architecture.
Liberalism seemed like a miracle when it allowed for scale and the massive advantages in wealth and productivity that come with it. But as the old identities and traditions fell away, the same force that allowed civilizations to grow beyond their wildest expectations also made them fragile and vulnerable. The trends we are watching play out across the Western liberal order are the slow but inevitable consequences of the radical shift we embraced in human organization, and they will not be corrected without paying a cost.
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