The War on Things That Work

Adventures in confusion about complements and substitutes.

Why does everything get nicer and shinier while ever more dysfunctional?

Economics teaches an important pair of concepts: substitutes (things that can replace other things, e.g. beer and wine), and complements (things that go nicely with other things, e.g. sausages with beer or cheese with wine).

The defining insanity of contemporary politics is, metaphorically speaking, replacing wine with cheese - optional extras not in addition to, but instead of core functionality , the ornamental instead of the essential. Some things are nice to have once you have everything in order, but you shouldn’t be getting them at the expense of the main thing, any more than a broke person should be buying a giant TV on credit. This is epidemically prevalent enough to be recognized as a new formal fallacy.

Examples:

Renewables - sure, let’s do it - where feasible, mostly small scale, and in addition to nuclear baseload. We ain’t powering a global civilization with biogas and water wheels. Solar is the only “renewable” that makes systemic sense, and even then, we need the nukes. Treating intermittent sources as complete substitutes for effective and reliable baseload causes grid instability, increased costs (therefore inflation and economic uncompetitiveness), and potential blackouts.

Protecting the environment - save rare Australonesian swamp sabretooth weredormice, sure - noble goal, valuable, nice to have. Let’s have a nice healthy vibrant environment, sure. But at the expense of people? Depopulation, degrowth, Kardashev-scale opportunity costs, and extremely real political oppression to save some fungus, which may or may not actually be endangered? Insanity! If the left-greenoids don’t want to be seen as misanthropic maniacs with anti-human priorities, perhaps they should stop being misanthropic maniacs with anti-human priorities.

Education - “soft skills” and “emotional intelligence” are no replacement for literacy and numeracy, and are often pursued as a diversion tactic exactly because the average modern teacher is incapable of teaching real stuff, especially to the depressing proportion of pupils who are unwilling and/or incapable of learning, and who ruin school for everyone else because of soft-handed delusional policies. Half of high school graduates in the United States functionally can’t read. Fix that before worrying about “cultural sensitivity training”, “digital literacy” and “critical thinking”, none of which teachers can teach because they don’t possess those things themselves. We need better teachers and more segregation by ability and willingness to learn, as well as zero tolerance towards disruptive and antisocial behavior, in schools and elsewhere.

Economic policy - emphasis on social programs instead of ensuring they aren’t needed by stewarding a robust, productive economy. This is, however, not in the interest of politicians as a class.

Government spending - 0 dollars should be spent on frivolous public art displays, festivals, million-dollar statues (laundered into party coffers via drinking buddy third rate "artists”) until basic services are operating optimally, trash is taken out, roads are fixed, water is drinkable, waiting times for healthcare don’t extend into months or years, and public debt is reduced or eliminated.

There is a jarring contrast between basic services people actually need and the performative amenities that signal "world-class" aspirations. It's peak substitute-for-complement thinking: trying to have the trappings of a prosperous city while ignoring the infrastructure that makes prosperity possible.

Our entire civilization is like an aristocrat maintaining the appearance of wealth while the roof leaks. Potemkin village.

Being nice to other cultures - sure, let’s celebrate the diversity of human civilization. But excusing grooming gangs? Shariah in western countries? Indulging indigenous hallucinations about mountain spirits and “other ways of knowing”, which belong as objects of study (not alternate epistemologies!) in anthropology and nowhere else, to block real scientific work? Pretending all cultures are somehow equal? Insane and evil. Let’s try to have the falafel and belly dances without the stabbings, misogyny and honor killings. Leftists chronically underestimate how much cultural diversity actually exists, and how deep it goes - it goes well beyond the decorative “spice” and taco trucks they trot(sk) out whenever the issue of cultural cohesion is brought up, and into completely alien and incompatible value systems and basic assumptions about the world, society, and human rights. Speaking of which.

Human rights - global institutional edifices have been raised to facilitate vast corruption and money laundering and more than a bit of child trafficking extension of an ever-expanding range of increasingly made-up, arcane, marginal and far-reaching “human rights” to all and sundry, except of course there is less and less concern for the actual, non-bullshit rights of law-abiding taxpayers, actual citizens, and people wishing to be left alone. If your country isn’t running a budget surplus, it has no business doing foreign aid, people with testicles don’t belong in women’s boxing, and nobody in a first world country was oppressed in living memory. Imaginary rights are used as pretexts for violating real ones.

Being nice to non-traditional sexualities - sure, why be mean to people for things that harm nobody and nothing else? Consenting adults and all that. But porn in schools, drag queen story hour, fetishists in gimp suits twerking at children? GTFO. Kinks will never be mainstream, and some things should remain private, and they become tasteless when performed as narcissistic exhibitionism in the commons, or even worse, books for children. Deal with it. We need to separate alternative sexualities from Cluster B personality disorders, which is gonna be difficult because there’s a high correlation, but they are not the same thing, and we should “be nice to” and tolerant of only one of them.

Being nice to criminals - yes sure they are humans with rights, and we should be as kind to them as possible even in punishment - TO THE DEGREE IT DOES NOT ENDANGER INNOCENTS, and ONLY if it doesn’t endanger innocents. Releasing violent criminals with a tap on the wrist because “they might not like jail”, “didn’t know raping people was wrong” or “come from disadvantaged backgrounds”, excesses of blank slatist, bioleninist, anarchotyrannic insanities of “restorative justice” that assume people are way more corrigible than they actually are, and simply doesn’t work, casting pearls before swine and framing homicidal monsters as “victims of external factors” - screw that. Instead, we need a legion of Bukeles.

Arts and humanities - obviously complements and nice to have, but in no way equal to STEM. I like Homer and antique vases, but I like electricity and antibiotics more.

Creative and self indulgent work - it’s nice to have art, but we can’t all be interpretative dancers (this is elf-values utopianism). We can’t replace the walls of the house with nice wallpaper.

Bicyclism - sure, it’s better for the planet and healthier, but the hardcore cycling zealots are really telling on themselves that they never had to move a fridge, take kids to school, or arrive anywhere smelling presentable and on time. They’re so deep in the leisure class they cannot even conceive of anyone needing to do anything real. Bikes are a solution for maybe 20-30% of people at best, and for some use cases only. But you cannot sacrifice half of the roads for 20-30% of people, because that reduces total capacity. The truth about urban transportation is that no silver bullet exists short of building whole new cities and/or going heavily underground. Traffic is otherwise unsolvable in a neat way, and there are real and hard tradeoffs (another bane of the leftist). One big solution is robotaxis, another is needing less transportation - work from home, drone delivery. The monomaniacal cyclist fantasy of garden cities with bike lanes and not a car in sight is insane, and wouldn’t work (just like they don’t).

Spending money on “experiences” and “fun” - instead of building a solid financial foundation and starting a family (it is what it is - the main quest in life), betraying both humanity and a fundamentally infantile “pocket money" attitude to wealth. (The tradeoff here may soon improve with robots.)

We could go on about unprofitable companies with meditation rooms and smoothie bars, cities with “world class art districts” and massive knife crime, the NHS in Britain commissioning hundred-thousand-pound artwork and paying diversity officers kingly salaries while nurses are on food stamps, but I think you get the idea.

It’s all very “let them eat cake” - in Potemkin’s village. It’s like a kid’s desire to eat only candy. What is broccoli good for, anyway? Incomprehension of the realities of making the world work, no sense of priorities, no awareness of what’s fundamental.

I’m pinning this problem politically on “the left”, because today, this mentality is their exclusive and typical trait, like the spikes on a hedgehog or zig-zag pattern on a viper. Much of modern leftism is the unrestrained, unqualified and unhinged pursuit of complementary goods at the expense of fundamentals, a preference for aesthetics, vibes and luxuries over such trifling concerns as rule of law, material security, and anything working properly. That’s beneath them, because of course, they are the aristocracy, they do not wish to be inconvenienced by such brutish trifles, which would interfere with the singular pursuit of social signaling and aesthetic self-realization, and they’re almost insulted that the load-bearing things aren’t automatic and given, like it’s beneath them, and wish to wish them away.

There are two deep causes of this mentality - Veblen leisure class values (aversion bordering on a disgust response to practicality) and leftism (metaphysical equality of all things). This may sound like a paradoxical combo - aristocratic and leftist values in one package of phenomenal suck - but it makes sense when you realize leftism became the elite ideology, which means it got parasitised by the older and more fundamental leisure class value system.

It’s the worst kind of elitism we’ve seen so far.

On the Veblen front, the mentality is a result of extremely real and obvious privilege, insulation from practical concerns and total obliviousness to what is necessary to make the world work. Ugh, non-negotiable reality, gross. That’s other people’s job!

On the leftism front, the problem follows from “equality” misunderstood as “equivalency”, which abolishes hierarchy as a matter of metaphysical first principle, and puts all things on the same “vertical” level, assuming only “horizontal” differences - everything is different but equally good - and therefore too much interchangeability. Why shouldn’t windmills do the work of nuclear reactors? Why shouldn’t all sexual proclivities be exactly equal (except for heterosexuality which is low status and bad, ignoring that it’s the only way to continue the species and very much the natural core function of sex to begin with)? Why should mechanical engineering be considered more useful than poetry? (You will note that all actual socialist societies put poets in labor camps, or made them write odes to tractors. It is better not to mention what they did to sexual minorities.)

Leftist methaphysics is explicitly an erasure and denial of all vertical and qualitative difference of any kind: better - worse, more legitimate - less legitimate, normal - not normal, healthy - unhealthy. It gets worse, because implicitly and in practice, leftism doesn’t stop at equality, but continues into inversion of natural hierarchy - the worse, the unhealthy, the dysfunctional, the impractical are treated as better (because “oppressed”, so deserving of privileges and preferential treatment to even things out).

Right is the new left. I find myself in the paradoxical position of being actually more committed to stated leftist goals than the strain of leftist we get these days.

The people who suffer most from all the waste and dysfunction are those at the bottom.

By contrast, the elites making these mistakes are so satiated in their core needs and situation that they go "luxury shopping", except on behalf of a society that is nowhere near that.

They’re like a trust fund kid, never having experienced a missed meal or unpaid bill, deciding everyone should switch to artisanal farm-to-table dining while they can’t afford groceries and the food bank runs empty - so insulated from basic needs that they mistake luxuries for necessities and inflict their preferences on people still struggling with fundamentals.

It's peak Maslow's Hierarchy confusion: they're pushing (their own version of) self-actualization on people who can't pay their electric bills, and who do not share their aesthetic proclivities. Having never worried about basic functions, they treat them as solved problems, as given, as beneath consideration - while obsessing over optional extras and aesthetic flourishes.

This is ultimately a form of class violence. When you never had to choose between heating and eating, it's easy to demand everyone switch to heat pumps. When you've never had to move a fridge or rush to the ER at 3am, you can fantasize about car-free cities. When you've never had to work a practical job, you can dismiss STEM in favor of “other ways of knowing”.

In their towers of genuine privilege, insulated from reality, the Griftatorship of the Lumpenvebleniat are confused about where society is in its hierarchy of needs. It's not just poor policy - it's a fundamental confusion about human flourishing born of too much privilege and too little contact with reality.

You want to help the poor? Great - they need reliable public transport more than bike lanes in wealthy neighborhoods. They need functioning schools more than DEI coordinators. They need emergency services that actually show up more than they need community dialogue facilitators. And they need cheap electricity, safe cities, functional transportation and genuine economic opportunities - not performative table scraps handouts and patronizing condescension.

You care about the environment? Excellent - then you should support nuclear power because it's the only proven way to decarbonize at scale. Real environmentalism means focusing on what works, not what feels green.

You want to fight poverty? Fantastic! Let's talk about how poor families can't afford the electricity bills inflated by feel-good energy policies that resulted in a colossal misallocation of resources and the enriching of cronies and grifters, to say nothing of China’s solar panel industry. Let's discuss how single mothers need cars to juggle work and childcare while urban planners fantasize about car-free utopias from their gentrified neighborhoods. Let's examine how minority communities suffer most when police response times stretch because budgets went to 'restorative justice consultants' instead of basic public safety. Stop treating poor people as props in social justice performance art. They need jobs, safe streets, good schools, and affordable energy. They need functioning systems and real opportunities - not patronizing poverty tourism and performative empathy.

You want economic equality? Then stop strangling small businesses with regulations while big corporations hire armies of compliance officers. Stop replacing vocational education with shit-tier community college art degrees (at 200k a pop). Stop destroying working-class jobs in the name of pseudo-noble policies that mainly benefit the professional-managerial class.

You care about future generations? Wonderful - then stop sacrificing their prosperity on the altar of aesthetic preferences. They'll need functioning infrastructure more than they'll need memories of climate awareness festivals. They'll need real technological progress more than they'll need your carefully curated concerns about it - or worse, decel anti-technological doomerism that seeks to abort, coopt and longhouse the very things that can save us.

The Lumpenvebleniat has replaced actual progress with a cargo cult of progressive aesthetics, while the material conditions of those they claim to champion deteriorate.

This substitution of aesthetics for function, of performance for productivity, of symbolic gestures for systemic solutions isn't just wrong - it's cruel. They maintain their status by performing compassion while denying the basic foundations of human flourishing. They've built a Potemkin paradise of progressive pretense atop crumbling infrastructure, failing schools, and dying cities - worse, a dying civilization. But reality doesn't care about performative politics or leisure class luxuries. A civilization cannot run on complementary goods alone - someone, somewhere, must keep the lights on, the water flowing, the trains running, the streets safe. The tragedy isn't just that our elite class has forgotten this - it's that they convinced themselves forgetting it is a virtue. Until we rebuild our capacity to distinguish between core functions and optional extras, between the load-bearing walls and the designer wallpaper, we'll continue sacrificing real progress to faux-progressive aesthetics. The poor and working class, as always, will bear the heaviest cost of this elite delusion.

They’re building zen gardens in a desert - ornamental luxuries that actively waste the scarce resources needed for survival. While people need water wells and shade trees, our elite class is meticulously raking sand patterns, trimming dwarf conifers and contemplating the koi. It's not just misguided - it's actively harmful, consuming precious water to maintain an aesthetic indulgence that serves no practical purpose except signaling refinement - and with it, the signal that they’re better than you, and you deserve it.

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P.S. There’s an equal and opposite spartan-fascist-soviet failure mode of disregarding nice things to maximize production of fundamental essentials of life (something you will note Sparta and Soviets both failed at), the optimized utilitarian barracks with not a flower vase in sight society, but we are so far from that as a civilization, and so far gone in the opposite direction of degenerate Woostock, that I don’t consider meaningful to mention except for the sake of completeness - we are ears deep in the opposite problem, and a bit of refocus on the important, core, load-bearing things, the substance and fundament that even enables our extensive frivolities to begin with, will do us a world of good.