The Curse of Stasisism: Why Britain and America Are Burying Their Own Enlightenment LegacyUntitled Draft
By 蒲渠波 @ 2025-10-06T13:29 (–8)
This post is intended as a submission to the EA Forum’s Essays on Longtermism Competition.
# The Curse of Stasisism: Why Britain and America Are Burying Their Own Enlightenment Legacy
> **Abstract**
> This essay introduces “Stasisism”—a systemic ossification in media, academia, and policy that rejects heretical ideas under pretexts like “doesn’t fit our style.” The author argues that this rigidity is burying the Enlightenment’s core legacy: the right to error, heresy, and reinvention. Without institutional channels for micro-adjustments, civilizations face a binary choice: suffocation or violent reboot. In the nuclear age—with 12,500 warheads, AI weapons, and engineered pathogens—we can no longer afford either.
## Prologue: A Proverb and a What-If
A few years ago, while browsing online, I came across a Chinese girl proudly posting a selfie of herself in Hanfu on a street in Italy. The comments started innocently enough, but quickly turned nationalist. One read something like this:
> “By the time our ancestors already had exquisitely crafted garments, those Europeans were still clad in animal hides! To call themselves the ‘fashion capital’ is nothing but showing off one’s axe before Lu Ban.”
She ended with a taunting question: “Do you even know what ‘showing off one’s axe before Lu Ban’ means?”
I deeply dislike this kind of self-congratulatory fantasy in broad daylight, so I replied offhandedly:
> “Yes, I know exactly what it means. Around 500 BCE, Lu Ban himself used his own methods to craft an axe of exquisite design and razor-sharp edge, then taught a group of apprentices to replicate it. But clearly, none of their copies matched his in either beauty or sharpness. Hence the saying: to bring your own axe before Lu Ban and boast of its craftsmanship or keenness is a sign of lacking self-awareness.”
But as I wrote that, a question struck me:
**What if Lu Ban had abstracted the materials and manufacturing process of his axe into mathematical formulas or standardized procedures, and founded an engineering college?**
Wouldn’t that have enabled him to train professionals capable of supervising artisans to mass-produce axes just as exquisite and sharp?
And if, building on that foundation, he had encouraged students to explore different materials and shapes—to adapt the axe to diverse applications, even to conduct disruptive research on the axe itself—wouldn’t that have been the prototype of a research institute?
It seems the roots of China’s reputation as a “copycat nation” and its current technological “chokepoints” may actually lie with Lu Ban himself!
Reflecting further, I realized: perhaps the decline of the Chinese empire over the past few centuries—and the concurrent rise of the Greco-Roman intellectual tradition in the West—stems precisely from this difference.
Thus, I formulated three concepts:
- **Stasisism**: institutional ossification (“welded-shut systems”)
- **Conservatism**: stability with room for localized evolution (“allowing partial evolution”)
- **Progressivism**: total-system disruptive reset (“full-spectrum reboot”)
---
## I. A Rejection Letter, a Symptom of the Age
Recently, I wrote an essay titled *Carrots, Severed Fingers, and the Road to Serfdom*. Starting from real events—such as the Trump administration deploying Marines into Los Angeles to arrest immigrants, patrolling Washington, D.C., and planning to take over Chicago’s public security—I posed a thought experiment:
> If stealing a single carrot were punished by amputating a finger of equivalent thickness, would society instantly achieve “perfect order”?
> If I see suspicious figures outside my window at night, and instead of dialing 911, I call the Marines—is that truly a triumph for human welfare? Or does it prove that society’s normal operating mechanisms have already collapsed?
The piece was rich in metaphor, logical rigor, topical relevance, and even dark humor. After submission, it vanished without a trace. Eventually, a senior editor politely replied:
> “Doesn’t fit our style.”
> He added, “I understand what you’re trying to say. But this kind of disruptive thinking and sharp tone will trigger triple rejection—from algorithms, advertisers, and readers alike.”
That sentence was like a key unlocking a deeper problem:
If we liken today’s media and intellectual sphere to a restaurant, how exactly is it being run?
This isn’t Conservatism.
This is **Stabilism**—a systemic self-isolation that replaces “intellectual exploration” with “brand management” and substitutes “reader comfort” for “civilizational resilience.”
And it is precisely this Stabilism that is burying the most precious legacy of the Enlightenment:
**the right to heresy, the courage to trial-and-error, and the freedom to “not be oneself.”**
Even more terrifying—
When Stabilism welds shut every channel for reform, the only next stop for civilization is a violent reboot via Progressivism.
And today, what we hold in our hands is not the guillotine—but **the nuclear button**.
---
## II. The Restaurant Metaphor 2.0: Three Civilizational Strategies
Imagine a nation as a giant restaurant. Its survival depends on whether its menu can evolve in response to famine, plague, war, or new ingredients.
### Conservative Restaurantism → The Safe Evolution of Civilization
- A weekly “Chef’s Special” window allows thinkers to serve “Carrot-and-Severed-Finger Soup,” professors to declare “democracy has turned cancerous,” and think tanks to simulate “the world after the dollar collapses.”
- **Mechanism**: New dishes are labeled “Adventurous Special—may not taste good.” If they receive >60% positive reviews within three weeks, they join the permanent menu; if not, they’re removed—but the chef isn’t fired, and the recipe is archived.
- **Significance**: Dissatisfaction finds an outlet; energy is released; institutions can fine-tune themselves.
- **Historical examples**: England’s Glorious Revolution, U.S. Constitutional Amendments, Germany’s Social Market Economy—gradual evolution, three centuries without civil war.
> This is the true inheritance of the Enlightenment: respect for tradition, but not deification; tolerance for heresy, but not license for destruction.
### ⚠️ The Stabilism Restaurant → The Slow Suffocation of Civilization
- Menu is permanently locked: any dish that “doesn’t look like itself,” even if life-saving, is banned.
- Editors say “doesn’t fit our style,” professors say “beyond the syllabus,” journals say “methodologically nonstandard,” think tanks say “politically unfeasible.”
- **Mechanism**: Innovation must be “repackaged as traditional flavor”; true heretics are marginalized, exiled to Substack, Reddit, or fringe platforms.
- **Consequence**: Superficial stability masks soaring fragility. Small problems go unaddressed until they explode.
- **Historical examples**: Ancien Régime France → guillotine revolution; Late Qing Dynasty → Wuchang Uprising; Late Soviet Union → sudden disintegration.
### ☢️ The Progressive Restaurant → Civilization’s Nuclear Option
- Periodic full menu resets—even abolishing the concept of “head chef,” with the public voting nightly on what to eat.
- Yesterday: “Free-Market Steak”; today: “Planned-Economy Stew”; tomorrow: “AI-Allocated Nutrient Paste.”
- **Mechanism**: Total rejection of the past, no transitions, no archives, no tolerance for dissenters.
- **Cost**: Success rate <5%. Failure means societal pulverization.
- **Historical examples**: French Revolution (40,000 executed), October Revolution (70 million unnatural deaths), Khmer Rouge (1/4 of population exterminated).
And today, we possess:
▸ 12,500 nuclear warheads
▸ AI autonomous weapons systems
▸ Gene-edited pathogens
▸ Global financial flash-crash capabilities
**The next “reboot” might not even leave time to carve tombstones.**
---
## III. Man Bites Dog: The Domestication of Thought
In journalism folklore: “Dog bites man is not news; man bites dog is news.”
But in today’s Anglo-American media ecosystem, this is no longer witty—it’s tragic:
- Dog bites man? **Not allowed to report.**
- Man bites dog? **Too afraid to report.**
The media is no longer a keen-eyed hyena—it has been domesticated into a bonsai: elegant, uniform, controllable.
When challenged—“Why reject heretical ideas?”—its defenses are astonishing:
- “The algorithm doesn’t like it.”
- “Advertisers won’t support it.”
- “Readers aren’t interested.”
- “Doesn’t fit our style.”
These are not technical constraints—they are **self-preservation mechanisms of discursive gatekeepers**.
Suppose someone writes a logically rigorous, darkly humorous critique of Thomas Friedman’s *The World Is Flat*, arguing that globalization is a closed club for the top 1%, while the bottom 99% are trapped in digital feudalism—using only data, history, and philosophy.
If it appeared in *The New York Times* op-ed section, directly confronting Friedman, what would happen?
- The **algorithm would go wild**—“man bites dog” is a traffic nuclear bomb.
- **Advertisers would scramble** for ad space.
- **Readers would stay up all night**, their worldview pried open.
So stop saying “the algorithm doesn’t like it.”
**The algorithm loves it. Advertisers crave it. Readers need it.**
The real blockers are editors and brand managers at the kitchen door—
afraid not of readers, but of **paradigm falsification, positional threat, and authority deconstruction**.
> “The algorithm doesn’t like it!” is merely a flimsy excuse to block challengers from entering the restaurant.
---
## IV. History’s Slap: Enlightenment Was Never Gentle
### Newton’s Academy of Physics: A Model of Intellectual Feudalism
In this academy:
- Newtonian mechanics is faith, not theory;
- “Universal gravitation” is dogma, not hypothesis;
- “Absolute space and time” is identity, not model.
All curricula and peer review orbit the “Newtonian paradigm.” Any deviation is “unscientific.”
So when Einstein submits his paper—proposing light-speed constancy, time relativity, and curved space—
#### 🧨 Einstein’s Fate: Not Refutation, But Domestication
> **Review Comment 1**: “Methodologically nonstandard—you didn’t base your model on Newton’s three laws.”
> **Review Comment 2**: “Style mismatch—lacks classical rigor.”
> **Review Comment 3**: “Politically unfeasible—would require rebuilding our entire teaching system.”
> **Review Comment 4**: “Consider transferring to the humanities college.”
#### 🧠 Outcome: Institutional Rejection, Not Theoretical Failure
- Paper rejected—not because it’s wrong, but because it threatens Dean Newton’s power structure.
- Einstein delivers mail, teaches German, publishes in marginal journals.
- Meanwhile, Dean Newton hosts “Annual Lectures on Universal Gravitation,” disciples award each other prizes, and the academy publishes *Contemporary Expressions of Newtonian Thought*.
History is full of such moments.
Copernicus, Bruno, Luther—**they weren’t born revolutionaries. They were made “system destroyers” by Stasisism.**
But that was the pre-industrial age.
Martyrdom was the price; civilization could rise from ashes.
**Today?**
We’ve built temples of thought—then handed the keys to security guards.
Their duty isn’t to protect truth—**it’s to ensure “nothing goes wrong.”**
---
## V. Stabilism’s Fatal Blind Spot
Longtermist communities obsess over:
- AI misalignment → human extinction
- Engineered virus leak → pandemic
- Nuclear miscalculation → civilizational reset
But almost no one discusses:
- **Intellectual rigidity** → inability to recognize real problems
- **Public discourse collapse** → failure to forge consensus
- **Academic self-castration** → solutions lagging behind reality
This is the more insidious existential risk.
A civilization without intellectual elasticity will be paralyzed before black swan events.
If longtermism focuses only on “external threats” while ignoring “internal soul decay,”
it’s using the most advanced shield to protect a rotting corpse.
What we need isn’t more “safe prediction models,” but a **cultural immune system**—
one that permits heresy, encourages trial-and-error, rewards risk-taking, and forgives failure.
And this is precisely the essence of the **Conservative model**:
**Core unchanged, boundaries open; tradition as anchor, innovation as sail.**
---
## VI. Conclusion: Tasting a New Dish Is Civilization’s Last Hope
A culture that blocks intellectual exploration with a flimsy excuse like “style mismatch”
has already signed its surrender in the depths of its soul.
We don’t need more “safe” papers, “docile” columns, or “compliant” reports.
We need:
- **Writers** brave enough to pen pieces that “don’t look like themselves,”
- **Editors** bold enough to publish content that “might get flak,”
- **Readers** willing to taste a dish whose “first bite may not please.”
Because the long-term survival of civilization depends not on perfect planning,
but on **continuous evolution**.
And evolution requires one thing above all:
**the permission for “not looking like oneself” to exist.**
Otherwise, all our AI safety protocols, bio-defense systems, and nuclear deterrence architectures
will be devoured by the hunger of a self-forgotten intellectual desert.
My rejection wasn’t my failure—**it was the system’s symptom.**
And diagnosing the symptom is the first step toward cure.
The next “reboot” may leave no Yelp reviews—
**only radioactive dust in the geological strata.**
---
> **Discussion Prompt**
> Do you see signs of “Stasisism” in the effective altruism community or broader intellectual institutions?
> How might we design systems that allow “micro-adjustments” without triggering institutional immune responses?
> Share your thoughts below.