Malthusian exploiters first take over institutions, then use them as weapons against society

What if institutions grow from the crazies having ideas and finding new orchards to explore until at some point the whole space within the framework is satisfactorily explored. Suddenly, it feels like all the good ideas are taken. I had this sense in high school.

Then, as the framework continues to bear fruit, you get more competitives going in and succeeding. They eventually displace the independent thinkers until the institutions become homogenous status seekers. They’re exploiters rather than explorers.

Once the framework stops being exploitable, the exploiters turn their attention outside. They decide to exploit the rest of society. They realize they’re in a bind because they know they’re not producing ideas anymore. They don’t want to look outside their framework because this risks cannibalizing their existing thing — and they may not be able to look even if they wanted to. But it doesn’t always take a genius to spot that new ideas are no longer emerging.

So you compartmentalize fields to avoid discovery. You put stricter enforcement on people stepping out of line. People who do are immediately shunned to prevent them from getting any genuine feedback. So people like Roger Penrose and others become cranks not because they have bad ideas, but for self-fulfilling reasons related to  people not giving them enough attention.

At the final stages, institutions become bureaucratic to slow down progress intentionally. Frameworks are like natural resources. You can exhaust them. At exhaustion, institutions can non longer pretend to be meritorious of their status. They instead become tyrannical and hostile.

The creations they cook up serve their own attempts to stay in power, and yet, in their attempts they ironically signal weakness. They inevitably bring about their own demise. The more insistent they are on using state power, the more they show that they are no longer operating on authority, but force.

I believe this is where communism happens. It’s not because we become advanced enough, or because we stop going to church, or because we forget how good capitalism is. Instead, it’s because we stop looking for new orchards.

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There’s a degree to which education doesn’t help you so much as it tells you what the world is going to be like for you, and who controls it. You don’t go to school to learn what the world is like, but to understand the existing views of the world. You don’t go to school to learn, but to figure out why the previous generation hasn’t made more progress in the areas they expected to. As a student, you are asked to embody the mind of the teachers. It’s a form of memetic elite transmission. The worst mistake you can make is to believe what you’re told. Your fresh perspective should allow you to see the field from the outside and understand it.