The Communist Mind Virus: The Worst of Both Worlds
China is often praised as a “long-term planner,” a civilization of dynasties and five-year plans. But the reality is less impressive. The supposed long-termism is undermined by erased memory — re-education and revisionist history make continuity impossible. What looks like foresight is mostly theater.
Meanwhile, short-term action is marked by pettiness and survivorship bias. This doesn’t build resilience; it strips away memory. No recursion, no compounding, no abundance. Instead of lossless energy — the kind that carries forward — it becomes wasteful energy, burned up in opportunistic scrambles that leave nothing behind.
And what gets scaled?
Almost always low-tech, backward ideas. Whether in business models or asymmetric warfare, the pattern is the same: scale what is already behind.
That’s not vision, it’s imitation with bulk.
Most of all, what this produces is inconsequential on the world stage. Pettiness, survivorship reflexes, and low-tech scaling may generate a lot of pieces, but they don’t create the picture. In the grand scheme, they are fragments at best. Scale cannot compete against high-tech presence. And speed, when it emerges from low barriers of entry or low skill, should not be mistaken for power. That kind of speed is noise — inconsequential speed that dissolves against the superior tempo of authored presence.
The outcome is the worst of all worlds: long-term theater, short-term pettiness, and scaled mediocrity in between.
Any new discovery meets resistance from the orthodoxy. That resistance isn’t mysterious — their incentives demand it. Incumbents protect what they know, even as the ground shifts beneath them.
But when proof is undeniable, when execution itself becomes the evidence, the burden of persuasion disappears. You stop worrying about the incumbent advantage.
You move past narrative and into truth.
And when truth is authored directly into the market — in real time, with memory embedded — history is no longer something written after the fact.
It is set in motion as it happens.
Memory puts you on the right side of history because memory creates history.
By contrast, a society that elevates authorship, elevates agency, and elevates the individual generates the opposite result. It produces memory, recursion, and abundance. It converts energy into momentum without waste. And it creates the conditions for true variance collapse: resolution that compounds into the future.
That’s why the real advantage may not be in pretending to stretch forever, but in the medium term — a horizon long enough to compound, short enough to adapt, and rooted in memory that isn’t erased.
Inconsequential speed fades; authored presence remains.