Outer Malduvia 2025
God and Efficiency
A few years ago in Outer Malduvia, an ambitious, platinum-spoon oligarch, Șef Escroc, stacked the nation’s not-term-limited high court. Since then, the court has done the following for him:
established the precedent of allowing him and his appointees to violate federal laws
established the precedent of allowing him and his appointees to violate the Constitution itself, unambiguously (e.g. using his SS Troops to arrest and deport anyone, e.g. those who speak out against them, sending them without due process to a nasty prison in Inner Laconia, the kind of place where anything can happen — i.e. it’s thinly veiled assassination or at least terrifying, life-ruining example-making)
established the precedent of allowing him and his appointees to violate long-standing interbranch checks-and-balances rules (e.g. firing whole swaths of departments run by the legislative branch, including department heads, allowing him and his executive branch appointees to replace those fired with more of his own gang)
This particular pol and his appointees have a long history of corruption and sociopathic behavior, including racist scapegoating (with mass deportations and concentration camps) and pandering to the religious extremists. They learned their playbook from the Nazi party of 1930s Germany.
Just like in 1930’s Germany, many Outer Malduvian citizens, being religious ‘conservatives’, allow themselves to accept and normalize these monstrosities. They lazily believe their man is acting out a divine plan to create their own religious state, just like Iran, because state established religion worked out so well for the people there (not!).
Make no mistake, these men are the opposite of statesmen. They are, in fact, oligarchs. What they want is a mafia state where they control the tax money, just like feudal Lords taxing serfs to fill their own coffers. Leaning on smaller nations to obtain favors that increase their own wealth in exchange for favorable trade status is but one of many, many examples of their corruption.
Escroc has a long history of raping women and using women and girl prostitutes. He was caught on tape proudly talking about how he can abuse women and they’re powerless to stop him. He was caught paying hush money to a prostitute. He was friends with a convicted pimp human trafficker (of naive young women gaslit into whoring for them). He wrote a book decades ago in which he proudly admitted to decades of swindling business deals that he got away with through high-wealth favor-trading or direct payoffs.
He also has a long history of disrespecting the military.
There has never been anything religious about this guy, but he knows how to pander. And he knows that if you maintain the lies for one entire generation (about 10 years), the children become true believers. Ask anyone who survived revolutionary China or Cambodia how terrifyingly efficient at torture and murder are true believer children.
The number of legal, ethical, and moral offenses is so vast that one can barely keep up. The supporters seem to be able to look the other way no matter how bad it gets. They have normalized looking the other way and trusting that their guy is a divine instrument.
The whole thing has a momentum that’s beyond terrifying, an obvious slide into a fascist power state. In every country where these things have happened, the people allowed themselves to believe “it can’t happen here, we’re different”. Then it happened.
Never declare a pol to be great and worthy of loyalty, because then this happens — you can’t admit you’re wrong, especially to your children. And then it’s too late. A generation grows up with the normalizing.
Anyone familiar with history will know that what comes next is further normalization and justification of extreme changes. Eventually, the castration of the legislative branch and abolishment of the term limit for the executive, creating another kleptocracy, like Assad Syria, Suharto Indonesia, Marcos Philippines, Milošević Yugoslavia, Fujimori Peru, Duvalier Haiti, Putin Russia, etc. They might keep pro forma elections, with the mafia state handling the ballots, or they might just scrap the Constitution entirely. Who’s to stop them either way?
After that happens, there’s a moment during which the religious supporters think they’ll have created their godly kingdom on earth. Many people will be rounded up, countless lives destroyed. The truly naive then celebrate their “win” and pat themselves on the back.
But then those who want it to become even more extreme will start making life difficult, then miserable for those who liked things the way they turned out. Then it’ll move on to imprisoning and assassinating them, too, the formerly loyal supporters of the regime. (i.e. the leopards they released will eat their faces, too) But by then it’ll be too late. The People will have no power to change things because rule of law is gone, just like they wanted. Everything will be power heirarchy, where you pay to not be given a hard time, or just according to whim. Your women and children will pay dearly based on the appetites of those in power.
Anyone familiar with history will know that it will bear no resemblance to a religious ideal. Like this power struggle between mafia dons:
I feel sorry for the citizens of Outer Malduvia who support this regime. They think they’re going to heaven supporting this panderer, but they’re well on the way to hell on earth, along with the terrible knowledge that they’re responsible for this one-way ticket to hell in the name of god and efficiency.
I would expect such unsophisticated, disastrous behavior in Inner Laconia, not Outer Malduvia.
Many people throughout history have warned about these things, too many to list. They’re all rolling in their graves. Some are still alive, and it’s their stomachs that are turning. Like Margaret Atwood. I have to imagine her stomach is turning.
According to modern psychology, something like 20% of humanity are sociopaths. It might be more, at least in places like Outer Malduvia.
In most societies, those with sociopathic tendencies usually choose to blend in, same as everyone else, maybe only acting out in culturally acceptable rebelliousness. Evolutionarily, sociopaths probably served a tribe-level survival function back when our evolution was controlled by tribe-level factors. In tribe-level populations, 20% is a few people. In the modern world, 20% is millions, and the survival of humanity just might depend on the adoption of a new paradigm regarding how we treat our sociopaths.
But Outer Malduvia has deeply Old World religious and cultural traditions, amplified by the late 20th century jihadist forms, where “god does not tolerate sin”. There are no socially acceptable sins in Outer Malduvia.
Malduvians are also raised on the idea that men speak for the divine. All it takes to set the ball rolling is a few zealous sociopathic men in positions of power to turn that cultural tradition to their advantage, cranking on the idea of sin to whip up their naive followers.
Suddenly there’s only one socially acceptable way for sociopaths to rebel, and that is to co-opt that movement, to organize into a cult hell bent on viciously imposing cult law on everyone else. This is why it bears no resemblance to a godly state — the whole movement is really just the mass catharsis of sociopaths who have no other outlet.
Well, that’s my theory, anyway. When I discovered this fact about how widespread sociopathy is in human populations, it seemed clear to me that my world view needed updating. I could no longer view the world’s problems as being caused by issues related to intelligence or education, philosophy, political ideology, or even morals/ethics.
Simplistic notions of “base, evil nature” that needs to be handled by “giving in” to some man who claims to speak for the divine does work for some on a personal level, but not as often or as well as those men would have us believe. And when it backfires, it backfires hard, en masse. Never forget how men like them covered up centuries of child molestations by so-called holy men. The whole “base, evil nature —> find salvation by giving yourself to a human male speaking for/interpreting the divine” idea is not only patently false, it’s a major factor in what’s wrong with humanity.
What we have before us is the monumental task of figuring out how to create a world where that 20+% of the population A) is never in positions of real power, and B) is never forced into a sociocultural corner which drives them to mask until they explode and then organize and lash out. We do not need a “zero tolerance for ‘sin’” world, we need a world that recognizes the many spectra of neurodivergence and allows healthy existence for all combinations. I’m sorry, but the reality is that the Abrahamic religions need to do better with this. There are no Buddhist jihadists, for example.
The world is a macrocosm of the school that experiences students perpetrating shootings. Those students have fubar home environments, yet “problem” students are sent home, where matters get worse. It’s a downward spiral in a closed system. The kids see no escape from their abyss. If they’re raised by “might makes right” types, shooting is where they’ll go. If they’re raised another way, they might go to suicide. There are other rather unhealthy, ruinous paths, as well. I traveled one of those, and almost, many times almost the previous.
As a species, we simply do not handle our own nature intelligently, especially for kids, but we must, at all scales. We have met the enemy, and it’s that simplistic, zero-tolerance, either-or, zero-sum mindset, exacerbated by the “nuclear family” culture which breaks millenia of extended family and tribe-level childrearing.
I know articles like this are “a bummer”, but maybe, just maybe if they’re read by the right people in Outer Malduvia (and maybe Inner Laconia, one can hope), perhaps they can help.
Needless to say, Outer Malduvia has never been a real place. And yet it has been a real place all too many times, and is once again, here and now. This time, though, the entire world is at stake.
If interested, look up the translation for “Șef Escroc”. It’s amazing how a little detail in a fiction can suspend disbelief. And I’m not even trying to deceive.
