THE CURSE OF STASISISM: WHY BRITAIN AND AMERICA ARE BURYING THEIR OWN ENLIGHTENMENT LEGACY  
A Political-Philosophical Diagnosis for the Age of Silence  
PQ. Boer (蒲渠波)  
Independent Scholar · Guangzhou, China  
© 2025 PQ. Boer. All rights reserved. 

Prologue  
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. That’s precisely what ‘showing off one’s axe before Lu Ban’ means.”  

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 a cohort of professionals capable of supervising and guiding 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 from a media outlet 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 Stasisism—a systemic self-isolation that replaces “intellectual exploration” with “brand management” and substitutes “reader comfort” for “civilizational resilience.”  

And it is precisely this Stasisism 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 Stasisism 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, One Survival Rule for the Nuclear Age  
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 PQ Boer 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. This is the true inheritance of the Enlightenment: respect for tradition, but not deification; tolerance for heresy, but not license for destruction.  
Historical examples: England’s Glorious Revolution, U.S. Constitutional Amendments, Germany’s Social Market Economy—gradual evolution, three centuries without civil war.  

⚠️ The Stasisism 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. When all safety valves are welded shut, the pressure cooker can only relieve pressure through explosion.  
Historical examples: Ancien Régime France → guillotine revolution; Late Qing Dynasty → Wuchang Uprising and imperial collapse; Late Soviet Union → sudden disintegration and shock therapy.  

☢️ The Progressive Media 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, population collapse, civilizational regression. In the nuclear age, there may be no second chance for a reboot.  
Historical examples: French Revolution (40,000 heads rolled), October Revolution (70 million unnatural deaths), Khmer Rouge (1/4 of the 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, Dog Bites Man: Media’s Self-Justification and the Domestication of Thought → Maybe Friedman Should Deliver Takeout  
In journalism folklore, there’s an old adage: “Dog bites man is not news; man bites dog is news.” Originally a witty definition of “news value”—emphasizing rarity, conflict, and surprise.  

But in today’s Anglo-American media ecosystem, this joke is no longer humorous—it’s ironic:  
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 in posture, uniform in style, controllable in content.  

And when challenged—“Why reject heretical ideas? Why not report ‘man bites dog’ events?”—its self-defense mechanisms are astonishing:  
• “The algorithm doesn’t like it.”  
• “Advertisers won’t support it.”  
• “Readers aren’t interested.”  
• “Doesn’t fit our style.”  

These sound like technical constraints, but in truth, they’re self-preservation mechanisms of discursive gatekeepers. They’re not guarding truth—they’re guarding their positions.  

Suppose someone writes a logically rigorous, sharply witty, darkly humorous article challenging Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” narrative, arguing that globalization is merely a closed club for the top 1%, while the bottom 99% are trapped in digital feudalism. The piece avoids slogans and emotional appeals, relying solely on data, history, and philosophical reasoning to mount a paradigm-level challenge.  

If it actually appeared in The New York Times op-ed section, directly confronting Friedman—what would happen?  
The algorithm would go wild! Because “man bites dog” is a traffic nuclear bomb, and “man-dog mutual biting” is a cultural tsunami.  
Advertisers would scramble to buy space! User dwell time, comment volume, and shares would break annual records.  
Readers would stay up all night! Their worldview is being pried open; their identity is being reconfigured.  

This is precisely the kind of content algorithms dream of!  

So stop saying “the algorithm doesn’t like it.”  
The algorithm loves it.  
Advertisers would beg for it.  
Readers crave it daily.  

The real “dislikers” are the editors, reviewers, and brand managers standing guard at the kitchen door. They fear not the algorithm, not the readers, not the advertisers—but the falsification of their paradigm, the shaking of their position, the deconstruction of their authority.  

Imagine a dining table that has served only cabbage, potatoes, and eggplant for years—  
not because customers love only these three, but because the kitchen forbids any other dish.  
Over time, the system “scientifically” concludes: “Users prefer potatoes.”  
So when someone brings a pot of simmering braised lamb, the system immediately alarms: “Algorithm doesn’t like it!”  

“‘The algorithm doesn’t like it!’—this is merely a flimsy excuse to block challengers from entering the restaurant.”  

IV. History’s Slap: Enlightenment Was Never Gentle—It Was a Violent Intellectual Uprising. But Today, We Can’t Afford to Lose  
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, journals, and peer-review standards are built around the “Newtonian paradigm.” Any deviation is deemed “unscientific” or “immature.”  

Thus, when Einstein submits his paper—proposing the constancy of light speed, the relativity of time, the curvature of space, and suggesting Newton’s theory is merely a special case—  

🧨 Einstein’s fate: not refutation, but domestication  
Review comment 1: Methodologically nonstandard  
• “You didn’t base your model on Newton’s three laws—lacks theoretical consistency.”  
Review comment 2: Style mismatch  
• “Your language lacks the classical rigor and rational tone of our academy.”  
Review comment 3: Politically unfeasible  
• “Accepting your theory would require rebuilding our entire teaching system—impossible under current budget and staffing.”  
Review comment 4: Suggest redirection  
• “Your interests seem more aligned with philosophy or mathematics. Consider transferring to the humanities college.”  

🧠 Outcome: not theoretical failure, but institutional rejection  
• Einstein’s paper is rejected—not because it’s wrong, but because it threatens Dean Newton’s power structure;  
• He may be forced to deliver mail, teach German, or publish in marginal journals;  
• Meanwhile, Dean Newton continues hosting “Annual Lectures on Universal Gravitation,” his disciples award each other prizes, and the academy publishes Contemporary Expressions of Newtonian Thought.  

History is full of such moments: when systems reject all voices that “don’t look like themselves,” true innovators can only appear as destroyers.  

In reality, Copernicus’s heliocentrism was initially circulated cautiously among scholars as a mathematical hypothesis; Martin Luther’s early critique of indulgences was seen as internal theological debate. Had there existed a public sphere allowing “micro-adjustments”—where some propose three points, others rebut two, journals archive debates, and lecture halls host discussions—perhaps “the Sun is the center” wouldn’t have required overturning the theological dining table, and the “95 Theses” might have remained a gentle doctrinal clarification.  

But reality was different:  
Copernicus had no chance to say “geocentrism can be fine-tuned,” so he had to declare “the Sun is the center”—toppling the theological cosmos.  
Bruno had no space to ask “can the Church embrace a multiverse?” so he had to assert “God needs no geocentrism”—and was burned at the stake.  
Luther knew his “Church Reform Proposal” would vanish into silence, so he nailed the 95 Theses to the church door.  

They weren’t born revolutionaries—they were made “system destroyers” by Stasisism.  

But that was the pre-industrial age.  
The cost of intellectual uprising was individual martyrdom; civilization could still rise from the ashes.  

What about today?  
We treat “disruption” as a risk item, “heresy” as an operational incident, and “style mismatch” as the ultimate rejection reason.  
We’ve built countless universities, journals, media outlets, and think tanks—  
then installed “content filters” that only allow “safe ideas” to pass.  
We’ve constructed temples of thought—  
but handed the keys to security guards.  
And the guards’ duty isn’t to protect truth—  
it’s to ensure “nothing goes wrong.”  

V. Stasisism Fatal Blind Spot: When the Soul Dies, Technology Cannot Save Civilization  
Longtermist communities obsess over:  
• AI misalignment → human extinction  
• Engineered virus leak → global pandemic  
• Nuclear war miscalculation → civilizational reset  

But almost no one discusses:  
• Intellectual rigidity → inability to recognize real problems  
• Public discourse collapse → society’s failure to forge consensus  
• Academic self-castration → solutions perpetually lagging behind reality  

This is the more insidious, more lethal “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 in the Nuclear Age  
A cultural atmosphere that can block humanity’s intellectual exploration with such a flimsy excuse as “style mismatch” has already signed its surrender in the depths of its soul.  

We don’t need more “safe” papers, “docile” columns, or “compliant” think-tank 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 meticulously designed AI safety protocols, bio-defense systems, and nuclear deterrence architectures...  
will ultimately 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.