Persistence
As everyone knows by now, the United States of America is celebrating its 250th anniversary - making it one of the oldest continuous governments under a single founding charter ever to exist in human history.
And for that, I think it’s fitting that its tribute for the 250th is about one of its greatest virtues - one that took root in one of the very reasons Homo sapiens came to dominate the planet for pretty much 12,026 years.
And that root is persistence hunting.
Homo sapiens isn’t the strongest predator. It’s slow, fragile, and weak. But unlike the other apex predators it outlived - including one practically designed to hunt it - it has several advantages:
- It’s bipedal, which frees its hands to manipulate objects better than any other terrestrial animal.
- It has one of the largest brain-to-body-weight ratios of any terrestrial species.
- It traded the protection of body hair against blood-sucking parasites for the ability to cool itself better than almost any other animal.
Combined, those enable a hunting technique almost no other predator can replicate:
Persistence hunting.
It doesn’t matter if an antelope outruns it. Every time the antelope stops to cool down, it spots a human hunter nearby and is forced to run again - until its own organs overheat and it simply shuts down, letting the hunters close in for the kill.
It wasn’t easy, though. It required a level of planning and coordination no other predator (except wolves) possessed, because a single hunter out of position could ruin hours of chase.
Now here’s where we come back to the United States of America’s 250th anniversary.
It’s still the same country, with a capital settled by compromise between Virginia and Maryland - only the dynasties that signed the Declaration are largely extinct.
It’s still the same Constitution, amended 27 times in 250 years, with the last substantive amendment over half a century ago.
The currency is still the same US dollar - bills that have never had to drop a single zero in 250 years.
The military comes and goes, sure, but West Point has stood for 224 years and Annapolis for 181.
It’s still the same nine justices of the Supreme Court and the same House–Senate legislature.
It’s even largely the same first-past-the-post voting system.
It’s still largely the same Star-Spangled Banner.
Now here’s the thing.
It survived Pax Britannica - one could even argue its first president helped make Pax Britannica possible by assaulting a fort in the Western Hemisphere back when he was still a redcoat colonel.
It absolutely survived the Civil War, and no amount of Southern nostalgia can change that.
It absolutely survived the “thousand-year Reich” and the “empire of the rising sun.”
It absolutely survived the largest land army in modern history at nuclear parity - much to the chagrin of a certain linguistics professor with daddy issues.
It survived a flat-out rebel sympathizer as president, deep penetration by hostile agents, and it absolutely survived a buffoon incarnate.
Which begs the question, for those who don’t get it: How?
For me, it’s not just the United States of America.
It’s something deeper, something uniquely English:
Robustness.
It’s designed for the eventuality of idiocracy - where the dumbest monkey that ever lived holds the power to rule, presiding over a bunch of monkeys who show up to Caleb Hammer’s studio, books in hand, to get called a dumb fuck.
It’s designed so no one can pull policy out of their ass without someone there to slap them back into place.
It’s designed, from the geography itself, so that no defeat is ever truly decisive.
It’s designed to be flexible enough that amendment is possible, but rigid enough that its antithesis never becomes the dominant interpretation of the Constitution.
Which is why the title of this post is “persistence.”
The United States doesn’t really have to do anything.
It doesn’t have to arm Ukraine against Putin’s Russia.
It doesn’t have to carpet-bomb the IRGC leadership.
It doesn’t have to enforce a trade embargo against Xi’s China.
Because Putin’s Russia made Putin the Tsar - and can’t even pressure him to say how the next Tsar gets chosen.
Because the IRGC depends on an export lifeline running through Gulf chokepoints - and ships most of its oil, at a sanctions discount, to the one buyer it can’t pressure: Xi’s China.
And Xi’s China is worse than Putin’s Russia. Putin got asked point-blank and refused to answer; Xi’s China actively beats up anyone who dares to ask, “Who’s the next Huangdi?”
So, just as Pax Britannica imploded from the imbalance within the Concert of Europe between Prussia and Austria, the US simply had to wait until all of Europe was incinerated in the flames of total war before intervening directly.
Just as the thousand-year Reich was buried under wars of attrition against almost everyone else - saddled with an ally that was more burden than help - the US only had to wait until that burden launched an air raid on Hawaii, forcing the Reich to declare war.
And just as the Soviet Union imploded under the sheer cost of permanent mobilization and the absurdity of a centrally managed economy, the Americans simply had to wait - grain exports in one hand, a hundred-billion-dollar IOU in the other.
All that matters is that the US keeps showing up.
Keep inventing entirely new, paradigm-shifting shit - even as its own people line up at Caleb Hammer’s studio to get called a dumb fuck over another financed Burgerpanzer F-150.
Keep throwing tantrums about $15/hour on YouTube, for every Chinese, Russian, and Iranian with a VPN to watch.
Keep doing nothing while Ukrainians subject Moscow to drone attacks all on their own.
Keep the CCP chained to neijuan - locked into an export market it can’t afford to lose, because involution leaves nothing at home to fall back on - and keep being rich enough to drop $50 on every sob story that leaks out past the Great Firewall.
Keep the IRGC sanctions in place, and force them to keep shooting their own people just to stay in power.
In other words: the United States only needs to be persistent.