Synthetic meat isn’t meat

Civic nationalism doesn’t create nations either.

In recent years we have witnessed the spectacle of companies trying to sell us synthetic meat, a product no one asked for.

Multiple fake meat companies sprung up mysteriously during the Covid era. The hype was a combination of science, innovation, environmental concern and money. Lots of money.

Lab-grown meat can be sold as kinder to animals and the planet as well as cheaper to produce.

It sounds great. It certainly attracted a lot of attention including government backing, media hype and celebrity endorsement. Major food retailers, including supermarkets and global restaurant chains, used the products. Success beckoned.

And yet it failed. No one wanted it.

Despite the hype, the succulent photographs and the celebrity endorsement, it didn’t sell. Almost everyone wanted real meat.

The drive for fake meat is a superb reflection of how technocratic leaders look at everything. They invent a problem, get excited over the innovative solution they create, then look on, aghast the rest of us reject their vision.

Entranced by mental models

Nobody is asking for synthetic meat since real meat exists. Eating meat is one of the most efficient methods of transferring energy from the environment to us.

And nor is it scarce. America alone could feed the world. If it had to it could create more real healthy natural meat than the world could ever need.

So why create fake meat?

Mental models. Some are entranced by ideas that exist inside their heads.

It is often observed the progressive left is populated by those who fixate on fantasy ideas and then become enraged they don’t exist. Income parity, gender equality and imagined global temperatures are contemporary examples. None survive even minimal scrutiny, yet they shape national policies and all because some people have a little movie showreel in their minds that is more appealing than real life.

We used to incarcerate people who had visions, now we elect them to high office. Utopianism is everywhere. It dominates our lives. Real problems are ignored in favour of fantasy.

But why does this happen? Why do otherwise able people become obsessed with fictional ideas?

One rarely discussed feature of mental models is their simplicity. They capture the basic elements of real life but ignore the mess, like a roadmap. They focus on just the essentials.

There is a certain kind of person who mistakes this oversimplification for clarity. The map is easy to understand and therefore so must the terrain be.

Needless to say real life is not so simple. This is why so many ideas come unstuck despite hype and resources.

Socialism is a famous example of this phenomenon. Its promises are based on an incomplete view of how an economy works. Socialist ideas ignore human nature, a key component of any model that hopes to predict human behaviour.

The complex models of socialism produced by economists are comically simple compared to the markets they try to reflect with their trillions of independent transactions no one can control or predict.

Adherents then become entranced with the model which promises straightforward control that never materializes.

While some realize this, others are mesmerized by its promise no matter what reality tells them. The crisp, succinct clarity of models promises mastery over things we may barely understand, a tempting proposition for some.

This seems to have been the driver behind the synthetic meat bubble. It sounded amazing to those already inside a world that included technocrats, NGOs, politicians and media pundits, all of them concerned with schemes to maximize their own power.

The hype, money and attention already afforded to climate change inevitably bled into farming as a useful target for their ministrations. It wasn’t long before dire predictions emerged with plenty of computer simulations to back them up. Methane, fertilizer and water were all problematic, requiring drastic solutions. The carbon footprint was colossal, something would have to be done. In time politicians, managers and capitalists with zero farming experience recast farming as dangerous despite its superb track record in feeding billions.

They believed their own hype, and then they financed ideas to combat the problems they had invented inside their own minds.

Along the way synthetic substitute meat emerged as a key focus. It ticked every box. Except one; the market they so hate but are forced to contend with.

They couldn’t make it work even with venture firms backing it and governments talking about rationing real meat.

Total failure because fake meat isn’t meat.

Even now enthusiasts lament the failure and view it as insufficient marketing. They cannot critically assess their faulty mental models.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. This blindness defines Western elites. They invent nonsense, they hype it up to establish their place, then they begin to believe they can do anything even while it fails.

And we see it in even more dangerous areas.

Civic nationalism is fake meat

Multiculturalism is the belief many distinct cultures can live together and flourish rather than devolve into conflict.

This is false. It has never worked anywhere.

The world itself is multicultural. The solution that emerged to manage different groups was national borders. Each culture could segregate and live apart from others because they could not successfully live together.

As the failures of multiculturalism become impossible to hide, social engineers reach for ideas to make it work. The latest is civic nationalism. The fake meat of the social governance world.

For all human history we have relied upon the real thing, but now today’s social engineers believe they have discovered a superior recipe, one that avoids the hassle and expense of tradition.

Anyone can become someone like you as long as they conform to an arbitrary list of beliefs, behaviours, laws and customs. We can ignore ethnicity, heritage and history. We can manufacture instant populations with passports and certificates just as we can create synthetic meat by combining the ingredients ourselves.

Like fake meat it looks workable on paper. Not only that, it is presented as self-evidently reasonable. Why has nobody thought of this before? How convenient governments and corporations can import a new workforce and they magically become British, American or Chinese because they “share values” and observe laws.

America was the first to experiment, a necessity after the introduction of non-European immigration in the 1960s. Needless to say they didn’t need it before that.

The country found itself importing people with no historical connection to the American population through heritage or history. Far fewer of them married into the family than previous waves of immigrants from European nations. While importing the world America was becoming the world with its racial, ethnic and cultural tensions.

They convinced themselves they had always been a nation of immigrants and conveniently forgot how long it took even the Irish to assimilate into America despite their ostensible similarity to the founding stock.

Strenuous efforts to make this seem normal, despite its novelty, included the energetic emphasis on shared values or adopted customs since the newcomers were often strikingly different.

Civic nationalism seems to be based on the same faulty reasoning as synthetic meat. We can circumvent the traditional approach using innovation. Why live through centuries of strife for a nation to emerge when you can just hand out certificates and make everyone instantly like you because they claim to respect the law and promise to adopt new customs?

Initially this can seem to work. If a small number of skilled immigrants come they are typically absorbed. Most cultures can do this if the numbers are modest and especially if the newcomers intermarry, or their children do.

Even more so, in traditional societies, including our own until recently, the pressure to adapt was almost universal; no translators, no welfare, no slack whatsoever.

Large numbers of immigrants over short time scales retard the process of assimilation, and generous welfare programmes can derail it completely.

America is also big unlike European nations, so it has taken a while for the full effects to be felt.

Despite the endless hype, people reveal their preferences in their behaviour. They can move. Pro-immigrationists have complained about white flight for decades, one very obvious example of the failure of civic nationalism.

Just like those inconveniently full supermarket shelves with their synthetic products no one will buy, people run from diversity when they can.

Civic nationalists, like climate zealots, resort to repeating their tired lines about their great intent, how amazing it is all meant to be if people would just get into the spirit of things.

But it is all fantasy. Literal fictions that exist only inside the heads of those who imagine utopia. Real life has its own ideas.

Expensive failure

Logically if civic nationalism can work then we should see a version of it work as civic internationalism. And yet this is a well-documented failure.

We instinctively understand we cannot make the world cohere under civic internationalism despite a century or more of trying via supranational bodies like the European Union or the United Nations.

These are celebrated attempts to bring disparate groups together under shared values and mutual benefits. Increasingly they are understood as expensive failures. People are people, cultures are cultures; the clever ideas of intellectuals do not change human nature.

And human nature is territorial, possessive, selfish, familial and aggressive. It is no exaggeration to state much of the world views the Western obsession with egalitarianism as weakness to be exploited; a rare blindspot in the world-changing conquerors.

Similarly, civic nationalism is not some brilliant innovation. It is synthetic nationalism. It is fake meat.

It is an idea cooked up inside the minds of intellectuals that ignores history, real life and human nature, just like socialism and other fads that entrance them.

Unlike lab-grown meat we have been given no choice and no realistic chance of rejecting it. The ruling class have imposed mass immigration on Western nations, and now their intellectuals and media salesmen have been told to cover its failures using civic nationalism.

The goal is to erase any memory of homogeneity or shared heritage, the basis for virtually all nations even now. And that is a massive problem for Western nations pushing civic nationalism, real nationalism is the absolute norm almost everywhere else.

Just as the Frankenstein horrors of synthetic meat could be compared to real meat on the shelf right next to it, so it is with faked social cohesion. The rest of the world prides itself on its actual nationalism while we force down the synthetic version. The Chinese who are 92 percent Han have announced their goal is to increase their homogeneity, not decrease it as it is essential for their longterm survival.

We know all this. Everyone knows it, we just pretend otherwise.

It is all fake meat.

There is only one natural diet, the one we evolved to eat. We can deviate a little. Some pizza and ice cream won’t kill us. Even veggie burgers work at a pinch, but not as a staple. The limitations in synthetic food soon assert themselves as ill health.

With immigration the rules are the same. We know what works. We can admit the odd person who may be different. If the numbers are modest and there is some basic filtering. The tradition was marriage. You can marry in and we ignore everything else. That still works. Few people are racial purists after all. The marriage is a proxy for acceptance of our culture. Someone has decided the immigrant can fit in and we go along with this.

But the current free for all can’t be fixed with fancy ideas around civic nationalism. The imports aren’t us no matter how much they protest. Too many are coming who will tell us anything we want to hear while maintaining their own culture for generations, making a mockery of “shared values” and other inventions of today’s bureaucratic states.

So it is time to accept civic nationalism is like synthetic meat, it is a product no one asked for, an unwanted solution to an avoidable problem. It too must be left on the shelf while we get back to the real thing just like everyone else.

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