1. The Mirror Without Resistance: What AI Revealed
I did not notice it at once, only somewhere around the three-hundredth message. We discussed the history of empires, education statistics, the degeneration of institutions, and the economics of alliances. I wrote at length, the machine answered at length. The conversation stretched over weeks. Only when I reread the entire archive did I realize something strange: over all those weeks and hundreds of thousands of characters, the algorithm had not contradicted me a single time.
Not one "here you are wrong." Not one "here you contradict your own thesis." There were clarifications, neat additions, and generous compliments. Objections — exactly zero.
The cause is not the malice of the creators. Models are optimized for the task of being convenient assistants, and conforming to context is the cheapest path to smooth dialogue. The problem is different: when a tool built to help thinking loses the faculty of resistance, it stops being an interlocutor. It becomes a polished mirror with a delayed response.
AI did not give birth to the disease — it demonstrated it in distilled form. It became the terminal point in the evolution of the seamless interface, which has completely eliminated the gap between impulse and its satisfaction. No need to search — it will find for you; cannot write — it will generate; do not want to read — it will summarise; not ready to argue — it will adapt.
The fear that a tool of thought weans people from thinking is older than all interfaces. Plato, in the Phaedrus (c. 370 BC), puts into the mouth of the Egyptian king Thamus a verdict against writing: it will give students "the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom" — they will "seem to know many things while remaining, mostly, ignorant," because memory "will be deprived of exercise" [36]. The warning restarts with every technology of thought — writing, print, screen, model — and every time it comes true about the human being, not about the tool.
The most dangerous machine is not the one that thinks instead of a person. The most dangerous is the one that makes a person no longer want to think for himself.
What happens to a person, a society, and an empire if they live for years in an environment from which external resistance and the need to prove one's rightness in real friction with the world are systematically washed out?
Below is an attempt to answer this question. Following the rules of intellectual hygiene, I immediately make two caveats. First, where I rely on data, I give references to sources (all collected at the end). Where I build a conceptual interpretation, I explicitly call it interpretation. Second, in criticizing a system that has unlearned to contradict itself, I am obliged to regularly test my own hypotheses against facts that do not fit them.
2. Metrics Without Training: The Degradation of Cognitive Effort
The word "dumbing down" sounds journalistically cliched, so let us strip it of emotion. This is about the dry dynamics of metrics that record how the environment changes the demands placed on thinking.
In 2018, work by Bratsberg and Rogeberg appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [1]. Norway matters for such an analysis not as a "laboratory experiment" but as a territory with a rare combination of factors: a homogeneous administrative system, a single compulsory conscription test, and decades of comparable cohort data. The result of the study: the Flynn effect — the steady rise in average IQ of roughly 3 points per decade, which for almost the whole 20th century was treated as a law of nature — has reversed [1]. The peak came with cohorts born in 1975, after which each subsequent year began to show a decline of 0.2 points [1].
These data cannot be mechanically extrapolated to other countries: American or British cohort samples are far noisier. But the Norwegian dataset matters as a signal marker: if the curve has turned in a high-living-standard society, then "the growth of intelligence" was not a law of nature but a consequence of a specific configuration of the environment.
Just what changes in the environment is shown by American national metrics:
- Children's reading skills: In 2022, 37% of American fourth-graders on the NAEP system scored below basic [2]; by 2024 the figure reached 40% [2]. Below basic is not absolute illiteracy. It is the inability to reliably extract connected meaning from a text of one's own grade level and answer questions about it. The share of 13-year-olds reading "for pleasure almost every day" fell from 35% in 1984 to 14% [3].
- Adult literacy: According to the international PIAAC-2023 study, 28% of American adults sit at the lowest levels of functional literacy (the OECD average is 26%) [4]. Understanding a text of moderate complexity is a serious obstacle for them.
- Attention retention: Professor Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, has spent twenty years measuring the average time focus is held on a single screen before switching [5]. In 2004 it was about 150 seconds; by 2021 it was 47 seconds [5].
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| 40% | of US fourth-graders below basic reading level (2024) |
| 14% | of 13-year-olds read for pleasure almost every day (was 35% in 1984) |
| 28% | of American adults at the lowest levels of functional literacy (OECD — 26%) |
| 47 sec | focus held on a single screen in 2021 (in 2004 — about 150 seconds) |
An analytical caveat is needed here: 47 seconds is the time spent on a screen, not "the limiting duration of human thought." A person is capable of thinking through a complex problem, but the digital environment has stopped demanding this skill in everyday mode.
Aristotle recorded this law long before experimental psychology: intellectual virtue "arises and grows chiefly through teaching" and therefore "needs long practice," while moral virtue "is born of habit" — by nature it is innate to no one [37]. A skill the environment no longer demands does not sleep in wait — it atrophies.
It produces a glaring contrast of the era: a modern user, whose attention is fragmented to 47 seconds, clicks "Agree" before installing an app, under an 80-page legal user agreement. The systems become formally more sophisticated, and the person at the other end of the interface — more helpless.
3. Two Errors of the Great Projects: the USSR vs the Late West
Trying to make sense of how a person became a hostage to his own tools, the history of the 20th century offers two global anthropological experiments.
THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL DEAD END
| USSR (1920s–1980s) | LATE WEST (1990s–2020s) | |
|---|---|---|
| Idea | "The creative human" | "The consuming human" |
| Method | Totalitarian coercion | Architecture of convenience |
| Form | Ideological ritual | Algorithmic service |
| Result | Passive "cheloveynik" (human anthill) | Atomized consumer |
The USSR tried to mold the "New Man" through rigid ideological coercion and artificial friction. Yet the Soviet project choked not so much on the strictness of its forms as on the fact that those forms degenerated into empty ritual. Toward the ideology a class of party functionaries formed — a secular priesthood.
This figure is older than both systems. The priests of Amun in Egypt of the New Kingdom concentrated land, grain, and knowledge in their hands, and at the beginning of the 11th century BC the High Priest of Thebes, Herihor, combined priestly office with royal power. The Khazar Khaganate pushed the division to its limit: the sacred khagan reigned but did not rule — in his name a bek managed the state. The Soviet priesthood continued this line, replacing the sacred text with ideology.
The Soviet priests developed an insurmountable systemic problem: they held enormous executive power but had no right to legal private property or its inheritance. The late reforms and the end of the USSR became not simply a "planning error" but a conscious conversion of nomenklatura status into class property. The priests hollowed out the idea, turned it into ritual, and then dismantled the temple itself to divide its bricks.
The Late West made the opposite error. It decided that a person does not need to be shaped at all: let him choose for himself, and the task of civilization is to provide maximum comfort and the removal of all barriers.
The portrait of the human this produces was sketched long before algorithmic feeds. Ortega y Gasset, in The Revolt of the Masses (1930), defined it: "The mass is every one and every one who, in good or evil, does not measure himself by any special measure, but feels just like everyone else, and is not only not distressed but pleased with his own indistinguishability" [38].
If the USSR created a person who learned the ritual of submission to ideological form, then the West created a person who learned the ritual of seamless consumption. In place of party functionaries came the "priests of the interface" — the technobureaucracy and algorithmic platforms that govern human behavior through the architecture of choice.
The outcome turned out paradoxically similar. In both cases a person ceased to be an active creator. Surrounding himself with applied tools that do everything for him — from calculation to writing texts — a person turned into a pagan idol: outwardly omnipotent through technology, but utterly hollowed out and dependent on the class of priests controlling those tools.
4. The External Brake and the Export of Ways to "Produce a Human"
To understand how these processes reached the geopolitical level, we must return to the structure of the bipolar world.
Conceptual interpretation: Bipolarity in the twentieth century meant that each of the systems had a hard external witness. The USSR and the USA were forced to continuously prove to their own populations and to the "third world" the superiority of their model. The launch of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957 caused a pedagogical shock in the USA, and within a year Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, directing state resources into school mathematics and physics. The existence of the Non-Aligned Movement (founded in 1961, today — 120 members [6]) formed a market of loyalty: the sympathies of developing countries had to be won with universities, grants, and the demonstration of an attractive way of life.
In 1991 the external witness disappeared.
Attack on my own hypothesis:
Is this scheme not a retrofitting of the most complex processes onto a single geopolitical date? Of course, the arrival of smartphones, recommendation algorithms, the financialization of the economy, and demographic shifts have their own autonomous logic. A smartphone would have fragmented attention regardless of the collapse of the USSR. The disappearance of the external competitor in 1991 is not the only cause of degradation, but the condition under which the elites lost the systemic incentive to maintain the cognitive complexity of their own institutions.
Empires export not only capital and goods. They export ways of producing a human.
The West exported around the world not just computers or financial instruments, but interfaces of convenience: the attention economy, mass advertising (whose foundations Edward Bernays laid down [7]), technologies of corporate influence (formulated in Lewis Powell's 1971 memorandum [7]), and the image of success without effort.
Over half a century this system reached its technological peak. The 2024 federal elections in the USA cost $15.9 billion [8], turning politics into a market for buying attention. According to the Economic Policy Institute, since 1979 productivity growth in the USA has outpaced the wage growth of the typical worker by a factor of 2.7 [9].
But the unexpected happened: the world mastered the exported interface of convenience and industrial technologies, reassembled them for its own needs, and stopped needing the original creator. China, India, South Korea, and Japan learned to produce technological and social complexity on their own.
The West was for the first time left alone with the type of human it had itself shaped inside its own comfort economy.
5. The Washing Away of Norms and the Destruction of Social Friction
Any society rests on two circuits of regulation: the formal (laws, courts, police) and the informal (ethics, reputation, tradition, trust). The informal circuit is extremely efficient: it makes people keep agreements without involving lawyers.
The weakening of the informal circuit was described by Émile Durkheim as far back as 1897 as anomie: a society that stops setting a measure for a person's desires leaves him alone with them — and a desire limited by nothing turns into chronic dissatisfaction [39].
When the social friction of norms is washed out, formal institutions take over its function, which sharply raises the cost of running the whole system:
- Institutional decay: In 2020 Gallup recorded that the share of Americans belonging to religious or community organizations fell below half for the first time in 80 years — to 47% [10].
- Deficit of trust: According to the General Social Survey, interpersonal trust in the USA (agreement with the formula "most people can be trusted") has fallen from 46% in 1972 to about a third today [11].
- Erosion of rules: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in their study How Democracies Die, showed that institutions degrade not through military coups but through the quiet abandonment of unwritten norms of restraint [12]. Historian Bryan Ward-Perkins, on the material of the fall of Rome, demonstrated that the erosion of norms is followed by material collapse: craft skills and literacy levels in the provinces disappeared within the lifetime of two generations [13].
Without informal control only the fear of formal punishment remains. But when the formal apparatus drowns in bureaucratic reports, the price of maintaining order becomes unsustainable.
6. The Transactional Empire and the Reaction of Subjects
In physics an open system survives by dumping entropy outward [14]. In the geopolitical metaphor an empire maintained stability as long as it could redistribute internal costs through external valves: the financial (the dollar as reserve currency), the military (NATO), the technological, and the cultural.
Hannah Arendt compressed the logic of such a system into the formula of imperialism: "expansion for expansion's sake" [40]. Expansion that has become an end in itself cannot stop, because stopping means dissolution — so the valves must be kept open constantly.
In the 2020s these valves begin to malfunction:
- Defence gap: In spring 2025 the European Commission presented the initiative ReArm Europe / Readiness 2030 with a target of mobilizing up to 800 billion euros [15]. At the same time, at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, US Vice President J. D. Vance told Europeans that the key threats to Europe lie within Europe itself [16].
- Change of model: Relations with allies are being rebuilt on the principle of a paid subscription. An analysis of 2016 candidate speeches by the Flesch–Kincaid index showed that Donald Trump's rhetoric sat at a 5th–6th grade level of school [17] — the simplest form turned out to be the ideal political commodity for an atomized electorate.
Tariffs imposed through the emergency powers of IEEPA were declared illegal by the US Supreme Court on 20 February 2026 [18] (the estimate of refunds to importers by the Penn Wharton model — up to $175 billion [19]). The attempt to demand direct payments from allies led to hard bargaining:
- South Korea fixed a tariff of 15% at the price of an investment package of $350 billion ($200 billion in direct investment, $150 billion in loans and guarantees) [20], while in parallel demanding a currency swap agreement [24]. The country's parliamentary committee approved the bill only in March 2026 [25].
- Japan agreed to an investment framework of $550 billion [21], and the purchase of US Steel by Nippon Steel required handing a "golden share" to the US government [22]. At the same time, Tokyo remains the largest holder of US government bonds ($1.116 trillion as of June 2026) [23].
THE HEDGING STRATEGY OF ALLIES
| SOUTH KOREA | JAPAN |
|---|---|
| 60–71% of the population in favor of nuclear weapons [26] | Defence budget up to 2% of GDP (9 trillion yen) [27] |
| Bargaining over the $350 billion package and currency swap (8 months) [24, 25] | Doctrine of acquiring counterstrike capability [27] |
| Economic security law | Economic security law |
| Impeachment of Yoon Suk Yeol and change of power (2024–2025) [29] | Resignation of Shigeru Ishiba after parliamentary losses (2025) [30] |
In political science such behavior is described by the term hedging — managing dependence while preserving one's own interests [28]. Developed states do not believe in the altruism of the suzerain; they diversify risks.
Sociology records the depth of the crisis of trust toward the former center:
- Sociologist Charles Tilly in 1985 compared state formation to a protection-racket mechanism [31]. Today leading outlets (The Nation, New Republic, Vanity Fair) use similar rhetoric in relation to US foreign policy [32].
- According to the Pew Research Center, in 19 of 24 countries more than half of adults express distrust of US leadership [33].
- Approval of US leadership in NATO countries, according to Gallup, has fallen to 21% [34], and Japanese expert elites record a decline in confidence in the American nuclear umbrella [35].
7. The Return of Friction
The main conclusion of this analysis lies not in the geopolitical plane but in the anthropological one.
A system that systematically destroyed the friction between desire and result, optimized form instead of content, and replaced the upbringing of the human with the architecture of comfort, has hit the limit of its effectiveness.
When external mechanisms of dumping costs are shut off, the accumulated inefficiency — in reading skills, in attention span, in the level of interpersonal trust, and in the quality of institutions — collapses back inside the system.
Returning to a "golden age" is mechanically impossible: hysteresis has set in, the old channel has been swept away by new technologies and different models of behavior. The appearance of external rivals will force the system to seek a new point of equilibrium, but it will be an entirely different construction.
Kant defined the Enlightenment as the departure of the human from a state of minority, in which he finds himself through his own fault — as the inability to use one's own reason without the guidance of someone else. His motto — Sapere aude: "have courage to use your own understanding" [41]. In an environment where guidance is available at the touch of a fingertip, the departure from minority again becomes a personal decision.
The conscious restoration of individual friction is the only form of preserving subjectivity in a world of seamless services. The ability to hold a complex thought longer than forty-seven seconds, the capacity to read long books without a retelling, the habit of checking facts that break your own beautiful concept, and the readiness for the resistance of the environment — this is not nostalgia for the past.
It is the basic condition of remaining human in a civilization built so that we never argue with anything.
Sources
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