Today China released its much vaunted plan for peace in Ukraine. You can read it here.
The extraordinary impotence of the text is striking. It’s a well-intentioned, bland word soup that could have been produced by ChatBot GPT. There’s nothing bad in it other than it should be shameful for anybody over the age of 14 publicly to release such a string of banalities. “War is bad. Peace is good. Sovereignty is important. Respect human rights!”
The plan is said to be based on the doctrine of “4 necessities, 4 commonalities and 3 observations.” Anybody who has had to sit through an administrative meeting knows that this is the language of Western bureaucrats. There’s a lady in our Office of Instructional Innovation and Design who speaks like this because there’s nothing else she knows how to do.
The most striking thing, though, is that the 14-year-old who wrote the text is clearly Western. This is Western mentality, the Western conceptual apparatus, carefully and eagerly regurgitated in a manner of a conscientious but dull student. Over a billion people, one of the highest-IQ group of the planet, and all they can produce is this major snooze.
People keep saying that China is the next global hegemon. But they confuse size with the capacity to lead. Look at Great Britain or Spain. They are tiny. Yet they created enormous empires and made their languages and cultures globally crucial.
When a small handful of Spaniards defeated the Aztec Empire, that happened because the Aztecs were in a civilizational dead-end of which they themselves were quite aware. Spaniards made themselves more attractive to the multitudinous tribes that went to fight the Aztecs on their side and guaranteed their win because they were a civilization on the rise. Aztecs were on the decline. They had no new ideas, no mental agility. Not on the individual level, of course, but as a group. They tried to inscribe the arrival of the Spaniards into an outdated system of old myths. That wasn’t working, so they got stuck pondering this tedious conundrum and lost valuable time. When you contrast the absolute certainty of Hernán Cortés and the impotent wavering of Moctezuma, it becomes clear who was bound to win the contest.
The same but even more egregious process took place when Pizarro conquered the Incas. And now Mexico and Peru speak Spanish and struggle with very Hispanic problems in a very Hispanic way. (OT: is anybody following what’s happening in Mexico? It’s major and really bad. I can post about it if people are interested).
Leadership comes from a complete certainty that you have something really cool going on and you need to share it with the world. It works this way both in our individual lives and small groups or globally. “I’m big so follow me” makes no sense. “Follow me because I know a wonderful place you’ll love” does. Today China made it abundantly clear that it has no map that could take us to a great place and, moreover, doesn’t even suspect that maps can be drawn and new places can be explored.
As a famous Soviet writer said, “the scariest enemy is the one you invented yourself.” Let’s stop fearing imaginary foes and concentrate on our own leadership.
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