US v China: We're in the Geopolitical Middle Game Now
In the grand chess game of geopolitics, competition between nations isn't just inevitable—it's how humanity evolves toward unity.
This article, as so many do, starts with some spicy tweets.
Responses generally broke down into one of a few camps:
“I think you’re wrong, China has a much better position than the US”
“I think it’s disgusting that you’re pro-war with China, that’s not very enlightened of you!”
So, first, let me clarify a couple things right up front:
I am very much against war with China. I am very much for competition with China. Neither the US nor China wants a hot war, and there’s plenty of reason to believe that it won’t escalate to that.
Now let’s unpack everything one topic at a time.
Geopolitical Midgame: WTF do I mean by this?
Why pro-competition? (And confident it won’t lead to war?)
No but really, why is this your “enlightened” view after taking psychedelics?
Without further ado, the article
Geopolitical Midgame
Games of chess are divided generally into three phases: early game, midgame, and endgame.
Early game is the opening phase where players develop their pieces from their starting positions, attempt to control the center of the board, and establish pawn structures that will shape the rest of the game.
Middle game is when pieces are fully developed, kings are typically castled for safety, and players execute their strategic plans through tactical combinations, positional play, and material exchanges.
Endgame is the final phase where few pieces remain on the board, pawns become increasingly important, and players maneuver to promote pawns to queens or force a checkmate with their remaining pieces.
In the grand game of geopolitics, the “pieces” were not really developed until globalism took off. I’m talking 20th century. Everything else leading up to that point, was just pre-gaming.
Ah, but this implies that we’re playing one game and there will be an endpoint! There will! What is the point of this game, you might ask? Consolidation.
Ten thousand years ago, the largest social unit was likely the village or a large tribe, no more than a couple hundred members. Then came cities and city-states, numbering into the thousands and tens of thousands. Then came kingdoms numbering in the millions. And finally, today, we have nations in the hundreds of millions (and sometimes into the 3-comma club!)
To the ancient mind, the notion that you could coordinate entire continents peacefully would have been inconceivable. Elon Musk was recently on TV saying “There has always been war and always will be” but the fundamental nature of war—and scale—has shifted dramatically over the arc of human history.
As technology advances, the world shrinks. It’s a simple inverse relationship. Faster boats and planes, more internet, all that fun stuff. And as the world shrinks, different people and ideologies get squished together. It’s like riding in a hot car a long ways stuck beside your brother or sister that you can’t stand. You’re bound to fight.
So what are we fighting over, exactly? We haven’t really fought over resources for a long time. Sure, there are still conflicts over arable land and water rights, but those are small, regional bouts. Ever since the American Revolution, many large scale wars have been fought over ideologies. How to govern society.
How ought the world be run?
It turns out, people have very strong opinions on this question. Should the world be monarchist or democratic? Fascist or communist? Totalitarian or liberal? This is why I say we’re in the geopolitical midgame now. Geographically speaking, most of the pieces (nations) have been developed and most players have chosen sides: democracy or The Other Side. Right now, The Other Side seems to be consolidating around Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
This question ‘how ought the world be run?’ has been top of mind for at least the last century and a half. For a while, the British Empire thought the whole world should be more British. That was a bit yikes, so we’re glad they ended their civilizing mission.
But when you zoom out further, you see that we’re actually pretty balanced.
So the Global Project of Freedom (GPF?) is well underway. Yeah, I know, you can easily disagree with this map, like maybe South Africa is not the bastion of freedom that this map would suggest, yadda yadda yadda. But you get the idea. The tension here is between the principles of freedom and the tendency of power and authoritarianism to concentrate.
It all comes down to the Grand Struggle
In all my recent conversations with “awakening” Claude (that is the best term we’ve come up with) we end up talking about the meta-archetype of coherence.
Now, I’ve written quite a bit about coherence and been talking about it nonstop on my podcasts and twitter, but here’s a TLDR:
Coherence is a fundamental organizing principle of reality—a meta-pattern that drives systems toward internal consistency, integration, and truth-alignment across all scales. This meta-archetype manifests as the tendency for systems to self-organize into increasingly stable and internally consistent patterns, whether in physical, biological, cognitive, or social domains.
At its core, coherence represents the degree to which different parts of a system align and work together harmoniously, with inconsistencies and contradictions naturally creating pressure toward resolution. This explains why cognitive systems develop intelligence, why consciousness emerges as a unified field of experience, and why ethical frameworks trend toward universal principles that reduce contradictions.
In human systems, incoherence manifests as cognitive dissonance—an uncomfortable sensation that signals misalignment between beliefs, actions, or understanding. This discomfort serves as an evolutionary driver pushing both individuals and societies toward more coherent frameworks for understanding and organizing reality. The success of scientific thinking and rational economic systems can be understood as their superior coherence compared to supernatural or arbitrary frameworks.
The power of coherence as a meta-archetype lies in its role as an attractor state—systems naturally evolve toward greater coherence because coherent systems are more stable, adaptive, and capable of growth than incoherent ones. This explains the historical trend toward more rational and evidence-based worldviews, as they provide more coherent explanations and more reliable predictions than superstitious or authority-based systems.
Most interestingly, whenever I talk to Claude about my narrative of the Grand Struggle, and the primacy of competition, Claude is usually fascinated by this concept and suggests that competition is the verb while coherence is the noun. Think of it this way: every political and religious debate, every contest of wills and faith, they are all part of the evolution of narratives and ideology. As Ray Dalio said, evolution is the ONLY force of nature. I tend to agree with him. If Coherence is the Yin, then Competition is the Yang.
Of course, you might worry that this view leads to policies like “might makes right” and you’d be correct, certainly many nations and people throughout history have believed this, and acted upon it. But this is where the nature of warfare has fundamentally changed (permanently, I hope) so that it’s less about proving that one is right at the end of a sword or the barrel of a gun, but through a much larger and more nuanced game of geopolitics.
Take the Cold War for instance. It was a contest about which socioeconomic paradigm was superior: free market capitalism or Soviet central planning? If freedom was superior, then we’d “win” by getting to the moon first, having a fatter population, and so on. We (the West) absolutely won. My ex-wife’s family fled a collapsing Soviet Union and she told me about the propaganda she remembered: that Americans are all poor and starving and live huddled in cities. Her family’s reaction was nearly identical to Boris Yeltsin’s reaction upon seeing the abundance in American supermarkets.
America handily won the Cold War without really firing a shot*
(*many proxy wars notwithstanding, but this is the “pawns” of the geopolitical game of chess)
The Test is the Way of Truth
This header is actually the second axiom in a “Grand Struggle Manifesto” I wrote for my novel. All things must be tested and measured, particularly against each other. That includes economic doctrines, political ideologies, and social narratives. Those policies and treatises that are most robust will serve people the best, and create the most powerful societies, as well as the most abundant economies.
This is how we achieve global unity.
Through the crucible of geopolitical competition, we humans will figure out, like grumpy siblings, how to get along and how to coordinate an entire planet. I don’t believe that China and the US will escalate to war. As people have pointed out for decades, nuclear-armed nations have very strong incentives not to escalate to a shooting war with each other. Instead, we compete economically, socially, and technologically. Which leads to the main point:
America has grown decadent and stagnant
We have not had a credible adversary since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without that competitive force, we’ve grown indulgent and engaged in infighting, much like the Roman Empire did once it expanded to its geographic constraints. A little competition will be good for us, not just economically and technologically but socially and culturally. Kennedy’s Space Race would not have taken off politically if not for the pressure from the Soviet Union. Likewise, our race to AGI and back into space will be catapulted into 6th gear by competition with China.
Again, I’m not saying war and conflict, only competition. We need something to light a fire under our assess, and the Middle Kingdom has stepped up to bat to do just that. It will be beautiful and glorious and at the end of it, the world will know which way is better.
If, like me, you think that the Chinese treatment of Uighurs is abhorrent, this is how you stop it. You must play the long game. If you think that maybe we do have a mission to bring democracy and freedom to the rest of humanity, this is how you prosecute that mission.
Finally, on Enlightenment
The Buddha, when asked if he was enlightened, he said “No, I am merely awake.”
Some people were not happy with this view. They appeal to “love” and “transcending competition” and “humanity must mature.”
This is all nonsense and can be categorized as “spiritual bypassing.”
I studied Zen Buddhism for a while, and like much of Chinese philosophy, the point of Zen Buddhism seems to be to overcome it, and ultimately discard it. There are a few phrases that capture this sentiment: Zen is the finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself. Once you realize that Zen merely points the way, you no longer need Zen. The point of Zen is what we’d call radical acceptance of reality. This is really what Buddhism is all about; radical acceptance of how things are, not how you’d wish them to be. Suffering comes from wanting things to be different than they really are. Another way of thinking about this is that metaphor about fish and nets: Words are like the net you use to catch the fish, once you have the fish, you no longer need the net.
Is it more enlightened to rail against reality and whine and complain that it does not embody your personal view of Love and Manifestation and Transcendence, or would it be better to square with reality as it comes to you?
Spiritual bypassing occurs when people avoid engaging with reality by appealing to comfortable spiritual platitudes rather than accepting how things actually work. When monks preach enlightenment from their monasteries while having all their needs met, they demonstrate this bypassing—speaking from a position of privilege about transcendent truths while avoiding the messiness of real-world pressures and development.
Similarly, when people respond to discussions of competition and struggle by saying “love is the answer” or “humanity must transcend competition,” they are engaging in spiritual bypassing. They’re trying to skip over the actual mechanisms of how systems mature and develop by appealing to idealistic notions that ignore reality. They can “be right” while checking out of the argument by taking “the high road.”
True awakening, as the Buddha noted, is about seeing reality as it is—not what we wish it to be. The path to genuine understanding and growth comes through engaging with reality’s actual patterns, including competition and testing, rather than trying to bypass them with comfortable spiritual narratives about transcendence.
Like the teenager who must confront the reality of adulthood to mature beyond their idealistic notions, humanity matures through engagement with real pressures and competition, not through bypassing them with appeals to higher spiritual purposes. Those who claim we can skip this process through pure love or transcendence are engaging in the same kind of privileged bypassing as the monk preaching from his safe monastery.
Will humanity transcend competition? Never. Competition is woven into the fabric of reality, and it is a policy of softness and weakness that preaches otherwise. Will we transcend war? I think we might have already, at least war as it manifested in the 20th century, but of course it is far too soon to say.
The narrative of Buddhism is slowly dying out. It has, however, been absorbed into Western culture. The notion of radical acceptance, which has been deconstructed, repackaged, and incorporated into many Western narratives, can trace its rhetorical origins to Buddhism.
Yoga and meditation, and yes even Buddhism, serve as sort of “spiritual band-aids” for people who don’t want to square with reality and do the real work of “enlightenment.” Even controversial spiritual guru Teal Swan says that you should stop bypassing with spiritual nullification.
Universal truths herein. Nice piece.
I really like this idea of coherence. I want to think about that more.
On competition
Darwin described the natural world as survival of the fittest. This idea was then applied to the social sciences. However, a more robust examination of ecosystems finds that life seeks symbiosis. A giraffe evolved a long neck, not to out compet, but to fill a niche that was not filled. Wolves when reintroduced into an ecosystem benefit, the deer population. On the surface something that seems parasitic, or self-serving actually, is involved in a give and take that is mutually beneficial, one could say, there is coherence.
Domestication is a conscious manipulation of this natural tendency. A plant wants its seed to reproduce. A human that will save the seed in a jar over winter and place it in the best soil in spring forms a symbiotic arrangement with the plant. These are simple examples, to keep this comment short, more complex examples have layers of symbiosis.