VaporTrad is a Radical Traditionalist metapolitical framework and historiographical toolkit. It is not an entirely new idea, but the Radical Traditionalist metapolitical framework stripped of its false dichotomization of wisdom and knowledge in favor of a more scientific approach that seeks to synthesize anthropological and historical evidence with Perennialist concepts and ideals.
Civilization is the product of endemic neolithic human warfare, beginning when warlords start setting aside specialized managers, merchants, and manual laborers to support a more specialized martial elite. This sedentary settlement dedicated to logistical and resource support, civilization, enables a tribe to achieve a military advantage.
This system, civilization, functions as an ecological habitat for those humans who operate within it. They are one step removed from nature, in a new world within the world with its own niches, roles, and rules. It is not merely, “sophisticated humans with buildings and stuff,” but a novel sort of synthetic meta-organism. To understand its processes and progression is to understand our collective fate.
The civilizational habitat follows a defined and predictable trajectory from the martial to the managerial to the mercantile, and finally to the manual. In the first, martial, phase, warlords establish sedentary settlements of non-combatants specialized in the logistical support of military power projection; with military elites achieving power through force. In the second, managerial, phase, the logistical support network overwhelms the military apparatus in size and scale, with clerical elites achieving power through influence. In the third, mercantile phase, the markets within the managerial civilization overwhelm the clergy or clerics in size and scale, with the mercantile elites achieving power through exchange. In the fourth, final, manual phase, the proletarianized peasantry overwhelm the finance capitalists and their apparatuses in size and scale, with the worker’s vanguard achieving power through labor.
The changes in the civilization brought about by each successive elite create the conditions that ultimately result in their eventual usurpation.
These are secular historical processes that transcend culture, clime, and time. But the manifestations of this inexorable process vary considerably on account of facts on the ground. Particular elites will always try to reproduce themselves by any means necessary, namely in projecting moral and metapolitical memes that justify their rule. Additionally, you have Sublimated Elites who achieve the transition from one method of power projection to another. Finally, we have examples of stabilized Symphonic arrangements wherein two or more elites achieve power projection at the same time.
It is my conjecture that the coming Manual stage of civilization must conclude with an Absolute Symphonia wherein a Sublimated Elites that are Managerial in root and Manual in branch subordinates the Martial and Mercantile elites to the advancement of the working class and their affordable family formation. It is my opinion that the CCP’s ongoing project of synthesizing and syncretizing Marxist memes and Neo-Confucian metapolitics is the nearest approximation of this process.
According to my VaporTrad analysis, Western Civilization is arriving at the conclusion of its Mercantile Age, confronting the irreconcilable crises and contradictions that occur when a society is ultimately beholden to its wealthy oligarchs, their financial institutions, and the ethical and ideological frames they’ve imposed on their subjects. The West is a distinct civilization from China and would necessarily follow a different path to a similar, hopefully even superior, symphonic reconciliation of its civilizational processes.
Absolute Symphonia differs from the Orthodox Christian concept of Symphonia in that the unity of church and state must also successfully assimilate the Mercantile elites. It is my historical analysis that the West’s Ancien Regime was brought down by Mercantile elites once mercantile modes of power projection became dominant in the incipient Mercantile Age. Similarly, the Byzantine Empire was destroyed by the Mercantile city-states competing with it, with the Turks merely delivering the coup de grace.