我想起了弗兰斯·德·瓦尔(Frans de Waal)著名的动物实验。两只猴子关在相邻笼子里。如果都给黄瓜，它们很高兴（绝对平等，虽然贫乏）。如果一只给黄瓜，另一只给葡萄（葡萄更好吃），那只拿黄瓜的猴子会哪怕饿肚子也要把黄瓜扔回实验员脸上，并剧烈摇晃笼子表示抗议。猴子不懂罗尔斯的“差异原则”（它没有想“虽然我有黄瓜，但如果我不抗议，也许以后葡萄也会分我一点”）。 猴子只有一个直觉：不公平（Inequity）本身就是一种伤害。这种“不患寡而患不均”的本能，是写入灵长类基因里的。可以想象的占据优势地位者的亏欠感也有进化意义：如果这些人对不平等无动于衷，要么不能及时发现不利地位者的怨恨，要么倾向于扩大自己的优势地位，这两者都可能更快地摧毁社会。 ↩︎
The gap between Europe's self-image and reality has grown into a chasm of delulu. One that's threatening to swallow the continent's future whole, as dangerous dependencies on others for energy, security, software, and manufacturing stack up to strangle Europe's sovereignty. But its current political class continues to double down on everything that hasn't worked for the past forty years.
But you can see why many politicians in Europe are eager to punish X for giving Europeans a social media that doesn't cooperate with its crackdown on wrongthink. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is personally responsible for 5,000(!!) cases pursuing his subjects for insults online, which has led to house raids for utterances as banal as calling him a "filthy drunk".
It's against this backdrop — thousands of yearly arrests for banal insults or crass opposition to government policies — that some Europeans still try to convince themselves they're the true champions of free speech and freedom of the press. Delulu indeed.
That's primarily because Europe basically stopped creating new, large companies more than half a century ago. So as the likes of Nokia died off, there was nobody new to replace them. In the last fifty years, the number and size of new European companies worth $10 billion or more is alarmingly small:
So cue the talk about security. European leaders are incensed by getting excluded from the discussion about ending the war in Ukraine, which is currently just happening between America and Russia directly. But they only have themselves to thank for a seat on the sidelines. Here's a breakdown of the NATO spending by country:
This used to be a joke to Europeans. That America would spend so much on its military might. Since the invasion of Ukraine, there's been a lot less laughing, and now the new official NATO target for member states is to spend 5% of GDP on defense.
But even this target fails to acknowledge the fact that even if European countries should meet their new obligations (and currently only Poland among the larger EU countries is even close), they'd still lag far behind America, simply because the EU is comparatively a much smaller and shrinking economic zone.
In 2025, the combined GDP for the European Union was $20 trillion. America was fifty percent larger with a GDP of $30 trillion. And the gap continues to widen, as EU growth is pegged at around 1% in 2024 compared to almost 3% for the US.
Now this is usually when the euro cope begins to screech the loudest. Trying every which way to explain that actually Europe is a better place to live than America, despite having a GDP per capita that's almost half.
And on a subjective level, that might well be true! There are plenty of reasons to prefer living in Europe, but that doesn't offset the fact that America is simply a vastly richer country, and that matters when it comes to everything from commercial dominance to military power.
But it's the trajectory that's most damning. In 2008, Europe was on near-parity in GDP with America! But if the 1% vs 3% growth-rate disparity continues for another decade, America will grow its economy by another third to $40 trillion, while Europe will grow just 10% to $22 trillion. Making the American economy nearly twice as large as the European one. Yikes.
These should all be sobering numbers to any European. Whether it's the 10,000 yearly arrests in the UK for social media posts or the risk of an economy that's half the size of the American one in a decade.
But Europe isn't doomed to fulfill this tragic destiny. It's full of some of the most creative, capable, and ambitious people in the world (like the fifth of US startup unicorns with European founders!). But they need much better reasons to stay than what the EU (and now a separate UK) is currently giving them.
Like drastically lower energy costs to for a competitive industrial base and to power the AI revolution, so best we quickly revive European nuclear ambitions. Like an immigration policy designed to rival America's cherry-picking of the world's best, rather than mass immigration from low-average-IQ regions of net-negative contributors to the economy (and society). Like dropping the censorship ambitions and bureaucratic boondoggles like the DSA. Like actually offering a European internal market for remote labor and a unified stock exchange for listings.
There are plenty of paths to take that do not end in a low-growth, censorious regime that continues to export many of its best brains to America and elsewhere. So: make haste, the shadows lengthen.
后来想再「认认真真」去一次 Shelter 的时候，它就关门了。人们在这个区域找回属于自己最原始的、不需要活在面具之下的身份。而与之相对，是一个类似的空间，人们在里面都戴着面具而活，那就是上海的 Sleep No More 的傻逼话剧（抱歉我用了相对侮辱的词汇），一群人都觉得自己看懂了胡乱的剧情演绎，像是集中营的昏暗空间里，都在暗自比较自己比他人更理解故事与情感，这一部分下次来说。
# LostOfShelter
符号、文艺和高概念
简单介绍一下 Sleep No More 的模式。
不眠之夜（英语：Sleep No More）是剧场公司 Punchdrunk 所创作的沉浸式戏剧，其内容根据威廉·莎士比亚《麦克白》、黑色电影以及佩斯利女巫等故事情节改编而来。2011 年 3 月 7 日，不眠之夜在美国纽约首演。
因为我们共同使用 Gemini 的缘故，我有机会看到他在 Gemini 上的对话(他那边也有我的账户)。我就随手翻了下，我发现他最近让 Gemini 帮他修改审阅一篇大概五年前的论文。这篇论文当时给我看过。此外他还问过 Gemini 康德如何区分优美感和崇高感，诸如此类。问题不多，不似我这样一步步启发式地与 AI 聊天，把 AI 当做一个可以激发灵感的对话伙伴（谁让我没有真人对话伙伴呢）。他几乎只是致力于弄懂康德哲学的某些部分。
我仔细思考了我和他的不同：
(1)在研究对象方面，我研究的是问题，我想弄清楚，比如说 A 到底是不是 B；他研究的是信念，他想弄清楚，比如说，x 是不是认为 A 是 B。
(2)在研究旨趣方面，我的研究可能牵涉到康德，比如说康德到底是否认为 C 是 D。我可能会去研究这个问题，但最终会回到自己的问题。我的研究旨趣不在于弄清楚任何人的确想什么，而是我的确想什么。与我不同，当我将所牵涉的问题与他交流，他会立即为这个问题在康德研究中寻找一个定位：如果有，则他可能会感兴趣，并且只是投入对康德如何理解这个问题的问题研究当中，而且不会返回到直面问题的情形中；如果没有，则判断不是一个真正/专业的关于康德的问题。
