Survival competition takes many forms: economic blockades, financial entrapment, cyberattacks, information control, and subversive infiltration are all battle tactics for defeating enemies — just as artillery fire is. War is the highest and most intense form of human survival competition: it determines not just victory and defeat, but life and death. For any living entity, the force that can determine its life or death holds ultimate authority over everything about it. As I have explained in “C1: True Power (Latest)” and “Introduction to Structural Theory (Latest)”: true punishment does not merely destroy the physical carrier of a living entity — it also severs the path of genetic transmission. Therefore, in survival competition, the highest form of “respect” for a living entity is total annihilation — whether that entity is a single person or an entire civilization.
The core of a social economy is industry. In the agrarian age, all social output was the output of land — therefore land was the fundamental determinant of wealth. Social rank was expressed through how much land one controlled, and that control determined not only wealth status but also the resources and power one could mobilize in survival competition.
Why did Central Plains civilization — built on farming — maintain the order of a unified empire through such extreme suppression of human nature? Because in the agrarian age, the ceiling on social productive forces was already fixed; only through scale could strength be increased. A French thinker once famously said: humanity has always consolidated to meet the challenges of its survival environment. For the people of the Central Plains, maintaining the order of a unified empire was the foundation of survival. Only at that scale could materials and manpower be mobilized to withstand the raids of nomadic tribes from the steppes.
The nature of survival threats shapes how living entities assess their situation and adjust their survival strategies. Throughout history, every major social institutional adjustment and reform has invariably originated from an imminent survival threat. Emperor Wu of Han carried out six currency reforms before finally feeling his way toward a state monopoly system for salt production and a fiscal system based on circulation taxes. These systems have remained in use ever since, underpinning the foundations that sustain a unified, ordered society. Emperor Wu’s six currency reforms and his series of social organizational reforms all revolved around a single theme — two words: getting money.
Why did he need to raise vast sums of money, repeatedly and on a massive scale? It wasn’t as if he was living in debaucherous excess. It was because he was continuously waging war against the Xiongnu — and every expedition across ten thousand li required gold to pave the way and men to form the walls. Because the costs were staggering, he exhausted every means to raise funds. And why did he keep launching campaigns against the Xiongnu? Because the nomadic tribes’ raiding of agrarian civilization posed the most intense threat to his people’s survival. Sometimes, to escape inner dread, people are willing to pay costs they would never accept under ordinary circumstances.
The reason nomadic peoples repeatedly moved south to raid agrarian regions was that in the agrarian age, they were constrained by productive capacity, population size, natural environment, and rainfall — unable to engage in the higher-yield, more stable agricultural production their growth demanded. Their production mode simply could not provide the subsistence their growing population required. To survive, the only option was to move south and raid agrarian peoples — especially when nomadic regions suffered natural disasters. Only one condition would stop them from raiding south: being completely outmatched militarily.
“For friends who come, there is fine wine; for wolves who come, there are hunting rifles.” You must have a rifle, ensure it can be used at any moment, and ensure your marksmanship is accurate — only then can you stop the wolves from causing harm. And none of this arises out of thin air. The infantry of agrarian regions, whether in attack speed or attack range, was far inferior to the cavalry of nomadic regions. For a group whose primary time was spent farming, there was simply no way to compete with nomadic groups for whom warfare, training, and killing were inseparable from daily life. Unless your numbers were far greater, you could train full-time, and you had sufficient surplus for other forms of exploration — such as manufacturing more advanced weapons and tools.
From an economic standpoint, agrarian groups establishing military superiority over nomadic groups depended on a denser system of social division and cooperation. To build that denser system, one needed larger inherent resources and scale, plus the ability to construct an orderly operating system that made full use of people and materials — capable not only of generating more social wealth, but also of producing the tools and organizational methods that could counter the opponent’s advantages.
A system with a higher density of social division and cooperation depends on pivot points that the original system never possessed. These pivot points form the entire skeleton of the upgraded system. The most dangerous and most difficult moment is the process of constructing that skeleton — because every single pivot point requires consuming more resources. Unless you can plunder massively from outside, you can only extract from within. The cost of building the upgraded system’s skeleton had to be borne internally, because the capacity for external plunder was not yet sufficient, and forced plunder would disrupt the process of upgrading the foundational structure.
You often hear people say: once you’ve made your first million, everything after becomes much easier and faster. Setting aside whether that’s even true — even if the second part is true, most people never manage to accumulate the million needed to get started. Why? If the basic cost of keeping one person alive is ten thousand, and that person earns exactly ten thousand, then with no unexpected expenses at all, they can barely break even. The slightest unexpected disruption pushes them into debt. Living normally is already a struggle, let alone accumulating a first million.
And sometimes the tree wants stillness, but the wind won’t stop. Setting aside the temptations that lead people into irrational self-destruction — in any society, those who hold resources will inevitably push up the price of those resources. In plain terms: they make it more expensive for everyone else to access those same resources. Anyone in a position of advantage does this. But it invisibly raises the cost of basic survival for many people. Suppose this person works hard and their income rises from ten thousand to fifteen thousand — but simultaneously, costs for food, clothing, housing, and transportation also rise, and by an even greater margin. Now their monthly cost of basic survival has climbed to twenty thousand. They clearly worked hard and increased their income by half, yet they’re living more precariously, carrying more debt, and further than ever from accumulating the startup capital they need.
Expand this example from a single person to a nation within the international order, and the underlying logic and predicament are identical. Moreover, the model described above is entirely idealized — it contains no emotional self-destruction, no external provocateurs setting traps, no sudden natural or man-made disasters that cannot be withstood, no accidents that can zero everything out in an instant. Yet in real survival competition, all of the above are unavoidable — they may even stack and compound simultaneously.
The core of survival competition is maintaining your own order while driving the opponent into disorder. When a community with the characteristics of a living entity collapses into disorder, all the resources it controls naturally become absorbed by other living entities. To maintain orderly internal operation, any community must sustain a structure of hierarchically distributed resources — without this, internal order cannot be guaranteed.
For the individual, the most critical factor is tier. To put it even more plainly: if you’re in the elite tier here, you may be in the elite tier there as well. If you cannot obtain the most basic necessities for survival here, the same tier there will be no different. The only variable is: which set of rules for reaching a given tier is easier for you to navigate?
As I have said before — in any pyramid, the top is held by bloodline, the middle by talent and resources, and the bottom by diligence and skills. Though diligence alone barely keeps you alive. However, the bloodline ties of Community A carry no weight in Community B. So many individuals who sit at the apex of Community A’s pyramid, when they go to Community B, can only use their bloodline connections to extract massive resources internally — trading them for a foot in the door. Even then, they still cannot penetrate Community B’s inner core. They can only be downgraded to the middle tier in Community B’s hierarchy. And once they can no longer rely on bloodline to extract resources from Community A, they can’t even maintain their footing in the middle tier of Community B.
When Community A is in a rising cycle, individuals at the apex tier — unless they are losers in the internal survival competition — find it not worth switching allegiances. Meanwhile, individuals in the middle tier of various communities tend to have a much stronger desire to move.
The more capitalized resources become, and the more freely they flow globally, the more middle-tier individuals in each community will behave like nomadic herders on the steppe — migrating wherever the grass is greener. Individuals at the lower rungs of a rising community often have better futures ahead of them than those at the bottom of other communities. Yet this rational judgment, grounded in structural trend analysis, reaches entirely different conclusions from the lived experience of the individuals actually occupying that position. This is precisely why, in 1945, there were people who surrendered to the Japanese — and in 1949, there were people who betrayed the revolution.