The merchant caste is inherently the loser caste.

 Highly feminized.
 This is one reason to believe the great filter is in the rear view mirror, and it's given h. sapiens a big fat F.
 The warrior and merchant castes are founded on destruction, not creation. The scholar invents the weapons, the warrior uses the weapons, but it's the merchant who creates the weapons, via trading with other losers.

 Not to mention, in circumstances the warrior can become subservient to the woman-merchant. It's unhealthy if the head doesn't lead so this isn't all bad, but unfortunately the jock can beat up the nerd, so mortal soyciety is inherently unstable. The warrior has to consistently choose humility to make it function, and the warrior is not one to understand the long term like that.

 As an example of circumstance, the warrior can't into debt  (long term) and shouldn't be allowed, but why would the merchant forgo their greatest debt slave? Especially since the merchant has no leverage over the scholar (he scams the scammers) except via leading warriors around by the nose. When the scholar, the brain, bans debt for the warrior for his own good, the skid tells the jock the nerd won't do his homework anymore...

 There's other things too. In peak societies, the warrior:peasant ratio is 1:100. If you have fixed assets to defend, like kernel fields, mines, factories, no warrior is so elite he can defeat 100 cannon fodder. Never mind the cannon fodder is also lead by a genuine warrior. In modern times you're lucky to get a mere 2000 fodder per warrior.
 The merchants supply the cannon fodder. They tell their ""friends"" to enlist. They're also the ones that administrate a draft. If they tell their ""friends"" not to enlist, the warrior is on his own.

 Cannon fodder is slow and vulnerable, so the warrior can still defeat them, provided he doesn't have a kernel field they can fetch their tubs of lard up against. That is: soyvilization is inherently weak. What if he gets all his bird feed by stealing it from the soyvilization? Why build factories when you can steal from the factories build by dysgenics dumb enough to breed cannon fodder?
 However, as we can see historically, the warrior has a raucously perverse need to avoid slaying the golden goose. The one time the warrior appreciates the long term, he holds back when the soyciety he pillages starts to flag.

 Turns out that's strategic defeat. The soyvilization only has to win once. They wipe out the warrior. The warrior has to win every time.

 Soyvilization is worse than barbarism. Unfortunately barbarians are too dumb, they can't bring themselves to lance the infection.

 Anyway the merchant caste is the loser caste.
 Merchants, as in the example above, are all about obeying norms. Who chooses the norms? Not the merchants, lol.
 Merchants are inherently dishonest. They compete to have the most friends, meaning they're the lowest-common-denominator caste. To say [cope merchant] is redundant, because every merchant is a cope merchant. They cannot possibly stand against the verbal destruction of the scholar or indeed the physical destruction of the warrior. Like women, they are cowards. Like women, they're all about [getting along]. Like women, the only aggression they can wield is passive-aggression. Merchants (fascists, democrats, egalitarians, christians) are only male in the most brute technical senses. Merchants do not have good breeding. Merchants are the caste of, [if it saves even one life], by which they mean even one customer.
 This wouldn't be such a serious problem if merchants didn't deal in intra-tribal competition. The traitor, parasite caste. They should be all about positive-sum trades, but instead focus near exclusively on scamming their alleged [[friends]]. All about eating without working. In a 100-man band, there's only so many real friends you can make before you've caught them all. There's only so many spears you can knap in a day, but you're still awake. There's only so many spears you can trade before everyone has one, and then what do you suppose they turn to?
 This still wouldn't be a problem if either warriors or scholars could into positive-sum hierarchies. Instead, mortals gonna mort. It would be weird if they didn't choose decline, fall, and death.  

 

 

 

 Democracies suffer immensely from the blood memory of already having supplied everyone with spears.
They call it [overproduction], and you've never heard this from a journalist, have you? It's mainstream political science. The idea - which is still current to a fever pitch - is that the factories will make so much stuff the peasants will be satisfied and put themselves out of a job. What if they only have to work 20 hours a week to get everything they want? Or only 10?

 Well...then nothing? This isn't a real problem. But your leaders...excuse me, [[[leaders]]]...including d.trump, absolutely think it is. Because, like everyone else and particularly women, they are still hallucinating a savannah. They still see only 100-150 people. They can't see iphones, they see stone spears. Made by hand.
 And if everyone has a spear, if they don't scam someone, they're [gasp] gonna have to hunt for their own food. It wouldn't have gone well then, and consider what happens now to fat, old trump when he thinks he might have to hunt for his own food. Which he can't not think. Mortals are dead, and like all dead things, cannot learn. Everyone will laugh at their hunting efforts, at best. All the skilled hunters are also the best warriors...