The Dynamics of Difference: A Parable

In an distant world, a group of funny-colored aliens must confront the contradictions of clashing worldviews.

In the following thought experiment, the Orange-Greens (OGs) represent an indigenous population with a long-standing set of cultural, moral, and political traditions. One day, the Red-Blues (RBs) arrive. They’re a foreign population with a vastly different worldview overall and tend to operate according to a vastly different socio-political construct that animates their thinking. While the OGs wish to preserve their way of life, the RBs believe their system should eventually replace that of the OGs.

Indeed, the RB’s religion says so.

A key challenge arises from demographic shifts: the OGs have a lower birth rate and are not growing at a rate that would maintain their population. By comparison, the RBs are both migrating to OG lands in significant numbers and have a higher birth rate. As a result, the RBs are steadily increasing their share of the population, which approaches 20 percent.

But an unsettling number of the RBs want to impose their ways on the OGs.

If the RBs are not interested in peaceful coexistence and instead aim to impose their way of life eventually, the OGs face the challenge of preserving their cultural identity and political autonomy in the face of accelerating change and the failure of the RBs to assimilate into OG culture.

In this evolving drama of cultural transformation, a quiet but profound conflict is taking shape—one not driven so much by bullets or ballots, but by population flows, institutional drift, and technocratic ambitions.

Many orthodox libertarians will huff and puff, arguing this parable is too collectivist. To this, I say, A) Don’t shoot reality’s messenger (i.e., people often see themselves as part of collectives, whether we like it or not, B) Collective social identity is determined and reinforced by people’s cultural commitments and animating worldviews, and C) Orthodox libertarians draw lines around membership based on ideological litmus tests all the time, so the very accusation of “collectivism” is exclusionary. Paradoxes can be a bitch.

Recall that at the center of this conflict are the OGs, a long-settled people whose social, moral, and political traditions have deep roots in their homeland. These original groups have spent generations building institutions that reflect their shared history and values. But those institutions, once reliable vessels of self-government, are faltering under a two-front pressure campaign.

The first pressure comes from below: the arrival and expansion of the new group—the RBs. Again, these recent arrivals don’t come with suitcases, but with a distinct cultural outlook, which the OGs justifiably perceive as hostile. Their birthrates outpace those of the OGs. And far from seeking to assimilate, many RBs hold to their imported traditions with a sense of moral superiority. Their growing numbers create a demographic and cultural undertow that is steadily reshaping their new environment.

Yet, the real change is not driven solely by migration. It is being managed—engineered, even—from above.

You see, the Yellow-Greens (YGs) have been quietly operating behind the scenes. They do not resemble a people in the traditional sense. Instead, they are a class—a global technocratic elite that moves easily among supernational institutions, multinational corporations, NGOs, and sprawling bureaucracies. They speak the language of *systems thinking* and planetary stewardship, but they are grabbing more and more power.

Their legitimacy comes not from the ballot box but from their self-appointed role as managers of global emergencies—whether pandemics, climate change, digital misinformation, or migration itself. Each crisis is an opportunity to centralize more authority, to enact new governance frameworks, and to regulate a little more of life.

The Yellow-Greens (YGs) view RBs as a means—an instrument of subverting OG culture and institutions. They actively facilitate their movement, subsidize their resettlement, and frame any dissent as racist, xenophobic, or regressive. Through this lens, the OGs are not the stewards of a legitimate cultural inheritance but are rather obstacles to progress—tribalists clinging to outdated identities.

What makes this dynamic particularly insidious is that it lacks the more salient marks of conquest and colonization. Unlike in the past, the RBs do not arrive with weapons drawn; they are often fleeing hardship or simply seeking opportunity. The YGs do not seize power through coups; they accumulate it through coordination, standardization, and philanthropy. Their influence flows through treaties, policy harmonization, algorithmic nudges, and international “best practices.”

In time, the OGs find their institutions utterly repurposed, their narratives rewritten, and their cultural spaces increasingly foreign.

This is not a story of victimhood so much as a slow structural disempowerment. So the OGs are trapped in a double bind:

• To resist the demographic shift is to be labeled intolerant (or worse);

• To resist global governance is to be seen as insular or anti-cosmopolitan.

The very language of self-defense has been weaponized against them.

Meanwhile, the YGs maintain plausible deniability, always acting in the name of higher causes—equity, sustainability, resilience—while ensuring that the OGs lose the power to shape their destiny as a people.

What emerges is a three-layered system of asymmetric influence. The RBs gain cultural confidence and material support. The YGs accumulate power without accountability. And the OGs, long the stewards of their land, slowly lose their footing—beset from above and below.

This thought experiment is not just a parable. It is a lens on contemporary tensions in many areas around the world. The erosion of sovereignty, the weaponization of compassion, and the rise of post-democratic governance are not isolated phenomena. They are interlocking elements of a broader shift—one in which the right to cultural and political self-determination is increasingly treated as an unforgivable sin.

The question, then, is whether the OGs will awaken to the full scope of this transformation—and if they do, whether it’s already too late to do anything to prevent the destruction of their civilization and way of life.

Some readers will have caught my reference to Spiral Dynamics, which has come under attack by intellectual onanists who want to attack the framework for being insufficient to explain a far more complex world. Fine. I maintain that Spiral Dynamics is a useful heuristic about tendencies, a general model of social complexity, not a means of limning the ultimate nature of reality. So, my reference to the color-coded labels serves a dual function—to identify the worldview patterns of the respective groups in the parable, and to do so with shorthand that allows me to avoid charges of racism. —MB