draft 读《why nations fail》

© 2025 Jules Vela / Dark Disease. All rights reserved.

This text, including all concepts, analyses, narrative structures, original arguments, and intellectual frameworks, is the exclusive intellectual property of Jules Vela. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, quoted, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission from the author.

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The Purgatory Funnel-History Model: The Extractive Cycles of East Asian Patriarchal Regimes This study introduces the “Purgatory Funnel-History Model” to explain the recurring pattern of extreme extraction, periodic dynastic collapse, and mass demographic loss observed in East Asia, particularly in China. The model posits that Chinese history is not a natural dynastic cycle but a structural extraction machine centered on a “Parasitizing Caste” and “Parasitizing King.” Lower populations, treated as “Enslaving Human Livestock,” have their “Human Essence” extracted through institutional, legal, and ritual mechanisms—an intensity surpassing Atlantic slavery, the Indian caste system, and European feudalism. This study offers a systemic explanation for collapses occurring every ~300 years, with 70–80% population decline and widespread cannibalism. It further argues that patriarchy and male desire to reach the parasitic apex drive the historical machinery. Across over three millennia, Chinese history exhibits remarkable structural consistency: heavy extraction, recurrent famine, catastrophic die-offs, population reduction to below 30%, dynastic collapse, and the re-emergence of identical structures. This study introduces the “Purgatory Funnel-History Model,” arguing that these patterns are not cultural accidents but manifestations of a deeply embedded patriarchal extractive mechanism.

Existing studies explain dynastic cycles through:
(1) environmental determinism (droughts, climate shifts),
(2) political corruption and institutional decay, and
(3) peasant uprisings.
Yet they fail to explain:
— why each collapse involves massive demographic loss;
— why extraction intensity resets to maximum every cycle;
— why Confucian ethics consistently reinforce hierarchy and legitimacy.

Theoretical Framework: The Purgatory Funnel-History ModelSociety functions as a funnel-shaped extraction machine.

1. Lower populations are institutionally designated as extractable resources.

2. What is extracted is not merely labor but “Human Essence.”

3. The Parasitizing Caste and King maintain legitimacy through institutions, rituals, and ethics.

4. Over-extraction triggers catastrophic collapse, after which new parasitic elites restart the cycle.

nslaving Human Livestock These populations possess replaceability, reproducibility, and extractability.
Their lives are structured as fuel for upper-level consumption.

Enslaving Human Essence This study introduces the concept that extraction targets not economic surplus but total human vitality, including:
— bodily resilience
— emotional capacity
— parental bonds
— autonomous will
— reproductive potential

The Parasitizing Caste A caste whose existence relies on consumption rather than production, legitimized through bureaucracy–Confucianism–clan networks.

The Parasitizing King The apex of the funnel, the point of maximal concentration where all extracted human essence ultimately flows.

Historical Evidence: Cycles of Destruction Chinese dynasties have an average lifespan of approximately 330 years—remarkably consistent across millennia.

70–80% 人口死亡（Demographic Collapse）Seven major collapses (Qin, Han, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing) involved 60–80% population disappearance.

Cannibalism Cannibalism was not incidental but the statistical outcome of extraction surpassing sustainability thresholds.

Comparative Analysis Chinese lower strata were trained by Confucian ethics to become morally self-surveilling hostages.

Institutionalized Reproduction

Ritual–Legal Conjunction

Gender: Patriarchy as the Engine of the Funnel ：The funnel is fueled not by grain but by male desire for hierarchical ascent.
Men seek to become the Parasitizing King, while women supply labor, lineage, emotion, and bodily resources.
Women experience four layers of extraction:
(1) sexuality
(2) reproduction
(3) emotional labor
(4) filial and kinship obligations.

Conclusion The Purgatory Funnel-History Model reveals that the core of Chinese history is not governance but extraction—a cycle and a machine.
This framework offers a new theoretical lens to reinterpret dynastic change, demographic catastrophe, patriarchy, and state formation in East Asia.

References：Fei, Xiaotong. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society.
Wittfogel, Karl. Oriental Despotism.
Elvin, Mark. The Pattern of the Chinese Past.
Brook, Timothy. The Troubled Empire.
Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence.

The funnel-history model describes a cycle: the lower strata (ENSLAVING HUMAN LIVESTOCK) are long-term extracted → resources flow upward to sustain the parasitizing caste → when extraction exceeds a critical threshold, social unrest or peasant uprisings erupt → old parasitic structures collapse, but new parasitizing kings or castes emerge → the funnel restarts. This model explains dynastic change as periodic releases of systemic tension rather than purely accidental events.The model also highlights legitimizing mechanisms—sacrifice, mandate-of-heaven rhetoric, education, and ritual—that provide moral cover for the funnel and induce the extracted to believe their provisioning has religious or ethical value.Compared to Atlantic slavery, Indian caste, and European feudalism, three major differences emerge: (1) internalized moral consent (self-surveillance by the oppressed); (2) institutionalized reproduction (population management, household registration, and corvée ensure sustainability); (3) ritual-legal conjunction that makes provisioning symbolically meaningful. These differences enabled long-term maintenance without exclusive reliance on overt violence

《中国人口史》《国家为什么会失败 》The Purgatory Funnel-History Model一方极度榨取，导致漏斗上面的沙子（ENSLAVING HUMAN ESSENCE）快速榨取无底线的，超越奴隶的苦难的流向另一头的THE PARASITIZING CASTE，特别是THE PARASITIZING king，导致中国古代的历史，就像电影恐怖游轮一样无限循环无限痛苦无限恐怖。每一次循环的结尾都会出现大规模的超过百分之70左右的人口死亡。且出现本可以避免的大面积的人吃人现象。而这样的循环每次都是300年左右一次。只不过驱动女主一定会登陆恐怖游轮的是她对孩子的爱，而驱动煉獄Funnel-History Model的，是父权和男性想要称为THE PARASITIZING king的欲望。

ABSTRACT：This study introduces four original analytic concepts to decipher the long-standing extractive logic of East Asian autocratic civilization: THE PARASITIZING KING, THE PARASITIZING CASTE, ENSLAVING HUMAN LIVESTOCK, and ENSLAVING HUMAN ESSENCE. Together, these concepts reveal that East Asia was not merely an agrarian empire but a highly engineered parasitic system designed to extract labor, emotion, cognition, reproductive capacity, and existential meaning from the majority of its population. I argue that the East Asian sovereign was not a typical ruler but the apex form of a single-point parasitic model, supported by a caste whose survival depended on funneling resources upward from an enormous subjugated base. Using institutional history, political psychology, anthropology, and demographic analysis, this paper demonstrates how this extractive architecture persisted from the Shang and Zhou to Qin-Han centralization, transformed through dynastic cycles, and remains structurally active in the 21st century.I argue that East Asia’s long-term stable authoritarianism involved not merely taxation and corvée, but a political-cultural technology that integrated bodies, emotions, cognition, and reproductive capacity into a continuous supply chain.Combining political history, institutional analysis, intellectual history, and archaeological textual evidence, this paper presents a “funnel-history” model showing how the parasitizing caste and parasitizing king institutionalized the extraction of human livestock and essence, and how periodic uprisings reset the parasitic cycle.

INTRODUCTION：This paper takes a pointed critical stance: within East Asian civilization there existed a structural parasitic system that, through legalization, ideological engineering, and ritualization, processed populations into repeatedly extractable resources.In comparative world history, East Asia stands out as a uniquely stable yet intensely extractive political ecology. From the sacrificial state of the Shang dynasty to the patriarchal order of the Zhou, and finally to the hyper-coded Legalist state of Qin, East Asia developed a “single-center parasitic model” in which power, resources, emotion, loyalty, the body, and even death were funneled into one central node—the Parasitizing King. Unlike feudal Europe, the Islamic empires, or the Indian caste system, extraction in East Asia was not polycentric or regionally fragmented but a model of single-point maximization.
Parasitism became the core function of the state, not a by-product.

THE PARASITIZING KING：THE PARASITIZING KING is not a monarch in the conventional sense. He is not the manager of the state apparatus but the central suction point of the apparatus itself. Through Qin Shi Huang’s principle of “One outlet of profit” (利出一孔), all economic, military, penal, ritual, bureaucratic, and epistemic power was consolidated into a single node, transforming the civilization from a multi-input governance system into a single-input extractive funnel. The sovereign thus enjoyed infinite extraction with zero accountability, converting the population into consumable survival material. Institutions did not exist to “govern” but to harvest.1Conceptual Positioning and Theoretical Significance
The Parasitizing King is not a rhetorical embellishment of the emperor; it is a precise naming of a structural position: the node within a political system institutionalized as the sole sink for resources and consumption. Its essence is that this figure is not merely a manager of power but the terminal absorber of the political–economic apparatus; ritual, law, and symbolic apparatus all orient toward provisioning it. Reading sovereignty as the core of parasitism, rather than simply rule, shifts analytical focus from surface-level operations of authority to the deep architecture of how society is engineered as a provisioning machine. This framing allows us to read historical practices—household registration, corvée, taxation, rituals, rites, and military merit systems—as technologies sustaining the parasitic node rather than neutral governance techniques.2Historical Origins: Transition from Shang–Zhou to Qin
To grasp the formation of the Parasitizing King, we must trace back to the Shang–Zhou transition and the institutional experiments of the late Warring States. In Shang and Zhou, ritual and tribute underpinned sovereign material bases, but distribution retained local and ritualized modalities. The Warring States’ rise of Legalist thought and a merit-based military economy introduced new technical possibilities: tighter population registries, direct mobilization mechanisms, and reward–punishment systems keyed to military achievement. The Qin innovation was to technify these possibilities—standardizing weights, script, roads, and currency, and replacing enfeoffment with centrally administered prefectures—thereby pulling people away from local aristocratic mediation into a central extraction network. This shift allowed the parasitic center to draw resources and labor directly from the base without intermediaries and to erect new ritual-legal legitimation.3The Technologization of Power: Registries, Measures, Corvée, and Military Merit
The realization of the Parasitizing King depends on a set of executable, measurable administrative technologies. Household registration and population coding made each unit traceable; standardization of measures and currency converted agricultural output and levies into quantifiable state surplus; corvée and labor rotation directly extracted people’s time for state labor; and the military merit system transformed death and service into an operable exchange vocabulary, legitimizing mobilization and consumption. This integrated technical package means governance no longer relied on local redistributive mechanisms but enacted continuous, predictable extraction through standardized state apparatus. The Parasitizing King thus became an institution to be fed rather than merely a symbolic figure.4Legalist Techniques and Behavioral Engineering (Synthesis of Knowledge–Law–Culture)Legalist thought plays a pivotal role: it provides not only legal terminology but an entire suite of behavior management and reward–punishment design. Shang Yang–style stringent laws, collective responsibility (lianzuo), household registers, and quantified merits turned bodies and minds into manageable engineering units. When Legalist technologies fuse with Confucian moral instruction, power gains a dual toolkit: external compulsion via law and internal discipline via shame, filial piety, and reputational penalties. The Parasitizing King thus maintained order not solely by repression but through this internal–external governance blend, rendering extraction automated and sustainable.5Ritual Legitimation: Sacrifice, Mandate, and Narrative RewritingThe sustainability of the Parasitizing King heavily depends on symbolic ritual legitimation mechanisms. Mandate-of-Heaven doctrine, sacrificial rites, and the sacralization of imperial authority render provisioning the sovereign a religious and moral duty. Ritual is not mere form: it constitutes a bridge for transferring material and life-symbols upward, convincing the extracted that their deprivation and sacrifice occupy a place in cosmic order. Bureaucratic narrative and canonical interpretation systematized the story of the Son of Heaven: the sovereign’s glory becomes the core social vocabulary, which then retroactively legitimizes parasitic acts. This is the sacralization of dispossession, enabling political expropriation to persist across generations with limited moral insurgency.6Economic Mobilization and Population Engineering: Turning People into Provisionable UnitsThe aim of the Parasitizing King was to convert population into a stable, renewable provisioning pool, prompting a suite of techniques to control fertility, mobility, labor, and life reproduction: household registers restricted migration; land regimes blocked free disposition of property; corvée defined individuals’ time capital; taxation and state monopolies absorbed surplus. These arrangements are more than extraction mechanisms; they are population engineering: through institutional designs that align life rhythms, labor intensity, reproductive structures, and intergenerational resource flows toward steady supply to the parasitic center. Over time, societal biological reproduction was nationalized, digitized (administratively), and institutionalized.7Long-Term Effects on the Body–Mind of the Base: From Visible to Invisible DeprivationWhen institutions extract not only grain, cloth, and labor but also schedule time, shape emotions, prescribe beliefs, and regulate reproduction, dispossession becomes an internalized condition. Lower strata, under economic scarcity and social shaming, learn self-discipline; their grief, compliance, guilt, and loyalty become systematized, quantifiable “resources.” Thus the Parasitizing King exhausts not only bodies but interior capital—hope, capacity for resistance, and the ability to plan futures. Long-term psychic deprivation produces social reproductivity of obedience, reducing the need for overt violence and making extraction appear as quasi-voluntary social behavior.8Comparative Glance: Why “Parasitism” Differs from Conventional Slavery or FeudalismComparing the Parasitizing King to Atlantic slavery or European feudalism highlights its distinctiveness. Atlantic slavery centered ownership, trade, and commodification; European feudalism featured lord–serf contracts and polycentric power. The core difference for the Parasitizing King lies in a system that automates extraction and legitimates it culturally, predicated on a single-point centralization. Its maintenance relies less on continuous external violence (though present) and more on institutionalized life reproduction prompting voluntary or habituated provisioning. This structure is both more pliant and deeper because it rewrites peoples’ affective and ethical relations to power.9Theoretical and Research Implications (Chapter Summary)Describing sovereignty as parasitic is not mere rhetorical sarcasm but a usable theoretical instrument: it connects dispersed administrative details, ritual systems, legal texts, and population management into a coherent extraction mechanism. The instrument’s value lies in exposing often-overlooked asset-types—emotional capital, time capital, reproductive capital—and incorporating them into accounts of historical power. For contemporary scholars, this framework points to analogies in modern state–market dynamics that continue to extract individual capitals.10Research Notes and Traceable Evidence Categories (Methodological Directions)In subsequent chapters and the full paper, support claims with the following evidence classes: oracle bones and bronze inscriptions (bodily provisioning language and sacrificial terms); legal codes and household registers (corvée, taxation, mobility constraints); economic estimates (population–grain ratios, mobilization rates); literary and ritual texts (sacrificial manuals, imperial edicts); and archaeological finds (butchery tools, isotopic evidence of diet). For each evidence type, indicate interpretive ranges and alternative readings, and adopt interdisciplinary triangulation to minimize misinterpretation.This chapter defines and deepens the concept of the Parasitizing King, explaining how it converted society into a long-term supply mechanism for a parasitic center through institutional technologies, Legalist governance, ritual legitimation, and population engineering. Next steps will elaborate further empirical evidence, regional comparisons, and micro-mechanisms of interaction between the Parasitizing King and the Parasitizing Caste.

Funnel-History Model： The funnel-history model describes a cycle: the lower strata (ENSLAVING HUMAN LIVESTOCK) are long-term extracted → resources flow upward to sustain the parasitizing caste → when extraction exceeds a critical threshold, social unrest or peasant uprisings erupt → old parasitic structures collapse, but new parasitizing kings or castes emerge → the funnel restarts. This model explains dynastic change as periodic releases of systemic tension rather than purely accidental events.The model also highlights legitimizing mechanisms—sacrifice, mandate-of-heaven rhetoric, education, and ritual—that provide moral cover for the funnel and induce the extracted to believe their provisioning has religious or ethical value.Compared to Atlantic slavery, Indian caste, and European feudalism, three major differences emerge: (1) internalized moral consent (self-surveillance by the oppressed); (2) institutionalized reproduction (population management, household registration, and corvée ensure sustainability); (3) ritual-legal conjunction that makes provisioning symbolically meaningful. These differences enabled long-term maintenance without exclusive reliance on overt violence.

ENSLAVING HUMAN LIVESTOCK：“Enslaving Human Livestock” is not a metaphor—it is a historical institution. Oracle bones of the Shang record humans processed as offerings, provisions, or wartime material. The Zhou continued graded slaughter. After Qin-Han, the forms changed but the logic persisted: the lower population was kept structurally consumable. Records of famine cannibalism and wartime consumption were not anomalies but the extreme expression of the system. When populations were engineered into perpetual hunger and inescapable labor cycles, they became extractable, expendable, and replaceable human livestock.stresses two points: first, it is not a momentary slaughter or contractual slavery but a highly normalized, institutionalized, and proportionally dominant condition (here defined as comprising the majority of the population); second, these people were institutionalized as a consumable resource pool—labor and low-income population in peacetime, convertible into consumables for military or ritual needs in wartime.

THE PARASITIZING CASTE：The parasitzing caste is the king’s supporting structure, maintained through three mechanisms: hereditary privilege secures material base; bureaucratic functions legitimize extraction and administration; cultural mechanisms (Confucian canon, ritual order) supply moral justification. This caste’s basis is not simply land or wealth, but the legitimized right to extract from others.Operational modes include tax systems, corvée allocation, ritual distribution, hereditary status succession, and moral-linguistic governance of lower strata.

ENSLAVING HUMAN ESSENCE：is the core concept and the most difficult aspect for external systems to replicate. It denotes techniques that convert individuals’ psychological energy, emotional labor, reproductive capacity, cognitive time, and moral commitments—intangible capitals—into supplies for the parasitizing caste. Extraction of these essences is not episodic but institutionalized to become seemingly voluntary supply.Concretely, mechanisms include Confucian moral domestication (filial piety and loyalty) that internalize emotion and identity into supplies for family and ruler; household-registration and corvée systems that institutionalize time and labor; civil examinations, rituals, and sacrificial systems that redirect aspiration and honor into symbolic labor serving elites; and legal and penal systems that enforce self-surveillance through shame and punishment.The difference from other slavery systems lies in the emphasis: Atlantic slavery relied on ownership and commodification, European feudalism on contracts and lord–vassal dependence with relative decentralization. In contrast, East Asia’s essence-extraction stresses internalized consent (apparent compliance becomes self-regulation) and long-term renewability (population managed to ensure sustainable supply).The resultant political craft is potent yet invisible: rather than continuous violent repression, extraction is achieved efficiently through education, custom, ritual, and law, causing the oppressed to internalize their consumptive destiny and lowering governance costs while increasing extraction efficiency.

Historical Evidence & Institutional：The Qin system is pivotal not only for political unification but for its systematized, standardized, and measurable governance technologies: unified measures, standardized script, household registration, military merit titles, corvée and taxation, and centrally administered prefectures and counties. These techniques converted dispersed social relations into administratively inspectable, taxable, and mobilizable data, enabling unprecedented precision in extracting human resources.

Let benefits flow from one orifice：The doctrine of li chu yi kong (let benefits flow from one orifice) aims to centralize all profits and resources to the state center, eliminating autonomous channels of private resource circulation. It supports strict taxation, control over land and resources, and the remolding of economic activity, preventing the accumulation of material bases for resistance and ensuring long-term dependency and extraction.

Shang Yang’s Five Techniques：Shang Yang and Legalist policies can be condensed into a set of techniques—keeping people ignorant, impoverished, weak, humiliated, and exhausted (five techniques). These include education control and information suppression (ignorance), heavy taxation and land reorganization (impoverishment), military and civil restrictions limiting arms (weakness), penal and collective responsibility systems causing humiliation, and intensive corvée leading to exhaustion. The five techniques function synergistically to create an efficient extraction field.

Archaeological & Textual Considerations：or claims about institutionalized human consumption, we must adopt rigorous, testable historical methods. Texts—oracle bones, bronze inscriptions, Spring–Autumn and Warring States, and later annals—provide records on wartime mobilization, famine, sacrifice, and punishment; material culture—burials, butchery traces, and isotope analyses—supplement these. Scholarly interpretations vary: some see evidence as symbolic or ritual, others as direct practice. This paper takes a middle path: juxtaposing textual, archaeological, and anthropological evidence to suggest clusters that point to possible institutionalized violence and consumption, while calling for further interdisciplinary verification.

East Asia’s long-duration centralization and extraction are not a single technique but a political ecology composed of the parasitizing king, parasitizing caste, enslaving human livestock, and enslaving human essence. Understanding this ecology helps reassess modern East Asian state forms, social memory, political cultures, and contemporary extraction of individual somatic and psychic resources by state and market.

© 2025 Jules Vela
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© 2025 Jules Vela / Dark Disease. All rights reserved.

This text, including all concepts, analyses, narrative structures, original arguments, and intellectual frameworks, is the exclusive intellectual property of Jules Vela. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, quoted, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission from the author.

Unauthorized use, reproduction, adaptation, AI training, or derivative creation based on this content is strictly prohibited.
All rights reserved worldwide.