On Darwin and Escape Hatches and the Will to Power

I am having a grand old time at the moment, reading Nietzsche down at the gym -- did you know that Nietzsche is a philosopher that makes jokes! Is that allowed? --  and a biography of the 20th century philosopher Wittgenstein when at home. What a piece of work he was!

And then, on a regular bookstore run, I picked up a remaindered copy of dearly-departed Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech. Hmm. Do you know what I think? I think that Tom Wolfe stole Nietzsche’s writing style and updated it for us Boomers. Jokes in Serious Journalism? Check. Wacky italics and punctuation and overuse of em dashes? Check. Naughty sneers at establishment received wisdom? Check.

The Kingdom of Speech is a jolly old attack on Darwin and Chomsky, both establishment darlings that weren’t above using their establishment cred to marginalize good honest fieldworkers -- or “flycatchers”-- on evolution and linguistics, people like Wallace and Daniel Everett that, you know, actually did, like, fieldwork. Whatever. Plus, Wolfe innocently suggests, Evolution is an unverifiable Theory of Everything just as unverifiable as the current Big Bang Theory.

Hey, nothing wrong with that. Every human needs a Creation Myth, even Atheists and Physicists, although, as we know if The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is anything to go by, physicists demand an additional "rigorously defined area of doubt and uncertainty" that some might regard as unwarranted "physicist privilege." Now go check out the NYT tut-tutting review of Wolfe's book.

All this is to set up none other than our beloved Sarah Hoyt, who penned a blog entry “Escape Hatches” that reminded everyone that your current job ain’t forever. Everything is going down the toilet: publishing --yay! indie -- education, movies. Because online is going to eat them alive.

If you’re in an artistic or communication industry, or one of the subsidiaries, you’re going to get hit.
Keep awareness of what is happening at all times.  Learn what others in your field are experiencing.  Prepare an escape hatch.  Ideally, prepare several escape hatches.

One of the things that really annoys me about our modern world is the universal demand that “they” take care of us. I understand where this comes from: it is the job of the tribe or the feudal lord or the nation state to protect us from the neighboring tribe, the neighboring lord, and the Mongols. That is something a human cannot do for themselves but only by joining a collective and supporting its armed forces.

But then the left decided we had to take care of the working class, and then women and then blacks, making them into little darlings of the neo-feudalist state. Well, the white working class was dying of despair until Trump came along and I dare say that intersectional women aren’t far behind.

But hey kids! Feudalism bit the dust 500 years ago; slavery 150 years ago. Free labor is supposed to look after itself. If you expect “them” to take care of you then you are saying: back to the future of feudalism, and the glorious arc of history is just bending towards neo-feudalism instead of justice.

Here’s the payoff. If you are an independent sort, and you have prepared an escape hatch or two, then you can tell the deep state and the activists and The Man and the globalists to go take a hike.

In other words, there is nothing in this world quite like what the average mansplainer and his buddies like to call F-U money.

If a simple village girl from Portugal can get this, why not well-born special snowflakes? Or ghetto-hardened Bros? You guys don’t believe everything The Man (or more usually The Woman) tells you, surely? Presumably, as the average mansplainer likes to say, you weren't born yesterday.

But as for me, I have a dream. I have a dream that one day a president will get elected to teach the American people to limit their government to protecting the borders from the Mongols. And then teach the American people that, in return for the glorious protection they get from the Mongols and the amazing smartphones they can buy for $129.95 (Apple smartphones for the 1% slightly higher), they ought to take it on themselves to find something useful to do. As in a job. Realizing that jobs don't last for a lifetime.

But of course, this does not apply to people-who-through-no-fault-of-there-own... Well, actually it does. I'd much rather that the wives of billionaires -- I'm thinking of you Melinda Gates --  should be taking care of the people-who-through-no-fault-of-there-own than in foolish initiatives to make venture capitalism more diverse.

(A philosophical point. Women have a Culture of Complaint; men have a Culture of Insult, as we know. Here's another. Women are Foolish; Men are Stupid. If you are not sure what that means, join the club. Neither am I. No wait! Foolishness is doing something stupid after talking it over with all your friends. Stupidity is doing something stupid without telling anyone.)

But what, you might say, does Nietzsche have to do with all this? Honestly, I don't know. The guy with the soup-strainer mustache wrote that asceticism is the way we modern humans deal with the fact that our instinct for cruelty is no longer appropriate for your usual dawn raid on the neighboring village. Or for the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258. Maybe I'll be able to tell when I've finished The Genealogy of Morals. But maybe not. Because as I see it, the question is: what does Nietzsche really mean by his "will to power." And I haven't got there yet.

Suppose the chatty chappie never does explain himself?