I argue that our lefty friends are reactionaries; faced with the shocking changes of the industrial revolution, they want to return to the good old days. So we have the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-piracy of high taxation. And so on.
But let us simplify things. What the left is doing is returning us to the slavery of the agricultural age, and the mob justice of the tribal village.
Let us look at the fact of the great socialist governments, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Castro's Cuba. We are talking about slavery. And this is reactionary, because the great characteristic of the agricultural age is its slavery. Oh yeah. Sometimes it was merely feudalism. But the basic fact of the agricultural age was that the farmers needed the protection of their warrior aristocracies to keep pirates and Vikings out of town. And the warrior aristocrats took advantage of them. Big time. Right through the agricultural age the farmers were actual or nominal slaves.
In a way, I think the end of the agricultural age coincided with a kind of apotheosis of slavery in the sugar plantation. Slaves cultivated sugar cane, a fast-growing plant that uses C4 photosynthesis, and the masters fed them maize, also a fast-growing C4 plant. Very efficient!
But the market economy doesn't work with slavery. Not because we are highly advanced and ethical and moral. But because slaves just aren't as profitable as free labor, because you can make more money with workers that use their noggins, rather than just follow the orders of the slave-driver. In the same way, after World War I, the German General Staff decided that soldiers as cannon fodder didn't work; they needed resourceful, responsible soldiers that would know to do the right thing when isolated on the modern lethal battlefield.
But isn't it amazing that our lefty reactionary friends want to return to the top-down, orders-from-the-top culture of the agricultural age! In a word, slavery.
The good thing is that the slavery experiments in the Soviet Union and Maoist China turned out to be staggering failures: not just a failure to match the economic growth of the capitalist countries, but veritable death cultures that starved and enslaved tens of millions of people, and not the peoples of conquered countries, looted and put to the sword by neo-Conans, "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!" No, the people that suffered under Communism were the people that Communism was supposed to help, the workers! Imagine!
In my view, the resort to slavery is programmed into the left, because politics is war by other means, government is force, and therefore the combination leads to slavery, because the whole point of politics and government is to draft everyone into the political army of the ruling class and forced to live their lives in service to the power agenda of the ruling class. So the politics of the left inevitably drafts the whole nation into the political army of the rulers. And what are draftees but slaves by any other name?
The other thing that goes with the left like ham and eggs is the moral panic. Call it the witch hunt, the reign of terror, the purge, the scapegoat mechanism of René Girard, or whatever you like. We are seeing a classic instance of this all-to-human characteristic in the campaign of vicious slander against Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
What has emerged in the moral panic over the nomination of Kavanaush is the purpose of all our legal traditions. The whole point of the law is to provide a replacement for the age-old method of dealing with intra-community conflict. The old way was for the community to gang up on a scapegoat and to invest that scapegoat with all its worries and hatreds and accusations and then kill to purge the conflict and the hatred. Maybe that worked in a small face-to-face community. But the whole point of law has been to provide a more peaceable alternative to the scapegoat culture.
Isn't it interesting that our liberal friends have completely demolished the cultural process of legal procedure in their conviction of Brett Kavanaugh by mass denunciation! And boy, do we now find ourselves reminded of what an amazing cultural miracle is our inherited culture of legal process.
I mean, what a concept! Instead of just fingering a suspect and slitting his throat, actually or metaphorically, we force the accusers to get their story straight, to submit to rules of evidence, to cross-examination of witnesses, to "beyond reasonable doubt" verdicts in the criminal law, and "preponderance of the evidence" verdicts in civil law. How blessed we are to live in this age where we benefit from these immensely civilized notions! We get to appreciate them all the more when our lefty friends gin up a periodic moral panic and demand to dispense with the law's delay.
My point is that when you decide that the price discovery system is not good enough for you, look out, because the next stop is slavery.
And when you decide that "due process" is not good enough for you, look out, because the next stop is a baying mob demanding the blood of a scapegoat, the gallows of the French Revolution and the Communist governments of the 20th century.
And that is why I call all lefties reactionaries, and their movement the Great Reaction. They want to return us to the slavery of the agricultural age and the scapegoating of the tribal village.
But let us simplify things. What the left is doing is returning us to the slavery of the agricultural age, and the mob justice of the tribal village.
Let us look at the fact of the great socialist governments, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Castro's Cuba. We are talking about slavery. And this is reactionary, because the great characteristic of the agricultural age is its slavery. Oh yeah. Sometimes it was merely feudalism. But the basic fact of the agricultural age was that the farmers needed the protection of their warrior aristocracies to keep pirates and Vikings out of town. And the warrior aristocrats took advantage of them. Big time. Right through the agricultural age the farmers were actual or nominal slaves.
In a way, I think the end of the agricultural age coincided with a kind of apotheosis of slavery in the sugar plantation. Slaves cultivated sugar cane, a fast-growing plant that uses C4 photosynthesis, and the masters fed them maize, also a fast-growing C4 plant. Very efficient!
But the market economy doesn't work with slavery. Not because we are highly advanced and ethical and moral. But because slaves just aren't as profitable as free labor, because you can make more money with workers that use their noggins, rather than just follow the orders of the slave-driver. In the same way, after World War I, the German General Staff decided that soldiers as cannon fodder didn't work; they needed resourceful, responsible soldiers that would know to do the right thing when isolated on the modern lethal battlefield.
But isn't it amazing that our lefty reactionary friends want to return to the top-down, orders-from-the-top culture of the agricultural age! In a word, slavery.
The good thing is that the slavery experiments in the Soviet Union and Maoist China turned out to be staggering failures: not just a failure to match the economic growth of the capitalist countries, but veritable death cultures that starved and enslaved tens of millions of people, and not the peoples of conquered countries, looted and put to the sword by neo-Conans, "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!" No, the people that suffered under Communism were the people that Communism was supposed to help, the workers! Imagine!
In my view, the resort to slavery is programmed into the left, because politics is war by other means, government is force, and therefore the combination leads to slavery, because the whole point of politics and government is to draft everyone into the political army of the ruling class and forced to live their lives in service to the power agenda of the ruling class. So the politics of the left inevitably drafts the whole nation into the political army of the rulers. And what are draftees but slaves by any other name?
The other thing that goes with the left like ham and eggs is the moral panic. Call it the witch hunt, the reign of terror, the purge, the scapegoat mechanism of René Girard, or whatever you like. We are seeing a classic instance of this all-to-human characteristic in the campaign of vicious slander against Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
What has emerged in the moral panic over the nomination of Kavanaush is the purpose of all our legal traditions. The whole point of the law is to provide a replacement for the age-old method of dealing with intra-community conflict. The old way was for the community to gang up on a scapegoat and to invest that scapegoat with all its worries and hatreds and accusations and then kill to purge the conflict and the hatred. Maybe that worked in a small face-to-face community. But the whole point of law has been to provide a more peaceable alternative to the scapegoat culture.
Isn't it interesting that our liberal friends have completely demolished the cultural process of legal procedure in their conviction of Brett Kavanaugh by mass denunciation! And boy, do we now find ourselves reminded of what an amazing cultural miracle is our inherited culture of legal process.
I mean, what a concept! Instead of just fingering a suspect and slitting his throat, actually or metaphorically, we force the accusers to get their story straight, to submit to rules of evidence, to cross-examination of witnesses, to "beyond reasonable doubt" verdicts in the criminal law, and "preponderance of the evidence" verdicts in civil law. How blessed we are to live in this age where we benefit from these immensely civilized notions! We get to appreciate them all the more when our lefty friends gin up a periodic moral panic and demand to dispense with the law's delay.
My point is that when you decide that the price discovery system is not good enough for you, look out, because the next stop is slavery.
And when you decide that "due process" is not good enough for you, look out, because the next stop is a baying mob demanding the blood of a scapegoat, the gallows of the French Revolution and the Communist governments of the 20th century.
And that is why I call all lefties reactionaries, and their movement the Great Reaction. They want to return us to the slavery of the agricultural age and the scapegoating of the tribal village.
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