"Movements" are So Over

In my series on Activism Culture I have been developing the idea that the left's faith in "activism" is a replay of the medieval romance -- King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; Lancelot, Guinevere, Parsifal, rescuing damsels in distress and all.

The point is that, in the days when the medieval romance flourished there were no more knights searching in the undergrowth for damsels in distress. The knights and barons had all become courtiers in the courts of the absolute monarchs. The monarchs liked it that way; it kept the powerful feudal lords under their watchful eye.

Now comes Adam Ellwanger with "On the Decline of American 'Movements.'" He notes that today's "movements" are unlike the great movements of yesteryear.

America has a rich history of movements. No one in 2020 seriously disputes the moral clarity of the abolitionist movement, the women’s suffrage movement, or the civil rights movement (in its mid-century articulation). But somehow, today’s “movements” seem less weighty—less substantive—than their forebears. Why?

Well, he says, take Black Lives Matter.

The organization claims to be addressing “systemic racism” and injustice. As many commentators have observed, “systemic racism” is a nebulous concept—it can manifest itself anywhere, in virtually any way. 

In all the current "movements" there is no clear articulation of what the problem is and what to do about it. You can see that the abolitionist movement was clearly about the abolition of slavery; the women's suffrage movement was clearly about votes for women. The civil rights movement was clearly about the prohibition of racial discrimination by the government and individuals.

And the point is that you could do all that by writing a law. Bliss was it to be in that day a political activist! To strike down with one blow, Siegfried, the evil dragon of the ages!

But what exactly does "systemic racism" mean? And what exactly would we do to end it?

What exactly does sexual harassment mean? And what would it mean to #BelieveAllWomen? In courts of law?

It seems clear that BLM activists and #MeToo activists are more nearly Live Action Role Playing, imagining themselves the glorious activists of yore, mounted on their palfreys, rescuing damsels in distress, and reveling in the heady experience of a mass movement and its mostly peaceful protests. Yeah! We are fighting against The Man!

So what has happened?

Suppose we say that the great injustices that we perceive in the age of the market economy have all been addressed?

It is relatively easy to suggest that everything will change, If Only we stop the government and evil corporations from discriminating against traditionally marginalized people.

But what do we do about police brutality against African American males, given that African American males in America commit about 50 percent of the murders? Defund the police? You mean in the face, already, of sharply increased urban violence and urban murders this year? Increase spending on social workers? But didn't we do that half a century ago with unclear results?

My point is that politics and government are very blunt instruments with which to do social surgery. Unless you are dealing with a pretty open-and-shut case, and a pretty clear goal of what to do, then politics and government are not the solution.

And, of course, very often politics and government fail to achieve beneficial goals even when the injustice is pretty clear and the proposed solution pretty simple.

So I say that the Age of Politics, of simple solutions to easily dramatized problems, is over. And the people that think that politics and "movements" and "activism" can solve our modern problems are reactionaries, nostalgically yearning for a simpler time when the problems seemed clear and simple.

Actually, I would argue, the problems were not simple, back in the day, nor did the political solutions do much to solve those problems. End slavery? Yeah! But in the century since, we have had gigantic wars into which elite politicians drafted -- enslaved -- young men as soldiers using the power of government and sent the enslaved young men to their deaths in the millions. But no slavery, no sir!

The answer, of course, is that we must look beyond the temptation of government and force, and look to the solution of religion and persuasion.

In a way, we are doing that. The Cancel Culture is recognizing that force is not the answer; naming and shaming and shunning is the way. But why not have a bunch of Cancel Cultures? Why should it just be a left-wing one? Hey, I know! Let's confine moral lecturing to within the culture of an actual religion that people join voluntarily?

In other words, for the really heinous stuff -- slavery, votes for women, racial discrimination -- we have laws and criminal penalties. But for merely moral questions we have religion: join the religious community of your choice. And, as we know, humans in a community tend to go along to get along. Maybe we encourage people to join the moral community of their choice by channeling various social benefits through them. Kinda like the mutual-aid societies and fraternal organizations back in the day.

Yes, Did you know that back in the 19th century, "everyone" belonged to a mutual-aid society or a fraternal organization? These organizations offered death benefits, life insurance, and "lodge doctors." Imagine.

For at the bottom of it all, we humans are social animals. All that means is that we have a ton of behaviors that avoid the resort to the dangerous and expensive solution of violence.

You can call the ton of behaviors:  religion, tradition, culture, archetypes, community, whatever. But government and force? Not so much, because we are better than that.

Our Rulers: Are They Playing Us for Idiots, or are They Idiots?

When you are the poor helpless victims it is hard to decide if the rulers that are bearing down on you are cunning and ruthless or whether they are mindless thugs.

The Zman takes the latter position in a rather dense piece on "The Parable of the Lizard People." He says that a group using political "violence on behalf of their cause is assuming there is no other option." But then he says that the folks being targeted, the shop owners, by BLM and Antifa are supported by corporate sponsors to the point that there are practically mega-corporation commercials supporting the rioters -- who are, of course, sponsored by the ruling class regime. Thus the folks targeted by the rioting,

the people under attack in our world lack self-awareness. They think they are in charge and that the corporations and politicians will respond to market pressure. You can be sure most of them think they will have their revenge in November. They think “get woke, go broke” is a reflection of reality. A big part of the war being waged on them is a psyop to reinforce this false consciousness.

Well, it could be. But that assumes that the "powers that be" are competent and know what they are doing. And I don't think so. I think that powers that know what they are doing are very rare. They are people like Bismarck and Lord Salisbury that kept Europe in the late 19th century under control. They they died and the idiots, Kaiser Wilhelm and the Brit and French politicians, burned the whole place down through stupidity.

I just can't help feeling that our ruling class today is shot through with idiots. It now appears that the whole Trump Russia thing was an incompetent sh*t show from the start, with the fabled Steele dossier put together by a "sub-source" Russian drunkard that had worked at the Brookings Institution. Just so the Clinton campaign could spy on the Trump campaign. And then the whole post-election stuff, including Special Prosecutor Mueller and the inpeachment effort: come on Dems, you can do better than that.

Or take the AntiFa riots. It would have been cool to have some huge peaceful demonstrations after the death of George Floyd, to rally the black vote to the Democrats one last time. But the present riots by young white gentry: Please. And we clearly have all the Dem mayors frozen in place like deer in the headlights, because their political education is in the fraud of "activism" and "peaceful protest." Which have been, for 50 years since the end of the Civil Right Era, fake play-acting by the ruling class's kidz. If the rioters had been eevil "far-right" white supremacists the mayors would have known exactly what to do and they would have done it if AntiFa didn't do their work for them.

See, I think it was staggering stupidity by Hillary Clinton not to concede the election in 2016 and send everyone home.

See, I think it is staggering incompetence by Nancy Pelosi and the other House leaders to allow the radical left to set the agenda.

I think it is staggering incompetence by the Dem mayors not to snuff out the lefty riots.

I think it is staggering stupidity for the Soros-supported prosecutors to do things like harass the St. Louis couple that defended their historic home with firearms. That's the sort of thing that transmits in a second through every gun-nut in the nation.

I think it is staggering stupidity for the tech-lords to have allowed their woke censors to be censoring center-right content and for Google to practically disappear Breitbart from its search results. Actually I think it is stupid to be censoring far-right content as well.

I think it is staggering stupidity for Judge Sullivan and the Court of Appeals to be still harassing LTG Flynn. I mean really fellahs. The definition of injustice is a powerful government hounding a private citizen using the full extent of the law and its staggering expense.

But what do I know? I'm just a guy that read a few books and thinks he knows something.

Here's what I'm thinking about. I wonder how we get through all the trillion dollar deficits and Federal Reserve money printing without a nasty inflationary bubble and a worse nasty recession a couple years down the road.

Now that, to me, is a real problem.

Liberal Woman Journalist Doesn't Get Conservative Women

One of the corollaries of my reductive Three Peoples theory is that people in one layer can't understand, and don't respect people in other layers. Example:

In Vanity Fair TV critic Sonia Saraiya asks "Is Hollywood too soft on conservative women?" Yes, she says, using "Mrs. America" on Phyllis Schlafly, "Bombshell" on Megyn Kelly, and "The Iron Lady" on Margaret Thatcher as examples. That's because Saraiya reckons "that they belonged to a group of “white nationalist racist gender traitors.”

In other words they had the wrong ideas, and weren't down-for-the-movement feminists. So launch the lefty pejoratives.

Did you know that "pejorative" means making things worse?

This attitude so common among educated women is, according to my theory, because People of the Creative Self, or educated Gentry, all have a culture in which women are supposed to believe in careers for women, and therefore abortion, and the notion that the "patriarchy" has oppressed women since the dawn of time.

And these people cannot understand or give the time of day to anyone outside the Overton window of their liberal world view.

But if you are a Woman of the Responsible Self, or a Commoner, you do not see yourself breaking the glass ceiling; you do not see the point. You see yourself as a wife, a mother, the caretaker of the family. So, you don't see the point of a career, not if it interferes with taking care of your family, you don't like the idea of abortion, because it implies that babies are expendable. And you don't see your husband as an oppressor, but rather as a provider that maybe doesn't always live up to the standards you have set for him. Yes, Commoner women tend to be a little patronizing towards their husbands.

Now, the women examined by Saraiya are/were not in fact ordinary Commoner women although they were born Commoners. Shlafly's father was a machinist and salesmen hammered by the Great Depression; Thatcher's father was a corner grocer in Grantham in England. But they got educated, starting with a Catholic girl's school for Schlafly and a British grammar school for Thatcher. 

Schlafly and Thatcher were both Amazon warriors, who learned how to operate in the men's public square utterly without fear -- or at least not showing any fear, which is what matters. They were extraordinary women, by any standard. Schlafly more or less singlehandedly ditched the Equal Rights Amendment; she argued that the ERA would be a disaster for women. Thatcher learned how to be a politician in Britain long before the parties prepared special women-only shortlists. It took Thatcher ten years of work before she got herself selected as a candidate for Parliament and elected to the House of Commons. And to see any of the videos of her as Prime Minister in the House of Commons shows her in complete mastery of the House of Commons culture, which is a male Culture of Insult. Only, because of House Rules, the insults must be indirect, which makes them much more fun.

The point of my Three Peoples theory -- and the reason I also use Curtis Yarvin's Three Layers theory of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients -- is because it proposes a world in which there are people Who Are Not Like You. And it thereby allows you to live with The Horror! that these other people are not going to agree with you.

"Because I am so wise" -- that's Fritzi's line, not mine -- I understand and empathize with the fact that the world is full of people that do not see it the way that I do. I realize that all the liberal Gentry women up the street with their #WeBelieve signs naturally believe all the liberal shibboleths like Love is Love and Women's Rights are Human Rights. But I also understand that they are sitting in their liberal bubbles talking to their liberal friends and just have no clue -- because their liberal world view does not admit such a clue -- of how the other half -- or rather two thirds -- lives and experiences the world. So, of course it makes sense for them to think of Other People as superstitious bigots or, in today's argot, “white nationalist racist gender traitors.”

You see, I believe in a world in which it is OK for a woman to be a furious feminist, breaking glass ceilings and non-cis-gendering to her heart's content. But I also believe in a world where it is considered worthy and honorable and respectable to be a wife and mother. And I also understand that there exists a world of Subordinate women, living in a pre-city culture in which women... Well I know not exactly how such a world operates. I assume it operates something like the community of women of the hunter-gather band or the village women of the agricultural era, or the working-class mothers of the industrial slum. But more research is needed.

Yes. What do lower-class women want? Or expect? Has anyone inquired, ever? Anyone thought twice about imposing their own world view upon these women?

Didn't think so.

What Does the Modern Sacrificial Hero Look Like?

In this series on "The Good Life" I have been trying to answer the question raised by Spencer Klavan in a review of Douglas Murray's The Madness of Crowds. We need “a vision of the good life more compelling than the fanatical march toward a virtuous future that the Left offers.”

Of course, I pointed out that the vision of the good life depends on who you are. If you are a Subordinate it has always meant being a loyal servitor to your lord. If you are a Commoner, it means living up to God's divine law, as you follow the rules, go to work, and obey the terrestrial law.

But, I said, if you are a Creative, a member of the educated Gentry, it means being a Hero. And I proposed that there are two versions: the left's version in which the Hero is an egoistic political revolutionary; and my version, derived from the German Turn and Jungian psychology, in which the Hero is a Sacrificial Hero, like the Sacrificial Hero Jesus Christ.

Fine, but what does that mean to a modern man? Well, I just ran into an example: Sick Heart River written by John Buchan just before his death in 1940. Buchan is famous for his Richard Hannay spy thrillers, The 39 Steps and Greenmantle. 

In real life Buchan, born in 1875, was a scholarship boy who won a First at Oxford, that promoted him in 1901 to private secretary to the High Commissioner for Southern Africa. In World War I he wrote government propaganda and was elected to the British Parliament in 1927. In 1935 he was made a baron and appointed Governor-General of Canada. In 1937 he went on a 7,000 mile tour of Canada's arctic North, and that forms the background to Sick Heart River, the story of a successful lawyer and politician, Sir Edward Leithen, dealing with a death warrant from his doctor that he had a year to live: tuberculosis.

Yes, what do you do when you have been told you have just one year to live? In Leithen's case the question is answered for his as he gets asked to look for a friend of a friend who had disappeared. This young man, Francis Galliard, was a successful finance man and husband to a devoted wife, Felicity. Leithen agrees to go find him.

Naturally, Galliard, a French Canadian from a decayed landowning family, has gone up North, into the vast wilderness that fascinated John Buchan. Teamed up with a half-Scot half "Indian" guide, Leithen goes after him and finds out that Galliard -- with his guide, the brother of Leithen's guide -- is on a trek to find a mysterious valley, Sick Heart River.

Leithen and his guide catch up with Galliard, who has been abandoned by his guide and is within days of death. Having saved Galliard's life, Leithen goes on alone with an Indian guide from the Hare tribe (even though he physically weakened by his TB) and finds Galliard's guide in the valley of Sick Heart River. Only, it's almost impossible to get out of Sick Heart River, for the valley is surrounded by steep cliffs. Except that Leithen is a mountaineer and can rope himself and his guide and Galliard's guide out of the valley of Sick Heart, thereby saving their lives.

But with the exertion of getting out of Sick Heart valley, Leithen collapses, and is nursed by the guides back to health in a log cabin they have built against the Canadian arctic winter. So the Indians and half-Indians have saved Leithen's life.

On their way back to civilization they learn that the Hare tribe is dying. The snowshoe rabbit, source of food from the trapper Hares, has succumbed to a periodic collapse in numbers, and the Hare men have given up. So when they get to the Hare village the men are dying, the children are dying, the sled dogs are dying, and the women are about to give up.

But Leithen decides to rally the Hares; he sends his guides out to hunt for caribou and moose to feed the Hare villages; he builds a huge fire in the village, and rallies the Hare people back to life.

But he kills himself with his exertions, and dies from his TB, despite the pleas from his guides to save himself.

But the Hares live; Francis Galliard lives and is reunited with his loving Felicity, and Leithen dies a noble death as the Sacrificial Hero.

An undercurrent in the book is that everyone is falling into the valley of the Sick Heart because their religion isn't delivering for them. Leithen is a successful barrister and politician, but not really supported by his nominal faith. The French Canadian Galliard has fallen away from his Catholic faith, and the Hares in their village are unable to face the vicissitudes of life, either from their traditional beliefs or from their local Catholic priest. So what is the answer to the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in the world of 1940 with Christianity falling away, the tribal religions useless, and the world plunging into war?

I would say, 80 years later, that we still don't have a clue.

Except that we do; we have a glimmering about the Hero's Journey into the depths of the unconscious, even into the underworld of Sick Heart River from which there is no return, and the miraculous ascent back from the depths with a wisdom obtained by facing the demons of the underworld.

And thus armed we can illuminate the darkness at the border between Order and Chaos, and bring our fellow humans back from despair and into the Light.

But we will probably die in the attempt.

Humans and Reality: the New Science of Categorization

For a while now, I have been slowly reading George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Well, that's a mouthful!

I had previously read his Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. It get into notions like "strict father" and "nurturant parent" moralities. 

But the big point is that we humans are not rational, logical scientists. We are animals, social animals, and our brains are coded to live -- survive -- in the world. Like other animals.

George Lakoff is a linguist, and Women, Fire and Dangerous Things is about linguistics, about how we humans came to realize that the traditional notion of categorization, handed down for a couple thousand years from the Greek philosophers, that we categorize things abstractly, is wrong. Here is how he describes the "classic theory of categories" as "abstract containers."

From the time of Aristotle to the later work of Wittgenstein, categories were thought [to] be well understood and unproblematic. They were understood to be abstract containers, with things either inside or outside the category. Things were assumed to be in the same category if and only if they have certain properties in common.

In fact, we are all taught to believe this. I suppose it has to do with our worship of logic and reason. We logical reasoners observe the world and mentally put things into the right boxes. Because logic.

All wrong, says Lakoff. In fact, beginning with the work of linguist Eleanor Rosch, our categories reflect our human embodiment. She noted that, in fact, things are not either "in" or "out" of a category, but graded.

Rosch... demonstrated that categories, in general, have best examples (called "prototypes")[.]

In other words, we humans use categories "to perceive, to form mental images, to learn and remember, to organize things learned, and to communicate efficiently."

And, it should be added, animals do this, and we humans have been doing it long before we created our modern cult of reason.

Let us illustrated this with Wittgenstein, who got deep into the idea of a "game." There are all kinds of games, from ring-around-the-rosy to chess. But what really is a game, the prototypical idea of "game?" Says Wittgenstein:

Someone says to me "show the children a game." I teach them gaming with dice, and the other says "I didn't mean that sort of game."

Yes, Ludi. Stop teaching the kids to gamble! That's not a good idea of a game!

So what Lakoff is saying is that categories are not abstract but coded into our bodies and our brains and our culture, as part of survival etc. And what we categorize at a "basic level" are the common objects of daily life: things like "dog" "cat" "chair." But this is just the basic level: we categorize dogs as representative of "animal" and chairs as representative of "furniture." Thus this sort of hierarchy: 

    

Superordinate	Animal	Furniture
Basic Level	Dog	Chair
Subordinate	Retriever	Rocker

 

Guess what. Human children learn to categorize at the basic level by age 2, and are pretty good at it by age 3. At age 4 they start to show skills at the subordinate and superordinate levels.

But, it is at the edges that things start to get complicated. For instance whatabout birds?

[Rosch's] experimental ranking shows that subjects view robins and sparrows as the best examples of birds, with owls and eagles lower down the rankings and ostriches, emus, and penguins among the worst examples.

Yes. When we go to the zoo we are amused by ostriches and emus and penguins. Because they appear exotic to us.

 

You can see from this that humans do not categorize things in the world as if they were philosophers and scientists. They categorize things in ways that are useful and meaningful them in their daily lives. 

Actually, when you look searchingly at science, it has followed the same paradigm. For instance Linnaeus puts "genera" at the center of his classification system as "'practical units of classification' upon which all biologists should be able to agree."

The same thing happens in modern physics, especially beginning with the problem of light. Was light made out of particles or waves, typical basic-level categories? The problem for all of us, where modern physics is concerned, is that basic-level categories and notions are not adequate to describe our notions of the micro-level of quantum mechanics and the macro-level of general relativity and the presumed vastness of the universe. So we have sophisticated math to do it for us. But when physicists are talking about physics they adapt ordinary concepts from daily life as metaphors for the impossible things going on at the macro and micro level. Or they show how sophisticated they are by using names like "quark" from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

All of which reminds us that the universe is nothing like it appears to us through our senses and our human-concocted categories. Which goes back to Kant and his declaration that we do not know things-in-themselves but only appearances.

But notice that our modern physics has a Creation Myth, called the Big Bang, and it has all kinds of theories about what happens at the end of the universe, as humans have always had all kinds of theories about the end of times, and "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in general.

So scientists are humans, after all.

Contra Harari: Analyzing "Sapiens" on Empire

Because Yuval Noah Harari is a professor he naturally sees the coming empire of the educated Gentry as a Good Thing in his Bill-Gates pleasing Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind.

Most of the time in the past 2,200 years, most humans have been ruled by an empire. Says he:

As the twenty-first century unfolds, nationalism is fast losing ground. More and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political authority, rather than the members of a particular nationality, and that safeguarding human rights and protecting the interests of the entire human species should be the guiding light of politics.

You know, because "melting ice caps."

I suppose that Sapiens was conveniently written at the last moment before a clear rebellion against the global elite of educated gentry really got into the saddle, such as the Law and Justice Party in Poland, the nationalist Fidesz party in Hungary, Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK.

My line is that we won't get global government, a single human empire, until the Trisolarians are on their way to take over the Earth. Why? Because politics is division. So long as there is no global threat, so long will humans be disunited. (Yes, that is what the global threat of climate change is all about.)

However, Harari wouldn't be properly within the Overton window of fellow professors and think-tankers without tut-tutting about the 500-year European world empire of roughly 1500-1945: the Spanish clobbering the Aztecs and Incas, and looting them of all their silver and gold; the Brits going to India and causing the First Bengal Famine: "the British conquest of India cost the lives of millions of Indians, and was responsible for the continuous humiliation and exploitation of hundreds of millions more." Then introducing slavery to the Americas after it has been eradicated in Europe. And Africa.

See I think that the European imperialism of the last 500 years is far more consequential and interesting than that. 

First of all, the initial voyages to the Americas were conceived and sold as investment opportunities, not as the natural expansion of a territorial empire ruled over by Pharoahs or Roman Emperors.

Secondly, although the Spanish and Portuguese started out frankly as looting expeditions, plundering the Americas of gold and silver for use in military adventure back in Europe, things started to change quite quickly. The Brits in India, the Dutch in Indonesia, they were there to trade. (Because hey, kids, trading makes a lot more money that simple loot and plunder). Their military dominations issued from the need to deal with neighboring feudal chieftains and stop them from looting and plundering the trading operations of the Europeans and the Indians and Indonesians that joined them. I suspect that the scandal of the Bengal famine of 1770 was that, since the Brits were ruling Bengal, it became a "thing." I'm sure there were famines aplenty before the Brits showed up, but, hey, back in the day, famines were just a part of life! A bunch of people died; the local rajah had do deal with reduced revenue for a while, and life went on.

Thirdly, the "imperialists" were mostly nobodies, like Clive and James Cook. And that was true not just of the leaders but the ordinary nobodies. My father's family had a business in St. Petersburg in the late 19th century; my mother's family had an export business between the world wars in Kobe, Japan. They were nobodies that could earn a decent living doing business across the world in countries that weren't yet up to speed on capitalism and the life of the market economy.

Fourthly, issues like slavery and human rights became issues as the European empires developed. I like to think that is because the nobodies weren't to the manor born; they weren't really into being top dog as the old nobles were. Plus, I believe, slavery and serfdom did not pay. And then came the moment in 1820 when some Brit administrator in India observed that the Indians didn't really like their imperial overlords. Really, old chap? The imperator cared whether his subjects liked him? That's the point: as the European hegemony proceeded, notions of self-government began to take over the world. As early as the Indian Mutiny in 1857 advanced Brits began to realize that they couldn't rule India forever. But it wasn't time to leave, not just yet, old chap.

Harari is a loyal member of his tribe, the global educated elite. And that tribe fervently believes that the average Commoner can't be trusted to govern with the enlightened wonderfulness of the educated elite. Thus nations are over, finished, and can never be allowed to raise their brownshirt face again because you know what happens with nationalism: literally Hitler! We see that with the current political emergency in the US. The educated elite fervently believes that we are one and a half steps away from "far-right" white supremacy, unless the educated elite cancels anyone that shows his head above the parapet.

I believe that the global educated elite are fools and knaves, and have no better idea about governance and human welfare than the emperors of old. Far better for the nations of the world to blunder along from one self-imposed crisis to another than for a self-congratulatory elite to seize the reins of power, for the benefit of all the world.

Because here's the problem. What happens when the globalist rulers rulers screw things up? As they always do. Who gets to step in and fix things? Under our current flawed system, we get alternation in office where the voters get to throw the rascals out every 8-10 years. I haven't seen anything from our global masters to indicate how they propose to enact the principle of Alternation in Office in their global empire that allows for the correction of mistakes on the political front. In all the supranational institutions from the EU to the UN to the World Bank to the IMF it's a case of Buggins' Turn, with one globalist turning the reins of office over to the next apparatchik in line. And a jolly good racket it is, for those in on the inside.

I look forward to an age of nation states all over, quarreling like mad, but never quite coming to blows. As the US never quite comes to blows with Canada and Mexico, and indeed as the nations of the Americas never quite come to blows.

But there is a problem. Without the hegemony of the global educated Gentry, where is honor, where is vanity, where is power for the worthy elite that is wiser and more evolved than you and I? It's a global problem.

History Lesson for Our Nance on "Stormtroopers"

You may have noticed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) recently accused President Trump of using "stormtroopers" when he dispatched federal police units to Portland, Oregon, to defend federal buildings in the Rose City.

Unidentified stormtroopers. Unmarked cars. Kidnapping protesters and causing severe injuries in response to graffiti.

These are not the actions of a democratic republic.@DHSgov’s actions in Portland undermine its mission.

Trump & his stormtroopers must be stopped.

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) July 18, 2020

Er, which kind of stormtroopers did you have in mind, Madam Speaker?

See, the Germans invented the notion of stormtroopers in World War I when they developed new tactics on the battlefield in France -- yes, they were way ahead of the Brits and the Frogs on that. These Sturmtruppen were specialist troops trained in infiltration tactics, particularly effective in the German offensives in the spring of 1918.

Was that the kind of stormtroopers you had in mind, Madam Speaker? Because those imperial German stormtroopers were soldiers in the army, rather than federal police dispatched to a city wracked with riot.

Then there were the Nazi stormtroopers in the 1920s. These stormtroopers, the Sturmabteilung, or storm department, were a paramilitary unit of the Nazi Party. La Wik:

Its primary purposes were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies, disrupting the meetings of opposing parties, fighting against the paramilitary units of the opposing parties, especially the Red Front Fighters League (Rotfrontkämpferbund) of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

 Was that the kind of stormtroopers you had in mind, Madam Speaker? Because those Nazi stormtroopers were not government police but the street thugs of a political party. 

The Nazi stormtroopers, the Sturmabteiling, seem to have been rather like the present AntiFa that presently operates in the Rose City, Portland, Oregon, and other US cities. Conspiracy theorists like me assume that AntiFa operates with the nod and the wink of Democratic Party officials in liberal cities like Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, etc. 

I'm not aware, for instance, that the Republican Party, or Donald Trump personally, have any informal shock troops or street thugs to neutralize the AntiFa mostly peaceful protesters that are clearly tolerated by officeholders in various woke cities in the US.

I assume that what you were really trying to do, in your typically lazy fashion, was to create the impression that President Trump's attempt to prod Democratic civic officials into actually keeping the peace in our nation's cities was in fact a departure from legal norms, an illegal attempt to beat up peaceful protesters for justice and black lives. Literally Hitler, as they say.

Or worse, you were making a lame attempt to make it look as though you were down with the movement, tagging along with the Democratic Party's lurch to the left in order to stay relevant and not get tossed out by the radicals in the House after the 2020 election.

Of course, I understand that the reason why we have so many militarized federal government law-enforcement operatives is that  every sub-bureaucracy worth its salt wants to have its own SWAT team, to show that it belongs in the front rank of government. For, whatever the current rubbish being spouted by liberal activists, the truth is that government exists only to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic. Everything else is either loot and plunder, handing out free stuff to supporters, or it is "legislating morality" as liberals used to say back in the day when the government had a tendency to do stuff that liberals didn't like.

Here's my advice to you Speaker Pelosi. At age 80, you really should not be in high political office. Speaker of the House is not an office for someone of your age. It's not as if there weren't dozens of Democratic House Representatives that could do the job. Since I don't know you, I don't know what combination of conceit and vanity have prompted you to remain as a House leader. But I do know that nothing becomes a leader so much as the way of departing his or her high office.

And you, Speaker Pelosi, have failed in this fundamental duty.

Contra Harari: Analyzing "Sapiens" on Religion

There's a women's book club book out there, recommended by Bill Gates and others, that gives us the human story so far.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind by Israeli prof Yuval Noah Harari is, as you might expect if Gates likes it, carefully located within the Overton Window of acceptable thought. As in: science good, Nazis bad, European imperialism bad, capitalism questionable.

The book was published in 2015 before wokiness became a global problem, so it doesn't really deal with the critical theory problem and the current ferocious ideological campaign that represents the ordinary middle class as the worst racist sexist homophobes ever.

To introduce the agricultural age Harari presents the colorful idea  that humans did not domesticate wheat; wheat domesticated humans. In the good old days of hunter-gathering humans didn't work much. They hunted, they gathered, and everyone lived happily ever after. But wheat is a demanding master. 

The ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, human in various parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants.

Wheat takes a lot of looking after, including clearing rocks and pebbles, weeding other plants, keeping the rabbits off: you name it. And, of course, you needed warrior lords to protect your grain stores and they don't come cheap. But the Earth could support a lot more human farmers than human hunter-gatherers.

But the larger communities of the agricultural age needed a change in religion. 

Stories about ancestral spirits and tribal totems were strong enough to enable 500 people to trade seashells, celebrate the odd festival, and join forces to wipe out a Neanderthal band, but no more than that.

So what humans came up with is an "imagined order," a religion or ideology, a shared belief system so "large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively." In other words, religions like "Christianity, democracy, or capitalism" are an imagined order imposed on the human community and insist "that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature." And "you also educate people thoroughly" in the imagined order.

But suppose you want to change things: revolution baby! Then you have a big task.

In order to change the imagined order I must convince millions of strangers to cooperate with me. For the imagined order is not a subjective order existing in my own imagination -- it is rather an inter-subjective order, existing in the shared imagination of thousands and millions of people.

You can see what our wokie friends are up to. They want to change the imagined order. They want to change the shared imagination of America. Of course, they do not want to do it by persuasion. Canceling and struggle sessions are more their style.

In fact this has always been the agenda of the left. They don't like our current imagined order of Christianity and the market economy. They want to change it, and they will turn the world upside down trying.

But Harari sees a different religious landscape. He sees three versions of "humanism" competing to create an imagined order in which "the supreme good is the good of humanity," thus:

Liberal humanism. "Humanity" is individualistic and resides within each individual Homo sapiens.

Socialist humanism. "Humanity"is collective and resides within the species Homo sapiens as a whole.

Evolutionary humanism. "Humanity is a mutable species.Humans might degenerate into subhumans or evolve into superhumans.

The "evolutionary humanism" is the Nazi one. Just so you knew.

Yes, but I'd say that that what unites these three humanisms is that they presume that humans have the ability and the opportunity to create a new man. And this fits into my reductive Three Peoples notion that the Subordinates have a god that orders them around, the Responsibles have a god that sets out a divine law for them to follow as responsible humans, and that the Creatives get to create their own world and law.

So, while the humans in the world come in three flavors (which Harari admits in his analysis of Hammurabi's code, with its superiors, commoners, and slaves) the only religion that counts for him is a religion that appeals to the creative types.

And that, in my opinion, is humanity's Big Problem right now. Its educated gentry cannot conceive of anything outside its own walled garden of creativity, cannot understand that other people don't want creative types creating wonderful new worlds for them that look to the outsider like oppressive hells.

See, I think that the beginning of wisdom is to recognize that there is a world outside your own little walled garden and that what works for you may not work for others.

Don't You See? Police Brutality is the Point

Our liberal friends know everything, so there is no point in a dialog. But the rest of us are not quite so sure about vitally important issues like, oh, police brutality.

For instance, if you ask me the whole point about police is to be brutal. Not with ordinary folks that follow the rules, got to work and obey the law. But the punks: you want young punks to think that they better not mess with the police.

And the only thing that young punks understand is force or the threat of force.

Because young punks are not yet assimilated into the culture of the city and the market economy. They are still living in a neo-tribal world where might is right. They believe that you gotta punch the other guy before the other guy punches you.

But that is not the way the city works. In the city we trust people unless they show themselves to be untrustworthy. We do not enforce our own justice with our own private enforcers; we leave that to the police.

Hey, we are using the police to do our dirty work, to rap the knuckles of the thugs out there.

And then we get all worked up because some poor schmuck of a cop puts his knee on a drugged-up ex-con that tried to pass a fake $20 bill. Please!

That is exactly what the police are for: getting rough with ex-cons trying to pass a fake $20 bill.

Oh, I get it: lefties. The whole point of lefties is to beat up on the middle class, because it's there. 

You know how it works. It makes lefties feel good to be advocating for the victims. Since they are the good guys, the educated and evolved people, and the victims are the innocents, obviously the middle class are the problem. And why not start with the poor schmucks that we employ to keep the underclass and the drug dealers and gang bangers down to a dull roar. Yeah! That guy put his knee on the neck of an innocent drugged-up criminal. Off with his head!

And now it turns out that putting a knee on the neck of a suspect on the ground is a recommended way to keep a suspect under control. Who knew?

There are of course many reasons why the left is one of the great crimes of history: its slave states; its death toll; its war on the middle class; its ruination of decent ordinary people. But I think the bigger issue, worse than a crime, a profound cruelty, is the non-stop campaign to direct first the working class and now the non-white underclass away from the road to the middle class, away from learning the code of the city and remaining outsiders to the city in a pre-civilized culture of ethnic membership and the subjugation by criminal gangs.

Back in the day conservative intellectuals invented the idea of "broken window" policing. The idea was for police to target the young punks that committed minor crimes of vandalism and disorder, to make them feel that The Man was watching them. This, it was thought, would scare a bunch of punks straight and also capture and incarcerate the punks that were also committing more serious crimes. And it worked. It was "broken window" policing that brought New York City's annual murder rate down from 2,000 a year to 600 a year. That was what Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg were all about. In the 20 years of their leadership New York City experienced a renaissance. Because the whole point of a city is to make the punks keep their heads down so the rest of us can wive and thrive and swive.

But Mayor de Blasio is a leftie. He's down for the movement. He believes in the lefty cant about oppression and police brutality. And wow, murders are going up! Who woulda thunk it?

Guess what Mayor Bill. The whole point of police is to take it to the punks and make them keep their heads down. So the rest of us can live in peace.

The idea is that the police are there to beat up on the punks. The idea is not that politicians get to beat up on the cops to impress their lefty friends in the Activism Olympics.

So You Want a Revolution

Curtis Yarvin is churning out more stuff on his Gray Mirror book. Yesterday he wrote about revolution, "Persuasion and the Mensheviks." Not the play-acting at revolution of our lefty activist friends, but real revolution: how to change the regime.

But first to identify the players. The wokies, according to Yarvin are the kiddies, the "youth militia of happy, hopeful teenage volunteers" in the Czar's religious police. And then there are the Mensheviks.

[All over], people are being busted all over the place for their long-past mindcrimes, which were not even crimes when they thought them, or which were misdemeanors but have become major felonies.  Our Mensheviks are against this—as they should be.

Only, of course, our Mensheviks, the good old centrist liberals like Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, are being canceled too. But "we" are Bolsheviks. What does that mean?

It means we need to be "reactionaries," by which Yarvin means people who can see beyond the horizon of the present, one who "has taken his passport as a citizen of history." And let's learn from that genius of revolution, Lenin.

Revolution is not an ideology, it is a strategy, and Yarvin calls it Lenin's Rule, the first law of revolution.

The essence of revolution is not that a new class shall govern with the old government machinery, but that it shall smash up the existing machinery and govern with a new machine.

"It is easier to replace than reform an old government," says Yarvin: as with software, and he should know. But we modern "techno-Bolsheviks" are not monsters like Lenin & Co. Ours must not be a violent revolution, but rather a "cosy" revolution.  How do you do that?

Here is an easy test: in any truly cozy sovereign transition, even the officials of the old government machinery must wind up with better, happier, and more fulfilling lives.

Call that the second law of revolution: "the new regime must not punish anyone for good service to the old regime."

It ain't gonna be easy, because of our chimp-like tendency to "maim any falling power on the way down." But it is not a hopeless cause: Lenin was into butchery, but not Caesar and Napoleon, and not the post-war Germans. Guess what happened to the average SS man and Stasi veteran? They got new careers and new lives. But not generally in the new regime.

Obviously there is no law to cover replacement of the regime, so our "cozy revolution" must pass through a "legal singularity,"

The singularity, while inherently above law, must be as quick and smooth as possible.

Then there's the third law of revolution: "surgery not butchery."

Any revolution requires a process of "expropriation and sequestration." In the singularity the new regime will need the power of expropriation. That's because the billionaires need to be humbled. But not humiliated.

Did you know, for instance, that our Constitution provides for the suspension of habeas corpus?

But do we have to be so mean to the billionaires? Well, yes, says Yarvin, because money is power, and "No regime is safe with a super-plutocratic class of questionable loyalty." But maybe, says Mr. Softy here, only a couple of billionaires need to be expropriated pour encourager les autres. Why do billionaires suck up to the current lefties? Because they know which side their bread is buttered.

Then there is "sequestration." Any revolution needs to separate the "critical human nodes" from the levers of power. They need to be sent on luxurious vacations to various tropical islands, the kind that feature in the NYT travel section.

Such is the sharp edge of 21st-century Bolshevism: a wealth tax on a few zillionaires, involuntary swank vacations for a few VIPs. Is this too much? Red Terror run wild? Must we refuse to countenance such naked violations of the non-aggression policy?

Surgery not butchery means separating the functionaries of the old regime from their power, but not from their lives. 

Had enough yet? Yarvin's not quite through. 

The fourth law of revolution is that "any new regime must be an unconditional and accountable monarchy." Yes, that means an absolute monarchy. Yarvin wrote a lot about the benefits of monarchy in his Unqualified Reservations blog.

The fifth law of revolution is that "any new regime must be universal. It cannot govern as the regime of a faction—cultural, ideological, religious, racial, linguistic, economic, or geographic."

Well, that is pretty obvious, because the reason for the need for revolution is that our current regime is indeed the regime of a faction, the globalist, leftist educated Gentry faction that believes in a religion of political power as a path to justice. The trick for the new regime is to bury the enmities that led to the crisis: in our case the educated Gentry against the Commoners. That means that the new regime has to honor Gentry as Gentry, and Commoners as Commoners, because all "communities" deserve equal respect.

Do you think this is all a bit too much, "going too far" in the words of George Eliot's Mr. Brooke? Most people usually do, says Yarvin. But,

For any malady of state, there are three possible solutions: do nothing; repair the government; or replace the government. 

And usually repairing the government doesn't work. That's because of my Fourth Law, that government programs cannot work because you can never reform them. But if we are going to succeed in our replacement strategy we will have to get the support of the Mensheviks, the good centrists that right now are not ready for extreme action

What is a Menshevik? A Menshevik is a small and good person—an intellectual hobbit. This small and good person is naturally attracted to small and good ideas.

And then Yarvin goes into a long disquisition about the fatuously useless resistance to the "cancel culture" by the centrists like Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan and the Harper's Wet-Noodle Manifesto and a new Substack blog called "Persuasion."

Obviously those guys are not going to free us from the the clinking fist of the Czar's cultural police. And yet we need them on our side. How do we do it? Yarvin doesn't tell us. Not yet.

The Third Imperial Age Is (Was) The Lefty Age

A couple of days ago I was commenting on a piece by Financial Times conventional-wisdom journalist John Lloyd that maybe we are entering the Third Imperial Age. His notion is Russia and China taking over the world.

Where the Second Imperial Age was the European imperialism of the last 500 years. But a sharp-eyed reader emailed me to say:

The power seeking imperial types turned their attention from conquering neighbor lands in 1917.  The Russian Revolution launched the third imperial age of socialism.  Power seekers expanded their power and wealth by attacking with taxes the productive endeavor of wealth creators.  Imperial government expanded and their welfare clients bred themselves into over supply.  The peak occurs when government harvests near half of all wealth created.

Hey! How come I didn't think of that! Is he right or is he right?

Yes indeedy. Lefties are all about power, political power, and only power. Talk about imperialism! The worst: the very worst.

Now let us rehearse imperialism down the ages.

First Age of Imperialism. It features chaps like China that believed -- when not distracted by a Time of Troubles -- in conquering neighboring states and making them into tributary states, states that send tribute to the Son of Heaven at the center of the world in Beijing. As it should be. Also Rome, which believed in sending the legionaries out every now and again for a spot of loot and plunder and slaves. But most of the rest of the time they let the folks trade to and fro. Except for the Carthaginians. Carthago delenda est. When the Romans ran out of loot and plunder and slaves they inflated the currency and slowly deflated the Roman Empire so that Edward Gibbon could write a book about the whole procedure.

Second Age of Imperialism. It features European nobodies heading out across the world to trade. Christopher Columbus, son of a Genoese wool-worker that owned a cheese stand. Robert Clive, son of a small landowner. A troublemaker, he was sent out to India and started out "as little more than a glorified assistant shopkeeper." But then he learned a spot of soldiering and went on to win the battle of Plassey. Captain Cook was the second son of a Scottish farm laborer. He began his naval career as a merchant navy apprentice in coasting ships carrying coals from Newcastle. Alexander Hamilton, "bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,"was a teenaged businessman in St. Croix, and was so smart the local gents sent him to New York to go to school, where he taught the Yanks how to do the National Debt. Cecil Rhodes, son of a curate, was asthmatic and was sent out to South Africa for his health. He and his brother failed trying to grow cotton, but then he headed out to the Kimberley diamond fields. All these nobodies were advancing the frontiers of trade, and if they made a spot of money they often returned to the home country and were stigmatized as "nabobs." Not quite out of the top drawer, old chap.

Third Age of Imperialism. It features rich kids with a faith in the power of politics to bend the arc of history towards justice. It has featured the two biggest slave states in history. Karl Marx, son of the top lawyer in Trier. Friedrich Engels, son of a textile manufacturer. Vladimir Lenin, from "a moderately prosperous middle-class family" got kicked out of university for mostly peaceful protesting. Mao Zedong was the son of "one of the wealthiest farmers in Shaoshan." Frankfurt Scholar Max Horkheimer was the son of "a successful businessman who owned several textile factories." Herbert Marcuse, of "repressive tolerance" was the son of "a well-off businessman." These intellectual giants advanced the idea of societies that were, at very least neo-feudal, with the ruling class taxing 35-50 percent of income to hand out to its supporters, and at the worst, as in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, the most savage slave states in history.

So, on this notion, we would say, pace John Lloyd, that the Putinist regime in Russia and the Xi regime in China probably represent the "Autumn of the Third Imperialist Age" as the internal contradictions of big government and its force and the divisiveness of politics-with-everything combine to inspire educated rich kids in general -- and foolish young women at The New York Times in particular -- to indulge in witch hunts and cancel culture to force the world to bend the arc of history towards justice, or else. Until we normals get a clue and tell them to go drink their fair-trade coffee where the sun don't shine.

See, my impossible dream is that maybe, maybe, we are entering a post-imperial age based on the principle that loot and plunder does not pay. I'd say that the First Imperial Age proved the limitations of the loot-and-plunder model; that the Second Imperial Age proved the potential of the trading model, especially when led by nobodies; that the Third Imperial Age proved beyond a doubt that we humans should be better than loot-and-plunder lefties.

But that's just my opinion. You opinions may differ.

When All the Gubmint Programs Fail At Once

I watched the Ken Loach movie Kes last night, because I'd read a piece arguing the child actor actually was viable. Usually, child actors are hopeless.

Kes is the name of Billy Casper's trained kestrel, that he took from its nest as a chick and trained up all by himself using a book on hawking he stole from the local used-books store.

Billy is a "hopeless case" kid whose Yorkshire mining village is a hopeless case in the 1960s as oil takes over the world from coal.

So Billy is a "hopeless case" going to a hopeless case gubmint school where the kids all sit around like zombies, living in a hopeless case gubmint "council house" in a village where the men all work in the gubmint coal mine, a hopeless case industry that you will remember blew up during the Margaret Thatcher years.

The school Billy attended and that is featured in the movie is a "comprehensive school" built in 1963 and demolished in 2011. Comprehensive schools were a hopeless idea of the Labour left that helped demolish the "grammar" schools that had provided a route up out of poverty for British youngsters since before the days of William Shakespeare, son of a glover that went to the grammar school in Stratford on Avon.

I say all this because it seems to me that the current cancel culture frenzy really comes down to the fact that the whole gubmint-program world that our liberal friends have created for our benefit is falling down around their ears. And they cain't stand it, as Lina Lamont would say.

Ken Loach is a lefty film director whose "socially critical directing style and socialist ideals," according to La Wik, "are evident in his film treatment of social issues". I suppose the idea back in 1969, when Kes came out, was to highlight the injustice suffered by the Working Class in the Tory years of the Fifties and early Sixties. Of course, today a Ken Loach would be directing movies showing how the white working class in the North of England were a bunch of racist-sexist-homophobe haters as proved by their recent shift to the Conservative Party in the latest "Get Brexit Done" election.

What struck me in Kes was the hopelessness of being on the receiving end of lefty politics and government. Back in the immediate post-WWII era the left was serving up gubmint education, gubmint housing and gubmit nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy. And the poor working class was on the hopeless receiving end of it all.

But whatabout Reform? Can't we reform all those well-intentioned programs and make them work? I doubt it. Because of the fourth of my Four Laws. It says

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them.

And you can see the truth of that in the current presidential election campaign here in the good old US and A. Our liberal friends are not proposing to reform education or housing or union-blighted industry. They are merely proposing new stuff, defunding police and ramping up racist DIE and going full bore on the Green New Deal.

And who is going to get screwed into hopelessness by the current lefty agenda? Why, almost certainly black voters. Defund the police? That'll really improve the safety of inner-city "communities." Kill school choice? That'll really brighten up the scene in inner-city schools. Green New Deal? That'll really help the workers that depend on trucks and diesel-powered equipment to do their construction and technician jobs.

You can read about this all the time: Stephen Greenhut writing about California's "absurdly high cost of living, driven by a host of progressive policies." Do you think our liberal friends have a clue about this?

Then there is the nearly two-century cultural effort to steer the subordinate class away from middle-class values. There's the absurd effort of the Smithsonian -- now taken down -- to identify middle-class values such as "rugged individualism... emphasis on scientific method... protestant work ethic" with "whiteness." Do these progressive nut-cases not understand that these "civilized" values are exactly what they say they are: the kind of values you need to wive and thrive in the city. "Civilized" means "citified" because the Latin "civis" means "citizen." Get it, wokies?

Actually it all makes me realize that I need a "Four Laws Explained" maxim. As in:

Four Laws: Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). But socialism means More Jobs for Gentry.

The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). But the administrative state means More Jobs for Gentry.

Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). But regulatory agencies mean More Jobs for Gentry. 

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill). But government programs mean More Jobs for Gentry.

Yeah. Who knew? Cui bono? I could go on.

Marxism means more jobs for Gentry. 

Universities mean more jobs for Gentry. 

Safe spaces means more jobs for Gentry. 

Think tanks mean more jobs for Gentry. 

Climate change means more jobs for Gentry. 

Systemic racism means more jobs for Gentry. 

Systemic oppression means more jobs for Gentry.

I never would have guessed. Government, any government, means more jobs for the educated Gentry. So you know what side they are going to come down on any issue. Does it mean more jobs and more power for the educated Gentry?

What is the Good Life Better than the Left -- for Women?

I've established to my own satisfaction that the meaning of "life, the universe and everything" for educated male Gentry or People of the Creative Self is symbolized by the notion of the Sacrificial Hero that comes through the Nietzschean/Jungian tradition, and through adepts like Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson.

But whatabout women?

Truth is, women are not into heroes. You can see that in the whole "safety culture" that powers the "cancel culture." If you make me feel unsafe, well, your words are hurtful and you should be canceled. We have seen this in the resignation of Bari Weiss at The New York Times.

This safety thing, to me, is a girl thing. Being safe, intellectually and emotionally, is not something that occurs to a guy. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." That's the guy approach to wordplay.

And this takes us back to Georg Simmel's prediction a century ago, that with women coming into the public square, they would transform it to suit "a more feminine sensibility." I have been thinking about this for a few years and have come to the conclusion that women don't relate to the public square; they aren't comfortable at all with a frank and fair exchange of views; they don't believe in "debates." That's because women that have a disagreement don't have it out woman to woman. They complain to their friends about the woman they have a problem with, and the whole thing gets massaged by the neighborhood community of women and spat out, eventually in some collective decision of naming and shaming and shunning.

The proof of this is the "safety culture" that is emerging in universities and in the prestige media as women take over. Most of your university students these days are women; most of your university administrators these days are women. And it certainly seems that most of your young journalists are women. That is why you see the rise of the "safety culture." Women expect to be "safe;" they insist on being safe. Being a hero doesn't make sense. Not to a woman.

(Yes I know. There are exceptions. I know a few of them, personally).

So what is "best in life" for a woman?

The answer, I believe, issues out of the basic concept of honor among women. As James Bowman writes in Honor: A History, 

[In] spite of the discrediting that honor has undergone, the basic honor of the savage -- bravery for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surfaces of popular culture what has done so much to efface it. If you doubt it, try calling a man a wimp or a woman a slut. (p.5)

I think the woman's notion of honor comes out in the #WeBelieve yard-sign which usually closes with "Kindness is Everything."

Then, of course, we turn to My Girl George Eliot, Mary-Ann Evans that was. In Adam Bede, the heroine Dinah Morris is the kindest and most thoughtful person in the world. She is always thinking about other people and how she can help them. Her antagonist, Hetty Sorrel, is the most selfish person in the world who thinks of nothing but her beauty, her self-adornment and herself. You can see the question of chastity in women blazing across the sky: goodness, thoughtfulness, kindness.

In Middlemarch we have a rainbow of young women exemplars, from Dorothea Brooke, who really wants to do good in the world, to Rosamond Vincy, who is completely selfish and cannot see out of her needs and her truth of her eternal innocence, to Mary Garth, the Mary-Ann Evans name-alike, who is not to be dislodged from her determination that Fred Vincy has to deserve her before she will accept him as her affianced husband. Dorothea is the kindest, noblest, most thoughtful young woman in the world, and yet, as her uncle Mr. Brooke might say, she has a tendency to "go too far." Rosamond is a peerless beauty, yet frozen in place, determined never to do anything wrong, yet unable to see the wrongness of her mindless selfishness and sense of entitlement. Mary Garth is the balance between the two: kind but firm; thoughtful but not yielding; good, but no pushover.

So, after the alpha and omega of womanhood in Adam Bede George Eliot in Middlemarch gives us a spectrum of women and the opportunity to reflect on the question of woman's honor in more depth and breadth.

Now let us think about how this works out in the context of the modern educated woman in the educated Gentry or the People of the Creative Self.

Clearly, for such women, the need is for something original, something that steps out of the Commoner context of being good and kind and thoughtful by following the rules, going to work, obeying the law. We are trying here to think outside the box of goodness, thoughtfulness, and kindness, all the while avoiding falling into the trap of becoming a Lady Bountiful.

So, obviously, our Dorothea/Dinah/Mary would not be doing conventional things such as nice liberal women do, just aping the current liberal line and doing good, being kind and thoughtful and Lady Bountiful around the usual liberal victims.

In other words, the role of the creative good/kind/thoughtful woman is hard, as the role of the male Sacrificial Hero is hard.

OK. We have solved the whole problem and the future of womankind is set for the next millennium.

But what shall we call this paragon of femininity, the name, the feminine ideal corresponding to the male Sacrificial Hero.

Frankly, I don't have a clue. So I will just lay the question aside and leave it to my Jungian unconscious to rummage around in its archetypes to come up with the right answer.

Will There Be a Third Imperial Age?

We are at the end of the Second Imperial Age, dominated by European powers who determined that land "designated terra nullius (“no-one’s land”) could be taken" -- should be taken. Writes John Lloyd of "the Financial Times and co-founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford."

They did so in pursuit of precious metals and stones, for settlement and defence (of other lands already seized), for points of supply to their ships, in order to demonstrate their power, and [to Christianize the heathen.]

Actually, the imperial age started with the Portuguese and the Brits trading with India, because it was cheaper to run the new ocean-going sailing ships around the Cape of Good Hope to India and back than pay for the camels and taxes of the overland route through Arabia etc. Indeed I had it confirmed from a guide in Jaisalmer, in the desert of western India a couple years ago, that the whole place went to the dogs once the Portuguese and the Brits appeared on the scene. Nobody needed their stinkin' camels and gorgeous havelis any more. So John Lloyd got it a bit wrong.

Yes, there was a lot of terra nullius argument where the humans in question were pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers or horticulturalists. But not in India and China.

Where India was concerned the Brits were forever dealing with the predatory robber lords just out of town of Calcutta or Madras. Like the Maratha Confederacy. Or the princes just up the road from Bombay in Pune, who were no doubt advised by the Brahmin ancestors of Seattle Brahmin politician Kshama Sawant.

The point is that the Brits weren't in India to loot and plunder it. They were there to trade.

But, of course, the Brit ruling class still lived in a feudal culture. So in due course you got Brit imperialists in India saying, up at the Royal Simla Club in the usual haze after tiffin, "Good Lord chaps, we've got to pacify Afghanistan before the Russkies get there."

It is my belief that the old order of loot and plunder is over. The reason is simple: wealth no longer adheres in land and "precious metals and stones," but in intangible capital, ideas and processes that create the stuff we buy in stores and the SUVs we take it home in. After World War II the Soviets looted and plundered eastern Germany of all its physical capital, factories and machines, and took the whole caboodle off to Russia. How did that turn out, Tovarich Brezhnev? Yeah. German per-capita GDP in 2018: $46, 241; Russia per-capita GDP: $11,289.

All we need is for our politicians and activists to catch up with us, and stop playing at chimp border warfare.

The point of empires is to send the Roman legionaries out for loot and plunder and bring the plunder and the slaves back to Rome and parade them through the streets in a Triumph. And it worked a treat for the Romans until the borders of the Roman Empire were so far from Rome that the old system didn't work any more, probably because the slaves all died on the journey back to Rome.

Now that the US is withdrawing from its post-WWII imperialism, John Lloyd writes, we may be at the dawn of a new imperial age dominated by China and Russia.

Russia’s authoritarianism and China’s totalitarianism (the second a harder version of the first), now allied, present a formidable front of two states dedicated to increasing their global power, in a fashion increasingly similar to the imperial strategies of Europe.

Now President-for-almost-life Putin is a former KGB guy, and President-for-life Xi is a Commie apparatchik. What the heck do they know about the modern world?

Most likely they are like the Brit chaps at the Club up in Simla in the 1830s worrying about Russkies after tiffin. Or they are like the idiots-all-round in the run-up to World War I. They only know politics and political power. They do not understand that wealth and power do not come from a big fat empire with ostrich-feather hats and impressive parade uniforms, or from regime-sponsored "activists" painting the streets with trite slogans. Or from gubmint programs that take from productive people to give to regime supporters.

But the problem is that, if you are a politician or an activist, the only thing you know is the game of political power. If the game of political power and empire is over, passé mon vieux, what does the poor wren do then, poor thing?

Well, that is what we are setting up the bleachers right now to find out. My feeling is that Russia and China are backing the wrong horse. I think that Russia and China are going to find out that the the whole world will combine against them. Because whether you are Vietnam or the Philippines or Australia or Japan or Crazy Rich Asians in Singapore, or the poor bloody Germans in Central Europe, you don't want to be under the thumb of some thug Commie bastard from Beijing or Moscow.

And, of course, now we don't care about Mid-East oil any more, because fracking. Yay frackers!

No, the Big Problem of the coming era is what to do with people that have a mania for social moralizing. See, I think that primitive men were all about defending the border -- or looting the neighbors -- and primitive women were all about naming and shaming and shunning that awful witch living alone just out of town.

I think that we have about pacified men and taught them to fight for market share instead of their share of slaves. But women? 

The problem is a bit like the problem with Harvard graduates: You can always tell a Harvard man; you just can't tell him anything.

Just Who Are Those Horrible Systemic Racist White Supremacists?

As we watch all the mostly peaceful protesters protesting against systemic racism and proposing to defund the police, we have to wonder. 

Just who are the monsters, the patriarchs, the white supremacists, the systemic systemists, the racists, of which we've heard tell?

Are they privileged corporate CEOs? No. Everyone from Amazon to Walmart has clearly declared their support for Black Lives Matter, and some have actually paid good money to back up their words.

Are they privileged college professors? Heavens No! College professors are all down for the movement, and are willing to DIE on the cross of Diversity, Inclusions, and Equality: for Blacks, and maybe for the odd Hispanic and certainly for all the non-cis-gendered in their many LGBT flavors.

Are they writers and intellectuals? Certainly not! The whole point of the Harper's Wet-Noodle Manifesto was for the intellectuals to declare themselves firmly on the side of the GoodWhites and absolutely opposed to President Trump's assault on democracy.

Are they Hollywood types? No indeed. In fact Hollywood is so determined to get woke that it looks like you ain't gonna work in this town again if you are a middle-aged white guy.

Are they root'n toot'n feminists demanding that that the marginalized women down the ages have the right to own their own bodies? I can't believe you said that. Feminists demand that marginalized women have the right to choose just like well-born academic women.

Are they nice liberal ladies preening themselves behind a forest of social-moralizing yard-signs of the #WeBelieve and #BlackLivesMatter variety? Absolutely not. Nice liberal ladies always take care to model the proper moral attitude.

Are they the activist college kidz that we see marchin' and protest'n in mostly peaceful protests across this great land and that are absolutely not spreading WuFlu with their protests? Of course not. You must be crazy to think that the kidz, perfectly programmed by two decades of regime propaganda, would have a white supremacist bone in their bodies.

So obviously there is something really weird going on. Some Deep Thinking is required.

Let's get a little more intellectual and apply this question to my reductive Three Peoples theory or Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer "Clear Pill" notion.

Are we talking about the educated Gentry or my People of the Creative Self as the cause of all this Police Brutality and white supremacy? No indeed. The Gentry is all down for the movement, committed to Justice for the historically marginalized.

Are we talking about the Clients, the Victims, or my People of the Subordinate Self. Certainly not! They are the very people that have been enslaved and enserfed and dominated and marginalized since the Dawn of Time and very likely earlier and for whom all good people demand Justice and an end to Police Brutality!

Then, we must be talking about the Commoners, the People of the Responsible Self, that obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules.

Really? Now I don't claim to know everything, just almost everything. And I cannot see how the average Commoner can be the guy that's to blame for all the problems of the world.

You know why? Because he doesn't have any power. He doesn't have any privilege. He can be fired in a moment for an ill-considered comment. Nobody pays no nevermind to his opinions and his beliefs. And as for his clothes and his baseball caps! Darling!

Let us create an image of this guy. He is the guy that you see in a Trump rally that forms the backdrop of Trump's performance.

Does he have more privilege than a CEO?

Does he have more privilege than a college professor?

Does he have more privilege than a famous writer?

Does he have more privilege than a Hollywood producer, or even a Grip, whatever that is?

Does he have more privilege than a feminist?

Does he have more privilege than a nice liberal lady?

Does he have more privilege than a mostly peaceful protesting college kid?

The question answers itself.

Now this notion, this scapegoat for all the sins of the world, goes back to the original Marxian narrative, in which noble educated youth and helpless proletarians would unite to scupper the bourgeoisie that was hell-bent on immiserating the working class due to the inevitable workings of classical economics and the neo-feudal instincts of the capitalists.

Of course, the Marxian narrative was just an update of the scapegoat of primitive humanity as outlined by Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred.

It had a point, back in the day, when the bourgeoisie and even the petite bourgeoisie, whatever that is, were a minority compared to the masses of workers. Yeah! They were an exploitative minority that was exploiting the workers. Down with the capitalists!

But today, I'd say, this narrative has passed its sell-by date. Because, for one thing, the middle class Commoners are probably a majority of the adult population. I'd say that a politics that blames a majority of the population for all the sins of the world is probably heading for a bruising.

I mean. Suppose a politician came along and told the middle class Commoners that they were the greatest people in the greatest nation in the world and that the Stuck-ups in the Swamp and the criminals in the streets were the guys that were really to blame for all the sins of the world.

Now I don't know where such a politician might come from or what he would look like. No Idea!

But you can see that there is an opportunity there for some courageous and adventurous soul that is not afraid to incur the wrath of all the Great and the Good.

Look, this scapegoat thing is as old as the hills. We humans have been doing the Scapegoat Waltz since whenever. But to compose a new tune to the Scapegoat Waltz and push it to the top of the hit parade. Well, that takes talent. And also a lightning strike.

What do you think?

The Crimes of the Wet-Noodle Manifesto Signers

Yesterday I sneered at the nice liberal signers of the Harper's Manifesto. But now I want to cut a bit deeper. And I echo Angelo Codevilla, who calls the current political regime a "Scamocracy in America." He refers to "the long-running race and poverty scam, the education scam, the environmentalist scam, the sex scam, the security scam, and now the pandemic scam".

All have been based on propositions touted as scientific truth by the most highly credentialed persons in America—experts certified by the U.S government, enshrined by academia as science’s spokesmen, and fawned upon by the media working in concert to forbid any disagreement on the matter whatsoever. Yet virtually all their propositions have turned out to be false, and indeed have produced effects opposite to those claimed.

 Or, as I like to say, our ruling class has made things worse. Actually, I divide the "scams" of the ruling class into two categories, the Left's Crimes and the Left's Errors.

Under the Left's Crimes I adduce that:

1. The left led the workers into the wilderness
2. The left led women into the wilderness
3. The left led minorities and LGBT into the wilderness

The left separated all these folks away from full membership and allegiance to the nation state. And that is a crime because the nation state is the best thing going until the planet unites to battle the Trisolarians from Alpha Centauri.

Under the Left's Errors I adduce that the following programs do not work. But nothing is done to reform them.

1. Social Security
2. Medicare
3. Medicaid
4. Public Schools
5. Welfare
6. Economic Regulation
7. Racial Preferences

There is a reason why nothing is done to reform them. It is that you cannot reform government programs, not until they collapse and run out of money.

But then I have written about "The Six Worst Injustices of the Liberal Domination,"

1. The liberal ruling class has confirmed workers and peasants in their pre-urban tribal, racist, subordinate culture
2. The liberal ruling class has attacked and marginalized the middle class
3. The liberal ruling class has wrecked education
4. The liberal ruling class has wrecked health care
5. The liberal ruling class has wrecked retirement
6. The liberal ruling class has wrecked charity

Want some more? How about "The Left's Syllabus of Errors, Part One."

1. The French Revolution
2. The socialist communities, like New Harmony.
3. Marxian economics
4. Top-down administrative government
5. Interventions to favor the left's Little Darlings, from workers to women to minorities to LGBT
6. War on religion
7. War on the nation state
8. Support or large-scale migration
9. Climate change
10. Oh, and Postmodernism

The point, and I do have one, is that the problem with the left is its worship of political power, the faith that justice rides on the back of political power, wielded by the right people.

But humans are social animals; we thrive by reducing the amount of force, because force is destructive and expensive. That is the point of all social animals, to reduce force. And the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years has demonstrated that we can transform the world without politics by letting nobodies define the future with technological and non-political innovation, penalizing people only for untrustworthiness and failure to contribute.

Meanwhile, here are the Four Stages of Marxist Takeover, from a KGB-trained Russian, Yuri Bezmenov:

1. Demoralization
2. Destabilization
3. Crisis
4. Normalization, with a "new normal."

The good thing is that you can stop the process anywhere you want.  And, it seems to me, that the Brinton Thesis, in Anatomy of Revolution, is that the Crisis is also the point where the Thermidorean Reaction takes over. Why? Because people cannot live forever in the white heat of a revolutionary Reign of Terror.

Most normal people want to live normal lives, working and wiving and thriving.

Hey, isn't it great that we have a Trump here in America and not a Kerensky, as the Russkies had in 1917. It's another proof of God's existence. Or, as Bismarck is supposed to have said: "There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America."

The Usual Suspects and Harper's Wet-Noodle Manifesto

Earlier this week, on July 7, 2020, the unwoke sector of the educated Gentry issued what I would call a Wet-Noodle Manifesto through the website of Harper's magazine. 

All the usual suspects have signed the manifesto: from Margaret Atwood, she of the clueless Handmaid's Tale; to Deirdre McCloskey, whose helpful Bourgeois Era books dissolved in the end into LGBT advocacy; to Gloria Steinem, she who needed a man like a fish needed a bicycle, but ended up marrying a rich guy.

And so on. The only signer that I half respect, as someone that mildly rows against the current, is John McWhorter.

The manifesto starts by praising the mostly peaceful protests following the death of a career criminal during his arrest  -- and makes no mention of riots and looting. This man allegedly passed a fake $20 bill and, if you believe the postmortem, was suffering from heart disease and various comorbidities and had high levels of the post-heroin drug fentanyl and other mind-altering drugs in his body.

Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts.

Let's translate that shall we?

Regime-sponsored rioters and looters have demanded we turn the clock back on sensible "broken-window" police reforms and further break the spirit and letter of the Civil Rights Acts of the Sixties with straight-up racist quotas and jobs for gentry.

 Then we get to Donald Trump:

The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy.

Just what planet are you usual suspects living on? I presume this is really saying that Donald Trump represents a threat to supra-nationalist educated gentry in "education, journalism, philanthropy... the arts" and global corporations. as in:

All across the world nationalists and populists are rising to political power, representing in general the ordinary middle-class commoners that get short shrift from the educated gentry in the ruling class that has plans to rise to glory on huge programs of political power from tackling climate change to continuing the failed program of international development. These populists are threatening jobs for gentry.

Listen, usual suspects. Donald Trump rose to power by beating more than ten other Republicans in a fair fight. Then he beat Hillary Clinton in the general election by concentrating on winning Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The Rust Belt states are home to millions of people that have not done well in the last 50 years. Meanwhile the Obama administration was spying on Trump's campaign using the "intelligence community" and a faked up "dossier" provided to them by an agent of a foreign power.

Hey, remember when Nixon spied on the Democrats, using not the intelligence community but a few ex-cops and former IC guys?

Then, usual suspects in the ruling class have spent three years conducting an unprecedented campaign to destroy President Trump personally and politically. And you say it is President Trump "who represents a real threat to democracy."

I don't know what Kool-Aid you usual suspects are drinking, but the biggest lesson I ever learned about politics was from a Greek friend expatiating on the end of the dictatorial rule of the Greek colonels. What was needed, he said, was for the center-right to win the election and for the left to accept the result and then for the left to win the following election and for the right to accept the result. 

That, usual suspects, is the basic ground rule for "democracy." Do you understand what I mean? It means that when the other guys win the election, your candidate steps up and concedes, and says "we are all Americans" and we all revere the same Declaration of Independence, the same Constitution, and the same Founders.

But you chaps have contested the last two change elections, in 2000 and 2016, when your guys were voted out in a normal change election. That, usual suspects, is "a real threat to democracy."

But you will talk to a thousand usual-suspect gentry liberals before you will find one that understands such a basic notion.

I've been reading and commenting on Curtis Yarvin's work-in-progress Gray Mirror in recent days. He proposes that political action, for or against the regime, is meaningless, because the regime always wins. "Detachment" is what he recommends, doing something orthogonal to the power regime.

I've been worried that there is something missing in his analysis. And I am coming to think that the missing link is that he assumes that the ruling class is functional, knows what it is doing.

But what can you say about a ruling class whose usual suspects put out a Wet-Noodle Manifesto like the one they put out this week?

You say that they really don't have a clue. That they are like the ancien régime in France in the middle of the 18th century, fumbling and bumbling from one cock-up to another.

Then, you say, someone is going to knock over these Klueless Klots some day soon, and it might as well be us.

Then, of course, the educated gentry will have to get a real job.