I had a minor epiphany the other day reading a piece about how the left is always in permanent attack mode against middle-class morality, things like faith, hard work, responsibility, volunteering, respect for authority, stable families, and all that.
Naturally this epiphany occurred within the horizon of my reductive Three Peoples theory.
My point is this. The emergence of the People of the Responsible Self -- and I just came up with a history of this emergence -- has a consequence of world-historical significance.
By and large, the People of the Responsible Self can be relied on to govern themselves. That's because they go to work, follow the rules, obey the law, show up to volunteer, stay in school, stay married, have children within marriage, and all that. When you live like that you don't bang up against the guard-rails very much. You don't need a government program to educate your children; you don't need a government program to pay for grandma's end of life. You don't even need much of a welfare program. Because People of the Responsible Self think that they are supposed to pitch in and do all that stuff themselves.
Do you see what would happen in a society where the People of the Responsible Self were not being attacked by little lefty thugs every day? I will tell you. Every day, some Person of the Subordinate Self would be saying to themselves: I oughta try that. Pretty soon, nearly everybody would be trying it. And pretty soon we wouldn't need a big-government state with all its jobs and power for ruling-class liberals.
Our liberal and lefty friends instinctively know this, and that is why they hate the middle class and everything it stands for. That is why the left advocates for life-styles that are just not going to end in people living happily ever after. Let us look at a few examples.
Suppose you are a union member. Your life is set up for you: benefits, pensions, rights. But what happens if the big corporation you work for, say a steel company, goes out of business? Well in that case you need big government to take care of you, because your whole life plan assumed that your corporation and your union had taken care of that for you.
Suppose you are gay. You probably won't have children, and you won't have an extended family network. So if things go wrong and you lose your job, or you get short of savings in retirement, or you are getting to end of life, why then you are going to want big government to take care of you.
Suppose you are underclass, a woman who isn't married to the father of your children or a man that doesn't work much. Well, obviously, you are a fan of big government. Period. Your whole life is a cunning pursuit of government benefits.
So it is clearly in the interest of the left to encourage social pathologies, because social pathologies need government benefits and strict government supervision and extended government regulatory power to keep them in check. It is clearly in the interest of the left to attack middle-class morality, because if everyone got to adhere to middle-class morality and started to marginalize people that resisted the middle-class culture, well, you would get a culture that didn't need much in the way of government, and there wouldn't be much opportunity for people to acquire political power by offering to lead the People of the Subordinate Self.
Now, my Prehistory of the Three Peoples narrated its emergence, first of all, from the void about three thousand years ago with the beginning of the Axial Age, where people with a responsibility culture first emerged in the rare cities of the agricultural age and built religions and cultures based on the idea of gods that wanted humans to be independent and responsible. But, of course, nearly all people were serfs and slaves, subordinate to the proud rulers and Pharaohs of the time. And jolly good fun it was, for the rulers and their supporters.
But the big thing of my Prehistory is the breakout of the People of the Responsible Self in the Great Enrichment of the past 200 years. Instead of being unusual people merchanting and trading in the rare cities of the agricultural world, suddenly the People of the Responsible Self living in the burgeoning cities of the industrial revolution reached critical mass, and started occupying significant cultural space. It was shocking.
It was the end of the old world of the Two Peoples, Masters and Slaves, Herren und Knechte.
It was shocking for the old agricultural ruling class, the Herren, suddenly confronted with the end of their millennium-long cultural and political hegemony. But it was also shocking for the People of the Subordinate Self, the Knechte, for it was no longer possible to live as the serfs on some powerful lord's estate, with at least the comfort that he needed you to hoe the weeds and serve in his feudal army from time to time. Now the People of the Subordinate Self were swept up into the economic turmoil of the Great Enrichment, and subject to the new concept of industrial discipline.
But the real shock was the emergence of a new class, the folks I call the People of the Creative Self. It turned out that these people, usually the educated sons of the haute bourgeoisie, chaps like Marx and Engels -- or Lenin, whose parents were both teachers and administrators -- had an appetite for power, and developed a secular faith that a heaven on earth could be created with the muscle of political power.
You will notice that this new ruling-class culture is the complete mirror image of the bourgeois culture of responsibility in which the state truly does wither away, not because of the glory of cooperation under socialism, but because responsible trustworthy people don't need much supervision, and don't see why other people should be set up in authority over them.
You can see how this notion I have been developing explains what is going on with our lefty and liberal friends. It is natural for them to attack ordinary middle-class morality, because such people do not need and do not vote for big government. It is natural for them to force non-bourgeois life-style and culture right in the face of the bourgeoisie to demoralize and intimidate the bourgeoisie into fearful silence. It is natural to encourage immigration of pre-bourgeois people off the farm in Latin America, or from the rough-and-ready herding culture of the Middle East. Such people are about one-and-a-half generations away from embourgeoisification, and are the natural rank-and-file for the left's political army.
But against the left's program of subordination and disorganization is the fact of the modern economy. You may read of interracial hate and identity politics, but when people work in the global economy they are required to be kind and helpful service workers rather than political street thugs, and their only job is to serve the customer, regardless of race, creed, sex, or any other distinguishing characteristic. The only thing is to be trustworthy and diligent.
Of course that is why the left is utterly opposed to capitalism and the market economy. Why, if everyone trusted everyone else, and thought of nothing but serving the consumer what would happen to big government and the power of politicians and government functionaries and the activists in activist organizations?
Obviously we are not just in the middle of a cold civil war; we are in the middle of an unprecedented cultural transformation, from a culture based on the defense of a patch of land, to a culture based on the propagation of trust and responsibility to the four corners of the planet.
And a lot of people are doing everything they can to put a stop to it. They are people that want to be Herren, lords, masters, leaders. Their god is politics and political leadership. I guess you could call their culture a cult of leadership.
The Germans have a word for that: Führerprinzip.
Naturally this epiphany occurred within the horizon of my reductive Three Peoples theory.
My point is this. The emergence of the People of the Responsible Self -- and I just came up with a history of this emergence -- has a consequence of world-historical significance.
By and large, the People of the Responsible Self can be relied on to govern themselves. That's because they go to work, follow the rules, obey the law, show up to volunteer, stay in school, stay married, have children within marriage, and all that. When you live like that you don't bang up against the guard-rails very much. You don't need a government program to educate your children; you don't need a government program to pay for grandma's end of life. You don't even need much of a welfare program. Because People of the Responsible Self think that they are supposed to pitch in and do all that stuff themselves.
Do you see what would happen in a society where the People of the Responsible Self were not being attacked by little lefty thugs every day? I will tell you. Every day, some Person of the Subordinate Self would be saying to themselves: I oughta try that. Pretty soon, nearly everybody would be trying it. And pretty soon we wouldn't need a big-government state with all its jobs and power for ruling-class liberals.
Our liberal and lefty friends instinctively know this, and that is why they hate the middle class and everything it stands for. That is why the left advocates for life-styles that are just not going to end in people living happily ever after. Let us look at a few examples.
Suppose you are a union member. Your life is set up for you: benefits, pensions, rights. But what happens if the big corporation you work for, say a steel company, goes out of business? Well in that case you need big government to take care of you, because your whole life plan assumed that your corporation and your union had taken care of that for you.
Suppose you are gay. You probably won't have children, and you won't have an extended family network. So if things go wrong and you lose your job, or you get short of savings in retirement, or you are getting to end of life, why then you are going to want big government to take care of you.
Suppose you are underclass, a woman who isn't married to the father of your children or a man that doesn't work much. Well, obviously, you are a fan of big government. Period. Your whole life is a cunning pursuit of government benefits.
So it is clearly in the interest of the left to encourage social pathologies, because social pathologies need government benefits and strict government supervision and extended government regulatory power to keep them in check. It is clearly in the interest of the left to attack middle-class morality, because if everyone got to adhere to middle-class morality and started to marginalize people that resisted the middle-class culture, well, you would get a culture that didn't need much in the way of government, and there wouldn't be much opportunity for people to acquire political power by offering to lead the People of the Subordinate Self.
Now, my Prehistory of the Three Peoples narrated its emergence, first of all, from the void about three thousand years ago with the beginning of the Axial Age, where people with a responsibility culture first emerged in the rare cities of the agricultural age and built religions and cultures based on the idea of gods that wanted humans to be independent and responsible. But, of course, nearly all people were serfs and slaves, subordinate to the proud rulers and Pharaohs of the time. And jolly good fun it was, for the rulers and their supporters.
But the big thing of my Prehistory is the breakout of the People of the Responsible Self in the Great Enrichment of the past 200 years. Instead of being unusual people merchanting and trading in the rare cities of the agricultural world, suddenly the People of the Responsible Self living in the burgeoning cities of the industrial revolution reached critical mass, and started occupying significant cultural space. It was shocking.
It was the end of the old world of the Two Peoples, Masters and Slaves, Herren und Knechte.
It was shocking for the old agricultural ruling class, the Herren, suddenly confronted with the end of their millennium-long cultural and political hegemony. But it was also shocking for the People of the Subordinate Self, the Knechte, for it was no longer possible to live as the serfs on some powerful lord's estate, with at least the comfort that he needed you to hoe the weeds and serve in his feudal army from time to time. Now the People of the Subordinate Self were swept up into the economic turmoil of the Great Enrichment, and subject to the new concept of industrial discipline.
But the real shock was the emergence of a new class, the folks I call the People of the Creative Self. It turned out that these people, usually the educated sons of the haute bourgeoisie, chaps like Marx and Engels -- or Lenin, whose parents were both teachers and administrators -- had an appetite for power, and developed a secular faith that a heaven on earth could be created with the muscle of political power.
You will notice that this new ruling-class culture is the complete mirror image of the bourgeois culture of responsibility in which the state truly does wither away, not because of the glory of cooperation under socialism, but because responsible trustworthy people don't need much supervision, and don't see why other people should be set up in authority over them.
You can see how this notion I have been developing explains what is going on with our lefty and liberal friends. It is natural for them to attack ordinary middle-class morality, because such people do not need and do not vote for big government. It is natural for them to force non-bourgeois life-style and culture right in the face of the bourgeoisie to demoralize and intimidate the bourgeoisie into fearful silence. It is natural to encourage immigration of pre-bourgeois people off the farm in Latin America, or from the rough-and-ready herding culture of the Middle East. Such people are about one-and-a-half generations away from embourgeoisification, and are the natural rank-and-file for the left's political army.
But against the left's program of subordination and disorganization is the fact of the modern economy. You may read of interracial hate and identity politics, but when people work in the global economy they are required to be kind and helpful service workers rather than political street thugs, and their only job is to serve the customer, regardless of race, creed, sex, or any other distinguishing characteristic. The only thing is to be trustworthy and diligent.
Of course that is why the left is utterly opposed to capitalism and the market economy. Why, if everyone trusted everyone else, and thought of nothing but serving the consumer what would happen to big government and the power of politicians and government functionaries and the activists in activist organizations?
Obviously we are not just in the middle of a cold civil war; we are in the middle of an unprecedented cultural transformation, from a culture based on the defense of a patch of land, to a culture based on the propagation of trust and responsibility to the four corners of the planet.
And a lot of people are doing everything they can to put a stop to it. They are people that want to be Herren, lords, masters, leaders. Their god is politics and political leadership. I guess you could call their culture a cult of leadership.
The Germans have a word for that: Führerprinzip.
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