If my concept of Fake Protest means anything, it must issue from a Great Error, a profound misunderstanding about the meaning of life, the universe and everything on the part of our liberal friends.
Because, as we observe the fatuous conceit of liberal Fake Protest, we have to ask ourselves: what went wrong? Why are these people making such fools of themselves? Why, at the end of two centuries of The Great Enrichment in which nearly all humans, North Koreans excepted, have enjoyed part or all of the increase in income from $1-3 per day to $100 per day, inflation adjusted, why are there people running around insisting that great swathes of humans are the most abject victims of racists, sexists, homophobes, etc., and that the only recourse is more government power, more administrators, more regulatory intervention in the normal to and fro of human exchange?
Now, I am something of a Lone Wolf, tending my garden without much regard for others and how they do it. But I am social enough to know that the one thing I hate is making a fool of myself. So we must ask ourselves: why are liberals making such fools of themselves? Or let us ask another question during the current madness of tearing down Confederate war memorials. Do not liberals understand that they in their turn will be the target of the iconoclasts, as a new generation judges them as the most foul and most ignorant oppressors and exploiters since the dawn of time. Have they not read Charles Murray's Coming Apart in which he judges that the top 20 percent of white Americans are doin' fine, with university degrees, satisfying careers, and merger marriages, that the middle 50 percent is doing just so-so, and that the bottom 30 percent is not so good, with the men not working much and the women not marrying much? What about "the children" of that bottom 30 percent?
So what have our liberal friends got wrong? What has led them into their folly and, by hanging onto their folly, what has driven them to commit injustice and oppression and call it bending the arc of history towards justice?
I think that their fundamental error is to believe that the hierarchical society of the agricultural age can and should continue as the model for the industrial and post-industrial age, that the only problem was that the wrong people were in charge. In the agricultural age, the fundamental fact was that land equals life, and the only thing to do is to defend your patch of land against the world. In reality, of course, it turned out that the farmers had to subordinate themselves to a warrior lord in order to defend that land, and the warrior lords took full advantage of the situation. subordinating the farmers to their rule in exchange for the offer of security. Thus the hierarchical feudal society. But in the new world, the evil and ignorant lords and the superstitious churches would be replaced by educated and evolved activists and experts: totally different, man; totally.
But in the industrial city the old culture of hierarchy cannot serve. This means that city people must learn how to conduct their lives in a different kind of subordination: to the market and its prices, rather than the lord and his lordly rules.
When the waves of people first arrive in the city the individuals are still peasants that know subordination to a lord; they have not yet learned the culture of individual responsibility and subordination to the market. So they subordinate themselves to urban political machines, to labor unions, to big corporate bureaucracies rather than to the market, for that is all that they know.
But what they need, in order the wive and thrive in the city, is to slough off the old ways of the subordinate peasant and put on the armor of a new culture, the culture of individual responsibility, and this is the only way because the city economy is too complicated to be directed by some lord, whether the lord of the land or the lord of the bureaucracy.
In my view the great error of the liberals and the socialist and progressive project has been that the leftists have hindered rather than helped the new arrivals to the city, by confirming them in their subordination to some great lord, or political big-shot, or corporate machine, rather than putting on the armor of light, the culture of individual responsibility that alone prepares the city dweller to wive and thrive in the new order. And as the years go by, the error is deepening into a crime, a crime of willful ignorance, at best.
I have written a book about the four skills people must learn on The Road to the Middle Class. Those cultural skills are: education, religion, mutual aid, and law. By education I mean the basic skills of literacy and numeracy that first emerged in the Fertile Crescent 3,000 years ago and more in the counting houses of the merchants and temples. By religion I mean in particular the cult of enthusiastic Christianity which has been down the ages the religion of people learning the ways of the city. It teaches people that they can be responsible beings bathed in the love of God. By mutual aid I mean the culture of social insurance in fraternal associations that grew up in the 19th century before it was blindsided by the welfare state. By law I mean the replacement of the traditional culture of feud with the culture of submission to the authority of the law.
In different ways our liberal lords have queered these four pitches. In education they have substituted regime propaganda for the basic skills needed for city life, and separated learning from working to a degree they never were before except for rich kids. In religion they have substituted their cults of creativity and victimhood for the city religion of Christianity. In mutual aid they have substituted top-down government programs for the social and mutual culture of fraternal association, the charming and cunning pretense of brother- and sisterhood among people that are no longer living in and around their blood kindred. In law they have substituted top-down administrative law for the reciprocal judge-made law common law. What all these actions do is put roadblocks and barriers on the Road to the Middle Class, and sequester the new arrivals to the city in ethnic, pre-middle-class ghettos. And this is no longer merely a dreadful mistake as it might have been a century ago, but a stupid crime against humanity, a willful blindness about the facts of the matter. It is, of course, unthinkable that our liberals lords have fought to block the Road to the Middle Class not because of folly and ignorance, but cynically and consciously in the knowledge that it enhances their political and economic and cultural power. Surely they are not that evil.
Because if the liberal barriers on the Road to the Middle Class are not accidents of stupidity, but planned and thought through, then the culture of Fake Protest is not just a foolish knee-jerk, a nostalgic attempt to re-create the world of 1850 when all the world was new, but a cynical ploy to enact a fake Theater of Protest that has nothing to do with the facts of the matter.
The basic science was set forth a century ago that socialism -- and by implication any administrative system -- could not work because it could not compute prices.
And so the question that every disciple of power must answer is to show why their new power proposal can possibly hope to outperform the individual actions of millions of consumers and thousands of producers as they interact with each other through the price system.
And that is why they resort to Fake Protest and invoke the power of government by a thousand dodges and catch-phrases, for they cannot answer the question.
Because, as we observe the fatuous conceit of liberal Fake Protest, we have to ask ourselves: what went wrong? Why are these people making such fools of themselves? Why, at the end of two centuries of The Great Enrichment in which nearly all humans, North Koreans excepted, have enjoyed part or all of the increase in income from $1-3 per day to $100 per day, inflation adjusted, why are there people running around insisting that great swathes of humans are the most abject victims of racists, sexists, homophobes, etc., and that the only recourse is more government power, more administrators, more regulatory intervention in the normal to and fro of human exchange?
Now, I am something of a Lone Wolf, tending my garden without much regard for others and how they do it. But I am social enough to know that the one thing I hate is making a fool of myself. So we must ask ourselves: why are liberals making such fools of themselves? Or let us ask another question during the current madness of tearing down Confederate war memorials. Do not liberals understand that they in their turn will be the target of the iconoclasts, as a new generation judges them as the most foul and most ignorant oppressors and exploiters since the dawn of time. Have they not read Charles Murray's Coming Apart in which he judges that the top 20 percent of white Americans are doin' fine, with university degrees, satisfying careers, and merger marriages, that the middle 50 percent is doing just so-so, and that the bottom 30 percent is not so good, with the men not working much and the women not marrying much? What about "the children" of that bottom 30 percent?
So what have our liberal friends got wrong? What has led them into their folly and, by hanging onto their folly, what has driven them to commit injustice and oppression and call it bending the arc of history towards justice?
I think that their fundamental error is to believe that the hierarchical society of the agricultural age can and should continue as the model for the industrial and post-industrial age, that the only problem was that the wrong people were in charge. In the agricultural age, the fundamental fact was that land equals life, and the only thing to do is to defend your patch of land against the world. In reality, of course, it turned out that the farmers had to subordinate themselves to a warrior lord in order to defend that land, and the warrior lords took full advantage of the situation. subordinating the farmers to their rule in exchange for the offer of security. Thus the hierarchical feudal society. But in the new world, the evil and ignorant lords and the superstitious churches would be replaced by educated and evolved activists and experts: totally different, man; totally.
But in the industrial city the old culture of hierarchy cannot serve. This means that city people must learn how to conduct their lives in a different kind of subordination: to the market and its prices, rather than the lord and his lordly rules.
When the waves of people first arrive in the city the individuals are still peasants that know subordination to a lord; they have not yet learned the culture of individual responsibility and subordination to the market. So they subordinate themselves to urban political machines, to labor unions, to big corporate bureaucracies rather than to the market, for that is all that they know.
But what they need, in order the wive and thrive in the city, is to slough off the old ways of the subordinate peasant and put on the armor of a new culture, the culture of individual responsibility, and this is the only way because the city economy is too complicated to be directed by some lord, whether the lord of the land or the lord of the bureaucracy.
In my view the great error of the liberals and the socialist and progressive project has been that the leftists have hindered rather than helped the new arrivals to the city, by confirming them in their subordination to some great lord, or political big-shot, or corporate machine, rather than putting on the armor of light, the culture of individual responsibility that alone prepares the city dweller to wive and thrive in the new order. And as the years go by, the error is deepening into a crime, a crime of willful ignorance, at best.
I have written a book about the four skills people must learn on The Road to the Middle Class. Those cultural skills are: education, religion, mutual aid, and law. By education I mean the basic skills of literacy and numeracy that first emerged in the Fertile Crescent 3,000 years ago and more in the counting houses of the merchants and temples. By religion I mean in particular the cult of enthusiastic Christianity which has been down the ages the religion of people learning the ways of the city. It teaches people that they can be responsible beings bathed in the love of God. By mutual aid I mean the culture of social insurance in fraternal associations that grew up in the 19th century before it was blindsided by the welfare state. By law I mean the replacement of the traditional culture of feud with the culture of submission to the authority of the law.
In different ways our liberal lords have queered these four pitches. In education they have substituted regime propaganda for the basic skills needed for city life, and separated learning from working to a degree they never were before except for rich kids. In religion they have substituted their cults of creativity and victimhood for the city religion of Christianity. In mutual aid they have substituted top-down government programs for the social and mutual culture of fraternal association, the charming and cunning pretense of brother- and sisterhood among people that are no longer living in and around their blood kindred. In law they have substituted top-down administrative law for the reciprocal judge-made law common law. What all these actions do is put roadblocks and barriers on the Road to the Middle Class, and sequester the new arrivals to the city in ethnic, pre-middle-class ghettos. And this is no longer merely a dreadful mistake as it might have been a century ago, but a stupid crime against humanity, a willful blindness about the facts of the matter. It is, of course, unthinkable that our liberals lords have fought to block the Road to the Middle Class not because of folly and ignorance, but cynically and consciously in the knowledge that it enhances their political and economic and cultural power. Surely they are not that evil.
Because if the liberal barriers on the Road to the Middle Class are not accidents of stupidity, but planned and thought through, then the culture of Fake Protest is not just a foolish knee-jerk, a nostalgic attempt to re-create the world of 1850 when all the world was new, but a cynical ploy to enact a fake Theater of Protest that has nothing to do with the facts of the matter.
The basic science was set forth a century ago that socialism -- and by implication any administrative system -- could not work because it could not compute prices.
And so the question that every disciple of power must answer is to show why their new power proposal can possibly hope to outperform the individual actions of millions of consumers and thousands of producers as they interact with each other through the price system.
And that is why they resort to Fake Protest and invoke the power of government by a thousand dodges and catch-phrases, for they cannot answer the question.
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