Today my fellow ex-Brit John Derbyshire is complaining about James Comey. What a dreadful thing it is, he writes, for a dullard like Comey to become Director of the FBI. Chaps like him are "Outer Party" types:
But fortunately, they are all idiots at the Deep State. They can play at leaking state secrets to the media, but really can't get the job done. Any Deep State worth its salt would have dispatched Trump. Instead all their dirty laundry is showing up in the wash, and some of them may go to jail.
Here is the Z-man complaining about the tendency of democracies to have the worst rise to the top.
No, I think that we need brilliance in the individual entrepreneur, and stupidity in the politician. My kind of guy is Freeman Dyson, reviewing a book, Scale by Geoffrey West, that praises the big urban city and its cross-connections. Because Grand Unified Theory and Sustainability. Writes Dyson:
All this folds back on the issue of creative and sacrificial heroes, the chaps that redeem a sick society that finds itself in a box canyon with no apparent way out. Society does not advance in a straight evolutionary, sustainable line. It goes on doing the same thing, kept on the straight line by religion and convention, until the brain-dead culture reaches a crisis where the good old ways cannot continue.
Call it creativity if you like. But here is the problem, upon which I and a lefty acquaintance recently agreed. We People of the Creative Self tend to think of creativity as the natural and sensible way to live. But we are wrong. Creativity is hard, and nearly everyone that tries it fails miserably, partly due to a lack of genius and partly due to a lack of courage.
The fact is that change is fraught with peril. And so is keeping on keeping on in the same old way. As Freeman Dyson relates, the last time someone came up with a Grand Unified Theory of change it was Marx, and his idea was a bloody failure.
On the other hand we have the 200 years of the Great Enrichment, through individual mad geniuses bringing us one technological revolution after another that the Powers That Be failed to stop before each revolution took over the world. Lefty Greens say that this Great Enrichment is going to kill the planet, and they may be right.
So what happens next? Well, the truth is that we don't know. We will blunder into the future, following various geniuses and plenty of idiots, and whatever happens, a ton of people will pay the price. Here is Dyson again.
They are the obedient, unquestioning enforcers of ideological orthodoxy: schoolteachers, college lecturers, local TV newsreaders, the Human Resources staff at big corporations, and so on.What we need, says Derb, is not a George Orwell 1984 banal Outer Party type, but a smart Inner Party type. Head of the FBI is an Inner Party job.
For Inner Party I want people super-smart and canny—clued in and up-to-date with social and cultural issues.No you don't Derb. You want dumb-as-a-post. If Comey had been smarter maybe he and he minions would have succeeded in entangling Trump in their attempt, first, to neuter him with Russia-salted oppo. research and, second, by trapping him in the coils of their Russia Collusion narrative.
But fortunately, they are all idiots at the Deep State. They can play at leaking state secrets to the media, but really can't get the job done. Any Deep State worth its salt would have dispatched Trump. Instead all their dirty laundry is showing up in the wash, and some of them may go to jail.
Here is the Z-man complaining about the tendency of democracies to have the worst rise to the top.
The main issue in our politics is that our system attracts the worst people. It is nearly impossible to find an elected official who has ever done honest work. Most are phenomenally stupid, outside their reptilian ability to fool voters and cozy up to the billionaires that bankroll them.And this is a problem? If they were really smart they would probably lead us into the most appalling messes. Think of really smart political leaders: Lenin, Mao, Castro, Chávez. They were so smart that they managed to lead their countries into poverty and still keep their jobs!
No, I think that we need brilliance in the individual entrepreneur, and stupidity in the politician. My kind of guy is Freeman Dyson, reviewing a book, Scale by Geoffrey West, that praises the big urban city and its cross-connections. Because Grand Unified Theory and Sustainability. Writes Dyson:
The last time humans invented a grand unified theory to make our existence sustainable was when Karl Marx came up with dialectical materialism. The theory had great success in changing human behavior over large areas of our planet. But the changes did not prove to be sustainable, and the theory did not remain unified.I suspect that Grand Unified Theories always tend toward sameness and enforced conformity, a resistance to organic change and adaptation. Says Dyson:
The choice of an imagined future is always a matter of taste. West chooses sustainability as the goal and the Grand Unified Theory as the means to achieve it. My taste is the opposite. I see human freedom as the goal and the creativity of small human societies as the means to achieve it. Freedom is the divine spark that causes human children to rebel against grand unified theories imposed by their parents.My kinda guy. But Dyson presents another idea, which I hadn't thought about. It concerns the notion of "genetic drift." See there are two things driving evolution: natural selection and genetic drift.
Genetic drift is the change in the average composition of a population due to random mutations of individual genes. Genetic drift causes species to evolve even in the absence of selection. Genetic drift and natural selection work together to drive evolution, selection being dominant when populations are large, genetic drift being dominant when populations are small.On this theory you get occasional outbursts of genius in small, isolated, populations. Which is the handmaid of the kind of imagined future that I like: isolated geniuses inventing crazy things that turn out to transform the world. Think Ashkenazi Jews, isolated in small communities for centuries, who combine genius with troubling genetic anomalies like Tay-Sachs disease.
All this folds back on the issue of creative and sacrificial heroes, the chaps that redeem a sick society that finds itself in a box canyon with no apparent way out. Society does not advance in a straight evolutionary, sustainable line. It goes on doing the same thing, kept on the straight line by religion and convention, until the brain-dead culture reaches a crisis where the good old ways cannot continue.
Call it creativity if you like. But here is the problem, upon which I and a lefty acquaintance recently agreed. We People of the Creative Self tend to think of creativity as the natural and sensible way to live. But we are wrong. Creativity is hard, and nearly everyone that tries it fails miserably, partly due to a lack of genius and partly due to a lack of courage.
The fact is that change is fraught with peril. And so is keeping on keeping on in the same old way. As Freeman Dyson relates, the last time someone came up with a Grand Unified Theory of change it was Marx, and his idea was a bloody failure.
On the other hand we have the 200 years of the Great Enrichment, through individual mad geniuses bringing us one technological revolution after another that the Powers That Be failed to stop before each revolution took over the world. Lefty Greens say that this Great Enrichment is going to kill the planet, and they may be right.
So what happens next? Well, the truth is that we don't know. We will blunder into the future, following various geniuses and plenty of idiots, and whatever happens, a ton of people will pay the price. Here is Dyson again.
[T]he life expectancy of a company at any age is about ten years. The short lifetime of companies is an essential feature of capitalist economics, with good and bad consequences. The good effect is to get rid of failed enterprises, which in socialist economies are difficult to kill and continue to eat up resources. The bad effect is to remove incentives for foresight and long-range planning.Now, the question is: should the "foresight and long-range planning" be conducted by geniuses or by dull banalities like James Comey? It's a good question.
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