As you may know, I divide people into three parts, as Caesar did with Gaul. It's a very human thing to do: Past, Present, Future; Garden of Eden, present misery, future Heaven; past perfect society, present injustice, future heaven on earth. The Rule of Threes is all over the place.
My Three Peoples are: the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants; the People of the Responsible Self, middle class individuals; and the People of the Creative Self, artists, writers, and activists.
The left has a different Three Peoples. There are: the historically marginalized helpless Victims, that lack agency. There are the Creative Activists, dedicated to bending the arc of history towards justice. And then there are the vile Deplorables, racists, sexists, and homophobes, that are responsible for all the world's wrongs.
Do you see the big difference? In my Three Peoples theory the question of Right and Wrong has not already been determined. In fact, it seems to me, the big point about my Three Peoples is that each People is living life according to their lights. Sure, my People of the Subordinate Self choose to minimize their responsibility, but this is a sensible decision based upon their understanding of the world and the disadvantage of living as a subordinate peasant or a worker. But the subordinate peasant or worker still lives in a responsible, if subordinate, way.
The People of the Responsible Self accept the suzerainty of the market, and do their responsible best to respond to its demands, while living according to the Word of God or other fixed menu of how to live. Obviously, for the responsibles everything hinges on how well you have followed the rule book. Good and Evil, Heaven and Hell, follow from that.
The People of the Creative Self accept the hardness of the creative life; how creative acts are not available by signing up for a course, or for following the rule book, but found in a perilous life on the border between Order and Chaos, ending perhaps in the death of the Sacrificial Hero.
In the Left's Three Peoples, the world is much starker, and simplified.
The Helpless Victims have no agency. They are not to be judged, for they are innocents, crushed under the wheels of oppression and injustice. Their only hope is to be led by activists in mostly peaceful protests to demand their rights.
The Deplorables have agency, and they have used it for ill by oppressing the Helpless Victims with racism, sexism, hate, homophobia, and all the other -phobias since whenever. And their very culture is poisonous: white supremacy and toxic masculinity.
The Creative Activists have agency, and they have used it for good, by rooting out long-buried oppressions and injustices visited on the helpless and the powerless, particularly in the capitalist age, because profits and patriarchy, and by advocating for the helpless and the powerless, and leading them in mostly peaceful protests to bend the arc of history towards justice.
Well? Am I right, or am I right?
I think that I am exposing the absurd moral drama that the left conjures up. It can't be true that the noble activists are always the good guys. Are there really no bad apples? And if there is an occasional bad apple, how could we tell? It is an insult to present the Helpless Victims as incapable of agency, forthat makes them subhuman. And it is a vile injustice to present the whole middle class -- as Marx did -- as evil.
Now, in my admittedly reductive Three Peoples system, the agency is understood to be graded, with the People of the Subordinate Self practicing the least amount of agency, and the People of the Creative Self practicing the most amount of agency.
And one of the most important things to understand is that the more you act in the world whether as a simple bourgeois that follows the rules, goes to work, and obeys the law, or as a creative artist or start-up businessman or as a political activist, the first thing you should grapple with is that, when you make a mistake, people will be hurt. That is the argument of the environmentalists' Precautionary Principle. In other words, the more talent you have, the more creative chops, the more ambition, the more lofty your goals, the more you should think about who gets hurt if, as the Brits say, you get your sums wrong.
Ain't it cute? When it suits the left to stop the capitalists and their projects dead in their tracks, the Precautionary Principle is front and center. But when we are talking about, e.g., a government takeover of health care, then nothing but crickets.
The reason for this little problem is quite simple. The left does not have the basic decency to look at itself in the mirror and ask: am I really helping the helpless, or am I merely flattering my conceit as history's gift to the helpless?
And that is worse than a mistake, worse than a crime. It is a blunder.
My Three Peoples are: the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants; the People of the Responsible Self, middle class individuals; and the People of the Creative Self, artists, writers, and activists.
The left has a different Three Peoples. There are: the historically marginalized helpless Victims, that lack agency. There are the Creative Activists, dedicated to bending the arc of history towards justice. And then there are the vile Deplorables, racists, sexists, and homophobes, that are responsible for all the world's wrongs.
Do you see the big difference? In my Three Peoples theory the question of Right and Wrong has not already been determined. In fact, it seems to me, the big point about my Three Peoples is that each People is living life according to their lights. Sure, my People of the Subordinate Self choose to minimize their responsibility, but this is a sensible decision based upon their understanding of the world and the disadvantage of living as a subordinate peasant or a worker. But the subordinate peasant or worker still lives in a responsible, if subordinate, way.
The People of the Responsible Self accept the suzerainty of the market, and do their responsible best to respond to its demands, while living according to the Word of God or other fixed menu of how to live. Obviously, for the responsibles everything hinges on how well you have followed the rule book. Good and Evil, Heaven and Hell, follow from that.
The People of the Creative Self accept the hardness of the creative life; how creative acts are not available by signing up for a course, or for following the rule book, but found in a perilous life on the border between Order and Chaos, ending perhaps in the death of the Sacrificial Hero.
In the Left's Three Peoples, the world is much starker, and simplified.
The Helpless Victims have no agency. They are not to be judged, for they are innocents, crushed under the wheels of oppression and injustice. Their only hope is to be led by activists in mostly peaceful protests to demand their rights.
The Deplorables have agency, and they have used it for ill by oppressing the Helpless Victims with racism, sexism, hate, homophobia, and all the other -phobias since whenever. And their very culture is poisonous: white supremacy and toxic masculinity.
The Creative Activists have agency, and they have used it for good, by rooting out long-buried oppressions and injustices visited on the helpless and the powerless, particularly in the capitalist age, because profits and patriarchy, and by advocating for the helpless and the powerless, and leading them in mostly peaceful protests to bend the arc of history towards justice.
Well? Am I right, or am I right?
I think that I am exposing the absurd moral drama that the left conjures up. It can't be true that the noble activists are always the good guys. Are there really no bad apples? And if there is an occasional bad apple, how could we tell? It is an insult to present the Helpless Victims as incapable of agency, forthat makes them subhuman. And it is a vile injustice to present the whole middle class -- as Marx did -- as evil.
Now, in my admittedly reductive Three Peoples system, the agency is understood to be graded, with the People of the Subordinate Self practicing the least amount of agency, and the People of the Creative Self practicing the most amount of agency.
And one of the most important things to understand is that the more you act in the world whether as a simple bourgeois that follows the rules, goes to work, and obeys the law, or as a creative artist or start-up businessman or as a political activist, the first thing you should grapple with is that, when you make a mistake, people will be hurt. That is the argument of the environmentalists' Precautionary Principle. In other words, the more talent you have, the more creative chops, the more ambition, the more lofty your goals, the more you should think about who gets hurt if, as the Brits say, you get your sums wrong.
Ain't it cute? When it suits the left to stop the capitalists and their projects dead in their tracks, the Precautionary Principle is front and center. But when we are talking about, e.g., a government takeover of health care, then nothing but crickets.
The reason for this little problem is quite simple. The left does not have the basic decency to look at itself in the mirror and ask: am I really helping the helpless, or am I merely flattering my conceit as history's gift to the helpless?
And that is worse than a mistake, worse than a crime. It is a blunder.
No comments:
Post a Comment