Lenin's Philosophy of Force

I have been developing the notion that the left movement is a Great Reaction against the market-economy-limited-government cultural turn of the last 200 years.

And because it is a religious movement that believes in its prophecy that politics leads to justice, every one of its revolutions ends in disappointment. Crane Brinton in Anatomy of Revolution traces the arc of all the modern revolutions from their origin in existential hope to the Reign of Terror when the prophetic hopes are dashed to the eventual return to normal in the Thermidorean Reaction.

But Gary Saul Morson in The New Criterion argues that Lenin didn't go through this process. He believed in terror from the outset.

An admirer of the French Jacobins, Lenin believed that state power had to be based on sheer terror, and so he also created the terrorist state.

In other words, Lenin didn't wait to get disappointed that his revolution wasn't turning out the way he hoped. He went for out-and-out force from the outset. Unlike the Nazis, for instance.

Under the Third Reich, an ethnic German loyal to the regime did not have to fear arrest, but Lenin pioneered and Stalin greatly expanded a policy in which arrests were entirely arbitrary: that is true terror. By the time of the Great Terror of 1936–38, millions of entirely innocent people were arrested, often by quota. Literally no one was safe.

But guess what. When people are terrorized by arbitrary arrest then they are going to bunker down and do nothing with their lives. As the Soviet joke went: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.

Hey, at least our woke lefties today only cancel people when they have foolishly shown their heads above the parapet. But Lenin arrested people on principle. So,

as far back as 1906 Lenin had defined dictatorship as “nothing other than power which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force.”

Now I think that one of the central contributions of Jordan B. Peterson is his story of the lobster, that male lobsters are programmed not to fight every time there is a question of hierarchy. In other words, even way down the evolutionary hierarchy we see this primitive species adopting a behavior that limits the use of force. And this notion applies throughout the animal kingdom. Animal interactions are designed to minimize the use of force.

But Lenin decided to turn that upside down.

Now I believe that the salient point of the last 200 years, the Great Enrichment, is the discovery of a new reason to limit and reduce the use of force. The market economy is built upon the simple notion that you trust people that act trustworthy and you maintain those trust relationships by making those relationships as permanent as you can.

This is why I call the left the Great Reaction. Because the left is a return to force; it says that to get to the perfect society of peace and justice we need more force, to hammer humans into shape, as though we were a block of marble. And then that perfect human marble statue will stand for a thousand years.

Sorry lefties, but you are wrong, dead wrong, for a simple reason. Every day, every moment, the world changes, and so we humans have to adapt to that change. The change could be anything: a change in women's shopping tastes; a change in the weather; a technological invention. Every single change in the world ripples through the economy, courtesy of price discovery, and it changes the world forever.

The whole philosophy of the left is that heroic intellectuals, revolutiinaries, or activists can imagine a perfect world and then implement it using politics. But they are wrong, dead wrong, as wrong as wrong can be. In the real world, things are changing all the time and we humans have to adapt. In the real world we construct hierarchies and relationships that are mutually beneficial and reduce or eliminate the need for force.

Do you see how the Leninist philosophy is worse than a crime, it's a blunder? Lenin is saying: forget about the lobsters; forget about the human extension of lobster hierarchy into community and into the mutual advantages of market relationships. Lenin says that force is the answer.

Force? To force people into executing the ruler's plan? But suppose some guy, some nobody, has a better plan. How would we know? How would that guy, that nobody, get to the Vlad the Ruler and say: Hey Vlad, your idea stinks. Here's a better idea. Yeah, like that's going to go down well, because the way politics works, the leader that changes his plan shows weakness and the whole point of leadership in politics is to demonstrate strength.

Do you see the issue here? The point about political leadership is to lead the people in an existential struggle against some enemy. For that you need leadership, strength, courage, marching towards the sound of the guns, willingness to die defending your homeland. And the cost of that is fearful, in blood and treasure and young men dead before their time.

But everyday life is not like the Spartans defending the pass at Thermopylae. It is people working with other people, people doing things for other people, people living in natural hierarchies and going with the flow unless there is some big reason not to.

And yet our lefties say the answer is force.

Well, I would have thought that Lenin would have settled the issue for us. Economists talk a lot about the difficulty of testing economic theories, because of the moral problem of testing the ideas out on human guinea pigs. But Lenin did the whole thing for us. He applied maximum force and arrested and tortured and killed and put people into slave labor camps. And then Stalin went one better on him. We still don't really know the bottom line of the full butcher's bill and hunger bill and just general impoverishment. Because the Soviets didn't publish properly audited accounts the way that corporations have to do. But we know that Lenin's plan was the biggest disaster in modern history -- after the double disasters of Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.

I mean: our lefties are proposing Lenin-lite: that's what AOC's Green New Deal and Just Society are all about. And the lefty cancel culture is Mao-lite; it's a cultural revolution complete with naming and shaming. Just not actual executions and sending people to the collective farms to teach them a lesson.

And as I say, it's worse that a crime -- which it is. It's a blunder. We know, from the experience of the Great Enrichment, that the market economy and limited government are the ways to go, the way to fill the lives of ordinary people with unimaginable riches. Force is not the answer, not in the economy, not in the culture.

Tell that to a lefty.

Not Quite Getting It on Progressive Ideology

Here's National Review's take on Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-MA) "limitless ideology." According to Greg Weiner liberalism of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan variety or conservatism "allows its adherents to ask how much good government can feasibly do." But today's progressivism sees no limits; "progress is like wisdom and beauty: More is always better than less."

So does the internal logic of progress reject limits, when progress is employed as a system of political thought or a principle of political action. It cannot respect dissent because progress is an inherent good, not a matter of dispute. For this reason, Warren describes advocates of progress as enlightened while she characterizes its opponents as categorically retrograde or corrupt.

See how limiting this is? It falls short of getting to the heart of the matter, describing today's progressivism as a religion, as a religion that believes that progressive government is the way to make a better society, and it believes that only through government directing the allocation of resources and activists defining good and evil can we bend the arc of history towards justice. And a government religion for a nation that has outlawed an "establishment of religion."

And, of course, this religious doctrine just happens to align perfectly with the natural tendency of rulers which has been, since time immemorial, to advertise for supporters by promising loot and plunder. In other words progressivism makes loot and plunder into a religion: that it is the essence of the just society to plunder bad people for the benefit of good people. I was to the site of the Battle of Marathon, and a nearby memorial advertised how it was financed "from the 1/10 of the Persian booty from the Marathon battle." It seems it was the regular thing to give 10% of your loot and plunder to the gods. So the notion of "tithing," donating 10% percent of your income to the church, is not as recent as we might think.

My point is that complaining of the ideology of limitless progress that amps up government loot and plunder every time you get a chance is not going to get the job done. It needs to be opposed by another religious doctrine, that the doctrine of limitless progress, increasing the size of every government program every half generation, is wrong, logically, epistemologically, scientifically, and morally. Period, full stop, and everyone that proposes bigger government is evil.

Back in the day the Founders fashioned a government of limited and separate powers. They deliberately created notions like the Electoral College and the Bill of Rights as advertisements against unlimited government. On their system it was wrong to propose to meddle with the power limitation provisions of the Constitution because the whole point of the Constitution was that it was a Good Thing to limit government powers and whoever has their hands of the levers of power at any moment. It worked while the overwhelming majority of Americans were God-fearing Christians. It worked partly because each Christian sect was suspicious of the other sects and did not want another sect to get an inside track on "legislating morality."

The problem with the modern secular religion -- socialism in its different versions from communism to progressivism -- is that it does not recognize itself as a religion. It merely experiences itself as progressive activists bending the arc of history towards justice. And in this religion you are either an activist bending the arc of history towards justice or you are a racist sexist homophobe toxic masculine white nationalist that ought to have been cancelled last week. The word for this in theology is "manichaean."

So I think it is bootless to speak of Elizabeth Warren's "limitless ideology." That does not get the job done. We should speak instead of her extreme and bigoted religion that sanctifies loot and plunder. We should condemn the Tiwtter mobs as the New Inquisition. We should demand the end of diversity administrators at universities as violating the Constitution's prohibition of an establishment of religion. And so on.

I'm not sure what the language should be to do this. That is up to the wordsmiths to develop. The point is that when you combine religion and government you get totalitarianism and religious wars and, as they delicately say in India, "communal violence," meaning Hindu and Muslim mobs killing each other.

In a way, I think we righty racist sexist homophobes have the inside track, because the wokians do not understand, literally do not get, that what they are doing is religion. They think they are modern and progressive and enlightened and educated and on the right side of history. They think they are the good guys advocating for peace and justice. But, to coin a phrase, they "literally know nothing."

I mean, look at AOC. First she comes out with her Green New Deal, an absolutely stupid administrative scheme to upend the whole economy. Anyone with half a brain knows it would starve half the world. And this week she has come with "A Just Society." Now, I'm sure that AOC herself has not put these ideas together. Some lefty brain trust has been doing the heavy lifting. But Egad! This stuff was rubbish 50 years ago! What kind of idiot is still marinating in this stuff! Whatabout the science! Whatabout the 100 million dead! Whatabout the failure of socialism from the Soviets to Venezuela! These people are idiots! This should not be that hard! The fact is that deputizing the government to do anything other than fight a war is a losing proposition!

All this stuff is religious doctrine. Green New Deal: if we don't act now we are all going to Hell! A Just Society: our guys are good and you guys are evil. But never mind the injustice it creates according to my maxim "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." For those of you that only got your education in government school, my maxim means that anyone embarking on a program to create A Just Society is almost certainly creating injustice by the bucket-load.

Hey! How about that! Socialism is the religion that sanctifies loot and plunder as moral obligations -- if executed by approved activists upon economic criminals.

Warren Understands that Politics is Loot and Plunder

Rightly or wrongly, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) understands that elections are not about religious questions like abortion and gun control and climate change. Government is about loot and plunder. You promise your supporters goodies in return for their vote.

So she is promising Social Security recipients $200 per month extra on their monthly checks. To be paid for by people earning over $250,000 a year with a 14.8 percent tax on wages exceeding $250,000 a year and a 14.8 percent tax on investment earnings over $250,000 ($400,000 on families) per year.

Really, what's not to like? The top 10% of federal income taxpayers already pony up a little less than 40% of the income tax take. Go where the money is.

I suppose it is useless for a guy like me to point out that untaxed income of the rich is a "live" resource that will be used by the rich to create jobs from anything from the wages of startup company employees to the wages of yacht-builder and mansion-builder employees. Whereas once resources are seized by the government in taxes they are dead as dead can be, paid out to people who are not taking the money in exchange for services rendered but just as loot.

The "science" is pretty clear on this, from the classical economics of Adam Smith to the marginal economics of 1870, even to the Keynesian economics of post World War I. The less the government gets its cotton-pickin' hands on the earnings obtained by people in voluntary economic activity the better.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has to know this. Even though her law degree comes not from Harvard or Yale but from Rutgers Law School, she is bound to know Economics 101. But Economics 101 does not get you elected President of the United States, and for some reason the same people that blather on about "settled science" when it comes to climate change are notably silent when it comes to settled economic science, about the human knowledge that explains the unprecedented Great Enrichment of the last 200 years.

Imagine a better world. Imagine a world in which an impressionable teenager like Greta Thunberg was lecturing the United Nations about the iniquity of taxing young workers and taking economic growth away from their futures in order to pay the pensions of older workers. Why, if government teachers spent five minutes teaching economics in government schools instead of climate change orthodoxy who knows what impressionable kids would think? Look, this is not that hard; conomics is not rocket science. Why, I dare say you could design a computer game to show children how economics works.

But here is the point. Just as nobody thought about gravitation until Newton, nobody thought about supply and demand until Smith. But, boy, what a difference it made. So our educated class knows all about the science of the modern era. But it would prefer not to, not when it is going back to the future on its Great Reaction, not when it conflicts with its power project.

Of course in a better world the voters would understand that when Sen. Warren offers them loot and plunder she is really bribing them with their own money. And, of course, if you are not in with the in-crowd you get to stand in line to get your share, and, if money is being handed out as loot it is not going to grow the economy so that the next generation can be better off that we are.

In a better world humans would not be tempted by loot and plunder, but I am not holding my breath. Obviously loot and plunder is one of the ways that humans have survived over the millennia. It has been a successful adaptation, at least up until now. 

Now I think that the age of loot and plunder is over, because humans don't get into a cornered-rat situation too much any more where it pays to loot and steal when you are starving in the hope that it will get you over the hump.

But we are still programmed to go for loot and plunder, and politicians know it. A politician like Sen. Warren started out her professional life with a lie, that she had native American blood, and so would be the first diverse law professor at Harvard. So what's another lie to her? Where's the downside for her in conning the peasants into voting for a little loot and plunder?

Meanwhile let us all look with disdain upon the educated ruling class, of which Sen. Warren is a perfect exemplar. They tell us they are all for justice, for fairness, for science, for saving the world. But really they are just like any ruling class since the dawn of time. They are into power, they want power, and will do whatever it takes to obtain that power and keep it.

Until.

Until the land fails to yield its bounty, because the productive and the creative have been stripped of their seed corn, because of the looting and the plunder of the ruling class and its supporters.

And the whole cycle begins again. With new rulers.

Understanding Postmodernism and Science

Here's a piece from Quillette about postmodernism and science by Maximilian Werner, who suffered under postmodern profs back in the day. Says he:

Although, in principle, challenges to the mainstream tradition are much needed, they reveal a bias toward culture as a vehicle for determining truth:

Well, yes. That's how the world works. That's what liberals are doing by challenging the mainstream tradition. And the whole point of lefty-liberals is to be the hegemon in charge of culture and be the guy that determines truth for you and me.

Competing narratives attempt to revise the dominant narrative according to their own particular ideological, racial, ethnic, or cultural experience. The voicing of these perspectives is, of course, long overdue, and because of it we have begun to appreciate the uniqueness and complexity of human experience.

Diversity, jolly good show, and all that.

But as the work of Foucault and other social constructionists shows, if truth is subjective, and one truth is as plausible as another, as long as there is a dominant group, particular subjective truths will prevail.

Exactly. Which is what liberals are doing with their "cancel culture" that deplatforms and gets people fired for disagreeing with the liberal narrative. In fact, I would say that the dominant culture under liberal postmodernism, that liberals tell us is diverse, is the opposite. It demands a suffocating uniformity. It does not allow competing narratives to challenge the dominant narrative, which is the lefty-liberal postmodernist narrative. It uses the supposed diversity of "racial, ethnic or cultural experience" as a Trojan horse to occupy and demolish the cultural space of the supposed "dominant narrative."

But the postmodern idea that there is “no underlying meaning” in the world apart from what people may produce is nonsense.

Right. Ish. The point is that we do not know if there is an underlying meaning, but we all assert some sort of underlying meaning based on the implications of our own narrative. The only thing is that the dominant group -- lefty white liberals -- gets to impose its dominant subjectivity, other groups licensed by lefty white liberals are only allowed to advertise their narrative providing it conforms with lefty white narrative, and don't you forget it, peasant.

That a certain perspective is exclusive and hinders access to other ideas is a comment on the limitations of the perspective, not on the degree to which truth can be known and shared.

Sure. Except that no "truth can be known and shared." All truths are asserted. The question is: does the dominant group allow other narratives any cultural space or does it marginalize and cancel anything that dissents from the dominant group narrative? Oh, and does the asserted truth work? But everyone disagrees about what works, up until it is too late.

And yet Foucault’s oversight persists, as evidenced by the popularity of writing texts that privilege subjectivity over objectivity; lived experience over scientific fact; difference over similarity; orthodoxy over exploration.

Sorry, there is no "scientific fact." There is only lived experience and faith. Here is how faith works in respect of science. You have faith in the equations of quantum mechanics, and all the lived experience of semiconductor technologists, and so when you next apply Moore's Law and design the next generation of chips you have faith in your scientific theory and the lived experience of your technology. And so the beat goes on. But most likely, in getting to your next generation of chips you find that you made a lot of mistakes, and that some of your science about semiconductor technology, in which you had faith, turned out to be less than factful.

The whole fuss about climate change illustrates this approach. There are a bunch of scientists that say that with current trends in greenhouse gases they have a scientific theory that proposes runaway atmospheric warning. They have developed computer models that they say model the atmosphere usng their theories sufficiently to show significant warming over the next few decades. Activists take those results and declare that unless we act now we will see the end of the world in 12, or 50 years. Yes, but will the warming actually take place? Will it significantly change the climate as in moving agricultural zones and in causing species extinctions? The truth is that there are no scientific facts. that can tell us whether there is a problem. All we have riht now are prophesies. Almost certainly, whatever happens, the scientists will discover that they have made a lot of mistakes. If they are lucky the mistakes will cancel out.

From the postmodern perspective there is an dominant mainstream narrative supported by high government officials, government-funded scientists, and left-wing activists. According to Foucault, then, "if truth is subjective, and one truth is as plausible as another, as long as there is a dominant group, particular subjective truths will prevail." Which is exactly what is happening.

But are liberals up in arms about the dominant group naming and shaming the dissident groups as "denialists" and demanding a diverse approach to climiate science? Of course not. Because lefty-liberals use postmodernism only as a club with which to beat their political opponents. In other words, for liberals and lefties postmodernism is for use in attacking their political opponents. But when they are anxious to maintain their own idea as a dominant narrative then forget about subjectivity. Climate change is settled science -- scientific fact -- and anyone that disagrees is a science denier that rejects scientific objectivity.

What these blind lefties do not understand, because they do not want to, is that nothing is really settled, everything in science or politics or culture is faced with serious questions that have no easy and agreed-upon answers. This means that orthodoxy, the orthodoxy of educated liberals, must not snuff out exploration by others.

The point is that a successful society operates at a delicate balance point between subjectivity and objectivity and orthodoxy over exploration. Societies like Stalinist Russia and Maoist China were notable for not allowing any dissent from ruling-class orthodoxy and the result was not good. Our present era of lefty white postmodernism is an echo of those regimes. But what matters is, does the subjective narrative deliver the goods?

Or as Shakespeare put it:

Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. 

Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?

And suppose, after the summoning, that Owen Glendower says that the spirits have come and Harry Hotspur says that they have not?

The truth is that if you are an open-minded person you are perfectly willing to allow a diversity of opinion and allow orthodoxy to mix it up with exploration. So if you are an open-minded person you are really a postmodernist.

But the supposed postmodernists are closed-minded people that are only interested in postmodernism when it can be used as a club to smash dead-white-male-toxic-patriarchy. Otherwise their truth is scientific fact and you better not take a step out of line.

Religion as Sacred History

One of the tasks of religion is to deal with the problem of Creation. How did the world begin? And who or what created it? But then there is the how and why of what came later, what we now called mythology, the story of the Earth and of humanity.

But another important function of religion is to document the trials and tribulations and overcomings of the past. The most famous is the escape of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt that Jews celebrate to this very day.

First we were slaves; now we are free is a very big part of what we might call "sacred history." It is obviously the major component of religion as practiced by the modern left.

First we were slaves as workers; then we won our rights. First we women were slaves of the patriarchy; then we got education and abortion. First we blacks were slaves of the white man; then we got our freedom and civil rights.

You can also see this narrative in the American revolution. First we were taxed by the bloody Brits to pay for their bloody French and Indian War; then we taught 'em a lesson they'll never forget.

There is another form of sacred history, that we were never slaves. The Brits have a version of this, with the idea that the last time Britain was invaded was in 1066. "Britons never never never shall be slaves," goes the line from "Rule Britannia!" Well, back in the day, most Brits were serfs. And, on my information the Dutch Prince William invaded Britain with a 500-ship navy in 1688. So what is that all about? It is about the Brits saying that they aren't victims, not nohow.

Obviously, in the modern age, the "we were victims" sacred hsitory has become almost universal. Really, you don't count unless you have a sacred history of victimhood. In the narrative of Christianity, this narrative is about the personal liberation from the bondage of a state of sin into the freedom of salvation through a personal acceptance of Jesus Christ as savior. But in the modern left-wing sacred narrative we are talking about the whole group's enslavement and the whole group's liberation from bondage through the agency of a political savior.

If you ask me there is a bit of a problem here. In the narrative of personal salvation there is a clear tendency to revisit the occasion of sin, and even, perhaps to wallow in it. In fact our lefty friends tend to be particularly critical of the whole guilt thing. My pal Nietzsche piles on with his critique of "the priests" that taught us to hate ourselves.

But our lefty friends do exactly the same thing with their holy victims narrative. Clearly, the workers are to be victims forever, and don't you forget it. Likewise women and minorities. It doesn't matter that we have enacted about a century's worth of pro-worker legislation, or that women have had the vote for about a century, or that the slaves were freed 150 years ago and obtained full civil rights 50 years ago. The victimization of racism, sexism, and homophobia are real and if you question the narrative you are a racist sexist homophobe.

Now, I've been reading some unapproved ideas lately, and it has occurred to me that maybe you can overdo this victimhood thing. I'm not at all sure that the Jewish obsession with going nuclear on anti-semitism is always a good idea. But, when you are a small minority, it seems like you need to be permanently mobilized against the possibility of danger. Perhaps because Jews have been an important part of the left since the beginning, all leftist movements share this culture of permanent mobilisation.

Is this culture of permanent mobilisation a good idea? It's a good question. If you want to maintain a group identification forever I suspect that the culture of mobilisation is essential. I don't think that the Jews could have maintained themselves as a people over thousands of years without their fierce culture of self-defense. But whatabout the workers? Do workers want to self-identify as embattled workers forever, now that workers are no longer starving and indeed sharing in full measure the prosperity of the modern era? Do women want to keep rehearsing the bad old days when women could not get an education and could not pursue careers? Do blacks want to maintain a separate racial identity from the rest of America?

Back in the day the declared purpose of the various left-wing movements was to mobilize people so that they could take their place at the table.and be recognized as the equal of anyone else in society. But the culture of mobilization keeps groups forever separate, forever rehearsing their grievances against the majority culture. This perpetuates a permanent division. And in fact indexes of memes like Google's Ngram have been documenting increased use of terms like "racism" and "sexism" in recent years. Really? Things are worse than they used to be?

We can see that the modern sacred histories are the same as the old sacred narratives. In fact, as Nicholas Wade writes, there is only one way that the gods can die, and that is if people stop believing in them. So it is with secular religions. The priests will continue serving the faithful as long as there are faithful. It is only when believers fall away that a religious movement starts to die and the priests are out of a job.

I suppose that the recent intensification of old left-wing narratives is an indication that the priests are worried. They evidently feel that their believers need to be energized and their faith renewed. But there's a problem. Whereas the old gods of Olympus needed to be propitiated with sacrifice forever, and the occasion of sin in Christianity is everlasting and the hope of salvation must be renewed constantly, the average left-wing religious movement begins, at least, as a specific attempt to right a specific wrong. Once the workers get their rights, once women get their abortions, once blacks get civil rights, once gays get their marriage, then, surely the urgency of bending the arc of history towards justice recedes.

The fact is that in the present time our lefty friends act as if they have a profound need to occupy religious space with a powerful victim narrative; otherwise someone else is going to elbow them aside with the urgency of their own misery.

Maybe conservatives need to play this game with our own narrative of monstrous injustice. Maybe that's the name of the game we have to play. But I don't like it. Suppose we beat the liberals at their own ame and create a narrative of conservative victimization. Will conservatives in their turn become so enamoured of their victim narrative that they can't leave go of it?

I'd say that there is another way to create a sacred history, one that avoids the trap of permanently mobilized victimhood. It would advertise America as the last best hope of mankind on Earth, the city on a hill that is "still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home." Hey, President Trump's notion of Making America Great Again is, in part, about renegotiating great trade deals with our major trading partners to make sure that everyone gets into a win-win proposition. It creates an inclusive narrative of America to which all belong, as opposed to an exclusive narrative of competing victimhoods.

Here's the challenge. I reckon that every human community needs a sacred narrative to establish where it is coming from and where it thinks it is going. The Christian narrative, of sin and redemption, is one such narrative, but it is clearly challenged by the left's victim narratives. We need a new narrative for Americans, indeed for all humans, to attach to, one that supercedes and overarches the lefty victim narrative with something that is higher, nobler, more inspiring than the lefty victim narrative of us against the world.

I get the utility of the victim narrative, especially if you want to maintain the identity of a small group in a large world. But the trouble with such a combative narrative is that it might encourage non-group people to think that they really are in a no-holds-barred fight against the small group, or use the small group as a sparring partner to maintain its own identity.

At any rate, I would say, non-lefty Americans either have to come up with a sacred narrative that goes mano-a-mano with the lefty victim narrative or we have to come up with a better, wiser narrative that marginalizes the victim narrative into a shriveled nothingness, for a simple reason, that our better, wiser sacred narrative appeals to ordinary Americans much more directly and inspirationally than the dreadful everyone-a-victim siren song of the left.

Ruminations on "Politics is Downstream from Culture"

We all know the Breitbart dictum, that politics is downstream from culture. That is to say, before you "win" in politics you need to win the culture. Then I read sci-fi writer John C. Wright, and he extended the maxim: "politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion."

How true. And that is the problem for conservatives right now, that not only do our liberal friends have control of the culture, through literature, education, the arts, journalism, but also through the dominatory hegemony of their secular lefty religion of political correctness.

For instance, I was to several Shakespeare plays over the last year, from Seattle, to Ashland, Oregon, to Stratford-on-Avon, UK, and every one of the plays had modern LGBT gender-bending. So this means that, over the whole English-speaking arts world, the culture of the educated elite and its promotion of LGBT culture is hegemonic. Personally, for me, this is unfortunate, because I believe that LGBT culture is dull and superficial. But you better not dissent from the idea that having general gender chaos in Shakespeare with women playing male roles and lesbians and transgenders showing up all over, because homophobia.

Now, I believe that the reason that today's elite culture is so superficial issues from the superficiality of its religion. The elite religion is that the current elite creative culture is the only thing in town: everything else is bigotry and superstition. The purpose of today's elite culture is that we elites get to practice our elite creative culture and your job is to like it. And the more it humiliates you racist sexist homophobe proles, the better.

I would say that the most bigoted and superstitious religion in history is the current superficial religion of creativity of our educated elite. But what would I know?

I believe that an authentic creative culture would issue from an authentic creative religion. And that religion would echo the Jungian notion that the creative process exists on the borders of order and chaos and that usually the creative experience ends in disaster for the would-be creator and also for those associated with him. Thus a true religion of creativity would be drenched in the humility of that knowledge, that the true creative hero is a tragic hero, a sacrificial hero.

Now we travel into new territory.

It seems to me that the function of religion is to translate and transform our unconscious instincts into the conscious culture of a religion. Obviously -- or, at least, obvious to me -- the nature of that transformation will reflect the reality on the ground and the needs of the particular human community that the religion serves. The religion of a hunter-gatherer band will be different from the religion of an agricultural people will be different from the religion of a city people will be different from the religion of a creative educated elite. And this is right and proper.

Now I think -- from five minutes ago -- that the religion of a people tends to be specific and conscious, and its purpose is to set the parameters for the unconscious culture of that people.

Huh?

Well, I think that the purpose of religion is to reformulate and redirect the unconscious instincts of a human group to set its members up to inhabit a new world of unconscious instinct -- that we call culture -- adapted by some prophetic visioniary to suit the new world of the group and to train its members how to act in their everyday lives, by consciously putting on the new suit of the religion and thereafter unconsciously wearing that new suit in day-to-day life.

On this notion, politics would be the conscious expression of the culture in connection with the specific communal problems of the society, and specifically those questions that require the use of force, of which the major items are the defense of the community from enemies foreign and domestic.

The point is that normally the day-to-day culture of the people will resolve all problems, because people instinctively and unconsciously follow the unwritten rules of the culture. But those that do not respond to gentle persuastion need specific encouragement -- perhaps throught the use of force -- and problems that seem to be beyond the ability of the unconscious culture rise to consciousness in the rhetoric of politics to be dispatched by communal decision and executed by government force.

It seems to me that the actual operation of government is, again, a return to unconscious process. The fact is that government goes on in its dilatory way, in its various programs of government force, from the collection of taxes to the policing of criminals to the education of children, in another unconscious culture, where people are not really thinking about what is going down. People do not think about being forced to pay taxes or send their children to government school, but they pay their taxes and send their children to school. They obey the law without really thinking about it.

Only when the application of government force is experienced on the receiving end as injustice does it then rise to consciousness and into politics.

Now you can see why the Breitbart dictum about politics being downstream from culture is important. Because culture is an unconscious thing. It is what it is, and it does what it does. And one of the thing it does is set the agenda for politics by setting the unconscious agenda of what "everyone" accepts as day-to-day reality. So, if you don't like the way that politics frames the problems of society you now realize that to do that you have to change the culture.

But then, you understand, after John C. Wright, that to change the culture you need to change the religion.

And that is not a small thing.

As I say, the problem with the world at this time is that its educated elite has developed a false and malicious religion. Its religion of creativity is a religion of self-worship that basically says that everything that educated creative people do is good and anyone that disagrees with them is a racist sexist homophobe that should be named, shamed, ostracized, canceled, fired from their job. And think themselves lucky that they haven't been sent to the guillotine.

Now I think that we have all the knowledge we need to solve this problem. We have the psychology of Jung which explains how our conscious culture is necessarily entangled with our personal unconscious and with all the collective unconscious and its archetypes down the ages. We have Nietzsche telling us that creativity is a hard and lonely path, as his Zarathustra explained. We have the developmental psychologists from Piaget to Wilber that demonstrate how different people have different levels of consciousness and how only people inhabiting the higher levels can understand people at lower levels, and that people at lower levels think that people not at their level are either dumb idiots or crazy loons.

What we need is our creative class to understand that only a few people are ready for a religion of creativity. Most of the rest of us don't want to live creatively and wouldn't know how to anyway. So a True Religion of Creativity would start with the knowledge that the creative life is not for everyone.

And most important of all, the True Religion of Creativity would start with the advice of actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Do you know what the advice was? There are variations, but it starts with advice to a young actress being bothered by the affections of older actors.

It doesn't make any difference what you do in the bedroom as long as you don't do it in the street and frighten the horses."

Interesting isn't it, that our liberal friends seem to have the opposite idea, that the whole point of a creative life is precisely to stampede the horses in the street and then shoot them for being too skittish.

Why We Have Another Eruption of Left-wing Extremism

The last eruption of left-wing extremism in America was in the 1960s. That was the famous age of campus rage and long-hairs, and of course, the end of the New Deal Democratic Party in the famous Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.

Now it's happening again, with "all" the Democratic candidates supporting left-wing extremism from Medicare for All to climate change to LGBT. Even a noble liberal spear carrier like author and journlist George Packer has expressed his concern because it is hitting him where it hurts, in the education of his child in the New York City schools.

I am come out with a new maxim to deal with this issue. It points out the problem when the tribalis of politics intersects with the moralism of religion.

Politics is the division between "us" and "them;" Religion is the division between "good" and "evil." Totalitarianism is the division between "us good people" and "them evil people."

Actually I missed something out. Because of course the true totalitarianism mixes all this with government force. So totalitarianism is the one that makes appoints "us good people" as police enforcers of morality over the "them bad people."

It seems to be instinctive in humans to want to "deal" with the problem of bad people. And this, I suppose is natural, for morality distills down to a fiery spirit, the need to enforce social standards. The point is, of course, that there is a difference between a furrowed brow judging someone else's moral lapse, or the "I can't believe she said that" of the culure of complaint with a law to send a moral leper to jail.

And this has been a problem with leftism since its birth in the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution.

And so the good old American idea of the separation of church and state rather cunningly deals with this issue. Your church ladies can mutter away with their Culture of Complaint that "I can't believe he did that" and by such means bring social pressure upon moral defaulters. But they do not have the power to put people in jail and get them fired from their jobs. On an unverified accusation.

But we have a problem. The dominant religious culture in our society, which is left-wing "wokism," does not have a church. Its institutional structure is government, whether it is the Democratic Party, the government schools, the government university, the media. People that subscribe to the left-wing of race and gender want to express their faith in government programs.

Yes, lefties, but that means, as you told us many moons ago, that you believe in "legislating morality."

And let's be clear. When you call for Medicare for All, you are making a moral argument, that it is sick and wrong for anyone to be deprived of medical care. When you call for America to stop fracking you are making the apocalyptic and prophetic point that, unless we act now, the god of the arc of history will bring the world to an end. When you outlaw single-sex bathrooms in the school attended by George Packer's kid you are making a moral point about the exclusion from the mainstream of non-binary genders. And you are saying that government should enforce these moral arguments with fines, jails, and social exclusion.

I think there is a basic problem with this totalitarian collapse of morality and government into a single agent of morality and force.

Not that lefties are the only people playing that game. We all do. It's just that, back in the day, our Founders thought we ought to keep a distance between the arena of force and the arena of moral disapproval.

Maybe I need to expand my maxim as follows.

Politics is the division between "us" and "them;" Religion is the division between "good" and "evil." Government is the division between "enforcers" and the "prisoners." Totalitarianism is the division between "us good enforcers" and "them evil prisoners."

And it is so easy to progress from a comfortable feeling of "us" to the conflation of "us" with "good" and "moral" and to then make the step of enforcing "our goodness" over the barrel of a gun.

Whaddya think of them apples? 

Giving Our Guys a Pass

In politics we usually give our guys a pass, but pick up on any accusation against someone on the other side.

Thus, for instance, the guys at Powerline expatiate endlessly on the various accusations against Rep. Omar (D-MN), including that she allegedly entered into a sham marriage with her brother for immigration purposes. But Omar's hometown newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, seems remarkably reluctant to probe into the doings of its Somali-born US Representative. Recently, there have been reports that Omar has entered into a relationship with her campaign manager and is separated from her husband.

Imagine if a Republican US Representative had been accused of such behavior.

There are also accusations of sexual harassment against the Democratic Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax of Virginia. Conservatives seem inclined to believe the accusations. Democrats? Nothing to see here.

Then we have the poorly sourced accusations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that were rather obviously flaky when Christine Blasey Ford made them before the Senate Justice Committee and less so when two NY Times reporters got out a book with more poorly sourced accusations against the Justice.

Oh, and then there were the poorly sourced accusations against President Trump that were boosted for two years by the entire liberal media.

It all does rather show the value of the rules of evidence in evaluating an accusation. And it does rather show the problem with mixed-sex college drinking and partying. Humans are easily tempted to make rash accusations, especially against their political enemies. And people can remember all kinds of things that happened at mixed-sex drunken parites decades ago.

What is difficult to evaluate is how people react when their side is gettin its ox gored. Does our side get riled up and determined to go vote no matter what? Or does it slink away in shame?

It helps, I suppose, to have the media on your side. That's why Republicans, up until Trump, learned the hard way that it does not pay to go up against the guy that buys his ink by the barrel. On the other hand it is also said that Republicans always trail in the approval ratings until the time comes to fight it out with paid media, as in a campaign.

The truth is, I suppose, that when the other guys are screwing your guy over, you need to get out there and give 'em hell, just like Harry Truman did. For unless you rile up your supporters with the vile injustice of the other guys, and get them out to vote, then the rightness of our cause doesn't mean a thing.

How to Control the Global Elite

The Zman has another interesting question, about the problem of our current elite. The problem is that the current constitution was written before the creation of the current global elite, the educated ruling class that runs all the western governments.

Back in the day, he writes, the Senate was a committee of the local elites, appointed by state legislatures. But now? Well, the problem is that there is nothing in the current design that provides a proper balance between the global elites and other interests, such as the ordinary middle class. Zman thinks that maybe we need a third house of Congress that represents the interests of the rich, the corporations, and, I would say, the educated.

But what exactly is the problem? I would say that it is that the educated and the activist occupy all the bandwidth of the public square and almost unconsciously mute the voices of the rest of us.

For instance, the Uber driver taking us to the airport at 4:00am told us that he preferred to drive at night because during the day the traffic on I-5 and elsewhere was impossible. And the other day I was talking to an Amazon friend who was down for the whole educated-class agenda, from climate change to mass transit.

Now my belief is that the interest of the ordinary middle class is for more highways, more office parks, schools for every taste and need, and more leafy suburbs. But good luck with that, because there really is no bandwidth in our current public square for the ventilation of that kind of agenda. Why? Because all the activists and interests are aligned with the educated class and its "urbanist" agenda of transit, bike lanes, "woke" education, and dense housing. Because climate. Because sprawl.

And the problem is that the legal system and the administrative hierarchy is completely dominated by the culture and the power interests of the educated elite. Good luck getting a word in edgewise against the blaring horns of the activists and their bribed apologists in the administraive hierarchy and the media.

Wait, there's a bigger problem, that the educated elite has no idea, no conception, that its agenda is narrowly focused on its own selfish interests, the interests of the educated elite, and is utterly oblivious to how its agenda affects and cramps the lives of ordinary people. And the important thing to understand that the educated class's agenda is mostly about being in the catbird seat and ordering other people around -- in their best interest, of course.

Of course the educated elite is engaged in things that benefit the educated elite, but not self-consciously, becauses its agenda is experienced by itself and advertised to the rest of us as merely doing good -- or as President Obama so innocently said, bending the arc of history towards justice.

Parenthesis: when Martin Luther King, Jr. used the phrase he talked about the arc of history bending towards justice, as though it would do it on its own. But with Obama, we, the cultural and political elite, are talking about consciously taking the arc of history and bending it towards justice ourselves. I'm sure that our educated elite has no idea about the rather significant difference between the two recitations.

So I don't know whether fiddling with the constitution or adding another house of Congress is going to do much for us.

For I believe that the problem is upstream of politics, in culture, and upstream of culture, in religion.

Now I am reading a bistory of Protestantism, by Alistair McGrath, Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution -- A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-first. Wow, what a mouthful! I'm only at the beginning, but already there is useful stuff.

For instance, we tend to think of the Protestant Revolution as Martin Luther and his 95 Theses. But McGrath is saying that the revolution spontaneously arose in a bunch of German cities all at once, led by some local rebel priest: Luther in Wittenberg, Zwingli in Zurich, Calvin in Geneva. Now, the question is, what was going on in those German cities that was throwing up these troublemakers and what was it about the citizens of these cities that the Luthers and Zwinglis and Calvins connected with them?

What was going on was something different than the fake activism of the educated class and its well-born scions that we experience today. But, we might say, there is something vaguely similar between the spontaneous eruption of Protestantism and the rise of Trump and Brexit and nationalists all over Europe. Because "nobody" saw it coming. I mean, nobody that was anybody, darling.

But, now that we see the populist nationalism right before our very eyes we can see the parallel with the Protestant Reformation. Back then, what with the Bible now available in print thanks to Gutenberg, so that many city people could read it themselves, the people in the city were saying, OK, we are going to br ptacticing our religion ourselves based on our own interpretations of the Bible, thank you very much, and we are not going to take it all on faith from the Catholic Church and its corrupt hierarchy.

Now, here in the good old US and A, and Brexit Britain and elsewhere, people are saying that we've had it up to here with you preachy and insufferable educated-class wankers -- sorry for the Britism -- and we are not going to take direction from you clowns any more. Because you are clueless.

I'd say that our beloved educated ruling class, at present, does not get it. I am not even sure if they have got to the "natives are restless" stage of realizing that something is up. Because the easiest way to understand the Get Trump culture and the Get Kavanaugh culture and the Cancel Culture is that our rulers have not got past the outrage someone is making a noise out in the public square and it is interrupting important ruling-class ceremonies. We have not got beyond an "out of the way, peasants" irritation among our august rulers.

The question is: what will happen when our rulers realize that something serious is going on, and that a genuine movement has formed in opposition to their rule? Because their reaction will determine what happens next.

If tbey realize, wow, we have a problem here Houston, and we better understand it and respond in a manner that accepts that the rulers should only rule with the consent of the governed, then we will get a period of reform and everything will be copacetic. But if the rulers continue in their current train and imagine that they can solve the problem by canceling Trump and canceleing Kavanaugh and canceling anyone that ever tweeted a racist sexist homophobic tweet ever since they were five and a half, why then we might end up with a revolution.

Now my belief is that ordinary folk, that just want to wive and thrive and raise a family and hope for our children to do better than we did, need to get with a vital truth. And that is this. Much as we might like free stuff, the problem is that the more free stuff we expect from our rulers the more power we ive them to order the details of our lives. We may not like to have to sweat it out in the market economy and do without all kinds of entitlements and benefits, but listen up. The more goodies we get from the government the more that the educated class gets to rule over us. And the more injustices we expect our rulers do Do Something about the more that we are encouraging ruling-class activists to come up with more ways in which they and their kind get to order us about.

I don't know if there are many of us that are ready to look that truth in the face. And I don't know if there will be that many of us ready to accept that truth a hundred years from now.

If politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion we are talking about a religious revolution in which the common sense, the conventional wisdom of all good little girls that right now are putting #WeBelieve yardsigns out front, would change so that they would be saying instead: "I can't believe that people are protesting the result of a normal presidential change election." Or "I can't believe that people are losing their jobs for a tweet sent 20 years ago." Or, "I can't believe that I can't send my kid to the school of my choice."

See what I mean? We are light years away from that, because good little girls today, especially good little educated girls, are good little supporters of the current educated ruling class. Because that's what good little girls do.

My Journey from Common Sense to Common Sense

One of the complaints of conservatives is the death of common sense. Logic and reason and common sense are what we assume inspired the Founders when they rebelled against the Brits to form this more perfect union.

And, we complain, the lefties have declared "War on Common Sense." Thus, Robert Curry in American Greatness:

Political correctness is quite simply a war on common sense. It is a war by the elites on the common people and on the shared understanding of basic realities of life that has made it possible for us to rule ourselves under the Constitution. Once this common-sense understanding of reality has been vanquished, it is “mission accomplished” for the Americans who reject America.

I would have agreed 100% with this 20 years ago. But then I read F.S.C. Northrop in The Meeting of East and West.

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been showed by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

And, of course, our Constitution and political culture in the United States was based on the truth, the common sense, of Descartes, Locke, and Hume. So began for me an intellectual journey in which I made my way through Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and now finally Nietzsche and Jung.

I still think our lefty and politically correct friends are wrong, as Curry does, but not because they are opposed to common sense and logic and reason. I think they are wrong because I believe that the German Turn does not invalidate the British empirical philosophers, but puts a new layer on knowledge on top of it, in the same way that relativity does not replace Newtonian mechanics completely, but only when dealing with astronomical distances and speeds close to the speed of light.

See, the "common sense" of the politically correct is that there is not one correct view of life but that diffferent cultures experience a different view of the world. It's all relative and uncertain.

And indeed modern science argues that all living things must choose, from the overwhelming amount of data pouring in through the senses, which data is important to them.

Prior to the Germans we Anglo empiricists thought there was mind, and matter, and common sense to put it all together. But actually Hume, the skeptic, noted that we cannot, for instance, justify the notion of cause and effect. Just because some event comes after another does not mean the first event caused the second. It is our faith -- in science, in Newtonisn mechanics, in common sense -- that connects the two.

Then Kant came along and questioned everything. Never mind cause and effect, he said. Really we cannot know things-as-they-are. All we know is what comes in throught the senses as sense impressions, and the theories we spin in our mind to make sense of it all. It is my belief that this radical notion, that really we are making it all up, leads directly to Einstein's relativity, do not pass Go. Because Einstein tells us that space and time are not absolute, as openly assumed in Newton's mechanics, but relative.

Do you see the amazing thing here? By casting loose from the notion of absolute space and time and matter vs. idea and believing that we know reality we humans made the most radical step forward ever in understanding how the Universe works.

Another thing that got moving in the German world was modern psychology. By the time we get to Freud and Jung we are saying that our conscious mind is just a tiny thing riding on the top of a fathomless unconscious. That really we are not conscious rational actors, but mostly the slave of our unconscious instincts. I recently read that scientists have discovered through brain scans that our mind makes its decision to act about 1.5 seconds before we experience the decision in our conscious mind.

Now, I believe in "common sense." It's just that my common sense is built upon all the work of Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Freud and Jung. I walk around the world realizing that my eyes are seeing far more stuff than I am aware of. It's just that my mind ignores 97 percent of the visual information and only concentrates on what it thinks is important. That could be a problem if I am stopped at a stop sign and my visual processing system fails to notice a car coming up in the corner of my eye. Indeed the whole modern concept of "situational awareness" understands that the processing of information in our brain is a tricky thing. And they say that at 79 your situational awareness starts to make such a serious decline that over-79s get involved in lots of "failure to yield" accidents at stop signs. Roll on driverless cars!

Now, I think that my journey, from the common sense of the British empiricists to the common sense of the post-Jungians is a glorious and liberating thing. Because it means to me that I can understand all the people in the world that have a different view of common sense than I do. And I have the conceit that I know where they go wrong. So I can forgive them, the poor little dears.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is supposed to show how it is perfectly natural and physical that people are different. The People of the Subordinate Self are workers and peasants; they think the world is run by vengeful gods and lords and political bosses. They do not yet know science. The People of the Responsible Self are citizens, that live and work in the city. They believe in a God that created the world and then told humans to get on with it, and he'll judge our performance on Judgement Day. Thus is pays Reponsibles to develop science and laws and stuff to make sense of the world and act responsibly in it. The People of the Creative Self are people that realize that humans are like gods, they can create the world anew, and change the Law, and even dream of a world of perfect justice.

But, if the People of the Responsible Self treat the People of the Subordinate Self like slaves and use them up as slave workers in satanic mills and slave plantations and factories with child labor then they are monsters. That is what Marx was talking about. Actually, the People of the Responsible Self were not that interested in driving slaves; that's why they abolished slavery just about at the moment that lefties first appeared over the horizon. They were OK with giving the workers rights and giving them the vote. So everything is now copacetic on the border between the Responsibles and the Subordinates.

However, if the People of the Creative Self treat the People of the Responsible Self as racist sexist homophobes, and declare them to be deplorables, and create politcal regimes to deliberately oppress and dis-empower Responsibles then they are monsters. And that is exactly what Stalin and Mao did, and plenty of Creatives to this day have failed to utterly deplore and condemn this great crime of history.

Yes, lefties, the People of the Responsible Self may be a bit slow, and bigoted and superstitious, compared to the woke, the educated, the evolved folks like you. But they still have a right to live according to their lights. Just as you chaps insisted, back in the day, that the workers had a right to live according to their lights and demand their rights even if it was mighty inconvenient to the bourgeoisie.

The point of any knowledge or world view is: does it help me understand the world? I say that my "common sense" helps me understand why lefties are going bat-shit crazy right now.

The lefty world view says that lefties are involved in a sacred project to "bend the arc of history towards justice." Obviously anyone that tries to stop this process is a monster and should be named and shamed and ostracized and fired from their job and deplatformed from social media. And yet, Donald Trump and his deporables!

Do you see how it makes complete sense that liberals would be beside themselves right now? Call it a Failure of Prophecy. By now, all the old racist sexist homophobes were supposed to be a thing of the past. And yet here we are, with a president elected by the votes of white working class deplorables in the old industrial states that liberals once loved and revered.

How could this have happened! What is going wrong! Obviously, the only thing to do is to redouble our efforts to bend the arc of history towards justice and suppress all the hate speech and toxic masculinity and extremism and fake news from whacko sites on the internet. This sort of reaction is normal. It is explained by Leon Festinger et al. in When Prophecy Fails and also by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution as the Reign of Terror that revolutionaries enact when their revolution fails to transform society in ein Augenblick.

See how my world view enables me to understand the Trump Derangement Syndrome of our liberal and lefty friends? My world view must be a good one, that's what I have to say.

And there is this. The world seems to be one religious outburst after another, when some religious group prophesies the end of the world unless we act now. As in socialism and as in climate change. But the overwhelming majority of people, most of the time, just want to get on with life, wiving and thriving and raising a family and pursuing happiness. When these two cultural forces clash then you are going to see some fireworks.

And by the way, that is why our Founders decreed a separation of church and state. So that religious fanatics could not seize the reins of state. Hey, I just came up with this maxim:

Politics is the division between "us" and "them;" Religion is the division between "good" and "evil." Totalitarianism is the division between "us good people" and "them evil people."

And the problem with our liberal and lefty friends is that they are mixing their politics of big government with their religion of bending the arc of history towards justice. History tells us that nothing good comes of uniting religion and government.

Let us end with a word from Nietzsche, who suggests in The Gay Science §292, to preachers of morals that they deprive the best things of honor and worth by praising them all the time.

Deny these good things, withdraw the mob's acclaim from them as well as their easy currency; make them once again concealed secrets of solitary souls; say that morality is something forbidden.

That way, writes Nietzsche, you might win over the only people that matter, the heroic.

Well, that's a thought. Maybe our liberal and lefty friends are making the case for tolerance and good fellowship by demanding absolute conformity to woke morality and lock-step conformity. 

Jane Austen and the Resumption of Manners

Last week the Wall Street Journal did a piece on Jane Austen and manners, "Jane Austen Knows That Manners Make the Man." Author Paula Marantz Cohen notes that, when Jane Austen became respectable, in the 20th century, the question of "manners" and "civility" was depreciated by critics. They preferred her "moral depth and astute satire."

And of course, by the mid 20th century manners went right out of fashion, and things have only got worse in the decades since.

But Cohen wants us to understand that in Jane Austen, civility and manners are a guide to morality, and that manners "need to be strengthened by practice." Maybe so, but I would say that the current moment shows a revival of interest in manners. The whole #MeToo movement is not so much a movement against sexual harassment as an attempt to revive the importance of manners.

So when the feminists bring out accusations against Brett Kavanaugh, they are really complaining about the lack of manners. A girl can't go to a party and expect the men to behave themselves any more. A girl can't work in an office without some man making her uncomfortable.

I think this raises an interesting question. Back in the day, when rough tough feminists were telling us that women could do anything a man could do, they were really telling us that the old rules, where women expected to be protected, were over. Women could take it, and they could give it right back. We are still in the aftertow of this, with female superheroes and rough, tough female helicopter pilots in Avatar.

I think we are seeing that those days are over. Women have now instinctively returned to the old culture, in which women expect to be protected. That is what special snowflakes, microaggressions, and safe spaces are about. It is women, now dominating the culture of the university, demanding a return to a protected space.

Of course, because it is lefty women leading the charge, it will be a complete mess, because lefty women "literally know nothing," in the famous phrase.

Now I believe that the culture of manners is the way that women dominate the domestic space. Among themselves, men do not have a culture of manners. Indeed, as I say, men have a Culture of Insult. This is related to the nature of honor among men, which is the reputation for courage, for in the casual insult between men, the guys are raising the question of courage. They are wondering if the other guy would really rise to the occasion when the chips were down. They are also testing the current state of the male hierarchy.

But women have a culture of manners among themselves and for mixed company, and they are pretty good at naming and shaming and even ostracizing people with bad manners. My notion of women having a culture of complaint, and of complaining about other women with "I can't believe she said that" is my way of understanding the women's culture of manners. By the way, the women's culture of complaint ties into the nature of honor among women, which is a reputation for chastity. I don't just mean sexual chastity, but being an all-around good little girl. Being a good little girl is the price she pays for protection and the right to complain about other people.

The dirty little secret about the sexual revolution -- and women's liberation -- is that it did not liberate women. By dismantling the culture of manners, women dismantled the major way in which women dominate the face-to-face culture of daily life. The point is that when there is a culture of manners in place then women dominate. That is the point of Jane Austen. The men in Jane Austen are mostly ciphers. The women run everything. And some of the women -- well you wouldn't want to get anywhere near their force field. I am thinking of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park.

Oh sure. The women don't own the mansions and the income. They don't have to. They command the domestic space, and that is nearly everything. Indeed, you might say that the overriding issue in Jane Austen is how a young woman crosses the bridge from vulnerable singlehood to a secure domination in her own married household. It is made perfectly clear at the end of each novel that the heroine, newly married, is to become mistress of all she surveys.

Think of the sexual revolution as the sexual equivalent of going off the Gold Standard. This usually happened because of war, back in the day. Getting back on the Gold Standard was called "resumption," and it usually included a tough time of deflation and social disruption, as after the Napoleonic wars, the US Civil War, and World War I. And the truth was that the losses suffered in the wartime inflation could never be made up, not without hurting innocents.

So I would advise that the resumption of manners is not going to be pretty. And the reason is that the educated women who will likely be in charge of the resumption are, like most men and nearly all women, completely blinded by conventional wisdom. These are the women that in North Seattle are putting #WeBelieve and "We're Glad You're Our Neighbor" and "Hate Has No Home Here" yardsigns in their front yards and thinking that they are demonstrating their superior morality and wisdom.

So, in many ways, it's going to get worse before it gets better. But nobody said that life was a bowl of cherries.

Nowhere Else to Go: Understanding Identity Politics

You may wonder why it is that our liberal friends have chosen to champion illegal immigrants and Muslims.

Actually, you may wonder what the whole universe of identity politics is about, apart from the fact, suggested by my Great Reaction meme, that identity politics is neo-tribalism.

The answer is that the name of the identity politics game is that the subject group needs to have no place else to go.

Or rather, said group needs to believe that it has no place else to go.

You can see that this cunning little trick started way back with Marx. Hey, he said, you workers better get with the program, for unless you sign up with the Communists the capitalists will oppress and exploit and "immiserate" you like you wouldn't believe. Really, you chaps have nowhere else to go.

Now, I am not saying that the workers didn't have a rough time in Britland back in the 19th century. Of course, the rough time was nothing compared with the rough time that the peasants experienced after the lords dumped them following the nationalization of the armed forces in Britland by Henry VIII. That was what the Elizabethan Poor Law was all about: trying to Do Something about the starving peasants causing chaos throughout the land. The last event in this story was the Captain Swing riots in SE England in1820.

But the truth is that the industrial revolution was the best thing that happened to the lower classes until the invention of sliced bread. Do I need to rehearse the reasons? First, working indoors. Yeah, I bet you never thought of that, but the Nike workers in Vietnam sure think that. Then, by moving to the city, the lower classes became the Social Question and achieved strategic concentration. And got the vote. And got to share in the loot and plunder of politics. And what with steam power and electricity and oil and manufacturing and all, they eventually got up into the middle class and bought houses and cars.

Anyway, the left tried the same game on women. Oh lord! Women had been oppressed since the Dawn of Time by their violent patriarchal husbands. Listen you ladies: unless you sign on with us lefties you will be raped and pillaged and kept barefoot and pregnant -- and Offended -- forever more. And as for a nice career in corporate HR, forget it! Really, you have nowhere else to go.

And so on with blacks, and gays, and transgenders and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. Hey, with Hispanics, not so much.

But today, the truth is that all the victims of the left, that once had nowhere else to go, are really in the catbird seat. Government, the ruling class, is forever fussing and worrying about whether their diapers need changing.

So the lefty rulers need new recruits to their political army. Nothing new here, nothing that the Ottomans didn't do centuries ago with their slave Janisseries, kids that were plucked out of their Christian families and forcibly converted to Islam and made into elite soldiers -- with no place else to go.

Whatabout illegal aliens? Really what's not to like about them? Because they have no legal rights, being illegal residents of the US, they rely for their continuance on lefty activists acting for them, and exempting them from the law of the land through the cultural and political power that any elite possesses. Yeah! Why not declare all the liberal cities in the nation to be sanctuary cities! Then the illegal aliens know who their patrons are, are really, they have no place else to go.

You can see how this applies also to Muslims. Because Muslim terrorists demolished the Twin Towers, patriotic Americans are naturally a little suspicious about them. And it doesn't help that their women wear headgear that broadcasts their difference. I mean, when every other woman in America is broadcasting her sexual assets far and wide with leggings, what kind of a weirdo would cover her hair? Still, given the way that Muslims keep themselves separate from the rest of America, can you blame them for sidling up to our lefty friends when they have no place else to go?

The whole point of identity politics today is to keep the liberal little darlings in fear and trembling. If it is blacks, the Republicans "wanna put y'all back in chains." If it is women, we are just one abortion away from women barefoot and pregnant. If it is gays, homophobia is ready to break out and throw gays back in the closet.

All I can say is that it works. And why not? The whole point of tribalism is to keep "our people" united and mobilized against the tribe next door, because you never know when the tribe next door will try to kill us all in a Dawn Raid. So, in the movement of the Great Reaction, the neo-tribalists are playing the same game. Unless you support us, the next thing you know the racist sexist homophobes will be eating you for breakfast.

Disagreeing with the Zman

I like to disagree with the Zman because, I suppose, he is plowing the same field as I am, only with a different plow and a different tractor. Not that much different, of course.

Today he is talking about the ineffectiveness of the right in countering the left.

The Democrats figure out how to get a majority and push through some reforms, which never work as intended or satisfy the base. The majority falls apart and the Republicans come in to preserve the real reforms, while cleaning up the collateral damage and telling their base they plan to roll all of it back. This never happens, of course.

But, I would say, this is not because the Republicans don't want to roll it all back. It is just that, since

government is an armed minority, occupying territory and taxing the people to reward its supporters

the Republicans have a problem. If you want to roll it all back you are going to make the supporters of the Democrats, the guys that got "rewarded" for voting Democrat, really mad. And in politics you don't want to do that. You want to motivate your own supporters to vote and you want to demoralize the supporters of the other side or put them to sleep.

That is why I say that it is impossible to reform a government program -- or the welfare state. The whole point of government programs is to hand out loot and plunder to your supporters. But the second after anyone gets a government check they decide they deserve it. So to take the check away is to take away something that the recipient is convinced he deserves.

This is why the only way to end government programs is in a general breakdown of law and order and the economy, after a losin war or a hyperinflation, so that people are worried about much more than the continuance of their checks.

The Zman represents our current politics as a dance between reformers and restorers, reformers trying to bring on a bright future through government programs and restorers trying to bring things back to the good old days. But now the restorers are losing credibility and a radical revolutionary right is appearing. And this legitimizes a radical revolutionary left.

My line is that the reformer left is running out of plausible plunder to offer the broad middle of the voters. If you have already provided pensions, health care, and education, then you are running out of new goodies to offer. Thus, the Democratic presidential candidates are proposing not just loot and plunder but radical ideas to overturn the present order, because that is all that is left to offer. And the Radical Right is reacting to an obvious attempt to name and shame and ostracize them, which merely encourages more extremism.

My belief is that the current annoying divide between a radical left and a radical right will continue, with the average American in the middle demanding a continuance of his or her benefits. This will continue until we run out of other peoples' money.

Note that President Trump is appealing to the middle that just wants things to continue. So he promises to Make America Great Again while not touching Social Security and Medicare. This is a cunning strategy that will work until Social Security and Medicare run out of money.

But what will come next? Well, that is where my Three People theory comes in. I'd say that it will be a contest between radicals of the People of the Creative Self, the Educated Youth that has been demanding the right to create the world in their own image for the last 170 years, and the People of the Responsible Self, the ordinary middle class that just wants the right to wive and thrive and serve their fellow humans without being bossed around too much by the swells. I'd say the whole thing will turn on which of the two radical movements, one Creative and one Responsible, manages to earn the trust and followership of the People of the Subordinate Self.

The big question is who will the People of the Subordinate Self consist of? Clearly, the People of the Creative Self have been trying to import a new Subordinate class so they can continue just as they are, imposing upon America their religion of creativity for themselves and subordination for the rest of us. And we Responsibles have been trying to head them off at the pass.

So I believe that the key is a New Right that is based upon the notion of the fundamental injustice of a creative class that believes in the absolute right for them to refashion society according to their vision of justice. The whole point of revolution is to run on injustice. A wise ruling class understands that however blind and bigoted and superstitious the plebs may be, a ruler still needs to patronize and flatter them. A foolish ruling class believes that it has the right and duty to eliminate all beliefs and people that stand in the way of bending the arc of history towards justice: i.e., injustice.

I believe that the solution to all our woes is for the creative class to learn a bit of tolerance for the folks that aren't quite and wise and evolved and educated as them. But I am confident that it will not learn this lesson except by the hard way, as is usual in human affairs.

So it is up to the rest of us to stick it to the Man and tell 'em to put it where the sun don't shine.

Forget 1619 NYT. Learn About 1917

One of the things our liberal friends want to ram down our throats, as evidenced by the New York Times "1619 Project," is that the United States was born and raised on slavery and racism.

Of course, the interesting story is not that, in 1619, North Americans from northern Europe were racist and introduced the first slaves from Africa into North America. The interesting question is why slavery and racism should have become a scandal. I would say that slavery became a scandal not later than 1800 and racism became a scandal around 1900.

The question is "why?" I have a short, Nietzschean, answer to that. It is because slavery and racism Do Not Pay. Yes, yes; I know. The issue is much more complicated than that, but still...

Now let us talk, NYT girls and boys, about something much more important: 1917. Anyone want to guess what I am talking about?

I am talking about the Bolshevik Revolution that enslaved the entire Russian people (and other non-Russians in the Russian Empire). If you want to talk about slavery, how about the Soviet Union, the second biggest slave state in history?

What? Only the second biggest slave state in history? So what was the biggest? Really, do you have to ask? I am talking about Maoist China, that enslaved the glorious Chinese people in one of the greatest crimes of history.

Get it NYT? Slave State #1: Maoist China. Slave State #2: Soviet Union. Total dead as a result of Communism, according to The Black Book of Communism by Stéphane Cortois et al., 100 million men, women and children. Population of the world in 1950, the heyday of the Communist states. was 2.55 billion. So the death toll of Communism was approximately four percent of the total world population.

So how does the United States rank with those two slave states? You tell me, pal.

Another thing, NYT. Those two slave states, the greatest slave states in human history, were not just socialist, or Communist. They were national socialist states. That is to say that they were both self-consciously about "socialism in one country." I thought you guys were nothing, if not anti-fascist.

Hye NYT. How about a "1917 Project" all about the great slave states of the 20th century.

And now we have the comical tweet you NYT chaps sent out on Twitter on 9/11 (and have since deleted):

18 years have passed since airplanes took aim and brought down the World Trade Center.

Hey NYT. How about a "9/11 Project" all about how educated liberals in the United States rammed 9/11 down the memory hole just as soon as journalistically possible.

You know, back in the day, NYT, your national socialist pals in the Soviet Union -- hey, remember NYT chappie Walter Duranty that said of the Ukraine famine in the 1930s, nothing to see here, move right along -- and your national socialist pals in Maoist China -- hey and in NYT's Herbert Matthews' beloved Castroite Cuba -- used to send people to "re-education camp." Do you think that maybe some of the folks in your Twitter unit need a spot of re-education, to purge them of the folly of their woke lefty stupidities?

Of course, I am not talking about a real "re-education camp" of the kind presently universal in our glorious US universities where youngsters are prepared for a life of debt slavery for the glorious necessity of keeping all the diversity and inclusion administrators and deputy diversion and inclusion administrators in work. Oh no. I just think that you should send some of the good little boys and good little girls presently working at the NYT -- that have been carefully taught from year to year in their little ear to hate and to fear the good old US and A -- to Seattle so they can have coffee with me. Maybe I could teach them something, or maybe not. Because, after all, those good little boys and good little girls at the NYT know which side their bread is buttered, ideologically speaking.

Hey! I was driving south on Highway 99 and there was a guy, a white guy, by the side of the road peacefully protesting with a TRUMP RACIST sign. This on the day before Trump lifts the ban on federal funding for faith-based historically black colleges. As Ed Driscolll notes on Instapundit: "WORST. RACIST. PRESIDENT. EVER." I get the guy's point. Whatabout the non-historically-black-faith-based-colleges?

But back to my original point. Why is it that we have put slavery, universal throughout the world until the day before yesterday, behind us?

Inquiring minds want to know. You chappies at the NYT might want to start an "1863 Project." For it was on January 1, 1863 that the US President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

See, I think the big queston is why slavery became a scandal, and why good little boys and good little girls at the New York Times know to say "Eeuuww" when the topic of slavery comes up.

Our Ruling Class Does Too Have a Religion. And How.

Here is the Zman bewailing "The Collapse of Authority." He means an authority that decides things.

The cancer eating away at the modern West is a lack of authority to which people can point to judge public policy, public debate on those polices, as well as the reactions to those policies and debates. As a result, debate has degraded into various camps striking poses, usually by signaling their unhappiness with the pose of other camps in the public sphere. The lack of an agreed upon authority means there is no way to judge the merits of any claim. Instead, it leaves force to resolve disputes.

But the reason that there is no authority is that we deplorables are contesting the authority of the current ruling class's religion. And they are striking back at us, trying to marginalize and eliminate us.

The Zman says that we don't have a religion any more.

In the current age, normal religion has been sidelined, not only as a source of authority, but as a legitimate part of public discourse. Fifty years ago, a public discussion of morality would have had representatives of various faiths to discuss what ought to be according their religions. A century ago those representatives would have provided authority for the current morality. Today, no public debate about moral issues, about what ought to be, includes religion, much less priests or theologians.

To which I say that you just ain't looking hard enough. I take this position from Roy Rappaport, who wrote:

No society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion.

 So I say there must be a religion. Because no human can exist, in my view, without a religion, something that declares "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Of course, in our society there are competing religions, and no one religion is generally accepted by almost everyone as the one true religion. I have, of course, explored this question under "Three Peoples Religion." Briefly, we have:

The Religion of the Creative/Educated Class. These people, our rulers, believe in: equality, supervised by them; education, supervised by them; the administration of the economy, supervised by them; the elimination of pollution, supervised by them; the prophecy of the end of the world, due to climate change caused by the sins of mankind. See the New Yorker. "What If We Stopped Pretending?" that completely endorses the ruling class prophecy of the end of the world, because human-caused warming. Anyone that contests this religion is evil, a modern Satan, and must be named, shamed, and ostracized, or worse.

The Religion of the Responsible Class. These people, you and me, believe in one of the Axial Age religions or their modern precipitates. We believe in a world created by God -- or the Big Bang -- and we believe that it works according to laws set down by God -- or learned through the transmission of tradition. We the People are empowered, indeed required, to work out our lives according to the laws of nature and nature's God.

The Religion of the Subordinate Class. These people do not believe they have agency, the ability to direct their own lives. They look for a powerful lord or politician to be their protector. Of course, they may determine, from time to time, that the lord or protector has betrayed them and riot in the streets.

When the Zman talks about the Collapse of Authority I believe he is really saying that we Responsibles have not yet come up with a modern religion that can take on the current lefty religion and its adherents in the educated and creative class. This is illustrated in the failure of "Buckleyite conservatism" which appealed only to Responsibles and did not attempt to win the hearts and minds of the educated class or become the champions of the Subordinate class.

My take is that we deplorables and Responsibles and dissidents need to formulate a new religion that merges the religion of creativity with the religion of responsibility. It would introduce the creatives to the notion of humility, that almost all creative action in this world is doomed to failure and irrelevance, and that certainly no creative activist should believe that just because they believe in something that they have the authority to force the rest of humanity onto their Procustean bed. It would encourage the Reponsibles to step out a bit, to challenge the hegemony of the Creative class and to seek the support of the Subordinates by becoming their patrons.

My belief is that this new religion is suggested in the German Turn from Kant to Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Jung. Where Kant starts with the statement that we do not know things in themselves, but only appearances, Nietzsche shows us a clouded vision of what the creative life is all about: that it means getting away from the herd, that it means getting away from hating yourself, that it is hard. Jung shows that the Hero's journey is a descent into the unconscious where you relearn all the lessons that are hidden below the horizon of self-consciousness. Jordan B. Peterson elaborates on the Jungian framework to remind us that the Hero is always a Sacrificial Hero, that sacrifices himself exploring the border between Order and Chaos.

What I say is that the religion of the future is all there, waiting for us to grasp it and prosletyze it. There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Now, let us say that our lefty friends are not totally clueless. But, like all creative endeavors, their record is full of disaster and error, and like most humans, they refuse to learn from their errors and disasters.

Really, all our lefty friends have to understand is that creativity is a wonderful thing, except that almost every creative endeavor is a failure, just as nine out of ten business startups is a failure. Every true creative hero understands that he will not end his days in clouds of glory, but in the oblivion of sacrifice, for the true hero is not a Supreme Ego, but a Sacrificial Hero, who dies that others may live.

This is not that hard. Except for the would-be hero.