Right now I am thinking about what comes next. I take it as given that the Enlightenment mechanical world-view and its notion of a final paradise on Earth, whether of the right's market equality or the left's political equality, is a dead end.
In particular I react against the notion that we are all alike and all want the same thing, or should be forced to.
That's because the billions of humans on this Earth all want different things.
However, that is much too complicated. We need to simplify. And what humans do when thing are too complicated is we simplify things down to a Rule of Three: Past, Present, and Future. Garden of Eden, The Fall, and Heaven.
That is why I have come up with my reductive Three Peoples theory, reducing all the billions of world views down to three. I know, what presumption!
But I think it makes sense. Creative people want a chance to create a new world; Responsible people want a chance to make work the existing world, the world they are given; Subordinate people just want to be able to hang on to some powerful patron and shelter from the storm till the next check arrives.
Now, a couple days ago I commented in the American Thinker on a John Gray piece in The New Statesman in which he told the cultural wokies that in the wake of Boris Johnson's "stonking" victory their world view had "melted down into a heap of trash."
But then I stumbled over another couple John Gray pieces in UnHerd.com. In first he tells the greenies that, even given that their scientific analysis is correct about climate change -- and he thinks it is -- their strategy for dealing with it won't work. We should be adapting to the changes we have created, not curling up in the face of "unstoppable climate change."
But in 'Liberalism: the other God that failed" Gray goes further and argues that all the Enlightenment ideologies are finished. In the old days, people could import their Christian values into Enlightment equality, and ex-Communists in the late 1940s could return from the Communist ideology and its revolutionary forced march to the perfect future to ordinary liberalism, left or right, and its gradualist walk to the perfect future. Not any more.
Actually, the whole history of the last 200 years and its Great Enrichment on the economic front tell us what is happening. From time to time there are world-changing economic revolutions, started by some nobodies, that change everything. Machine textiles, steam power, world transportation, wood to coal to oil to electricity to nuclear, personal powered transportation, computers, internet, smart phones. Each of these has been an astonishing transformation, and yet we are all still here. Do you see how remarkable this is? We have had economic revolution after economic revolution, and yet almost everyone has kept up. More than that, the left-behinds, in China, India, and Africa, are catching up, even as the developed West keeps reinventing the economy. What is going on?
What is going on is humans analyzing the situation, coming up with 101 different plans to Do Something about it, and then letting the chips fall where they may, so that the two or three chaps with plans that actually work get to be billionaires and own the future. For a season.
And that is where my reductive Three Peoples theory comes in. The Creatives are the people that are going to be coming up with the 101 plans for the future. Good for them. Let them experiment with their own money and money that investors and speculators give them, and let the rest of us sit in the bleachers and see who wins the race. The Responsibles are the people that just live their lives as best they may and hope to adapt in a competent way to whatever the Creatives come up with. The Subordinates just sit there and shelter from the storm in the retinue of some great lord or big government.
The problem with the current situation is that the Creatives, the educated gentry, are forever coming up with plans that they want to force the rest of us to pay for and submit to. Because they are special.
They get to create the plans. We get to pay for it. They get the credit if it goes well, and robber barons take the blame if it blows up. Thanks very much.
Obviously, they "literally know nothing" because modern psychology, Jung version, has rediscovered that the way to the future is the Sacrificial Hero living and exploring on the border between order and chaos, and giving up his life so that others may live. The Sacrificial Hero is not the proud activist that gets to create a totalitarian regime that sacrifices everyone else's life so that the proud activist and his minions can live the life of Riley. Not at all.
We will know when our liberal friends come up with a good plan. Because it will be a plan to recognize that the highest and best thing to be is a Sacrifical Hero, and not a revolutionary activist or carping moralist. The plan will make it clear that it will be the Creatives that will do the sacrificing, not the average Commoner or the average Subordinate.
In particular I react against the notion that we are all alike and all want the same thing, or should be forced to.
That's because the billions of humans on this Earth all want different things.
However, that is much too complicated. We need to simplify. And what humans do when thing are too complicated is we simplify things down to a Rule of Three: Past, Present, and Future. Garden of Eden, The Fall, and Heaven.
That is why I have come up with my reductive Three Peoples theory, reducing all the billions of world views down to three. I know, what presumption!
But I think it makes sense. Creative people want a chance to create a new world; Responsible people want a chance to make work the existing world, the world they are given; Subordinate people just want to be able to hang on to some powerful patron and shelter from the storm till the next check arrives.
Now, a couple days ago I commented in the American Thinker on a John Gray piece in The New Statesman in which he told the cultural wokies that in the wake of Boris Johnson's "stonking" victory their world view had "melted down into a heap of trash."
But then I stumbled over another couple John Gray pieces in UnHerd.com. In first he tells the greenies that, even given that their scientific analysis is correct about climate change -- and he thinks it is -- their strategy for dealing with it won't work. We should be adapting to the changes we have created, not curling up in the face of "unstoppable climate change."
But in 'Liberalism: the other God that failed" Gray goes further and argues that all the Enlightenment ideologies are finished. In the old days, people could import their Christian values into Enlightment equality, and ex-Communists in the late 1940s could return from the Communist ideology and its revolutionary forced march to the perfect future to ordinary liberalism, left or right, and its gradualist walk to the perfect future. Not any more.
When ex-communists became liberals, they shifted from one secular faith to another. Troubled liberals today have no such option. Fearful of the alternatives, they hang on desperately to a faith in which they no longer believe. Liberalism may be the other God that failed, but for liberals themselves their vision of the future is a deus absconditus, mocking and tormenting them as the old freedoms disappear from the world.Actually this is not surprising, at least not to me. Because I moved on from the mechanical Enlightenment world and its logic and reason view years ago. We are not moving along an arc of history, not towards justice, and not towards universal prosperity. We are living things struggling to live in a changing world, adapting it if we can, and adapting to it if we must. We do not know the correct strategy for survival. Never did, never will. What we will do, what we have always done, is stumble along day to day, and hope that we didn't make a fatal blunder. Some people don't make it, sometimes a lot of people don't make it. But the world goes on.
Actually, the whole history of the last 200 years and its Great Enrichment on the economic front tell us what is happening. From time to time there are world-changing economic revolutions, started by some nobodies, that change everything. Machine textiles, steam power, world transportation, wood to coal to oil to electricity to nuclear, personal powered transportation, computers, internet, smart phones. Each of these has been an astonishing transformation, and yet we are all still here. Do you see how remarkable this is? We have had economic revolution after economic revolution, and yet almost everyone has kept up. More than that, the left-behinds, in China, India, and Africa, are catching up, even as the developed West keeps reinventing the economy. What is going on?
What is going on is humans analyzing the situation, coming up with 101 different plans to Do Something about it, and then letting the chips fall where they may, so that the two or three chaps with plans that actually work get to be billionaires and own the future. For a season.
And that is where my reductive Three Peoples theory comes in. The Creatives are the people that are going to be coming up with the 101 plans for the future. Good for them. Let them experiment with their own money and money that investors and speculators give them, and let the rest of us sit in the bleachers and see who wins the race. The Responsibles are the people that just live their lives as best they may and hope to adapt in a competent way to whatever the Creatives come up with. The Subordinates just sit there and shelter from the storm in the retinue of some great lord or big government.
The problem with the current situation is that the Creatives, the educated gentry, are forever coming up with plans that they want to force the rest of us to pay for and submit to. Because they are special.
They get to create the plans. We get to pay for it. They get the credit if it goes well, and robber barons take the blame if it blows up. Thanks very much.
Obviously, they "literally know nothing" because modern psychology, Jung version, has rediscovered that the way to the future is the Sacrificial Hero living and exploring on the border between order and chaos, and giving up his life so that others may live. The Sacrificial Hero is not the proud activist that gets to create a totalitarian regime that sacrifices everyone else's life so that the proud activist and his minions can live the life of Riley. Not at all.
We will know when our liberal friends come up with a good plan. Because it will be a plan to recognize that the highest and best thing to be is a Sacrifical Hero, and not a revolutionary activist or carping moralist. The plan will make it clear that it will be the Creatives that will do the sacrificing, not the average Commoner or the average Subordinate.
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