Why is Everyone Going Crazy?

Back in 2016 it was the Republican Party that got blindsided by a outside candidate, Donald Trump.

All the wise heads agreed that it just didn't make sense that everyone should be going crazy. Except it did make sense. Trump appeared and put himself at the head of a disorganized rabble of ordinary Americans, people that were neither educated swells or subordinate serfs: call them Responsibles, Commoners, Yeomen, whatever.

The point is that in the last 50 years the ruling class and the educated Gentry -- or Creative Class or clerisy -- has been implementing a cultural and political agenda that makes the ordinary American the scapegoat, because racist, sexist, homophobe. And Trump came along and made himself the leader of those selected to be scapegoats.

Today, in 2020, the Democratic Party is falling apart as Bernie Sanders, unreconstructed Sixties Commie, is the leading candidate for president. What is going on?

I mean, come on chaps! This is crazy! Nobody really believes that socialism works do they?

Sorry, but they do. And I would say that it is a consequence of the educated Gentry playing with gasoline for almost a century.

What the Democratic Party and the educated Gentry have been selling since, say FDR and the New Deal, is Oh No! We are not crazy lefty socialists, but boy, how you poor victims have been screwed by the system! And how about some free stuff if you vote for us!

The problem is, of course, that to win elections you have to promise free stuff, and the free stuff you handed out at the last election doesn't count.

As I say in my reductive Three Peoples theory and as Curtis Yarvin says in his three-layer theory, the current political setup is that the educated Gentry gets to occupy the commanding heights of the culture and education and the bureaucracy by organizing the Clients -- or victims or serfs -- against the ordinary middle who are racist sexist homophobes.

Plus, because the educated Gentry is also a kind of priesthood, a clerisy, it promulgates from a thousand cultural pulpits its religion of woke virtue. Due to the internal logic of such sermonizing you get to a point where ordinary Commoners that don't intone the correct responses to the Creed get named and shamed and shunned: canceled.

Now it is my belief that the current religion and culture of the educated Gentry is is fact a peculiarly nostaglic longing for the good old days, the prehistoric days: a Great Reaction. To use a Jungian notion, the educated Gentry is rediscovering the hidden harmonies and resonances of the old archetypes.

One of the points of the Jung doctrine was to say: don't you imagine that you are a modern that is all about logic and reason. Those ancient prehistoric archetypes are still at work in your unconscious mind, and don't you forget it.

Thus when I say that socialism is a return to slavery, I am saying that there is a peculiar satisfaction, if you are a notable in the Gentry, to ordering the plebs around.

When I say that the welfare state is a return to feudalism, I am saying that there is a peculiar satisfaction, if you are a functionary in the Deep State, to sashaying around like the local lord in caring for your flock of peasants.

When I say that activism is a replay of medieval knight-errantry, I mean that there is a peculiar frisson from pretending you are a brave revolutionary waving the flag of revolution on the barricades.

My belief is that the Left and its culture and its instantiation in the United States in the Democratic Party is a reactionary movement that is really cool for the educated Gentry, spending other peoples' money on themselves. But it is not good for the Commoners and Yeomanry.

And it is not good for the serfs, the Clients, the subordinates. Why? Because it does not help them master the Code of the City, that you leave the comforts of your ethnic tribe in the city ghetto and bravely, one step at a time, learn how to master life in the city as a contributor and cooperator in the market economy. The Gentry says to the victims, oh, don't worry about silly little things like getting a skill or learning how to be a good employee, or how to use the finance system. Just vote for us and we will take care of you.

Only the day comes, as it did for the white working class, when the Gentry reneges on its promise to its "Little Darlings" and leaves them by the side of the road. Sorry about that.

But that is not all.

The day also comes when the whole progressive project starts to split at the seams. You see that with Our Nance and Chuck the Schmuck. This week they are issuing crazy pronouncements blaming President Trump for his Coronavirus response. You mean, instead of going to the White House and saying: "Mr. President. How can we help!"

In other words, they don't have a clue what they are doing and where they are going. They are just reacting to the latest news and blaming it all on Trump.

Let us give the educated Gentry its due. Back in the day it made some kind of sense to imagine that the destiny of educated children of wealthy businessmen ought to be to help the workers in the city, who would otherwise die of "immiseration" among those Satanic mills.

Actually, they turned out to be wrong about that. The Industrial Revolution saved the peasants from starvation and gave them jobs in the cities and then the workers could climb up from being mere "hands" to a modest respectability as, in the 19th century, the Irish in America rose in half a century from "shanty Irish" to "lace-curtain Irish."

But whatabout the blacks? We need to give them their rights and end the shame and injustice of slavery and Jim Crow.

OK. Done that. Yes, but whatabout institutional racism, and disparity and exclusion? And toxic masculinity! And homophobia!

Oh yeah. I see. You chaps want a job. You want to maintain meaning in your Gentry lives. You are looking around you and want get your name up in lights again.

Well, now the whole project is in ruins. Actually, in this situation, Bernie Sanders makes sense. As developmental psychologists like Clare Graves and Don Beck and Ken Wilber say: when your life seems to be failing then you reset back to a lower developmental level. So if the woke-and-identity politics seems to be failing let's go back to the class politics of our fathers!

Of course, I know exactly what should happen next, because I am all-wise and all knowledgeable.

First, the educated Gentry should actually think about how to help the serfs, clients, and subordinates. My advice is to help them to get out of the victim culture and become Commoners and Yeomen and middle class.

Then, the educated Gentry should think about how to help the Commoners, Yeomen and deplorables. My advice is to help them imagine that they could step out of the set routines of middle-class life and become just a little bit creative. But nobody should pretend that the creative life is just a walk in the park.

Then, the educated Gentry should think about themselves. What does it actually mean to be woke and evolved and creative? My advice is that the real creative life is the life of the Sacrificial Hero, that descends into the underworld of the unconscious to confront the truth about himself, and if he survives that journey he may return to the world to live on the border between Chaos and Order and try to explore that terrifying land -- and hope that his experience will be a boon to his fellow humans. And to recognize that there will be no hosannas and statues and adoring crowds. In other words, better leave ambition and vanity and honor at the door.

But back to the excitement of today.

Conrad Black says that the Dems need to commit (temporary) suicide.

An ineluctable process of national political renovation is proceeding apace... the Democratic Party will... slouch off to Milwaukee to consummate temporary suicide, enabling a sensible resurrection worthy of that historically great party.

And if their wise heads plump on my suggestions above, then future generations will sing hosannas to their vision and their wisdom.

Another Three Layer Theory: From Joel Kotkin

Really, anybody that has half a brain understands human society in some kind of a three-layer theory. Now Joel Kotkin joins the party. In "The Two Middle Classes" he divides the middle class into clerisy and yeomanry. Then there are the serfs. Actually he also has a class of oligarchs on top. So does Curtis Yarvin with his three layers system. Thing is the top class, whether you call them oligarchs or ruling class, aren't a lot of people.

But Kotkin describes his clerisy in the same way that Yarvin describes his Gentry.

[T]he clerisy [is] a group that makes its living largely in quasi-public institutions, notably universities, media, the non-profit world, and the upper bureaucracy.

Just like Yarvin's Gentry. Back to the clerisy.

Although certainly not unanimous in their views, the clerisy generally favors ever-increasing central control and regulation...

Today’s clerisy are concentrated in professions whose numbers have grown in recent decades, including teaching, consulting, law, the medical field, and the civil service... Some professions that were once more closely tied to the private economy, such as doctors, have become subsumed by bureaucratic structures and—in the United States, at least—shifted from a dependable conservative lobby to an increasingly progressive one.

Yeah, like my yoga teacher, a retired physician.

At its apex, the clerisy today is made up largely of the well-educated offspring of the affluent. This class has become increasingly hereditary, in part due to the phenomena of well-educated people marrying each other—between 1960 and 2005, the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25 – 48 percent.

That is one of the findings of Charles Murray in Coming Apart. But you knew that.

Enough about the bloody clerisy. Let's talk about the yeomanry.

The perspective of the traditional middle class [yeomanry] generally differs from that of the clerisy, and constitutes what Piketty labels the “merchant Right.” These people make their living in the marketplace, and that often places them in conflict with both the oligarchs, who continually seek to crush or absorb their businesses, or with the clerisy, which hands down environmental and other regulations that inhibit their activities. 

Yeah!

Now Kotkin has a basically pesssimistic outlook on things, that unless we do something...

An independent and assertive property-owning middle class that can thrive remains the only force able to challenge ever-growing centralization. Without them, there is likely no way to prevent a new feudal order from emerging in the future. As the radical social theorist Barrington Moore suggested a half-century ago, “no bourgeoisie, no democracy.” 

But I am more optimistic. That's because my world view says this essentially Marxian view, that the workers and the petite bourgeoisie will be "immiserated" as profit margins decline, has been proved wrong by history.

Why? Because the story of the last 200 years is that the forecast "immiseration" has always been liquidated by yet another technological revolution that upset the apple cart and removed the "ever-gowing centralization."

Of course, maybe This Time is Different, and we have reached the limit of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years in which real per-capita income in the rich countries has increased by 30 times.

But maybe not. And the truth is that nobody knows. The neighbor across the street is doing a fusion-power startup. And down in California Lockheed is doing the same. What happens if and when those chaps come on line? Does Google get even bigger, or does an ageing Google get pushed aside by the young upstarts figuring out how to leverage fusion power into the stratosphere and beyond?

And another thing. One of the problems with a clerisy sitting in the catbird seat protected by government power and perquisites is that it loses its sharpness. The whole point of going into the clerisy is to avoid the greater risks of the market system and its startup culture and Peter Thiel's Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. But that means that you are choosing the easy path instead of hiking out into the unknown.

It's a sensible choice, to stay safe. And most people that hike out into the startup jungle are never heard from again. But the ones that do make it change the world, and put the old oligarchy and its fawning clerisy out of business.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

You Get Revolution When...

The Z-man uses a software metaphor to explain revolution. A business creates a software system to implement its business processes, but then needs to modify it. At some point the system becomes too expensive to modify, so the business throws the old system out and buys or develops a new one. So it is in politics:

When the humans can no longer change the system or work around it efficiently, the users of the system start to question the system. 

Thus 2016 and Trump and 2020 and Bernie:

The first round of efforts to modify the existing system started in 2016 with the election of Trump. We’re seeing a second round now with the apparent nomination of Bernie Sanders as his challenger. Trump was always a reformer who believed in the fundamental integrity of the system. Sanders is a revolutionary who promises to first remove the legacy system. 

Sorry. Don't agree. I think that Bernie is a last ditch effort to pedal-to-the-metal the welfare state, to preserve the legacy system. If Medicare is good, Medicare for All is better. If subsidized college is good, then free college is better. Bernie is saying: let's just pour more money into the legacy system. It's worked all these years; why change now?

What Bernie is doing is exposing the lie at the heart of the welfare-state project. It was not about what is good for America and Americans but what it takes to win elections with free stuff.

As you can see from the chart, US government spending as a percent of the economy has gone about as far as it can go.

So, really, when Bernie is proposing to double down on everything from Medicare to the Green New Deal, he is really telling us the the game is over. Because the net effect of politics since 1980 is steady as she goes.

Now I believe what is happening is that Americans are being offered two futures, by two competing upper classes. The old future, represented by the Democratic Party and the educated gentry is the old game of the Gentry combining with the lower-class Clients to loot the Commoners. Loot in return for votes. The new future, represented by Trump, is for the Commoners to rebel against the old system and demand that their Commoner concerns and aspirations be addressed. Something that the old Republican Party was failing to do.

But, the question is, can the Commoners possibly win this game, when you consider that the whole educated Gentry would get totally screwed if politics in the US were reoriented towards the needs of the Commoners? No doubt the Gentry would fight to the last Client in order to keep their privileges and authority and feed their ambitions to be the wise rulers teaching the deplorables their needed daily lesson.

But then you look at the chart above and see that government spending has gone about as furr as it can go. Are the American people -- those suburban moms -- really going to vote for a massive increase in government spending? Probably not, unless you can stampede them into believing that the planet is about to die.

See my analysis of politics so far is that the creative class, the educated Gentry, has been running for the last century on the idea that, oh, we are the guys that care about the helpless victims, the workers, the women, the blacks, the immigrants, the homeless.

That line was gold when the vast majority of Americans were indeed workers struggling up through the industrial revolution. And, in the post-WWII world, the program adapted to the workers as they became suburban home-owners.

But since the Civil Rights revolution the gentry game has been to give free stuff to minorities -- and now immigrants -- out of the hide of the white working class, which is now really the Commoner class.

Back in the day the Republican Party was a Gentry party of the educated and the fairly well-to-do that was arguing for moderation in the expansion of government. It accepted the premise of benefits for the workers, but not so fast that it wrecked the economy.

But Trump has reinvented the Republican Party into a Commoner party that is saying: why should we Commoners pay for you Gentry to bribe your Client voters with our lives and our money?

So US politics has been transformed into Commoners-stick-together against the century-old coalition of educated Gentry and Clients.

I'd say the situation is that the Democrats are beside themselves; they really do not have a clue what to do next. Because all of them are apparatchiks of the old order, where you offered a little bit more free stuff to the Clients, and that was enough to get you over the finish line, most of the time. And don't forget the Irving Kristol rule that you must deal in the middle class if you want to help the poor.

Notice something? The Dems have stopped dealing in the middle class. Because Medicare for All doesn't offer anything to the middle class; instead it takes away their health insurance for... Yes, for what exactly?

But why? Why would the Dems do this?

Well, I think it is because in any ruling class, or any corporate hierarchy, the guys that understood what they are doing are the founders -- of the state or of the corporation. The chaps that come along later and step into the slots created by the founders know how to check the boxes and how to recite the anthems, but they don't know why. And so when they turn the dials and press the buttons and nothing happens, they really don't know what to do next.

So Bernie is punching his buttons, and Joe is punching his buttons, and the others are punching various buttons they learned from the Elders. And nothing is working.

What they need is someone that knows what he is doing.

Everyone thinks that Trump is an idiot, and is fumbling and stumbling like an amateur and really does not know what he is doing. Or maybe he got lucky. Maybe.

But if I were a Dem I would tell everyone I know to cut the crap and assume that Trump does know what he is doing.

And I believe that the future of politics in the advanced countries is going to be Commoners-stick-together. Oh, and any of you Clients that want to join us Commoners, come on in; the water's fine.

Hey, it makes sense. Commoners are the majority. They oughta have a politics that responds to their needs.

Democracy, dontcha know.

Don't Panic! I Say Bring Bernie On!

It looks like all the usual suspects are panicking, as usual. And none more so than your regular Democratic operatives with bylines in the media. (Imagine! Wikipedia actually has that!)

OK. So I panicked for a moment. But then I thought, hey, we gotta fight this battle sooner or later. And really what better with a moonbat like Bernie Sanders going up against a street-fighter like Donald Trump?

I was to yoga this morning and what do you think? Jim the yoga teacher was all embarrassed about President Trump mispronouncing the name of the guy that brought yoga to the West. Well, I doubt if the 100,000 Indians at the cricket stadium -- what? there's a 100,000 seat cricket stadium? -- were too worried about that! Turning the tables, I think that there is something charming about furriners trying to pronounce Anglo-Saxon names. But at least they tried!

But notice what my liberal yoga pal did not talk about. Bernie. Oh, last week, before the Mike the Tyke debate rout and the Nevada rout, he was mumbling about Bloomberg or something.

Here are a few Good Things about a possible Bernie nomination:

• It would teach all those nice suburban women a lesson. You girls ready for Bernie to take your health insurance away? Your SUV? Make higher education free so that your professional income can't compete against bright students with less money than you?
• It would teach those twentysomething kids a lesson. Yeah kids! Americans don't like socialism. So why don't you grow up!
• It would give America's gun owners a reason to show up and vote.
• It would make it harder for nice moderate Democrats to win in nice moderate suburban districts. Remember how all those nice moderate candidates in 2018 were going to vote against Pelosi? Hey girls! Cat got your tongue?
• It would permit eevil right-wing racist-sexist-homophobes like me to say forever after that, back in 2020, America was offered socialism and it voted it down (I hope) 60-40.
• It would help the next Clinton to move to the center and declare on a stack of Bibles that he was a New Democrat and utterly rejected the divisive politics of Bernie.
• It might even roll back the identity politics/intersectional priests and their ilk. For a while.
• It might help President Trump clean out the Swamp in his second term.
• It would make Florida red. Those Cuban-Americans aren't going to take Bernie lying down.
• And so on.

Of course, socialism is personal for me. My dad was born and raised in Russia and escaped in 1918 at the age of 16 ten feet ahead of the Bolsheviks.

Shall we rehearse my anti-socialist notions, just for fun? First there are the Four Laws.

Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises).  

The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek)  

Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler).  

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill).

I think that is perfectly clear, don't you? And if you don't understand the first law, about prices, then you really don't get it. Prices, you see, are perhaps the most amazing cultural invention of humans ever. Prices enable us -- even the poorest -- to broadcast to the world what we are willing to exchange in the moment to moment dance of social cooperation, and for what value in exchange. It is what enables the unfathomable complexity of the market economy to function at all. The reason that socialism fails every time it is tried is because, under socialism, the consumers don't get a chance of feedback, to signal to the producers what they want -- or what they can be persuaded to want -- and what they are willing to pay.

Do you think that is enough? No. I think we need to mention the Great Reaction, the mad reactionary enthusiasm among lefties for the old days.

Socialism is a return to slavery;  

the welfare state is a return to feudalism;  

identity politics is neo-tribalism; 

reparations is neo-vengeance;  

activism is part medieval knight-errantry, part pro-regime street-thuggery, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a play;  

helpless victims are a return to sacrifice,  

social justice is good old loot and plunder.

 I'm sure the list isn't really exhaustive. But I'm working on it.

It all comes down to this, my US Politics in Four Lessons:

The American People are the best people in the world. 

The USA is the best country in the world. 

When you lose a normal change election you concede with a good grace. 

Anyone that accuses someone of being a racist is a monster.

Anyway. I am sure that Brad Parscale and the boys are busy working on the framework of a campaign against Bernie. 

And I am sure that President Trump is up to the challenge.

In face, think about it. What GOP nominee of the last 50 years is better adapted to run a campaign against a socialist and win? OK. Maybe Ronald Reagan.

Suppose We are Approaching the End of the Age of Politics

Here's what I think is interesting:

• That about 250 years ago slavery became scandalous. Then we had the two biggest slave states in history. What was that all about?
• That about 150 years ago war became pointless. Then we had the two biggest wars in history. What was that all about?
• That about 250 years ago educated gentry decided that government power could and should be limited. Now we have the biggest governments ever that supervise endless details of people's lives. What's that all about?

I think that, following Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution, the sign that an age is ending is a frantic effort to keep it going, no matter what. That is, when you need a Reign of Terror to keep your movement going then your movement has a problem.

Let's recall slavery. We've all been carefully taught to hate and to fear slavery. But the fact is that 1,000 years ago it was ubiquitous. Viking society was divided into earls, peasants, and "thralls." Thralls were slaves. And the Vikings had a grand old time trading in slaves, from Dublin to the Volga River. At that time in England, according to Danziger and Lacey in The Year 1000, you, as a serf, could make yourself into a slave -- and the three squares that came with it -- by kneeling before your lord and placing your hands within his. And, if you want to know, the Venetians and Genoese did a grand trade in shipping Circassian beauties to the harems of the Middle East. And, I believe, the Circassian beauties were often sold by their families to the slave traders. Then, you may say, a curious thing happened. Slavery started to pay, as Venetian capitalists started slave sugar plantations on Cyprus. And then slave sugar spread west to the Atlantic, and then South America, and then, in 1640, the Brits got into the sugar slave game on Barbados. A grand old time was had by all except the slaves for about a century until, with the rise of evangelical Christianity and William Wilberforce, plantation slavery became a scandal. And we the US had the granddaddy of all civil wars over slavery. And then socialism inspired the two biggest slave states in history. You know who they were.

Today, of course, everyone hates slavery with a passion. Only, some people say that we are enslaved to our worker-bee corporate jobs, and work harder than any humans in history. What's that all about?

Let's think about war. Let's admit it: war was ubiquitous since whenever, whether it was hunter-gatherers contesting territory, or marcher lords patrolling the borders of feudal agricultural empires, or the Romans marching their legionaries all over the Mediterranean area, or the Frenchies and the Swedes marching all over the German lands in the 17th century. The trade of high-status males was war. And everyone down to male serfs was likely to get involved in the lord's nice little wars. Then, of course, the northwest Europeans conquered the world, starting in 1492. Europeans completely took over North America in flat-out conquest. And dominated the Central and South Americas without actually killing off the inhabitants. But then a funny thing happened. The Brits went to India and didn't really conquer it. They just wanted to trade, and keep the native princes from their traditional loot and plunder. And when it came to China, the westerners couldn't or didn't want to get anything more than a foothold in China and demand the right to have treaty ports where they could trade with the Chinese interior. Then we had Napoleon wrecking French primacy in Europe with his abortive conquest of Russia. But Bismarck cleverly united Germany with three finely sewn wars against Denmark, Austria and France. Then we had the reign of the idiots and World War I and II. What were they thinking?

I don't think we have really begun to process what has happened to the war culture over the last two centuries. Except that war really is not the cosy thing it used to be back in the day when the Franks did a nice bit of loot and plunder every year beyond the eastern borders of the Frankish empire.

And now politics. Politics used to be a natural hierarchical thing, with the king the lord of his lands, and everybody in their place beneath him. The king was mainly concerned with keeping his barons in check, and the barons mainly concerned with keeping their yeomen and serfs in their place. The fact is that political power had a limited reach because it lacked the technology to extend its power. But then, during the second millennium, an idea began to grow about limiting political power. First the barons pushed back against the king in Magna Carta. Then came all the theories of politics from chaps like Montesquieu proposing a division of powers between various political sectors that got instantiated in the US Constitution. What was that all about? And then we get what I call the Great Reaction of the last 160 years in which rich-kid sons of bnourgeois businessmen and merchants developed a theory of totalitarian unification of all human sectors: religion, politics, and economics, under a single leader, in which all life was militarized into a quasi-military hierarchy under a Great Leader. We have, now, the idea of the great war leader extended into all areas of life, so that administrative and hierarchical power from the top is concerned in all areas of life, political, economic, and religious/cultural.

I have a whole jumble of ideas about this, but I have an overall notion that politics is past its sell-by date, that we don't really need a vast political-ideological structure, that the human future is something completely different. And I believe that the current frenzy in the educated gentry for political and ideological power is a sign of the end of the political era. See, I don't think we need powerful muscular political institutions. Modern people are remarkably pliable and cooperative; they don't need a blow in the solar plexus to teach them a lesson. They respond pretty well to the social and economic cues they get from the people they interact with in day-to-day life. It is a conceit in the educated gentry, in my view, to think that the power and wisdom of the educated gentry is needed to keep us all from falling into a dark place of hate and bigotry and exploitation and poverty.

They say that every human generation thinks it is living in the end times of irreversible decadence, and that strong action is needed to reverse the slide. Probably not.

What is probably true is that the world is heading towards a future that nobody has a clue about. And that, indeed is scary. But the chances are that our descendants with muddle through. Imagine that!

But meanwhile we have to get through the current mania in the Democratic Party -- symbolized by unreconstructed lefty Bernie Sanders -- to have comprehensive and mandatory administrative solutions for everything for all time. Which is merely to say that the mess that comprehensive and mandatory administrative solutions have created in our society is reaching the crisis point, and that comprehensive and mandatory solutions for everything have reached their sell-by date.

Suffering, Religion, History, and the Three Peoples

According to Nietzsche, the Eternal Recurrence is the end point of decadence, the decline from growth and optimism. When you start to fall away from the faith of the fathers, then you get to nihilism, where you don't believe in anything. Then you get to the Eternal Recurrence, where your life is a meaningless repeat, day after day: Groundhog Day.

But in The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History Mircea Eliade tells a different story. For him, the Eternal Return is a way, invented by our ancestors, of dealing with the unbearable suffering of life by escaping from history, and it is characteristic of all primitive peoples, pre Axial Age.

[S]uffering proceeds from the magical action of an enemy, from the breaking a taboo, from entering a baneful zone, from the anger of a god -- and when all other hypotheses have proven insufficient -- from the will or the wroth of the Supreme Being. (p.97) The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

But, in addition, primitive man escapes from history, the whole miserable story of endless suffering, with the Eternal Return, the annual renewal of the world in New Year celebrations, which erase the past and starts the world anew with a celebration that both marks a return to the chaos before the Creation and celebrates a new creation in the New Year.

You can see that this attitude survives into the modern era in the belief systems of the People of the Subordinate Self or Yarvin's Clients. Our lower classes attribute their sufferings to the malevolence of employers and billionaires. Or Jews, according to taste. And our periodic elections provide a chance for a new beginning, a Time for a Change, or Hope and Change, endlessly recycling without end.

Notice how this approach conflicts with Nietzsche. According to him, the Eternal Recurrence is the end point of decadence and failure and meaninglessness: really dumb. According to Eliade, the Eternal Return is an attempt to erase the eternal sufferings of life and begin anew: pretty clever.

Now, according to Eliade, when we get to the Axial Age religions, the priests are now trying to deal with history instead of hiding from it. Well, almost.

[History] can be tolerated because it is known that, one day or another, it will cease. History is thus abolished, not through consciousness of living in an eternal present... nor by means of a periodically repeated ritual... [as with primitives;] it is abolished in the future.

But the point is that, at some point, all the sufferings, i.e., history, will end. Yay!

Now, in Eliade's account, the question of "sin" arises when, e.g., with the Children of Israel, the prophets start selling the idea that the misfortunes of the Israelites are a consequence of them losing their faith in God.

Through their terrifying visions the prophets but confirmed and amplified Yahweh's ineluctible chastisement upon His people who had not kept the faith.

Do you see what is going on here? All of a sudden "the priests" are demanding that people take responsibility for their actions. You fall off the wagon, pal, and disaster will ensue. In other words, the Israelites are now supposed to be People of the Responsible Self, responsible for their lives before God and not mere helpless thralls that go crawling to the sorcerer or sacrificing the firstborn to the Supreme Being when things go wrong.

Note that Nietzsche excoriates "the priests" for teaching us to hate ourselves. But on Eliade's version, the priests are merely asking us to take responsibility for our lives, that our suffering is not the result of "the magical action of an enemy" but our own faults and sins. Got it, Fritzi?

OK. Whatabout our pals the People of the Creative Self? Where do they get off in this battle of the intellectual giants. Perfectly simple.

Nietzsche is telling us that we need to be free spirits, strong, growing, fearless. Willing to take the rough with the smooth, indeed actually seeking out challenge and difficulty. He is saying that we should stop whining about suffering, and trying to hide from history. Be a Man. That is what Nietzsche is saying.

Now it may be that the Nietzschean ideal is not just Übermensch, over-man, but beyond-man, that it challenges us to be something that is really beyond the capabilities of humans. That we cannot forget our sufferings and our fears, and need the comforts of the Eternal Return of the primitives or the Eternal Rest of eternity after history has ended.

And you may say that the collapse of Nietzsche into madness in 1890 proves this. Nietzsche, despite all his bold writing, could not really deal with the ideal he had conjured up. He set up his ideal of the man that lives without the comforts of home and the promise of paradise, but in the end couldn't live up to his ideal.

And you may say that our own overlords, the People of the Creative Self and Yarvin's Gentry, are jolly good at thinking up rules and standards for us Normals to live up to. But when it comes to themselves, the law doesn't apply to them. Any backtalk from the deplorables is rejected as racist-sexist-homophobic hate.

All true. But I think that it just shows that the Creative Turn is a lot more difficult and challenging than we first thought, back in the day when we special people decided that God is Dead.

Government is Force. Part 742

It's just a minor piece from Steven Greenhut in California, "Taking Property for Fun and Profit," about high property prices in California and the resort to government to Do Something about it.

That is to say, they propose to solve the problem with Force. Of course they do, because Government Is Force.

You don't like the way that the world has treated you? If you are the Vikings you get in your longships and head out for a bit of loot and plunder. If you are a worker in the late 19th century hammered by the Long Depression of the 1870s and 1880s, you strike your employer to protest wage cuts.

If you are a homeless mom in Oakland, why, you take over a vacant house and the local activists celebrate you.

As one of these Oakland moms said, “Housing is a human right. I pay bills there. I pay water, PG&E, internet. We live there. We want to purchase the home; it needs to belong back in the hands of the community. It was stolen through the foreclosure crisis.”

Or this in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles city council might use the power of eminent domain to seize a 124-unit apartment building called Hillside Villa in Chinatown.

See, back in 1986 when the owner built the apartments, part of the deal with the government was to provide some below-market-rate apartments. Now, 30 years later, the owner wants the rent the apartments out at market rates, but "Councilman Gil Cedillo’s plan would have the city take the apartment building to maintain the lower rents."

The point is that all this government force doesn't solve the housing affordability crisis. As Greenhut writes:

The bigger issue, however, is that Los Angeles and other California cities have screwed up their housing markets through decades of excess regulation, slow-growth rules, rent controls, and other policies that depress housing construction and drive up the price of the housing that everyone says they want.

Yeah. And where are the wise heads in the media telling us everyday that regulation, slow-growth, environmental rules, rent control are the best way in the world to destroy the housing stock in a city and make it affordable only for the very rich?

How can it be that a presidential candidate like Bernie Sanders that wants government to take over everything from health care to student loan forgiveness is not laughed out of court?

OK, so Bernie's supporters feature kids from educated families that have had everything handed to them and don't see why it shouldn't continue.

And every kid today seems to be taught the holy art of activism and peaceful protest and the fun of making protest signs and banners.

But suppose I sent out to the local yard-sign company and axed 'em to make me up a sign like this to put in my front yard?

Or this one?

Do you think that I would get my car keyed by some irate Bernie Bro? Or similar Subaru type with a COEXIST bumper-sticker?

You tell me.

Now I think, in fact, that we humans are in a confusing transition era, between the necessity of force to protect our food-growing land in the old days and the necessity, today, of cooperating with everyone in the world to make and sell things.

And I think that our lefties are glorious reactionaries, overflowing with nostalgia for the good old days when every man word his salt was a warrior. Or a revolutionary.

But I say that today's activists are reactionaries, imagining themselves as revolutionaries. Bu they are really modern Don Quixotes, for

activism is part medieval knight-errantry, part pro-regime street-thuggery, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a play.

"Activisme" is French for "activism." If you were wondering.

But it still comes down to "Government is Force." And, I think, force is on its way out. Like slavery.

But you knew that.

Deficits: Where Does It End?

The deficit hawks are always there, worrying about deficits as far as the eye can see. And they are right. Sooner or later the bill will come due.

Here's a piece featuring Fed Chairman Jerome Powell worrying about how the Fed can fight the next recession when interest rates are already at all time lows. Well, it turns out that he'll just print money, like the last time. But whatabout the budget?

“Putting the federal budget on a sustainable path when the economy is strong would help ensure that policy makers have the space to use fiscal policy to assist in stabilizing the economy during a downturn,” Powell told the House Financial Services Committee.

Yes, Yes. Of course. Let's Do Something about the deficit and solve all our problems. We could, you know. Because we did it before. See my "Federal Debt Analysis" and this chart.

See what's going on? In World War II our politicians shot the federal debt up to 120 percent of GDP to fight the Nazis and the Japs. Then, for the next 35 years until 1980 they brought the federal debt down to about 30 percent of GDP.

Look what happened then. Our politicians, led by Ronald Reagan, pushed the federal debt up to 60 percent of GDP by the end of the 1990-91 recession.

Then we had the mother of all financial crashes, 1929 excepted, in 2008. And our politicians ran the federal debt up to 100 percent of GDP.

So you tell me. What is different about now compared to the 35 years after WWII?

Well, all I suggest is that, back in the day, the ruling class all agreed -- nod, nod, wink, wink -- to haul the debt down from the wartime peak at 120 percent of GDP. No talking out of school, chaps, we just do it.

But then the Dems did the Great Society in the 1960s and failed to curb it when the data showed it was a failure, as documented by Charles Murray in Losing Ground.

So chaps like Ronald Reagan said: OK, if you Dems aren't going to curb your failed programs we aren't going to play green-eyeshade accountants over taxes. We are just going to cut tax rates and let her roll. Hey, the spending programs all benefit your Dem voters anyway; it's your job to look after them.

And that has been the rule ever since. When Dems get in they up taxes a bit and spending a lot. When GOPs get in they cut taxes a chunk and increase spending a bit.

President Trump has done nothing except continue that policy. Only now the federal debt, instead of 30 percent of GDP in 1980, is over 100 percent of GDP.

So, sooner or later, something will have to give. But what?

OK. So what gives? Well, roughly speaking 25 percent of the federal budget is defense, 25 percent is health care as in Medicare and Medicaid, 25 percent is Pensions including Social Security, and the rest is up for grabs, except for interest on the debt which right now is at about 10 percent of the federal budget.

Right now, nobody is willing to cry Uncle. Old men won't let anyone touch their Social Security. Old women and daughters of old women won't let anyone touch their Medicare. Defense? Maybe. Welfare? Maybe. The "Remainder" that includes interest on the debt? Well, that's the money that the educated Gentry feeds on in grants and deep-state sinecures.

So you can see that nothing will happen until the pips begin to squeak.

And you can be sure that whatever happens the old geezers like me will demand to keep the benefits we paid for and the deep state will demand its grants and sinecures.

So the guy that will get hurt will be that fellow behind the tree.

The only optimistic thought is that the ruling class will want to solve the problem without a total economic meltdown because if there is a true economic meltdown then their power as a ruling class might come under revolutionary challenge.

And we wouldn't want that would we?

But, there is a problem. Look at Nancy Pelosi. I look at Nancy Pelosi and I don't see a full deck of cards. I see someone blundering around in a strange land that Daddy never told her about.

And that could be a problem.

Scott Alexander's Two Tribe System vs. My Three Peoples

I just picked up a link to Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex piece "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup." It models the US as Blue Tribe vs. Red Tribe on the current political color model inaugurated in 2000 that makes liberals blue and conservatives red. Rather than lefties red on account of the Red Flag of communism.

The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music. 

The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.

This was written back in 2014. Before Trump.

Notice what is missing? The Victims Tribe. Actually, Alexander does get to them, eventually, when he says that

Research suggests Blue Tribe / Red Tribe prejudice to be much stronger than better-known types of prejudice like racism. Once the Blue Tribe was able to enlist the blacks and gays and Muslims in their ranks, they became allies of convenience who deserve to be rehabilitated with mildly condescending paeans to their virtue.  

Oh. But do you notice something? Blacks and gays and Muslims are not accorded the dignity of identity, or of a tribe of their own. They are just to be enlisted into the Blue Tribe. In other words, Alexander confirms my doctrine of the Victims as "Little Darlings" that the Blue Tribe dotes on. The Little Darlings are wonderful and pure and perfect until they are no longer useful politically, like the white working class.

But, of course, Scott Alexander goes on for 8,500 words without really describing the point of it all.

The point is that the Blue Tribe is the Gentry, the creatures of the ruling class, and they are ambitious. Yarvin calls their ambition thymos, from the Greek, meaning in Plato: Spiritedness (ego, glory, honor). For Yarvin, "thymos is somewhere between ambition, honor, and vanity."

And the Red Tribe is the Commoners, ordinary people that just obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules.

I am referring here to Curtis Yarvin's "Clear Pill" notion of a three-layer society, of Gentry, Commoners and Clients, where

The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.

Yarvin's three layers correspond pretty nearly to my reductive Three Peoples theory, in which my People of the Creative Self are his Gentry, my People of the Responsible Self are his Commoners, and my People of the Subordinate Self are his Clients.

Now it seems to me pretty clear that the thymos of the Blue Tribe or Gentry depends upon the opportunity for glorious deeds. Back in the day, these deeds were military, warrior deeds. These days the warriors are become social justice warriors, bending the arc of history towards justice and bravely whacking the Red Tribe, the Commoners, into surly and demoralized obedience for the notorious thought crimes of racism-sexism-homophobia. And the Blue Tribe, the Gentry, are held together by their hatred of ordinary Commoners. Not really accorded agency are the Clients of the ruling class, blacks and Hispanics and Muslims and immigrants, who are useful as soldiers in the political wars.

The whole of Scott Alexander's piece describes in excruciating detail how the Blue Tribe hatred of the Red Tribe works. And, boy, it works beautifully. But what it does not point out is the point of it all, indeed the point of all tribalism.

The point of tribalism is to unite the group to fight against the foe. Which is usually next door. And it performs a real function, which is to protect the tribe's food-growing land and the very food that the tribe eats.

Obviously this tribal instinct can be abused. For instance, it can be turned inward so that the tribe finds itself split into two factions that experience each other as the enemy rather than the tribe next door. Maybe the tribe will split in two and divide its tribal lands in two.

Or, as in the 20th century, the tribal instinct can be used to make the industrial nation state next door the enemy, when the nation state is no longer a semi-isolated group depending for survival on its food-growing land but on its ability to produce and sell its industrial and intellectual products. What, you might ask, is the point of Germany and France going to war in 1914? Or in 1939? Hitler had the idea in Mein Kampf that Germany needed food-growing land. Because of course it did.

The same argument can be made about the current culture war between the Blue Tribe and the Red Tribe, or the domination of the Commoners by the Gentry and their allies the Clients. If there is no external enemy then you naturally switch to an internal enemy.

If you are going to have politics you are going to have Us and Them. Because that is the whole point of politics, to stand forth as the savior of the tribe and protect the tribe from its enemies.

Now, given that humans naturally divide up into Us and Them, into Red Tribes and Blue Tribes, it would seem that wise men would seek to find a way to tamp down this natural divisiveness down to a dull roar.

Oh yeah. Limited government. Separation of powers. Creating a defense in depth against political ambition and rage. Oh, and above all, separating government, the sector of force, from religion, the sector of meaning.

Oh yeah. That's what all the political thinking of the eighteenth century was about: trying to avoid a repeat of the religious wars of the seventeenth century. By getting everyone to cool their jets, and trying to take religion out of politics.

But try telling your Blue Tribe friend that modern leftist politics is religion by any other name.

Hey, today's lefty liberals have almost convinced me of Marx's dictum that

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. 

Only it's not quite the way that Marx and Bernie and the Bernie Bros and the Blue Tribe of the Gentry think. It's not about heroic revolutionaries saving the proletarians from the savage power of the bourgeoisie. Not any more.

No, I'd say that today's class war is about saving the ordinary Commoner from the Gentry's need for meaning.

And that's what gives my life meaning. So to speak.

The German Turn: How Germans Invented the Modern World

If you want to understand the modern world, a good place to start is with Kant, woken up from a dogmatic slumber by the philosophy of David Hume.

What it meant was the end of the Age of Reason, the conceit that humans had banished ignorance and superstition with the triumph of human logic and reason.

It started with Kant and ran for over a century. Whether you consider it ended when Hitler flung the brain of Germany across the Atlantic to the US of A, or perhaps later with Marcuse and Habermas, I call it the German Turn.

Back in the day it was called "the German pestilence that would ruin almost two millennia of facts about the Bible."

My relationship with the German Turn began when I read this, from F.S.C. Northrop of Yale. It's in The Meeting of East and West, Chapter V, German Idealism:

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, which defined the foundations of traditional French and Anglo-American democratic culture, has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

If you have never heard of F.S.C. Northrop, here is a clue from British philosophy popularizer Bryan Magee, who wrote "F.S.C. Northrop... remains one of the only two people I have ever met with what tempts me to call... a genius for teaching."

Never have I known anyone so excited by ideas; and he was able to pass on not only the ideas but also the excitement. He would walk into the room already talking, and from then on perfectly formed sentences would come geysering out of his head as if he were a gusher blowing its top... [W]e were stimulated as I have never known any other teacher stimulate his students. Bright young graduate students would emerge from his seminars thrilled by the prospects they had just glimpsed and impatient to pursue them... and they would rush straight to the library, lusting to get at the books.

But what does this mean?

It means, to begin with Kant, that we don't experience the world directly as commonplace objects like mothers, tables, chairs, dogs, horses, and food, as we imagine. We cannot know "things-in-themselves" but only the sense impressions from our five senses, most notably vision, that have been processed into a vision of the world by our brain and its "categories."

What, you might ask? What craziness is this, when we can't even accept the reality of the every-day world around us? Well, I would now say, after 20-odd years reading and thinking and writing about this, it is the beginning of wisdom.

Here is what I wrote, for American Thinker, nearly 15 years ago in "Conservatives and the Creative Impulse." Let us start with the phenomenon of Freud and the notion of the unconscious underneath our conscious mind.

Freud's psychology may seem to conservative Americans as a sudden, irrational outburst from Teutonic Europe.  But his psychology develops naturally out of Kant's conscious ego, Fichte's impulsive ego, Hegel's stage theory of consciousness, and Schopenhauer's theory of repression.  The key link in this chain is Johann Gottlieb Fichte, because he isolates the key factor in human knowledge: humans.

How does knowledge come into the world?  Descartes thought that knowledge came from a scientist making logical inferences from known indubitable facts to a necessary theory.  But Fichte showed that facts are dead, and dead men tell no tales.  It is the free imaginative act of the scientist that breathes life into facts to create a new theory.  And that act comes from impulse: "All our thought is founded on our impulses," he wrote.  It was surely Fichte that gave the great generation from Einstein to Heisenberg permission to think the unthinkable and shock the world with modern physics.

Of course Fichte’s discovery applied not just to scientists. Artists and writers were delighted to think the unthinkable—and do it too. A century later, Freud taught the young artist to regard his dreams as a holy font of impulse welling up from the unconscious id and to fear that repressing it would lead to neurosis. 

I am in the middle of reading Freud's On Dreams, and I must say I find it indigestible, partly because I find Freud too mechanical and Newtonian. I prefer the chap that came after Freud, C.G. Jung, who connected the unconscious with all the myths of mankind, as an expression, a welling up, of the human unconscious. Oh yeah. Whatabout Richard Wagner, who created a four-opera cycle about German pre-Christian mythology, The Ring of the Nibelungs, right in the middle of the German Turn.

But notice that Freud did not just appear out of nowhere, and did not invent his idea of the unconscious out of whole cloth. He is the heir to the German thinkers that came before him. Jung says that C.G. Carus invented the unconscious, and Eduard von Hartmann reinterpreted Schopenhauer's Will and Idea into unconscious and conscious thought.

Actually, you could say that the whole German Turn is the development of understanding about the unconscious. When Kant says that we don't know things-in-themselves, but only sense impressions, he is telling us that, unbeknown to us, our unconscious mind is creating an image of the world out of our sense impressions, a theory about the actual things-in-themselves or whatever it is out there.

Jordan B. Peterson comments on this. He says that we -- and the animals -- walk around in the world on the unconscious's autopilot until the moment that something unexpected happens. Then we freeze until we figure out what is going on. In other words, our unconscious theory of the world has broken and we need to mend it with a spot of conscious thought before we proceed.

So the point of the German Turn is to say that the magnificent skyscrapers of logic and temples of reason are built on hidden foundations that we ignore at our risk. These foundations are the hidden depths of the unconscious. Indeed, it may be that 90 percent of our brain action goes on in the unconscious. And, some naughty boys have suggested, maybe the conscious mind is just a movie -- think The Matrix -- that our unconscious mind runs in our brain to make us feel good about ourselves.

One of the consequences of the German Turn is the modern culture of creativity. To repeat Fichte: "All our thought is founded on our impulses." This, of course, is what artists and writers experience. Their stories and theories do not come from pure logic and reason; they come from somewhere deep in the unconscious, or, as opera composer Puccini said of Madama Butterfly, "the music of this opera was dictated to me by God."

Notice how the notion of creativity replaces the old notion of a fixed mechanical universe, and before that of a world run according to the whim of the gods. In the old days, we understood that we were the mere playthings of the gods, and subject to the power plays amongst them. How to get in their good favor? Sacrifice. Then, with the Axial Age religions, we might discover the workings of God's or Nature's universe and we spoke of God's Law. But now we are in the business of creating the future, not merely understanding God's plan and executing it. And our lefty friends are busy creating the future and heaven on earth with their critical theory and activism and peaceful protest.

I have tried to give expression to all this with my reductive Three Peoples theory. My People of the Subordinate Self are people that believe that powerful forces run the world, and that they need to find protection under a powerful lord. My People of the Responsible Self are people that believe in God's Creation and his rational Divine Law, and the point of life is to use reason and logic to find out and live God's plan. My People of the Creative Self are people that believe that they are creating the world through creative process. They are the people inspired by the German Turn.

However, there is a problem. You may have noticed it. There is a tendency for humans only to respect and understand their own kind. Thus People of the Subordinate Self have a tendency to believe that the  rest of the world is out to get them; The People of the Responsible Self have a tendency to think that the Subordinates are lazy bums and that the Creatives are whacky immoralists. The People of the Creative Self tend to believe that Responsibles are racist-sexist-homophobes and that the Subordinates are helpless victims of the bigoted Responsibles.

But I think that my wonderful Three Peoples theory, as a stage theory of consciousness -- see Hegel above -- understands and respects humans at all levels of consciousness as it also understands why people at different levels mistrust and dislike "the other."

I have recently come into contact with Curtis Yarvin's "Clear Pill" and his three-layer model of society, of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. Says he:

The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.

So great minds think alike.

Now, I believe that Kant's dictum that we don't know things-in-themselves leads directly to the revolution in physics, of curved space in relativity, of indeterminacy and the state function in quantum mechanics.

I believe that Fichte's "impulse" theory of thought leads directly to our notion of creativity and the Freud and Jung theories of the unconscious.

I believe that Jung's theory of the individual and the collective unconscious and the archetypes allows us to connect with and understand our pre-rational ancestors and their mythologies.

And I believe that Nietzsche's theory of the will to power is what powers the modern notion of creativity and perhaps even Schumpeter's notion of economic "creative destruction." For instance, I was just reading Nietzsche this morning and he talked in Will to Power §784 about freedom and power.

One desires freedom so long as one does not possess power. Once one does possess it, one desires to overpower; if one cannot do that (if one is still too weak to do so), one desires "justice," i.e., equal power.

And this echoes Horkheimer and Adorno of the Frankfurt School in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order to dominate it and other men.

In other words, the German Turn leads to all things, both good and evil. And "creativity," rather than being the innocent craving of starving artists and writers for inspiration, is really a program of power. For, even back in mythology, it was understood that the god of creativity was also the god of destruction. As in Schumpeter's "creative destruction."

In a way, the German Turn is another expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Before Kant we were innocents in the Garden of Reason and Logic. But now we realize our nakedness, and are ashamed. We have learned frightful powers, and yet, as ever, there is no return to the Garden of Eden. Once you have tasted the apple of the Tree of Knowledge there is no going back.

So we go forward, terrified of our powers, and yet inspired to discover more, still the social animals of Africa that added a new dimension to social cooperation with language, still the creatures that developed logic and reason out of the need to keep our story straight in social interactions, and now conscious of our amazing and frightening creative powers.

That we have the power to make the world anew. And also to destroy it all in less time than it takes to say it.

Thanks to the German Turn it is the best of times; it is the worst of times: the age of wisdom, the age of foolishness.

As it ever was, and is, and shall be.

Bloomberg's Gaffes Tell Us the Truth about Politics

Rule One of politics is that you should never tell the truth. The reason is simple: the whole point of politics is to band together to get something that you couldn't get by ordinary free exchange of labor and/or money.

And obviously, you are going to have to lie to get that something that you shouldn't want.

So, we have the Dem's great billionaire hope, Michael Bloomberg getting blasted for saying, a few years ago, things that you are not allowed to say any more.

A gaffe in politics is when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

Do our liberal friends ever worry about things like that? That things you were allowed to say five years ago are now utterly beyond the pale?

Anyway, Pat Buchanan lists Bloomberg's No-nos for us. The first No-no is the "broken windows" policing concept, that you police the areas where the crime is.

"One of the unintended consequences is people say, 'Oh, my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.' Yes, that's true. Why? Because we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. ... Why do we do it? Because that is where all the crime is. ... And the way you get the guns out of the kids' hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them."

In the book Ghettoside Jill Leovy explains why this is a problem. I wote about this five(!) years ago at American Thinker. It's because in the black community people complain about crime this way. They complain that the courts won't convict the real criminals. Good point: but there is a reason for this. The gang-bangers intimidate potential witnesses, and so they don't testify, and the gang-bangers don't get convicted. But the black community also complains about police harassing folks on the streets. Well, the reason they do that is to nail the known gang-bangers for small infractions on which the arresting officer can testify and ordinary intimidatable eye-witnesses aren't needed.

Do you see the internal contradiction here? If so, go to the head of the class. You are a person that understands why politics never works.

Then there was the gaffe about the Great Recession, about the policy of ending "red-lining" or denying mortgages to poor, usually black, areas. Oh, Mikey, how could you?

"It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone. ... Redlining ...was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, 'People in these neighborhoods are poor, they're not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don't go into those areas.'"

Now, the red-lining started in the New Deal area, after the federal government started its secondary market in mortgages to "help" end the Great Depression. You can see why they might do it. Now that the mortgage market had been taken over by govenment with its Federal Nation Mortgage Association the banks might not care too much about the creditworthiness of the borrowers since they would merely originate the mortage, get all the commissions, and then sell the mortgage to Uncle Sam's Fannie Mae.

Do you see the progression? First we have a Great Depression, the consequence of the Federal Reserve System absolutely cocking-up its response to the credit crisis consequent upon the stock market crash of 1929. Then we have the Federal National Mortgage Association, an attempt to revive the mortgage-lending industry after the wipe-out of the Great Depression. Then we have the need for government regulations to regulate the regulated. Then we have an additional unanticipated consequence, discovered in the civil-rights era, that the victims of the regulation were poor inner-city blacks, therefore racial discrimination. So we decide to take off the regulations that were put in there to stop corrupt activity. And then we have another financial crash that fortunately was a mere echo of the 1929 crash. Although in 2008 as in 1929 the Fed was stumble-bumbling around like a Skid Row drunk. Again.

[What I mean by that is that little Ben Bernacke, Fed Chairman, was saying, in the fall of 2008, that he didn't have the legal authority to bail out Lehman Brothers, and so, instead of nipping the crash in the bud, it went on for another five or six months. Ben, oh Ben! What do you think is the meaning of the phrase that the central bank is the "lender of last resort?"]

See, to me, all this shows that utter flatulence of modern government. What's the point of having police if they don't beat up the latest gang-bangers? That's what police are for: keeping the lower-classes of the time down to a dull roar. And what's the point of government programs and regulation if they tie themselves in knots of utter pointlessness?

My line is that the dirty little secret of modern times is that, really, we need very little government. Because the vast majority of people are good little boys and girls that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the laws, unlike almost any era in history.

Back in the day we needed brave defenders to keep the Vikings or the Mongols from conquering and killing us, raping and enslaving our women, and stealing all our grain.

But in the last 200 years we have entered a new era, where it does not pay to conquer, loot and pillage. Just leave people alone to produce and exchange, and make sure that you are the ruling class that gets its percentage off the top.

Because even with two world wars and endless destruction, the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years has added up to an increase in personal income of 30 times. And we are now, according to experts, down to a global poverty rate of 10 percent that is utterly unprecedented in world history. And all through the development and intensification of people producing, inventing and exchanging, "ships setting sail again, all over the world."

However, now as ever, there is no greater crime in politics than telling the truth. Because we, the voters, insist that our leaders lie to us.

And Michael Bloomberg will have to pay the price for his truth-telling.

Facing the Racism Issue Fair and Square

A friend just wrote about how a TDS acquaintance accused him of racism three years ago. And how he is not a racist.

Then there is Edward Ring at American Greatness writing in "What is Racism Today?" about the utter bankruptcy of the racism issue today: "Unconscious Racism", "Institutional Racism", "Racial Profiling", "Disparate Outcomes/Wealth Inequality", "Environmental Racism", "Racist Voter Supression": all that stuff is just ruling class manipulation.

Listen. We passed civil rights laws half a century ago that made it illegal for the government and private institutions to commit racist acts. Did you observe a racist act yesterday? OK, get onto the Feds. Because racist acts are illegal.

Whatabout racist opinions? Yeah. Big problem. Only thing is that opinions aren't illegal, and can't be prosecuted. Because? Because down the years the legal system has decided that peering into peoples' minds is a very tricky business. And, if you didn't already know, the lefty totalitarian governments of the 20th century with their show trials showed in black and white why basing the legal system on the hunting down of bad thoughts is Not Good.

And anyway, everyone prefers their own kind: by race, by sex, by political allegiance, by every other way that people distinguish themselves as humans.

But here's the problem:

We have made white racist thoughts shameful, but we have celebrated black racist thoughts.

We have made male sexist thoughts shameful, but we have celebrated feminist sexist thoughts.

We have made homophobic thoughts shameful, but we have celebrated homosexual bigotry.

And yes. I am a racist-sexist-homophobe. How about you?

The problem is that, right now, even President Trump lacks the cultural power to tell the lefty racist-sexist-heterophobes to go pound sand. So what do we do about it?

We The People need to get out in front on this. And we need to do it with the male Insult Culture.

"I'm a racist? Oh yeah? So you advocate "diversity and inclusion." That's racist to the back molar."

"I'm a sexist? Oh yeah? Tell that to the feminazis! Talk about toxic sexism!"

"I'm a homophobe? So what! The gays already got their gay marriage."

The truth is that everyone is a racist. It's just that in our society the cultural wokerati have arrogated to themselves the power to determine what kind of racism is bad: anything expressed by white deplorables; and what kind of racism is good: "mostly peaceful protests" by Black Lives Matter.

Now President Trump is developing a masterful campaign to encourage blacks and Hispanics to leave their racist ghettos and identify as Commoner Americans in the coming elections. Dear God, I hope he succeeds.

Because the educated Gentry is driving us down the road to the racial and sexual War of All Against All. They have the conceit that, because they are educated and evolved, they will be able to control the battle -- as maybe the Capitol guys in the Hunger Games.

In fact they are fools and knaves playing with matches in the middle of a drought. They have no idea of the disaster that they are setting up. Of course not. Because they have never had a serious thought in their lives.

Bottom line: we made racial and sexual discrimination illegal half a century ago. Now it's time for all the activists to go home and find something else to activate.

And the rest of us must stop being terrified of being called racists, expecially old geezers like me that can't be fired from their jobs by a lefty mob.

"Call me a racist? Sure. So what yer goin' to do about it? String me up from the nearest tree? Burn me like a witch?"

What Would It Take To Wean Kids Off Socialism, Bernie?

It's no secret that the prime supporters of ageing "democratic socialist" Bernie Sanders, winner in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire, are young people.

Because?

Yeah, really. What in the world do rich white kids think they are doing?

There are many reasons offered to explain the support for socialism in the young:

• Socialist ideology is like a family: your share of the loot and your share of the work are determined by family relationships.
• What do you expect from the teachers at government child custodial facilities?
• Nearly all politicians and activists are in the game of selling more government loot. Where is the percentage for anyone active in politics to say: Hey, we need a lot less government force!
• Nearly all journalists are in the game of political push and shove. Who wants to read about price theory and regulatory capture?
• Nearly all academics are in the game of selling "with this weird trick we can tranform society." Just like the click-bait artists.
• Nearly everyone feels that, if they lost their job, where would they look fo help? The market?
• And anyway, whatabout Marx, Engels, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and the rest? Exactly; rich kids, sons of businessmen. Why should our rich white kids be any different?

Plus, the world of universal wage labor and capitalist production is brand new. Five hundred years ago almost everyone in the world was a peasant, a serf or slave subordinate to some local lord. And that fake family, that would take care of you, maybe, was the inheritor of the extended family of the hunter-gatherer band.

So we are living in a totally new world, and it is not surprising that the most obvious cultural meme is what I call the Great Reaction, a retrospective ideology that instinctively lurches back to the old and familiar.

And even if we decided to teach the kiddies to love the market, which might work for boys that are coded for war and danger, whatabout the girls? We are teaching girls that they can be superheroes, but the most notable cultural development of recent years, I'd say, is the concern with "microaggressions" and "safe spaces," and that is girl stuff. Women are easily offended, and do not like to interact like men in the male Culture of Insult; and women do not like physical danger, not at all: they want to be safe and their loved ones too.

So I say that, probably for girls and young women, it's a hopeless cause. Women expect to be protected and always will.

But boys: Well, I think that boys should be chucked out of school at 13 and expected to take up apprenticeships -- or internships if you prefer -- and these apprenticeships should be away from home. And boys that want more school-learning should be forced to crawl over broken glass to get it. OK. I know this will never work for rich kids, because mothers. But for the rest it will generate rough, tough hombres with a Nietzschean tolerance for a good deal of "accidents and nonsense." And they will be the kind of men that don't want to be soft soy boys in their parents' basement. And they won't be Bernie Bros.

I also think that all government education should be transformed into parent-controlled vouchers, so that parents can choose their kids' education from a whole menu of options. Poor parents could choose KIPP schools to get their kids into the middle class. Or Rudolf Steiner schools for rich kids to make them into creative artists. Or home schools run by the neighborhood mothers. Or college prep schools to get kids into the fancy-pants selective colleges. Or other types of schools that I would never have thought of.

Hey, I know. Maybe the Bernie Bro phenomenon is the last gasp of socialism, because whatever comes next is going to be different.

What will that thing be? I have no idea, except that I suspect it will be derivative of the German Turn from Kant to Jung. But I am sure that it will make everyone from me to the local lefty absolutely outraged.

And why not?

Why should rich lefty white kids set the agenda for the nation? Whatabout diversity and inclusion? Whatabout if diversity turns out to be the rising generation of minority Commoners that want to be resourceful and independent and proud and not tied to liberal rich white kids?

Why can't the rest of us have fun?

Controlocracy: Xi's Big Mistake

Here's a line on China's President-for-life Xi Jinping.

Norwegian political scientist Stein Ringen describes contemporary China as a “controlocracy,” arguing that its system of government has been transformed into a new regime radically harder and more ideological than what came before.

Yes. It's easy for higher-ups in all kinds of endeavors to imagine that the only way to make the system work is for strong leadership at the top.

But, as Xiao Qiang continues:

China’s “controlocracy” now bears primary responsibility for the coronavirus epidemic that is sweeping across that country and the world.

Do you get it, President Xi and Bernie Bros and all the ships at sea?

Strong leadership and central control and top-down systems and administrative hierarchies are not how the world works.

My own Four Laws are a modest contribution to that truth.

That socialism, i.e., top-down controlocracy, cannot work because it cannot compute prices. What does that mean? It means that in order for the world to work, we need input -- prices -- from all the folks up and down the food chain.

That administrative bureaucracy cannot work because it does not have the bandwidth to keep track of everything. Which is the same thing as the first law.

That regulation cannot work because of "regulatory capture" of the administrators by the folks being regulated. Which is a corollary of the first two laws, that, since the regulators don't really know what they are doing they have to rely on the folks in the industry they are supposed to be regulating in order to decide what to do.

That government programs cannot work because you can never reform them. Which is to say the same again, that a government program stops the normal give and take of every human social endeavor, and thus puts it on track for ruin.

"Controlocracy" is the utterly foolish and adolescent idea that you, Mr. Playground Bully, are the smart guy in the room and that if only everyone would just stop their selfish greed and get with the program, Jenkins, then things would start to work again.

But the corona virus epidemic shows the fundamental flaw in the "controlocracy" notion. The whole idea in a "controlocracy" is to impede feedback, because the whole point of the "controlocracy" is that we already know all we need to know. So shut up, peons, and do your job. But, as Wretchard just tweeted:

A Chinese doctor was raising the alarm in December 2019. Then they shut him down. In a world where emergent events will come with increasing frequency we can't afford to have an uncensored, text-only communications circuit.

And that's the point. All events in the world are "emergent" events. They are not the billiard balls of a mechanical system. Everything going on in your body right now is an emergent event, triggered by who-knows-what kind of an emergent-event cascade.

Right now in Seattle it is late winter, and all over the place plants are budding and crocuses are croci-ing and cherry blossoms are getting ready to cherry-blossom. Why? Because God issued the orders on December 27, 2019 at 1:00am Heaven Time? Or is it something much deeper, much more mysterious than that?

We know a heck of a lot about things out there, but the more we know the more we know we don't know.

For instance, the "controlocracy" bug that has infected control freaks all over the world issues from our human conceit about our "consciousness" which reached its apogree during the heyday of "reason and logic" that we now call the Age of Reason.

But ever since reason's apogee we humans have been saying, yes, but. Yes, but, obviously we don't just run on reason, but instinct. And what does that mean? Or, as the German Turn revolved from Kant to Hegel to Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Freud to Jung, we got to the point where we recognized that our conscious mind was just a bobble on top of our unconscious mind. And that mind, or brain, was just a bobble on top of the emergent events going on in the rest of the body where things are going on as if according to some divine plan. Only, what is that divine plan, or is it much more complicated than that?

I think that the best way to understand things is to recognize that, in human affairs, it certainly makes sense to appoint a strong man when the borders are threatened by invaders. Of course, even then, as the Germans determined in World War I, you still need enterprising soldiers down the chain of command to appraise the situation and act responsibly. In other words, the General at the top doesn't have the bandwidth to supervise the details down the hierarchy to the chap on the front line. See Four Laws, above.

But absent that emergency? You'll notice that almost all political appeals want to make you think that there is an emergency that requires top-down supervision from the Savior of the Nation, as if someone were attacking on the border.

Only, the message we get from almost everything in Nature is that everything and everybody, down to the individual cell level and below, should just be getting on with their business as best they can. Call in the US Cavalry -- or the Cajun Navy -- if you are really in a jam. But normally, just get on with things, and call in help from the guy right next to you.

Now, of course, I have a deep dark suspicion that the way things really work is women having lunch together. I was at the Vancouver Art Galley on Monday, and what do you think was going in the second floor café? Exactly. A room full of women, two to a table, discussing things across the table and staring meaningfully into each other's eyes. I dare say the fate of Vancouver was being decided right there, right after the pairs of women separated so that each one could then speak confidentially to another friend and that friend speak confidentially to her friend, and so on, until the whole of the Vancouver Community of Women had been brought up to speed on the developing -- and emerging -- consensus.

But what will not solve things is a new "controlocracy."

Good lord. After the experience of the 20th century and its disastrous "controlocracies" near and far, high and low, how can there be anyone left that does not now recognize the need for emergence, not control?

When Will the Dems Cry Uncle? Not Yet.

Did you notice the interesting thing about last week? President Trump said as how he and President Xi were working together beautifully to deal with the corona virus issue.

But with Democrats it is war.

What is going on here? Well, I'd say, crossing the Churchillian "in victory, magnanimity; in defeat, defiance" with Trump's corporate win-win culture, that with China, Trump has won and so he is showing the Chinese that the United States is not a fearless competitor tussling for world domination, but a win-win benevolent partner that they should learn to trust.

But with the Dems, they have not yet cried Uncle, as the Chinese did on trade. So Trump has not yet reached the point where he has reached victory, and the point where he can switch his strategy to magnanimity, and proceed to a win-win partnership.

So it is still war to the knife with the Democrats. And if you didn't believe that then, after Speaker Nancy's behavior at the State of the Union speech, you certainly believe it now.

Actually, according to folks like J.T. Young at the American Spectator, the top Democrats have a problem. If they don't harass and impeach and investigate Trump at every turn then the lefty activists will primary the more centrist officeholders and pitch the centrists out of office.

And the lefty activists won't learn their lessons, at the earliest, until Trump wins big in November and the GOP wins back the House and maybe not even then.

I know this because I was there in the 70s, in the aftermath of the the Sixties lefty lunge, I know that it takes a while for our lefty friends to get the message. In the aftermath of the Sixties it took two Nixon wins and two Reagan wins and a Bush win before the Dems cried Uncle and decided that, with Bill Clinton, they were New Democrats and centrists after all. And so they won. And then Obama ran as a moderate and the First Black President. And then, under the radar, he hired platoons of lefty activists to run his administation.

Yeah. I blame Obama for lurching the Dems to the left.

And I get it. The educated Gentry class obtains Meaning from its faith tradition of Salvation through Politics. Gentry virtue issues from political action to help the vicitms. Used to be social legislation to help the workers. Now it is diversity and inclusion to counter a society that is institutionally racist and therefore, according to Elizabeth Warren, needs "race-conscious" laws to end the racism. Race-conscious laws so we Gentry can feel good about ourselves and develop meaning from our political activism.

I think that this is horrible. I call it a Great Reaction, going back to the past and its hierarchical political system. Whereas the new order is what Jordan Peterson might call a competence hierarchy.

I say that the modern era celebrates creativity, in which we create the future with our human ingenuity rather than just living in God's creation and God's law.

But how? Our Gentry elite thinks that creativity means more inventive ways to "help" the poor and the marginalized -- and not so incidentally wallow in power and privilege as a reward.

I think they are wrong. I think that creativity means the Hero's Journey of Joseph Campbell and the Sacrificial Hero that gives his life that others may live. In other words, the creative individual does not go out in the world like Lady Bountiful and distribute goodies, and then go home and feel good about herself. Because social justice. The life of the creative is a life of hardship, of a harrowing journey into the underworld of the unconscious, a journey from which few return to tell the tale.

But I don't think we can expect our lefty and Gentry friends to get this. Not for an eternity of winters.

And I think that the real scandal of Gentry creativity and self-congratulation is that it has notably harmed the recipients.

The reason that the working class crashed in the post-Sixties world is that the Gentry taught it to sit around as recipients of social insurance and worker benefits instead of becoming competent Commoners in the constant creative destruction of the modern market economy.

And the reason that marriage and children-within-marriage has crashed with the poor, blacks, and whites and everything in-between, is that the government social welfare system requires people to be victims in order to get in on the loot. Whereas, in the 19th century, workers and Commoners ran their own social welfare organizations, that we now call mutual-benefit societies -- like the Masons, the Elks, the Odd Fellows.

And the reason that the simple non-racism of the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s transformed into the monstrous fact of today's "race-conscious" diversity and inclusion is that a simple ban on government racial discrimination doesn't have any Meaning for secular-religious activists in the Gentry.

I mean: where is the power, the glory in a simple law that says that government can't discriminate on the basis of race?

For the only way that well-born gentry scions know to have a meaningful life is through political activism. Poor things.

But hey. All I can say is that if it weren't for Trump, we'd have to invent him.

Because someone has to teach our lefty Gentry that the way to salvation is not through political activism but through the way of the Sacrificial Hero.

Just don't expect any result on the Sacrifical Hero front any time soon. These Gentry folk are not that smart. They are going to have to learn their lesson and learn it again. And then have the lesson rammed down their throats.

It's a shame, because until they learn their lesson, millions are going to suffer, in consequence of the disasters that the Gentry creates and the "unanticipated consequences"of their conceits.