The Meaning of Life and the Gods of the Three Peoples

As I finish up a long-form article about what "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" means to our highly educated moderns, I find the need to reduce it all to a maxim, a maxim that reflects the different world views of the Three Peoples and their different gods.

So, the meaning of life, for People of the Subordinate Self, comes down to the will of the gods. Whatever the gods are deciding up on Mt. Olympus or as the spirits in the trees, everything on this Earth comes down to the capricious Will of the god in question. And, as we see in The Iliad, the gods tend not to agree among themselves. So God's Will may be the result of a dust-up in the halls of the immortals.

But for the People of the Responsible Self things are different. Because here the monotheistic God is not a capricious member of a court of the gods, but a perfect Creator of the world who has constructed a perfect set of divine laws to guide humans in the right path. Do you see the difference? Now life is not just a question of suffering under God's Will, but a question of understanding divine law and acting on it. Now life is not the Chaos of the will of the gods, but the Order of divine law.

As usual, the interesting situation is the People of the Creative Self. Because the idea now is that there is no God's Will, no divine law. No, things are not that simple. Now it is up to humans to figure it out for themselves. Notice that now we do not have God setting forth his laws but scientists discovering scientific laws; philosophers discovering the limits of reason; psychologists discovering the boundaries between genius and madness; artists stumbling into the music of the spheres. Life is no longer a question of just living God's law but the rather more challenging question of figuring out just what law will promote the welfare of mankind and -- here's a puzzler -- whether the welfare and mankind would be best served by no law at all!

Of course that is where things get complicated. Because it is clear that after you have figured it out for yourself you are faced with two options. Do you proclaim your discovery from the mountain top and demand that the whole world gets with the program? Or do you just live life according to your new wisdom, and tell people what you found out? Do you live your new meaning of life even if it means that the whole world gangs up against you as a heretic and a hater?

This is the difference between the Egoist Hero and the Sacrificial Hero. Your Marx is an Egoist Hero. Listen to me, pal, he says. I just solved the problem of the ages, that the capitalists are going to "immiserate" the workers, and the only way to stop it is to give power to chaps like me so we can stop the capitalists in their tracks and save the workers from evil exploitation.

So when Satan takes the Egoist Hero up into an exceeding high mountain and shows him the kingdoms of the world, and says "all these things will I give thee," he says, "Yeah! Revolution, Baby!"

But the Sacrificial Hero is different. He travels into the echoing caverns of the unconscious and slays the personal demons he finds there, and becomes a sadder and a wiser engine.

When he emerges from his Hero's journey he does not go up into the heavenly precincts of Sils-Maria or fancy Magic Mountain resorts, but simply lives his life, illuminated by the wisdom he has discovered on the boundary between Order and Chaos, and illuminating all around him with the light of his hard-won knowledge.

So, what does it all mean? It looks like we are reduced to the following aphorism:

How to find the meaning of life. For Subordinates, follow the gods' will; for Responsibles, follow God's divine law; for Creatives, figure it out for yourself and leave the rest of the world alone.

But maybe tomorrow I will have a better idea. 

Habermas's Lifeworld and My Three Peoples

I'm working on a long-form piece about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything as it applies to our modern educated Gentry. It featured what I call the German Turn of Germans from Kant through Nietzsche to Marcuse, and then I thought, whatabout Habermas?

I had read Habermas and his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, some years ago, and I thought I better take a look at what I had written on him.

The point about Habermas is that he is a lefty trying to get out of the lefty box canyon, but not if it means a really steep banked turn.

(This is flyboy talk. For pilots, a box canyon is a valley that you fly up with a cliff at the end, and maybe no way to climb over the cliff or no way to turn back without crashing into the walls of the canyon.)

What Habermas did was to convert Marx's economic and social theory of exchange labor and social labor -- taken from the classical economists -- and convert it into a two-system world of system and lifeworld.

Habermas converts the world of abstract labor and social labor into system and lifeworld. System is not just the alienating force of big bad capitalism, but of the terrible twins, rational government and rational business, the system of force and the system of money. Lifeworld is not just social labor producing social value, but, following Husserl and Heidegger, a full face-to-face culture of shared experience in the world, for being is not just consciousness of the ego, but being-there in the world, and being-with the Other.

I think it is fair to say that Habermas's lefty comrades have not really taken up this challenge to their world view. For if they did, they wouldn't be so keen on more government, realizing that big government run by noble progressives is just as dominatory and hegemonic as big business run by eevil capitalists. Let us continue.

Thus, for Habermas, humans are not merely rational actors pursuing their strategic ends through the use of instrumental reason, as the Enlightenment and his teacher Theodor Adorno supposed. They also live in community in the world with other humans with whom they communicate and develop moral agreement. If the rational system of the Enlightenment and its instrumental reason is indeed strategic, a mechanical system that deals only in power and domination, it is only part of the truth. Humans also dwell in a lifeworld of shared cultural tradition. 

See how this applies to my reductive Three Peoples theory? For me, the Three Peoples live in three different lifeworlds, three different "communit[ies] in the world with other humans with whom they communicate and develop moral agreement", three different "lifeworld[s] of shared cultural tradition."

So it makes perfect sense that since they live in different lifeworlds they develop different moral agreements about the meaning of life, the universe and everything. The People of the Subordinate Self live in a neo-tribal community of kindred and (urban) village; their moral and cultural tradition is developed in that lifeworld. The People of the Responsible Self live in the city world of wage labor and market economy and so their moral and cultural tradition reflects that lifeworld.

And then there are our friends the People of the Creative Self, Yarvin's Gentry. The point is that their lifeworld and their moral and cultural tradition is significantly different from the lifeworlds of the Subordinates and the Responsibles. Their ethos of living the creative life makes sense to them, whereas the Responsibles and the Subordinates would regard the creative life as dangerous and reckless.

When you shine Habermas's system/lifeworld light on society it makes complete sense that, given the different lifeworlds and moral and cultural communities in which people live, that they would experience the world differently and could be easily led to believe that other lifeworlds are illegitimate, or deplorable, or exploitative.

But if you believe that humans are "diverse" and live in various lifeworlds then you are ready to start dealing with the idea that people in different lifeworlds are going to disagree about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and what to do about it.

Wait a minute! How come lefties, that worship at the altar of "diversity," are so determined not to understand the lifeworld of the deplorables? I smell a rat!

The Creatives Attack Dignity. Of Course They Do

I often find something useful to react to at the Zman, and today is another such day. For he is writing about "The Loss of Dignity." He is singing my reductive Three Peoples song, only in another key.

How come we have lost the valuing of dignity in cultural and political life?

In the Demon In Democracy, Polish academic Ryszard Legutko observed that liberal democracy had abandoned the concept of dignity. This is the obligation to behave in a certain way, as determined by your position in society. Dignity was earned by acting in accordance with the high standards of the community. In turn, this behavior was rewarded with greater privilege and responsibility. Failure to live up to one’s duties would result in the loss of dignity, along with the status it conferred.

Well yes. That, in my Three Peoples terms, would mean that Responsible behavior would earn a person Dignity points, thereby confirming people in their decision to become and remain one of the People of the Responsible Self.

Instead, modern liberal democracy awards dignity by default. We are supposed to respect all choices and all behaviors as being equal. There are no standards against which to measure human behavior, other than the standard of absolute, unconditional acceptance. As a result, the most inventively degenerate and base activities spring from the culture, almost like a test of the community’s tolerance. Instead of looking up to the heavens for inspiration, liberal democracies look down in the gutter.

Well, yes. Do you see what is going on here? If you are a Creative, and your world view constitutes advancing your right to be creative, and cuddling your Little Darlings in the Subordinate classes, then it makes complete sense to devalue dignity, to award the dignity that the Responsibles strive for by default to all the Creatives messing about being "inventively degenerative" and the Subordinates that are just degenerate. Really, it's brilliant.

And yet, there is obviously something wrong with it. What is it? Why do we get to the point in "liberal democracy" where our masters go about "elevating the profane and vulgar, while pulling down the noble and honorable?" Zman notes that Legutko blames the Protestant reformation. But what is the problem, really?

Maybe we are just not built for anything but scarcity. Want gives us purpose and without it, we lose our reason to exist. Either way, without dignity, we cannot defend ourselves and the results are inevitable.

Well, I would say that this is not so hard. It falls naturally out of the structure of my Three Peoples theory, and the wrong turn that many Creatives have taken.

As a result of reading and deep thought and lucky inspiration that comes to me in the dead of night, I can say that the People of the Creative Self have two paths before them. Both paths are versions of the Hero's journey. Path One is the path of the Egoist Hero: it's all about me and my creative life. Path Two is the path of the Sacrificial Hero. He returns from his Hero's journey sadder and wiser. And he demonstrates his creativity and his heroism by exploring the border between Order and Chaos, trying to understand the borderlands of Chaos so that others may benefit from his trials and his hard-won knowledge.

I am afraid that the dominant part of our modern People of the Creative Self opt for the path of the Egoist Hero. And naturally whatever the Egoist Hero does must be right, because he is being creative. That's at the cultural level. At the political level he needs to maintain the political dominance, the hegemony of the People of the Creative Self, and ever since the brilliant Marx this has involved a political coalition between the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self against the People of the Responsible Self.

What would be the most obvious way to keep your Creative Dominance? Simple. You strip the People of the Responsible Self of their Dignity. You say that the Clients of the Gentry should be accorded just as much dignity as the deplorables in the middle class. Not to mention all the creative types in the yeasty woke neighborhoods of our major cities with their non-binary genders and the like.

You have to appreciate the genius of this. The very thing that Responsibles live by is the dignity of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules. Our educated Gentry is telling us that this means nothing, nay, worse than nothing: deplorable.

Note that this pejorative attack on the Responsibles and calling them names is merely a power play -- what playground bullies have done since the dawn of playgrounds. It is just the natural thing to do if you want to dominate the culture and the politics and keep the Responsibles down so you and your Gentry pals can enjoy your appetite for "ambition, honor, and vanity."

In Maps of Meaning Jordan B. Peterson calls the Egoist Hero by his old name, the Devil,

the spirit who eternally states, "all I know is all that there is to be known"; the spirit who falls in love with his own beautiful productions and, in consequence, can no longer see beyond them. The devil is the desire to be right, above all, to be right once and for all and finally, rather than to constantly admit to insufficiency and ignorance, and to therefore partake in the process of creation itself.

The Egoist Hero rather than the Sacrificial Hero.

So, the way that Responsibles must act to regain their dignity is to have the courage to stand forth and take a stand against leftist conformity, to risk being canceled by the Cancel Culture. As Dave Rubin says, "if everyone started speaking up more—they can’t take us all out."

And I think what we would learn is that the cancel culture mob really is a paper tiger. It gets its power from our acquiescence. From our fear and silence. So I want more people to stand up... Because they use the mob, and they use cancel culture, and they use fear, so that good people won’t say what they think. 

When you think about it, all this is a good thing. Responsibles need to stand up and assert our dignity, and that means taking a risk. You don't earn dignity points just be existing; you earn them by action that deserves to be dignified. Our lefty friends have basically challenged up to stand up for what we believe in.

Why don't we take them up on the challenge? 

We Won't Fix the Federal Budget Until We Commoners Demand It

What do we do about the federal debt, the debt we have dumped on our grandchildren? G. Tracy Mehan III wrote about it ten years ago when the federal debt was 54 percent of GDP. Now it's over 100 percent. He writes

The Republicans have painted themselves into a corner with all this profligate spending. They will soon be faced with the choice, not of cutting taxes, but searching for the least damaging way to raise revenue without encumbering income and productivity. In the game of chicken, budget cuts and entitlement reform versus raising taxes, the Democrats will be hard to beat.

Don't think so. If we are in a jam it is because that's what the American people have voted for. We voted for Social Security, and we oldsters won't vote for anyone that proposes to reform it. And women all want unlimited health care and education, and they won't vote for anyone that proposes to cut Mom's Medicare.

Pensions, health care, and education are the three big government programs, amounting to an estimated $4.6 trillion out of a total of $8.1 trillion. Defense is another trillion, so the government spending on "everything else" is $2.5 trillion.

If we Commoners decide that we are fed up with the gubmint running our pensions, we could change it. We could, if you like, convert to a mandatory savings program for all workers. Or we could just trust American citizens to get on with it.

If American Commoner women decided, they could take health care out of the hands of government. They could make sure their mothers were taken care of in their End of Life, and they could make sure that their husbands earned enough for health care for them and their children. And the Karens could supervise health care for the poor.

If American Commoner women decided, they could take education out of the hands of government -- and all the lefty teachers and professors -- and do it themselves. They wouldn't do it alone, of course; they would do it as a neighborhood, with all the other mothers putting in their share, and specializing in this or that. And they'd rope in the fathers to do the boy stuff.

Gubmint education was started in the 19th century by chaps like Horace Mann when the average human was still barely literate. So it made sense to them for government to step in. Also, they didn't like the idea of the Puritans or the Catholics running the education system; they were Transcendentalists. But I say that today's American women have the chops to educate our children without the supervision of bossy Horace Manns and foolish women professors like Harvard's Elizabeth Bartholet, who thinks homeschooling is "authoritarian." She means, presumably, that parents having authority over their children's education gives them authority. And that is authoritarian. I am not making this up.

This is not that hard. If we are true Commoners and want to take responsibility for our lives and for our loved ones, then we have to tell the authoritarians that they can take their free stuff and put it where the sun don't shine. Otherwise, in the words of Shakespeare, the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

And until that day our overlings are going to take advantage of us, and use our wages as tax money and deplete our savings with inflation to buy votes and indoctrinate our children and inflate our currency and lord it over us. Because we are underlings.

It ain't the fault of Republicans. It isn't even the fault of Democrats. They are the Inner Party and their gig is Jobs for educated Gentry -- and satisfying the Gentry lust for ambition, vanity and honor. They do it with the votes of the Clients and free stuff for underlings.

And if we don't rebel against this stitch-up, then we are underlings, and deserve what we get.

How Do You Counter the Gentry's "Anthems"?

At WattsUpWithThat today they are chuckling about Michael Moore's latest documentary. It suggests that renewable resources aren't quite and pure and spotless as we have heard tell.

They are amused by Michael Mann, the Hockey Stick guy, who tweets, complaining that only in the Trump era could anyone suggest that right-wing plutocrats were secretly funding the effort end our dependence on fossil fuels.

It's funny, really, that a guy who is 20 feet deep in the trough, should be complaining about plutocrats. Except that, as far as I know the plutocrats are supporting the green agenda openly. Plutocrats are quite happy to cash in on renewable subsidies, particularly wind turbines. What do you think Tom Steyer, plutocrats, is up to? And what do you think Elon Musk is doing with his Tesla electric cars? Trying to save the planet? Hell no. He is troughing.

But there's a bigger issue here. There always is.

Backstage, Al Gore is coordinating with Joe Biden on the Green New Deal and we learn how Joe was right there with the program. Yes. The fact is that the educated Gentry is pretty well on board with the extreme climate agenda. And you can see why. It creates lots of jobs for the educated Gentry, whether in scientific research, in bureaucratic regulation, or in lapping up subsidies for Green Energy work. And good little girls like AOC believe.

And anyone that complains is a "climate denier." As in "holocaust denier." By the way, did you know that the area around Auschwitz-Birkenau was notable because it was the center of German attempts to synthesize oil products like gasoline from coal mined at the nearby coal-mines. Also synthetic rubber.

My point is that it is almost impossible to push back against the ruling-class narrative. And, of course, the time and energy you spend could have been more profitably spent on something else. Curtis Yarvin goes on for 8,000 words about this in his "Clear Pill: Part Two." The rulers compose and play their "anthems" that please the Gentry, on the one hand, and on the other they punch out their political formulas.

And by the time they have finished they have hogged all the bandwidth.

It makes you long for the good old days of the 18th century when the thinkers and intellectuals were busy crossing up the ruling-class narrative. So that, in the French Revolution, the rulers were on the ideological defensive.

Look, I get it. Government is always looking for another excuse to wield government power. And there are always plenty of people willing to hire on in exchange for loot and plunder.

Yeah, I know. How did the French Revolution start? It started because the French government was running out of money, and it called the Estates General in order to get the estates to buy in on giving the state More Money. Big mistake, because the Estates General took the bit in its teeth.

See, I really don't want the American people to suffer through a revolutionary era in which everything is turned upside down. And for what? So we can get a Napoleon and the Duchess of Devonshire's Ball in Brussels on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo?

OK, so I am doing my bit, thinking up all kinds of ways in which to discredit the present ruling class and its educated Gentry supporters. And I suppose that's the right thing to do, right now, when the rulers can still count on the support of their Clients high and low that are getting their uninterrupted loot and plunder as promised.

But I wish that it didn't have to be this way, that we could reform the system and discredit the grifters without turning the whole place upside down.

Three Layers, Three Peoples, Three Religions

I just had a brain wave. It happened, of course, during the night.

I realized that Curtis Yarvin's three-layer theory is related to my reductive Three Peoples theory, in this way.

Yarvin's theory of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients is a political theory. It divides the world into three classes, and it is an external theory. It looks at how the world categorizes people.  You look at someone and you say, oh yeah: educated Gentry. Or, if you are Hillary Clinton, you look at Commoners and call them a "basket of deplorables." Or, if you are an activist, you look at subordinate victims and see them as potential Clients of your activism. Yum.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is a cultural theory. It divides the world into three experiences, three ways of living, as a Subordinate, as a Responsible, or as a Creative. It is an internal theory, how people look at themselves, how they experience themselves. So you feel yourself as helpless, thrown about in the world and needing a strong leader? Or do you think of yourself as responsible, living off the script of God and His Divine Law? Or do you think of yourself as a creative person, able to understand and navigate the world without the help of a divine script?

And, of course, let us not forget Andrew Breitbart's dictum that politics is downstream from culture.

But, as John C. Wright says, culture is downstream from religion. So whatabout religion?

Perfectly simple. You look up my Three Peoples Religion label. And my Three Peoples Religion says that the Three Peoples each have a different god. Of course they do.

The People of the Subordinate Self have a vengeful power god, that helps and hinders people as the mood takes him. These gods are like the Olympian gods that run things in The Iliad. Humans are the pawns in their Olympian political wranglings.

The People of the Responsible Self have a God that has created the world and set forth His divine laws and left humans to get on with it. Humans are, of course, responsible for their acts and will be judged at the Last Trump.

The People of the Creative Self have themselves as their god. For them the nature and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not a mystery known only to God, but a Gordian Knot that creative man himself is unraveling. Notice the fundamental advance over the Responsible Self: now the Creative person imagines himself possessing the means to extend his understanding of the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Do you see the breathtaking scope of this three-times-three theory? It lets you look out upon the world and understand that the Brave New World hath such different people in it, and this is normal. You look say, at a helpless victim, beloved of our leaders and betters, and you say, well, someone like that is going to want to nestle under a strong leader, and they are likely to feel helpless and subordinate, and they are likely to feel that the world is a nasty, vengeful place. You can do this because you have three ways of looking at everyone, from a political point of view, a cultural point of view, and a religious point of view.

But, most important of all, you are equipped to understand and judge the world's Big Problem, the Gentry, the People of the Creative Self, the believers in themselves as gods.

And you begin to see, in a glass, darkly, why the Creative chaps have been making such a dog's breakfast of the last century or so: boosting socialism, which is nothing but a return to slavery; the welfare state, which is nothing but a return to feudalism; and activism, which is nothing but a return to the noble conceit of the Middle Ages, the cult of knight-errantry.

I mean, when you are getting everything wrong, maybe you have a problem!

On China: "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Asians"

There seems to be a consensus forming that it is time to Teach China a Lesson. Good and Hard. I would like to dissent from that notion.

Oh, I believe that China's government and ruling class are a bunch of unreconstructed Commies. For sure. And that means, like everyone in politics, they lie about everything and nothing. All in a mindless worship of political power.

But I believe we should take the road suggested by Noel Coward in his WWII song "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans." Of course, I have no idea what Coward actually believed. But I certainly believe that being beastly to the Germans after World War I turned out to be a bad idea.

Of course, after World War II the idea was to make the rubble bounce, and we only changed our minds when we started quarreling with the Soviets, as victors tend to do. So we stood back when Ludwig Erhard restarted the German economy with a new currency -- even though all the experts said he was a fool.

Don't get me wrong. I think we should step back from the close embrace of China and practice a little Social Distancing. But it should all be done in a Hail Fellow Well Met kind of spirit.

In other words, instead of lots of rhetoric about teaching the Chinese a lesson, we should just apply the "iterative Prisoners Dilemma" strategy known as TIT-FOR-TAT. The strategy is simple. You trust and trade with people who demonstrate in their actions that they are trustworthy. You go out into the world ready to trust anyone. If they act in a trustworthy fashion, then you continue the relationship. If they cheat you then you stop trading with them. No Big Deal: you just step away.

Of course, China is not a normal economic counterparty; it is a government, and that means that it is basically untrustworthy, being run by politicians and bureaucrats. And, as we have seen in the Wu Flu epidemic, the natural instinct of a government is to cover up bad news and silence the messenger. Hey, all governments and politicians and activists do this. But Commie governments do it more, because they can.

My point is simple. We don't want to back China into a corner where its leaders think that the only way out is to, say, invade Taiwan. Or to declare the South China Sea a China lake. No, we want the ChiComs to figure that the best way to stay in power and enjoy all the lovely perks of power is to deal with the rest of the world fairly, face-to-face.

Mind you, I expect that China is going to face some nasty stuff in the future. For instance, I think that it is going to find that the cost of its Belt and Road Initiative is prohibitive, and not an economic benefit as I am sure it has believed up to now. And I dare say that the Brits will not be the last to decide they don't want the Chinese designing and running their 5G communications networks.

And, don't forget that the domestic politics in China is pretty fragile. I read a few years ago that there are something like 87,000 organized protests in China every year. And those would not be regime supporters doing their activist "peaceful protest" gig like we get here in the US, but real ordinary people with a beef.

Rather like the folks protesting in the US right now against the lock-downs and getting their Facebook pages censored by Facebook at the behest of Democratic governors. Imagine Facebook shutting down a lefty activist group! Hmm. Maybe our US politics is a bit fragile too!

Of course, all this fits into my Great Reaction and Lefts Errors notions, that the left's faith in politics and government as the royal road to justice and social peace is worse than a crime, worse than a blunder, but a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole point of social animals.

The lefty ChiComs think that China needs to strut its stuff in the world to make the world respect it. Actually, the opposite is true. All the Chinese need to do is be good global citizens -- although certainly not take any guff from anyone -- and then they will find in no time that China rules the world.

As it used to do.

Government: It Always Comes Down to Force

It must have been nearly 20 years ago when a woman acquaintance, said, in passing, that "government is force."

I confess to being a little shocked, at the time. But now "Government is force" is one of my official Maxims. Oh, did I mention that I go on with:

Government is an armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

All government is unjust, because government leaders reward their supporters before the rest of the people.

The only warrant for government power is an existential peril.

What people want from government and political leaders is protection.

There are a couple of articles out there today illustrating my point. The first is the rather chilling battle of the experts over a girl that had been sickly since childhood. One set of expert doctors felt that the girl was genuinely sick; the other set of expert doctors thought that her problem was "psychosomatic" and that her parents were encouraging her belief in her illness.

So, the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) was called in. Justina was declared a ward of the state, and confined to a room in the hospital’s psychiatric unit.

Woah! Using government force to imprison a child over a disagreement between experts whether she was sick or faking it?

Hmm. I'd say that the bar on the use of government force and imprisonment needs to be set just a tad higher than that. But you can see the point. If you are an expert, and 97 percent of experts are right, then just who are you peons to resist their expert decision?

Whatabout experts and the Wu Flu? How much do we believe them and how much should government officials implement their recommendations for the use of force and shutting down the economy and enforcing Social Distancing dicta.

Then there is Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet. She thinks that homeschool education is a problem and that the state ought to prevent parents from going off piste and ignoring the advice of education and moral experts like her.

Homeschooling “not only violates children’s right to a ‘meaningful education’ and their right to be protected from potential child abuse, but may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society.” Because of the dangers of homeschooling, Bartholet recommends that it should be presumptively banned either by the courts or various legislatures.

See what I mean? It is one thing for parents to be wrong. It is another for the state to step in and force the opinion of its experts upon the parents. But then with Curtis Yarvin's three layer theory, the upper class Gentry are the state.

Put it this way. Is there a right to be wrong? And if so, how far does it go?

Here's another look, this time from the Zman. He is making an Order vs. Chaos argument about the election of Trump in 2016.

Through the ballot, the public had injected a foreign body into the political system. How the system would react to that foreign body was unknown, but... What we are getting is chaos. Everything about the old order is suddenly in question, as everything about it is breaking down.

Think about it: that is the whole point of the "revolution, baby" of our lefty friends. You can't have "change" without chaotically destroying the Order of the old regime. And, of course, the people most distressed by the Trumpian chaos are the educated Gentry and the experts of the old regime. They cannot understand, cannot bear the chaos that has been unleashed upon their cosy assumptions and sinecures by the Trumpian hurricane.

In other words, our Gentry friends are completely against "revolution, baby" when it turns out that the revolution is going to upset their apple cart.

And now Trump has decreed a temporary halt to immigration! The nerve!

Actually, we can now understand the concern of the "intelligence community" back in 2016. They had, just had, to spy on the Trump campaign. What would you do if you were the Guardians of Order and this Trump chaos agent came in an started upending things right and left?

If you are a Jungian like me you understand that the question of Order vs. Chaos is central. We need Order, and yet Order is also hierarchy and hegemony. We cannot long survive Chaos, and yet the very center of life is facing up to Chaos and trying to bring it under control.

And the whole point of social animals is to reduce the resort to force.

Getting Beyond Binary Thinking

The Zman today writes about "Binary Thinking," as in good v. bad, as in gay marriage.

One trick the Left has used is to alter the shared consciousness in such a way that everyone is a binary thinker. That is, every issue, not matter how trivial, is assumed to be one thing or the other... 

The classic example of this was the homosexual marriage debate. Before anyone knew what was happening, the beautiful people were insisting that anyone opposed to the idea must hate homosexuals.

Well yes. But what do we do about it? There's no doubt about the grounds of all this. It is the natural, instinctive human programming to come together in a crisis. What human can stand back when the call goes out to rally to defeat the invaders?

And one of the achievements of the Axial Age religions has been to transfer the physical response to danger to the moral realm, for the community is just as much at risk from a moral horror as from a physical threat.

But obviously, 97.2 percent of life is not about the crisis to end all crises in which all good men come to the aid of their country. Or else.

On the other hand, sometimes there really is a crisis and the best way to respond is to call All Hands on Deck!

My line, in my writing, is that in the modern era we have developed, in the market system, an extremely effective way of being social animals and using hierarchy to reduce violence. And I argue that the left represents a Great Reaction against the modern turn with a multi-layered attempt to return to the Good Old Days.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is an attempt to propose that, since there are three very different types of people in the world they will each want very different religious, cultural and political frameworks to fit their different views of the world. And that all enlightened people should agree on that.

Moreover, I argue that in the modern Great Enrichment the old reality that food-growing land was life and wealth has been replaced by a new reality that cooperating in the market economy and developing "intangible capital" inside peoples' heads is the way forward, and since land isn't so important any more neither is the culture of defending Us against Them.

But, there is no doubt that there is a huge "rush" that humans experience from political and moral combat and driving the other guys before us and hearing the lamentation of their women.

I suppose that the only way to defeat the instinct for the moral binary is to defeat the moral binary enthusiasts in single combat.

Because the reason the left uses its moral binary tactics is that up to now, it has worked.

And that is why we got Trump. Because "he fights." He fights for the Commoners and their get-along culture against the Gentry and their I'm-in-charge culture.

Now, of course, I know what we need. We need the Gentry to abandon their Ego Heroism culture that features brave counter-cultural artists and writers, revolutionaries, activistes, and knight-errants of all kinds. They need to be dunked in the ancient and modern notion of the Sacrificial Hero.

The idea is really simple. If you want to change the world, or, as the Jungians say, explore the border between Order and Chaos, then you need to understand that you are not going to succeed as the strutting Creative Hero. You will only make the world a better place by sacrificing yourself on the border of Order and Chaos as you render to the rest of the world, by your sacrifice, a knowledge of how the world works beyond that terrifying border.

There will not be any ego-satisfying "ambition, honor, and vanity" as described by Curtis Yarvin in his "Clear Pill" evisceration of our liberal Gentry. No, on the border between Order and Chaos all that goes out the window. And who amongst us is ready to surrender even one of those egoist conceits, let alone all three?

You can see what is required to get out of our "binary politics." Our liberal Gentry has to abandon its present religion that experiences the Gentry as Creative Heroes saving the deplorables from themselves. And the only way that people abandon their religion is if it utterly betrays and abandons them.

In other words, our liberal Gentry friends have to go, like it or not, on the Hero's journey into the underworld of the unconscious and its terrifying dragons.

I don't think they will do that until well after it is clear to them that their Lefty Prophecy has utterly failed.

The Two Level Left, and Ne'er the Twain Shall Meet

The whole point of life, the universe, and everything for me is to conduct a proctological examination of the left and all its works, and in particular its manifold errors.

So here is James Bloodworth on UnHerd.com worrying about the divide between lefty thought leaders and the rank-and-file. For instance, the Bernie Sanders campaign thought they were going to inspire youngsters and non-voters.

Much like the Corbyn campaign in the recent UK General Election, the Sanders team was banking on a surge in the non-voter and youth turnout. Presented with a genuine alternative, those who would normally stay at home during the election cycle would be enthused enough by the radicalism on offer to actually get out and vote. Or so the theory went.

Only the non-voters and youth didn't turn out. And so the lefties apparently dissolve into an argument over whether the class argument of Sanders should trump the "identity" argument -- in all the various race, sex, and other identity groups on the left.

It's a bit difficult for me to understand the class vs. race argument that is represented by the argument on the left over "class reductionism." You figure out if you can understand this New Republic article. I suppose it is an argument between the old school Marxists that reduce everything to the class struggle and the newer types that have branched out into every kind of non-white-middle-class-male identity.

But I think there is an important thing to understand here, something that the lefties don't understand. And we shall, of course, use a three-layer theory to understand it.

The point is that Clients -- or Subordinates -- approach politics from a tribal solidarity point of view, and what they are interested in is loot and plunder for their tribe. This was what the working class was interested in back in the day and what black voters are interested in today.

But folks in the Gentry -- or Creatives -- approach politics from a moral point of view. They are not interested in loot and plunder. Oh no! They are above all that stuff, except of course that they will get the jobs running all the loot and plunder programs. No, what the Gentry is concerned about is bending the arc of history towards justice, and "hurl[ing] headlong... to bottomless perdition", etc., the racist-sexist-homophobes who "durst defy" their holy call for justice. (Little bit o' Paradise Lost there).

Do you think they are on a bit of a witch-hunt here? I wonder.

The point is that the intellectual lefties, and Jewish Marxists like Bernie Sanders, all imagine that they are the world's foremost moralists. Only they don't call it morality, but "social justice." So they experience politics not as a rather ordinary question of protecting the people against existential perils and rewarding their supporters with free stuff, but as a holy struggle for truth, justice, and the progressive way. That is the world, the "bubble" they live in in their yeasty gentrified neighborhoods from North London to Brooklyn. And everyone agrees with them.

So they don't understand the Commoners that just want to follow the rules, go to work, obey the law and raise a family.

And they don't understand the Clients that just want a reliable ward boss that keeps the loot flowing.

And they get flummoxed and gehet post-election stress disorder or Trump Derangement Syndrome when the world proves them wrong.

There's another little problem, of course. It was the problem that inspired the Frankfurt School after World War I. Although the workers may be defined by their class identity, they are in fact more defined by their national identity. In World War I the workers went dutifully into the trenches. In France, in Britain, in Germany.

And what President Trump is working hard on is getting blacks to identify as American rather than black. Of course he is.

But lefties and Gentry in general are all opposed to nationalism and the nation state. Because Hitler, or something. Thus their opposition to tariffs and borders and limited immigration. In this they are wildly out of sync with the Commoners and also the Clients who are a bit mixed up about their loyalties.

I read a day ago about a black guy that lived in a white neighborhood getting in trouble with the ladies at the church for his pro-Trump views. Well, yeah: he had been in the armed services and learned to identify as an American. Go figure.

All I am saying is that there is bound to be a disconnect between the educated Gentry that justifies its political beliefs by a moral calculus and its rank-and-file supporters in the marginalized sector. The marginalized sector is loyal to its ethnic group and to the politician that promises loot and plunder.

I could go on to say that the conflation of politics and morality among our educated Gentry is a staggering and criminal error, and that our modern wokerati to go down in history as the worst of the worst. For the idea that politics is anything other than force, and that politics can ever achieve a moral purpose other than by accident, is a common ruling-class conceit down the ages.

But that is a question for another day.

Your Health Care Provider is Not Working for You

I was to the girly site Quillette this morning reading a piece complaining about the lack of Wu Flu testing, written by a "single mother, writer, and secondary school teacher" and MFA.

I have been thinking, rather than complaining, about this, and as I have a telephone appointment with my Kaiser Permanente "Care Team" today I plan to ask what "the protocol" is at Kaiser regarding:

• Wu Flu testing
• (Hydroxy)chloroquine cocktail treatment at Kaiser
• (Hydroxy)chloroquine as a prophylactic

I wonder what the answer will be. Because I am on Kaiser as a Medicare Advantage person, which means that Kaiser gets a fixed fee from the gubmint for my care. And because I am an unreformed racist-sexist-homophobe I understand what that means. Kaiser is not working for me, but for the gubmint.

That's the problem with all gubmint programs. The folks you deal with aren't working for you. They are working for some darn politician. And the politician isn't working for you; he is working for the special interests that contribute to his campaign.

So. Why do we do it? Why am I, an unreconstructed racist-sexist-homophobe, signed up with Kaiser for my health care when I know that Kaiser works for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and not for me.

Well, I'll tell you. For me, it's because getting the very best of care and living to age 110 is not that important to me. I have two daughters and six grandchildren and I think I am the luckiest man alive. I really don't want my health provider spending billions to keep me alive till next time. And I don't want the bother of the complicated billing that comes with regular Medicare with a Medicare Supplement.

I realize that for most people gubmint health care is good because, 1) it is free, or freeish, and 2) it means that you don't have to make morally agonizing life-and-death decisions. The protocol does it for you.

I keep reading Instapundit Glenn Reynolds boosting the latest research to extend human life, and I always think that he's missing the point. The whole point of life is that the old'uns die off. It is not a bug that old people have dry skins and dicky hearts and dementia. It is a feature! The longer the old'uns hang on the more the young'uns have to wait around drumming their fingers with impatience.

Hello Nancy Pelosi, aged 80, and Joe Biden, aged 77!

And Donald Trump, aged 73, for that matter.

Really, if you ask me, headline politicians should be in their 50s. Of course, at that age they might be a teeny bit too energetic and get us into unnecessary wars. Or not.

Of course, the whole question of the woman's Culture of Complaint and its basis in the fact that women expect to be protected is fascinating to me.

Because I think that if women are truly to become liberated, the liberation will come when they emerge from out of their Culture of Complaint and stop expecting anything.

But, as I have written again and again, women don't really want that. They want to complain about stuff, and they want to cause trouble at work, but they really don't want to march towards the sound of the guns. And they expect to be protected.

There is nothing right or wrong about this. It is just the way that women are programmed, and you can see why when you study chimpanzees where the males do nothing except protect the borders of the troop's territory. The females do everything else, bearing and raising the baby chimps. That's the line of Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn.

And that is the really important work: bearing and raising the next generation. And then getting out of the way, Nance and Joe!

Of course, I'm not complaining. Oh no!

But if you want to complain about Trump and the gubmint's response to the Wu Flu epidemic, go right ahead.

Just don't forget that the only people working for you are the people you actually pay, directly. Those are the people that might, just might, bend the rules a bit for you.

And paying your taxes to the IRS doesn't count.

Meaning of Life: Let Me Count the Ways

There are, writes Johan Huizinga in The Autumn of the Middle Ages, three different meanings of life that humans attach to. Let's just list them:

• The Path of Denial. "The more beautiful life sees to be attainable only in the world beyond". Therefore it is a waste of time to put effort into the present world; only the next world "will prove to be a deliverance from all earthly concerns." Big thing in the Middle Ages. And Buddhism.
• The Path of Improvement. It is the idea of "the improvement and perfection of the world itself." Not something the Middle Ages believed in. "The world was as good and as bad as it could be". God had made the good things; "it was man's sinfulness that made the world miserable."
• The Path of Dreams. "If earthly reality is so hopelessly miserable and the denial of the world so difficult, this leaves us... to live in a dreamland of shining fantasies, and to soften reality in the ecstasy of the ideal." E.g., the medieval romance full of knights-errant and damsels in distress. Not to mention fabulous feasts and rich tapestries.

But, I just happen to have read the Zman this morning, and he has some different ideas. Each of us has a set of beliefs based on assumptions:

• Communists "assumed that human beings are naturally cooperative, but that private property creates conflict. The greed of a few, exploiting the many, results in conflict between the classes. Eliminate private property and you eliminate that social conflict."
• Libertarians believe in natural cooperation. "Because humans are motivated by self-interest, they naturally cooperate with one another to increase their material prosperity."
• Our Rulers believe in the "blank slate." They see "people come into the world as amorphous blobs that can be shaped into whatever society makes of them." Of course, "The differences we see in people are the result of racism, poverty, inequality and the legacy of white supremacy."

These are all, I would say, versions of The Path of Improvement. Rubbish, writes the Zman. "The engine that drives humanity is the need for safety."

• The Need for Safety "[D]own deep, in the store of man’s oldest desires, is the urge to huddle in the cave with the rest of the tribe, as the storm rages outside. That is man’s oldest desire as a social animal."

Now, I look at all this from my lordly perch and say: Rubbish. What is perfectly clear to me is that my reductive Three Peoples theory explains everything.

I would say that it is the Subordinates, the "thralls" of the Vikings, that believe in The Need for Safety. Of course they do, otherwise they wouldn't be sheltering in place on the demesne of some great lord or the benefits of the welfare state.

I would say that Responsibles or Commoners are the Libertarians that believe in natural cooperation. They are the Adam Bedes of the world that believe they can make a life with their talents and hard work. This is close to the Path of Improvement.

The other meanings of life are ruling class conceits in the Gentry and the Creatives. But, to give them credit, they are all over the map, between the Path of Denial, the Path of Improvement, and the Path of Dreams.

First, Our Rulers believe we are all helpless blobs that cannot thrive without their supervision and direction. Darling. So our rulers must be charged with directing the Path of Improvement.

Pompous rich kids, Communists from Marx to Marcuse, believe that the rich (forgetting that they are the sons of the rich) are screwing the plebs. Probably what they mean is that it is an outrage that their glorious talents have not yet been recognized by their fathers. Hey, Fredo, how yer doin' pal? Is this a Path of Improvement of a Path of Dreams?

Now we come to the two remaining Paths developed by Johan Huizinga. Obviously the Path of Denial is another rich-kid thing. Siddhartha, the Buddha, was a prince who walked away from his wife and kids and princely responsibilities and decided to meditate under a Bodhi tree. Thank goodness rich-kid Trump didn't decide to do this.

Whatabout the Path of Dreams? Isn't it obvious? That's the path of our beloved Wokerati who, realizing that they probably don't have the moxie or the grit to make something of themselves in the real world, decide instead to dream of being progressive knights-errant like the Sir Whatsits in the medieval romances and Arthurian legends. Only they aspire to be Quixotic activistes nobly going forth on their NGO palfreys to bend the arc of history towards justice. And to fight the dragons of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

And thus do we humans wrestle with the problem of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

And what am I doing this lovely shelter-in-place morning? I am listening to dear old Hans Knappertsbuch's recording of Parsifal, nestled deep in the 70 gig-o-bytes of my smartphone musicology. That's the German version of the Sir Perceval medieval romance, Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach. The main thing about Parzival is that it takes the young lad three nights in bed with his lady love, the virgin Queen, to get to the point. And then the next morning he heads out on his knightly quest.

Wagner in Parsifal takes a gentler tone, with Kundry begging, unsuccessfully, for "nur eine Stunde" with the pure fool Parsifal. That's "only an hour" for you German students.

Great Reaction: Vengeance in the 1400s

OK. I finally started reading the great classic by Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages. And it was because I picked up my unread copy of The Broken Spell: A Cultural and Anthropological History of Preindustrial Europe by Pieter Spierenburg and saw references to Huizinga. Hmm, I thought; I should really read Huizinga first. So I got my unread copy of Autumn out and started to read.

The first chapter is all about how everyone was beating each other up with a culture of vengeance back in the 14th and 15th century, whether it was the kings and princes like Charles the Bold and Philip the Good and their ancestral wars or the city folk with their party colors. And then there was the intensity of life.

The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us... The great events of human life -- birth, marriage, death -- by virtue of the sacraments, basked in the radiance of the divine mystery.

Yes, and vengeance.

Whoever would write a history of the House of Burgundy would have to let the motif of revenge sound through their narrative like a pedal point... [B]lood revenge was the essential element that dominated the actions and fates of princes and countries...

The attachment to the prince was childish-impulsive in character; it was a direct feeling of fidelity and community... [and] blazed into reckless passions during feuds and strife.... [Thus] in purely feudal times, separate and isolated feuds can be seen everywhere, in which one cannot find any other economic motive than envy by one side of the wealth and possessions of the other... [and] not less importantly that of honor. 

Of course, I am stringing this out because of my belief in my notion of the Great Reaction, and how the left represents a return to the old culture -- slavery, feudal hierarchy, tribalism, vengeance, and a sort of Quixotic attachment to the knight-errantry of activism.

Of course, when I first set this up, or when it came to me out of nowhere at 2:00 o'clock in the morning, it was just a notion, just supported by a hunch. But really, when you observe progressive politics, what else can you say: "fidelity" to the progressive tribe. Vengeance and envy towards "the rich" and "the corporations" the stirring up of racial emotions. And, as I say, the notion that our modern politics is civil war by other means.

This appears to me in stark terms because one of the big themes that comes out of reading George Eliot's Adam Bede in the last week is the feeling of vengeance that Adam feels towards the young master Arthur Donnithorne, who has seduced the young girl that Adam hoped to marry, and how people like the Rev. Irwine talk Adam out of it, and how the saintly Dinah Morris by her example makes vengeance seem petty and unworthy.

For the question is: what changed? What changed between the tribal, feudal culture of the late Middle Ages and the rural Commoner culture of 1800 (viewed by George Eliot from sixty years later) where in people like Adam Bede and Dinah Morris their own personal behavior was more to be judged than the insults against them? And in people like the tenant farmer Poysers honor consists in having a spotless character in the community.

And what has changed today where the progressive left epitomizes all the qualities of the Autumn of the Middle Ages with its violent politics-with-everything and its partisan with-us-or-against-us ethos?

Well, I say that the old ways are never far below the surface. That is the point of concepts like Jung's archetypes, to remind us that our rational conscious mind is but a surface effect rippling on a vast depth of instinctive, coded behavior.

Now I do not assert that we moderns are more moral than the ancients -- or indeed our progressive pals. I think that the reason that slavery, feudalism, tribalism, and vengeance have retreated somewhat is because they do not pay when compared to the alternative, the market culture. For most all of us we can live a much better and more prosperous life by attaching to the culture of the market, which is founded on the notion of trust: trust all those that behave trustworthy towards you. And the untrustworthy? Don't deal with them; don't try to teach them a lesson; just stay away.

Now I believe that our progressive friends do not live so much in the market culture. They live much more in hierarchical, party organizations, from government education to government research to political activism. And as for the arts scene! So, for them, the old ways make more sense.

You are on the tenure track at a university? You size up the politics of your department: Whose side should you be on? Which senior academic should you support? What are the right opinions that will identify your party colors and help you get in with the in-crowd?

Wanna be an activist? So which monster of oppression are you going to attack and how are you going to publicize your activist campaign? In the progressive culture getting along with everyone is not the ideal. The ideal is to find a good enemy and attack! Oh, and, as Herod said to Emperor Claudius in Robert Graves' I, Claudius: Trust No One!

On this view, the strategy of the Commoner racist-sexist-homophobes should be to try to alter the payoffs in the culture of the educated gentry to reduce the payoffs of party loyalty and discipline. And to soften the feudal attractions of the welfare state by privatizing as much as possible.

Or not. The fact is that the world has not changed since the Middle Ages because some cunning strategist planned it all out in an OODA loop. Things changed because they changed, and nobody knows why.

Mrs. Poyser and the Plague of Karens

The general opinion, experts say, about Mrs. Poyser, the tenant farmer's wife in George Eliot's Adam Bede, is that she is a "comic character."

To which I say: you experts are missing the point. George Eliot gives Mrs. Poyser a comic turn because otherwise she would appear so serious as to make her a deeply unpleasant character. And all the characters in George Eliot's novels have some redeeming quality. Because George Eliot was that kind of woman. Henry James:

Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her… Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking.

Everybody loved George Eliot, despite themselves.

Now for a bit of throat-clearing. We are told by our betters that the society of old was a white patriarchal society where women were oppressed and kept in their place. Maybe so. But, on the evidence of George Eliot, it was also profoundly matriarchal. If the men were patriarching out in the field, the women were matriarching back in the home. And how.

Mrs. Poyser in Adam Bede is the mother of three children -- two rambunctious boys and baby Totty. She is also mothering two orphaned nieces, Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrel. She is running a dairy, renowned for its cream cheese, and keeps a remarkably clean kitchen, that visitors never forget to praise.

Mrs. Poyser's big problem is the unmarried girls in the household, dairymaids and whatnot. Because these single girls think of nothing but "finery," all except the sainted Dinah. These days we refer to "finery" as the "baubles, bangles, and beads" of the song made memorable by Peggy Lee.

One interesting thing in Adam Bede is that the married women all rate highly the provision of a "bit o' victual" to their husbands as the major thing they do. I take that to be George Eliot's hint that getting food on the table in 1799 during the Napoleonic Wars was not a trivial matter.

In brief, far from the world being a patriarchy, for the Commoners it was a serious matter where everyone's contribution, men and women, mattered. I dare say it was a matter of life and death rather than a choice between Whole Foods and Trader Joes.

The other thing that seemed to be a matter of life and death was the reputation of the family in the community. Any misdeed by any member of the family shamed and humiliated not just the sinner but the whole family. So when Hetty Sorrel kills her out-of-wedlock baby the Poyser family immediately decides to pick up and leave the land they have farmed since whenever and move to another place where their shame is unknown.

Mrs. Poyser seemed to think that the only way the unmarried girls could be got to do their work around the house and in the dairy was through detailed supervision, featuring constant nagging and complaining. Who are we to say that she was wrong?

It is clear that women today still think that constant supervision and nagging and complaining is the way to get the world to work, and we have come to call this attitude "Karen" that we understand as "an entitled, obnoxious, middle-aged white woman." Some opinion-makers have suggested that many women in public office exhibit this characteristic, especially during the current plague.

Who am I to disagree? But I would advise all women in public life to think seriously about this issue. It may be possible to run a household on this basis, and maybe its strategic value is to encourage all unmarried girls to get out of the household as soon as possible and start making his "bit o' victual" for a darling husband.

But in the larger world, detailed supervision does not work. That is the meaning of the market economy. You offers your price, for your labor or your product, and the miracle of the price system works the whole thing out without any Karens -- or Stalins -- having to order anyone about.

And, by the way, it is also the judgement of the German General Staff, which determined during and after World War I that detailed supervision of lower ranks did not work in the "lethal battlefield" of rifled guns and artillery. Responsibility had to be pushed down the chain of command as far as possible.

In my view, Karenism is a disease of the whole liberal woke-aholic world. It is the idea that educated, evolved Gentry were born to supervise and nag the ordinary Commoners of the world. Because of their bigotry and superstitions.

This, as they say, is worse than a crime, it's a blunder. It may be possible, it may be desirable, to run a household as Mrs. Poyser ran the Hall Farm. But anything beyond the scope of the family -- and maybe the neighborhood -- does not respond to Karenism. And, for sure, bossy supervision should not be enacted into law, as in regulating whether people can have drive-in church services or whether the sale of seeds at Walmart is an essential service or not.

Oh, I get it. In the present plague, politicians are desperate to seem decisive and leader-like. And bureaucrats are desperately trying to come up with stuff to make it look like their flaccid and inefficient operation is "fit for purpose."

But guess what! We humans are social animals. We are at our best and most social during an emergency. This is exactly the time when we should relax the rigid web of supervision and Karenism and encourage all our good citizens to "have a go" and figure out something that might help their fellow humans.

I am afraid that some of our fellow citizens are going to have to find this out the hard way.

Adam Bede, the Exemplary Commoner

In the current Age of Social Distancing I am re-reading my favorite Jane Austen and George Eliot novels.

And what I am finding out is that Nothing Has Changed. If you read Jane Austen you read about women having Satisfactory Emotional Experiences, each one depending on where Austen puts the character in the emotional Bell Curve of feminine experience.

And one of the most important parameters is the extent to which the character publicly exhibits her emotional state. Austen's heroines tend to keep their emotions guarded. Her villains and idiots tend to let it all hang out.

A good example of this is Mansfield Park where the three sisters, Mrs. Price, Mrs. Norris, and Lady Bertram, are all examples of what not to be: Price a helpless emotional victim, Norris a vile emotional bully, and Bertram a lazy emotional zero.

But whatabout Fanny Price, the timid heroine of the book? Well, she is an emotional hurricane, feeling everything to the very depths of her being, but being the poor cousin taken in by the Bertrams, she cannot express her emotions publicly.

You can see that this is a problem when you decide to dramatise Mansfield Park for TV. How do you show Fanny being emotionally overcome when she first meets the stern patriarch Sir Thomas? Or her delight when it turns out that she will not have to live with her monster Aunt Norris? Or her helpless love for her cousin Edmund who is the only person at Mansfield Park that treats her like a human being?

For instance, there is the scene where Edmund helps Fanny write a letter to her beloved brother William.

Fanny's feelings on the occasion were such that she felt herself incapable of expressing; but her countenance and a few artless words conveyed all their gratitude and delight, and her cousin began to find her an interesting object.

The point of Mansfield Park to my mind is all about a Commoner girl thrown into a nest of Gentry swells. How on Earth does such a girl survive it? The answer, of course, is steadfastness and principle, living to rule.

The same thing applies to George Eliot's great novel Adam Bede, that I would subtitle "Story of a Commoner."

But first an aside. What happens in the first scene in the carpenter shop where Adam and his brother Seth work? The men interact with a Culture of Insult. No kidding. You mean that back in the day in George Eliot's England, the men were insulting each other in an almost friendly way just like men do today? I Can't Believe They Did That.

And when Adam goes home to his mother after working late, what happens? She issues into an orgy of Complaint -- about just about everything.

You mean to say that George Eliot knew all about the masculine Culture of Insult and the feminine Culture of Complaint? So it's not just me making it up? Well I Never.

Anyway, the whole point of the novel, from beginning to end, is the examination of Commoners trying to do the right thing. They do it, of course, by reference to the Bible, trying to understand its maxims and their application to their own lives. Both Adam Bede and his heroine the Methodist lay preacher Dinah Morris are always pondering the right action to take. In comparison their antagonists, Hetty Sorrel and Arthur Donnithorne are governed by their emotions and instincts, do not think about the consequences of their actions and turn out badly.

Aside: Adam Bede was written shortly after Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter featuring the lovers Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. You tell me that George Eliot wasn't commenting on the unlikely duo in Massachusetts, who do not "head out West" as any real -- rather than fictional -- youngsters would have done in their situation.

The Introduction to my copy of Adam Bede speaks about the book being about "ordinary people" who had not previously appeared in English novels except as "clowns and buffoons and criminal types."

Such people were disenfranchised in Victorian times as to political power and, until George Eliot came along, were more or less disenfranchised as citizens of the English Novel.

But really, what has changed? Today the ordinary Commoner is just as despised and disenfranchised as ever. The whole point of the wokerati and the Get Trump movement is to stop any effort of Commoners to secure a decent treatment from the modern state that is run by for and on behalf of the Educated Gentry. And as to the enfranchisement of Commoners in today's American or English Novel! Well, Darling! The Very Idea!

The point, of course, is that George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans, was born a Commoner, daughter of a carpenter that became a steward or land-agent. He is represented in Middlemarch in the character Caleb Garth, whose daughter Mary Garth refuses to marry the unsteady Fred Vincy until he shows himself "willing and able to live seriously, practically and sincerely." La Wik.

Mary Garth is a Commoner. Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, is Gentry. Dorothea can afford to make a few mistakes in life. And she does. But not the Commoner Mary Garth. She better get it right first time. And she does.

See, my line is that we are in the middle of a great Culture War to determine whether 21st century Commoners have the right to live our ordinary lives free of the oppressive cultural hegemony of Gentry liberals.

What Gentry liberals want you to believe is that the only thing is to do the Don Quixote thing and tilt at windwills until the poor helpless victims of the world are all saved. But if you are a Commoner you should stand aside until the glorious lefty effort to bend the arc of history towards justice is complete and all the medals and sinecures have been handed out to deserving liberals.

I say there is a word for the culture of the left and its cultural and poitical agenda.

That word is: Injustice.

And the place to start to understand all this is in the pages of Adam Bede.

The Problem with Two-Layer Cultural Analysis

I'm a three-layer man. I believe that you need to understand human society as a three-body problem, and not as an Us vs. Them two-body problem.

And that is especially important for Us, whether you call Us the far-right, conservatives, Responsibles, or Commoners.

The three-body analysis reduces to an Us vs. Them analysis, of course, in this way.

If you are Curtis Yarvin and his Gentry, Commoner, Client three-layer system you notice that while the three layers have three different cultures, the politics devolves into a coalition between Gentry and Clients against Commoners.

I'd say that if you start with a two-body problem, such as Cloud People vs. Dirt People -- from Dennis Price and adopted by the Zman -- or Anywheres vs. Somewheres -- from Brit David Goodhart -- you are missing the point.

(Actually, Goodhart's two-body theory is really a three body one. He reckons Somewheres at 50 percent of the population of Britain, Anywheres at 25 percent, and the rest as "Inbetweeners.")

You can see my complete list of Three Layer theories here.

But it is easy to make the mistake, because the third layer, the Clients of Curtis Yarvin or the Subordinates of my reductive Three Peoples theory, is not an actor on the political stage. That should be obvious from its name. Clients and Subordinates, whether working class whites in the 19th century or the "marginalized" of today, are people that attach to a leader and expect the leader to represent them and act on their behalf in the political square.

In other words, in return for protection the Clients and Subordinates sign on to the agenda of their leader, and usually that agenda is political power.

Today we have a piece out of The Federalist by John Daniel Davidson that says that Bernie Sanders "won" the Democratic nomination because Joe Biden has pretty well adopted his "democratic socialist" platform.

Yeah, and the point about the current rage for "democratic socialism" is all the power it gives to Bernie Bros and AOCs and all other kinds of educated Gentry to order other people around.

The point about all left-wing platforms since Marx and Engels is that, whatever socialism or identity politics or postmodernism may do for the helpless victims -- that I call Little Darlings -- the bottom line is All Power to the Lefties.

That was true with the Communist Manifesto; it was true with the Fabian socialists; it was true with the Frankfurt School; it was true with Antonio Gramsci's ΅march through the institutions;" it is true with Marcuse's "repressive tolerance;" it is true with today's wokerati and Green New Dealers and the latest New Thing, "degrowth."

My point is that you are missing the point if you don't understand that the game of the lefty message-of-the-moment is always to capture the support of the lower-order victims, whether workers or blacks or immigrants -- or fake victims like gays and feminists -- so that the left can have power.

If you say, oh well, Cloud People vs. Dirt People, at least it's a fair fight, you are missing the point, because really the Cloud People are buying the support of lower-order victims in order to make war on the Dirt People.

If you say, oh well, Anywheres vs. Somewheres, at least it's a fair fight, you are missing the point because really the Anywheres are buying the support of the Inbetweens in order to make war on the Somewheres.

When you put it that way, things look a bit different.

Now I say that the three layers are all natural and physical "stages" in human cultural evolution. A large chunk of humans have felt themselves subordinate and understood that the road to survival is the shelter in place as the subordinate of some powerful lord. People who have graduated into the culture of the market economy accept the abstract rules of the market economy and the monotheist God and they have a perfect right to live like that. Highly educated people see themselves as creators, fashioning something new out of the unformed clay of human evolution. So they want to practice their creative ideas in the world.

All I say to the creatives is: practice your creativity on yourselves and not on the people. Why? Because 97.2 percent of all creative endeavors end in failure. And the more people that are enrolled -- or drafted -- into your experiment the more that will suffer in the event of failure.

This is nothing remarkable. It is baked into the ancient notion of the Hero's Journey. Wanna be a Hero? Then you must go down into the Underworld of your unconscious and grow some wisdom, become a sadder wiser engine, before you come back into the actual world of the everyday and start saving society.

This is our fundamental problem today. The Creatives -- or Cloud People or Anywheres -- think they have a warrant to order the rest of us around, because they are special.

Fine, Sunshine. Just don't forget that everyone else, the non-specials, have a right to live according to their lights, and not according to your lights.

The key thing to understand is that the Hero's Journey usually ends in Sacrifice, not in Hosannas from an adoring populace.

Are you prepared for that, Sunshine? Have you studied up on the Sacrificial Hero?

Didn't think you had.

COVID-19 Lesson: What You Are Not Allowed to Say

The problem with China is that its government can lie without consequences. Ditto Putinist Russia. Etc.

That's why we can't trust them.

But our liberal friends all seem to be getting a liberal Hive consensus that the whole Wu Flu thing is about anti-Chinese racism. Such as Ben Stein's 78-year-old friend:

“It’s not the ‘Chinese virus’ like Trump says. It’s just a virus and to call it the Chinese virus defames all of the wonderful people of Chinese descent in our country. It’s racist and I don’t want to hear it.”

A gay artist acquaintance has the same take. Of course he does. Because liberal anti-racism has been the most glorious moral crusade since the Frenchies' Reign of Terror. They ain't gonna give up on this one until we ram it back down their throats and choke them.

But my truth is that wherever there is something that you are not allowed to say, then there is a problem. Like the N-word. Which even I don't dare write.

Message to African Americans: Suppose you all declared that the ban on the N-word was over because we got the power and who cares about a couple of gap-toothed racists back in the hills? Talk about liberation!

Now we hear about universities determining what you are allowed to call the Coronavirus that seems to have originated in Wuhan, China. Anything else, you are not allowed to say. Because racism.

Message to Asian Americans: When liberals decide to end the anti-Asian quotas at Harvard then you will know that you can start to believe liberals when they yell and scream about anti-Chinese racism.

So here's my idea. When anyone says "you are not allowed to say X" then you cannot trust that person.

Because Trust is a two-way street. If you say that I am a liar and a racist, then you are saying that I don't have a right to have an opinion. That I can't be trusted.

Well, hello Sunshine! When you say that "I" don't have a right to have an opinion it means that "you" can't be trusted.

Because the first thing that a human does when they have shut down the opposition is they start lying. Humans are like that. They only lie when they think they can get away with it.

As you recall, the Chinese doctor that first tried to publicise the Wu Flu got taken in by the Chinese police and told the facts of life.

Now I am not one of those that think we should teach China a lesson. I don't say this because I am a wimp, although I certainly am a wimp. Otherwise I would have the courage to use the N-word.

No. We just need to proceed on the basis that we can't trust the Chinese government and we can't trust anyone paid to echo Chinese government propaganda, and we can't trust anyone on whom the Chinese government might have power.

When you have a counterparty that you know you can't trust, well, that changes things.

For the last 20 years we have given China the benefit of the doubt, assuming that in good time it would emerge from its genocidal Maoist past and join the modern world of trust and reciprocity.

But obviously, with President Xi appointing himself president-for-life and with the Chinese government lies about the Wu Flu we have to understand that we can't trust the Chinese government. And we likely won't be able to trust it until the day dawns when the ruling party recognizes that even a glorious ruling party like the Chinese Communist Party needs an opposition.

Of course, beyond having an opposition there is the Cloud Cuckoo Land of actual alternation in office with that opposition. Imagine!

Yeah. Imagine if in America's universities conservative voices were actually allowed to be heard. Forget the idea that a Harvard or a Yale might actually appoint a conservative as president.

Hello Google! Do you see how the James Damore kerfuffle broadcasts to the whole world that it cannot trust Google? And do you see that that might be a problem for Google? Especially if some stockholders were ever to sue Google?

The whole experience of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is based on the expansion of the boundaries of trust.

Back in the old days you would only trust your kin. (They say that the old days still apply in China).

Then you could only trust people in your tribe. Then people in your nation.

And now in the global elite you can trust everyone in the globalist elite.

But the real rule is that you trust anyone that acts trustworthy towards you. If they act untrustworthy then you stop trusting them. That is the lesson of the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game's TIT-FOR-TAT strategy.

Obviously, if someone comes right out and says that they can't trust you, because racism-sexism-homophobia, then you can't trust them.

Like I say. This is not that hard.

Understanding the Left's Secutar Religion

Radio host Dennis Prager, author of The Rational Bible, proposes that the left's worship of nature is a return to the old religion. Quoting G.K. Chesterton, he writes

"When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything." 

One of these substitute gods has been nature. 

Indeed, of all the false gods, nature is probably the most natural for people to worship. Every religion prior to the Bible had nature-gods -- the sun, the moon, the sea, gods of fertility, gods of rain and so on. 

That is why the farther Western society gets from biblical, i.e., Judeo-Christian, religions, the more nature is worshipped.

And, of course, this new religion has adopted all the trappings of the old. He quotes Ross Douthat at The New York Times,

"The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs: a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of 'thou shalt nots,' and a piping-hot apocalypse."

But I take a different tack, which you may accept or not, as you wish. And, of course, my tack is informed by my reductive Three Peoples theory, and its adjunct, the notion of what religions the Three Peoples believe in. I set out the following notions:

The God of the People of the Subordinate Self is the great lord or patron.

The Subordinate does not experience the possibility that his actions may make a difference. He is like the Achaeans before the walls of Troy, whose battles were completely determined by the Olympian gods. He doesn't pretend to know how the world works; he just submits to the power of his lords and gods.

Compare that with the God of Responsibles.

The God of the People of the Responsible Self is the abstract, though personal, God of the Axial Age religions... The problem for humans is no longer to submit to the actual power and might of the ruler, but to submit to the abstract rules of the Law.

The Responsible still does not understand how the world works, but he acts on the general principles of God's Divine Law in the faith that such action will be successful.

But the world of the Creative is different.

The God of the People of the Creative Self is the Creative Self. If the old God was the creator of the universe, or at least in on the design, the modern creative self aims to become as God. The nature and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not a mystery known only to God, but a Gordian Knot that creative man himself is unraveling and will eventually master. That is why our modern ruling class is full of plans for improvement and bending the arc of history towards justice. Society is, for them, a creative project.

The point is that in the modern age since the scientific revolution mankind has come to believe that he can understand the world enough to make a difference. It is no longer a question of following orders from the Olympican gods or following the Divine Law of the Axial Age God. The world seems to be understandable. That is why, as Prager notes,

When you ask atheists, as I have for decades, what they believe in, the most common answer is "science."

The point is that, if you believe in science, you believe that humans can make a difference through improving their understanding of science, or "how the world works."

And "we" all believe this, these days.

The question is, of course, whether human knowledge should be a social project, of humans in social cooperation, or a political project, deploying science with force.

The basic fault line between Right and Left, I would say, is the question of force. Shall we use science to enact a forced march to the future? Or shall we let the natural social cooperation of humans, informed by experiment -- and most important of all by mistakes -- to illuminate the future.

Yes. The $64,000 question. Shall we lordly rulers permit our underlings to make mistakes? In my view we humans advance to the future over the rubble of our mistakes.

Now it is my belief that the left's faith in political force represents a return to the past. Because I think that the whole principle of all social animals is the principle of the reduction in force.

You see this in the present Chinese Virus epidemic. Our lefty friends are horrified by the off-the-cuff remark by President Trump about the encouraging prospect of (hydroxy)chloroquine. Where was the FDA approval? Where were the double-blind studies? Where was the protocol?

And CNN journalist Jake Tapper just asked President Trump about the return to normal: "What's the plan?" In that he echoes Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) who campaigned on the theme of "my plan is..."

Well, it was the Prussian general von Moltke that said "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy." He meant that, once the battle starts, everyone from the general in charge to the lowliest subultern is going to have to improvise and react to the changing conditions on the ground.

Do you understand what that means, Jake Tapper? It means that now, six weeks into the Corona War, the plan, if there was one, is dead and buried. All the administrative state procedures and chains of command and expert advice are there only to enforce "settled science" and medical knowledge. But when the war starts all that safe-spaces stuff goes out the window. Because we are now all guinea pigs, and nobody knows what will work.

The perfect example is the AIDS epidemic. Gay AIDS activists did a remarkable job putting pressure on the medical and administrative hierarchy to permit the use of experimental drugs on AIDS patients. Because when you are under a death sentence, you are not worried about double-blind studies and administrative regulations. You are willing to be a human guinea pig and try anything that might save your life.

So I don't think that our secular religious friends are going back to the past with their nature religion. Of course Nature is amazing. Indeed the more we learn about Nature the more we are amazed.

My problem with our secular religious friends is the return to force, the idea that we know all we need to know and here is The Plan. Or else.

And that's why I call the left a Great Reaction.

Human Sense and Sensibility Never Change

A couple of days ago I just couldn't take it any more, so I whipped out my copy of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and reread it.

Every time I reread Jane Austen I seem to penetrate to a new depth.

For instance, it seems to me that all the characters, for all that they are Regency era swells, are no different that humans today.

All the women in Sense and Sensibility are prone to "hysterics" except our heroine Elinor.

OK. We are not allowed to use that word today. Sexism, dontcha know. But today almost all women jump at the chance to have a Satisfying Emotional Experience. So what's the difference? Both emotional experiences are predicated on the presumption that someone will show up and pat the little dear and tell her how helpless and innocent she is.

So, in those days we had "hysterical" females. Today we have females that get totally bent out of shape by a "microagression."

The exception, our heroine Elinor Dashwood, has all the emotional responses that all the other women are having. Only she keeps it bottled up, because someone has to keep on carrying on.

Eventually, her sister Marianne realizes what a heavy load Elinor has been carrying, and begs her forgiveness. But only in the novel, not in real life.

The men, except for the peerless Colonel Brandon, are moral cretins. They flop around engaging the affections of all the unattached young women, without a thought for what they are doing. And only in retrospect do they realize what bounders they are. Or, like John Dashwood, they are analyzing the world purely in monetary terms, of pounds a year in income, and assuming that everyone else sees the world that way.

Of course the women, whoever they are, spend the whole novel judging the other women and their behavior. So nothing has changed there.

But here is a puzzler. It raises the question of just how satirical Austen was. For instance, in Volume III, Chapter VIII, Elinor ruminates on the dastardly Willoughby, and judges his "extravagance and vanity," his every "faulty propensity," as though she were God.

I suppose the genius of Jane Austen is that we can never really be sure when the character is speaking, when Austen is speaking, or indeed when Austen's Muse is speaking.

Maybe if I took the time to read Austen's letters with her sister Cassandra in Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others I might find out.

In any age, of course, people are busily judging others with complete confidence in their authority to do so. Ben Stein reports on a 78-year-old liberal lady castigating him for a comment on China.

“I don’t want to hear that,” she said angrily. “It’s not the ‘Chinese virus’ like Trump says. It’s just a virus and to call it the Chinese virus defames all of the wonderful people of Chinese descent in our country. It’s racist and I don’t want to hear it.”

Sweetie Pie Ben "didn’t want to argue about it for even a moment." But I rehearsed in my mind the sort of comeback appropriate for the occasion. Maybe this:

I don't know about that, but have you ever thought that pejorative rhetoric like that is what is going to get us more Trumps?

I am doing a long think piece right now that is anchored in this thought from Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return.

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[.]

Humans are obsessed with the question of suffering, and I would argue that it is not just "primitives" that are obsessed with it. Axial Age religions are obsessed with Sin and Redemption, where Sin is the consequence of trying to avoid suffering, and post Death of God secular ideologies are likewise all in unison that the sufferings of the marginalized and oppressed are all the fault of someone, a someone that is probably white and probably male and certainly privileged.

But what if our obsession with suffering is just a human conceit? That suffering is nobody's fault, least of all racist-sexist-homophobes and Satans and Old Scratches. That life, the universe, and everything is uncertain, with a quantum theory roll of the dice every moment.

Surely it cannot be so. Because what would all the moral arbiters and bullies do then, poor things?