Ch1: Curtis Yarvin's "Gray Mirror" Project

The polymath Curtis Yarvin, smart Jewish kid that blogged for years as Mencius Moldbug and created Urbit, a new software environment, is at it again. He is writing "Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince" that proposes a politics for the 21st century.

But Yarvin is writing his book online, using Substack, "a place for independent writing." So you get to read the first two chapters of Gray Mirror on Substack for free. And then you can pay $22 for a subscription, or wait until the book comes out. I paid my $22 because I am fascinated by Yarvin, and think his ideas, right or wrong, should make you think. He certainly makes me think.

But Yarvin issues a dire warning. If you subscribe, he says, he'll send the fragments of his book to you by email. But:

If you forward them, kittens will die. If I violate the sanctity of your email, my kittens will die.

Oh no!

However, I assume that it is OK to analyze and discuss what Yarvin has written. So here goes on the first installment, "#1. A General Theory of Collaboration."

Back in the day, maybe, people could just hide from the world. But now in 2020 "everyone is relevant" and "everyone is either a collaborator or a dissident." with respect to political power.

Everything is about power. Everything has to have a side. Everyone knows what side they should pick. Pick it—and you're a collaborator. Reject it—a dissident.

It's a "total state" where everything is about power and everybody has to care. But if, as Yarvin proposes, the current regime is "broken, cannot be fixed, and merits neither your fealty nor your odium," and you should be neither collaborator or dissident, then what?

"Detachment," that's what. It's the strategy of Czech dissident Vaclav Havel. The strategy for people who wish to be free of their enslavement, as collaborators or dissidents in the total state, is this:

First, they must teach themselves to be powerless. They must fully inhabit their private irrelevance. Above all, they must stop trying to change the world.

So, in this, Yarvin is congruent with me, for I say that the important thing to understand about the modern world is that power is no longer that important, because wealth is no longer in land, but in peoples' minds, and you can't loot and plunder minds like you can good food-growing land. In fact, if you want to enjoy the fruits of peoples' minds you would want to fertilize and water those minds rather than plunder them.

Now it is time for a Three Phase history. Pre-civilized societies were total states, says Yarvin, because everyone was relevant. But then came pre-modern civilization:

[These] were partial states, in which power only concerned a small set of rulers, or regime. Everyone else was a subject[.]

But now, since Gutenberg and especially since the Internet, everyone is connected, everyone is relevant. And everyone has to love the regime: back to the future.

But power is insecure. That is why it wants us to love it. And the worse it gets the more it wants us to love it. "The closer a regime feels itself to death, the worse its behavior must become."

Sound familiar?

Our big problem in the current moment, says Yarvin, is the power leak, that "confers sovereign power on an individual or institution not formally entrusted with it." It is all around us, with lobbyists, corporations, non-profit groups that have power without responsibility. Unaccountable power is evil.

The point is, if I get it, that in any society beyond a hunter-gatherer band, there must be a regime and subjects, because the society is too big for everyone to be totally relevant like they are in a prehistoric society. In other words, ours is a society with "power leaks" in which people get to feel good because they have appropriated power from the regime. In fact we merely contribute to the gathering incompetence of the regime. Like right now.

So Yarvin wants an "ultramodern partial state" where we honestly admit to having officials with power and subjects without it -- and no power leaks. But that's OK, because

There are two principal advantages of a well-designed partial state. First: it tends to work much better. Second: its subjects, since their opinions don’t matter at all, can think and say what they want.

But what if the officials oppress the subjects? You mean like right now? Exactly. what could be worse than the current dysfunctional regime and its general incompetence? And if power is not really that important anyway, and not something that really benefits anyone, well, why not be "detached" and get on with life? 

For instance, you could spend five years on a disquisition about politics and power, in Unqualified Reservations, then invent a whole new software universe, like Urbit, and when you have got Urbit pretty well up and running, you take off and write a book about the new ultramodern partial state that is to come.

Interestingly, Yarvin is proposing what the Zman is writing about today, about people being unplatformed. Zman says: Don't fight back. "When you engage with them, you are giving them oxygen."

The way forward is to reduce the number of contacts between them and us.

In other words, "detachment." 

The Woke Contradiction in CorporateLand

Trying to keep up with the tech Joneses I get a email from Benedict Evans that tells me about the latest and greatest in the tech universe. A couple of days ago his email had two links that illustrate the cultural contradictions in the culture of Tech Land.

One of the links is about Apple, and the extraordinary vision and determination at Apple: "Apple's Relentless Strategy, Execution, and Point of View." Stephen Sinovsky, a Microsoft veteran, compares and contrasts Apple's execution that seems to care little for its installed base, but goes where others fear to tread. While Microsoft is all about serving its corporate customers that want a stable platform. Apple's approach is:

• Fearless multi-year strategy
• Clear unified planning/prioritization
• Wildly unprecedented execution

In other words, "the people at Apple are amazing. Yes everyone says that and believes that but boy everyone at Apple is the world’s best at their thing." And when Apple changes the technology, as they are now moving their Macbook laptops off Intel, they change it. If you want to come along, great.

But at Microsoft, Sinovsky says, 

It is literally impossible to end something at Microsoft. I can’t tell you how many times I (or we) tried. A running joke was how long the Excel team kept doing bug fixes on OS/2 Excel for a European bank. It was long after no one used OS/2 (except that bank).

So, Apple is like explorers in the desert. They just go on, fearlessly and creatively.

But then all these techies are all-in on woke politics. Read about Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer. He's commenting on "a good deal of employee backlash to Mark's decision to leave President Trump's posts about Minnesota protesters up." Says he:

Obviously the events of the last few weeks have had a disproportionately negative impact on anyone who's personally experienced or been afraid of experiencing violence at the hands of police, discrimination, bias either in the world or at work. We've been having a lot of hard conversations over the last few weeks with lots of people who are sharing their story, their experience, how these events have touched or triggered them and wanting to know that the company sides with them as individuals, sides with the ideals of better racial justice and equality, and that we're doing whatever we can to further connection and cohesiveness in the world. It's been a tumultuous few weeks, and I think understandably so, particularly for friends and colleagues in the Black community.

See, I don't believe this. I don't believe that anyone working at Facebook has seriously experienced "violence at the hands of police." I just don't. Because people that work at Facebook are good little girls and boys that never blotted their copybooks in their lives. The are absolute team players, dedicated to the sort of culture they have at Apple: to be the best in the world at what they do. I think that Facebook employees feel all this triggering and racial justice and equality because that is what good little girls and boys in the educated Gentry are taught in their Woke Bible classes.

Because the guys that need to beware of police violence are guys like the drugged George Floyd with a violent criminal record and children from several women left behind. Or the drunk Rayshard Brooks, who broke away from police when he realized that he was going to be arrested and imprisoned.

It is a fatuous conceit for the good little girls and good little boys at Facebook to imagine themselves in danger from police violence. It is virtue signaling. It is social-moralizing. It is nice church ladies gasping to each other about the horrors of life in the lower orders.

The fact is that we have police to isolate the function of keeping order, and keeping the lower orders from breaking the peace in the city; that is what it takes for ordinary commerce to proceed in peace. Or, to put it in a less anodyne way, we have police to do the dirty work of knocking the heads of knuckleheads so we don't have to.

The alternative is, well, the Montagues and Capulets of Verona. No police there, so you have the notables of each big family keeping order. Only, there is the problem of the notables of the other families in town, and you know what they are all about. In our modern era with police, the notables aren't in conflict with each other. But instead we have the criminal gangs of the ethnic groups presently in the middle of adapting to life in the city and not yet transitioned to the middle class. So, back in the day, we had the young swells of the Montagues and Capulets having a bit of a rumble. In Leonard Bernstein's time we had the Sharks and the Jets going at it.  Now we have black gangs and Salvadorean gangs and young punks blowing each other away in cities like Chicago every weekend. And now Seattle.

But our wokey corporate good little boys and good little girls literally know nothing of all this. How could they? They spend their lives on video games and social media. And instead of actually reading a book, they get nothing beyond the woke ideological indoctrination they get at school from the educated Gentry.

The tech people are brilliant when it comes to stuff they know, like tech. They are utterly clueless when it comes to culture and politics. And the "internal contradictions" of the current woke culture are going to bite them, sooner or later.

Want to know why? It arises out of my maxim, that "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." The educated Gentry has been executing on a monstrous program of injustice, injustice to ordinary Commoners so they can feel good about bringing justice to the traditionally marginalized. They are absolutely blind to the truth that, when you are patting yourself on the back for fighting for justice, you haven't really thought that maybe, yes maybe, your noble quest to bend the arc of history towards justice may instead be creating new injustice, and doing the opposite of what you imagine.

Codex of Preferred Progressive Pejoratives

The following is a Codex, manually assembled from Ancient Progressive Manuscripts and diverse Instructions to the Faithful and brought into the public square for public information and education.

Item	Explanation	Applies to:	Toxicity
Racist	One who does not profess enthusiastically and support the orthodox progressive doctrine on race, mostly as it applies to Americans descended from people enslaved by the tribes of West Africa and sold to European slave traders.	Whites1	Very high
Sexist	One who does not profess enthusiastically and support the orthodox progressive doctrine on sex or gender, particularly one who does not bend the knee to educated American women.	White Males2	High
Homophobe	One who does not profess enthusiastically and support the orthodox doctrine on non-heterosexual identity and activity, particularly as it relates to homosexuals and lesbians.	Straight White Males	High
Transphobe	One who does not profess enthusiastically and support the orthodox doctrine on transsexual identity and activity, particularly as it relates to young people "transitioning."	Hetero-sexuals	High
Xenophobe	One who expresses skepticism about immigration and who mentions the word "border" or "illegal immigrant".	Patriotic Americans	High
Islamophobe	One who worries about "terrorism."	Patriotic Americans	High
Fascist	One who fails enthusiastically endorse the progressive political enthusiasm of the moment.	Non-Left Person	Medium
Nazi, Hitler	One who has just won an argument against a progressive. See Godwin's Law.	Non-Left Person	Medium
Bigot	A general term of abuse against one who might not profess enthusiastically and support an unspecified item of progressive secular-religious orthodoxy.	Religious Believer	Medium
Hater	One who does not hate the haters that all progressives rightly hate.	Unspecified	Medium
Science Denier	One who fails to enthusiastically endorse the progressive political position on progressive planetary prophecy.	Oil Co. Grantee	Medium

Notes:

1. Progressives of European descent are not included in this category.

2. Not even progressive white males are exempt.

The Conflict of Interest of the Educated Gentry

One of my notions, coming out of my reductive Three Peoples theory, is that life for the People of the Creative Self is not easy.

Of course, I do not mean that their physical life is hard, but that the agenda of each person that desires to be creative is daunting.

We can show that by comparison with the others of the Three Peoples. If you are a Subordinate then all you have to do is suck up to your lord, and if things go wrong it is his fault. If you are a Responsible then all you have to do is follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law. In both cases you go along to get along, presuming that is the way to survive and prosper.

But the essence of the life of the Creative person is to create something new. This is hard, very hard. We know, from the experience of artists and of people that start new businesses, that almost all creative endeavors fail.

What do humans do when facing failure? We tend to cheat. So if you are a Subordinate you probably steal from your lord or your employer. If you are a Responsible you don't always follow the rules or work as hard as you might.

Whatabout the Creatives? In this case, you might fake up some routine project as creative. Or you force your creativity on the rest of mankind.

In the fake department I like to use the example of LGBT. Everyone is interested in sex. So almost anyone can think up some lame way to be creative about sex. But the real program of sex is to bond with a person of the opposite sex and create children and a family and a home and stick to it through thick and thin. Anything else is really just faking it, taking the easy way out.

So a lot of what we call "creative" is not really creative at all, but people playing at being creative.

But then there is the other way, to force your creative project on the rest of mankind. Here's trivial example, how the educated class has mucked around with the regulation of automobiles: first it was gas mileage, then it was crash protection, then it was ethanol, then it was ASS, automated engine start/stop. But ethanol makes engines run hotter, which uses up old cars faster. 

Then you could be a health-science professional and order people around with creative ideas about how to fight epidemics.

Or you could be an environmental scientist and order people around with creative ideas about how to save the planet.

My point is that the regulation of cars and fuels, and the regulation of health care -- and the whole environmental game -- is all about the educated class having a creative project to work on. And it has to be backed by force, otherwise failed ideas would never get implemented or, if implemented, soon discarded. And then the educated gentry in question wouldn't feel creative.

To me, the whole project of the left suffers from this problem, going back at least to Marx. Hey, the fathers have been screwing things up since forever. So now we educated youth have a new idea, to end centuries of oppression and domination. And we demand the right to impose this idea on the rest of you, by force.

Put that way, it looks absurd. But it never occurs to the young sprouts full of rage.

Hey Uncle Joe! How yer doin', pal?

Now, it is my contention that most of the glorious moral and political advances of history are not glorious and moral at all, but just an adjustment responding to the fact that the old way just does not pay.

For instance, the change from sacrificing the first-born to sacrificing a goat. From sacrificing domestic animals to sacrificing the Son of God so the rest of us don't have to. Not moral; just practical.

Changing from the rule of the fathers and the conflict of the tribes to the state with its monopoly of violence, encoded in our time with police forces. Not a moral advance, just practical common sense.

Switching from slave labor and from serfdom to free labor. Not moral, but practical because free labor is more profitable to all concerned.

Emancipation of women. Not moral but practical because women aren't needed to birth lots of kids and spend their lives preparing and preserving food. They could do other things.

The next thing, I think, is the reduction of the administrative state and the rule of the educated gentry that makes them creative and important. Not because the administrative state is immoral and the educated gentry have a conflict of interest but because, first, the administrative state does not pay. And the educated gentry could be doing more productive things than ordering us all around in a pandemic. and sending their children to mostly peacefully protest about issues that were decided half a century ago.

But, but! What would the educated gentry do then, poor things?

Exactly, they would have to face up to the real challenge of all creative endeavor, that they are probably not creative enough, and not courageous and not persevering enough to get much beyond having a creative idea or two that they fail to develop and bring to fruition.

And then there is my bigger theory, that we are in the twilight of the political era, die Politischedämmerung, because, with our market economy and its trust culture, we really don't need much policing and administrating, except for the few people that haven't yet got with the program. And for them we need a few of Dickens' Inspector Buckets to tap their noses and straighten out the thugs and malingerers.

But whenever humans enter a new era we seem to have to go through a period of transition where some reactionary movement falls in love with the past and pushes the pedal to the metal trying to revive the old days. Like our lefty friends and their Great Reaction.

Like right now.

I Wonder What Women "Expect" on Currrent Mostly Peaceful Protest

It is a basic point of my philosophy that to ask, as Oscar Wilde did (or was it Sigmund Freud), "What Do Women Want," misses the point.

It is not What Women Want, but What Women Expect. If you don't instinctively know that you don't know nuttin'.

And what women expect, in particular, is they expect to be protected. If the men don't protect them then they will find other protectors. This is evoked most clearly in the book A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous. This Anonymous was actually a 30-year-old woman journalist, and she was writing about being a woman in Berlin in the two months from May to July 1945.

You may recall, or you may have read, that the Women in Berlin had a bit of a problem in May 1945. Their men were all imprisoned in POW cages all over Germany and they were left alone to face the occupying Russians.

So what did they do? They sought out the highest rank of Red Army officer suitable to their age and beauty to be their lover and protector. Of course they did.

One good thing they did. They put the teenaged girls in the attic during the two months that Berlin was under the martial law of the Red Army.

So I wonder what the women of Seattle and indeed all progressive cities all across America right now "expect" in regards to their protection.

See, I think that it is one thing to put out a Black Lives Matter yard sign outside your North Seattle house. It is another thing for Karen to realize that the police may not come to protect her if she is attacked by AntiFa thugs and she calls 911. Or if the local gang enforcer turns up at the door demanding money for the protection of home and hearth. That's what's been going down in the CHAZ/CHOP zone down in Capitol Hill in Seattle.

So I am keeping my ear to the ground, listening to the women as they complain to each other in the manifestation of the Women's Culture of Complaint. Are they saying to each other "I can't believe they let those protesters get away with trashing the whole neighborhood." Or, "I can't believe the way they let the homeless camp all over the city." Or what?

My point is that the Women's Gossip Network does not operate according to the progressive culture of mostly peaceful protest and intimidation. It operates in the one-on-one conversations of women in neighborhoods.

And all of a sudden, if you are a politician, you wake up in the morning to find that the universe changed. Because the organic consensus of the women's gossip network has changed social reality.

I wonder if this will play out in the election in November. I wonder if women will be saying one thing to their liberal friends, but another thing in the ballot box. I wonder if it is one thing to repeat after me Black Lives Matter but another thing to feel unprotected from rioters and looters.

Honestly, I don't know how this will turn out. 

I do believe this, that the Nancy Pelosis and Chuck Schumers are in a half panic because they need to stay one step ahead of the mob which really wants to kick them out and make the Democratic Party into a truly woke and truly progressive party at last. And the more that they veer left the more it means that the Republican Party will be the only party for ordinary Commoners that just want to follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law.

Toppling Statues: The Problem with Iconoclasm

Back in the day, "iconoclasm" -- the destruction of icons -- was considered a Bad Thing. But now that the progressive mob is pulling down statues of everyone from confederate generals to Saint Junípero Serra, it's all in a good cause.

Of course, I am completely opposed to the destruction of monuments. Hey, I was to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece last year. And do you know why it survived? Because they had an earthquake in 373 BC that buried the temple. Then the Roman Emperor Theodosius I had the temple destroyed in 390 AD in the name of Christianity. And so the temple lay buried under a village until the German and French archaeologists came along in the 19th century with the idea to dig it up.

The reason I don't like destroying monuments is because I am really interested in how ancient and not so ancient peoples thought and acted. Of course, they were dreadfully ignorant, darling, but what can you say?

Actually, they were all people of their time. And when we think about anyone in high politics -- and you'd have to be a Somebody to have a monument built to commemorate you -- he or she is probably pretty thoroughly flawed. I'm all in favor of Winston Churchill being commemorated, and I filed past his bier in Westminster Hall in 1965. But the guy was a piece of work, and I put him in the basket with all the dumb politicians of the 1930s from Chamberlain to Hitler to FDR. Hey, maybe it took two dreadful world wars to convince the Great and the Good that maybe world wars were not such a good thing.

But you know what? I want statues of everyone from Churchill to Hitler and Goebbels. So that little kiddies can go see them and be carefully taught what idiots people were back in the day.

See I don't think it helps to say that all the Confederates were evil. Yep, they were wedded to plantation slavery, as invented by the Venetians on Cyprus. And we now, from our great moral height, condemn slavery as the worst thing ever.

Worse than Soviet Bolshevism? Are you sure?

See, I don't think we ended slavery for moral reasons. I think we ended slavery because slavery doesn't pay. Not compared with free workers. Hey, even Adam Smith thought that.

See, I think that morality very often follows the market. Just saying. I mean, how difficult is it, when evaluating two things, one that benefits you and one that does not, to decide that the thing that benefits you is a Good Thing and the other thing is a Bad Thing?

But I get what the inconclasts are doing. Thay want to erase history so that the only thing that people are able to believe is their sacred orthodoxy. Because everything else has been canceled.

But that's OK. Because it focuses the minds of the racist sexist homophobes like me that love America as it is, warts and all.

And Wokies, let me tell you that you are the biggest wart on the flesh of America right now. By a mile. 

But that's OK, because you have clarified the issues rather thoughtfully. As Victor Davis Hanson said on FoxNews,

This election no longer is about Donald Trump's tweeting. It's not about Joe Biden's cognitive impairment. It has nothing to do anymore with a lock-down, the virus, the economy, foreign policy. It's an existential question, a Manichean choice, between whether you want civilization and you believe America doesn't have to be perfect to be good and we are not in this third century going to destroy all that people died for, or you feel that was is inherently flawed with a cancer and we have to use radiation and chemotherapy and kill the host to kill the cancer. And that's the choice we are looking at and I'm going to vote for civilization.

Know what I think? I think that President Trump should make short videos about the eminent Americans whose monuments were pulled down. And he should prepare a few words about each of the canceled monuments. Like General Grant. He could say:

Grant was a heavy drinker. He married a women in a family that had slaves. But then he took his slave down to the courthouse and freed him. And went on to lead the Union armies to win the war against slavery. Ulysses S Grant was a great American and a flawed American. But flawed Americans are all we have, and all we will ever have, to Make America Great Again.

When I walk around my neighborhood and look at the social-moralizing yard-signs, that started with #WeBelieve and then "Hate has no Home Here" and "Be the One" and now feature "Black Lives Matter" I think about the people that have put those signs up.

And what they are is educated Gentry, People of the Creative Self, that think themselves -- know themselves -- a cut above ordinary Commoners and People of the Responsible Self. And certainly higher and better than white nationalist deplorables. Because, you see, they advocate for the victims of oppression and and fight against systemic racism.

And yet they know literally nothing.

As I have been reading and writing for these many years, I have developed the conceit that I can figure out where the pre-digested political rhetoric I am hearing from other people comes from. Because, of course, most people don't read, don't think; they just pick up memes that they hear in the agora. Thus it ever was and thus it ever will be.

And what we should all hope for and work for is for the day when it is our ideas and rhetoric that ordinary people and journalists unthinkingly repeat.

Remember, the "Activists" Aren't Revolutionaries

Now that Seattle's CHAZ/CHOP is winding down, according to Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, in a "phased" way, we can now say what it was not.

It was not revolution. What is was, instead, was regime supporters getting to let off a bit of steam after the glorious emotional experience of the George Floyd riots.

And it was, as all left-wing activity is, a reactionary moment, a nostalgic recreation of the good old days of organic, pre-city, community.

In a way, you can say it was a scientific experiment. Let's see what happens if you set out as a new Adam, as "he drives his spade into, and sets up his stockade around, the most fertile patch of land he can find?" That's Bernard Shaw, writing the first pages of Fabian Essays in Socialism.

Well, thanks to intrepid reporter Andy Ngô, we know that it means going through a couple thousand years of history in ten days. First of all, establish the borders. Then the men start to fight over who will be boss. Then you have to figure out the laws. Then you have to keep the peace. Then you identify that people that dress like you are the good guys and you start to hate the people beyond the border.

I suppose that one of the things that drives the Great Reaction, the movement of the left to recreate the primitive community, is the annoying realization that all the cool stuff has already been done. No Fair!

So you decide to do a redo, to re-enact the scenes from the past. Setting up a new community. Enforcing the peace. Competing to see who will be leader. Hating the monsters on the other side of the border.

What you are not, are revolutionaries. You are regime-sponsored "activists" doing what you have been carefully taught: You cannot be a revolutionary when the local mayor pats you patronizingly on the head and talks about a "summer of love." When activism is taught in government schools to children. When degrees are awarded in government universities in grievance studies. When the media reports on "mostly peaceful protest" in a burning city.

What you are doing, you activists, is doing the dirty work for the ruling class, frightening the Commoners, canceling the stepmother of an accused policeman. Roughing up conservative websites for their comment section.

If your protests were real revolution then the functionaries of the Inner Party -- the Nancy Pelosis, the Chuck Schumers, the tame journalists that parrot their sound bites -- would be coming down like a ton of bricks on the protesters, invoking the End of Days, the brutal behavior, the pile of skulls, the racism-sexism-homophobia of the terrorists, the wild violence of the protesters, er, riotous mob.

When you walk around my neighborhood full of nice white liberal ladies and see Black Lives Matter yard-signs and protest signs you are not seeing revolution. Nice liberal ladies do not do revolution; they instinctively seek out the approved line on everything and chant the responses with the rest of the faithful.

Here's a lovely tweet out today about the Beckys supporting revolution (Or are they Karens?):

Woke White Women continue to take over these protests. https://t.co/ZvlVLPuzkT

— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) June 23, 2020

As Instapundit puts it: "White Women's Self-Esteem Matters." And Woke White Women don't do revolution, baby. They do and say what they have been carefully taught. By Mommy, by Daddy, by teachers, by professors, by other Woke Women. Women Don't Do Revolution.

And this reminds me to make the obvious point.

The reason we have cities and states and police and the market culture is because it is staggeringly beneficial to humans that get with the program. That's what the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is about.

When you stop fighting over affronts to your sacred honor, and stop the vengeance culture and trust anyone that acts trustworthy to you, then a thousand flowers bloom. Not to mention a million IRAs.

But there is a problem. A part of the human instinct is the instinct to protect your little patch of land from looters and plunderers, to only trust your kind of people, and to be ready to drop like a ton of bricks on anyone that "disses" you and yours. A part of the human instinct loves to dump on the neighbors, whether in the women's gossip network of "I can't believe she did that" or in the man's honor culture of "you wanna back that one up, pal?"

What we need is a way to sublimate the women's gossip network into something that isn't mean-spirited naming and shaming and shunning, and a way to sublimate the men's insult culture into something that doesn't end in a fist-fight or worse.

And I don't know how we do that. Not when the ruling class prefers to keep the Commoners frightened and demoralized.

The Sublimation of Primitive Instincts

Back in the day the only thing that men did, more or less, was defend the border. That is what we men are programmed to do. So men are creators, warriors, destroyers.

Back in the day women did everything else, in a close-knit village community of women that bore and raised the children. So women are learners, carers, teachers.

So now what?

Well, we know what. We decided, or God decided, to sublimate our primitive instincts into less violent channels.

For men we have invented exploration, sports, video games, winning market share, tech startups. But clearly young men still need the opportunity to create a bit of mayhem, as in the recent riots and CHAZ/CHOP insurrections. I wonder if we can do a better job of providing scope for mayhem without the unfortunate admixture of lefty lunacy.

But whatabout for women? I think that is the Big Problem today, because the feminists and all the Goodwhites have assumed that What Women Want is to get into the public square and have careers and STEM and become fighter jocks and all.

I think the disproof of that was the incident where a US Navy ship collided with a container ship. And why? Because two women officers "weren't talking to each other."

Yes, how do we sublimate the women's culture of gossip and complaint and social moralizing from the old village community to the modern world? I have to admit that I don't have a clue.

Well, I do have a few ideas. Women should run the education of children, but not as gubmint employees. Rather they should organize their own neighborhood schools for their children and the neighbors' children.

Women should run the social welfare system. But not as gubmint employees. Rather they should act as a voluntary neighborhood or citywide committee to help the helpless. And do the necessary social moralizing to shame the shameless into social behavior.

And women prefer person-to-person jobs and careers. So let's stop worrying about whether women should be in STEM or corporate execs. The truth is that women are instinctively drawn towards activity that involves person-to-person contact and maintains the status quo. So they probably will not like being stuck in front of a computer or directing risky financial and business ventures.

Above all, women should not think that they want to do all the things men do. That is going down a rabbit hole. Men do the things they do because they have had to figure something else to do, something less lethal, now that they don't spend their days sharpening their weapons and keeping an eye on the border.

Women? Well they are not as far down the road as men, because women have been completely engaged in bearing and keeping kids alive until the day before yesterday.

One of the tricky things, in my opinion, is the intersection of this sublimation trend and government. For instance, I see government as a way of reducing male-on-male conflict. But whatabout the moral world? One of the problems I see with modern government is the irruption of the moral. Instead of people conducting their own moral communities separate from government we now have everyone trying to impose their moral principles using the power and the force of government. I don't think this ends well. It certainly didn't in Soviet Russia and Communist China.

And this is a problem where women are concerned, because women control their community of women through their culture of naming and shaming and shunning. Fine, if this social control is the community of women. But if women are using government to impose their moral structure, not so good.

Government and its law and police are designed to deal with serious violations of the peace for which forcible encouragement is needed. Morals and values are for the lesser anti-social behaviors where frowns and less extreme correctional measures are appropriate.

See what I mean? Government is a guy thing, because force. Morals is a girl thing, because "I can't believe you did that" and social moralizing.

Still, it's all a work in progress. Because we are still primitives deep down, and those primitive instincts want to emerge from under the modern repressions. The primitive instincts got their rights, after all!

The Different Kinds of Hero

Last night I had another of my 3:00 am Aha! moments. I realized that the Sacrificial Hero is the hero that inaugurates a new religion. But whatabout people inaugurating a new culture? Or a new politics? Whatabout them?

Let's get back to fundamentals.

Politics is downstream from culture. Said Andrew Breitbart.

Culture is downstream from religion. Says John C. Wright.

Religion is downstream from the question "what is the meaning of 'life, the universe, and everything?'" Says Christopher Chantrill.

And I say, in my "Vision of the Good Life," which is supposed to replace the left's reactionary vision, that the new answer to the question of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything," is the Sacrificial Hero. Like Moses, bringing his tablets of a new religion down from the mountain, but never getting to the Promised Land. Like Jesus Christ, dying for the idea that you don't need blood sacrifice to atone for your sins.

But whatabout the guy that creates a new culture out of the new religion providing a new answer to the question of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything?"

That was the point of my Aha! moment. Because I thought to myself: probably the chap that develops a new culture is not a Sacrificial Hero. But what is he? Is he a Hero? Is he a Philosopher? An Artist? A Writer?

See, the point is that the cultural innovator is not really, as Jungian analysis proposes for the heavy lifting, a Hero teetering on the border between Order and Chaos. Because the heavy lifting has already been done. By the time the cultural innovator comes along the area of Chaos is no longer complete Chaos. The outlines have been mapped out.

So let's do the decent thing and say about the cultural innovator: I don't know.

Same thing for the political innovator that creates a new politics. This chap is not really tilling virgin ground that has never felt the blade of the plow. He is taking a culture and working out the implications of the culture when it comes to politics.

And that means we have to do the decent thing and say about the political innovator: I don't know.

But already my mind is seething with ideas. What do you call chaps like Calvin and Luther? What do you call Montesquieu, the chap that invented the political framework that our Founders hammered into the good old US and A? What do you call Kant? My pal Nietzsche? Whatabout the Rousseaus and Marxes and Marcuses? Whatabout Saul Alinsky, of Rules for Radicals? Whatabout Martin Luther King, Jr.?

And what you you call the actual high-profile politicians, the Lincolns, Bismarcks, Roosevelts, Reagans, Obamas?

What indeed do you call President Trump, the most unlikely of political innovators?

I don't know. Because I just don't want to jump to conclusions. Not just yet.

But I will be back!

Gorsuch Decision Means Back to the Drawing Board

With Justice Gorsuch legislating gay rights into the Civil Rights Act of 1965, another fantasy of conservatism bites the dust.

We are never going to win the culture war with conservative justices on the Supreme Court. Why?

Because the judicial branch is the aristocratic branch; it reflects the culture of the educated Gentry. And always will. Actually, that was the intention of the Founders.

Right now, the educated Gentry thinks that LGBT rights is a Good Thing that all Goodwhites agree on.

Let us be clear about what this means. It means that if you want to change the laws of the country you have to do more than win elections.

Because, as Andrew Breitbart said, politics is downstream from culture. Don't expect to win political battles unless you occupy the high ground of the culture.

But that is not enough for, as John C. Wright writes, culture is downstream from religion. 

Don't doubt me on this. And if you did, you might change your mind and get to see why Wright is right on this, in a moment when the devotees of the religion of Wokeness dominate the culture with their religious devotions and flagellations "mostly peaceful protesting" for Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police.

So is it all over? Do we all just take a knee, the baptismal rite of Wokeianity? Not at all.

Because there is something upstream from religion. And that is the classic line from Douglas Adams, that he repeats again and again in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It is the eternal human search for the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

Let it be said that we are no closer to succeeding in this search than the first humans that developed the conceit of self-consciousness. And we never will. The closer we get, as we increase our knowledge and wealth and power and wokeness, the further the answer recedes into the depths of the universe.

For instance, just this week the "Physicists Union" -- that demands, if you remember, "rigorously defined areas of doubt and uncertainty" -- announced that the Hubble Constant isn't quite as constant as we thought, and this "bolster[s the current] challenge to the basic model of the universe."

Whatever it is that the universe is. If, indeed it is something rather than nothing.

So, what we need to do is to come up with a meaning of life, the universe and everything that will condense into a new religion for the educated Gentry that will change the culture that will change the politics and that will make it unthinkable for the aristocrats on the Supreme Court to continue with the current faith in finding new "rights" to enshrine in law and new "victims" to be inducted into the sacred hall of victims.

Should be a snap, right?

I mean, it shouldn't be that hard to find some sort of meaning of life that is higher and better than Wokeness, the religion of Activism that there are billions of helpless victims out there wallowing in helplessness unless straggly-haired Chés and Good Little Girls in face masks all get together and hand-letter signs and mostly peacefully protest and demand that we bend the arc of history towards justice for the helpless victims?

I mean, surely smarter minds that you and I should have figured this all out by now, and forged a new and better meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." Right?

Of course they have. And I have made it my life's work to sniff out these noble heroes. And now I have published my findings, "A Vision of the Good Life Better than the Left's," that begins here.

I warn you, it is an extremely sophisticated analysis that is way beyond the ken of the average Ché or Good Little Girl in a good little face mask.

Now I have come up with the Ideal of this new meaning of "life, the universe and everything." It is the Sacrificial Hero who dies upon the border between Order and Chaos.

This Hero is not the Warrior Hero of old, the Prince Harry or the Harry Percy of Shakespeare. He is not the Revolutionary Hero of leftist revolutionary fantasy literature. He is not the Activist Hero of the current Activism Culture.

But what is he, then?

I will tell you. He is rather like Jordan B. Peterson, author of Maps of Meaning and 12 Rules for Life. 

Why would I pick him, when tough guy Vox Day makes fun of him in Jordanetics: A Journey into the Mind of Humanity's Greatest Thinker? Two reasons:

1. Peterson came out against Canada's C-16 law that basically legislated the LGBT agenda. If you watch his testimony before the Canadian Senate you can see that he is basically offering himself up as a sacrifice.
2. His latest blog post, taking aim at the entire current culture in the university, "Missives of Appalling Idiocy and Envy Embarrassing to Behold," in which an eminent Canadian chemistry prof has been thrown to the woke mob.

When you do this you are offering yourself up to Pontius Pilate as a sacrifice to the search for the meaning of life. It means you are willing to sacrifice reputation, career, respectability, honor, everything.

But actually, of course, you are transcending the woke mob and its Cancel Culture, because in offering yourself as a sacrifice you are in fact daring the wokies to make you into a martyr. And that is something that they don't want.

But who really has the courage to stand up to the mob? Not me. But maybe you are. Anyway, Jordan B. Peterson is, in my opinion, an example of what it takes to be a Sacrificial Hero. Needless to say, his Maps of Meaning goes into great depth about the Sacrificial Hero and the whole question of the Hostile Brothers. 

I investigate Maps of Meaning here.

So, All we need to do is make the philosophy of the Sacrificial Hero a conventional wisdom among the educated Gentry. Then the whole religion and culture and politics of Wokeranity will vanish in a puff of smoke.

And we can start to deal with the next problem.

What is the Current Moral Revolution All About?

Let us start with the Zman who argues that our liberal democracy, unlike the classical forms of monarchy, republicanism and tyranny, has no overall architecture.

There is no sacred text or body of philosophical work to provide authority. Like a school of fish, morality shifts on a dime and that new direction is assumed to be the general will and therefore the proper course. Morality in a liberal democracy is a riot with no real purpose, other than to feed the need of the people to feel they are the virtuous actor in the great drama of life.

Well, I think he is missing the point. Our liberal democracy used to be about fluffing the nest of the workers, and then the minorities. But if an evil policeman can snuff out the life of a poor helpless black, then what is the point of it? That is what I understand about the current moment. So everyone is all in a flutter.

John Gray, in Unherd, compares the current moment to late medieval flagellants. The Wokies know society is immoral, just like the flagellants. But they don't have a clue what to do about it, except to cancel anyone that disagrees with them. Then Gray goes off into the weeds talking about America's founding on the crimes of black slavery and the seizure of indigenous lands.

Let's go back to the Zman. Whaddya mean "there is no sacred text?" We have a century of lefty thought, from Marx to Marcuse, which is nothing if it is not a Bible of sacred texts. Only this Bible is staggeringly, mind-blowingly wrong about its analysis and its moral program. It accuses the capitalists and bourgeoisie of a program of oppression and hegemony that is flat wrong. The capitalists and the bourgeoisie are not that interested in political power. If you come to them complaining of some injustice they will likely listen to you and try to do something about it.

And the lefty solution to all problems is flat-out wrong. It always proposes some kind of top-down supervisory system to right all wrongs, run by people like them. When it could have suggested minor tweaks to encourage pro-social behavior.

For instance, instead of government education it could have proposed employer-supported schooling for the children of employees. Instead of government-run health care it could have beefed up the 19th century universe of mutual-aid societies.

Then, instead of forming its own churches to create communities of lefty belief it has infiltrated all the institutions of society, from government to corporations, and essentially forced its wokey secular religion on the whole of society.

I would say that all this has been a complete failure and thus the lefty adepts and advocates are beside themselves with rage, because the whole world was supposed to be perfect by now. And there are plenty of young kids perfectly happy to burn the place down if the police will only stand back and let them have at it.

Look at the last ten years.

How could our betters have screwed up the credit system and allowed a generational credit panic like 2008? I thought they were experts.

How could President Obama have screwed up the recovery with old and failed policies like free money for teachers, and cartelizing the health care system when what was needed was jobs, jobs, jobs.

How could the health care experts mis-predict the effect of the Wu Flu epidemic by an order of magnitude? What is the point of experts if they can't predict the future within an order of magnitude?

How could black men still be out-murdering white and brown young men by a factor of 8 times? What are experts and policy professionals for if not to solve social problems like over-representation in crime statistics?

The answer is obvious. Our betters are complete idiots whose world view has failed and who don't know what to do other than keep on keeping on, and making sure that they and theirs get all the top jobs, as of old.

So, the world is totally screwed up, and naturally the young'uns do what they have been carefully taught. They go out into the streets and make hand-lettered signs and peacefully protest as though they were helpless peasants from 1819 instead of educated scions of the middle class in 2020.

So, liberals, what exactly was the point of that "march through the institutions" and purging of everyone that disagreed with you? Because if you haven't created a perfect world by now I'd say that your world view and your shock troops occupying all the commanding heights of the institutions amounts to a big fat zero.

And there is nobody left in the "institutions" except mindless idiots like you. So who is going to repair them and reform them?

The "Nazis' favorite intellectual" Fritzi Nietzsche predicted it all. When God is Dead -- i.e., the progressive agenda has utterly failed -- then you get decadance, a dying of the old order. Hmm. Aren't we seeing that, with populist Trumps and Borises popping up all over as people lose faith in the old ways? And then we get to nihilism, with nobody believing in anything. Hmm. Wouldn't that exactly describe our AntiFa friends who certainly know how to bomb and burn, but don't have a constructive idea in their heads?

Let me be clear. The problem is not with the helpless victims, who are just responding to the perverse incentives set up by the clueless ruling class. The problem is not the Commoners, who just want to wive and thrive, obey the laws, go to work, and follow the rules.

The problem is our educated Gentry that just know that they are ordained to bend the arc of history towards justice. And if the last program to bend the arc of history didn't work, well, they have another one that is bound to work this time.

Well, I have an analysis of the present situation, a Vision of the Good Life that transcends the failed vision of the left. And it centers on the basic error of the lefty educated Gentry, that they are warrior heroes hacking their way through the unjust jungle towards a perfect world of equality and justice. Wrong! Real heroes are sacrificial heroes that sacrifice themselves on the border of Order and Chaos.

But I don't expect lefty idiots to have a clue what that means. Maybe it's time for you chaps to shut up and go read a book.

Reign of Terror Means the Revolution is Failing

One of the conventional wisdoms on the right these days is that the Conservative Establishment failed us. It failed to fight against the left. And now look where we are, with the left canceling everyone in sight, and Big Business keeping its powder dry by mouthing conventional platitudes about Black Lives Matter.

So argues Julie Kelly at American Greatness.

The argument of the Conservative Establishment, on the other hand, is that Trump's crazy chaos politics radicalized the left. But for Trump, we would all be getting along.

I think that both arguments are wrong. I believe that what we are experiencing is the classic case of a religious movement dealing with the impossible situation, that its faith is not moving mountains.

Do you realize the impossible place our lefty friends are in? The whole arc of leftism is that, with a new politics, we could create a heaven on earth, free of hunger, free of poverty, free of discrimination, free of oppression, free of racism, sexism, homophobia and all the other -phobias in the dictionary.

They said that their labor laws would revolutionize the workplace. Oh yeah, how are the workers doing these days? Dying of despair? How come?

They said that their Civil Rights laws would transform race relations and lift African Americans up from centuries of slavery and Jim Crow oppression and segregation. Oh yeah, how are the blacks doing these days? Still getting killed by police for resisting arrest? How come?

They said that feminism would liberate women from the patriarchy of the ages. Oh yeah? Then how come women reported themselves happier in the 1950s than today?

When the revolution fails to deliver the promised Paradise, the revolutionaries do not just give up and go home. They redouble their efforts. And redouble them again.

Eventually we get the Reign of Terror, Great Purge, Cultural Revolution, Great Awokening.

And then comes Reaction.

That's the model proposed by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. And I like it.

But why Reaction? Why don't the wokies keep on keeping on naming and shaming and canceling from now until forever, or until the last Deplorable Statue has been erased from history and the last "far-right" activist has been fired from his job and divorced by his wife?

Because, Crane Brinton writes, humans cannot live forever in the frenzy of white hot religion. Eventually we relapse back to normal life.

The classic Reaction is the end of the French Reign of Terror in July of 1794, the so-called Thermidorean Reaction when Robespierre was removed from office. And it led to the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Of course, Bonaparte then led France through the disaster of the Napoleonic Wars from which France has never really recovered. Some people think that is a good thing.

But I think that, because the United States is a proof of God's existence, that we in America will get through the Reign of Wokeness without the bloodbath of the Reign of Terror.

And that is because the voters of the United States elected Donald Trump in 2016.

Yes, of course Conservatism Inc. is really resentful about Donald Trump. Hey, he's managed to do what they failed to do for 60 years, ever since William F. Buckley Jr. decided to stand athwart history, yelling Stop. Wouldn't you be angry?

Yes, of course the left is fit to be tied by Donald Trump. According to their arc of history, Donald Trump ought to be impossible. Yet here he is. 

And One Million people have signed up for his June 20th rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Although the top Tulsa city health expert wants Trump to cancel the rally, because health.

Do you see why that would be? Why a million people might have signed up for Trump's rally in a stadium that holds 19,000? 

It's because the vast majority of people just want to live their "humdrum lives" -- immortalized by Lina Lamont. They don't want to bend the arc of history towards justice, or stand athwart history, or amaze their college classmates with a brilliant career, or get into activism, or even go to Mars with our tech billionaires. They just want to live and work and get married and have a family and live to enjoy their grandchildren.

And let it be said that this simple agenda has never been easy, down the ages, on account of the Four Horsemen representing pestilence, war, famine, and death.

In a way, it is appropriate that President Trump has been assailed non-stop by a series of harassments from the ruling class, starting with surveillance from the intelligence community, then an effort to take out his advisor LTG Flynn, then the Special Prosecutor investigation, then the impeachment effort, then the hyped-up WuFlu epidemic, and lately the faked-up riots over the death of a black career criminal in police custody.

Really, what president in our history could have stood up to all this abuse the way Trump has done?

Now I believe, following my research into Jungian psychology and his concept of "archetypes," that the proper role for the man who wishes to change history is the role of the Sacrificial Hero, one who probably perishes on the border between Order and Chaos trying to understand and stand for new ideas and knowledge despite the baying of the mob.

Donald Trump is, of course, an improbable candidate for Sacrificial Hero of the Year, since he is a proud and boastful egomaniac, thrice married, and I know not what.

And yet he has stood against the rage of the mob for nigh on four years, standing for Making America Great Again and promising to Drain the Swamp of the Deep State.

Will he succeed or will he go down to ignominious defeat at the hands of the wokey mob and the devious wranglings of the Deep State?

Nobody can tell, but I believe that he has changed history to this extent. He has redefined the Republican Party as the party of the ordinary American Commoner. As opposed to the Democratic Party that is clearly the party of the educated Gentry and its Clients.

In my view the only question is now how the left in its current Great Awokening will go down the tubes. Will it be at the hands of Donald Trump, as the Sixties went down the tubes with the two elections of Richard Nixon, or will it be at the hands of a future Reactionary that seizes the reins of power at the next Thermidorean moment?

You tell me.

Jews, Anti-Semitism, and the "Other"

One of the astonishing things about the Jews is how they have managed to maintain a religious/tribal identity from whenever.

And, remember, for most of this period, Jews have maintained this separate identity as tiny minorities within larger, hostsile political units.

How did they do it? Because, if you look at the broad sweep of history, all the eternal nations and tribes and empires and religions are not eternal at all. They are born, they grow, they squabble, they divide, they combine, they die. 

But the Jews have kept their identity going against all odds, let us say, ever since the Romans made Palestine a part of the Roman Empire.

How do you do that, when you are a tiny minority in a much larger political unit?

I think the answer is that you create a culture of perpetual innocence.

Of course, all nations and cultures do this. And I supposes it relates to the notion of "fault" in the primitive mind. If something goes wrong, there must be a fault. And the fault must be the other guy.

But if we, whoever we are, are perpetually innocent then whatever happens can't be our fault. Therefore we should soldier on, and never falter.

Of course, the Jews, who, we can say, came out rather on the wrong side of the nation-state movement of the last millennium, have now created the most nationish nation state in the world with the nation of Israel.

But when your define yourself with such determination, you define yourself as the "Other" to the rest of the world.

And when things go wrong, people usually blame the "Other." Because there must be a fault, and it can't be that "we" are at fault.

Having a bit of a problem with the Black Death? Blame the Jews. Or, as a convenient backup, the witches.

Having a bit of a problem in Germany after the disaster of World War I? Blame the Jews.

You see this with the current WuFlu. There are all kinds of conspiracy theories flying around, from the Chinese did it deliberately in their Wuhan lab in Wuhan to the US did it and seeded the offending viruses in the unsuspecting Chinese lab in said Wuhan. And then all the blame games, from Trump doing too little or too much, too early or too late, to the Dem governors deliberately wrecking their state economies in order to get Trump defeated in November.

And don't get me started on all the mostly peaceful protests over the death of the black innocent George Floyd.

One of my tentative notions is that the innocence culture of almost all left-wing groups issues from the fact that intellectual Jews have been their leaders, from the workers and communism and socialism to blacks to the current wokey AntiFa and Black Lives Matter.

See, I have a problem with innocence culture. I think that in the modern era with the market economy and the city culture people have to get beyond a reactive innocence culture and grow up a little. Because nobody is innocent; nobody is perfect. We all have to rub along and put up with people that, given our druthers, we would rather not.

Hmm. Maybe I need another leg in my Great Reaction concept, something along the line of "identity politics is a re-assertion of innocence."

Notice that one of the things in Christianity is its notion of Sin, that we are all sinners, and that we all have to work for salvation. Nobody is an innocent. The Jews have a similar concept, the Book of Life, in which God records who's the good guy and who's the bad guy.

The point is that all politics depends on "Us" and "Them." And all politicians establish their tribe by demonizing the "Other."

Obviously, if we humans are to ascend from the dusty plain of political conflict to the ethereal heights that soar above such petty squabbles, we all have to shed the armor of innocence.

And I don't know how that works. Well, I do, but I don't know how to get there.

Saying the Unsayable on Race and Slavery and Police

As the Zman writes this week, “The thing that white people never quite get about black people is black people, especially the talented tenth, obsess over their blackness.” Especially if they work for The New York Times.

See, white people don’t usually get paid to write about their whiteness, don’t really think too much about their whiteness. But blacks… You get the point.

Now, I just take it as given that the lefty obsession with race as well as the black obsession with blackness must be part of the whole lefty program of the Great Reaction, the lurch back to the primitive. Or rather, now I think about it, a staged re-enactment of the primitive: LARPing the good old days.

That, I think, is my takeaway from the classic -- and mostly indigestible-- Autumn of the Middle Ages by John Huizinga. The elite upper-class were in the middle of converting from root’n toot’n medieval warlords into good, well-behaved courtiers to the emerging absolute monarchs. So they really loved the tournaments and medieval romances that gave them a nostalgic look back to the good old days when knights were bold and damsels were in distress.

But now I am in the middle of The Broken Spell by Pieter Spierenburg, another Dutch historian, and he seems to get the modern age completely. First of all, in the old days, a thousand years ago, almost all people in Europe lived in a "household" of masters, servants, and slaves, in which both production and consumption were combined; people lived almost entirely within the boundaries of their household. Today, households are merely units of joint consumption. Production takes place elsewhere, so people have to go out into the larger world, away from the protection of their household and deal with the world out there.

Secondly, there is the question of security. A thousand years ago Europe was “stateless.” That means that safety and security of individuals were managed by the patriarchs, heads of households and kinship groups. A wrong was righted by vengeance and vendetta. But with the formation of states in the pre-industrial period, “pacification” occurred.

Violence and supreme rule were monopolized [by the state], which generally facilitated an increase in restraints upon the violent inclinations and the emotions of individual persons… Eventually this resulted to a certain extent in a society free from violence, except for the relations among states.

Notice that when security is enforced by the household or the kinship group people tend to confine their economic and social activity within the household. But when it becomes society-wide then people interact economically and socially with a much broader range of people, as white people do in America. Because they feel safe. Why, it’s so safe that people can elect a woman to be their mayor and appoint a woman to be police chief, as in nice safe Seattle.

But that chap who’s the capo di tutti capi in Seattle’s CHAZ. He is a man.

We see this safety and pacification process work itself out after the industrial revolution in the story of the American city. Ethnic groups arrive in the US and settle in ethnic ghettos, often protected by an ethnic criminal gang. Only after they learn the ropes of life in the good old USA do they emerge from under the protection of their ethnic “household” into the wider world.

Now, I propose that it is shameful to be an ethnic group locked up in its ghetto; it means they are not yet up to snuff. When people are screaming “racism” and “discrimination” they are admitting that they are inferior, afraid to submit themselves to the judgement of the rest of society. And the problem is compounded when well-born liberal activists advocate for them with convenient insults, like the meme-of-the-week, “systemic racism.”

And that, I think, is the meaning of Candace Owen’s recent George Floyd video. As an American, she is ashamed of her fellow blacks that are afraid to come out into the broader society.

Hey, let’s have a slavery minute! Back in the jolly old Roman Empire, Spierenburg writes, when slaves were plentiful, the Roman patriarchs kept them in barracks and wouldn’t allow them to marry. But when the slave supply dried up, the Romans started to think it was OK for slaves to marry and have families. Hey, they even started to let them live in individual housing rather than barracks. 

Now, my take on the end of slavery in the industrial world is that the eevil capitalists decided that free labor is more profitable than slave labor. I wonder if even Stalin might now agree about that.

But here's the point. If the "pacified" societies of state regimes reduce the need for patriarchs managing the safety of the women and children, then isn't the city police a Good Thing? Because it permits women, especially, to venture out beyond the protection of their lords and masters and husbands into the public square, confident that the police are out there to make them safe.

Of course, the police are a problem if you are an unpacified minority young man that has not yet acquired the skills to thrive in the city economy and if you are a young man that still adheres to the old pre-city culture of vendetta and vengeance. For instance, the notion of "dissing" in black male culture is obviously a pre-city cultural thing, of men whose reputation in the world is not what they can do for you -- which is what a man in the city is all about -- but what they can do to you -- as a warrior on the border of the household's territory.

Are you thinking right now about the contradiction in the world view of our lefty friends? On the one hand they are utterly against eevil patriarchs and toxic masculinity, the culture of the the pre-state world when the patriarch protected you from the baddies. On the other hand they are against the police forces that pacify the city and make it safe for women and soy boys to live and work and move about the city.

So which is it, lefties?

Yes, Let's Have a Talk about Slavery

Since we are all in the middle of being carefully taught to hate the 400 years of slavery and oppression suffered by African Americans, let us just review a curious tale of slavery, in the naval novel, The Privateersman, by Captain Marryat.

Captain Marryat, all you wokies will know because you are all so well-read, is the chap that invented the naval novel genre, that we now enjoy with Patrick O'Brien and a host of others. Marryat was an actual naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars and served under Lord Cochrane, the inspiration for all the heroes of O'Brien and the others.

In The Privateersman, our hero works for a shipowner in Liverpool -- a port that you scholars will know was a notorious slave port. The shipowner, father of the most perfect girl in the world, used to make lots of money in the slaving line, but now prefers the less abominable trade of privateering.

Privateering, all you scholars will know, was a second-tier thing in the Napoleonic Wars, where ship captains with "letters of marque" were licensed to prey on the King's enemies for loot and plunder.

Our hero is the captain on a couple of privateering voyages but then, partly influenced by the daughter, he tells his boss that he's not going to go a-privateering again.

One thing leads to another, and he goes down to West Africa and gets captured by West Africans and made a slave -- to the lovely concubine of a West African chief. But eventually the Brits come and free him.

Then he makes another trip to West Africa, this time to trade goods -- for gold dust and elephant tusks -- but one thing leads to another and his ship gets taken over by a villainous Portuguese who puts him in irons and exchanges the tusks for slaves. When the ship arrives in Brazil with its African slaves, our hero gets imprisoned and sent as a white slave for life to the Brazilian diamond mines.

Hmm. I wonder what Captain Marryat means by that.

One thing leads to another and our hero gets freed after a couple of years, and sets sail in a xebeque for North America, on the way home to Britain and the most perfect girl in the world. But the ship gets wrecked on the coast of North America and our hero gets captured by Indians and forced to marry an ugly old Indian squaw.

One thing leads to another and our hero escapes and presents himself at a small tobacco plantation in the wilderness run by a six-foot woman and two indentured servants, criminals branded on their hands, and forced to work as virtual slaves. She decides she wants to marry him and puts him in chains until he agrees. Well, but soon enough the Indians attack their log cabin and set fire to it. But our hero manages to escape in all the smoke.

One thing leads to another and our hero climbs on board a pirate ship, and is more or less forced to become a crew member because if he didn't agree to become a pirate the crew would kill him.

But one thing leads to another and the pirate ship gets captured by a Royal Navy ship, that just happens to be commanded by our hero´s younger brother. Everything ends happily ever after, including getting the most perfect girl in the world.

Now I don't know exactly what Captain Marryat was trying to say, but I'd guess that he was trying to make the point, in 1846, that there was a whole lot of slavery going on back in the day. And just about everyone was doing it, from Liverpool merchants to West African chiefs to Portuguese colonial regimes to native Americans to white women running tobacco farms in tidewater America. And anyone could be taken into slavery. For the rest of their natural life.

Now, I'm bound to admit that the slavery of African slaves on North American plantations was a particularly villainous kind of slavery, because the capitalist plantation owners made it pay, as capitalists are wont to do. Usually, slavery was a muddle, a sign of status, rather than profit, for you either were a slave or you owned slaves. Back in the day.

But soon enough lots of people, including many of the most perfect girls in the world, got to feeling that slavery wasn't really Christian. Even William Wilberforce, the son of a merchant in Hull, England, agreed.

Well, one thing led to another, and the Americans of 1860 decided to have a war over it.

Then one thing led to another and the socialists of the world decided to give slavery another try in the two biggest slave states in history. Guess which states I am talking about.

Then our progressive friends decided to go half way to slavery with neo-feudal welfare states in which about 40 percent of peoples' incomes are extracted from them by force for the ruling class to give out as free stuff to the supporters of the progressive regime.

I wonder what our progressive friends will come up with next. In the slavery and feudal line.

To Be Continued.

Insurrection in Seattle

Well, well, well. The AntiFas and wokies have taken over a six block area of wokey Capitol Hill in Seattle, the place where all the 20-somethings in artistical black live.

And the first thing that happens is they erect barricades. Otherwise known as a border wall. Imagine if Trump...

And the first thing their police force does is rough up a guy doing an unapproved "tag." Imagine if the Seattle Police Department...

Well. 

I called my Seattle city councilman this morning, axing what his 5-point Plan was to end the insurrection. I suggested to his voice mail, as an example of tough action, the Clinton-era attack on the Branch Davidian compound that, I believe, resulted in the whole compound of the religious cult being burned to the ground and several Branch Davidians and federales being killed. It all started when the Bureau of Tobacco and firearms came to get the guns of the cultists.

So. They came for their guns and the followers of David Koresh said, out of my cold dead hands. Thank goodness there wasn't a Republican president at the time or everyone would have thrown themselves on the ground wailing and gnashing their teeth at the end of "our democracy."

Since I'm a mere 5 miles from the center of insurrection, you might think I am concerned, and I am, of course, because you never know.

But maybe we need this, because, as Edmund Burke said, "Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other." Borders. No kidding. Police doing a bit of the rough stuff. No kidding.

This is the sort of thing that President Trump is rather good at addressing, and I dare say he will when he addresses the Republican National Convention and gets on the road again with his Trump rallies.

The point is that the educated left in this country are ignorant idiots. They, in the words of Ben Rhodes, literally know nothing.

Here they are returning the nation back to vigilante justice, justice by vengeance rather than bureaucratic law and order and police restrained by actual laws and rules.

Here they are returning to naming and shaming and shunning, as practiced down the ages by the women, and latterly in church communities and their "dis-fellowshipping." Oh and by the Kidz in Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Here they are, proposing to "defund the police" and spend the money on social programs. Oh please. Don't you idiots realize that the social programs are the problem?

The problem, dear liberals, is that you are trying to combine your religion, the religion of woke equality and justice, with the prosaic system of law and order, which tries not to take a position on the question of "the meaning of life" but merely to remove some of the primitive cultural practices like outgroup hate and vengeance with police and law courts.

The point about police and law is not that they are morally superior, but that they remove the older practices that we colloquially refer to as "the Hatfields and the McCoys."

The point about the separation of church and state is the idea to separate the search for meaning from the prosaic question of keeping the peace in the city.

And there's another question, that appears in black and white to me, as a profound sexist. A lot of the naming and shaming and canceling is being done by women. I believe this is because naming and shaming is part of the women's instinctive community culture, the way that women have interacted since the dawn of women living close to their mother-in-laws.

I am here to say that I don't think this women's cancel culture works in the so-called "public square" of the modern world.

Put it this way. Just as men have had to modify their instinctive male honor code from vengeance and the duel to merely insulting each other in public forums -- limited in places like the House of Commons and Congress by rules against insult -- so women need to civilize their culture of name and shame, of "I can't believe she said that" and getting the other women on your side against the neighborhood woman that offended you.

Right now our wokie women and the nice liberal ladies have No Idea that their Culture of Complaint is a problem. No Idea.

And I don't know how we are going to educate them and the SJW kidz educated in our lefty seminaries, except by the Burkean concept of the School of Example.

The whole purpose of knowledge, of course, is to limit, at least in part, the brutal lessons of the School of Example.

Meanwhile Long Live the Revolution of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone!

Dennis Prager Itemizes My Great Reaction

Dennis Prager recently put out a piece "The Four Horsemen of America's Apocalypse." That is:

1. Victimhood: "People who think of themselves as victims feel that, having been victimized, they are no longer bound by normal moral conventions -- especially the moral conventions of their alleged or real oppressors.
2. Demonization: "demonizing a group as inherently evil."
3. A Cause to Believe In: "The need for meaning is the greatest human need after the need for food. Leftism, with all its offshoots -- feminism, environmentalism, Black Lives Matter, antifa -- has filled that vacuum."
4. Lies: "Lies are the root of evil."

Of course, I interpret this through the lens of my Great Reaction idea. That the left is a lurch back to the primitive.

Thus, of course the left deals in victimhood. As I keep quoting, 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[.]

Right. So the troubles of the poor are all the fault of the corporations, or the whites, or something. For Hitler, the poor suffering Germans were the victims of the Jews. "There is always a fault at the bottom of it."

Thus, of course the left deals in demonization. This goes back to the notion of the scapegoat that was given a recent push by René Girard. The point of the scapegoat is to unite the community and put all of its divisions and arguments on a single person or group and then banish them from the community.

Thus, of course the left comes up with a succession of causes, socialism, feminism, climate change: a cause to believe in. We all are tormented by the need to know the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." That is what religion -- and science -- are all about. They are an effort to try and figure out what the heck is going on in this town, this world, this solar system, this galaxy, this universe.

Notice how the boundary of the Will to Know keeps expanding. Used to be that people were really concerned about the spirits in the local trees. Then they started worrying about the moon and the sun and the stars that revolved across the sky. Then they started worrying about the Sun as the center of the solar system. Then the Sun as just a medium star in the galaxy. Then galaxies in a universe of galaxies.

I predict that one day we will be worrying about a universe, or multiverse, or something, bigger than our current Big Bang created universe.

Thus, of course the left deals in lies. Because the lie is the shortcut to the truth. In truth, the truth is unknowable, or at least unfathomable. And all religions, philosophies, cultures, narratives are a shortcut to the truth. All of them, therefore, are lies. The only response is the classic line of Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken," that all knowledge, all ideas, all everything is incomplete, less than the truth. And that the beginning of wisdom is to understand that, deep in your bowels.

Now I maintain that the modern age is an astonishing miracle, that has repressed -- in the sense of Schopenhauer and Freud -- the basic primitive instincts that Dennis Prager listed. The point is that we can't have our larger society, our market economy, our multicultural cities, unless people repress their basic human instincts, to think that "someone is to blame," to want to punish the scapegoat, to believe, to jump to a cheap explanation that justifies your action.

But, you would expect, our ascent from the dusty plain to the current heights would not be without incident and setback. And, as new-age philosopher Ken Wilber has written, when things go wrong we regress to our old ways and consciousness. Of course we do. If our new ideas seem to falter we go back to what is old and familiar.

And that is why we have the left. Because there is a constant nagging feeling that in all our progress and modernity we have lost something, something that we imagine we used to have in the old community. Thus the left's nostalgia for the solidarity of olden days. Only, of course, life then was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

And you tell me why the left, that imagines itself a movement of rebellion against the injustices and repressions and intolerance of the modern age, is so devoted to political power and fault and vengeance.

It could be because they are idiots.

Gee, Why Would These Folks Be Rebelling, Liberals?

Yesterday I was bemoaning how politicians only know politics, and politics is always about loot and plunder: vote for me and you will get free stuff.

But then I read this Joel Kotkin piece in American Mind: "The Rebellion of America's New Underclass," and it nicely illustrates the problem.

I mean the problem of the "unanticipated consequences" of political loot and plunder.

Kotkin notes that the young are the particular victims of the current economic lockdown:

• "Many young people, including college graduates, are now often employed in these low-wage ['personal contact'] industries.
• "privileged...  radicals... putting into action the political indoctrination they imbibed in college and, increasingly, even earlier."
• "the end of a remarkable period which saw, first, the ascendency of the middle class and then, particularly after World War II, the steady improvement of conditions for the working class."
• "urban renaissance... at the cost of 'the deprivation, frustration and anger of those who are becoming the new urban serfs.΅
• "Particularly impacted, first by lockdowns and then by the riots, have been urban small business owners."
• "Particularly vulnerable are the two thirds between 25 and 32 who lack a 4-year college degree."
• "Yet even educated youth now suffer consistently lower wages than their counterparts from previous generations"

And of course what these young people want is loot. As offered by Bernie Sanders and so forth.

Gosh! Now this couldn't be the fault of our ruling class, could it?

It couldn't be that college has become ridiculously expensive, powered by student loans that have absolutely no connection with marketable skills?

It couldn't be that a lot of kids are kept in school when maybe they could be doing better by working in apprenticeships at low wages building up skills.

It couldn't be that the importation of low-wage furriners has the double effect of pricing student-debt-loaded Americans out of the job market while providing serf labor for big business, because H1B-type workers cannot easily change jobs, like the agricultural serfs of old.

It couldn't be because of tons of occupational licensing that serves to prop up the old guys and keep out the young competitors.

It couldn't be because of the substantial taxation on labor with various payroll taxes that can add 30 percent to the lost of labor.

It couldn't be because of minimum-wage laws that prevent youngsters without connections from getting a start in the labor market (while rich kids get to do unpaid internships).

It couldn't be because of complicated zoning laws and the expensive development process that obviously privileges existing developers against new entrants.

It couldn't be because the whole education system is a government loot-and-plunder operation privileging government workers and resistant to change and reform.

It couldn't be because energy is getting more expensive as electric utilities are forced to load up on expensive and unreliable and subsidized "renewable"energy.

It couldn't be because the current welfare system discourages the two-parent family and encourages young lower-class women to have children without benefit of father, so that in the white underclass, at least, the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

It couldn't be because liberals have been teaching the lower classes for over a century to believe in themselves as victims rather than get on the Road to the Middle Class and learn the ways and the skills of the city.

"Only by restoring broad upward mobility can we hope to maintain a healthy democratic society", writes Joel Kotkin.

But he really doesn't have a clue. The way to restore upward mobility is to prevent the established -- government union workers to licensed physicians to Social Security recipients -- from taxing and looting the youngsters.

And all the "it couldn't be"s that I have listed above, or almost all, derive from the left and its religious faith in the power of government programs to "bend the arc of history towards justice."

No! The great lesson of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is that it was always a surprise. Nobody saw it coming, not machine textiles, not steam power from coal, not oil from under the ground, not even Amazon and its on-line marketplace.

I mean. Who among us bought Amazon stock the day it went public in 1997 at $1.97 per share (in today's shares)? Today Amazon is at $2,618 per share. So, suppose you bought $5,000 of Amazon on a flyer in 1997? Today it would be worth $6.6 million.

But who among us ever imagined Amazon would end up like this? I certainly didn't. Hey, I bought books on Amazon, but never imagined what it could become, now with a fleet of 80 aircraft delivering goods!

But that's my point. The whole of the last 200 years of astonishing economic growth has been on the backs of the Amazon of the day, that nobody saw coming.

And that means that, Rule One is: nobody has a clue. 

Especially politicians. Especially activists. Especially journalists. Especially professors. Especially nice liberal ladies with social moralizing yard-signs out front.

Now. Who amongst us is going to go first and tell the liberal Emperor he has no clothes?