Ch4: But How Does a New Regime Come into Being?

Now that Curtis Yarvin is well into his Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince I think I am ready to start making a critique.

And I think my basic problem is the idea that the Nihilist Prince could actually know what he is doing. As I understand Macchiavelli's The Prince I believe that his notion was to teach princes how to maintain and hold power: what worked and what didn't.

But Yarvin is going deeper. For instance in his Chapter 4 on Principles of the Next Regime he is getting into religious and cultural matters: should the new ruler be running a zoo for humans, a video game to let people get off on their natural aggression, or putting people to work doing satisfying work?

But this assumes an almost totalitarian concern for peoples' moral welfare as well as physical welfare.

And I would say that the lesson of the 20th century is that governments that get into the details of welfare, whether physical or cultural or moral, are setting themselves up for failure because the scale of the job is too big for a top-down social structure. The regime just doesn't have the bandwidth.

Yarvin writes about the "Cathedral" and its top-down structure of moral and cultural control:

Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.

But I think that, as with the physical medieval cathedrals, the ruling class builds the structure of the Cathedral after it has gained religious and cultural power. The Cathedral is the method of maintaining power.

But when putting together a new regime? What does anyone know, except that the old regime has to go?

And in the old regime, what does anyone in the Brain or the Voice know except that any new regime would be worse -- especially for the rulers and their supporters. For in the old regime, the Brain is not really thinking but only defending the orthodoxy, the correct opinion, of the existing regime.

And this is as it should be. Nobody goes out looking for new knowledge unless there is a problem, a glitch in the Matrix.

In normal times the ruling class and its Cathedral are unopposed. Everything is working as it should be: God is in His Heaven and the King is on his throne and the people prosper.

But if things seem to be going wrong: defeat in war, bad harvests, financial crises, mobs in the street; why, then people start to ask what is wrong and What Is To Be Done. But only a very few people.

Moreover, I suggest that the "very few people" are regarded by all sensible people as complete idiots, not really worth taking seriously. Why? Because for all sensible people everything is still working as it should. No glitch in the Matrix here, no sir.

But what if the Cathedral detects dangerous heresy and the Brain and the Voice and the Conversation swing into action to destroy it? 

I wonder. I wonder if, usually, the hierarchs and heretic hunters will really understand that, if there is a problem, it is probably not that the heretics are evil monsters, but that the apparent smooth surface of the glorious ruling class doctrine and its Cathedral and Cathedral spires are all an illusion. That there is, in fact, corruption and decay, and the foundations are undermined.

We see this is the current situation in the United States. Our ruling class and its educated Gentry cannot see that it is producing less than optimal results for great numbers of the people. That's because the whole job of the Cathedral is to demonstrate to the world that everything about the regime is all for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

So when the American Committees of Correspondence started talking to each other in the decade leading up to 1776 dear old King George and his courtiers didn't really take them seriously. And anyway, did the Committees really know what they wanted?

Or in the run-up to the French Revolution, did the chaps in the cafés at the Palais Royal really know what they wanted and why, and did Louis XVI's courtiers really have a firm grasp on the problem? Life was good under the old regime, according to Talleyrand:

He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and can not imagine that there can be happiness in life. 

Look at the current situation in the US. In the debate on September 29, 2020 candidate Joe Biden railed against the white supremacist Proud Boys but said that AntiFa was "just an idea." But President Trump said of the Proud Boys that basically there was nothing to see here, while AntiFa was a problem.

So the two main political parties can't agree on who the current "peaceful protesters" and/or rioters are, who is behind them, and how significant each group is. But each party agrees that the people in the streets identified with the Other party are clearly a menace.

So what is the solution to the problem of the Next Regime?

Well, I would say that it starts with religion, with people that find the current moral framework ill-adapted for the needs, the meaning of life for people like them. So they start bumbling around trying to create a new religion.

Then there is the broader cultural question of a general moral framework, in which, I would say, the great mass of educated and suburban women establish their expectations of each other and the men that protect them.

And then this cultural framework starts to influence the politics.

And the beginning of wisdom, I believe, is for the folks developing new religions and moral frameworks to recognize that different people need and respond to different religions and moral frameworks; there is no one size fits all.

And the beginning of wisdom in our current left-liberal Cathedral is to understand that its Religion of Creativity doesn't really work for the rest of society. In my reductive Three Peoples theory this means that the religion of the Creative People looks like evil to the Responsible People. And vice versa.

And if the Creative People keep ramming their religion down the throats of the Responsible People they are cruising for a bruising.

Just sayin'.

First Principles of Yarvin's Next Regime

After telling us all about the "System" and the "Cathedral" political philosopher Curtis Yarvin wants us to think about what the Next Regime is going to be all about.

Today, "In 2020, we are all nihilists." Because, whatever we have inherited from the 20th century, "almost none of us has any significant positive belief in it."

What does that mean? I suppose we can say that it means that almost everyone is extremely dissatisfied with the political status quo. Only, we all believe that it is the Other guy's fault.

But nihilism, for Yarvin, involves both detachment and absolutism. What on earth is that all about?

Detachment... means disengaging, detaching, withdrawing or resigning from every form of power, or ambition for power, influence or relevance, under the present regime. 

This is, if nothing else, practical, because it reduces the likelihood that the regime will come hunting for you. It has other fish to fry.

Absolutism... means thinking ex nihilo: from scratch, from first principles, not relative to any specific past or present reality.

OK. Fine. So what's that when it's at home? Well, it recognizes that, while anyone trying to develop new knowledge is standing on the shoulders of giants, we have to recognize that a lot of knowledge these days is baloney, and if we carelessly accept it, we will be standing on the shoulders of ogres instead. So we have to climb down and step back and reevaluate all the knowledge extant to determine what is good giant stock and what is useless ogre stock.

For instance, suppose we had to choose between "government of the people" and government for the people," what should we choose? Yarvin says government for the people is a necessity, while government of the people is a luxury.

Government for the people ideally means an overlord that makes the "justest laws and enforces them efficiently and impartially".

Government by the people could easily mean "chaos and anarchy, in which we are bullied, assaulted, extorted, beaten" by our crazy cousins.

Simply put, Yarvin is arguing that no-one has a moral right to political power. In fact the world is full of Hamlets, Prince of Denmark, that imagine that they are born to rule. Hello wokies!

Our modern system is based on the notion of vox populi, vox dei that the people are the voice of God. Only, of course it doesn't quite work that way in practice. Our real ruling principle is "the people are always right, if rightly educated." That way, of course, the powerful only have to deal with the teachers, rather than the people. And if the rulers have all the teachers, professors, journalists, bureaucrats on their side...

So what we have is an oligarchy, with the Cathedral of moral teachers defining orthodoxy and using Karl Popper's "paradox of tolerance," "So we tolerate everyone, except the intolerant." That, of course was the argument of Herbert Marcuse in his doctrine of "repressive tolerance." Says Yarvin:

Popper’s advice is pure Machiavelli. Its message to any regime is: take and hold the levers which control public opinion, before someone else does.

And that is what our Wokie cancel cultists are all about. Fire the heretics before they do any more damage.

But what the "if rightly educated" hierarchs are really doing is handing out goodies to the people: the greatest good to the greatest number? Utilitarianism. Only, it ends up as luxury. It makes sense when we humans are scrabbling around for basic necessities, but not when we are, like the Crazy Rich Asians, engaged in an orgy of  name-brand luxury. Luxury, in the hands of Kevin Kwan, becomes a major motion picture joke.

A political system devoted to delivering luxury is not government for the people.

If we now examine the Latin tag Salus populi, suprema lex, or "the health of the people is the supreme law" we see we are dealing with the luxury problem. But it ain't that simple for "while the health of a body can be quantified, sort of, the health of a soul is a qualitative and aesthetic judgment."

OK, so if we have a government for the people that is truly devoted to the health of the people what would it look like?

Would it be like a zoo, with a worthy zookeeper devoted to the health of the people in it? Not really, because in a zoo, the lions are not really living as lions, dealing with "the real challenges of being a lion."

Would it be like a video game? Well, the experience of video games is that what gamers want is a game of total intensity, and that means "virtual worlds with only violence." That might be too much of a good thing. We could put individuals into video game pods, and harness their energy to do stuff in the real world. Or we could combine people into village pods.

But we still have a situation where the video game producer is directing traffic according to his own notion of what people should be doing.

Maybe we should reimagine the economy and throw away all the cheap plastic toys and put everyone to work making good old-fashioned wooden toys. That way people could once more become artisans rather than mere industrial labor. But that gets awfully close to Bastiat's notion of creating work for glaziers by breaking windows.

But that, it appears are Yarvin's three options to make human health, physical and spiritual, the purpose of government for the people: Put humans in a zoo; put them in a video game; put them to work making toys by hand.

But I would say that if this is the three possible modes of "absolutism" then Yarvin is missing the point, for he is assuming the one thing we do not know, and that is "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." In every generation, in every era, we cobble together some religious and cultural and political answer to this eternal question, but we never get close to answering it.

And he seems to be imagining a closed system: that is what a zoo, or a video game, or a toy manufacturing program is all about.

And I would say that the truth of existence is that it is an open system. We men all thirst for challenge and adventure, which we used to get from defending the border, and more recently in global world wars. But there are alternatives, like exploration. We men had a grand old time between 1500 and 1900 exploring and colonizing the world. The 20th century has taught us that the exploration game is over. No doubt that is why tech billionaires are planning the exploration of the solar system.

And then there is the question of women. Oh yeah. Because the point of men defending the border is to provide a safe place for women to have babies, and the food-growing land to produce the food to feed the babies until they are full grown.

And in the last 200 years we have converted the energies of men from fighting on the border to fighting for market share, or fighting to supply the consumers with the best products. I think that the future of politics and governance and culture and religion and economy is to find something for men to fight about that, like fighting for market share, actually benefits mankind.

Women, as ever, will do exactly what they are carefully taught while simultaneously manipulating the world of men to supply them with the protection and the support they need to bear and nurture the future of humankind.

For me, I don't believe in going back to first principles. That is the error of the whole progressive project. As Yarvin says, each of us live by standing on the shoulders of giants, and hoping to avoid getting tangled up with ogres. The task before us is to tag the ogres and build upon what we already have been given by the giants.

We all start from where we are: in this age, this decade, this day, this moment. We never get to start over.

My "1584 Project"

Remember when the peerless New York Times journalist put up her "1619 Project" and the editors announced it thus?

The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. [emphasis added]

Yes, of course, that bold bit has since been memory-holed. Because reasons, chiefly because a lot of historians weighed in and said this narrative is, as they say in Critical-Theory-Land, "overdetermined." And, I understand, the chief writer in the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has taken her Twitter feed private, because reasons.

I get all this. It's because we humans all want to recite "the story so far," the comforting story about how "we" -- whoever "we" happens to be -- are the culmination of the history of the world so far. Educated blacks like HNJ want a narrative special to them. And our liberal friends are deeply in love with the "oppressed peoples, allies, white oppressors" narrative which is all about how liberals are the saviors of the world because they are the allies of the oppressed peoples and plucked them from out of the clutches of the eevil white oppressors.

The purpose of the 1619 Project is, of course, to throw offal on the "founding narrative," that the American people are the best people in the world, the United States is the best country in the world, and our founders are the best politicians in the world.

Which is really cool if you are a liberal, but not so much fun if you are, say, a gap-toothed white redneck. Where do you fit in to all this virtue-signaling?

Enter my "1584 Project." It is critical theory on steroids, because it is a critique of the "1619 Project" as a prime example of the domination and hegemony of the educated class. You see, it may very well be that August 20, 1619 marked the arrival of the first slave ship in North America. But back in 1584 the first ships from England arrived off the coast of North America to found the Roanoke Colony.

What was the Roanoke Colony? According to La Wik, It was the brain-child of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was awarded a charter by Queen Elizabeth I to "discover, search, find out, and view such remote heathen and barbarous Lands, Countries, and territories ... to have, hold, occupy, and enjoy." He sent an expedition out in 1584 which made landfall at "Port Ferdinando" by Roanoke Island. Raleigh's people spent the next couple of years trying to establish a colony, but gave up, probably abandoning a few colonists to their fate.

But what was this colonization all about? If you read Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, it is all about the problem of "waste population" in England in the 16th century.

I know, let's tell a story.

Back in 1000, let us say, the Brits lived in a pure feudal system where they lived as serfs in a medieval manor. They could, if they chose, become slaves of their lord, and get their three squares a day directly from the loving lord rather than scratching for it as agriculturalists farming the open field system.

But in the 12th century, according to La Wik, "some fields in England tilled under the open field system were enclosed into individually owned fields." Then came the Black Death and that really got the break-up of the feudal system going.

Many farms were bought by yeomen who enclosed their property and improved their use of the land. More secure control of the land allowed the owners to make innovations that improved their yields.

The nobles also liked the enclosure concept. Their idea was to enclose land so they could graze sheep. This became a political issue by 1500, so that in his Utopia Thomas More could speak of how when gentlemen "that carry about with them... a great flock or train of idle and loitering serving men" die, their heirs "thrust [them] out of doors."

And what do they do, these landowners?

[They] leave no ground for tillage: they enclose all into pastures... and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made into a sheep-house.

The money, says More, is in the growing "of the finest and the dearest wool" and that is what the "noblemen and gentlemen" were doing. Not coincidentally, the first vagabond act was passed in 1495.

To add insult to injury, monarchs in the 16th century started disarming their nobles and creating national armies. This created another reason for nobles to kick their "idle and loitering serving men" out of doors.

By 1584, Richard Hakluyt in his "Discourse Concerning Western Planting" proposed not just the advantage of merchants and artisans improving the waste lands of the Americas, but the benefit of exporting the human detritus from the improvement and enclosure movement. Isenberg:

[T]he bulk of the labor force was to come from the swelling numbers of poor and homeless... Idle and unused they were waiting to be transplanted to the American land and be better... put to use.

Then the convicts. Here is what Hakluyt planned for them in America.

Among the first waves of workers were the convicts, who would be employed at heavy labor felling trees and burning them for pitch, tar, and soap ash; others would dig in the mines for gold, silver, iron, and copper. The convicts were not paid wages. As debt slaves, they were obliged to repay the English commonwealth for their crimes by producing commodities for export.

Anyway, after the Roanoke Colony failed the Brits tried again with Jamestown, founded in 1607. It struggled as badly as Roanoke, but then in 1609 John Rolfe introduced a strain of tobacco from Bermuda, and "tobacco quickly became the new gold --  the ticket to wealth."

But for that the planters needed labor, and so they pleaded for "more indentured servants and laborers, who, like slaves were sold to the highest bidder." Actually, the normal game was that men that did not pay for their own passage to the Americas paid instead with a term of indentured labor. And contracts of indenture bound servants to their masters and even their heirs. If an indentured servant died, his wife and children were expected to work out the term of indenture.

So the waste population of England was not that different from the conquest slaves of West Africa.

Of course, some of the indentured servants escaped, and learned to live off the grid as squatters and crackers.

They lived off the grid... disappeared into unsettled territory and squatted down... anywhere and everywhere.

As early as the 1750s they were called the "scum of nature" and "vermin"; they had no means of support except theft and license.

Thus the whole pejorative vocabulary of White Trash, from Nancy Isenberg:

Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tuckies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White [n-word]. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people. 

Don't you think it is time for a new movement among the elite, to champion the White Trash against their oppressors? Oh wait. In that case the moral narrative would be about "oppressed white trash, gentry oppressors, and don't cares."

Did you know about the "maroons?" They were communities of escaped African slaves all up and down the eastern coast of the Americas. They usually lived just far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't be bothered to bother them.

So really, the maroons were the same as the white trash, the squatters and crackers, that lived far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't bother them. Both white trash indentured servants and negro slaves were useful to the ruling class to work in their money-making plantations, if they could keep them from escaping.

In my narrative of The Story So Far, I reckon that, at some point, the benefit of slave labor began to burn out. Eventually the powers that be started to realize that free labor was much more profitable than slave labor. And so indentured servitude and slavery became a scandal to the great and the good.

However, I maintain that the pendulum has swung back somewhat to feudalism, for in my critique of the left as a Great Reaction, I call socialism a return to slavery and the welfare state a return to feudalism. In the welfare state the workers give a lot of their wages back to the government in return for benefits. And what is that, in effect, but a kind of quasi-serfdom?

There seem to be only two ways of recalling the past. Either it was a golden age or it was a shameful barbarism. Or both.

But I think a better way is to be understanding about the past. It was what it was. We should be hesitant to praise it unduly, and we should be disinclined to sneer at it.

For who knows how our own age will be judged by those that come after us.

Angelo Codevilla's "Revolution 2020"

How can one begin to deal with the prophecies of Angelo Codevilla's "Revolution 2020" just out at American Mind?

Where he says that, whether they intended it or not, America's ruling class has declared the Deplorables beyond the pale and therefore ordained a totalitarian future in which nobody will be allowed to dissent from the orthodoxy, or hold an opinion at odds with the orthodoxy, or hold a job if they they are not orthodox.

The point is that Donald Trump represents an inchoate rebellion against the supremacy of the ruling oligarchy:

More and more, America’s ruling class, shaped and serviced by an increasingly uniform pretend-meritocratic educational system, claimed for itself monopoly access to truth and goodness, and made moral as well as technical-intellectual contempt for the rest of Americans into their identity’s chief element. That, along with administrative and material power, made our ruling class the gatekeeper to all manner of goods.

Because, of course, to oppose the oligarchy's "monopoly access to truth and goodness" is the very definition of Satanic evil. And it must be stamped out, in every detail of its satanic systemic racism.

And, of course, once you get the whip in your hand, there is no end to it.

Affirmation of one’s own superiority by punishing inferiors is an addictive pleasure. It requires ever stronger, purer doses of infliction, and is inherently beyond satisfaction.

Codevilla laughs at the pompous notion of the "resistance" to Trump's 2016 election by the ruling class. Yes, of course, the ruling class resisted; it is still resisting.

In fact, the election’s outcome had resulted from the general population’s resistance to the ruling class further solidifying its oligarchy.

And, let us be clear, this resistance of the general population is barely organized or led by anyone. It is inchoate, instinctive, organic.

The warrant for the ruling class oligarchy's power has always been its self-image as certified experts, as truth-telling scientists, its moral concern for "education, to well-being for the poor and disadvantaged, to a healthy natural environment, and to public health." And of course, it moral stand against racial and sexual oppression.

But each and all of these campaigns produced mostly the ostensible objectives’ opposites while increasing the numbers of the oligarchy’s members and their wealth and power[.]

In other words, the oligarchs have wrecked education, demolished the poor, used environmentalism to oppress ordinary people, and used oppression narratives to oppress the deplorables. No wonder the deplorables are rising up.

As with Crane Brinton's notion in An Anatomy of Revolution, the need for totalitarian domination arises from just this failure, of political action failing to achieve its promises -- even producing "the ostensible objetctives' opposites." When your revolution fails to create the Promised Land, that's when you have the choice to admit your failure or double down.

But the ruling class has a problem. The mostly peaceful protesters of the Summer of 2020 have inadvertently made it clear that their real enemy in not Donald Trump but the whole race of deplorable Commoners.

For the ruling class, the electoral problem is that the intersectional coalition’s actions and demands have made far too explicit that crushing Donald Trump is only incidentally its objective—that crushing the spirit of independence in America’s “deplorable” population is its essential objective. 

But, if Trump wins in 2020 and the Republicans maintain their position in Congress, what then?

The greatest benefit that would come from the Left’s defeat in the 2020 election is the possibility that it may become possible to convince the ruling class, if not the intersectionals, that such accommodation is the best deal they can get. But the intersectionals are violent enemies—who must be dealt with as such. Fortunately, there are more spoiled children among them than heroes.

So, the question is whether the oligarchy, the educated Gentry, decides on a truce with the deplorables, to let them go on being deplorable if they don't make too much trouble, or whether the oligarchy truckles to the "intersectional" extremists and goes for broke. Right now, I'd say that the Chucks and the Nancys are finding the AOCs and AntiFas a bit to hot to handle. So there is the temptation to loose them upon the American people as a whole.

And maybe it would work, for a while. But as I say, "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." What prompts people to form a head of rebellion is perceived injustice.

Oh, and there is one other thing, that women expect to be protected. If you don't protect them, dear oligarchs, then they will look for another protector.

And I suspect that our oligarchic rulers have no idea, literally No Idea, of the depth and breadth of the injustice they have loosed upon the land. Rulers seldom do, until the peasants with pitchforks show up at the door. 

Science, Climate Change, Politics, Prophecy and Reason

California Governor and nephew of Nancy Pelosi Gavin Newsom just issued an executive order to ban the sale of fossil-fueled powered cars in California in 2035.

Because the science of climate change demands it.

Over at UnHerd.com they have an article suggesting that only by harnessing the power of Nationalism will the world be able to tackle climate change.

Because the disconnected politicking of left and right can't do the job. We need to act as if we were fighting the Nazis or the Commies.

Or take the wonderful City of Seattle Council that has overridden the veto of Mayor Jenny Durkan and made "a down payment" on defunding the police with a reduction of 100 officers in the upcoming fiscal year.

Because, as Marx wrote, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce. Just because Revolution, Baby, failed in the Sixties doesn't mean it won't succeed today!

What is going on? Why are these politicians doing all this stupid stuff?

Fear not. I have the answers right here.

First of all we must recognize the nasty bind in which today's politicians find themselves. Politics is all, and only, about rallying the men to fight against the foe -- external and internal enemies -- in the present emergency.

Or as I say it in my Maxims: "The only warrant for government power is an existential peril."

But, that was for the old days, the tribal days, when the men of the tribe had to be ready to foil the neighboring tribe's dawn raid. What do you do when the threat of invasion and conquest has diminished to a nothing?

You make it up. That is what climate change is all about. That is what systemic racism is about. Because if there weren't any climate change or systemic racism to worry about we wouldn't need our brave political leaders leading us into battle against the evil giants.

Yes, but what about the science?

OK. Here is where I am going to lose you. Science is nothing more than Prophecy. Oh, it is very good prophecy, much better than divination and the entrails of a goat. But science is still prophecy, meaning it makes predictions about how stuff in the world moves and shakes and changes from moment to moment and day to day and eon to eon.

But isn't science all about logic and reason? Yes indeed. But did you know that humans invented logic and reason to manage their social relationships, and especially their lies? Sorry, I forgot to save the link. But here is another look, "Why Do Humans Reason?" by Hugo Mercier that argues that humans reason in order to argue and persuade: 

Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade... Skilled arguers... are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.

Actually, it was not that long ago that the philosophers descanted upon logic and reason in their coffee houses completely separate from the mechanics across town that made the clocks and the carts and the cathedrals. And ne'er the twain would meet. Until they needed really accurate clocks for global navigation and the mind-guys got together with the clock-maker guys and the European adventurers conquered the world.

The only point of science is to help predict the future, which may be anything from predicting the flight of a cannonball to predicting whether a bridge will fall down. But if you are an engineer you will know that engineers always build in a "factor of safety" when designing a building or an airplane.

Now, this notion of science as prophecy is built into what I call the German Turn in modern knowledge. It begins with Kant saying that we can't know things-in-themselves but only appearances. He was responding to the canceled Hume's dictum that there is no such thing in human knowledge as cause and effect, but only correlation. Just because a building fell down right after a raven flew across the face of the moon doesn't mean that the raven caused the building to fall down.

The German Turn reaches its peak with Jung saying that, for all our conscious knowledge, we are still mostly programmed by unknown "archetypes" in our unconscious, the primordial instincts that kept us as a human species alive for millions of years, and other living species for hundred of millions of years.

What does a living thing need, most of all? It needs to have some glimpse of what happens next, so that it can react in time to make a kill of a mega-fauna or dodge the spear or the bullet. And then whatabout next week? Whatabout next year?

That is what Prophecy is all about. Generally, once a prophetic tradition gets a hold of human minds it becomes an orthodoxy, enforced by the powerful and their priests. Notice that a prophetic tradition does not necessarily have to have a track record, just that influential people support it and enforce its doctrine.

This even extends to science. That's what Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was all about. A new scientific theory doesn't just come along and everybody agrees with it. The new theory -- or "paradigm" -- is not just a harmless idea; it proposes to humiliate the supporters of the old theory. It threatens jobs and reputations in academia. So it really doesn't succeed until the old generation dies off. Best of all, the new theory should make a prophetic prediction: like the prediction of General Relativity that light is bent as is comes close to a very massive object like our Sun.

You can see why climate change and the COVID-19 epidemic are like catnip to politicians. The politician really has nothing to do unless there is an existential peril requiring bold action. The world is coming to an end and we will all die! Unless we act now! There is a new plague and we will all die! Unless we all act now. And this is not just the politician acting up. He is activating Jungian "archetypes" deep in our unconcious.

Do not underestimate how vital and powerful these archetypes are. Writing in 1936 Jung said in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious:

There is no lunacy people under the domination of an archetype will not fall prey to. If thirty years ago anyone had dared to predict that our psychological development was tending towards a revival of the medieval persecutions of the Jews, that Europe would again tremble before the Roman fasces and the tramp of legions, that people would once more give the Roman salute, as two thousand years ago, and that instead of the Christian Cross an archaic swastika would lure onwards millions of warriors ready for death -- why, that man would have been hooted at as a mystical fool. (p.48)

So it is not surprising that politicians lurch towards any existential peril as a warrant for political power; that well-born young men and women throng the streets in mostly peaceful protest, that scientists go with the program and advocate for the hot thing that gets the grants, and that nice liberal ladies throng to the meetings of the latest prophet. 

The thing is to jump off the prophetic train before it transports us to disaster. But how?

Hamnet and "A More Feminine Sensibility"

As I keep writing, I read, years ago, the German sociologist Georg Simmel who wrote that while the public square -- Öffentlichkeit in German -- was invented by men for men, the emergence of women into the public square starting in the 19th century meant that women would start to change the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

I pondered that for a few years but have since come to believe that women don't relate to the public square, not at all. The public square is a relic of the duel, the fight between two men for dominance, only conducted today with words rather than fists. That is not how women live, or interact. As I say, women communicate one-on-one over coffee and in that conversation they do not disagree with each other, not at all. They talk about other women, as in "I can't believe she said/did that." The public square is not just a thing invented by men for men. It is inaccessible to women because they are women and their brains are wired differently.

So whenever I read a woman author I am thinking about her world-building: how does she present her women characters? Are they presented as just like men only better, like Mulan or a thousand martial-arts female heroes in the movies of the last two decades? Or are they handmaid victims in The Handmaid's Tale? Or what?

Recently a friend gave me a copy of Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O'Farrell, an Irish-born writer that seems to have worked her way up in the Brit world as a journalist. The book is about the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet, as experienced by Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway, of the well-known cottage.

Hathaway -- called Agnes in the book -- is not your regular feminist kick-ass heroine. Instead the whole book is about her feelings and emotions: what it was like when she first had sex with our Will, what it was like to be left behind in Stratford with the in-laws when Will went to London. And above all what it was like when her beloved son Hamnet dies of the plague and our Will heads back to London after a couple of days: things to do, people to see. And what it was like when Will wrote and produced a play called Hamlet.

Considering that Maggie O'Farrell lives and works in the liberal and woke environment of Brit journalism -- being at one point "deputy literary editor of the Independent on Sunday" -- it is remarkable that she writes a book so free of feminist cant and orthodoxy. And it makes me feel that the worm is turning, and that high-status educated women are starting to get beyond the fantasy of competing mano-a-mano as "independent women" with men in the public square. Instead these high-status women are realizing that the life of a woman just isn't anything to do with strutting your macho stuff on the public stage. It is about who you love, who you hate, who you look after, who you mourn, and what you feel about the day-to-day events of life -- oh, and, of course, the kind of people you invite to dinner.

Now, of course we know, with Curtis Yarvin, that for people in the educated Gentry life is all about "ambition, honor, and vanity." So well-born women are still going to be all about that, only of course, in the feminine sense of ambition, honor, and vanity. And don't forget from Honor: a History by James Bowman that honor among men is the reputation for courage, and honor among women is the reputation for chastity -- or as they say over at Washington Examiner, "Am I a good person?"

Nobody should doubt the emotional wear and tear that come from living a life in a male skin suit, doing that male swagger and male hierarchy thing while still being a woman inside that instinctively is programmed to life a completely different life.

I've been appreciating this more and more from reading Jung and his notion of the battle between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind. When you remember that almost the whole animal world lives only by the instinct and stimulus and image-making from the unconscious mind -- or whatever it is that prompts ants to ant and swallows to swallow -- it helps you appreciate that we humans, that have distinguished ourselves from all other animals by our conscious mind, are still complete beginners in the consciousness game. And, to use Jung's emphasis on the importance of dream analysis in understanding the operation of the unconscious, every time we fall asleep the unconscious mind rears its head and rushes forth from the shadows on to center stage and performs a little playlet, starring the archetypes.

So, I would say that the worm is starting to turn on the women-in-the-public-square front. But don't get your hopes up. Not yet. Not for a while. But it is a start.

"We Get to Play-act on Your Dime"

I was exchanging emails with a friend about Colorado's Governor Jared Polis, who is putting a vegan on the state board that regulates livestock.

Polis is gay, and he and his "husband" have two children, who go to private school.

Up until now, I have proposed that one of the main aspects of the left's Great Reaction, its lurch back to the primitive, is the Activism Culture, that I say amounts to "play-acting revolution."

But now I am inclined to think that the whole culture of the left, from LGBT to climate change, is all about play-acting.

The idea is that the children of the educated Gentry get to play-act, with sex, with culture, with the environment. On our dime. And if any particular play results in negative results -- even disaster -- well too bad.

Notice how this goes against the notion advanced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his Skin in the Game. He says:

What should I do? I want to help mankind. His suggestion:

1) Never engage in virtue-signaling;
2) Never engage in rent-seeking;
3) You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business.

In other words, don't do anything unless you have Skin in the Game, so that if your idea to help mankind turns out to be a dud -- and most such ideas are -- then you are the one that suffers the losses, not the rest of mankind.

See what I mean? Everything our liberal friends do is at other peoples' expense. If they are professors advocating for the Green New Deal, then it's all gravy for them. Government grants for now, and maybe Green Czar jobs down the line. But if the whole thing wrecks the economy? Hey. don't blame me; I only work here.

Oh no! A pandemic! Shut the economy down, because even one life lost is too much! But whatabout the millions of young people and semi-skilled that get furloughed and fired, while gubmint employees skate for a year and the bureaucrats that set the rules are entirely unaccountable for their mistakes? (And everyone makes mistakes).

If it is the Great Society, to give money to unmarried mothers, and results in 70 percent of children in the black community being born outside marriage? Hey, what's your problem, racist?

If it is gay marriage, suggesting to suggestible youngsters that it is kinda cool to experiment with your gender, well whatabout the kids? An American philosopher once told me that all children want a mother and a father: their mother and their father. I wonder what the social-science research says about children raised by gays and/or lesbians? Or is that even allowed?

If it is "affordable housing" and brilliant academic economists propose low-down-payment loans and liar loans, and the whole thing ends up in a generational financial panic where millions lose their jobs and millions more their life savings, where are the ones responsible? The academics with the brilliant ideas? The activists that sold the idea as a matter of justice? The politicians that bought votes with promises of home-ownership?

If it is electric cars, then electric car manufacturers get subsidies, electric car buyers get subsidies, Elon Musk makes a fortune, and German car manufacturers promise to stop making diesel-powered cars. What happens if renewable energy wind-turbines and solar cells can't deliver the power? Who takes the losses? The greenie activists? The rent-seeking billionaires? The ordinary consumers suffering power outages? The politicians that told us we had 12 years to save the planet?

There are literally dozens, if not hundreds of "issues" for which professors want research money, activists want to virtue-signal, special interests want to rent-seek, and politicians want to buy votes. But none of them have Skin in the Game. None of them will go bankrupt and lose everything they have if their brilliant idea turns out to be a dud. They are, in effect, play-acting on the public dime, kids playing on the jungle gym at the local park.

And what happens if all these grand plans all come crashing to Earth at the same time?

Hey kid. Grow up and stop with the play-acting. Learn what it means to have Skin in the Game and get a life!

It's Not a Good Idea for the Supreme Court to Legislate Morality

So here we are, with another Supreme Court nomination fight on our hands.

I was to dinner with the liberal neighbors last night and they were all sighing over the death of Supreme Court Justice and liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They had seen the documentary of her life, RBG, and were full of scenes like the moment in law school when the professor publicly made fun of her taking a place away from a guy.

For me, Ginsburg was a problem, because as a Good Little Girl of her feminist generation she thought that the job of the Supreme Court was and is to legislate liberal morality.

Of course, liberals high and low are horrified by the idea that Donald Trump might nominate a conservative Christian woman like Amy Coney Barrett. The Noive!

All I have to say, liberals, is that this is the wages of your strategy of legislating from the Supreme Court.

That is not what the law is all about. In the end, you will rue the day that you decided to start legislating your agenda through the administrative state and the law courts, but that time is not yet.

Now, some years ago I read The Story of Law by John Maxcy Zane. And the big takeaway for me was how much that the story of law has been about inheritance and commerce. In other words, when things go wrong with inheritance and with trade, that's when you have to call in the lawyers. It's amazing how complicated things can get. Why is this? Zane writes:

Nothing is more silly than to say that the law made private property. The fact is the exact opposite. Private property came to exist and it made the law. (p.147)

In other words, once humans began to treat some or all property as private, attached to an individual, then humans needed law to sort out conflicting claims about private property. 

That has made me skeptical, ever since, of the usefulness of law when it comes to morality.

Let us ventilate three ideas.

Politics and government are all about force. On what grounds can the state apply force to people? Because of violence? Because the state needs the money to pay for its wars?

Law is all about private property. What do you do when the heirs to railroad magnate -- and notorious robber baron -- Jay Gould start fighting over his $30 million fortune?

Religion is all about morality. What do you do about behavior you regard as immoral?

May I say that I regard this separation of powers as one of the most amazing achievements of humankind?

Let us investigate the question of abortion in this light of this separation of powers.

What do you do, for instance, about a woman who aborts her fetus? Immediately after conception? After the first trimester? Just before normal birth? Right after birth?

Now, I would say that a man that tells a woman carrying his child to "get rid of it" at any point is a cad. I take the moral position that if you have sex with a woman then your act is a commitment that says you would like her to have your child. Don't like my morality? Fine. I ain't forcing it on you.

But whatabout a woman who decides to abort her fetus?

In the first trimester? I'd call her flighty and foolish.

In the second trimester? I would call her very flighty and very foolish.

In the third trimester? I would call that flat out immoral.

At or immediately after birth? I would call that a crime.

See, I believe there is a difference between an immoral act, where all good women agree to name and shame and shun the immoral wench in question, and a criminal act, which implies an act of force, where police and criminal courts and hanging judges and gaolers are needed to take care of things.

But there is always a temptation, especially if you are a fervent believer or an ambitious elitist, to legislate morality, to treat questions of morality using the state institutions for dealing with human-on-human violence.

And that is the Big Problem of our times. Our liberal educated Gentry have abused their position as cultural arbiters, as what Curtis Yarvin calls the "Cathedral," to impose their morality on the rest of humanity.

See, even though I think that a woman that gets an abortion is flighty and foolish, and a man that encourages his partner to "get rid of it" is a cad, I still don't think that it should be a question of criminal procedure.

However, when a woman encompasses the death of her newborn baby, as George Eliot dramatizes in Adam Bede, where the abandoned mother Hetty Sorrel abandons her baby in a pile of leaves, well, that is something that requires the state to intervene. George Eliot makes it perfectly clear that Hetty Sorrel is both flighty and foolish. But she saves her from the gallows and sends her off to Australia. George Eliot was a sweetie.

Back in the day it seemed like a good idea to liberals to legislate Roe v. Wade from the bench and bring the US into the 20th century and legalize abortion like all modern societies in Europe. But did you know that the "modern societies in Europe" all pretty well ban abortions after the first trimester? Whereas in the US liberals are toying with OKing abortion "after birth?"

Then, of course, liberals legislated Affirmative Action and gay marriage and I know not what from the Supreme Court.

Problem is that what yesterday's Supreme Court decides last year can be reversed next year. So all your liberal Supreme Court decisions rest on a knife-edge, the partisan composition of the nine justices. So that is why all liberals go crazy whenever there is a vacancy on the court that takes place when a Republican is president. Because suddenly everything is at risk!

Let me tell you a story. Back in 1984 in Washington State, the religious right put Initiative 471 on the ballot to ban public funding of abortions. It went down, 53%-47%. And that decided the question of abortion in Washington State. Basically, we haven't  had a peep from the religious right since.

Do you see the difference of deciding this by a vote of the people and a vote of the educated elite? When the people decide, that is final. When the elite decides they end up having to enforce their decision with cancel culture. Why? Because they didn't take the trouble to persuade people. They just used their power as the educated elite to change the rules, and don't you dare object, peasant.

I don't know when our liberal friends will see the error of their ways. I would guess not for decades, not until there is a permanent Republican majority on the Court and a permanent Republican majority in the Congress.

What? Is that even conceivable? Well, it does according to my reductive Three Peoples theory. The evolving Republican Party under Donald Trump is a party of the ordinary middle class Responsibles, the Commoners. And our liberal friends have no idea, No Idea, that Commoners have a different view of the meaning of life, and have a right to have the government and its laws take account of that.

But, the bigger question would be for the government to get its cotton-picking hands off morality and let ordinary religious communities take care of the question of naming, shaming, and shunning the members of their community that violate their unwritten moral values.

Why the Age of Revolution is Over

Starting with an oped at The American Thinker on September 1, I have been tossing around the notion that "the Age of Revolution is over."

What I mean by that is that, once the old feudal hierarchy and its bastard child, the absolute monarchy, had submitted to the rise of the non-noble bourgeoisie there was no more work for revolution to do.

What is revolution? Good question. At the very least it is a Singularity between two oil-and-water regimes that seem unable to mix.

Or at least, you have to have a ancien régime that cannot get its head into the idea of discussing questions of power and precedence with those people, darling.

Thus Charles I of England and Scotland. It just seemed unthinkable to deal with those Roundhead Puritans. So coarse, old chap. So the Brits had a Civil War.

Thus also the American Revolution. Just shut up, peasants, and pay your taxes to pay for the French and Indian War that benefited you! So we got the shot heard around the world.

But when we get to the French Revolution, I'd say that Louis XVI had already kinda inhaled the new ideas. He couldn't bring himself to bring the hammer down on the lawyers and activists that were brewing revolution in the cafés of the Palais-Royal. So he went to the guillotine, but not from a civil war.

Thus also the Russian Revolution. The Czar Nicholas was already less than the pure autocrat of Czarist ideology. So he got pushed aside by a bourgeois revolution that only later got beheaded by the cunning Bolsheviks.

I want to set this up, because when we come to the Sixties and Revolution Baby, we are not talking about revolution. Why not? Because the Sixties Kidz were tolerated, even encouraged by their parents and their professors. Liberal Parents, Radical Children wrote Midge Decter. Liberal parents were already the upper social class that dictated what other people thought and said. The Sixties Revolution was not an old ruling class being replaced in a Singularity by a new elite. It was more of a changing of the guard of one sector of the ruling class -- call it the old WASP elite -- by another, the liberal educated elite.

Incidentally, the ordinary all-American middle class didn't like the Sixties, not one bit. But, as they say, we are all living the Sixties culture now, letting it all hang out unless strictly forbidden by the cancel culture.

But here we are again, with the Kidz in the streets enacting their kabuki dance of "mostly peaceful protest." Is this the Revolution, baby? No, it ain't. This is the street theater of the ruling class, by the ruling class, and for the ruling class.

And what is it all about? It is rehearsing what seemed to work back in the Obama era when President Obama and the ruling class decided to make a big deal about the death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of a "white Hispanic," George Zimmerman in early 2012, the year in which President Obama was running for reelection after a less than stellar first term. What do you do to rally your supporters before an election or before a war? You get them to think that the enemy is coming to get them. And that is the point of the Trayvon Martin / Michael Brown / George Floyd phenomenon. To get African Americans to think that, once again, the white racists are coming to get them.

I wonder if the real story is that the monolithic Black vote is in danger of breaking up, is breaking up, unless the ruling class whips it into shape with a racist panic?

And could it happen that One Fine Day, the black vote will not rally to the usual racist Police Brutality canard?

Anyway, whatever the current mostly peaceful protests may be, they are not Revolution, because they are not in any way threatening the ruling class of educated Gentry.

Unless, of course, the mostly peaceful protests provoke the voters to reelect Donald Trump in a landslide.

Here's how we get to Revolution. We get there if the current ruling class of educated Gentry continues to refuse to consider the grievances of the Commoners of America when presented to them politely from a peaceable assembly.

See, that's how Charles I lost his crown and how George III lost his American colonies. They and their advisers just could not get their heads around the idea that their critics belonged in the same room with them.

And that is the message that President Obama sent with his "bitter clingers" remark and that Hillary Clinton sent with her "basket of deplorables" remark.

So, if the Age of Revolution is not in fact over, the reason will be that our liberal friends in the ruling class have No Idea that their current rule is starting to give the ordinary American Commoner no option except to raise a head of rebellion that will, without doubt, force him to pledge his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor to a less than peaceful protest against injustice.

Thoughts on the Lefty "Successor Ideology"

The term "successor ideology" was coined by Wesley Yang to describe a "melange of academic radicalism now seeking hegemony throughout American institutions." That's how Reihan Salam at the Manhattan Institute describes it while leading off a discussion on "The Successor Ideology" with Ross Douthat, Coleman Hughes and Wesley Yang.

But what are we to think?

I had several takeaways from the discussion. First of all, if you are a minority, especially if you are black, it is really rough trying to make it in the educated culture of the academy, the corporation, and the bureaucracy. It explains the mania about "microaggressions." Wesley Yang:

There's a process that people go through when they enter into... new social settings where they don't know what fork to use at the dinner table, so on and so forth.

In other words, the climb from being a middle-class "anybody" into an upper social class "somebody" is fraught with embarrassment and setback, because you are learning the culture as you go. In fact, the chaps that were "to the manor born" are going to sneer at you. Back in Britland, this sneering is encapsulated in the putdown: "not quite out of the top drawer, old chap." 

So, you can react to difficulty by steeling yourself for the struggle, or you can complain about the meany-jellybeanie white supremacists that are laughing and sneering at you. Guess what: if you want to rise in the world, it is hard! Get used to it.

But, on the other hand, according to Ross Douthat, there is among ordinary white people in the upper social class "a sense of exhaustion with the culture of meritocracy." Or, to put it another way, there are a lot more people competing for the glittering prizes than there were a while ago, and the problem is that there are only a limited number of glittering prizes.

There was this period that coincided with the kind of Fukuyama and end of history, where meritocracy really believed in itself, I think, and there is this sense that you could just run this system of high SAT scores and plucking people from all over and putting them into elite institutions and making them experts and it would all work out pretty well.

So, even white people from good families can get on the successor ideology bandwagon because it gives them an excuse to fail.

Then there is the need for sin. In the old Christian dispensation original sin was a personal thing. But what to do if you no longer believe in the Christian concept of sin? Perfectly simple: you can believe in the collective sin of "enslaving black people" and fill your "original sin shaped hole in the human psyche" with the sin of slavery.

Then there is the baby-boomers-owning-the-world problem. If you are a millennial, and especially a non-white millennial, it seems like the white baby boomers have got the whole world cornered. No fair!

Then there is the class aspect. Black Coleman Young says:

When I go to my family reunion, which is just middle class black people from Ohio, some college educated, some not, there's not a hint of [woke]. There's a lot of center left politics, but not a single hint of the vocabulary of the successor ideology could be found, and it would be alarming if it were there.

Meanwhile, I'm at Columbia and I can't find anything. I can't even find the person using the language of Christianity. It's just intersectionality all the way down in the culture.

In other words, this successor ideology is a thing of the upper social class, the educated Gentry. Commoners need not apply.

Coleman Young then relates how he got to go to a "People of Color Conference" that was led by "this extremely charismatic gay black man... the type that... could be selling books on the road and be drawing audiences to get his self help stuff." Er, no, Coleman. We are talking about a revival meeting and the sawdust trail. Good to know that the good old tent revival meeting is not yet lost to history, thanks to our lefty friends. And remember back in the day when revival meetings were just eeeuw!

Then Ross Douthat blames it all on Donald Trump whose "approach to racial issues, to put it mildly, is inflammatory and ineffective" and who has accelerated the leftward move in US institutions and driven a lot of suburban white Americans -- and white female suburban white Americans -- away from conservatism.

Yeah. Except that as far as I can see, Trump is running a full-court press for blacks and Hispanics to think of themselves as regular Americans. He is saying: come on in and join the party, because you belong as ordinary Commoner Americans.

Then there is the curious fact, introduced by Wesley Yang, that the current move away from entry to university on the basis of test results happens to coincide with a period in which a huge wave of Asians are outperforming whites in the test department. And these Asians come from a culture that determined "the life chances of their young people on the basis of a single high stakes examination for more than a thousand years." I mean. If you are exhausted with the competition of more and more people competing for the same glittering prizes...

I have a modest connection with this. Back when I was a kid in Britland as a baby boomer, I was conscious that I was the first generation of public-school boys that were not going to get into Oxbridge without extraordinary effort and brilliance. Oh well; I was not really that interested in competing for the glittering prizes anyway. But suppose I had wanted to dance with the girl who danced with the Prince of Wales? Then I might have been bitter for the rest of my life.

Oh, and I had my share of "microaggressions," like the prof at university that told me that I was taking a place away from a deserving working-class boy; or the managing partner at work that asked "where did this guy come from" when I made a mild remonstrance against something in a cultural sensitivity training session. But you know what? That is life. You don't let other people get you down. After all, they are knaves and fools!

My takeaway?

Yep. Life is rough right now for the scions of the upper middle class, the children of people that, without particular standout talent, rose to professorships and deputy assistant directorships. And life is rough for the young folks, particularly blacks, trying to make it in the upper social class of education, corporation, and bureaucracy, because you are learning a new culture, and that is hard.

But here's the thing. If you want to be a "somebody" then a career in the educated bureaucracies, whether in the university, media, coporations, or government or activism is actually fake. You will not make yourself into a "somebody;" it will all be let's pretend. 

You wanna be a "somebody?" Well, then try to be an Elon Musk. Or a Steve Jobs. Dive into high tech for a season and then try your own startup. I know a young man that dropped out of university to get into a blockchain startup. One thing  led to another and he's sold his company for a tidy sum to an outfit doing 401(k)s and IRAs. That is what I call real achievement; that is the real arc of getting from "anybody" to "somebody." 

But if you are just checking the boxes in the existing upper-class hierarchy? Well, Charles Dickens had you figured out nearly 200 years ago when he wrote in Little Dorrit about the Barnacles and Stiltstockings at the Circumlocution Office.

If you fancy a career in the bureaucracy, which are you? Are you a Barnacle, just hanging on to your job until you get the pension? Or are you a Stiltstocking, strutting and fretting your hour upon the stage with the illusion that your dull post in the hierarchy will make you into a "somebody?"

Here's what I think. I think that this whole successor ideology or leftist reign of terror is a reflection of a cultural crisis in the educated elite, a failure of meaning.

The fact is that going through the chairs in the administrative elite is a life without meaning. You can see this in the parade of swamp creatures we have seen in the War on Trump. They are anybodies pretending to be somebodies. But the scions of the elite have always expected to jump the queue, to get a nice plum job without having to brave the dangers of the time. 

And when they get frustrated they need to blame someone. They can't blame the minorities trying to come up through the system. They cannot blame themselves -- heavens no! -- so they blame the Trump deplorables.

Yeah, no kidding! Life is hard, even in these times when everyone in the world except way out in the country has a smartphone. Life is no longer a struggle to survive, to get the next meal on the table. But it is still a struggle for status, for being the equal or the superior of your fellows. People are still jockeying for position in the hierarchy. Indeed, according to the modern notion of the hierarchy of needs, once you have food on the table then your whole life turns around the next stage in the hierarchy. And there is no end to this.

The experts at the Manhattan Institute think that the successor ideology still has ten years to run before it runs out of steam.

Very good. But then what? What will succeed the successor ideology?

Politics Can't Change Anything, Unless...

In his description of the "System," the combination of military, business, bureaucracy, and "Cathedral" that rules over us, Curtis Yarvin is at pains to note that there is no way to for political elections to countermand the orthodoxy of the "Cathedral" -- the Brain, Voice, and Conversation among the elite -- that defines the "Dream," the orthodoxy of what fashionable people of the "upper social class" think. (Or rather not think, but fashionably repeat, imagining themselves as clever and wise).

Simply put, there is no way to  promote a heresy against the orthodox view without getting eaten for lunch. Especially at times like this when the "Cathedral" feels embattled and is openly conducts a Holy Inquisition to deal with the heretics with its cancel culture.

Except.

Except whatabout the Protestant revolution? The fact is that the Protestants -- Luther, Calvin, and the rest -- changed the Cathedral, and changed the Dream, the "doctrine... [that] defines good and evil for all decent people."

But why did it work for Luther and Calvin and Co.?

I guess because the Gutenberg printing revolution made it possible for the idea guys to get their ideas out there so that their ideas could become part of the "Conversation." Before Gutenberg this rebellious distribution of ideas just couldn't have taken place, because hand-copied manuscripts were too expensive for broad distribution.

And, of course, the burgeoning cities and trade of Europe in 1500 had created a "bourgeoisie" in the cities of Europe ready for a new ideological Dream, a new notion of good and evil for all decent people to believe. A new notion that was better aligned with their need for a meaning of life.

And then, in due course, the Protestant Cathedral and its Dream got replaced by the current System, run by an educated Gentry with its professor ideologist Brains in the university, its fake-news Voice in the media, its Conversation among the educated upper class that fashionably imagines itself the "allies" of the "oppressed peoples" fighting against the "white oppressors."

As in, I don't think so. Listen pal. If you are the political elite, whether eevil feudal lords or robber barons "the rich" or noble "allies," then you are the oppressors, not some bitter-clinger Trump supporters in a Trump Car Parade.

So yeah. Politics doesn't change anything, but ideology does. 

And wouldn't you know, in our generation we have another publishing revolution, the Internet, that allows Brains with new ideas to have a Voice without necessarily getting the fake news media on board to spread the word and get the word out into the Conversation.

Of course, whatever happens, it ain't gonna be easy. The current ruling class is pulling out all the stops to prevent the rebels from talking to each other and getting into the Conversation. But then the Protestant Revolution wasn't easy either.

But here's the point. If the new wave of ideologists, brainiacs like Curtis Yarvin, come out with ideas that seem to answer the questions that today's people have about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" then those ideas will tend to get in the Conversation in spite of the Woke Holy Inquisition that is traveling the world busily stamping out every heretic it can lay its hands on.

Now my notion is that the key to the future is to understand that there are Three Peoples, and each of the Three Peoples needs its own religion, or Dream, the answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything that appeals to people like them.

That is what my Three Peoples Religion notion is all about. We must understand that in our modern world we need to create not one but three Dreams, because the Dream of good and evil for Creative People, the Gentry, is going to be different from the Dream of good and evil for Responsible People, the Commoners, and different again from the Dream of good and evil for Subordinate People, the Clients.

So I say that if you want to persuade the world, you need a sophisticated Dream that understands the world not just for people like you but for all the other people in the world too. Is that so hard?

Notice that our wokey friends, with their "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors," notion have a Dream that is basically tailored to the interests of the allies. The allies decide who is oppressed, who is oppressor, and who is an approved ally. The allies, needless to say, are the best people in the world. And the rest of you can go pound sand.

And another thing. The big thing about the Trump Effect, I would say, is that Trump is encouraging the bitter-clinger deplorables towards self-consciousness. And if you listen to the Trump Rallies, it is clear to me that President Trump is reciting a Dream, a narrative of what it means to be an American. Same thing about his speech at Mount Rushmore. Same thing with his appearance in California pinning medals on the helicopter crews that rescued people from the fires.

But what do I know?

Why a Sorority Sister Got Arrested at a Riot

In the BLM riot over a man shot by police in Lancaster, PA, after he charged them with a knife, a certain

Kathryn Patterson, 20... was “charged with felony arson, felony vandalism, felony riot, failure to disperse and other protest-related charges.” It turns out that Patterson is a junior at Franklin and Marshall College, a private liberal arts college in Lancaster where the annual cost of attendance is $75,801, including room and board. She’s also a Kappa Delta sorority member and an “ally” (whatever that means) of the college Black Student Union[.]

Readers of this blog will know that "ally" refers to the current notion of society as "oppressed peoples" and "allies" fighting against "white oppressors." Obviously, as a white sorority sister, Kathryn cannot be an "oppressed people." But she can be an "ally."

Why in the world would a sorority sister at a swank private college be into rioting? Because it's fashionable. And fashion is where it's at. Curtis Yarvin is the guy that 'splains it all. 

You see, we are ruled today not by politicians, but by "the System," and the System is directed by the "Cathedral." 

Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class.

Stop right there and read it again. The Cathedral is professors and journalists and artists and authors. And they tell us what to think. Just as fashion magazines tell sorority sisters what to wear.

As I wrote yesterday:

"The central fact of the Cathedral, the center of power in our System, is its "monopoly on legitimacy." It works like this:

Prestigious information passes from Brain to Voice, and Voice to Conversation. This process is subtle enough, and its product is of high enough quality, for the Conversation to believe it is actually making up its own mind—from filtered inputs. The Conversation—all of legitimate public opinion—always admires the System. It thinks of this as a completely voluntary and spontaneous critical assessment."

And the Conversation is all about fashion.

And the Conversation, which is the discourse of the upper social class, is always the discourse of fashion. For the nobility (rich or broke), fashionable ideas are de rigueur.

In other words, when you walk around your nice gentrified neighborhood, and see all those fashionable #BackLivesMatter and #WeBelieve yard-signs, you are seeing people wearing the current fashion in political ideas in the "upper social class."

For some reason, I have rebelled against this. And I don't know why. Maybe I have the fashionable notion that it is fashionable to be a rebel.

So of course sorority sisters are out there protesting. That's what a fashionable young woman does these days. Better still, protest at Trader Joe's; then you can do some shopping after you are done protesting.

I first cottoned onto this Activism Culture years ago when a woman friend allowed as how she had always wanted to "get into activism." That is what you do if you want your life to have meaning and purpose if you are a member of the "upper social class" these days. As Yarvin writes:

A noble's [or sorority sister's] life purpose is the highest stage on the pyramid of needs: self-actualization. The most obvious way to be self-actualized is to be important, so nobles crave power and importance. 

Back in his Three Layer days, Yarvin wrote about the Gentry and its need for "ambition, "vanity" and "honor." Of course! How else would the educated Gentry sorority sister get to "self-actualization?"

Or you can explain it with my reductive Three Peoples theory, in that the People of the Creative Self have an existential need to be "creative" and what that generally means is doing the current fashionable thing decreed for creative people by the Cathedral.

The point is that all this fashionable "upper social class" activity is all about them. It is not really about "oppressed peoples." It is not really about the dreadful bitter clingers and deplorables and Trump supporters and "white oppressors." All the Gentry are merely players, strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage, signifying nothing. And the bitter clingers are just the usual opera chorus of peasants.

By the way, who would the "white oppressors" be but the "upper social class" that imagines itself to be "allies" of the "oppressed peoples?" It can't be the bitter clingers and deplorables because they are all far too busy attending Trump Car Parades, Trump Boat Parades, and Trump Rallies. And they have no power.

My question is: can't we start a new fashion that the fashionable sorority sisters can get down with? And all the gentry liberals in their gentrified neighborhoods? One that gives the liberals their ambition, their vanity, their honor, but doesn't beat up the poor bloody commoners and doesn't entangle the "oppressed peoples" in the dysfunctional hell of the welfare state and its programs?

Ch3: America's Real Constitution: The "System"

Curtis Yarvin's Gray Mirror is a modest project to imagine a politics for the 21st century. In his previously published chapters he proposed the emptiness of political action, for if your political action supports the regime it is merely serves to prop up the regime and if your political action opposes the regime its certain failure props up the regime.

And I have been analyzing it, step by step, mostly so I could understand what Yarvin is writing.

Now, in Chapter 3, the Descriptive Constitution of the Modern Regime, Yarvin sets out to show the difference between our formal constitution and the real, unwritten constitution, the "System" we live under. 

The form of government that the Constitution’s text prescribes, that its initial leaders created, and that its citizens emotionally believe in today, is an elected monarchy. The Republic in one sentence: the voters elect the chief executive of the government, who holds power for four years.

In fact we are not ruled by our elected monarch, nor by the electors, the demos. We are ruled by the System, as follows:

We divide the System into four great organs: in ascending order of power, the Castle, the Factory, the Bureau and the Cathedral. (Later, we will add a fifth: the Show.)

Castle is the military and the police. Factory is "production of goods and services: all companies, trade and finance, mining and agriculture." Bureau is "administration, the professional civil service." Cathedral is "information: truth, philosophy, ethics, narrative, art and intelligence."

Now, if we are are not a monarchy, for the elected president does not have much power, and if we are not a democracy, for the people cannot rule, we must have oligarchy.

There are four forms of oligarchy: hereditary oligarchy (rule of nobles), military oligarchy (rule of soldiers), commercial oligarchy (rule of the wealthy), and clerical oligarchy (rule of thinkers). The System is a clerical oligarchy.

 But, but, but. Surely we are supposed to have a separation of church and state? Well, not if you understand religion in a broader sense than understood by your average bear. For me, religion is all human energy devoted to the question of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Here is the composition of our clerical oligarchy.

Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.

And, you might add, its Inquisition is the corps of eager beavers that runs the "cancel culture" on social media.

The central fact of the Cathedral, the center of power in our System, is its "monopoly on legitimacy." It works like this:

Prestigious information passes from Brain to Voice, and Voice to Conversation. This process is subtle enough, and its product is of high enough quality, for the Conversation to believe it is actually making up its own mind—from filtered inputs. The Conversation—all of legitimate public opinion—always admires the System. It thinks of this as a completely voluntary and spontaneous critical assessment.

In other words, all the folks with their Black Lives Matter and #WeBelieve signs think that they are spontaneously critiquing the bad people. But in fact they are just repeating-after-me the "prestigious information," the articulation of the Dream, that has proceeded from Brain to Voice to Conversation. 

And the Conversation, which is the discourse of the upper social class, is always the discourse of fashion. For the nobility (rich or broke), fashionable ideas are de rigueur.

Yeah, fashionable ideas. Boy, do we have fashionable ideas in our modern world. And don't you dare criticize fashionable ideas, pal.

Notice that Yarvin's idea that the Cathedral is in charge is completely vindicated in the current cancel culture. Where is the bureaucracy, the Bureau? It is busily conducting critical race seminars. Where is business, the Factory? It is busily getting down with Black Lives Matter. Where is the military, the Castle? The generals are down with the movement with women fighter pilots. The police? Oh yeah. There is a bit of a problem, because the police are still beating up on the helpless spawn of the welfare state, the wild young men that never had a father.

So the Cathedral runs the whole System; everyone who is anyone takes his cue from the Conversation on the street decreed by the Brain of the Cathedral. It is infallible, because there is no appeal. But what if the Cathedral is wrong?

[T]he Cathedral is either marching faster toward utopia or sliding deeper into mania. Wherever it goes, the System follows; wherever the System follows, the country follows. To answer this question is to read the future.

And what the Cathedral promulgates is the Dream.

The Dream is the ideal future of the noblest, most fashionable people in the world. It really is a nice Dream. The problem with the Dream is not that it is evil, but that it is impossible. From that error (also a sin: the sin of vanity), all the evil it does proceeds.

For, when the Cathedral needs an Inquisition to enforce its Dream, then you know that something is going wrong.

Yes, but couldn't we elect a president who would sidestep the Cathedral and actually reform something? Not really, because the President is not really chief executive, but "chief oracle." Most of his job is not directing traffic but making decisions on issues that bubble up from the Bureau, the bureaucracy, where he gets to choose between three options. So when we elect a president nothing changes.

Yes, but couldn't we elect a new Congress that would actually reform something for a change? Not really. First, people do not care about congressional elections the way they care about presidential elections. Second, there are no real local notables and celebrities to act as symbolic representatives of the people. Third, we elect congress-critters, in effect, for life. Some do get defeated, occasionally. But not often. Fourth, a newly elected congress-critter is a nobody, with no power to change anything. (Except AOC, but she is the mouthpiece of the Cathedral, so that's different.) In fact, Congress is driven by the lobbyists and the activists. Period.

The point is that to change anything, through a presidential election or a congressional election, would require a level of energy orders of magnitude greater than the current levels of political energy we experience from day to day.

Yes, Americans can still elect a new regime—but they have to really, really want one, and they all have to want the same one, and it has to be one that can actually work. The distance from here to any such regime change can hardly be exaggerated. 

And let's face, it. Today, very few people "really, really want" a new regime. The only people pretending are the BLM/Antifa folks, and they are merely the stooges of the System, play-acting revolution.

The problem with the System is that its director, the Cathedral, is corrupted. In a perfect world, its Brain, the thinkers, would be like mathematicians working away like squirrels on their equations, and only equations that worked would become agreed-upon mathematics. But, for the Brainiacs, there is the problem of power. And "power corrupts ideas."

A marketplace of ideas, like any Darwinian system, evolves for whatever it selects for. If it is selecting for power—for “impact,” for “changing the world"—it will evolve powerful doctrines: ethical justifications for wielding power.

Which is exactly what we have today. And if you want to escape the poisonous killing fields of power you are going to have to be doing Brainiac things where your ideas are not going to make you famous or powerful or encourage you to believe you are "changing the world."

But what would that look like? Ah yes...

Be sure to watch next week's exciting episode. 

Suppose the Wildfires in California Are Not Due To Climate Change

Up here in Seattle we have smoky haze this morning, resulting from the California wildfires. According to the science, the wildfires are a consequence of global warming. Says former President Obama.

The fires across the West Coast are just the latest examples of the very real ways our changing climate is changing our communities. Protecting our planet is on the ballot. Vote like your life depends on it—because it does. pic.twitter.com/gKGegXWxQu

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 10, 2020

Yes. And here is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

“Mother Earth is angry,” the San Francisco Democrat said during an appearance Thursday on MSNBC. “She’s telling us -- whether she’s telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is … that the climate crisis is real and has an impact.”

Notice how the Catholic Pelosi uses religious language -- actually pre-Christian religious language -- to make her point.

Of course, climate deniers like this nobody say that the California wildfires are due to the environmentalists. 

I live here. Have a seat and learn something, sir. In the state of California the environmentalist lobby sets policy. Controlled burns? Bad for air. Logging to reduce forest density? Bad for the owls. Focus on replacing ancient transmission lines? Nah, we're building wind farms.

So who are you going to believe? The former President of the United States backed by the scientists or a nobody?

And, if you are a climate denier, that still doesn't believe, no matter what a former President of the United States says, what do you do about it? Particularly when all the best scientists agree with the former President of the United States.

I guess there are two available strategies.

The first strategy is to appeal to peoples' selfish interests. If you are campaigning in Pennsylvania, which has benefited enormously from the fracking revolution, you say that the Green New Deal will cost Pennsylvania jobs.

This is, after all, the strategy of the anti-capitalists for the last 150 years. Doesn't matter that the economics says that capitalism is great, that real per-capita income is up by 30 times in 200 years. When a factory closes down or a CEO makes a fortune, a Robert Reich will show up to blame "robber barons." And it works.

But pro-Green New Deal Joe Biden goes to Pennsylvania and declares that he won't ban fracking. Yep, and I gotta bridge to sell you.

The second strategy is to capitalize on failures of prophecy. Science is science: it is merely a technique for trying to understand how the world works. It has achieved amazing results, particularly in the last 500 years, particularly in the last century. But whenever science makes predictions about the future, it is still prophecy, just as in the old days. That is because science is not the final word on how the universe works; it is just the latest human attempt to figure out what is going on. Thus Kant: we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances. 

Only, modern science is a lot better at predictions than the old methods of divination and examination of intestines. Still, weather forecasting, despite the biggest computers in the business, is still a pretty chancy affair. So is hurricane prediction. So is stock-market prediction. So is climate modeling.

Ultimately a failure of prophecy is what will kill off the climate change religion. But not yet. For the climate-change enthusiasts have cunningly arranged that just about everything is a confirmation of climate change.

And it doesn't matter that Karl Popper declared that science isn't science unless it opens itself to "falsification." He meant that if everything is interpreted as confirmation of your theory you do not have science, you have prophecy.

The way real science works is the confirmation of general relativity in 1919 by Sir Arthur Eddington. Einstein's relativity predicted that light passing close to a heavy body like the sun would be slightly bent. Because space is curved by gravitation. And it was.

So, using the bones and the entrails of general relativity math, Einstein prophesied that light from a star would be bent as it grazed the surface of our Sun. And he was right.

The best way to understand prophecy is the helpful book When Prophecy Fails by Festinger et al. It's about a UFO cult in the late 1940s predicting that a UFO would come and rescue them before the Earth was destroyed. It didn't, and the Earth was not destroyed. Oops.

But a cult doesn't collapse the day after the predicted end-of-the-world. It takes a while. So even if the global temperatures stop increasing -- say, due to a new grand solar minimum -- it won't change minds, not right away. But a while after the failure of prophecy, the cult starts to break up, to make room for the next great prophetic cult.

Meanwhile, you can blame electrical blackouts on climate crazies. You can blame soaring electrical rates on climate activists. You can resist restrictions on automobile use. You can let billion-dollar light-rail projects wither on the vine. And you can vote against politicians that want to raise your taxes and kill your job.

What you cannot expect to do is discredit the ruling-class narrative. Not yet.

Suppose "Politics is Division" is a Good Thing

At American Greatness Curtis Ellis is observing that the Davos set, the corporate globalists, are shedding their camoflage.

The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions,” the oligarchs of the World Economic Forum helpfully advise. “Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.” (Emphasis added.)

Or the Zman is saying that, "maybe it is simply the end of Left and Right. The Left won." But I say that when the Left has vanquished all its foes, then what?

And Willis Eschenbach is wallowing in Scott Adams' Win Bigly: Persuasion in a world where facts don't matter, in which Scott talks about the idea that mass delusions are not infrequent, but normal. As in, you would expect the world's scientists to all buy into the climate change delusion since their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor depend on it being true. Scott says this a bit differently:

[S]cientists who oppose the climate change consensus have a high degree of career and reputation risk[.]

So why bother, pal? Just go with the flow.

Let's go back to Scott Adams and his 3-D world view:

This worldview says humans are irrational 90 percent of the time. The only exceptions are when decisions have no emotional content. 

This is actually what the science of the German Turn says. Our conscious -- and supposedly rational -- mind is only 10 percent of the whole. The rest is the unconscious mind, and who knows what it is thinking? We know, at least, that it is operating instinctively and emotionally.

If you are not going to have mass delusions going on all the time and leading us over the cliff, then you have to have a counter mass delusion to even things out.

As in, two party politics, where the mass delusionists of each side can hurl their vitriol at each other.

As in, a world open to all religions, so that the moralists of every description can damn the other guys to hell and back again without the benefit of canceling their opponents in the public square and lighting up a nice cozy auto-da-fé.

As in, a free economy where there is not just one monopoly corporation in bed with the political elite, but different corporations each with a different strategy for market domination.

But boy, do we all hate it when the other side dares to question our mass delusion!

As in, the Davos globalists hating on Trump for questioning their august authority and right to direct traffic from the Magic Mountain.

As in, the deep state in the US that has run the US for decades with a nod-nod-wink-wink consensus throughout the corridors of power. Until Trump came along and upset their apple cart.

It's curious, isn't it, that everyone is insulted by the idea that there are people over there that don't agree with Our Saving Truth.

Here's something to think about. If the educated Gentry managed to completely vanquish the bitter-clinger Deplorables, what would they do then, poor things?

Because I would say that the only reason that the Davos special people are united is that they have the awful populist nationalists to kick around. I think that if the nationalists ever succumbed, then the globalist elite would divide into factions and start to fight each other.

And if the critical race theory postmodernists ever succeeded in purging the last racist-sexist-homophobe from America then they would split into two and start beating up on each other.

And so, really, the health of the state, or of the culture, or of science, is when everyone is beating up on the other guy -- verbally, of course.

Those Davos Pooh Bahs are fools if they think that the right thing is for them to step up and tell the rest of us what to do.

Those deep-state anonymous sources are crazy to think that they should not be roughly sorted out every decade or so.

Those critical race theorists would be out of luck if they ever won and condemned the hated racist-sexist-homophobes to the University of Outer Slobbovia.

I realize what I am saying. I am saying that the chaos agent Donald Trump is probably the best thing that has happened to the US since sliced bread.

OK. So the worst that can be said about that is that it is a mass delusion of the Deplorables driving around aimlessly in their Trump Car Parades.

And that my maxim that "politics is division" points to the good thing about politics. That a true mano-a-mano politics -- Marquess of Queensbury rules, old chap -- is the best thing going.