The Mostly Peaceful Hellscape

Yesterday in a mostly peaceful effort, law enforcement officers caught up with accused AntiFa killer Michael Reinoehl. 

In the report of Reinoehl's mostly peaceful death I noticed a number of tweets from mostly peaceful AntiFa related Twitter accounts that seemed to be advocating violence.

Hey @Jack! How come those violent mostly far-left accounts are still mostly unlocked?

OK. We can all trust @Jack to deal with the mostly hateful haters. But, we have to ask, what is wrong with the generation that seems to be represented in the mostly peaceful protests of the past few months?

One only has to review the sickening recordings of the recent “peaceful protesters” around our nation-- Atlanta, Saint Louis, Seattle... and Portland to confirm the “peaceful” perps were almost exclusively young adults born between 1990 and 2002—people who have been brainwashed into progressivism by their education and lack of ambition or work for a living.

Thank you, Senator, I am glad you asked me that. The whole thing is explained by my reductive Three Peoples theory, that people in the modern world can be reductively classified into Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.

In this reductive theory the great story of the modern era is the astonishing pilgrimage of Subordinates -- once starving peasants -- from feudal subordination to a noble lord to the alternative, the subordination to the rule of the market. And for those that made the journey the consequence has been a increase in real per-capita income over the past 200 years of 3,000 percent. See my Great Enrichment page.

But whatabout the people that have been born into the middle class, for whom a life of Responsibility is a given?

For these life is inexpressibly hard. Oh, not in the physical sense, of scrambling to make a living. But in the emotional sense of what we today call living a creative life, as a person of the Creative Self.

This is because nearly everyone that yearns to live a creative life ain't up to the challenge.

If that weren't enough, the rise of the Left two hundred years ago has meant that many young people are being fed a fake narrative on how to be a creative and live a creative life.

I call this fake narrative the Activism Culture. It is as fake as the medieval romance culture of King Arthur and his Knights enjoyed by the courtiers of the early absolute monarchs. And the Activism Culture is the moral framework of what I call the Great Reaction of the left, its lurch back to the primitive.

The notion behind the Activism Culture is that the way to live a creative life and "make a difference" is with revolutionary politics, by peaceful protest, marching against the injustices of the day. But I am here to say that the Age of Revolution is over. The logic of the Age of Revolution was the rising bourgeoisie wanting to replace the hierarchical culture of the agricultural feudal age with the transactional culture of the market economy and business.

Once that was achieved then the logic of revolution was over. Do you know why? Because when it came to the rise of the working class, the bourgeoisie was perfectly happy to accommodate the workers. And when it became time to accommodate women and minorities, the bourgeoisie was perfectly happy -- if a little slow -- to accommodate them too.

So the Age of Revolution is over. But I also think that the Age of Politics is over.

This is because I think that politics cannot go much beyond the crude domain of force. If you are talking about defending the border, then you need politics and government to do the job. If you have criminals harassing ordinary citizens then you need police to crack the heads of robbers and gangsters.

And you need laws to punish people that defraud and exploit others in normal commercial transactions.

But pretty soon you get to the point where you are legislating morality, and that's where things get sticky. Whatabout the annoying tree in the neighbor's yard that is threatening to grow into a monster that might one day fall upon your house in a storm?

In the regulatory state we have assigned a ton of moral questions to the supervision of the state, and I wonder if it is time to wonder if there isn't a better way to do it.

So I say that the Age of Politics is over. We need another way of negotiating between neighbors than the resort to regulation and lawyering. And we haven't really even begun to think about this.

And I believe that young people that have been carefully taught the culture of Revolution and the culture of Politics have been sold a bill of goods and that is why they are going crazy in the streets.

But if young people of a creative bent or a desire to Do Good in the world are not to do it with Revolution and with Politics, what are they to do?

Thank you, Senator, I'm glad you asked that.

They need to reject the Egoist Hero's Journey of fighting for justice and embrace the Sacrificial Hero's Journey. This journey is the journey down into the underworld of the unconscious that emerges from Jungian psychology and was popularized by Joseph Campbell. It is as new as social media and as old as the Jungian archetypes that try to make sense of the ancient human world before writing and maybe even before language.

I have tried to make sense of this in my series on the Good Life.

My point is simple. If you want to be creative, if you want to create a new world, then you are embarking on a journey of unimaginable difficulty and trial. It will take you up to the border of madness and possibly over it. At the very least it will involve a journey into the underworld of the unconscious that will expose all the monsters in your Self that you are hiding, not from the world but from yourself.

But most of us don't want that. We want something easier. Like the left's Temptation of Activism.

Become an Activist! Change the World!

You mean like lefty icons Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Castro?

Wanna become an Activist? The simple answer is: Don't. You can do much more good in the world by simply working, marrying, raising a family, and hanging on for the grandchildren.

As My Girl George Eliot writes at the end of Middlemarch of her heroine Dorothea Brooke:

that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs

instead of blazing across the firmament like a comet.