The Three Peoples and Revolution

In this "summer of love" featuring "mostly peaceful protests" in Democratic governed cities across the USA, there is a question. 

What do the Three Peoples in my reductive Three Peoples theory think about it all? Perfectly simple.

The People of the Subordinate Self (and Curtis Yarvin's Clients) follow their leaders. They are subordinate, haven't really cottoned to the middle-class city and its individualism, and they feel left out. So they are often ready to be led to the barricades.

The People of the Responsible Self (and Curtis Yarvin's Commoners) expect the police to control the streets so they can live their responsible lives obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules. To the Responsibles all political disagreements should be sorted out in elections. That's what the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th century were all about: to curb the warlike nobles and gravitate power to the middle class where things would all be sorted out in frank and free discussions according to Robert's Rules of Order. So Responsibles really hate riots, demonstrations, mostly peaceful protests and all the rest. Because to them, what's the point? Everyone has a vote, and the time to change government is at election time. You want to change things? Then persuade a majority at the next election and bring your agenda to the legislature.

The People of the Creative Self (and Curtis Yarvin's Gentry) are special people. They regard themselves as a cut above the rest and are irritated by the comfortable blandness of middle-class morality and politics -- or of Trump Boat Parades. The whole point of being creative is to strut and fret your hour upon the stage, to think up something new, not get on with your work and tend to your family.

Actually, as Jung and Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson and I write, the real creative hero is the sacrificial hero. I develop this notion in my Good Life series.

But our Creative Class, our educated Gentry, thinks that the good life is bending the arc of history towards justice with politics and peaceful protest. That is where they get meaning in their lives. They live what I call an Activism Culture. It is what you might call a surgical culture where these Creative people are acting rather like surgeons in an operating theater, operating on society to remove its cancerous growths.

And notice how this surgical metaphor tracks pretty closely to the medical profession. Medical professionals are not emotionally engaged in the lives of the people they treat. Their patients are, for them, statistics. Of course, they like to do the right thing, but if someone dies on their watch, well, that's life. They are careful to observe the established protocols, but let's face it: today's patient is today's patient. Tomorrow there will be another one.

Thus, I argue, when you see a mostly peaceful protest on the streets of Portland, Oregon, or an earnest activist demanding we implement the Green New Deal to address climate change, you must understand that this is an ego trip. It is all about the protester, all about the activist: the play's the thing.

In my view the Creative Class and the educated Gentry really have no idea how their protests and activism are received and experienced by the ordinary Responsible Commoner. That's because it is not a dialog; it is a performance.

Back in the last eruption of left-wing culture, the Sixties, it took about 20 years before the Sixties Kidz realized that they had a problem, that the ordinary American commoner hated their protest culture, that if they wanted back into command they had to moderate their message and pretend to be moderates.

But all along they were still dreaming of being Ché Guevara, of setting the world aflame, of bending the arc of history: Revolution Baby!

Only the Age of Revolution is over. Surely anyone with half a brain can see that: all the revolutions since the bourgeois revolutions have been bloody failures that have not brought justice but bloody killing fields. Revolution has been replaced by ordinary corrupt politics, of loot and plunder by tax and spend rather than by conquest and subjugation.

Of course, my line is that the follow-on Age of Politics is over, too. Almost anyone with a brain should be able to see that anything and everything run by the government is incompetent and dysfunctional. We know why this is so: it is dictated by my Four Laws: that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices; that administrative government does not work because it does not have the bandwidth; that regulatory government cannot work because of "regulatory capture" of the regulators by the regulated; and that anyway, government programs cannot work because you cannot reform them, except by handing out more loot.

I interpret the current situation as the utter folly of the educated Gentry, thinking that a couple of nice peaceful protests can solve the injustices of the world. That, obviously, is what the Democratic mayors and councils of Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, thought when all this violence started with the death of a drugged up felon who had just passed a fake $20 bill. That's because they believe what they have been carefully taught, that the way to justice is through the annealing flame of protest, acting as "allies" of "oppressed peoples."

Of course, they have no idea about how they have buried the ordinary Commoners in injustice, how they have betrayed the support of the "oppressed peoples" over the last 50 years.

If there is any justice in the world then our Creatives, our educated Gentry, should be up before the Bar next.

But don't forget that they have No Idea that they have done anything wrong. Not yet.

Boy, that would be a Revolution, the day when our conceited Gentry gets a Bill of Indictment from the Responsibles, the Commoners, they have exploited and oppressed for so long.